The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [58]
† Much the same motivation was behind propaganda about the US-DPRK talks of the mid-1990s; it was gloatingly claimed that American negotiators had signed an agreement disastrously unfavorable to their side. See for example, Ry’ŏksa ŭi taeha, 496.
CONCLUSION
“Kim Jong Il doesn’t believe that stuff himself,” an American diplomat cheerfully told me in 2005 after I had finished a lecture on North Korean ideology. “He told Madeleine Albright it’s all fake.” Many in Washington evidently think the same way. Indeed, America has so far negotiated with Pyongyang under the apparent conviction that the regime believes the opposite of what it tells its subjects. The louder the Text calls for a “blood reckoning” with the Yankee enemy, the more firmly Washington believes that the DPRK wants better relations. At a government-sponsored conference in Washington in 2008 I heard more than one Pyongyang watcher argue that Kim Jong Il wants America as an ally.
The obvious retort to this wishful thinking is to ask how the DPRK could possibly justify its existence after giving up the confrontational anti-Americanism that constitutes its last remaining source of legitimacy. We are dealing here with a failure not just of information analysis but of common sense—a failure to understand that North Korea is one of two states laying claim to the same nation. It must either go on convincing its citizens that it is the better Korea or acknowledge Seoul’s right to rule the whole peninsula. This is why it is so futile for the West to promise Pyongyang aid and assistance in return for disarmament. As if the poorer Korea could trade a heroic nationalist mission for mere economic growth without its subjects opting for immediate absorption by the rival state! But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the regime in Pyongyang is as unaware of this problem as so many outside observers seem to be. The question still arises why it would enshrine the military-first principle in the DPRK constitution, groom the putative successor as yet another invincible General, and continue demonizing America as the eternal race enemy, if it had not already rejected the possibility of a fundamental change in policy.
Some might insist on the unlikelihood of such a manifestly intelligent leader, such an urbane and well-informed ruling elite, such a literate and resourceful populace genuinely believing things that everyone else in the world finds so irrational. But if outside observers knew North Korean ideology better, they would understand (as I trust the reader of the preceding chapters has understood) that it is not as irrational as all that. Praising a leader as the perfect embodiment of ethnic virtues is less extravagant than praising him, as Stalin was praised, as the highest authority in every science. One could also argue that there is at least more historical justification for the DPRK’s anti-Americanism than many other states have had for their own hatemongering campaigns. Paranoid nationalism may well be an intellectual void, and appeal to the lowest instincts—there is nothing in North Korean ideology that a child of twelve cannot grasp at once—but for that very reason it has proven itself capable of uniting citizens of all classes, and inspiring them through bad times as well as good ones.
As I explained in the historical part of this book, the regime was very quick to adjust its claims downward when it had to, i.e. in response to post-Soviet economic realities and the influx of heterodox information. But to concede the regime’s genius for propaganda—a genius which only now seems to be deserting it—is not to imply that it does not believe the official myths itself. Could it be any clearer that in its relations with the outside world, the leadership