The Cleanest Race (8 page)

In May 2006 North and South Korean generals met to discuss a re-alignment of the maritime border between the two states. In preliminary small talk the South’s delegation leader mentioned that farmers in his half of the peninsula had taken to marrying women from other countries. His counterpart made no effort to hide his displeasure. “Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance,” he said. “I am concerned that our singularity will disappear.” The
South Korean, dismissing such marriages as a mere “drop of ink in the Han River,” responded that the mainstream would suffice to preserve the nation’s identity. More concerned with racial purity than cultural identity, the DPRK general replied, “Since ancient times our land has been one of abundant natural beauty. Not even one drop of ink must be allowed.”
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Although foreign journalists took amused note of this exchange, it did not discourage them from referring to the DPRK as a “hard-line communist” state.
²
They seem to have assumed that the North Korean officer was speaking off the record. In fact his remarks were fully in line with the official ideology. Only weeks earlier, the party daily had condemned the South Korean government for welcoming an American star football player of half-Korean parentage and for tolerating miscegenation:

Even the general’s seemingly irrelevant remark about Korea’s natural beauty was orthodox. One of the many correspondences between the North Korean worldview and European fascist thought is the notion of a mystical unity between the nation and its territory. (German
Völkisch
theorists believed the Jews, being originally of the desert, were naturally shallow and dry.)
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The regime never tires of conveying the message, not least through the monumental
landscape paintings before which the leader receives foreign dignitaries, that the motherland’s physical attributes—from the loftiness of its peaks to the purity of its mountain lakes—reflect the virtues of the race itself.

An especially common motif is the deep forest, which psychologists regard as a universal archetype of the instincts. Informed as they are by our traditional mistrust of spontaneity, our fairy-tales and legends tend to depict the forest as a menacing place of witches and wolves. The North Koreans, with their celebration of pure racial instincts, treat it as a safe and womb-like place that affords them an insurmountable advantage over the enemy. Another popular image, especially since the collapse of the national economy in the early 1990s, is that of giant waves hurling themselves against the motherland’s rocky coast.

Use of the word “motherland” in this context may surprise Western readers who, proceeding from the popular fallacy of a Confucian-cum-Stalinist state, tend to expect North Koreans to think in terms of a fatherland instead. That is indeed the word more often used in the KCNA’s English-language service.
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But when propaganda for domestic consumption—or what for convenience’s sake I call the Text—compares the country to one of the two parents, it is always to a mother: the most common term is literally “mother homeland.”
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Kim Jong Il himself is quoted as saying, “The homeland is everyone’s mother … [from whose] bosom all true life and happiness springs.”
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A mythologized version of Mother Korea’s history is at the heart of the Text. It can be summarized as follows.
Thousands of years ago, on a beautiful peninsula in the center of East Asia, there emerged one of mankind’s first distinct races, the Korean race. While still evolving from Early Korean to Modern Korean Man the Koreans settled the whole peninsula and much of northeast Asia. All they lacked was a strong leader. At last, in the third millennium BE, a great emperor named Tan’gun united Koreans into a state named Chosǒ
n, taking Pyongyang as his capital. Koreans were thus the first Asians to achieve nationhood, a crucial first stage of civilization. Though Old Chosǒ
n shared the peninsula with other, smaller kingdoms, the Koreans were always one people with the same blood, language, culture and lofty morals. In the year 918 they were united once more. Alas, foreign aggressors, resentful of Korea’s autonomy and greedy for its natural riches, refused to leave the peace-loving people alone. Only by repeatedly driving back invading forces—from Chinese tribes to Japanese samurai to American war ships—was the Korean race able to preserve its unique integrity up to the present day
.

