The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [51]
The myth of an America quaking in constant terror of the DPRK has enabled the regime to explain away food aid shipments, which began arriving in the mid-1990s, in terms of reparations.49 The Yankees are also depicted (and not without a basis in truth) as paying in grain for the right to undertake fruitless inspections of suspected nuclear sites.50
“Excellency! We in the (US) Department of Defense hope to have your military facility at Kŭmch’angni revealed to us, no matter what it takes. Please tell us the price of viewing it.”
Pong Myǒng-ju looked down on Dunne with a dignified smile. “Due to your economic blockade and natural disasters we are now going through … difficulties. Looking at things from a humanitarian aspect, and in view of the consequences of our conflict with you, we regard 700 thousand tons of grain as appropriate.”51
This propaganda line is the reason why North Korean citizens are permitted to use aid sacks, including those emblazoned with the US flag, as carry-alls.
For most of the 1990s, the regime’s desire to pose as both an invincible superpower and an aggrieved victim of American slander forced the Text into an almost comical vagueness. The masses were told only that Washington had trumped up “some so-called nuclear problem,” and so on. Things became less complicated after Pyongyang explicitly acknowledged the existence of a “deterrent to nuclear war” in 2003. Since the testing of this deterrent in October 2006—followed by another American “surrender,” i.e. a return to talks—less attention has been devoted to the back-story of the nuclear saga, which, quite apart from its logical holes, now seems rather dull in comparison.
Since 2006 the propaganda apparatus has engaged in all-out acclamation of the “military-first” policy that made the DPRK a nuclear power. (Only the Great Leader’s liberation of the peninsula now occupies a more important place in the national history.) The masses are to believe that America now has even greater respect and fear of its adversary, a message unwittingly confirmed by the superpower’s recent peace overtures, such as the New York Philharmonic’s visit to the DPRK in February 2008. When former president Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang in August 2009 to win the release of two detained US journalists, the official media made much of the deference and contrition shown to the Great Ruler by his erstwhile foe. (It was also claimed, though the US State Department denied it, that Clinton had conveyed an oral message from President Obama.)52 The Korean bomb is even said to have intimidated the Yankees into assuming a lower profile in their colony to the south. On theater stages, clowns with noses enlarged by putty play GI’s bumbling around amidst the increasingly rebellious South Koreans. In a recent comic strip, US military officers ask a passing local to take their picture. Promising the perfect backdrop, he leads them to the UN cemetery.53
But America is too important a scapegoat for the regime ever to claim to have defeated it once and for all. To do so would be to raise public expectations of a drastic improvement in living standards, the immediate reunification of the peninsula, and everything else that Washington is now accused of preventing.
The enemy must therefore always be shown reneging on the terms of its latest surrender.54 Lest anyone think that nuclear talks might lead to a different relationship with the US, Kim Jong Il himself is quoted as saying, “The Yankees are the eternal enemies of our masses; we cannot live under the same sky with them.