Free The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers Page B

will not only help the West to understand the loyalty shown to the DPRK by its chronically impoverished citizens, but also to understand why the West’s policy of pursuing late Cold Wartype solutions to the nuclear problem is doomed to fail.
    The word ideology is used in this book in accordance with Martin Seliger’s understanding of it, which Zeev Sternhell puts in the following nutshell: “a conceptual frame of reference which provides criteria for choice and decision by virtue of which the major activities of an organized community are governed.” 2 Note the word
major
. No ideology determines every aspect of a nation’s daily life. Technology, production and administration have always been guided in the DPRK by what Franz Schurmann referred to, in regard to China, as the “practical ideology of expertise.” 3 And like all parties, the Workers’ Party is ready to resort to temporary deviations from ideological essentials in order to maintain its hold on power. Paranoid, race-based nationalism has nonetheless guided the DPRK in its policy-making from the start. It is only in this ideological context that the country’s distinguishing characteristics—which the outside world, with its Stalinist-Confucian model, has always found so baffling—make perfect sense.
    What is more, this ideology has generally enjoyed the support of the North Korean people through good times and bad. Even today, with a rival state thriving next door, the regime is able to maintain public stability without a ubiquitous police presence or a fortified northern border. Sensationalist American accounts of the “underground railroad” helping North Korean “refugees” make it through China to the freeworld gloss over the fact that about half of these economic migrants—for that is what most of them are—
voluntarily return
to their homeland. The rest remain fervent admirers of Kim Il Sung if not of his son. Though we must never forget the men, women and children languishing in Yodŏk and other prison camps, we cannot keep carrying on as if the dictatorship did not enjoy a significant degree of mass support. How significant? Enough to make the regime desperate to hold on to it. I intend to argue, however, that this support cannot be sustained for long, because what the masses are taught—especially in regard to South Korean public opinion—is coming increasingly into conflict with what they know to be true. It is the regime’s awareness of a pending legitimacy crisis, not a fear of attack from without, which makes it behave ever more provocatively on the world stage.
    The official worldview is not set out coherently in the leaders’ writings. These are more often praised than read. 4 So-called Juche Thought functions at most as an imposing row of book-spines, a prop in the personality cult. (A good way to embarrass one’s minders in the DPRK is to ask them to explain it.) Unlike Soviet citizens under Stalin, or Chinese under Mao, North Koreans learn more about their leaders than from them. 5 It is not in ideological treatises but in the more mass-oriented domestic propaganda that the official worldview is expressed most clearly and unselfconsciously. I stress the word
domestic
. Too many observers wrongly assume that the (North) Korean Central News Agency’s English-language releases reflect the same sort of propaganda that the home audience gets. In fact there are significant differences. For example, where the DPRK presents itself to the outsideworld as a misunderstood country seeking integration into the international community, it presents itself to its own citizens (as I will show later) as a rogue state that breaks agreements with impunity, dictates conditions to groveling U.N. officials, and keeps its enemies in constant fear of ballistic retribution. Generally speaking the following rule of thumb applies: the less accessible a propaganda outlet is to the outside world, the blunter and more belligerent it will be in its