The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
B.R. Myers
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 1933633913
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Understanding North Korea through its propaganda
What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them?
Here B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn—from the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in terror of “the Iron General.” In a concise but groundbreaking historical section, Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled.
What emerges is a regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid nationalist, “military-first” state on the far right of the ideological spectrum.
Since popular support for the North Korean regime now derives almost exclusively from pride in North Korean military might, Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear program. The implications for US foreign policy—which has hitherto treated North Korea as the last outpost of the Cold War—are as obvious as they are troubling. With North Korea now calling for a “blood reckoning” with the “Yankee jackals,” Myers’s unprecedented analysis could not be more timely.
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Government, and less prominent propaganda outlets picked up the slack. The latter asserted that Kim Dae Jung had come to Pyongyang in 2000 to make the North renounce socialism, only to be dazed by the Dear Leader’s genius into accepting his demands for inter-Korean cooperation.† The ensuing years saw the regime devote ever more energy to demonizing the Republican administration in Washington. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s reference to North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” was met with.
Who mock these platitudes fail to realize that the content of Kim’s guidance is not as important as the time and effort he takes to administer it. (In many pictures of these visits, he is merely listening with a smile.26) After all, to impart consciousness and discipline to the child race would be to make it less pure and childlike, which must never happen. Nor could Kim pose as an educator or disciplinarian without seeming an imperfect embodiment of Koreanness. In short stories, the emotional.
She made: Everyone talks about the Arduous March this, the Arduous March that, but how many people are really going through it? The only one is the General [Kim Jong Il] himself. Ask your conscience, am I talking hot air? You know from watching TV. Doesn’t our General go up and down steep mountain paths without a moment’s rest in order to visit with the People’s Army troops? He’s trying to keep watch over the Homeland, over all of us. And he always insists on eating just what the people are.
Fists, hoisted effortlessly on bayonets, or squashed under missiles.46 Even mathematics textbooks reinforce the impression of a hopelessly outclassed foe: “Three People’s Army soldiers rubbed out thirty American bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought?” etc.47 Also common are calls to “sweep” the Yankees from the peninsula like so much dirt.48 The myth of an America quaking in constant terror of the DPRK has enabled the regime to explain away food aid shipments, which began.
Pŏsŏtta.” Sŏul sinmun, November 13, 2006. Ch’oi Kyŏng-hŭi. “Ch’inil munhak ŭi tto tarŭn ch’ŭngwi.” Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi chaeinsik, 1:387-433. Ch’oi Mun’il. “ ‘Taminjok, tainjong sahoe’ ronŭn minjok malsallon.” Rodong sinmun, April 27, 2006. Ch’oi Nam-sŏn. “Chŏllyŏk chŭnggang ch’onghu suho ŭi chillo. “Maeil sinbo, March 7, 1945. “Chŏlse ŭi wiin ŭl ttarŭnŭn manmin ŭi hŭmmo.” Ch’ŏllima, August 2004, 34-35. Chŏn In-gwang. “P’yŏngyang ŭi nŭnbora.” In Hŭk, ppuri, 114-145. Pyongyang, 2007. Chŏng.