The Cleanest Race (13 page)

A central theme of depictions of the latter half of Kim’s rule is his worldwide renown, which brings statesmen from around the world on tributary visits to Pyongyang. He receives them straight-backed, with benign smiles but no real warmth. While all may derive benefit from his insights, his love is for the pure race alone.
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Special treatment is shown to foreigners who have done the DPRK a particularly great service. “I am grateful to you,” Kim tells an obsequious Reverend Billy Graham in a recent account, “for spreading so much propaganda about us.”
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The Kim of the early 1990s—that is, of the last years of his life—is shown in somewhat different terms. He remains the revered leader of the country, in which role he accepts Jimmy Carter’s abject surrender proposal in June 1994, but with his own race run, he is content to leave the defense of the country to his brilliant son.
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This hereditary succession is seen overseas as proof positive of the DPRK’s Confucian tendencies. In depictions of the early 1990s, however, Kim treats his son with a deference that turns the most important of Confucius’s Five Relationships on its head. An official documentary made in 1992 shows him writing a florid panegyric to Jong Il, and in historical novels he converses with him, even in private, in polite Korean, addressing him as Supreme Commander or General.
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When I show these works to my South Korean students, who unlike their northern counterparts have been raised to think in Confucian terms, they laugh and shake their heads.

This does not mean that the Kim cult bears no traces of Korea’s pre-colonial traditions, nor that it is completely
unlike its defunct Eastern European counterparts. The far more obvious and significant influence, however, is that of the Japanese emperor cult. Like Kim, Hirohito appeared as the hermaphroditic parent of a child race whose virtues he embodied; was associated with white clothing, white horses, the snow-capped peak of the race’s sacred mountain, and other symbols of racial purity; was said to be joined with his subjects as one entity, “one mind united from top to bottom”; and referred to as the Sun of the Nation (minjok ŭi t’aeyang), the Great Marshal (taewŏnsu) whom citizens must “venerate” (pattŭlda) and be ready to die for.
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A significant difference is that while the Text likes to draw bemused attention to outsiders, including Americans and South Koreans, who allegedly regard Kim Il Sung as a divine being, it never makes such claims for him itself.
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But the similarity between the two cults remains too great to be explained away, as it is by some observers, in terms of borrowed “elements.”
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They are
fundamentally
alike, because they derive from a fundamentally similar view of the world.

Many in the West, of course, continue to doubt that the North Koreans really believe in their personality cult. This skepticism derives in part from recollections of the double lives led in the old East Bloc, where the average educated citizen feigned fervent support for his country’s leader in formal settings only to joke about him behind closed doors. But this only goes to show how little the East Bloc and North Korea ever had in common, for the masses’ adoration of Kim Il Sung has always been very real. Even among the few North Koreans who have left the country and stayed out, a heartfelt admiration for the Great Leader is mainstream. (I personally
know migrants who still cannot talk of him without tearing up.) This has much to do with the far greater psychological appeal of nationalism itself, but Kim Il Sung’s peculiarly androgynous or hermaphroditic image also seems to exert a far more emotional attraction than any of the unambiguously paternal leaders of Eastern Europe were able to. I am not qualified to analyze the cult (or anything else) from a psychological standpoint, but just enough should be written here to counter the reader’s skepticism that sane people could give themselves over to the adoration of a male mother figure. Sigmund Freud wrote of every child’s yearning for a phallic mother, a truly omnipotent parent who is both sexes in one, and Ernest Becker agreed that the hermaphroditic image answers a striving for ontological wholeness that is inherent to man.
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This may explain why Jesus and Buddha are far more feminine and maternal figures in the popular imagination than in the original scriptures of Christianity and Buddhism. The North Koreans’ race theory gives them extra reason to want a leader who is both mother enough to indulge their unique childlikeness and father enough to protect them from the evil world.

Interestingly enough, the absence of a patriarchal authority figure may also have helped the regime preserve stability by depriving people of a target to rebel against. C. Fred Alford has written, “In ‘society without the father’ … everything just is, naturelike in its givenness, so that it does not even occur to one to rebel, just as one does not rebel against the mist.”
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Perhaps it is no wonder that the propaganda apparatus decided to make the country’s next leader even more of a mother than Kim Il Sung had been.

Visual documents of pre-liberation history hardly look like photographs at all, though they are referred to as such. Left: Kim Il Sung as a schoolboy in exile. Right: Kim with his wife, Kim Chŏng-suk, in their guerrilla days. The crudeness of these forgeries is no mere matter of technical ineptitude; a country that can forge US currency can do much better than this. The regime seems to want to present its creation myth as a grand, epic past that must be believed on its own terms.

The Torch of Poch’ŏnbo
(1948), one of the earliest pictorial depictions of Kim Il Sung, shows the “general” and his guerrillas after their famous victory against a Japanese border outpost. While the battle itself is recorded fact, the quality of the uniforms shown here attests to the personality cult’s indifference to the dictates of realism.

Kim Il Sung, his wife Kim Chŏng-suk and their son Kim Jong Il ride horses near the liberation army’s secret camp on Mount Paektu. Note how the color of the uniforms differs from the earlier depiction.

Kim Il Sung greets the adoring masses; behind him, the DPRK’s coat of arms, a red star shining down on a hydroelectric power plant. The personality cult has never hid the corpulence of either of the Kims; on the contrary, it is seen as a sign of their spontaneous and easy-going nature. Yankee villains, in contrast, are often beanpole-thin.

Kim Il Sung “visits kindergarten in a mountain village.” Propaganda likes to associate both leaders with snow, a symbol of purity, and with carefree children, symbols of the innocent spontaneity of the race.