The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [33]
Confident of the popular desire to believe in a homegrown liberation army, the propaganda apparatus has never worried much about realism or consistency. For a while it was claimed that the revolutionary army had acquired its gleaming weapons by sneaking up on Japanese sentries and throwing red pepper in their eyes!15 Over the past sixty years the young Kim and his fighters have been depicted in lavish uniforms of various styles and colors, an olive-brown finally replacing the too Japanese-looking khaki of old.16 The foreigner may well chuckle at this, as at the other preposterous illustrations in the history books: the General’s pristine log cabin, looking like something in a child’s snow-dome; demure female partisans dashing through emerald forests in crisply pleated skirts. But there is more method here than meets the eye. The liberation myth would not exert as strong an appeal if it were served cold, i.e., as a sober and realistic narrative of an all-too recent history. The regime wisely prefers to depict a magical and epic past that must be accepted on its own terms.
Needless to say, the Text claims that Kim Il Sung took over the country on the day of liberation, August 15, 1945, though it fails to explain why two months elapsed before his triumphant homecoming speech to an enormous Pyongyang crowd. This event is the subject of many verbal and visual depictions, all of them far removed from the original photograph taken that October 14, which has been doctored beyond recognition. (The Soviet generals who stood directly behind Kim at the rally are nowhere to be seen; neither is the Red Army medal on his chest.)17 Paintings of the first months of independence often show Kim at the center of a frantically cheering crowd. Sometimes he wears a dark suit, sometimes a military-type uniform with knee-high white padded boots, sometimes a white tunic and matching trousers.18 Another popular theme is his triumphant return to Man’gyŏngdae, the village of his childhood. We are meant to marvel at the great man’s humility as he chats with straight-talking aunts and uncles.19
In contrast to depictions of the guerilla era, Kim appears in DPRK-themed pictures always as plump, if never quite as fat as he was in real life. Unlike Stalin and Mao, who personified the triumph of consciousness over the instincts, Kim had little need to pose as an ascetic. On the contrary, his plumpness symbolizes the race’s newfound freedom to indulge its innocent instincts. (Yankee villains, incidentally, are beanpole thin.)20
The DPRK’s propagandists are clearly uncomfortable with the “Homeland Liberation War,” even if they do depict it as a glorious victory over the US; there is no getting around the awkward fact that the republic was utterly devastated on the Parent Leader’s watch. War writers thus tend to keep him off-stage while invoking him as a galvanizing inspiration to the race. Soldiers shout “Long Live General Kim Il Sung” as they lead the charge or blow themselves up in suicide attacks.21 One of the few well-known war-themed works in which Kim makes a physical appearance is a painting entitled “Leader, the Front Line is Up Ahead.” Kim has just disembarked from the presidential jeep (bearing, in cap and jackboots, an unfortunate resemblance to a chauffeur). While an aide surveys the smoke-dimmed middle distance, a female soldier—the usual bob-haired personification of Korean chastity—informs the leader that the front is just around the bend. Kim, somehow standing atop the thick mud and not in it, listens with a smile. Presumably one is meant to marvel at his courage in putting himself so close to harm’s way and his modesty in traveling with only one aide.22
In depictions of the post-war years—or the Homeland Reconstruction Period,