The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [52]
The poem “To Grow Up Quickly, Quickly,” (2004) aims to instill this thirst for revenge in children by reminding them of the alleged American massacre at Sinch’ŏn during the Korean War:
How bitter [General Kim Jong Il] must have felt
To remain so long
Before the grave of the 102 children
Clenching his fists in silence.
The Father General must have come
To Sinch’ǒn, where all children my age died
To make sure that in this land,
There would never be another bloody Sinch’ǒn …
So, taking that resolve to my own heart,
I am going to join the army;
I will take two guns, three guns
And shoot down all the American bastards
Ah, to grow up quickly
To grow up quickly, quickly.57
There is much talk of this “blood reckoning” that the nation’s elders expect the younger generation to execute. “Our masses have already imposed a death sentence on US imperialism,” a literary journal intoned in 2006. “We will certainly carry it out.”58
Yet the rhetoric usually stops just short of demanding an offensive invasion of the South. The standard message can be reduced to the following nutshell: We will destroy the Yankees and their lackeys, re-uniting the motherland in the process, if they dare attack or provoke us.59 But the regime’s notion of what constitutes an act of war against it—economic sanctions, attempts to inspect its ships, etc—grows ever broader. Posters now threaten America and Japan with a devastating reprisal if they so much as insult the republic. One caption: “We will reckon decisively with anyone, anywhere who meddles with our self-respect.”60 There is no discounting the possibility that the armed forces receive an even more bellicose form of the Text than the population at large.
Ideologies that divide a virtuous in-group from an evil outside world always do an excellent job of unifying the in-group. “Hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment,” Jacques Ellul wrote. “Propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided he is not too powerful.”61 The Americans are still vilified in precisely those terms, as they never were in Soviet propaganda. The line, “The Yankees are the source of all our masses’ misery and suffering” is belabored especially often in June and July, which, due to the anniversaries of the war’s beginning and end, are to anti-US invective what February, March and April are for the Kim cults.62
The anti-American short story “Jackals” (1951) was simultaneously republished in three magazines in August 2003, just as the Six Party Talks were due to begin. Above, the story’s missionary-villain in one of the accompanying illustrations.
To Bruce Cumings and other left-leaning observers, these expressions of anti-Americanism reflect a more or less popular and untutored anger at US outrages in the Korean War. I happen to agree with Cumings that the bombing of the DPRK (which included plentiful use of napalm) was carried out with enough indifference to the lives of civilians to constitute a war crime. Let us bear in mind, however, that a) no other bombed-out country has borne a grudge with such fervor for so long, b) that anti-American propaganda was hardly less intense before the Korean War than after it and c) that Jackals (1951), the Text’s main anti-American tale, is not about the war but about missionary child-killers: a tale, in other words, with one obvious root in nineteenth-century peasant rumor and another in fascist Japan’s anti-Christianity campaign.
It is no coincidence that a poster illustrating that story’s central crime—the caption: “100,000 times revenge on the Yankee vampires”—appeared in 1999, when North Korea was the Clinton administration’s main aid-recipient in Asia.63 Nor was it by accident that Jackals was simultaneously republished, complete with racist caricatures, in three magazines in August 2003, just before and during the first round of the six-party talks.64