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who recite the teachings of their greatest leaders. As Don Oberdorfer has noted, the state leader’s opinion was seen as the only legitimate organizing principle of people’s daily lives: “In an explicit analogy to the human body, in juche the Great Leader is the brain that makes decisions and commands action, the Worker’s Party is the nerve system that mediates and maintains equilibrium between the brain and the body, and the people are the bone and muscle that implement the decisions and channel feedback to the Leader. However bizarre this belief system seems to outsiders, North Koreans are systematically instructed in it and walled off from contrary views.”49 Despite the seeming interconnectedness by which each body part—in Oberdorfer’s metaphorical expression of the way North Korea’s society functions—relates to all the others, it is evident that the brain is the fulcrum of this organism, to which the other body parts are subservient. However, the revolutionary operas attempt to create an impression of a seamless connection between Kim Il-sung, the Party, and the people by using the structure of the traditional family with a father, mother, and children . The familial relationship becomes a powerful way of securing such a connection. For example, in the text of the revolutionary opera True Daughter of the Party, the Korean Workers’ Party is compared to a mother ‹gure, which complements as well as accentuates Kim Il-sung’s paternal image. As the chorus sings, “The female warrior is deeply moved by the mother, the Party.”50 The unity between father and mother illustrating the symbiotic relationship between Kim Il-sung and the Korean Workers’ Party persistently appears in the social realm. For example, Rodong Sinmun on February 4, 1981, noted: “The blood ties between our Party and the people [mean that] . . . the Party and the people always breathe one breath and act as one. . . . The creed of the people [is] that they cannot live or enjoy happiness apart from the Party . . . today our Party and people have become integrated in ideology and purpose, which no force can break. The Korean Workers’ Party . . . is the Mother Party bringing boundless honor and happiness to the people.” The family rhetoric not only helps to create an intimate connection between the state father, the mother party, and the children people but also helps to establish a familiar hierarchal relationship between Kim and the Party: they are necessary to each other, yet the patriarch occupies a much more authoritative position within the power dynamics between the two. People, in this scheme, become their children, as is seen in the self-explanatory title True Daughter of the Party. North Korean people, in turn, Revival of the State Patriarchs • 155 pledge their alliance with the father. This circular love, exchanged between the father and his children, remains a political mechanism fostering— metaphorically speaking—collective incest,51 and reinforces the purity of political bloodline and loyalty gene pool. One of the ways in which this incestuous relationship is performed is through children’s speeches voluminously quoting Kim Il-sung’s instructions. The ability to quote Kim is presented as carrying tremendous prestige, which becomes a distinctive political marker used to distinguish right from wrong. As a way of drawing the boundary between inside and outside of that collective purity, only politically correct and sanguine characters quote the leader and thereby establish the moral basis of their action. To put it differently, quoting Kim becomes the marker distinguishing heroes from villains, revolutionaries from counterrevolutionaries. For example, in The Song of Geumgang Mountain, the conductor lectures on correct artistic inspiration, which stems from Kim Il-sung’s teaching: CONDUCTOR: Comrade Seok-min, Our General instructed us: If you are going to write a poem, Write for the revolution. If you are going to compose a song, Compose for the people.52 In the same production, Myeong-hui, the wife of Seok-min, instructs her daughter Sun-hui by resorting to the authority of Kim Il-sung: MYEONG-HUI: Sun-hui, you grew up happy Thanks to the bene‹cial love of the father [Kim Il-sung] Never forget the supreme leader’s love Wherever you go, you must reciprocate his love with loyalty. MYEONG-HUI AND SUN-HUI: Centuries and millennia would not change our love We will not forget his love even though the land and the sky change.53 By repeating the quotation from Kim, the characters accomplish dual goals: to proclaim both their political...

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