The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [54]
In 1945, just after the Great Leader Kim Il Sung had defeated the Japanese, the Yankees took advantage of the temporary chaos to occupy the southern half of the peninsula. Setting up a puppet regime in Seoul under the traitor Syngman Rhee, they brutally crushed the people’s councils that had sprung up across the south—killing tens of thousands of people on Cheju Island alone—and reinstated pro-Japanese collaborators to positions of power and influence. Rejecting the Great Leader’s call for a pan-Korean election, Rhee proclaimed the “Republic of Korea” in 1948.
In June 25, 1950 the Yankees and their stooges launched a surprise attack on the DPRK, but were repelled, and finally surrendered on July 27, 1953. Thwarted in their scheme to destroy Korean socialism, the Yankees set about exploiting their puppet state with renewed vengeance, all the while waiting for another opportunity to attack the DPRK. For decades the southern brethren were forced to live in abject poverty, suffering the brutal oppression of the puppet dictatorship and enduring the crimes and outrages committed by rampaging US troops. In 1980 the Yankees and the Chun Doo Hwan clique colluded in the massacre of young demonstrators in Kwangju, but the forces of freedom and democracy would not be silenced. Again and again they took to the streets, finally forcing the “Republic of Korea,” in desperation, to claim that military rule had ended.
A civilian “government” was “elected,” but behind the façade of “democracy” the Yankees continued pulling the strings. Fortunately the military-first policy of General Kim Jong Il has so frightened and confounded the Yankees that they dare not oppress their colony as heavy-handedly as before. In 2000 the puppet “government” had no choice but to yield to the southern masses’ demands for inter-Korean cooperation. At a meeting that year in Pyongyang the Dear Leader had the south Korean “president” sign an agreement pledging to pursue unification without American intervention. In the following years inter-Korean economic cooperation flourished, leading to a rapid improvement in the quality of life in the Yankee colony. The southern masses are acutely aware that were it not for the DPRK’s military-first policy, the Yankees would long since have plunged them into another ruinous war. They owe their material comfort to the self-sacrifice not only of the Dear Leader, but of all the heroic citizens of the DPRK. To be sure, this material comfort is but paltry compensation for the Yankee’s defiling presence. The south Koreans’ most fervent wish, now as before, is to live in a free and united nation under the Dear Leader’s rule. Unfortunately the drive for unification suffered a setback in 2008, when the traitor Lee Myung Bak took over as the new “president” of the puppet state, vowing to turn back the clock on inter-Korean cooperation …2
Because the ROK is now condemned almost exclusively on ethnocentric and moralistic grounds, the Text is free not only to concede the rival state’s economic affluence but even to exaggerate it, the evident aim being to inoculate the masses against future revelations. No amount of wealth, the message runs, can still the southern brethren’s yearning for freedom and purification. The typical “south Korean” in the visual arts is thus no longer a starving child on a junk heap but a handsome man in a suit waving the so-called unification flag (the peninsula in blue against a white background) or a fashionably dressed college girl thrilled by the projected image of Kim Jong Il’s signature.3 The novel Encounter (Mannam, 2001) introduces readers to a young journalist in Seoul who can somehow afford both a flashy car and a house in the city center. His free time is spent wandering with his girlfriend “from cinema to video room and theater, zoo, botanical gardens, Mount Chiri and Mount Sǒrak, discotheque and beach.”4
Of course, this superficial affluence masks a world of ethnic contaminations. In contrast to the DPRK, where the people are “as pure as the water they drink,” the South