The Cleanest Race Page 8
In depictions of his guerilla years, for example, the young General is almost never seen in actual combat. Instead he appears between battles, fussing cheerfully over his soldiers’ food and well being.11 His wife Kim Chŏng-suk, the object of her own minor personality cult, cuts a more martial figure than he does. She is even referred to as his “bodyguard.”12 In one illustration she sternly holds back her smooth-faced husband while she fires at the Japanese enemy.13
How, the critical outsider may ask, did the General manage to keep his guerillas so well-dressed and well-armed? If he never lost a battle, why was almost no Korean territory liberated until that effortless “final push”? Why is every photograph from this period so blurred and grainy?14 Citizens born in the DPRK might not wonder about such things, but what about those old enough to have experienced the Soviet occupation? We can, I believe, exclude the possibility that they swallowed the new version of history whole, rejecting their own memories in the process. More likely they shrugged off its “mere” factual inaccuracies while accepting it as essentially true. Foreigners fought the Japanese out of imperialist motives no better than Japan’s; only Koreans fought for pure and righteous reasons; ergo only the Korean fight was historically meaningful. South Korean nationalists interpret modern history in much the same way.
Confident of the popular desire to believe in a homegrown liberation army, the propaganda apparatus has never worried much about realism or consistency. For a while it was claimed that the revolutionary army had acquired its gleaming weapons by sneaking up on Japanese sentries and throwing red pepper in their eyes!15 Over the past sixty years the young Kim and his fighters have been depicted in lavish uniforms of various styles and colors, an olive-brown finally replacing the too Japanese-looking khaki of old.16 The foreigner may well chuckle at this, as at the other preposterous illustrations in the history books: the General’s pristine log cabin, looking like something in a child’s snow-dome; demure female partisans dashing through emerald forests in crisply pleated skirts. But there is more method here than meets the eye. The liberation myth would not exert as strong an appeal if it were served cold, i.e., as a sober and realistic narrative of an all-too recent history. The regime wisely prefers to depict a magical and epic past that must be accepted on its own terms.
Needless to say, the Text claims that Kim Il Sung took over the country on the day of liberation, August 15, 1945, though it fails to explain why two months elapsed before his triumphant homecoming speech to an enormous Pyongyang crowd. This event is the subject of many verbal and visual depictions, all of them far removed from the original photograph taken that October 14, which has been doctored beyond recognition. (The Soviet generals who stood directly behind Kim at the rally are nowhere to be seen; neither is the Red Army medal on his chest.)17 Paintings of the first months of independence often show Kim at the center of a frantically cheering crowd. Sometimes he wears a dark suit, sometimes a military-type uniform with knee-high white padded boots, sometimes a white tunic and matching trousers.18 Another popular theme is his triumphant return to Man’gyŏngdae, the village of his childhood. We are meant to marvel at the great man’s humility as he chats with straight-talking aunts and uncles.19
In contrast to depictions of the guerilla era, Kim appears in DPRK-themed pictures always as plump, if never quite as fat as he was in real life. Unlike Stalin and Mao, who personified the triumph of consciousness over the instincts, Kim had little need to pose as an ascetic. On the contrary, his plumpness symbolizes the race’s newfound freedom to indulge its innocent instincts. (Yankee villains, incidentally, are beanpole thin.)20
The DPRK’s propagandists are clearly uncomfortable with the “Homeland Liberation War,” even if they do depict it as a glorious victory over the US; there is no getting around the awkward fact that the republic was utterly devastated on the Parent Leader’s watch. War writers thus tend to keep him off-stage while invoking him as a galvanizing inspiration to the race. Soldiers shout “Long Live General Kim Il Sung” as they lead the charge or blow themselves up in suicide attacks.21 One of the few well-known war-themed works in which Kim makes a physical appearance is a painting entitled “Leader, the Front Line is Up Ahead.” Kim has just disembarked from the presidential jeep (bearing, in cap and jackboots, an unfortunate resemblance to a chauffeur). While an aide surveys the smoke-dimmed middle distance, a female soldier—the usual bob-haired personification of Korean chastity—informs the leader that the front is just around the bend. Kim, somehow standing atop the thick mud and not in it, listens with a smile. Presumably one is meant to marvel at his courage in putting himself so close to harm’s way and his modesty in traveling with only one aide.22
In depictions of the post-war years—or the Homeland Reconstruction Period, as it is called—the Great Leader is again in the forefront, often dressed in purifying white as he conducts “on-the-spot guidance” at farms, factories and construction sites. The Text gushes endlessly about these visits. Many of them were reported on days after they allegedly took place, and are remembered today with plaques and stone slabs, some engraved in blood-red script, at the relevant sites. (In 2008 I saw a South Korean tourist sternly rebuked for touching one of them.) But quite a few depictions of Kim’s “on-the-spot guidance” are presented to the public as literature and art, as works of the imagination. The leader’s statements in such stories are therefore not printed in boldface, as they would have to be if the account were ostensibly true.†
Their air of intimacy removes all doubt that they are fictional: no North Korean would think that a mere writer could have been privy to the great man’s private thoughts and conversations. Lest anyone still contrive to miss the point, these accounts are published as “short fiction” (tanp’yŏn sosŏl) and reviewed accordingly, with critics either praising or—much less often—faulting a writer for the story he has dreamed up.23 The reader is nonetheless expected to believe that the work is true to the essence of the great man. (A comparison can be made to the non-Biblical tales of Jesus taught to Christian children.) With paintings it is somewhat harder to tell imaginary scenes from purportedly historical ones, though the latter are more likely to include dates and locations in their titles.24
It may seem odd that such a repressive regime would allow writers and artists to cast the leader in situations of their own imagining, but only the most trusted members of the cultural apparatus are commissioned to create such works. In doing so they must not only meet the party’s demands for a certain topical theme—a campaign to boost agricultural production may call for depiction of the leader at a farm—but also follow the Text’s rigid iconography. Artists, for example, must copy the face already familiar from canonical pictures; there are none of the minor stylistic variations evident in Soviet paintings of Stalin or Lenin.
