The Cleanest Race (15 page)

Since the proclamation of a “military-first” policy in 1995, the Supreme Commander’s five-pointed star has become as prominent a propaganda motif as the national flag itself. Standard are depictions of a square-jawed soldier leading the way to a strong and prosperous country, while the rest of society—here a laborer and a white collar worker with one of Kim Jong Il’s works—follows closely behind. But outsiders who think the military has been placed over the party should note that the legend reads, “Let us loyally venerate
the party’s
military-first leadership.” (Emphasis mine) It is the party, in other words, that puts the military first.

In a depiction of the near future, joyous Koreans praise Kim Jong Il for having brought about national reunification. The vertical banner over the peninsula reads: “Long live General Kim, the Sun of Unification!”

For decades South Korea was depicted as the “living hell” to the North’s “paradise on earth”; the collapse of the information cordon in the mid-1990s made the regime take a more nuanced propaganda line.

Regardless of whether Kim Jong Il ever intended to pose as his father’s equal, the DPRK’s fall from Soviet-subsidized grace in the early 1990s made such a strategy impracticable. The Text implicitly admits, therefore, that although the Dear Leader is the greatest man alive, he is not quite the man the Great Leader was. When
père
and
fils
are pictured together in paintings the focal point is always the older, taller, better-looking man.
¹
Where Kim Il Sung was the effortless master of
all
sectors of
public life, his son is the military-first “General,” compelled by the Yankee threat to concentrate on national defense at the expense of economic matters. Since this is not a Marxist-Leninist state committed to the improvement of material living standards, but rather a nationalist one in which the leader’s main function is to embody Korean virtues—which are not seen to include intellectual brilliance anyway—the relative inferiority of Kim Jong Il’s genius troubles propagandists less than an outsider might assume. It is in no small part
because
he appears more human and vulnerable than Kim Il Sung, and thus a more convincing embodiment of the child race itself, that the Dear Leader is so dear to his people, even if he is not as fervently venerated as his father.

We already saw that the Text recounts only Kim Il Sung’s life before 1945 as a coherent story, reducing the history of his rule to a jumble of “on-the-spot guidance” anecdotes. It
does the opposite with the Kim Jong Il cult, telescoping the man’s younger years while treating his rule as a linear legend in progress. The mythobiography can be summarized as follows:

It was on February 16 1942, in a snowcapped log cabin at Kim Il Sung’s guerilla base on Mount Paektu, that Kim Chŏng-suk gave birth to the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Overjoyed partisans celebrated the great event by carving his name into thousands of tree trunks. Although the little boy was often cold and hungry, he never complained, anxious even at that age not to trouble his parents. Alas, no sooner had the Great Leader succeeded in liberating the nation than his loyal wife, weakened by decades of self-sacrifice, fell seriously ill. She passed away in 1949. Before her son had overcome this blow, he was forced to witness first-hand the destruction caused by the American invasion. The experience left him with a
lasting hatred of Yankee imperialism
.
Never one to seek special treatment, he participated directly in the reconstruction of Pyongyang before entering Kim Il Sung University in 1960, where he organized fellow students into Juche study groups
.

At the age of 22 he went to work in the party’s central committee. For decades he played a vital role in the implementation of the Great Leader’s policies and issued brilliant treatises on the Juchefication of the arts. All the while he traveled ceaselessly to farms, factories and military bases around the country, bestowing his motherly love on the masses and earning their love in return
.

In the early 1990s the USSR surrendered to the forces of imperialism without a shot. Emboldened, the Yankees stepped up efforts to destroy Korean-style socialism, claiming a nonexistent
“nuclear problem” as a pretext for imposing suffocating sanctions on the DPRK. In response Kim Jong Il, who in 1991 had become Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, rallied the troops in a spectacular show of resolve, at the same time dispatching diplomatic warriors around the world to make clear that the DPRK would never back down
.

