The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [47]
In 2002 their new president Bush reverted to America’s traditional strategy of threats and provocations, calling Korea part of an “axis of evil.” The Dear Leader responded to this hard-line policy with a “super hard-line” policy of his own, successfully testing a nuclear deterrent in 2006. With this brilliant triumph Korea joined the world’s most elite club, the club of nuclear powers. Again the Americans raged—and again they came crawling back to the negotiation table. In 2009 Clinton himself came to North Korea to apologize for the illegal activities of two American journalists. The DPRK’s military first policy has so intimidated the Yankees that even in south Korea they are lying low. The day is nigh when these jackals in human form—now as always the sole obstacle to national unification—will be driven from the peninsula for good.11
Like the “Japs,” the Yankees are condemned as an inherently evil race that can never change, a race with which Koreans must forever be on hostile terms. Readers should therefore not be misled by the Marxist jargon so common in the KCNA’s English-language rhetoric. In propaganda meant only for the domestic audience, the terms “US imperialism” (mije) and “America” (miguk) are used interchangeably, and Americans referred to routinely as “nom” or bastards.12 In a recent picture printed in the monthly art magazine, a child with a toy machine gun stands before a battered snowman. The caption reads, “The American bastard I killed.”13 The DPRK’s dictionaries and schoolbooks encourage citizens to speak of Yankees as having “muzzles,” “snouts” and “paws”; as “croaking” instead of “dying,” and so on.14
As in colonial Korea, propagandists are fond of demonizing missionaries, the better to combine an anti-American and an anti-Christian message.15 Christianity is dismissed as a mere tool of infiltration and subversion; one recent poster shows a copy of the Bible with the Statue of Liberty on its cover.16 The following depiction of a missionary family comes from the hugely popular novella Jackals (Sŭngnyangi, 1951), in which a Korean child is murdered by a mysterious injection of germs. (The crime is now treated as historical fact.)† The writer makes clear that the Americans’ evil can be “read” in their big noses, large breasts and sunken eyes.
The old jackal’s spade-shaped eagle’s nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen’s teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf-cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake that has just swallowed its skin. Their six sunken eyes seemed … like open graves constantly waiting for corpses.17
As might be expected, the Korean War occupies a central place in anti-American propaganda, but the Text dwells less on the US Air Force’s extensive bombing campaign (which is hard to reconcile with the myth of a protective Leader) than on village massacres and other isolated outrages. The killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Sinch’ŏn in October 1950 (which was actually perpetrated by Korean rightists) is held up as the Yankees’ most heinous crime.‡ The nightly news regularly shows groups being led through the museum in the village by ever-indignant female guides. A typical illustration of the massacre shows US soldiers menacing captured Korean women. As is common with Yankee villains, the commanding officer has a white neck, Caucasian features and a dark-skinned face; presumably such depictions are meant to convey the contaminated nature of American racial stock to the domestic viewer