The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [12]
Those who ran afoul of the state faced punishment ranging from the denial of food rations to imprisonment, but the party did not build up a massive police presence, nor did the average citizen live in terror of arrest. Like the colonial government before it, the regime knew how to exploit the Korean people’s traditional tendency to conform. The personality cult also played a vital role in garnering support for the regime.2 With the young Kim Jong Il at its helm, the propaganda apparatus made sure that the cult kept pace with its Chinese counterpart. Mao’s renown as a poet, for example, inspired the DPRK’s cultural apparatus to “revive” revolutionary plays, hitherto unmentioned, which Kim Il Sung had allegedly written during his youth.3 It was also “remembered” that in the 1930s the General had taken his partisans on an Arduous March every bit as heroic as Mao’s Long March.4 And if Mao had routed the Japanese without foreign help, then by golly, so had Kim. This last claim necessitated the withdrawal of countless reference works and school books that had paid fawning tribute to the Soviet Red Army.†
Many in the West wrongly assume, as George Orwell did, that a regime cannot reinvent history without resorting to brainwashing and intimidation. One need only look at the South Koreans, who celebrate their liberation from Japan every year with nary a mention of their liberators, to see how easily nationalist mythmaking goes down even in open societies. But Korean nationalists do not seriously believe that they were never aided by foreigners. Rather, they think that because that aid was motivated by self-interest, it is not historically meaningful, nor does it warrant grateful acknowledgment.
Mao’s reputation as a thinker posed a greater problem to Kim, who had never even led the discourse of his own party.5 Scouring his speeches for glimmers of original thought, the executors of the personality cult focused on his conveniently vague use of the Marxist term “subject,” or juche (chu’che) in Korean. In a speech in December 1955, Kim had reminded propagandists that the “subject”—the agent, in other words—of ideological work was the Korean revolution; instead of merely aping Soviet forms the party needed to establish the proper “subject” in its propaganda work. This sort of toothless nationalism or “domesticism” had been de rigueur throughout the East Bloc in the 1950s, for which reason the speech had aroused no special attention either in Pyongyang or Moscow. But North Korea watchers in the West, unaware of the greater communist context, or the standard Marxist use of the word juche, had been quick to misinterpret the speech as a bold, epochal declaration of Korean nationalism. (They still make the same mistake; Kim’s line “to love the USSR is to love Korea” is invariably overlooked.6) Their impressed response appears to have encouraged the North Koreans to begin touting “the subject idea” in the latter 1960s as Kim Il Sung’s original contribution to Marxist thought.
Kim saw no urgent need to create an actual ideology to back up the cant, but one of his advisors, a self-styled philosopher named Hwang Chang-yŏp, finally persuaded the leader to entrust him with this task.7 Hwang had his work cut out for him because there was nothing in Kim’s talk of self-reliance, or of adapting Marxism-Leninism to national conditions, that Mao had not only said more eloquently, but had done a much better job of putting into practice as well. Hwang also had to be careful not to make the new ideology clear or appealing enough to distract the domestic masses from the de facto ideology of race-based nationalism (which of course could not be conveyed to the outside world). He had to come up