The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [26]
The physiognomic ideal admits of little variation. A worker in one painting appears much like a farmer or a soldier in another, while the children pictured in school textbooks are virtually identical.31 We have all seen clips of the Arirang mass games in which scores of children of the same height, body type and hairstyle dance and leap in unison. These games are not the grim Stalinist exercises in anti-individualism that foreigners (such as the makers of the aforementioned documentary) often misperceive them as, but joyous celebrations of the pure-bloodedness and homogeneity from which the race’s superiority derives.
The term “military first” does not mean that the armed forces lead the party; rather it is the party which, in accordance with Kim Jong Il’s will, puts the military first. It is also the party’s own propaganda that puts the armed forces on a high pedestal. Yet this glorification is often so extravagant as to make it appear that the party is abdicating at least part of its traditional role. Visual depictions of the new society tend to show a soldier (massive forearm outstretched, mouth open in a shout) leading the way for factory workers, farmers and scientists. The TV evening news often quotes Kim Jong Il as calling the military “the university of the revolution,” and “a magnificent school of ideological, intellectual and physical training.”32 (One wonders where this leaves the nation’s women, most of whom do not go through this school.) The soldier is also held up as a model for all to emulate, which is not necessarily the case with the party cadre. (The latter is a much less prominent and heroic figure in North Korean narrative than in the socialist realism of the old East Bloc.)33 Kim Jong Il is said to “love warriors most of all.”34
The DPRK’s cult of military life is different from its Prussian or Japanese counterparts in that training is seen as going with and not against the grain of the recruit’s instincts. Discipline is all well and good, but must never diminish the race’s unique spontaneity. Indeed, in one “historical” novel from the 1950s, Kim Il Sung commands the headstrong young protagonist to stay away from the guerilla fighting in the hope that this order will be disregarded!35 The film The Youths of the SS Seagull (Kalmaegiho ch’ǒngnyǒndŭl, 1961) invites the audience to side with the boyish hero as he cheerfully flouts the rules of his ship, annoying superiors no end. Needless to say, he does so for the sake of the collective, overstaying his shore leave to win a prize pig for his crewmates’ dinner, and so on. Still, such a story would have been inconceivable in the USSR.
Even in war, soldiers are depicted as overgrown children. A tank driver in the story Tank No. 214 (Ttangkǔ 214 ho, 1953):
The skin was dark, but the face was both noble and adorable, like the face of a small child. Chǒn Ki-ryǒn’s expression didn’t even change when he rolled over the enemy.… Chǒn was a twenty one year old boy. A voice within Comrade Sǒ suddenly called out, “You kill people with a smile, you little rascal, you were born to beat the enemy!”36
For all the army-as-school rhetoric, depictions of life in uniform dwell more on its healthy fraternal joys than its intellectual or physical rigors.37 Boisterousness is smiled upon as the mark of truly Korean naivety and innocence. In 2006 a magazine article told approvingly of soldiers who vaulted a fence in a mad rush to welcome Kim Jong Il’s sedan.38 There has been no shortage of historical incidents—from the Panmunjom axe-killings of 1976 to the recent shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Kumgangsan resort, to say nothing of the army’s maraudings during the famine—which indicate that this celebration of instinctive behavior has affected the culture of the real-life military. This in turn seems to have contributed to a certain friction between the military