The Cleanest Race (5 page)

Those who ran afoul of the state faced punishment ranging from the denial of food rations to imprisonment, but the party did not build up a massive police presence, nor did the average citizen live in terror of arrest. Like the colonial government before it, the regime knew how to exploit the Korean people’s traditional tendency to conform. The personality cult also played a vital role in garnering support
for the regime.
²
With the young Kim Jong Il at its helm, the propaganda apparatus made sure that the cult kept pace with its Chinese counterpart. Mao’s renown as a poet, for example, inspired the DPRK’s cultural apparatus to “revive” revolutionary plays, hitherto unmentioned, which Kim Il Sung had allegedly written during his youth.
³
It was also “remembered” that in the 1930s the General had taken his partisans on an Arduous March every bit as heroic as Mao’s Long March.
⁴
And if Mao had routed the Japanese without foreign help, then by golly, so had Kim. This last claim necessitated the withdrawal of countless reference works and school books that had paid fawning tribute to the Soviet Red Army.
^†

Many in the West wrongly assume, as George Orwell did, that a regime cannot reinvent history without resorting to brainwashing and intimidation. One need only look at the South Koreans, who celebrate their liberation from Japan every year with nary a mention of their liberators, to see how easily nationalist mythmaking goes down even in open societies. But Korean nationalists do not seriously believe that they were never aided by foreigners. Rather, they think that because that aid was motivated by self-interest, it is not historically
meaningful
, nor does it warrant grateful acknowledgment.

Mao’s reputation as a thinker posed a greater problem to Kim, who had never even led the discourse of his own party.
⁵
Scouring his speeches for glimmers of original thought, the executors of the personality cult focused on his conveniently vague use of the Marxist term “subject,” or
juche
(chu’che) in Korean. In a speech in December 1955, Kim had reminded
propagandists that the “subject”—the agent, in other words—of ideological work was the Korean revolution; instead of merely aping Soviet forms the party needed to establish the proper “subject” in its propaganda work. This sort of toothless nationalism or “domesticism” had been
de rigueur
throughout the East Bloc in the 1950s, for which reason the speech had aroused no special attention either in Pyongyang or Moscow. But North Korea watchers in the West, unaware of the greater communist context, or the standard Marxist use of the word
juche
, had been quick to misinterpret the speech as a bold, epochal declaration of Korean nationalism. (They still make the same mistake; Kim’s line “to love the USSR is to love Korea” is invariably overlooked.
⁶
) Their impressed response appears to have encouraged the North Koreans to begin touting “the subject idea” in the latter 1960s as Kim Il Sung’s original contribution to Marxist thought.

Kim saw no urgent need to create an actual ideology to back up the cant, but one of his advisors, a self-styled philosopher named Hwang Chang-yŏp, finally persuaded the leader to entrust him with this task.
⁷
Hwang had his work cut out for him because there was nothing in Kim’s talk of self-reliance, or of adapting Marxism-Leninism to national conditions, that Mao had not only said more eloquently, but had done a much better job of putting into practice as well. Hwang also had to be careful not to make the new ideology clear or appealing enough to distract the domestic masses from the
de facto
ideology of race-based nationalism (which of course could not be conveyed to the outside world). He had to come up with something innocuous, impenetrable, yet imposing, and in the end he did just that.

Hwang’s so-called Juche Thought—credited of course to Kim—revealed itself in September 1972, in the form of “an answer to questions from Japanese journalists,” as a stodgy jumble of banalities. A representative excerpt from the seminal text:

Only when talking of Juche Thought does the regime express itself in this peculiar style, which is far too repetitive and dull not to be so by design. It recalls a college student trying both to stretch a term paper to a respectable length and to discourage anyone from reading it through. Far more concise and stirring language is used to espouse the true ruling ideology of paranoid nationalism. Though Juche Thought is enshrined in the constitution as one of the country’s guiding principles, the regime has never shown any indication of subscribing to its universal-humanist bromides: “man is the master of all things,” “people are born with creativity and autonomy,” etc. I
do not mean to imply that if an ideology is not lived up to, it is
ipso facto
a sham. (Judged by that standard, no ideology will ‘scape whipping.) But Juche is not even professed in earnest, and no wonder; its central notion of the masses’ mastery of their fate runs counter to the sacrosanct notion of a uniquely vulnerable child race in the Leader’s protective care. Koreans must thank him, after all, even for what they earn by their own labor.

The pseudo-doctrine of Juche continues to serve its purpose all the same. It enables the regime to lionize Kim Il Sung as a great thinker, provides an impressive label for whatever policies it considers expedient, and prevents dissidents from judging policy on the government’s own ostensible terms. Just as importantly, it decoys outsiders away from the true dominant ideology. Instead of an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth, the world sees a reassuringly dull state-nationalism conceived by post-colonial Koreans, rooted in humanist principles, and evincing an understandable if unfortunate preoccupation with autonomy and self-reliance.