From the start Koreans were marked by a strong sense of virtue and justice, and their exemplary manners earned the country renown as “The Land of Politeness in the East.” No less famous were their clothes, which were as white as the snowcapped peaks of Mount Paektu. Kind-hearted and well featured, Koreans lived in harmonious villages, respecting the people above them and loving those beneath them. Unfortunately the effete ruling classes, having fallen under the sway of Confucianism, Buddhism and other pernicious foreign ideologies, proved no match for the imperialists’ schemes, and in 1905 Korea became a Japanese colony. Burning with righteous anger, the masses rose up on March 1, 1919 to demand national independence
.
The demonstration was brutally suppressed. Fortunately a great leader had already been born who would guide the nation to its proper place on the world stage.
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   The regime in Pyongyang is often accused of “brainwashing” its subjects, as if the former secretly believed something very different, and the latter were passive or even unwilling victims of indoctrination. Perhaps this misperception derives from the mistaken belief that the personality cult—which looks much harder to swallow when regarded in isolation—forms the basis of the official worldview. In fact, as we can see from the above summary, the personality cult proceeds from myths about the race and its history that cannot but exert a strong appeal on the North Korean masses. In his classic book
The Denial of Death
(1973), the social anthropologist Ernest Becker concluded that man’s fear of death and insignificance makes him look to his country for an “immortality project,” a myth that will make him feel “vital to the universe, immortal in some way.”
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The notion of every citizen’s sacred mission to reunite the pure race and move it to the center of the world stage does a very good job of filling the North Koreans’ need for significance, not least because everyone is given a role to play.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, it was the Japanese who taught the Koreans to see themselves as part of a uniquely pure and virtuous race. All the Kim Il Sung regime did was to expel the Japanese from that race and transpose the familiar Japanese symbols into Korean ones—replacing the divine racial founder Jimmu with the homegrown Tan’gun, Mount Fuji with Mount Paektu, and so on. History books now treat the Tan’gun myth, including the story of his birth on Paektu,
as fact. In 1993 the regime claimed to have excavated the great man’s tomb near Pyongyang.
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This is not the place to discuss whether Tan’gun really existed, or whether Korea’s history was as traumatic as all that. As Walker Connor pointed out, “it is seldom
what is
that is of political importance, but what people
think is
.”
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Much the same myths (sans the Kim cult, of course) are widely believed in the southern half of the peninsula too, despite the freedom of speech and information enjoyed there. The main difference is that North Korea regards the country’s history as a long foreshadowing to Kim Il Sung, much as Christians see everything before the birth of Jesus as a
Vorgeschichte
or pre-history.

In the late 1940s, propaganda began celebrating Mount Paektu, hitherto known merely as Korea’s highest peak, as a sacred racial symbol à la Mount Fuji. South Korean veneration of Mount Paektu did not begin until decades later.

Also unique to the DPRK is the effort to puff up Pyongyang’s historical importance at Seoul’s expense.
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The capital is second only to the snow-capped, lake-filled crater of Mount Paektu as the national landmark and geographical symbol of racial purity. The destruction of the original city by American bombs enabled the regime to re-design it from scratch as a grand and enduring work of propaganda in its own right: enormous monuments, most of them constructed in the Soviet-subsidized golden age of the 1970s and 1980s, face each other across wide plazas and boulevards. These
include the giant bronze statue of Kim Il Sung, which would dwarf any Mao statue in China; the Arch of Triumph, far larger than its obvious Parisian model; the monument of the winged Ch’ŏllima horse; and, on the other side of the Taedong River, the Juche Tower, complete with a ruby-red electric flame on top that lights up at night; and the monument to the Workers’ Party, i.e. gigantic stone renderings of a hoe (for the farmers), a hammer (for industrial workers) and a writing brush (for the white collar workers). Foreigners sneer at the kitsch of these things, cluck about the money spent on their construction, and assume—as is falsely assumed of Nazi buildings—that their imposing size is meant to make people feel insignificant. But propaganda is never a mere waste of money, and its whole point is to make people feel as significant as possible. No doubt North Koreans feel as much pride in these enduring monuments of strength and unity as Americans feel at the sight of the Lincoln Memorial.

White is the dominant color in Pyongyang: white concrete plazas, white or at least blonde-stoned buildings and white statues of virginal maidens in long gowns abound, as could only be possible in a city with none of the heavy industry that Stalin and Mao allowed to develop in urban centers. Pyongyang is often photographed or depicted under snow, a favored symbol of purity in itself.

White is made much of throughout the official culture. There is constant reference to the child race’s legendary preference for white clothes. In a painting dealing with what the regime calls the Homeland Liberation War (1950-1953) a camouflaged river-raft and its military cargo are steered by a girl in a dazzling white
chŏgori
or traditional blouse.
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In an equally improbable painting Kim Il Sung’s female partisans wash their whites in a creek, while others hang theirs where they can be seen for miles around. (No men are in sight; in the DPRK, washing is women’s work.)
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