The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [37]
Interestingly enough, the absence of a patriarchal authority figure may also have helped the regime preserve stability by depriving people of a target to rebel against. C. Fred Alford has written, “In ‘society without the father’ … everything just is, naturelike in its givenness, so that it does not even occur to one to rebel, just as one does not rebel against the mist.”47 Perhaps it is no wonder that the propaganda apparatus decided to make the country’s next leader even more of a mother than Kim Il Sung had been.
† I say “current,” because the myths have changed over the decades. It was not until the mid-1960s, for example, that the Text began claiming Kim Il Sung had defeated the Japanese and the Americans without foreign assistance.
† The bold-print rule applies to all ostensibly authentic statements from Kim Il Sung, his parents, his wife and (of course) his son Jong Il.
† In an article entitled “Brilliant Life Dedicated to Country and Nation,” it is written, “A foreigner said that … he believed in Kim Il Sung like God. [sic]” KCNA, July 6, 2007. Propaganda about the Dear Leader is similar: it is reported that many foreigners and religious South Koreans regard him as God/a god. In the novel Gun Barrel for example, a visiting American concludes that Kim Jong Il is the Messiah. Many foreign researchers mistakenly believe that the North Koreans themselves acclaim their leader as a God. See for example Noland, Avoiding the Apocalypse, 62. See also Ch’ŏngddae, 2003, page 462.
Visual documents of pre-liberation history hardly look like photographs at all, though they are referred to as such. Left: Kim Il Sung as a schoolboy in exile. Right: Kim with his wife, Kim Chŏng-suk, in their guerrilla days. The crudeness of these forgeries is no mere matter of technical ineptitude; a country that can forge US currency can do much better than this. The regime seems to want to present its creation myth as a grand, epic past that must be believed on its own terms.
The Torch of Poch’ŏnbo (1948), one of the earliest pictorial depictions of Kim Il Sung, shows the “general” and his guerrillas after their famous victory against a Japanese border outpost. While the battle itself is recorded fact, the quality of the uniforms shown here attests to the personality cult’s indifference to the dictates of realism.
Kim Il Sung, his wife Kim Chŏng-suk and their son Kim Jong Il ride horses near the liberation army’s secret camp on Mount Paektu. Note how the color of the uniforms differs from the earlier depiction.
Kim Il Sung greets the adoring masses; behind him, the DPRK’s coat of arms, a red star shining down on a hydroelectric power plant. The personality cult has never hid the corpulence of either of the Kims; on the contrary, it is seen as a sign of their spontaneous and easy-going nature. Yankee villains, in contrast, are often beanpole-thin.
Kim Il Sung “visits kindergarten in a mountain village.” Propaganda likes to associate both leaders with snow, a symbol of purity, and with carefree children, symbols of the innocent spontaneity of the race.
Kim Il Sung “visits a school on the first day of compulsory 11-year education.” Here too the leader seems not to be talking at all, instead simply exuding benevolent solicitude and