In July 1994 Kim Il Sung passed away, plunging the entire nation into mourning. Though his heart was breaking, Kim Jong Il manfully hid his grief from the masses. Again the Yankees smelled victory. Boastfully predicting that the DPRK would not survive for long without the Great Leader, they redoubled their efforts to crush Korean-style socialism. To make matters worse, a freakish combination of natural disasters destroyed one harvest after another. Though in dire straits the masses never complained, trusting instead that the Dear Leader would lead them through this second Arduous March just as his father had led partisans through the first. Aware that the Yankees would stop at nothing, the General announced a military-first government and embarked on a ceaseless tour of army outposts. Wherever he went he moved soldiers to tears by insisting on eating the same meager fare as they
.

By the end of the 1990s the worst was over. With a renewed joy and confidence sweeping the nation, the General ushered in a glorious new era by announcing the “Strong and Prosperous Nation” campaign. Shortly thereafter he concluded an agreement with the southern masses to expedite unification by strengthening economic and cultural ties. But that was not all: in 2006 the Dear General successfully oversaw the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent that would protect the Korean race forever. Truly, the son had proven himself worthy of his great father
.
²

Although the regime uses the title “Dear Leader” in English publications, a practice I reluctantly follow in this book, the Korean original should more accurately be translated as “Dear Ruler,” for it is not the word “great” but the word “leader” (
suryǒng
) that is reserved for his father; Kim Jong Il is often called Great Ruler (
widaehan yǒngdoja
), as he was in North Korean coverage of his meeting with Bill Clinton in August 2009.

But as the reader can gather from the foregoing summary, there is much more common ground between the myths of the two Kims than there are significant differences. Like his father before him, the Dear Leader embodies Korean virtues and is therefore the greatest man alive. (He too was born with these virtues, as the talk of his angelic toddlerhood is meant to attest.) But to counter the assumption that the boy had an easy time growing up, the Text stresses that he was “born and bred in … difficult circumstances,”
³
extracting plenty of pathos from the death of his young mother: “No matter how he called and cried, [she] still did not come home.”
⁴
Tales abound of his aversion to receiving special treatment.
⁵
In one novel it is claimed that he always called Kim Il Sung “Leader,” “General,” etc, refusing to claim special filial status for himself.
⁶
He is often shown fussing over his father’s health, warding off those who would trouble him unnecessarily, and doing all he can to disseminate Juche Thought.
⁷

Never is he shown simply enjoying himself. His clothes are simple and austere, usually a zip-up tunic and matching pants in a drab brown; unlike his father he never wears suits. Artists like to portray the youthful Jong Il in solitude, often at a site associated with the anti-Japanese struggle, or looking
on with a wistful smile as his father greets adoring citizens.
⁸
The message: For Kim Jong Il so loved the Korean people that he gave them his only parent.

Still, this is rather thin stuff to be making a personality cult out of, and one can only wonder how the public would have responded to the Dear Leader’s accession had the nuclear crisis of the early 1990s not fitted him out with his own myth of national rescue. (We will discuss the conflict with America in the following chapter.) Even now the regime evidently feels the need for the dead Parent Leader to remind the masses what “enormous luck” they enjoy in having his son around, and that they must venerate the General “no matter what wind may blow in the future.”
⁹
They must also take good care of his health, making sure that he gets enough rest, etc.
¹⁰
The regime seems to have an endless supply of these remarkably
topical-sounding quotes, only a few of which can be traced back to Kim Il Sung’s collected works.
¹¹
It would appear that for all the propaganda apparatus’s hard work, the Dear Leader is still far from enjoying the popularity that his father did. This problem is certainly not unconnected with the appearance of the real-life Kim Jong Il, a short, homely and now wizened man given to wearing sunglasses—eyewear often associated with Yankee villains—even in indoor photo-ops. (His voice is not particularly pleasant either, judging from South Korean footage of the 2000 summit, though like his father’s voice—and Hirohito’s until Japan’s surrender—it is not heard in public.) But the masses’ perception of his father as the greater of the two men undoubtedly has more to do with the power of the national liberation myth and the higher living standard they enjoyed under his rule.