The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [23]
From the start Koreans were marked by a strong sense of virtue and justice, and their exemplary manners earned the country renown as “The Land of Politeness in the East.” No less famous were their clothes, which were as white as the snowcapped peaks of Mount Paektu. Kind-hearted and well featured, Koreans lived in harmonious villages, respecting the people above them and loving those beneath them. Unfortunately the effete ruling classes, having fallen under the sway of Confucianism, Buddhism and other pernicious foreign ideologies, proved no match for the imperialists’ schemes, and in 1905 Korea became a Japanese colony. Burning with righteous anger, the masses rose up on March 1, 1919 to demand national independence. The demonstration was brutally suppressed. Fortunately a great leader had already been born who would guide the nation to its proper place on the world stage.8
The regime in Pyongyang is often accused of “brainwashing” its subjects, as if the former secretly believed something very different, and the latter were passive or even unwilling victims of indoctrination. Perhaps this misperception derives from the mistaken belief that the personality cult—which looks much harder to swallow when regarded in isolation—forms the basis of the official worldview. In fact, as we can see from the above summary, the personality cult proceeds from myths about the race and its history that cannot but exert a strong appeal on the North Korean masses. In his classic book The Denial of Death (1973), the social anthropologist Ernest Becker concluded that man’s fear of death and insignificance makes him look to his country for an “immortality project,” a myth that will make him feel “vital to the universe, immortal in some way.”9 The notion of every citizen’s sacred mission to reunite the pure race and move it to the center of the world stage does a very good job of filling the North Koreans’ need for significance, not least because everyone is given a role to play.
As discussed in the preceding chapter, it was the Japanese who taught the Koreans to see themselves as part of a uniquely pure and virtuous race. All the Kim Il Sung regime did was to expel the Japanese from that race and transpose the familiar Japanese symbols into Korean ones—replacing the divine racial founder Jimmu with the homegrown Tan’gun, Mount Fuji with Mount Paektu, and so on. History books now treat the Tan’gun myth, including the story of his birth on Paektu, as fact. In 1993 the regime claimed to have excavated the great man’s tomb near Pyongyang.10 This is not the place to discuss whether Tan’gun really existed, or whether Korea’s history was as traumatic as all that. As Walker Connor pointed out, “it is seldom what is that is of political importance, but what people think is.”11 Much the same myths (sans the Kim cult, of course) are widely believed in the southern half of the peninsula too, despite the freedom of speech and information enjoyed there. The main difference is that North Korea regards the country’s history as a long foreshadowing to Kim Il Sung, much as Christians see everything before the birth of Jesus as a Vorgeschichte or pre-history.
In the late 1940s, propaganda began celebrating Mount Paektu, hitherto known merely as Korea’s highest peak, as a sacred racial symbol à la Mount Fuji. South Korean veneration of Mount Paektu did not begin until decades later.
Also unique to the DPRK is the effort to puff up Pyongyang’s historical importance at Seoul’s expense.12 The capital is second only to the snow-capped, lake-filled crater of Mount Paektu as the national landmark and geographical