A propaganda poster at the school of the Chongsanri farm, a model farm shown to foreign tourists, praising a North Korean kids’ game:
“It is exciting to play soldiers beating and seizing the Americans!”
Messages directed at farmers: the first one, issued years ago, expressing a wish that has yet to be fulfilled:
“Let’s send more tractors, cars, and modern farming machines to the farm villages for the working class.”
“Let’s raise a great number of goats in every family.”
“Let’s raise a lot of livestock through multiple methods.”
“Let’s expand goat rearing and create more grassland in accordance with the party.”
“Let us turn grass into meat!”
“Let’s grow more sunflowers.”
“Prevention and more prevention. Let’s fully establish a veterinary system for the prevention of epidemics!”
Messages on posters, in newspapers, and on loudspeakers urging voters to take part in elections held every five years. Elections are mostly a formality, though: citizens elect the candidate for their district chosen by the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland, which is dominated by the Korean Workers’ Party.
“July 24 is day of elections for deputies to provincial (municipal), city (district), and county people’s assemblies.”
“Let’s demonstrate the power of single-hearted unity.”
“Let’s all vote yes.”
The first message below urged people to work at the speed of the mythical Korean Pegasus, a campaign to make Pyongyang look modern by 2012 (when the hundredth birthday of founder president Kim Il Sung was celebrated):
“Let’s develop Pyongyang, the capital city of the revolution, into a world-class city.”
“Electric power, coal, the metal industry, and the railroad are important to the revitalization of the people’s economy.”
“Let’s construct small and medium power plants everywhere in our country and get energy everywhere.”
“Work and live with the mind and spirit of Pegasus!”
“The twenty-first century is the age of information (communications) industry.”
“Radical turn in people’s livelihood improvement!” (The slogan, several years old and regularly repeated, will hopefully be realized someday in the not too distant future.)
Calling upon families to avoid wasting resources:
“In your family, let’s conserve every drop of water.” (The poster shows a mother closing a dripping water tap.)
These messages should make clear that North Korea is invincible thanks to its military might:
“Just as it began, the revolution advances and is victorious, through the barrel of a gun.”
“The reunified fatherland is at the tip of our bayonets.”
“Nobody in the world can defeat us.”
“Let’s be invincible in every fight.”
“Let’s achieve even more supremacy.”
“Our missile program is a guarantee for world peace and security.”
Calling for reunification of North and South:
“Kimjongilia, the flower of reunification.” (The poster depicts united Korea in the shape of a sea of Kimjongilia flowers.)
“Let’s quickly end the agony of division.” (The poster shows a grandmother still waiting for reunification.)
“Between our people, let’s rush towards a majestic and prosperous strong unified country.”
Messages to keep people alert about the threats posed by the DPRK’s worst enemies from day one of its existence:
“When provoking a war of aggression, we will hit back, beginning with the U.S.”
“Let’s take revenge a thousand times on the U.S. imperialist wolves.”
“If the American imperialists attack us, let us wipe them off the map forever!”
“Death to U.S. imperialists, our sworn enemy!”
“Let’s prepare thoroughly in order to defeat the invaders. The Japanese invaders slaughtered innocent, law-abiding citizens. 1,000,000 slaughtered; 6,000,000 forced arrests; 2,000,000 sex slaves.”
LIFE IN COLOR
Seeing propaganda spread across every nook and cranny of North Korean society, it’s easy to pass off North Koreans as mindless drones. But would such logic make sense if it were reversed? Do Americans get brainwashed by cravings for McDonald’s and Starbucks, seeing their logos smothered all over the country? Do they salute every American flag?
Actually, North Koreans simply walk by propaganda posters—including new ones—without so much as a glance. Like their American counterparts who constantly drive by advertising billboards and are inundated with flashy Internet marketing, North Koreans are accustomed to the messages at political training courses, mass rallies, and in the mass media and blurted out on loudspeakers. The propaganda is reiterated—again and again—until the slogans are known by heart (just like how most young Americans bandy about the old McDonald’s tagline, “I’m lovin’ it”).
A recent U.S. government-funded study titled A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment reads: “While it remains the most closed media environment in the world, North Korea has, to a significant extent, opened unofficially since the late 1990s. North Koreans today have significantly greater access to outside information than they did 20 years ago.” Young North Koreans in particular are better informed overall and take official propaganda with a grain of salt. They’re less respectful of the state and less fearful of repression.
North Korea historian Andrei Lankov even argues that state subjugation overall has significantly diminished over the last two decades and that propaganda has lost some of its power of persuasion. He also stressed that “contrary to media portrayals in recent years, North Korea has actually become a less repressive place to live.”3 Keep in mind, though, that North Koreans rarely gossip about politics and that the country is still a very authoritarian state despite the loosening.
Propaganda posters twenty or thirty years earlier portrayed North Korea as an industrial powerhouse, with steel mills and factories running at full capacity. South Korea was depicted as a poor agrarian country with grim and oppressive American soldiers. Taking account of the latest developments on the Korean Peninsula that are largely known to North Koreans, newer propaganda posters are portraying the South in a reverse mode as a place where people are being suffocated by air, poisoned by its numerous factories and vehicles, and deafened by infernal noise. North Korea, meanwhile, is shown as a pristine, quiet natural paradise.
Compare the everyday experiences and struggles of North Koreans with the stereotypes coming out of the West. In 2012, Stanford professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson wrote a novel set in North Korea, but included just about every negative generalization he could find on the country. He and his publishers promoted the book as “insight” into North Korea.
So much for insight: he claimed that in North Korea “no one has read a book that’s not propaganda for 60 years,” a patronizing falsehood. My staff, along with all sorts of other North Koreans I’ve met, have read foreign books such as Alexandre Dumas’s thriller The Count of Monte Cristo and Ernest Hemingway’s short stories Men without Women, and some of them could even recite lengthy passages. At home and sometimes at their universities, they watched foreign movies like Gone with the Wind and Titanic.
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