The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [32]
A personality cult comes into being when a one-man dictatorship presents itself as a democracy. The goal is to convey the impression that due to the ruler’s unique qualifications and the unanimity of the people’s love for him, his rule constitutes the perfect fulfillment of democratic ideals. In this respect at least, the Kim cult resembles the cults of Mao and Stalin. In most others it is closer to the leader cults of fascism. Where the Chinese and Soviet cults derived their respective leaders’ greatness from an unequalled grasp of dialectical materialism, the North Korean cult derives Kim’s from his embodiment of ethnic virtues: he is the most naïve, spontaneous, loving, and pure Korean—the most Korean Korean—who ever lived. As one propagandist recently put it, Kim Il Sung is “the symbol of the homeland.”6
Blank-eyed as always, the young Kim takes from his mother the gun with which he would start his war of liberation.
To eliminate all doubt that the Leader’s virtues were inborn and not acquired, the Text plays up his impeccable lineage (crediting his great-grandfather with leading a famous attack on an American gunship in 1866) and the very young age at which he began manifesting his virtue.7 His father Kim Hyŏng-jik (a rather pallid hero of the resistance for whom the Text can work up no real passion) is rarely shown teaching his son, let alone disciplining him.8 With very short hair and a soft, pale-moon face marked by small and feminine features, the boy Kim recalls the children pictured in imperial Japanese schoolbooks. Usually he looks cheerful, showing the dimpled smile to which the Text constantly draws attention. In some pictures, like one in which he receives a gun from his mother, he seems to sense the responsibility weighing on his young shoulders, but even here his eyes are blank: because true Korean spontaneity ends where an intellectual expression begins, Kim is never shown thinking.9 Anything that might be seen as having diminished the leader’s artlessness and naivety is downplayed or ignored altogether. Love of the race leads him spontaneously to Marxism, an ideology that the Text praises but (for obvious reasons) is loath to explain.
One may well ask how a leader can pose as the embodiment of naivety on the one hand and a brilliant strategist and revolutionary on the other. In the 1940s and 1950s writers made ludicrous efforts to explain away this contradiction, claiming, among other things, that Kim’s best ideas came to him in his sleep.10 The propaganda apparatus soon realized it would be better simply to divert public attention elsewhere. While the leader’s genius and invincibility on the battlefield are accorded all due praise, only his ethnic virtues—his naivety, his purity, his spontaneity and solicitude—are constantly shown in action.
In depictions of his guerilla years, for example, the young General is almost never seen in actual combat. Instead he appears between battles, fussing cheerfully over his soldiers’ food and well being.11 His wife Kim Chŏng-suk, the object of her own minor personality cult, cuts a more martial figure than he does. She is even referred to as his “bodyguard.”12 In one illustration she sternly holds back her smooth-faced husband while she fires at the Japanese enemy.13
How, the critical outsider may ask, did the General manage to keep his guerillas so well-dressed and well-armed? If he never lost a battle, why was almost no Korean territory liberated until that effortless “final push”? Why is every photograph from this period so blurred and grainy?14 Citizens born in the DPRK might not wonder about such things, but what about those old enough to have experienced the Soviet occupation? We can, I believe, exclude the possibility that they swallowed the new version of history whole, rejecting their own memories in the process. More likely they shrugged off its “mere” factual