The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [22]
Although foreign journalists took amused note of this exchange, it did not discourage them from referring to the DPRK as a “hard-line communist” state.2 They seem to have assumed that the North Korean officer was speaking off the record. In fact his remarks were fully in line with the official ideology. Only weeks earlier, the party daily had condemned the South Korean government for welcoming an American star football player of half-Korean parentage and for tolerating miscegenation:
Mono-ethnicity [tanilsŏng] is something that our nation and no other on earth can pride itself on … There is no suppressing the nation’s shame and anger at the talk of “a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society”… which would dilute even the bloodline of our people.3
Even the general’s seemingly irrelevant remark about Korea’s natural beauty was orthodox. One of the many correspondences between the North Korean worldview and European fascist thought is the notion of a mystical unity between the nation and its territory. (German Völkisch theorists believed the Jews, being originally of the desert, were naturally shallow and dry.)4 The regime never tires of conveying the message, not least through the monumental landscape paintings before which the leader receives foreign dignitaries, that the motherland’s physical attributes—from the loftiness of its peaks to the purity of its mountain lakes—reflect the virtues of the race itself.
An especially common motif is the deep forest, which psychologists regard as a universal archetype of the instincts. Informed as they are by our traditional mistrust of spontaneity, our fairy-tales and legends tend to depict the forest as a menacing place of witches and wolves. The North Koreans, with their celebration of pure racial instincts, treat it as a safe and womb-like place that affords them an insurmountable advantage over the enemy. Another popular image, especially since the collapse of the national economy in the early 1990s, is that of giant waves hurling themselves against the motherland’s rocky coast.
Use of the word “motherland” in this context may surprise Western readers who, proceeding from the popular fallacy of a Confucian-cum-Stalinist state, tend to expect North Koreans to think in terms of a fatherland instead. That is indeed the word more often used in the KCNA’s English-language service.5 But when propaganda for domestic consumption—or what for convenience’s sake I call the Text—compares the country to one of the two parents, it is always to a mother: the most common term is literally “mother homeland.”6 Kim Jong Il himself is quoted as saying, “The homeland is everyone’s mother … [from whose] bosom all true life and happiness springs.”7
A mythologized version of Mother Korea’s history is at the heart of the Text. It can be summarized as follows. Thousands of years ago, on a beautiful peninsula in the center of East Asia, there emerged one of mankind’s first distinct races, the Korean race. While still evolving from Early Korean to Modern Korean Man the Koreans settled the whole peninsula and much of northeast Asia. All they lacked was a strong leader. At last, in the third millennium BE, a great emperor named Tan’gun united Koreans into a state named Chosǒn, taking Pyongyang as his capital. Koreans were thus the first Asians to achieve nationhood, a crucial first stage of civilization. Though Old Chosǒn shared the peninsula with other, smaller kingdoms, the Koreans