The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [14]
Ever since this efflorescence of the personality cult, outside analysts have confidently claimed that the DPRK is in effect a Confucian family writ large, with Kim Il Sung as the father, the Workers’ Party as the mother, and the people as the children.10 A nice and neat theory, to be sure, but only the latter half of it holds up. In fact Kim Il Sung was increasingly acclaimed by the androgynous title of Parent Leader (ǒbǒi suryǒng), and like Hirohito was more a mother figure than a patriarch. By its own admission, the Workers’ Party calls itself the Mother Party not because it complements but because it emulates both Kims’ style of leadership.11 This prevalence of maternal authority figures is hard if not impossible to reconcile with Confucianism, which dictates that a mother must obey even her own sons.
Most North Korean refugees remember the 1970s as a happy time. Food, energy and clothing were in far more plentiful supply than they are today, Pyongyang’s proud rhetoric not having stopped it from squeezing even Bulgaria and Cuba for economic aid. As the DPRK saw things, it had shown its moral superiority by rejecting, at no small cost to its standard of living, all concessions to capitalism. It was only right and proper that inferior races should pay tribute by sharing some of their ill-gotten gains. Though much of the aid was provided in terms of loans, the DPRK made little effort to repay them.
In 1982 Kim Jong Il joined the Supreme People’s Assembly, assumed the title of Dear Leader, and became the object of his own extravagant personality cult.† Much was made of his birth on sacred Mount Paektu (though he had really been born in the USSR), his loving care for his father, and his alleged expertise in cultural matters, especially film-making. While foreigners regarded the planned succession as additional evidence of Confucian tendencies, Kim Jong Il emerged as an even more maternal figure than his father had been. He was, as one novelist put it, “More of a mother than all the mothers in the world.”12
Where the pseudo-doctrine of Juche Thought made much of the need for self-reliance, the DPRK’s economic policy reflected a commitment to isolation instead, which is something very different. It is perhaps helpful to draw an analogy to hikikomori, young Japanese men who refuse to venture out of their bedrooms, instead demanding that parents leave meal trays outside their door. They feel they can preserve their independence better by relying on the outside world than by working with it.13 Similarly, Kim Il Sung appears to have believed that the best way of maximizing his country’s isolation and security was not to strengthen the economy—a goal that would have required integration into the socialist trading community and other horrors—but rather to rely indefinitely on aid. This is not to deny that North Korea has always done many things for itself. One cannot depend completely on outsiders without forfeiting one’s isolation, or at least one’s privacy. (The hikikomori cleans his own room.) When a form of aid serves isolation, the North Koreans take it indefinitely, and when it does not, they do without; a concern for self-reliance per se does not enter into things. Especially telling, in this regard, is Pyongyang’s history of squandering currency reserves on luxury imports.14
The DPRK was thus caught flat-footed in 1987 when the USSR began sharply reducing its aid to the country. Two years later the East German leader Erich Honecker was forced out of office and into exile, much to Kim Il Sung’s consternation. German unification was quick to follow. Meanwhile Moscow began demanding that the DPRK pay world market prices for Soviet goods.15 Imports dropped accordingly.16 With the