The Cleanest Race (7 page)

But while outside cultural influences were much in evidence, even in Pyongyang itself, no credible visitor to the DPRK registered significant signs of political dissent. One aid worker said that the only criticism he had heard in weeks touring the country in 2005 came from a drunken man who said, “People
would prefer a better life.”
^†
Nor was there evidence to support claims that a Christian multitude was secretly worshipping there.
⁶
The closest thing to a popular non-secular activity appeared to be the consultation of shamans and fortunetellers for business advice.
⁷
There were, for that matter, no reliable indications that North Koreans engaged in any illegal forms of associational life that were not aimed at making money. Nor did they consider their entrepreneurial activities to be at odds with the official ideology. “Making money is patriotic” was said to be a popular if informal slogan.
⁸
In short, the spread of capitalism did not appear to be eroding support for the regime.

Though never going so far as to praise either of the left-wing presidents to occupy the Blue House in Seoul, the North had for most of the decade concentrated its invective on the “warmongers” and “Yankee lackeys” in South Korea’s conservative opposition. As the presidential election campaign got underway in the rival state in 2007, the KCNA zeroed in on the “traitor” Lee Myung Bak, who was then campaigning on pledges to strengthen the alliance with the USA and cease unconditional aid to the North. When Kim Jong Il agreed to a second North-South summit in October 2007, many South Korean commentators expected him to offer a spectacular concession to the outgoing President Roh, thus countering Lee’s criticism of the Sunshine Policy and boosting chances for the pro-Pyongyang candidate.

But the deterioration of the information cordon since the first summit in 2000 had changed things. Kim Jong Il could no longer hope to pull off the feat of posing to the South as a jovial peace-maker while posing to the North as the condescending host to a tributary delegation. What the one half of the peninsula would hear and see of the summit, the other was likely to hear and see as well. The General had no choice but to put his domestic image first. At their first meeting, which took place outdoors, he stood stock-still and poker-faced as the broadly smiling Roh approached to shake his hand. The South Korean delegation claimed that Kim warmed up behind closed doors the next day, but word soon spread that he had mocked his counterpart for being unable to decide on his own whether to stay a few days longer. If billions of dollars in unconditional aid had effected an improvement in inter-Korean relations since 2000, there was no sign of it. The summit ended in another declaration averring both sides’ determination to work towards unification, but the damage had been done. The South Korean electorate’s disaffection with the Sunshine Policy played an important role in helping the conservative candidate win in November.

Had the Kim regime been misled by the sheer vociferousness and visibility of South Korea’s anti-American left into doubting pollsters’ predictions of a Lee victory? Perhaps. The propaganda apparatus certainly appeared to have been caught off guard by the election results when South Korean TV announced them in November 2007. What to say to the North Korean public? With so many citizens now accessing outside sources of information, none of which had criticized the vote-counting process, it was not feasible to claim that Lee had stolen the election. But
neither could the truth be conceded that the southern brethren had chosen the pro-Yankee candidate; this would mean either that the Korean race was not so pure after all, or, even more unthinkably, that there was something in the Dear Leader that had alienated them.

For several weeks the official media simply said nothing about Lee’s triumph. (The apposite Korean phrase:
muksal
, to kill with silence.) Finally, in early 2008, it began asserting that the “traitor” had hoodwinked the electorate by keeping his true political intentions secret. For decades so surefooted in its strategy, the propaganda apparatus was now reduced to hoping the masses would not remember its criticism of Lee’s campaign platform! But luck was on Kim Jong Il’s side. Hardly had the new president taken office than the South Korean public lashed itself into another of its xenophobic frenzies. This time the occasion was the administration’s intention to open the beef market to American imports. As rumors spread of a unique Korean susceptibility to mad cow disease, massive crowds took to the streets of Seoul denouncing Lee as a dictator and traitor, and accusing the Yankees of saving their most diseased meat for the peninsula. Many of the demonstrators interviewed by reporters said they felt cruelly deceived by a man they had just voted into power. The Kim regime could not have asked for a more timely and dramatic confirmation of its propaganda; it gloated over the crisis for months while exhorting the southern brethren to rise up and sweep the puppet state from power.

