The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [30]
From The Flower Girl, 1972.
At last the girl’s brother, having escaped from prison and joined Kim Il Sung’s partisans, returns to exact revenge on the landlord. Although the heroine pledges to join the revolutionary struggle, it is not her sudden access of fighting spirit but the purity and naivety that she displays throughout the film that have made her an ethnic icon. This, the movie says, is how hard it was to be Korean in this evil world—before the Leader set the race free.
† The collapse of the information cordon that once sealed the North off from the “Yankee colony” has changed little in this regard, since the ROK’s media has strongly xenophobic tendencies itself. See for example the South Korean newspaper article “Oegugin bŏmjoi kŭpchŭng” (Drastic increase in foreigner crime, Chosun ilbo, October 18, 2007), which is accompanied by an illustration of a Korean girl fleeing in terror from knife-wielding big-noses.
† When I was screening the film to my South Korean graduate students, one of them turned smilingly to me during this part and said, “Typical Korean mother!”
† In 2005 it was reported that South Koreans read the least (only about three hours a week to Americans’ six) among the thirty nations whose consumer habits were surveyed by a consultancy. See “Indians ‘world’s biggest readers,’ ” BBC News, June 27, 2005.
† It is claimed that Kim Il Sung conceived and staged the story in Manchuria during the anti-Japanese struggle, but the fact that it was not mentioned until the 1960s, when Mao’s international fame as a poet was burgeoning, speaks for itself.
† Popular “new kabuki” plays performed by visiting Japanese troupes in the 1910s and 1920s helped to engender a Korean tradition of weepy and formulaic “sinp’agŭk” narratives, the influence of which can be seen in South Korean films and TV serials even today. Ho, Han’guk yŏnghwa 100-nyon, 22-24.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PARENT LEADER
Western journalists routinely claim that North Korea is essentially a Confucian country.1 A “Confucian version of George Orwell’s 1984,” writes one, a “Confucian museum, covered by a thick but superficial layer of Marxism-Leninism,” writes another.2 Scholars such as Selig Harrison and Thomas Hosuck Kang agree that the regime’s longevity can be attributed in large part to its skill in exploiting this age-old tradition.3 In fact the DPRK’s official culture clashes with the sage’s teachings in all significant respects. Confucius demanded rigorous self-cultivation through study; the Kim regime urges its subjects to remain as childlike and spontaneous as possible. Confucius considered no race better than another; the DPRK regards the Korean people as uniquely virtuous. Nor does the Workers’ Party condone the rites of ancestor worship that are still taken so seriously in the southern half of the peninsula.
To most observers, the North Korean regime’s heavy use of family symbolism is sufficient proof of Confucian tendencies. But almost all cultures espouse respect for one’s parents, and kinship metaphors have been part of political language since time immemorial. Indeed, there was once a father figure in every communist country. In order to prove a Confucian influence on the DPRK’s personality cult, one would have to demonstrate that there is something distinctly Confucian about it, a task doomed to failure. Contrary to what so many outsiders take for granted, the leader depicted in official propaganda is hardly a father figure at all, let alone a patriarch.
Before discussing this any further, let us summarize the current version of Kim Il Sung’s mythobiography.†
On April 15