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By Root 757 0

“yes” or “no”…. Wavell at last spat out the word “yes” and hung his head. Since then use of the word “yes” in negotiations is regarded in the West as a symbol of subjugation and shame. But history has repeatedly forced the vanquished to say this humiliating word. At the Korean War truce talks the UN Commander Clarke had no choice but to answer “yes” to our demand that he surrender. In later years, after the Pueblo incident and the downing of the E-121 plane, the enemies bayed for war like madmen, but ŭltimately when we asked the stern question, “Will it be war?” they had no choice but to answer “no.” And when we said, “Will it be talks?” they had no choice but to answer “yes.”… Our people, our invincible People’s Army is asking, so answer them! No need for a long answer. One word will do. War? “No.” Talks? “Yes.”

Kim Jong Il smiled.…36

The Text thus treats the negotiations leading up to the Agreed Framework of 1994 as having taken place between a victorious DPRK and a vanquished USA.37 The content of these and all other negotiations is overlooked, the regime being unable to admit that it would so much as listen to requests for concessions. Instead readers are treated to peripheral dialogues like this:

America had no choice but to grovel.

Gallucci: “We respect you. The future peace not only of the Korean peninsula but also of Asia, the Pacific Region, depends on us, on the US and [North] Korea.”

Mun: “Whose words are those? Yours?”

Gallucci. “The words of the White House.”

Mun: “That amounts to saying that we’re a superpower too.”

Gallucci: “That’s right, you’re a superpower. A superpower like America!”

Now Korea was on an equal footing with the United States, the world’s only superpower. Asia’s small country Korea, which had once lost its luster on the world map.…38

As I mentioned in the historical part of this book, the assertion that America signed the Agreed Framework out of fear creates a logical inconsistency in the Text. On the one hand, the Clinton administration’s claims that the DPRK was developing a nuclear arsenal are condemned as outrageous lies, while on the other hand heavy hints are dropped that a bomb already existed at the time. In a novel set in 1993 (and published in 2000), Kim Jong Il vows he will retaliate against any nuclear attack by turning America, in a single day, into “a sea of fire.”39

Of course, many in the West will shrug this off as bravado masking a deep fear of American attack. How could the DPRK not be afraid, after what it endured in the Korean War? But in the early 1960s, East Bloc diplomats registered their worry that the North Koreans were too dismissive of the American threat, even talking of another attempt at liberating the South, despite the nuclear weapons stationed there at the time.40 And that was before the DPRK embarked on its unbroken string of successful provocations of the superpower, from the USS Pueblo capture in 1968 to its detainment and show-trial of two American journalists in 2009. Suffice to say that there is no trace of fear of any adversary in the Text. (One is struck by the contrast to anti-American propaganda in East Germany during the 1980s, which constantly raised the specter of nuclear war.) On the contrary, the child race is depicted as itching for a “holy war” or sŏngjŏn—once a common term in Pacific War propaganda—in which to kill Yankees and reunite the motherland.41 “No matter how the Americans threaten us with their foolish war plans,” Kim Jong Il chuckles in a novel set in 1998, “we are not frightened in the least.”42 Clinton and his men, meanwhile, express grudging respect for the “iron man” of Pyongyang and terror of the DPRK’s long-range missiles, which are faster and more accurate than America’s own.43

The disconnect between Washington’s bark and its bite is contrasted with North Korean resolve. “If we say we do something, we do it,” a gargantuan KPA soldier shouts in one poster as he slams his fist down on the continental USA. “We don’t utter empty words!”44 Other posters show wish-fulfilling images