The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [0]
© 2010 B.R. Myers
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-935554-97-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Myers, B. R., 1963-
The cleanest race : how North Koreans see themselves and why it matters / B.R. Myers.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Korea (North)—Social conditions. 2. Propaganda, North Korean—Social aspects. 3. Nationalism—Korea (North) 4. National characteristics, Korean. 5. Ethnicity—Korea (North) I. Title.
HN730.6.Z9M66 2010
303.3’75095193—dc22
2009045072
v3.1_r1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PREFACE
PART I
A History of North Korea’s Official Culture
PART II
Understanding North Korea Through Its Myths
Mother Korea and Her Children
The Parent Leader
Photo Insert
The Dear Leader
Foreigners
The Yankee Colony
CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MOTHER: 1) The woman who has given birth to one: Father and mother; a mother’s love. A mother’s benevolence is higher than a mountain, deeper than the ocean. Also used in the sense of “a woman who has a child”: What all mothers anxiously want is for their children to grow up healthy and become magnificent red builders. 2) A respectful term for someone of an age similar to one’s own mother: Comrade Platoon Leader called Dŏngmani’s mother “mother” and always helped her in her work. 3) A metaphor for being loving, looking after everything, and worrying about others: Party officials must become mothers who ceaselessly love and teach the Party rank and file, and become standard-bearers at the forefront of activities. In other words, someone in charge of lodgings has to become a mother to the boarders. This means looking carefully after everything: whether someone is cold or sick, how they are eating, and so on. 4) A metaphor for the source from which something originates: The Party is the great mother of everything new. Necessity is the mother of invention.
FATHER: the husband of one’s birth mother.
Two entries from a North Korean dictionary of the Korean language, 1964
PREFACE
The most important questions regarding North Korea are the ones least often asked: What do the North Koreans believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them? Yes, we know the country has a personality cult, but this fact alone tells us little. Cuba has a personality cult too, yet the Castro regime espouses an ideology quite different from that of its counterpart in Pyongyang. On what grounds is the North Korean Leader so extravagantly acclaimed? What is the nature of his mission, and the purported destiny of his nation as a whole? Only through this sort of information can one begin to make sense of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), to use its formal name. It is unfortunate but by no means surprising that our news correspondents eschew such topics in order to return ad nauseam to the same monuments and mass games, the same girl directing traffic. More remarkable has been the extent to which academics, think-tank analysts and other Pyongyang watchers have neglected to study the worldview of the military-first regime. Regardless of their own political leanings (and North Korean studies remains marked by a sharp left-right divide), they have tended toward interpretations of the country in which ideology plays next to no role. Conservatives generally explain the dictatorship’s behavior in terms of a cynical struggle to maintain power and privilege, while liberals prefer to regard the DPRK as a “rational actor,” a country behaving much as any tiny country would in the face of a hostile superpower. Such interest as either camp can bring to bear on so-called soft issues exhausts itself in futile attempts to make sense of Juche Thought, a sham doctrine with no bearing on Pyongyang’s policy-making.
To be sure, the Western world is generally much less interested in ideology—for reasons that are themselves ideological—than it was during the Cold War. Most Americans know just as little about Islamism as they did before 9/11. But why is there