The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [55]
‘Han’guk’ [the South Korean word for Korea—BRM] is making its world debut as the flashiest of American colonies, so much so that the Americans tout it as a model. But look under the silk encasing, and you see the body of what has degenerated to a foul whore of America. Here and there covered in bruises from where it has been kicked black and blue by the American soldiers’ boots, or decaying from where the American sewage has seeped in. And out of all of that has come a rotten “president,” a rotten “government,” rotten media.… [I]t turns the stomach just to imagine it.5
The regime attributes the influx of heterodox culture to a US scheme to destabilize the country; in fact, the most popular DVDs and videos in the DPRK are of South Korean origin.
Plenty of attention is devoted to the dangers of life in the South. The following excerpt from the novel Ah, Motherland (A, choguk, 2004) refers to South Korea under Kim Dae Jung’s rule.
Here in this accident-filled “republic,” with its traffic accidents and collapsing buildings, this country that likes putting its former presidents in prison, the media does not enlighten people about the world so much as keep them in the dark.… Do you know how many cars are stolen every year? The place is full of thieves. 120 people disappear every day, everywhere there are assaults, violent gangs, the subway is a hell-way.… You know the only thing this South Korea leads the world in? In indictments and reports to the police it’s number one. It’s five, ten times the level of other countries, so mightn’t one just as well say that the whole country consists of snitches and police detectives? Where else can one find such a disgraceful state of affairs?6
Just what America seeks to achieve in its colony is left unclear, as is the extent and nature of its control. The Text wants to present a colony groaning under the Yankee yoke, but it also wants to mock the occupying power’s failure to control its subjects. It indulges the latter urge more often; nothing is more contemptible to the North Korean worldview than weakness. South Korea’s rulers (including the dictator Park Chung Hee) are more likely to be shown scraping obsequiously before their foreign masters than cracking down on basic freedoms. The lowest ranking representatives of the colonial power come in for the brunt of vilification. Straw-haired, beak-nosed GI’s, often in dark glasses or Military Police helmets, are shown harassing women on darkened streets or committing outrages against local children: running them over for a laugh, say, or “adopting” them for use as house-slaves.7 These are rather tame allegations compared to propaganda disseminated before the mid-1990s. The public’s growing awareness of the real South Korea has made it impossible for the Text to keep claiming (for example) that the Yankees use children for shooting practice. One is to believe that the “military-first” policy has frightened the Americans into behaving better. Every week the Rodong sinmun quotes half-identified South Koreans (“a Mr. Kim in Seoul,” “a professor in Busan”) who express their gratitude to the Dear Leader for his “super-hardline” stance.8
Especially interesting are North Korea’s efforts to discredit President Kim Dae Jung, the architect of the accomodationist Sunshine Policy. In real life a left-wing nationalist sympathetic to Pyongyang, he is depicted as traveling to the summit in June 2000 with the sinister goal of dragging the DPRK into the “free world.” (The scare quotes are the Text’s.) He even rehearses the talks beforehand with Kim Jong Il impersonators or kagemusha, the better to sharpen his skills of persuasion.9 (The Japanese word underscores the un-Korean deviousness of the exercise.) Days before the trip, his men trumpet their anti-communism in the “national assembly.” They will dangle aid in front of the North Koreans in the hope that the country’s economic difficulties will make them yield to the South’s proposals.
The plan backfires. Arriving at the airport