The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [36]
A central theme of depictions of the latter half of Kim’s rule is his worldwide renown, which brings statesmen from around the world on tributary visits to Pyongyang. He receives them straight-backed, with benign smiles but no real warmth. While all may derive benefit from his insights, his love is for the pure race alone.40 Special treatment is shown to foreigners who have done the DPRK a particularly great service. “I am grateful to you,” Kim tells an obsequious Reverend Billy Graham in a recent account, “for spreading so much propaganda about us.”41
The Kim of the early 1990s—that is, of the last years of his life—is shown in somewhat different terms. He remains the revered leader of the country, in which role he accepts Jimmy Carter’s abject surrender proposal in June 1994, but with his own race run, he is content to leave the defense of the country to his brilliant son.42 This hereditary succession is seen overseas as proof positive of the DPRK’s Confucian tendencies. In depictions of the early 1990s, however, Kim treats his son with a deference that turns the most important of Confucius’s Five Relationships on its head. An official documentary made in 1992 shows him writing a florid panegyric to Jong Il, and in historical novels he converses with him, even in private, in polite Korean, addressing him as Supreme Commander or General.43 When I show these works to my South Korean students, who unlike their northern counterparts have been raised to think in Confucian terms, they laugh and shake their heads.
This does not mean that the Kim cult bears no traces of Korea’s pre-colonial traditions, nor that it is completely unlike its defunct Eastern European counterparts. The far more obvious and significant influence, however, is that of the Japanese emperor cult. Like Kim, Hirohito appeared as the hermaphroditic parent of a child race whose virtues he embodied; was associated with white clothing, white horses, the snow-capped peak of the race’s sacred mountain, and other symbols of racial purity; was said to be joined with his subjects as one entity, “one mind united from top to bottom”; and referred to as the Sun of the Nation (minjok ŭi t’aeyang), the Great Marshal (taewŏnsu) whom citizens must “venerate” (pattŭlda) and be ready to die for.44 A significant difference is that while the Text likes to draw bemused attention to outsiders, including Americans and South Koreans, who allegedly regard Kim Il Sung as a divine being, it never makes such claims for him itself.† But the similarity between the two cults remains too great to be explained away, as it is by some observers, in terms of borrowed “elements.”45 They are fundamentally alike, because they derive from a fundamentally similar view of the world.
Many in the West, of course, continue to doubt that the North Koreans really believe in their personality cult. This skepticism derives in part from recollections of the double lives led in the old East Bloc, where the average educated citizen feigned fervent support for his country’s leader in formal settings only to joke about him behind closed doors. But this only goes to show how little the East Bloc and North Korea ever had in common, for the masses’ adoration of Kim Il Sung has always been very real. Even among the few North Koreans who have left the country and stayed out, a heartfelt admiration for the Great Leader is mainstream. (I personally know migrants who still cannot talk of him without tearing up.) This has much to do with the far greater psychological appeal of nationalism itself, but Kim Il Sung’s peculiarly androgynous or hermaphroditic image also seems to exert a far more emotional attraction than any of the unambiguously paternal leaders of Eastern Europe were able to. I am not qualified to analyze the cult (or anything else)