The Cleanest Race (11 page)

Western journalists routinely claim that North Korea is essentially a Confucian country.
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A “Confucian version of George Orwell’s 1984,” writes one, a “Confucian museum, covered by a thick but superficial layer of Marxism-Leninism,” writes another.
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Scholars such as Selig Harrison and Thomas Hosuck Kang agree that the regime’s longevity can be attributed in large part to its skill in exploiting this age-old tradition.
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In fact the DPRK’s official culture clashes with the sage’s
teachings in all significant respects. Confucius demanded rigorous self-cultivation through study; the Kim regime urges its subjects to remain as childlike and spontaneous as possible. Confucius considered no race better than another; the DPRK regards the Korean people as uniquely virtuous. Nor does the Workers’ Party condone the rites of ancestor worship that are still taken so seriously in the southern half of the peninsula.

To most observers, the North Korean regime’s heavy use of family symbolism is sufficient proof of Confucian tendencies. But almost all cultures espouse respect for one’s parents, and kinship metaphors have been part of political language since time immemorial. Indeed, there was once a father figure in every communist country. In order to prove a Confucian influence on the DPRK’s personality cult, one would have to demonstrate that there is something
distinctly
Confucian about it, a task doomed to failure. Contrary to what so many outsiders take for granted, the leader depicted in official propaganda is hardly a father figure at all, let alone a patriarch.

Before discussing this any further, let us summarize the current version of Kim Il Sung’s mythobiography.
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On April 15 in 1912, the first year of Juche, in the Man’gyŏngdae district of Pyongyang, a son was born to Kim Hyŏng-jik and his wife Kang Pan-sŏk. It quickly became clear to all in the village that this was no ordinary child; more upright and virtuous than his playmates, he climbed a tree in a naïve effort to catch the rainbow. When only seven, he saw the police arrest his father for anti-Japanese activities. After his release in 1923 the family resolved to leave for Manchuria. Mature beyond his
years, the boy vowed not to return to Pyongyang until Korea’s independence had been restored
.

In Manchuria Kim Il Sung devoted himself wholly to the anti-Japanese struggle. By the age of sixteen he had already formed the Anti-Imperialist League and purged the Korean revolutionary movement of narrow-minded nationalists and xenophiles alike. At a conference of revolutionaries in 1930 the eighteen-year-old Kim set out his brilliant new ideology of Juche Thought, explaining that man is the master of all things, and that a revolutionary strategy for Korea must reflect the country’s unique conditions. Two years later he founded the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. Basing his headquarters first in the Tumen River region, then on sacred Mount Paektu, he launched a series of crushing attacks on Japanese troops. After a particularly bold strike on the Korean border town of Poch’ŏnbo in 1937 the KPRA found itself under threat from a counter-offensive. Kim rescued his troops in the winter of 1938/39 by leading them on the now-legendary Arduous March along the Yalu River valley. Not once did he rest or slacken in his concern for his men, who under his brilliant leadership won every battle. In 1942 his wife Kim Chŏng-suk, a revolutionary fighter since childhood, bore the General a son. The couple named him Jong Il
.

On August 9, 1945, the General led his army in a final concerted push through the enemy’s border strongholds, at the same time ordering secret fighting units to rise up across the peninsula. The Japanese held out for all of six days before falling to their knees on August 15. As the victorious army advanced southward people rushed weeping from their homes to greet its commander. Arriving at last in Pyongyang, Kim
restored its ancient status as the nation’s capital by setting up his government there
.

Alas, the American imperialists had already invaded the southern part of the peninsula, installing the reactionary Syngman Rhee as “president” of the new colony. On June 25, 1950 the Yankees, determined to crush Korean socialism forever, launched a surprise attack on the DPRK. Under the General’s brilliant leadership, the Korean People’s Army dealt them such a savage series of counter-blows that they retreated whence they came, finally signing an abject declaration of surrender on July 27, 1953
.

In the years that followed Kim Il Sung worked day and night, waking every morning at 3 am as he rebuilt his country into a shining model of self-reliant independence. Juche Study groups sprang up around the world as foreigners sought to emulate the DPRK’s spectacular progress in all fields. But for all his many duties, the Leader found time to visit factories and farms, solving their problems at lightning speed while touching the hearts of the workers with his parental concern for their welfare. Unfortunately this selflessness took a toll on his health, and on July 8 1994 he passed away, plunging the masses into a grief such as they had never known. It was no small comfort for them, however, to know that the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il would carry on his father’s legacy.
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   Although the DPRK came close to another war with the US in the last years of Kim Il Sung’s life, the resolution of this crisis is generally credited to his son, who by then had assumed command of the armed forces. Yet the summary above should not mislead anyone into thinking that the personality cult skims over the latter half of the Great Leader’s life. The problem, for my purposes at least, is that only the first half forms a linear story. The second falls apart into undated tales of “on-the-spot guidance” and other anecdotes that are too numerous to count, let alone summarize. They play such an important role in official myth that new ones are constantly being generated.
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A personality cult comes into being when a one-man dictatorship presents itself as a democracy. The goal is to convey the impression that due to the ruler’s unique qualifications and the unanimity of the people’s love for him, his rule constitutes the perfect fulfillment of democratic ideals. In this respect at least, the Kim cult resembles the cults of Mao and Stalin. In most others it is closer to the leader cults of fascism. Where the Chinese and Soviet cults derived their respective leaders’ greatness from an unequalled grasp of dialectical materialism, the North Korean cult derives Kim’s from his embodiment of ethnic virtues: he is the most naïve, spontaneous, loving, and pure Korean—the most Korean Korean—who ever lived. As one propagandist recently put it, Kim Il Sung is “the symbol of the homeland.”
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Blank-eyed as always, the young Kim takes from his mother the gun with which he would start his war of liberation.