Stories of Kim’s “on-the-spot guidance” are alike not only in their depiction of the hero, but in their storylines and secondary characters as well. The latter usually include a rather slow-witted aide—a different man each time, the better to play up his comic astonishment at the leader’s every word and deed. Things usually start off with Kim in an unidentified office. (In contrast to the Stalin cult, with its many paeans to the “light in the Kremlin window,” the Text does not associate the leader with any particular residence or workplace; he was and is everywhere, for he is at the heart of every Korean.) The standard plot: the aide reports on a problem in a remote farm or factory, the leader jovially suggests a road trip, and the two men head out in the presidential sedan, throwing everyone into a tizzy when they arrive. The leader must then be shown solving the problem, but without coming off as cerebral and therefore un-Korean. Both problem and solution are thus described in terms a child can grasp.
Indeed, the Leader’s published remarks are always trite: “Rainbow trout is a good fish, tasty and nutritious.”25 Foreigners 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 pic
tures 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 climax comes after Kim’s breezy solution of the problem, usually in a scene in which he fusses over someone in the adoring throng who looks cold or tired.27 It is this loving attentiveness on the part of the world’s busiest man that moves the characters to tears, and is meant to make the reader cry too. Even when Kim is referred to as Father Leader (abŏji suryŏng), therefore, there is nothing Confucian or patriarchal about him. In a short story called “Father,” for example, he neither exercises authority nor imparts wisdom, but rushes an injured child to hospital. The official encyclopedia praises the story in maternal terms, describing “the Great General as the loving parent who holds and nurtures all Korean children at his breast.”28
Note the pointedly androgynous or—more accurately—hermaphroditic designation of “parent.” Kim is referred to primarily as Parent Leader (ŏbŏi suryŏng), though with his maternal side praised far more often than the other.29 Kim Jong Il himself has long described his father’s motherly qualities as key to his success. These qualities manifested themselves “even in his teenage years.”
Like a sensitive and meticulous mother the Leader took it upon himself to know people through and through, and to make them feel better with just one word, so it is only natural that everyone believed in the leader and followed him.30
Artists and writers not only play up the feminine aspects of Kim Il Sung’s appearance—the soft, pale face, the dimpled smile, the expansive bosom—but also show him holding small children or letting them clamber over him. In photographs we see him grinning as schoolgirls pull yearningly on his arms and hands.31 Even in depictions of his guerilla years these qualities are always on display. In one illustration he is tucking children into bed. The title of another, “The Parent Leader General Kim Il Sung Holding the Children of Mt. Ma’an to his Breast,” speaks for itself.32
But even grown Koreans are children at heart, and to be treated accordingly. Here is the first verse from the song “The Leader Came to the Sentry Post”:
The Leader came all the way to the sentry post
And held us affectionately to his bosom
So happy about the warm love he bestowed on us
We buried our faces in his bosom
Ah! He is our parent!
Ah! A son in his embrace
Is happy always, everywhere!33
In one painting Kim smilingly squats down in deep snow, tying a young soldier’s bootlaces; in another he drapes an overcoat over an exhausted cadre who has fallen asleep at his desk.34 In “Worrying About A Warrior’s Health,” the smiling Kim is holding to his chest a young soldier, who like a child has pressed his pink-cheeked face up against the white tunic.35
Though all personality cults stress the people’s love for their leader, the North Korean one differs from its Soviet and Chinese counterparts in stressing individual citizens’ personal yearning to see him or be held in his embrace. “I miss the General” is a constant refrain. The chorus of the plaintive official classic “Where Are You, General I Long For?” runs, “The harder the cold autumn wind blows/ the more I yearn for the warm bosom of the General.”36
The closest Kim Il Sung comes to appearing as a father in more than name is when he is depicted together with Kim Jong Il. The reason is obvious: If the Great Leader were shown mothering his own son, the public might be inclined to conclude that the latter had a privileged upbringing, a notion the regime—as we shall see in the following chapter—is at constant pains to dispel. Paintings often show the older man walking with dignified mien a pace ahead of the younger one, much as one sees real-life fathers and sons walking in South Korean corporations.37 The younger man must of course be shown learning from his father, because the hereditary succession derives its legitimacy in no small part from the claim that he imbibed Juche from the source. But the Text prefers to show him reflecting vaguely on past lessons; this obviates scenes of father-son instruction in which Kim Il Sung might come off as erudite and therefore un-Korean.
Whether the backdrop is the 1950s or the 1980s, the depiction of the Great Leader is basically the same, though he is shown growing fatter with age, and as an elderly if unwrinkled man is often pictured in black-framed glasses and a cap.38 (Needless to say, the goiter that afflicted the real-life man in later life is not to be seen either in photographs, which had to be taken from the same angle, or in portraits.) Relaxed and cheerful, he is occasionally even shown with a cigarette in one hand.39
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.40 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.”41
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.42 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.43 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.44 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.† 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.”45 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 Ki
m 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.46 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.”47 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.