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By Root 697 0

symbol of racial purity. The destruction of the original city by American bombs enabled the regime to re-design it from scratch as a grand and enduring work of propaganda in its own right: enormous monuments, most of them constructed in the Soviet-subsidized golden age of the 1970s and 1980s, face each other across wide plazas and boulevards. These include the giant bronze statue of Kim Il Sung, which would dwarf any Mao statue in China; the Arch of Triumph, far larger than its obvious Parisian model; the monument of the winged Ch’ŏllima horse; and, on the other side of the Taedong River, the Juche Tower, complete with a ruby-red electric flame on top that lights up at night; and the monument to the Workers’ Party, i.e. gigantic stone renderings of a hoe (for the farmers), a hammer (for industrial workers) and a writing brush (for the white collar workers). Foreigners sneer at the kitsch of these things, cluck about the money spent on their construction, and assume—as is falsely assumed of Nazi buildings—that their imposing size is meant to make people feel insignificant. But propaganda is never a mere waste of money, and its whole point is to make people feel as significant as possible. No doubt North Koreans feel as much pride in these enduring monuments of strength and unity as Americans feel at the sight of the Lincoln Memorial.

White is the dominant color in Pyongyang: white concrete plazas, white or at least blonde-stoned buildings and white statues of virginal maidens in long gowns abound, as could only be possible in a city with none of the heavy industry that Stalin and Mao allowed to develop in urban centers. Pyongyang is often photographed or depicted under snow, a favored symbol of purity in itself.

The snowstorm rendered Pyongyang—this city steeped in the five-thousand year old, jade-like spirit of the race, imbued with the proudly lonely life-breath of the world’s cleanest, most civilized people—free of the slightest blemish … covering everything in a thick white veil of purity.13

White is made much of throughout the official culture. There is constant reference to the child race’s legendary preference for white clothes. In a painting dealing with what the regime calls the Homeland Liberation War (1950-1953) a camouflaged river-raft and its military cargo are steered by a girl in a dazzling white chŏgori or traditional blouse.14 In an equally improbable painting Kim Il Sung’s female partisans wash their whites in a creek, while others hang theirs where they can be seen for miles around. (No men are in sight; in the DPRK, washing is women’s work.)15

It goes without saying that this propaganda could not be further removed from a Marxist worldview. There is, after all, a great difference between patriotic or state-nationalist communism à la Tito’s Yugoslavia, and the North Koreans’ belief in their innate moral superiority to all other peoples. But for obvious reasons the regime does not advance its race theory explicitly enough to offend its dwindling group of foreign friends. It has little need to be explicit, however, for there is no other worldview inside North Korea against which it must assert itself.16† Occasionally Kim Il Sung will be quoted as having said, for example, “Korea’s citizens are homogenous; therefore they have strong brotherly love,” or his son quoted as saying that “our people is … the purest and cleanest in the world.”17 But the official race theory is generally propagated more through omission and implication. By stressing that Koreans exhibited “lofty moral attitudes” from the earliest stages of their civilization, and by leaving out the positive mention of formative influences on the national character—Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and shamanism are all denounced—the masses are given no choice but to infer that they are born virtuous.18

No physical superiority over other races is claimed. Propaganda freely acknowledges, for example, that Americans are much taller.19 Nor is superior intelligence asserted with any real conviction, though Kim Jong Il has described Koreans