The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [21]
Whatever kind of country the successor stands to inherit, it will not be a communist one. The DPRK’s revised constitution, ratified in April 2009 and made known to the world in the fall, forbore even to pay lip service to that term, instead invoking “military-first” socialism as the country’s guiding principle. Short of reviving the kamikaze slogans of the Pacific War—though of course it has done that too—the regime can hardly make its ideological affinity to the first “national defense” state on Korean soil any clearer. Whether the world will ever stop regarding the DPRK as “the last bastion of Stalinism” is another matter.
† I once spoke to a German lady, a Korea scholar, who had interpreted for Kim during his visit to East Berlin. Though an admirer of the man, she conceded, “He seemed never to have read a serious book.”
† Much the same myth is propagated south of the DMZ. In 2006 a South Korean government commission announced that of eighty-six Koreans convicted by the Allies of war crimes, eighty-three should be regarded as blameless “victims of Japan.” A telling exception was made for those who had committed crimes against other Koreans. Alford explores the Koreans’ refusal to attribute evil to their countrymen in Think No Evil (1999), but draws the wrong conclusion that they have no concept of evil at all.
† Although the North Koreans refer to the Korean War in English-language propaganda as the Fatherland Liberation War, they refer to Korea in their own language as the Homeland or Motherland (literally Mother Homeland). See the following chapters for more on the DPRK’s penchant for mother metaphors.
† North Korean historians later backdated the start of this movement to 1956 to make it seem less like a copy of its Chinese counterpart. Alas, even conservative South Korean researchers now uncritically accept 1956 as the year the movement began.
† A North Korean refugee, the son of a poet, told me how plain-clothed police came to the family apartment in Pyongyang at this time to search for such books.
† Dear Ruler might be a more accurate translation, because the Korean word chidoja—or yŏngdoja, as is now more common—is different from the word suryŏng used in Kim Il Sung’s title of Parent Leader.
† A former secret police operative from the harbor city of Namp’o told me that to spread this distorted view of the summit she and other colleagues were made to visit towns and villages posing as well-connected travelers from Pyongyang.
† In May 2005 a video purporting to show evidence of dissent in North Hamgyŏng province—an angry banner hung from a bridge, a defaced portrait of Kim Jong Il—was made public. This bold defiance was credited to the “Freedom Youth League,” which, according to the filmmaker, has cells across the country. The fact that both the banner and the portrait were hung directly by the filmmaker himself, who then sold the video to a Japanese broadcasting company, speaks for itself. See “Flicker of Dissent,” The Houston Chronicle, June 4, 2005.
† “N. Korean poster seems to confirm succession,” Chosun Ilbo, September 25, 2009.
PART II
Understanding North Korea Through Its Myths
CHAPTER TWO
MOTHER KOREA AND HER CHILDREN
In May 2006 North and South Korean generals met to discuss a re-alignment of the maritime border between the two states. In preliminary small talk the South’s delegation leader mentioned that farmers in his