Data from U.N. agencies and The World Factbook 2013-14. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2013.
Chapter 3
Look to the Party, Young Revolutionary, and Buy
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by
the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The
masses have to be won by propaganda.
—Hannah Arendt
"He looks like a monkey,” Mr. Kim, a customer, said while giggling during our lunchtime one day, as he watched a Western aid worker at another table. I laughed as I found both the foreigner funny as well as the reactions of the two Koreans.
The foreign aid worker had piercings all over his face, on his eyebrows, nose, lips, and even cheeks. His untidy long hair was patched with dyed colors. He wore a ridiculous-looking cap that was too small and had a zany insignia, and tattered clothes, including the typical torn jeans in vogue for Westerners.
He wasn’t the only unkempt Westerner I knew in the expatriate community, and people like him reinforced the stereotype. They seemed to forget that they were, in fact, guests in a foreign country, and not there to take advantage of some tributary vassal state in the Far East.
Mr. Kim’s superior, Mr. Son, looked at him sternly, disapproving of his remarks. Mr. Son probably thought exactly the same thing. But Mr. Kim was not supposed to express his thoughts about a foreigner in front of another foreigner. Reading between the lines, I understood what both of them were really thinking. What Korean would ever want to become like him?
Meanwhile, patriotic songs were constantly blaring on public loudspeakers, on television, and at military parades. But one piece in particular got stuck in my head, played over and over as the country’s most popular melody. At a gymnastics performance, the tune buzzed on once again, prompting me to turn to a friend for an explanation.
Mr. Pang, a chief beer brewer working at a beer factory, responded that he was shocked that this Swiss expatriate wasn’t familiar with it.
“You don’t know this tune?” he answered with genuine surprise. “It’s called ‘No Motherland without You.’”
“What is it about then?” I inquired.
He went into an impassioned but short speech, showing off his patriotism for the fatherland. “It’s about our General Kim Jong Il. It says without him we cannot exist, as he has extraordinary talents and virtues, and that’s why we Koreans love him. It was him who further developed the Juche idea created by our Great Leader president Kim Il Sung, and it was him who introduced the Songun (military first) politics to protect our motherland and the Korean people.”
Mr. Pang then translated the core sentence that is repeated in the song: “We cannot exist without you, Comrade Kim Jong Il! The motherland cannot exist without you!”
For all his faults, Kim Il Sung did everything in his power to preserve Korean arts and culture. His ideas were even supported by ardent overseas Koreans who opposed the regime.
North Koreans consider themselves to this day as ethnically pure and intrinsically superior, far more than do the people of other nationalistic regimes in Japan and China. They believe that they are the world’s most upright people living in the world’s most exceptional nation.
The mindset is a natural extension of their history. A national experience of foreign dominance by China, Japan, and the U.S. has, in the eyes of the North Koreans, wrecked the purity of their southern neighbors; today, North Koreans have taken sole guardianship of what they see as true “Koreanness.”
The attitude is reflected in North Korean propaganda, and taking a look at the myriad of posters and leaflets reveals much about the mindset. Pyongyang is home to the Korean Workers’ Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, which controls far-reaching ideological campaigns. The state sees propaganda as particularly valuable, giving it the needed resources that take up a good chunk of the gross national product—although the precise data haven’t been published.
To be fair, all over the world businesses engage in another form of propaganda: advertising. The only difference is that it advances a cause of consumerism rather than politics. North Korea had banned the unsocialist practice until 2002, when advertisements were allowed. The opening suggests at least a partial embrace of market ideas.
Still, it’s only a little creek compared to the vast sea of state-sponsored information: PyongSu, my pharmaceutical company, launched its first radio commercial for its painkiller PyongSu Spirin in 2005. For a short while in 2009, television stations surprised their viewers by broadcasting commercials for beer, ginseng, hairclips, and a Korean restaurant.
The government has, unfortunately, not resumed TV commercials since then, part of a ploy by the same hard-liners who pushed for a disastrous currency devaluation in 2009. Yet it wasn’t a complete reversal of the new policy: the state didn’t clamp down on printed advertising, allowing PyongSu and other North Korean companies to continue distributing flyers and catalogues and advertising their products and services on the country’s intranet. TV advertising was perhaps perceived as too politically sensitive by the conservative old guard since foreign visitors as well as South Koreans could watch and observe it.
However, propaganda continues to be an everyday message blurted in front of the North Korean people. And it plays a significant role in their lives.
After Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, party mouthpieces shot off a new emergent ode called “Footsteps”—and it wasn’t the jazz standard performed by John Coltrane. The piece was written for Kim Jong Un, and its title signified that he was marching in the heroic footsteps of his deceased father. North Koreans attribute the song with son Kim’s emergent legacy. Of course, pretty much no beautiful melody on TV, radio, or in karaoke rooms is free from ideology and propaganda. Most of them appeal to patriots, the party, and the army. They often wax philosophical on the sufferings under the yoke of the Japanese colonialists or praise the leaders.
A PROPAGANDA STATE?
It is true that Bible-like allegories have a profound impact on how North Koreans see themselves and the world, as told to me by countless locals. Posters are also a potent venue: they are the regime’s most visible form of propaganda, painted with bright colors, meaningful symbols and images, and large fonts. Simple but commanding language is used.
Barbara Demick, the author of the widely acclaimed 2010 book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, mentioned that in his book 1984, “George Orwell wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea.”1 But her statement isn’t entirely true. Half a decade before she wrote this, we had already plastered our pharmaceutical factory with a green color, because it was a well-known pharmaceutical symbol in continental Europe.
Around the same time, other buildings were being repainted in Pyongyang in a wider variety of colors. People could be seen over the years with more colorful clothes, not only during holidays, as is tradition. More young students carried colorful Hello Kitty and other fancy school bags.
In her book, Demick also claims that “Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book.”2 But I saw people reading the novel at the Grand People’s Study House in Pyongyang and in public libraries in provincial capitals. The gap between Barbara Demick’s Orwellian stereotypes and the reality on the ground is widening a little every
