The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [53]
† The Jews’ baleful influence on American politics is mentioned in Ryǒksa ŭi taeha, 226, Ch’ŏngddae, 262, while in Yŏngsaeng, 253, Kim Il Sung tells Jimmy Carter (whose reaction is not given) that the Jews are treacherous.
† Ch’ǒllima, inside back cover, May 1999. In 2002 I visited a re-settlement facility for refugees near Seoul, where I was eyed with open hostility. When I finally managed to engage a teenager in conversation, she said, “Americans did bad things in Korea.” When I asked her to elaborate, she told me haltingly about missionaries in the colonial era who killed a child for—she put her head to one side—was it taking fruit from their orchard?
‡ The South Korean writer Hwang Sŏk-yŏng’s novel Sonnim (The Guest, 2001), based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre, inspired an MBC television documentary in 2002, which confirmed Hwang’s assertion that the killings had taken place just before the arrival of American troops.
CHAPTER SIX
THE YANKEE COLONY
The regime’s discussion of South Korea—or “south Korea” as its English-language organs prefer to call it—has always differed starkly from the Sozialkritik that East Germany once brought to bear on its rival. Faced with a porous border to West Berlin and constant infiltration by Western television and radio broadcasts, the GDR had no choice but to concede the outward signs of affluence and freedom in the Federal Republic. Propaganda sought to persuade the East German people that the glittering exterior masked “contradictions” in the capitalist system that doomed it to ruin. As the West’s economy pulled further ahead, the communists found it ever harder to get this message across; the rest is history. Kim Il Sung, in contrast, had little problem keeping heterodox influences out of his domain. By the mid-1960s he had sealed his citizens off even from the socialist bloc. As a result his propaganda apparatus was free to depict South Korea as the impoverished antipode to the North’s “paradise on earth”: a “living hell” where children rummaged for food in trash heaps while American soldiers shot at them for target practice.1
The rapid deterioration of the information cordon in the latter 1990s forced Kim Il Sung’s successor to drop that propaganda line, and admit that South Koreans had come to enjoy a higher standard of living than their brethren in the DPRK. If the masses took this revelation in stride, as they appear to have done, it was because the “Yankee colony” had always been condemned more on nationalist and moralist than on Marxist-Leninist grounds.
After the North-South summit in June 2000, the KCNA and the Rodong sinmun newspaper cut back on their coverage of the South and refrained completely from direct attacks on Kim Dae Jung, thus conveying the impression of a Sunshine-induced thaw in relations. There were also carefully worded editorials that welcomed North-South “exchanges” while stopping short of recognizing the South’s right to exist. Anti-ROK propaganda in these high-profile sources was largely reduced to: the ironic use of quotation marks when referring to the country’s official name (“Han’guk”) and institutions (“government,” “national assembly,” etc); the one-sided if sober reporting of bad news from the South (diseases, accidents, etc) and the histrionic condemnation of its conservative opposition.
Meanwhile a hard-line anti-South message continued to be spread by schoolbooks, novels, oral propaganda, party lecture materials, and other forms of propaganda that the outside world was rightly expected to overlook.
A brief summary of the myth