The Cleanest Race (14 page)

Kim Il Sung “visits a school on the first day of compulsory 11-year education.” Here too the leader seems not to be talking at all, instead simply exuding benevolent solicitude and good cheer; this is no traditional Confucian educator, let alone a Marxist-Leninist one à la Stalin or Mao, but an indulgent parent on the side of the instincts.

The Workers’ Party symbol shows a hoe for farm laborers, a hammer for industrial workers, and (a rarity in the symbols of socialist parties) a writing brush for the higher-educated or white collar class. This last has helped keep casual foreign observers from recognizing the DPRK’s intense anti-intellectualism.

Kim Il Sung on one of his countless “on-the-spot guidance” visits. (In his depiction of the leader’s coat and hat, the artist has rather unwisely worked from a real photograph.) These visits, as the written records of them make clear, are not about imparting knowledge or revolutionary consciousness; the content of Kim’s guidance is less important than the trouble he took—often, as here, in the dead of winter—to administer it.

While some landscapes are painted in a kitschy, extravagant manner, others, like this one, are done in a more subdued and traditional style. Either way, what is celebrated is not nature in general but the nature of the motherland. With its rugged, lofty peaks and pure mountain streams, the Korean landscape is thought to reflect the characteristics of the race itself.

Kim Jong Il is often depicted as having spent his school years in the 1950s enlightening fellow students about his father’s Juche Thought. In fact, the sham doctrine was not even spoken of until the cultural revolution of the mid-1960s, with the first books on the subject appearing several years after that.

Demobilized soldiers, still carrying their military-issue knapsacks, are welcomed with flowers by the workplace to which they have been assigned. While Soviet painters played up the heroic exertions and sacrifices of industrial laborers, the better to show them “tempering” their spontaneity, the DPRK’s propaganda depicts collective work as something joyful to which Koreans are instinctively inclined.

Kim Jong Il comforts a distraught nation after his father’s death on July 8, 1994. In the background is the 66 ft. high bronze statue of the Great Leader that was erected on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang in 1972. Dark skies in depictions of this period symbolize the growing threat from without.

The myth of Kim’s tireless, never-ending inspection of the country’s defenses is meant to absolve him of responsibility for the DPRK’s economic woes.

The Dear Leader stands guard as the waves of a hostile world crash ineffectually against the rocks.

Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton pose for a photograph after their meeting on August 4, 2009. The choice of background was no accident: waves breaking on the rocky coast symbolize the futility of the world’s harassment of the motherland.

South Korean cooperation with the North is often misrepresented as a shared effort to drive out the American enemy, shown here in standard hook-nosed form. The legend reads: “Working together as national brethren, let’s reckon with the US imperialists and unite Korea!”