The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [57]
Propaganda now concedes South Korea’s superior material wealth while still claiming that people there yearn to live under Pyongyang’s rule. Above, a street in Seoul erupts in joy at televised footage of Kim Jong Il.
As with the American enemy, the South Korean government’s gestures of good will are attributed to fear of the DPRK’s superior might and resolve. Kim Dae Jung’s repatriation of North Korean spies after the 2000 summit is a case in point: “The [southern] authorities bowed to pressure from the Republic’s government.”20 The following excerpt from the oft-reprinted novel World of Stars (Pyŏl ŭi segye, 2002) recounts the Dear Leader’s response to the news.
Comrade Kim Jong Il quickly skimmed the report. For a moment a smile crossed his face. “They had no choice. Hm. Well, take a look. They’re finally bowing down.” All eyes turned to the document. Soon their faces, too—faces that had been taut with excitement and tension—were wreathed in smiles.… “Comrade Supreme Commander, the bastards, their backs against the wall, made this decision out of fear, didn’t they?” “Yes, it’s true,” someone cried. “It looks like they were frightened of us, all right.” Comrade Kim Jong Il just kept on smiling.21
At another point in the novel, the South (now under Kim Dae Jung’s rule) requests that the North do a little repatriating of its own. One of the Dear Leader’s officials is stunned by this presumption:
“General,” he said falteringly. “They’re saying they’re going to apply their principle of ‘reciprocity’ even to the issue of the long-term prisoners they couldn’t convert, so it looks like once again we’re going to have to.…” [Kim Jong Il:] “Make them eat another hard blow? Of course we have to do that.”22
The Text continues to remind the public of how much North Korea’s heroic returnees suffered in captivity.23 Always the unchanging nature of the Yankee colony is stressed: “The ‘government’ can change ten, twenty times, and America will still be calling the shots,” according to The Letter (2005).24
And yet this line never prevented the regime from claiming, especially in material aimed at South Korean readers, that an accession to power by the right-wing Grand National Party would plunge the peninsula into another ruinous war. These “Yankee lackeys” are described in the Text as a lunatic fringe able to wield political influence only due to their close ties to Washington. The election of a conservative to the South Korean presidency in 2007 thus forced the propaganda apparatus to claim that “the traitor Lee Myung Bak” had deceived voters about his true intentions. The following is from the KCNA’s English-language service:
Propaganda celebrated the defeat of the South Korean right in regional elections on April 29, 2009, but President Lee Myung Bak, shown here in the noose, had already begun rising in opinion polls—much to the DPRK’s consternation.
As far as Lee Myung Bak is concerned, he is a conservative political charlatan who took the office of mayor of Seoul from the ticket of the GNP after doing business since the period of the “Yusin” fascist dictatorial regime [of Park Chung Hee—BRM]. No wonder he revealed his true colors as a sycophant towards the US and anti-north confrontation advocator as soon as he came to power.25
Though massive street protests in Seoul against American beef imports in 2008 seemed to confirm this propaganda line for a while, they were quick to fade away, and Lee’s approval ratings have since climbed steadily. A popular conservative president in the South, and the information cordon too full of holes to keep the North Korean masses ignorant of him: the propaganda apparatus seems at a loss to deal with this unprecedented state of affairs. In apparent desperation it has reverted to preposterous, pre-2000 style claims of widespread South Korean poverty.26 Thus does the regime run the risk of forfeiting the credibility it managed to maintain for so long, but what choice does it have? Even if Lee’s popularity declines again, it is