The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [25]
The race’s historical vulnerability to attack is ascribed to the absence of a great leader who could turn its purity into a source of unity and strength. Since the advent of Kim Il Sung, Koreans can and should indulge their pure childlike instincts. For this reason the party poses as a nurturing, protective mother. The Rodong sinmun newspaper explained the metaphor in 2003:
The Great Ruler Comrade Kim Jong Il has remarked, “Building the party into a mother party means that just as a mother deeply loves her children and cares warmly for them, so must the party take responsibility for the fate of the people, looking after them even in the smallest matters, and become a true guide and protector of the masses.”22
Accordingly, citizens are expected to behave like children. The following is an excerpt from “Mother” (Ǒmŏni), one of the country’s best-known poems.
Ah, Korean Workers’ Party
At whose breast only
My life begins and ends;
Be I buried in the ground or strewn to the wind
I remain your son, and again return to your breast!
Entrusting my body to your affectionate gaze,
Your loving outstretched hand,
I will forever cry out in the voice of a child,
Mother! I can’t live without Mother!23
It goes without saying that this state-sponsored infantilism exerts a strong psychological appeal. Erich Fromm wrote of how man’s fear of emerging from the warm security of the family keeps him “in the prison of the motherly racial-national-religious fixation.”24 No less obvious is the incompatibility of this propaganda with Marxism-Leninism. Believing that “the people is an eternal child,” as the French revolutionary Saint-Just famously remarked, Lenin saw the communist party’s raison d’être in forcing it to grow up.25 The Soviet party posed as an educating father, as did the dictator who so famously talked of the need to “re-engineer” the human soul. A leading American scholar of Stalinist culture has shown that the so-called spontaneity-consciousness dialectic forms the master plot of socialist realist fiction.26 Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalyalas’ stal’, 1936), for example, tells how a party cadre, armed with the teachings of Lenin and Stalin, educates a headstrong youth into a politically conscious “positive hero.”
In contrast, the DPRK’s propaganda is notably averse to scenes of intellectual discipline. Because Koreans are born pure and selfless, they can and should heed their instincts. Often they are shown breaking out of intellectual constraints in a mad spree of violence against the foreign or land-owning enemy.27 Cadres are expected to nurture, not teach, and bookworms are negative characters. In short: where Stalinism put the intellect over the instincts, North Korean culture does the opposite. When a sympathetic British documentary about life in the DPRK entitled A State of Mind (2004) was shown in Pyongyang, the authorities changed the title to “Maŭm ŭi nara,” or The Country of Heart.28
How do artists depict this spontaneous child race? The men in posters are robust but boyish, with somewhat swarthy complexions, thick eyebrows, square jaws and full lips, the women plump but girlish, with round pale faces and low nose bridges. For all the stylization the faces are recognizably Korean, and although replicating the ideal is more difficult in movies than in posters, most of the country’s film stars come close.29 The men’s hair is always short, the women’s usually above the shoulders and permed. Little boys’ heads are