Potato Propaganda: a Very North Korean Revolution

Potato Propaganda: A Very North Korean Revolution Author: Jed Lea-Henry Everything had already been tried, and most people weren’t listening. Now firmly on the edge – after four years of famine – it seemed like their world was finally coming to its natural end. Potatoes would be a last, clawing attempt at survival. It started when it all started. Waiting until he was sure that the Japanese shadow would never return, a stout man, with a patchy reputation, skulked into the eastern port of Wonsan. There was no welcoming party, and no one recognised him; just as he didn’t recognise the country around him. Then in his mid-thirties, this was a home that he had fought for, but which he hadn’t seen with adult eyes. Soon he was the ‘Great Leader’, and the same people who couldn’t tell-him-apart, and who only had a spattering of preposterously over-the-top war stories to base anything on, were suddenly expected to adore him. It was too early to risk ruling by fear alone, but the young leader, Kim Il-sung, needed to rapidly stake his reputation. The alternative – if history was anything to go by – was coup d'état, and it all coming to an early end, dangling from a lamppost in downtown Pyongyang… passers-by too scared to cut him down. The average citizen needed something measurable – they needed rapid improvements in their daily lives. Money was borrowed from the Soviet big brother, subsidized fertilizer was distributed, terraced fields were erected, and traditional irrigation systems were replaced by electric pumps. Once an impossibly hard place to farm successfully, North Korea was transformed overnight… and the slow burning fuse of famine was lit. As he died in 1994, the Great Leader got out at just the right time. The Soviet Union had collapsed, fertilizer had become too expensive to import, and an energy crisis put an end to the irrigation system. For the first time in generations, farmers were left to themselves, toiling unassisted in the mountainous, harsh conditions. They failed. Utopias don’t do disaster planning – so when the floods came, no one was prepared. The terraced fields were submerged, and soon swept away entirely… the famine had arrived. And immediately reports of hunger, or food shortages, became crimes in themselves. When this became impossible to police, it was playfully renamed the “Eating Problem”; this failed to do the trick. A more evocative, nationalistic tact was attempted – the famine was the ‘Arduous March’. Starvation edges its way on top of you. Like a knife to the throat, you may try to pretend it’s not there, but the cold metal still nags at your skin and forces a shiver all the same. The scenery began to noticeably change, with once clear hills suddenly littered with fresh, shallow graves. The worst stories of Ukrainian cannibalism were resurfacing with a Korean face, and those willing to risk gunfire were crossing the Yalu River into China at record numbers. As a percentage of the population, more Koreans died in the famine than Chinese in the Great Leap Forward. And it was now all on the head of a new Kim. Having inherited the leadership from his father, Kim Jong-il, though one of the few people in the country that was still well-fed, was nonetheless staring- down his own death. All that North Korea was, was no more. The effeminately named ‘Dear Leader’, if he wanted to survive, would have to start again. State ideology twisted. Six weeks after the ‘Agreed Framework’ was signed, when U.S. aid was flowing into the hands of famine victims, after President Clinton had personally written to Kim Jong- il to reassure him about their intentions, at an absolute apex in American-North Korean relations, Songun – or ‘military first’ – was incongruously announced. The ever-predatory American enemy, and the heavy cost of keeping them at bay, was the reason for the scarcity and suffering. But more was needed – something positive that people could cling to. And this would be potatoes. North Korean propaganda, when it turns inward, has the badgering, we-are-all-in-this-together, tone of a passive aggressive spouse; beginning its demands with an imploring ‘lets’. “Let Us Defend the Revolutionary Spirit of Independence” – “Lets eat two meals a day” – “Lets breed more high-yielding fish” – “Lets expand goat rearing and create more grassland in accordance with the Party!” – “Lets grow more sunflowers” – “Let us raise more grass-eating animals!” At one point, this messaging was all about corn. The famine put an end to that. It also put an end to the lazy, one dimensional style. Learning directly from foreign media and Western marketing techniques, North Korean propaganda, at just the moment that it needed to, matured into something