The Cleanest Race (18 page)

Missionaries in colonial Korea murder a child by injection; the legend calls for “revenge against the Yankee vampires.” This poster appeared in 1999, when the US was the largest foreign aid donor to the DPRK.

The DPRK joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985, but refused to allow inspections of its peaceful atomic program until the Yankees withdrew their nuclear weapons from south Korea—which they soon did. When the UN inspections of the DPRK’s facilities ended without incident, the Americans incited impure elements inside the UN to demand inspections of additional sites. Naturally the DPRK refused to allow the enemy to lay bare one military secret after the other. Washington then announced that it would resume “Team Spirit” war rehearsals with south Korean soldiers
.

In response the Dear Leader placed the DPRK on a war alert in March 1993, throwing the Yankees into a panic. Weeks later he struck a second blow by announcing that Korea would withdraw from the NPT. The Yankees promptly waved the white flag, promising the Leader’s diplomatic warriors that they would cease their provocations and even provide the DPRK with light-water reactors. President Clinton personally affirmed his commitment to the treaty in a letter offered up to the Dear Leader. But despite their humiliating defeat the Americans continued scheming against Korean-style socialism
.

In 2002 their new president Bush reverted to America’s traditional strategy of threats and provocations, calling Korea part of an “axis of evil.” The Dear Leader responded to this hard-line policy with a “super hard-line” policy of his own, successfully testing a nuclear deterrent in 2006. With this brilliant triumph Korea joined the world’s most elite club, the club of nuclear powers. Again the Americans raged—and again they came crawling back to the negotiation table. In 2009 Clinton himself
came to North Korea to apologize for the illegal activities of two American journalists. The DPRK’s military first policy has so intimidated the Yankees that even in south Korea they are lying low. The day is nigh when these jackals in human form—now as always the sole obstacle to national unification—will be driven from the peninsula for good.
¹¹

   Like the “Japs,” the Yankees are condemned as an inherently evil race that can never change, a race with which Koreans must
forever
be on hostile terms. Readers should therefore not be misled by the Marxist jargon so common in the KCNA’s English-language rhetoric. In propaganda meant only for the domestic audience, the terms “US imperialism” (mije) and “America” (miguk) are used interchangeably, and Americans referred to routinely as “nom” or bastards.
¹²
In a recent picture printed in the monthly art magazine, a child with a toy machine gun stands before a battered snowman. The caption reads, “The American bastard I killed.”
¹³
The DPRK’s dictionaries and schoolbooks encourage citizens to
speak of Yankees as having “muzzles,” “snouts” and “paws”; as “croaking” instead of “dying,” and so on.
¹⁴

As in colonial Korea, propagandists are fond of demonizing missionaries, the better to combine an anti-American and an anti-Christian message.
¹⁵
Christianity is dismissed as a mere tool of infiltration and subversion; one recent poster shows a copy of the Bible with the Statue of Liberty on its cover.
¹⁶
The following depiction of a missionary family comes from the hugely popular novella
Jackals
(Sŭngnyangi, 1951), in which a Korean child is murdered by a mysterious injection of germs. (The crime is now treated as historical fact.)
^†
The writer makes clear that the Americans’ evil can be “read” in their big noses, large breasts and sunken eyes.

As might be expected, the Korean War occupies a central place in anti-American propaganda, but the Text dwells less on the US Air Force’s extensive bombing campaign (which is hard to reconcile with the myth of a protective Leader) than on village massacres and other isolated outrages. The killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Sinch’ŏn in October 1950 (which was actually perpetrated by Korean rightists) is held up as the Yankees’ most heinous crime.
^‡
The nightly news regularly shows groups being led through the museum in the
village by ever-indignant female guides. A typical illustration of the massacre shows US soldiers menacing captured Korean women. As is common with Yankee villains, the commanding officer has a white neck, Caucasian features and a dark-skinned face; presumably such depictions are meant to convey the contaminated nature of American racial stock to the domestic viewer without insulting the DPRK’s African allies.
¹⁸
The Text does its best to celebrate the truce of July 27, 1953 as a crushing defeat for the Americans, but incessant calls to avenge their crimes reflect a painful awareness that the enemy got off far too easily.
¹⁹

A poster commemorating the Sinch’ŏn massacre of October 1950 “Let us not forget the grudge over Sinch’ŏn!”

Above: The iconic photograph of the USS Pueblo crew after their capture in 1968. Below: The poster reads: “If the US imperialist indiscriminately lash out, they will not be able to escape the fate of the USS Pueblo!”

Gloating over the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968 is more truly felt. History books treat it as the shining highlight of North Korea’s long-running confrontation with the United States. The photograph of the hapless crew with their hands in the air is the single most iconic image of the enemy; there are even postage stamps of it. The short story
Snowstorm in Pyongyang
(P’yŏngyang ŭi nŭnbora, 2000) contrasts the Pueblo prisoners’ filth and depravity with the purity of the child race. Frequent showers do nothing to alleviate the Yankees’ nauseating stench, so that a KPA soldier finally refuses to go on cutting their hair.
²⁰
In a half-revolted, half-jeering tone, the narrator tells the scandalous back stories of the captured “bastards.” One crewmember, it is claimed, felt so disillusioned by the incestuous goings on in his family that he “began sleeping with whatever women came his way. Tiring of that, he became gay.”
²¹

The Text regards homosexuality as a characteristically American “perversion.” Here one of the Pueblo’s crew pleads for the right to indulge it in captivity.

The US government having apologized for spying, the prisoners are led off. At the same time a snowstorm rages, “as if intent on sweeping the country clean of all the filthy ugly revolting traces” left behind by the Yankees.
²³

Let us turn now to the Text’s treatment of the ongoing nuclear dispute. Here too the contrast to Soviet propaganda is stark. Where Moscow always professed a respect for international law, the North Koreans reject the notion that a pure race should be bound by the dictates of an impure world. The Text thus cheerfully admits that the DPRK joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985 only to “use” it for the country’s own ends, whereupon it “ignored” or “scorned” the treaty’s stipulations.
²⁴
The “diplomatic warriors” of the DPRK’s Foreign Ministry roam the world at will, barging into the offices of frightened officials to make blunt, rude demands. In the following passage from one of the most highly celebrated novels of 1997, Deputy Foreign Minister Mun Sŏn-gyu (a thinly disguised version of Kang Sŏk-chu, who held the title at the time) calls on Hans Blix in Vienna.
²⁵

So although the DPRK had hitherto “ignored” the NPT’s stipulations, Mun wants it treated like a member in good standing. Perhaps aware of the shamelessness of his own demand, he does not appear genuinely angry. Instead he is amusing himself by bullying Blix. Readers are clearly meant to be amused too: