The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [39]
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DEAR LEADER
Regardless of whether Kim Jong Il ever intended to pose as his father’s equal, the DPRK’s fall from Soviet-subsidized grace in the early 1990s made such a strategy impracticable. The Text implicitly admits, therefore, that although the Dear Leader is the greatest man alive, he is not quite the man the Great Leader was. When père and fils are pictured together in paintings the focal point is always the older, taller, better-looking man.1 Where Kim Il Sung was the effortless master of all sectors of public life, his son is the military-first “General,” compelled by the Yankee threat to concentrate on national defense at the expense of economic matters. Since this is not a Marxist-Leninist state committed to the improvement of material living standards, but rather a nationalist one in which the leader’s main function is to embody Korean virtues—which are not seen to include intellectual brilliance anyway—the relative inferiority of Kim Jong Il’s genius troubles propagandists less than an outsider might assume. It is in no small part because he appears more human and vulnerable than Kim Il Sung, and thus a more convincing embodiment of the child race itself, that the Dear Leader is so dear to his people, even if he is not as fervently venerated as his father.
We already saw that the Text recounts only Kim Il Sung’s life before 1945 as a coherent story, reducing the history of his rule to a jumble of “on-the-spot guidance” anecdotes. It does the opposite with the Kim Jong Il cult, telescoping the man’s younger years while treating his rule as a linear legend in progress. The mythobiography can be summarized as follows:
It was on February 16 1942, in a snowcapped log cabin at Kim Il Sung’s guerilla base on Mount Paektu, that Kim Chŏng-suk gave birth to the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Overjoyed partisans celebrated the great event by carving his name into thousands of tree trunks. Although the little boy was often cold and hungry, he never complained, anxious even at that age not to trouble his parents. Alas, no sooner had the Great Leader succeeded in liberating the nation than his loyal wife, weakened by decades of self-sacrifice, fell seriously ill. She passed away in 1949. Before her son had overcome this blow, he was forced to witness first-hand the destruction caused by the American invasion. The experience left him with a lasting hatred of Yankee imperialism. Never one to seek special treatment, he participated directly in the reconstruction of Pyongyang before entering Kim Il Sung University in 1960, where he organized fellow students into Juche study groups.
At the age of 22 he went to work in the party’s central committee. For decades he played a vital role in the implementation of the Great Leader’s policies and issued brilliant treatises on the Juchefication of the arts. All the while he traveled ceaselessly to farms, factories and military bases around the country, bestowing his motherly love on the masses and earning their love in return.
In the early 1990s the USSR surrendered to the forces of imperialism without a shot. Emboldened, the Yankees stepped up efforts to destroy Korean-style socialism, claiming a nonexistent “nuclear problem” as a pretext for imposing suffocating sanctions on the DPRK. In response Kim Jong Il, who in 1991 had become Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, rallied the troops in a spectacular show of resolve, at the same time dispatching diplomatic warriors around the world to make clear that the DPRK would never back down.
In July 1994 Kim Il Sung passed away, plunging the entire nation into mourning. Though his heart was breaking, Kim Jong Il manfully hid his grief from the masses. Again the Yankees smelled victory. Boastfully predicting that the DPRK would not survive for long without the Great Leader, they redoubled their efforts to crush Korean-style socialism. To make matters worse, a freakish combination of natural disasters destroyed one harvest after another. Though in dire straits