capable of salvaging the regime. And it would do so, strangely, by trying to alter the cultural significance of root vegetables. The Dear Leader would be saved by gamja hyeongmyeong’ – the ‘Potato revolution’. It all began in October 1998, with Kim Jong-il taking a trip to Taehongdan County in Ryanggang province. Once there he announced that the military, in their time-off from fighting the “Yankee Bastards”, would be working to make North Korea the “potato kingdom of Asia”. A favourite story of the new propaganda machine, involved the pregnant wife of a soldier-farmer having her unborn child named (a great honour) by the Dear Leader. Prophetic as always, Kim had the foresight to offer two names; Hongdani for a girl, Taehongi for a boy (both derivatives of the county’s name). She gives birth to twins; a girl and a boy. Imagery of the Taehongdan field trip, such as Kim Song-min’s painting, ‘A Long Awaited Meeting in Taehongdan’ (2009), shows Kim sharing potatoes and ‘guidance’ as local farmers huddle around a campfire. Taehongdan is ground-zero. A symbol for a desperate people. With hard-work and direction from the leader, the suffering could be over; and a new affluence, beyond pre-famine standards, would be felt. As the propaganda goes, the soldiers were gifted new apartments, personally furnished by Kim Jong-il, and the farming community broke free from a starvation that they were never allowed to admit existed. When the North Koreans want to add legitimacy to shaky ideas, they go back to Kim Il-sung. So despite having nothing to do with the potato revolution – as you would expect for something that began four years after his death – stories started to emerge of the Great Leader’s guerrilla days in Manchuria. So affected was Kim Il-sung by ‘the potato’, that he never stopped lauding them as a bulwark, backs-to-the-wall resistance against starvation. He remembered in vivid detail how the local peasants “survived on potatoes”, and how his first wife Kim Yong-suk would cook the vegetable in camp, fuelling tired men to continue fighting. While the new epicentre of ‘the potato’, Taehongdan, became, almost overnight, the historical site of a great anti-Japanese resistance. The placement of Soviet-linked propaganda is another, slightly more surreptitious, attempt to link the potato back to a previous era, and a leader whose credibility was beyond question. It is an old communist tactic, that when selling improvement it is done in the basest possible terms – food security. Selecting a town, almost at random, and then building them as a national example, based on a single, new, agricultural initiative, such as the 1950’s slogan, “corn is queen of the fields”, is a lesson learnt from Soviet experience. Credit for the potato revolution would go to the dead leader – appropriate enough considering he was posthumously conferred as ‘Eternal President’. The role of his son would be to, once again, bathe publically in his father’s afterglow. Propaganda would paint the picture of a master organiser, a man implementing the potato revolution and polishing the rough edges; all the while being guided from beyond the grave. As sweet potato stalls began popping up around Pyongyang, and as people were tasked with collecting and donating their own faeces for fertilizer, it was all being personally overseen by Kim Jong-il, in an effort to “spread the potato-growing industry to the whole country”. When visiting Russia in 2001, the Dear Leader was pressed to explain the policy in a way that he would never have to in North Korea. “Look at the Germans. They have grown used to the potato and it’s become their staple food. Why can’t we do this in North Korea?” he responded. “You Russians have a good tradition of eating potatoes. I am also trying to introduce the potato in Korea but with little success so far”. To kick things along, propaganda started looking back to the pre-1945 period of Japanese rule. There were no potatoes back then, and there were no potatoes when the famine hit in 1994. It was shockingly tenuous, but – consciously stoked along through the years – anti-Japanese sentiment had never waned, and there was likely some value in reviving the old scape goat. But pointing to something that is not there, doesn’t quite catch the mind in the same way as pointing to something that is. And at a time of such extreme famine this would have to be done delicately. The old promises of meat, eggs, pork, chicken and rice wouldn’t work, hence the potatoes; though neither would anything that promoted – even inadvertently – consumption. The new propaganda would have to be, at least in the beginning, careful not to remind people about what they could no longer afford, and the shortages they were now feeling.

Load more