The Juche Tower

But how could foreign scholars read the English-language versions of the official Juche discourse without realizing how empty it is? One answer is that by the time those texts started appearing in the 1970s, North Korea’s allegiance to the mysterious doctrine was already accepted overseas as fact. Another answer is that the very incoherence, dullness and evasiveness of Juche convey to the postmodern Western reader an impressive difficulty. Now
this
, he thinks, is what an ideology should look like, as opposed to the race-based nationalism espoused in the DPRK’s schoolbooks, films and
paintings, which is too crude and direct to be taken seriously. Even scholars aware of the triteness of the Juche discourse assume there has to be more to it than meets the eye. The historian Bruce Cumings, in apologetic desperation, concludes that it is “inaccessible to the non-Korean.”
⁹
As if North Koreans were not as baffled by it as everyone else! The regime’s decision not to publish a comprehensive Juche treatise under Kim Il Sung’s name turns out to have been a stroke of genius. Whatever one reads, one is always left thinking the profound stuff must be somewhere else.

The statue of Kim Il Sung on Pyongyang’s Mansu Hill

The perceived need to pay tribute to the USSR had long kept the Kim cult within certain boundaries, but in 1972, the year the leader turned sixty, it surpassed even the Mao cult in extravagance. Erecting an enormous bronze likeness of him in Pyongyang’s main square, the regime instructed natives and foreign visitors alike to lay wreaths at its base. An arch of triumph, far larger than its Parisian model, went up to commemorate the leader’s anti-Japanese struggle.

Ever since this efflorescence of the personality cult, outside analysts have confidently claimed that the DPRK is in effect a Confucian family writ large, with Kim Il Sung as the father, the Workers’ Party as the mother, and the people as the children.
¹⁰
A nice and neat theory, to be sure, but only the latter half of it holds up. In fact Kim Il Sung was increasingly acclaimed by the androgynous title of Parent Leader (ǒbǒi suryǒng), and like Hirohito was more a mother figure than a patriarch. By its own admission, the Workers’ Party calls itself the Mother Party not because it complements but because it
emulates
both Kims’ style of leadership.
¹¹
This prevalence of maternal authority figures is hard if not impossible to reconcile
with Confucianism, which dictates that a mother must obey even her own sons.

Most North Korean refugees remember the 1970s as a happy time. Food, energy and clothing were in far more plentiful supply than they are today, Pyongyang’s proud rhetoric not having stopped it from squeezing even Bulgaria and Cuba for economic aid. As the DPRK saw things, it had shown its moral superiority by rejecting, at no small cost to its standard of living, all concessions to capitalism. It was only right and proper that inferior races should pay tribute by sharing some of their ill-gotten gains. Though much of the aid was provided in terms of loans, the DPRK made little effort to repay them.

In 1982 Kim Jong Il joined the Supreme People’s Assembly, assumed the title of Dear Leader, and became the object of his own extravagant personality cult.
^†
Much was made of his birth on sacred Mount Paektu (though he had really been born in the USSR), his loving care for his father, and his alleged expertise in cultural matters, especially film-making. While foreigners regarded the planned succession as additional evidence of Confucian tendencies, Kim Jong Il emerged as an even more maternal figure than his father had been. He was, as one novelist put it, “More of a mother than all the mothers in the world.”
¹²

Where the pseudo-doctrine of Juche Thought made much of the need for self-reliance, the DPRK’s economic policy reflected a commitment to isolation instead, which is something very different. It is perhaps helpful to draw an analogy to
hikikomori
, young Japanese men who refuse to venture out of their bedrooms, instead demanding that parents leave meal trays outside their door. They feel they can preserve
their independence better by relying on the outside world than by working with it.
¹³
Similarly, Kim Il Sung appears to have believed that the best way of maximizing his country’s isolation and security was not to strengthen the economy—a goal that would have required integration into the socialist trading community and other horrors—but rather to rely indefinitely on aid. This is not to deny that North Korea has always done many things for itself. One cannot depend
completely
on outsiders without forfeiting one’s isolation, or at least one’s privacy. (The
hikikomori
cleans his own room.) When a form of aid serves isolation, the North Koreans take it indefinitely, and when it does not, they do without; a concern for self-reliance
per se
does not enter into things. Especially telling, in this regard, is Pyongyang’s history of squandering currency reserves on luxury imports.
¹⁴

The DPRK was thus caught flat-footed in 1987 when the USSR began sharply reducing its aid to the country. Two years later the East German leader Erich Honecker was forced out of office and into exile, much to Kim Il Sung’s consternation. German unification was quick to follow. Meanwhile Moscow began demanding that the DPRK pay world market prices for Soviet goods.
¹⁵
Imports dropped accordingly.
¹⁶
With the food supply worsening throughout the early 1990s, the party launched the slogan “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day” and stepped up the glorification of self-sacrificing “hidden heroes” in remote farms and factories.
¹⁷