To eliminate all doubt that the Leader’s virtues were inborn and not acquired, the Text plays up his impeccable lineage (crediting his great-grandfather with leading a famous attack on an American gunship in 1866) and the very young age at which he began manifesting his virtue.
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His father Kim Hyŏng-jik (a rather pallid hero of the resistance for whom the Text can work up no real passion) is rarely shown teaching his son, let alone disciplining him.
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With very short hair and a soft, pale-moon face marked by small and feminine features, the boy Kim recalls the children pictured in imperial Japanese schoolbooks. Usually he looks cheerful, showing the dimpled smile to which the Text constantly draws attention. In some pictures, like one in which he receives a gun from his mother, he seems to sense the responsibility weighing on his young shoulders, but even here his eyes are blank: because true Korean spontaneity ends where an intellectual expression begins, Kim is never shown
thinking.
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Anything
that might be seen as having diminished the leader’s artlessness and naivety is downplayed or ignored altogether. Love of the race leads him spontaneously to Marxism, an ideology that the Text praises but (for obvious reasons) is loath to explain.

One may well ask how a leader can pose as the embodiment of naivety on the one hand and a brilliant strategist and revolutionary on the other. In the 1940s and 1950s writers made ludicrous efforts to explain away this contradiction, claiming, among other things, that Kim’s best ideas came to him in his sleep.
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The propaganda apparatus soon realized it would be better simply to divert public attention elsewhere. While the leader’s genius and invincibility on the battlefield are accorded all due praise, only his ethnic virtues—his naivety, his purity, his spontaneity and solicitude—are constantly shown in action.

In depictions of his guerilla years, for example, the young General is almost never seen in actual combat. Instead he appears between battles, fussing cheerfully over his soldiers’ food and well being.
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His wife Kim Chŏng-suk, the object of her own minor personality cult, cuts a more martial figure than he does. She is even referred to as his “bodyguard.”
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In one illustration she sternly holds back her smooth-faced husband while she fires at the Japanese enemy.
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How, the critical outsider may ask, did the General manage to keep his guerillas so well-dressed and well-armed? If he never lost a battle, why was almost no Korean territory liberated until that effortless “final push”? Why is
every
photograph from this period so blurred and grainy?
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Citizens born in the DPRK might not wonder about such things, but what about those old enough to have experienced
the Soviet occupation? We can, I believe, exclude the possibility that they swallowed the new version of history whole, rejecting their own memories in the process. More likely they shrugged off its “mere” factual inaccuracies while accepting it as essentially true. Foreigners fought the Japanese out of imperialist motives no better than Japan’s; only Koreans fought for pure and righteous reasons; ergo only the Korean fight was historically meaningful. South Korean nationalists interpret modern history in much the same way.

Confident of the popular desire to believe in a homegrown liberation army, the propaganda apparatus has never worried much about realism or consistency. For a while it was claimed that the revolutionary army had acquired its gleaming weapons by sneaking up on Japanese sentries and throwing red pepper in their eyes!
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Over the past sixty years the young Kim and his fighters have been depicted in lavish uniforms of various styles and colors, an olive-brown finally replacing the too Japanese-looking khaki of old.
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The foreigner may well chuckle at this, as at the other preposterous illustrations in the history books: the General’s pristine log cabin, looking like something in a child’s snow-dome; demure female partisans dashing through emerald forests in crisply pleated skirts. But there is more method here than meets the eye. The liberation myth would not exert as strong an appeal if it were served cold, i.e., as a sober and realistic narrative of an all-too recent history. The regime wisely prefers to depict a magical and epic past that must be accepted on its own terms.

Needless to say, the Text claims that Kim Il Sung took over the country on the day of liberation, August 15, 1945, though it fails to explain why two months elapsed before his triumphant homecoming speech to an enormous Pyongyang
crowd. This event is the subject of many verbal and visual depictions, all of them far removed from the original photograph taken that October 14, which has been doctored beyond recognition. (The Soviet generals who stood directly behind Kim at the rally are nowhere to be seen; neither is the Red Army medal on his chest.)
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Paintings of the first months of independence often show Kim at the center of a frantically cheering crowd. Sometimes he wears a dark suit, sometimes a military-type uniform with knee-high white padded boots, sometimes a white tunic and matching trousers.
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Another popular theme is his triumphant return to Man’gyŏngdae, the village of his childhood. We are meant to marvel at the great man’s humility as he chats with straight-talking aunts and uncles.
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