According to BR Myers for The New York Times in May 2003, reproduced here:
In North Korea, the people's spontaneity is seen as one of the country's greatest strengths.
North Korean novels and movies often show the hero casting off the restraints of his book learning in a fit of wild, sometimes suicidal rage against the Japanese or American enemy. This political culture induces officials to tolerate a high level of violence in daily life; North Korean refugees attest that fistfights are the accepted way for men and women to settle even minor differences. While communism was always an internationalist movement, juche (literally, self-reliance) sees the world in ethnic terms. North Korean propaganda makes no distinction between American capitalists and American workers; the entire "Yankee" race is presented as inherently evil, degenerate and ugly. Dictionaries and textbooks suggest that Americans be described with bestial attributes ("snout" for nose, for example).
The central villain of Han Sorya's novella "Jackals" (1951), the country's most enduring work of fiction, tells of an American child who beats a Korean boy so brutally that he ends up in a hospital -- where he is murdered by the American's missionary parents. Since the South Korean government began pursuing its policy of rapprochement, the North's ethnocentric world view has become even more stark; the United States is now presented as being exclusively responsible for all tensions on the peninsula.
This propaganda appears to be effective even among North Koreans opposed to the rule of Kim Jong Il. When I visited a resettlement center for refugees near Seoul last year, many of those to whom I was introduced as an American recoiled in terror or glared at me in hatred.
Yeah, that song that Lang Lang played for Obama, with the lyrics about the jackal, that's just a complete coincidence! And totally innocuous and lacking in any cultural specificity whatsoever!
(image source here)
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| Han Sorya's 1951 'Jackals' is about an American missionary who deliberately kills a Korean boy by injecting him with germs. |
