The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [3]
The official worldview is not set out coherently in the leaders’ writings. These are more often praised than read.4 So-called Juche Thought functions at most as an imposing row of book-spines, a prop in the personality cult. (A good way to embarrass one’s minders in the DPRK is to ask them to explain it.) Unlike Soviet citizens under Stalin, or Chinese under Mao, North Koreans learn more about their leaders than from them.5 It is not in ideological treatises but in the more mass-oriented domestic propaganda that the official worldview is expressed most clearly and unselfconsciously. I stress the word domestic. Too many observers wrongly assume that the (North) Korean Central News Agency’s English-language releases reflect the same sort of propaganda that the home audience gets. In fact there are significant differences. For example, where the DPRK presents itself to the outside world as a misunderstood country seeking integration into the international community, it presents itself to its own citizens (as I will show later) as a rogue state that breaks agreements with impunity, dictates conditions to groveling U.N. officials, and keeps its enemies in constant fear of ballistic retribution. Generally speaking the following rule of thumb applies: the less accessible a propaganda outlet is to the outside world, the blunter and more belligerent it will be in its expression of the racist orthodoxy.
The following chapters are based on my own extensive research of as many different forms of domestic propaganda as I could find at the Unification Ministry’s North Korea Resource Center in Seoul. (This is, ironically enough, a better place to study the stuff than Pyongyang, where a foreigner’s requests for anything more than a few months old are met with suspicion.)6 From nightly news reports and television dramas to animated cartoons and war movies; from the white-papered Rodong Sinmun, the Workers’ Party organ, to women’s and children’s magazines printed on rough, gray paper; from short stories and historical novels to dictionaries, encyclopediae and school textbooks (these last printed, semi-legibly, on the worst paper of all); from reproductions of wall posters, oil paintings and caricatures to photographs of monuments and statues: these are the sources I have spent much of the past eight years studying.7 In the interest of brevity and variation—and in emulation of Alfred Pfabigan’s practice in a perceptive travelogue entitled Schlaflos in Pjöngjang (1986)—I will occasionally refer to the body of myths espoused in this propaganda as the Text, though the reader is not, of course, to imagine a closed set of books.
Why would such a secretive country export propaganda that lays bare the true nature of its official ideology? There are many reasons. One is that the DPRK has never relinquished its dream of fomenting a nationalist revolution in South Korea. Another is that it can earn hard currency by selling these materials at a high price to one or two licensed distributors, who in turn sell them to research libraries abroad. Perhaps most importantly, the regime rightly assumes that almost no one hostile to the DPRK will ever bother to look at these materials. (I can count on one hand the times I ever saw a Western visitor take a North Korean book from the Resource Center’s shelves.) Finally, and unfortunately, the more sensitive content is kept out of mass-produced, “hard copy” propaganda and confined to outlets intended exclusively for domestic eyes and ears. A current example is the on-again, off-again glorification of Kim Jong Il’s putative successor Kim Jong Ŭn, a mainly oral campaign carried out at party lectures, factory assemblies and the like, and through unprepossessing posters hung in display cases far from tourist sites. Fortunately a sharp-eyed Taiwanese