The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [18]
Although South Koreans are glad that they compromised their nationalist principles for wealth and modernity, many of them feel a nagging sense of moral inferiority to their more orthodox brethren. They may disapprove of the North’s actions, but rarely with indignation, often blaming America or Japan for having provoked them. Eager to assuage their guilt about not wanting re-unification, they prefer to see in the DPRK’s lack of democracy and human rights only a benign difference in stages of development.
The Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun administrations that ruled the country from 1998 to 2008 heightened these tendencies by encouraging an anti-American line in education and urging the media to “finlandize” their coverage of the DPRK. As a result, a North Korean surreptitiously watching TV broadcasts from Seoul would have seen little in these years that directly contradicted the myth of a rich-but-shamefaced South chafing under the Yankee yoke. Instead he would have heard news announcers referring respectfully to Kim Jong Il as the “National Defense Council Chairman,” a title that implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of both the North Korean state and its nuclear program. He would have seen numerous anti-American demonstrations, attended by tens of thousands of South Koreans of all ages and economic classes. He would have learned of the opinion polls according to which the US is the country most widely perceived as South Korea’s main enemy. He might even have seen romantic comedies in which a virginal girl from the North appears as the better, purer Korean.
None of this, however, discouraged the DPRK’s youth from trying to follow the Yankee colony’s music, slang and fashions. The regime responded by condemning the influx of heterodox culture and information as a CIA plot to destabilize the republic. A lecture written in spring 2005 for party-internal use (and later smuggled out of the DPRK) quotes Kim Jong Il as saying, “Through all manner of falsehoods and trickery, the imperialists and reactionaries are paralyzing the healthy thinking of the masses while spreading among them bourgeois-reactionary ideas and rotten bourgeois customs.”3 These included living in a lazy, corrupt or decadent fashion, wearing long hair and clothes with “politically problematic words or pictures on them,” and otherwise copying other countries’ ways.4
What will happen if we succumb to and fail to block these customs of living that the bastards are disseminating? In a word, we become … incapable of adhering to socialism. Most importantly, we become unable to defend to our death the leadership of the revolution.5
But while outside cultural influences were much in evidence, even in Pyongyang itself, no credible visitor to the DPRK registered significant signs of political dissent. One aid worker said that the only criticism he had heard in weeks touring the country in 2005 came from a drunken man who said, “People would prefer a better life.”† Nor was there evidence to support claims that a Christian multitude was secretly worshipping there.6 The closest thing to a popular non-secular activity appeared to be the consultation of shamans and fortunetellers for business advice.7 There were, for that matter, no reliable indications that North Koreans engaged in any illegal forms of associational life that were not aimed at making money. Nor did they consider their entrepreneurial activities to be at odds with the official ideology. “Making money is patriotic” was said to be a popular if informal slogan.8 In short, the spread of capitalism did not appear to be eroding support for the regime.
THE DPRK IN CRISIS, 2008-
Though never going so far as to praise either of the left-wing presidents to occupy the Blue House in Seoul, the North had for most of the decade concentrated its invective on the “warmongers” and “Yankee lackeys” in South Korea’s conservative