But by summer 2008 the beef crisis had passed. Realizing that Lee was in the Blue House to stay, the Kim regime turned a critical eye to the two North-South cooperation projects
upon which it had embarked during the Sunshine Policy era. Clearly, the economic benefits to be derived from the Mount Kumgang tourist resort and the Kaesong Industrial Zone (both just north of the DMZ) were not worth the political dangers of being seen to be cooperating, even indirectly, with the “traitor” in Seoul. The party was in any case growing increasingly concerned about the intermingling between local staff and Hyundai employees at these sites. When a KPA soldier in July 2008 shot and killed a South Korean tourist who had strayed into a restricted area at Mount Kumgang, the Kim regime offered no apology. President Lee responded by suspending all trips to the resort.

On September 8, 2008, Kim Jong Il failed to appear in public at a military parade celebrating North Korea’s
sixtieth
anniversary, a milestone to which the official media had been building up for months. The world press soon began receiving information that Kim had suffered a stroke in August. Speculation about his health intensified throughout the autumn, punctuated by rumors that he had already died, until there finally appeared a few topical and authentic-looking pictures from his endless “on-the-spot guidance” tour. The pudgy, expansively gesticulating General of old had given way to a thin, slack-faced man with one gloved hand hooked awkwardly in the pocket of his jacket. The propaganda apparatus had evidently concluded that offering visual evidence of a stroke was better than letting the world run riot with rumors of an even more subversive nature, but the decision cannot have been an easy one. (Physical infirmity always carries a greater stigma in states that espouse a race theory; the goiter on Kim Il Sung’s neck had had to be kept
a strict secret.) Such were the challenges of maintaining a personality cult in the absence of an information cordon.

The photographs did nothing to stop outside journalists from wondering who was next in line for the succession. It was soon learned that young North Koreans had been taught to sing a song glorifying a certain General Kim, whose vigorous stride (so the lyric) was making the very rivers and mountains rejoice. That this General was not the current leader, whose name is invariably invoked in its full three syllables, was clear enough, ergo the poem’s subject had to be the successor to the throne. But the lyric offered no further clues as to which of Kim Jong Il’s sons by his various wives was meant. Various names were bruited about in South Korea and elsewhere over the next few weeks, with expert consensus finally settling on Kim Jong Un, the second son of the Dear Leader’s third wife. Meanwhile the North Korean media stuck to its longstanding policy of acting as if the Dear Leader had no wife or offspring at all.

The regime spent the spring of 2009 launching missiles from sites on the east coast and urging the masses, under the slogan of a “150 Day Battle,” to farm and produce more, the better to strengthen the country against the Yankee enemy. The deliberate ratcheting up of tension did not discourage former US president Bill Clinton from arriving in Pyongyang in August 2009 to secure the release of two American journalists who had been arrested in March for illegally entering the country. Kim Jong Il, it was soon learned, had agreed in advance to look favorably on the request in return for his erstwhile foe’s spectacular pilgrimage. Fittingly enough, the party newspaper carried photographs of Kim and Clinton
sitting before an enormous painting of waves crashing on rocks, a standard symbol of the country’s resolve to stand up to a hostile world.

Hardly had the “150 Day Battle” ended amid great fanfare in September than a “100 Day Battle” was embarked upon. Rumor had it that speakers at party lectures and workplace assemblies were crediting these glorious enthusiasm campaigns to Kim Jong Il’s young heir. The national broadcast and print media, however, had still not mentioned him; evidently the goal was to keep the outside world in the dark for as long as possible. At last, in September 2009, a Taiwanese tourist photographed a wall poster that congratulated the masses on having not only the Dear General to take care of them, but the “young General” too.
^†
The latter’s full name was written in the blood-red ink reserved for names in the Kim Il Sung line: Kim Jong Ŭn. As of the time of this writing, it was not yet certain whether he and the Kim Jong Un of outside news reports were one and the same, but the likelihood appeared very high. It seemed no less probable that the succession would be formally announced by or during 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth and the year in which the DPRK was to attain to the status of “a strong and prosperous country.”

Whatever kind of country the successor stands to inherit, it will not be a communist one. The DPRK’s revised constitution, ratified in April 2009 and made known to the world in the fall, forbore even to pay lip service to that term, instead invoking “military-first” socialism as the country’s guiding principle. Short of reviving the kamikaze slogans of the Pacific War—though of course it has done that too—the regime can hardly make its ideological affinity to the first
“national defense” state on Korean soil any clearer. Whether the world will ever stop regarding the DPRK as “the last bastion of Stalinism” is another matter.