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By Root 743 0

of aid by continuing to vilify his counterpart in Seoul as if nothing had happened. So it was that the official news agency ceased its attacks on the South Korean government, and less prominent propaganda outlets picked up the slack. The latter asserted that Kim Dae Jung had come to Pyongyang in 2000 to make the North renounce socialism, only to be dazed by the Dear Leader’s genius into accepting his demands for inter-Korean cooperation.† The ensuing years saw the regime devote ever more energy to demonizing the Republican administration in Washington. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s reference to North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” was met with aggrieved posturing by the KCNA (which since its founding in 1948 had vigorously applied the word “evil” to the United States). Propaganda contradicted itself: On the one hand the Americans’ allegations of a nuclear weapons program were condemned as far-fetched lies, while on the other it was truculently implied that they were true. “Under the pretext of a so-called ‘nuclear problem’ the US is making its military threats against our republic ever more explicit,” wrote a KCNA scribe in May 2003, weeks after North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “The only way to guard the nation’s peace … under these circumstances, which cause such deep concern to the entire Korean people, is to have a strong deterrent against war. We have already prepared such a military deterrent.”1

By the summer of 2003 the DPRK had agreed to take part in nuclear negotiations with the US, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. While the regime’s diplomats expressed hope for better relations, domestic propaganda stridently insisted that the Yankees were inherently evil and would never change. In August, with the first round of the six-party talks about to convene in Beijing, Jackals (1951), the canonical tale of murderous Christian missionaries, re-appeared simultaneously in three monthly magazines, complete with drawings of sunken-eyed, hook-nosed Yankees.2

The DPRK’s recovery from the famine years did not mean a full restoration of the internal security of old. Many in the northern provinces continued tuning in to Chinese TV on their smuggled sets, and communicating with migrants by smuggled cell phones. Some near the DMZ had even taken to watching television broadcasts from Seoul. Despite periodic crackdowns by the authorities, South Korean videos and DVD’s did a roaring trade in rural markets.

As a result, the South’s prosperity quickly became common knowledge inside the DPRK. Realizing that it would do no good to deny it, the propaganda apparatus in 2000 began openly admitting that South Koreans enjoy a higher standard of living. This prosperity was rather ingeniously attributed to the Dear Leader’s “military-first” policy, which had allegedly kept the Yankees from unleashing another ruinous war on the peninsula. At the same time, of course, it was claimed that despite their wealth, the southern brethren yearned to rout their oppressors and rush to the Dear Leader’s embrace.

This line was not as preposterous as all that. Koreans in both republics generally agree that they are a uniquely homogenous, i.e. pure-blooded people whose innate goodness has made them perennial victims of foreign powers. While the DPRK expresses itself more stridently on such matters, there has never been as sharp an ideological divide as the one that separated West and East Germany. The dictators that ruled the ROK until the late 1980s thus had to keep strenuously downplaying the rival state’s Koreanness, referring to it as “the northern monster,” a Soviet satellite of strange “reds”; these were depicted primarily in animated cartoons. (Middle-aged South Koreans recall with a chuckle how in their childhood they had believed the “reds” were literally red!) The rise of public sympathy for the DPRK in the late 1990s was caused not by pro-Pyongyang propaganda but by the mere disappearance of the anti-Pyongyang kind: “As soon as we saw that they are Korean too, we stopped hating them,” is a typically naive