How propaganda turns nature into a stage for a “Living God.”
Former President Park Geun-hye was subjected to extremely degrading personal attacks. North Korean propaganda referred to her using expressions such as “prostitute,” “comfort woman of the United States” and “cunning courtesan.” File Photo by Yonhap/EPA
The author prefers to use the lowercase “n” to challenge the Kim family regime’s legitimacy.
I recently had the chance to speak with an undergraduate student at a university in Poland. As he had been closely observing north Korea’s political propaganda, he posed a weighty question:
“Why does north Korea, even in the 21st century, keep repeating the image of a leader riding a white horse? Do they really believe that kind of visual propaganda still resonates with their people?”
That weekend, while reading How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev, I found myself pausing at a single phrase: the Harz Mountains.
The landscape of Germany around World War I, as described in the book, bore an eerie resemblance to north Korea’s propaganda surrounding the “Baekdu bloodline.” There, too, existed a prototype of propaganda — one that contaminates nature with myth and cultivates hatred toward enemies in order to sustain power.
The “white horse” symbol that intrigued the Polish student can, in fact, be traced back a century to the propaganda of Kaiser’s propaganda. He was obsessed with visualizing himself as a monarch blessed by divine grace, adorned in splendid military uniforms and mounted on a white horse.
This image was not merely an expression of authority. It was a “completed legitimacy” that required no explanation. The monarch on the white horse is not someone to be persuaded; he is staged as a figure beyond doubt.
This method was inherited through the Nazis and ultimately to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong Un under the banner of a so-called “pure identity.” In north Korea, the “Baekdu bloodline” functions less as political legitimacy and more as a kind of religious lineage.
Here, purity does not mean moral innocence. It signifies “a state of absolute obedience in which no difference or opposition is permitted.”
Authoritarian regimes erase internal differences and confine the masses within the frame of a “pure us.”
The leader is then elevated as both the embodiment and sole guardian of that purity. The image of the white horse visualizes this flawless sanctity.
It does not persuade rational judgment; rather, it eliminates the very space in which reason might intervene.
The symbolism of the white horse, as the Polish student intuited, finds its roots in what could be called the Kaiser’s propaganda.
Through ornate uniforms, white horses and the doctrine of “Divine Right,” Wilhelm II sought to embody sacred authority. He portrayed himself as a strict, yet benevolent, “father” of a grand German family, replacing individual loneliness with a sense of collective belonging — the “glory of the empire.”
north Korea’s portrayal of its leader as the “fatherly leader,” often staged on horseback, is ultimately nothing more than a modern technological replication of this pre-modern grammar of monarch worship.
The Nazi regime went a step further, summoning the Harz Mountains as a stage for propaganda. What had once been a peaceful countryside was infused with the myth that “mystical Germanic power flows here,” thereby mobilizing the masses.
Yet, there is a decisive difference between Germany and north Korea. While German propaganda used nature to inspire national pride, north Korea has gone further — destroying and occupying nature itself as “physical proof of human worship.”
north Korea has effectively taxidermized the vast natural landscape of Mount Paektu into the private domain of the Kim family. Living tree bark is stripped away and carved with political slogans under the name of “slogan trees,” and massive rock faces are engraved with inscriptions like “Jone-il Peak.”
This goes beyond any notion of respecting nature, it represents a grotesque culmination of idolization, where even the destruction of nature is justified to prove the leader’s divinity. Just as the Harz Mountains were once confined behind the barbed wire of division, Mount Paektu now groans under the iron bars of an ideology called “bloodline.”
Propaganda, in order to solidify internal unity, always requires a powerful “external enemy.” It was no accident that Nazi propaganda blamed all of Germany’s misfortunes on Britain and hurled vile personal attacks at Winston Churchill, calling him a “Dirty Jew-loving drunkard.”
Totalitarian propaganda, in order to preserve internal “purity,” must define the outside world as absolute evil. Just as past German propaganda labelled Britain as “lunatics,” “barbarians” and “monsters,” north Korea directs unspeakable invective toward South Korea and the United States.
This language is not mere insult. It is a classic propaganda technique, combining antisemitism and personal attack to degrade an individual and, by extension, define an entire nation as corrupt and hostile.
The moment an opponent is depicted not as human, but as a “monster,” all violence becomes justified. Complex reality is reduced to simple hatred, and human beings are diminished into disposable targets.
In the end, space controls memory, and language controls emotion. When these two axes converge, people cease to be thinking beings and become merely reactive ones.
north Korea has directed toward the United States expressions such as “old lunatic imperialist wolves” and “rabid beasts drenched in blood,” shifting all responsibility for economic failure and hardship onto the enemy.
South Korea has been labelled as “American running dogs” and “idiots” and even insulted with phrases such as “boiled head of cattle.”
In particular, former South Korean President Park Geun-hye was subjected to extremely degrading personal attacks. north Korean propaganda referred to her using expressions such as “prostitute,” “comfort woman of the United States” and “cunning courtesan,” while also comparing then, U.S. former President Barack Obama to a “pimp.”
It also employed appearance-based and bodily insults, describing her as a “wrinkled old face covered in heavy makeup,” a “venomous skirt-wind woman” and a “mad bitch without a tail.”
Because she was unmarried and childless, she was further labelled a “cold-blooded creature,” an “immature girl” and a “bizarre old maid.” Additionally, she was depicted through animalistic and monstrous metaphors such as a “rotten bat,” “murdering devil,” “mad dog” and “old witch of the Blue House.”
Just as Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains, has shed its past as a Soviet listening post and become a site of public recreation, will Mount Paektu one day be freed from the shackles of “bloodline”?
Yet, concern outweighs hope, for another, more sophisticated form of propaganda is already approaching us.
Totalitarianism has always turned nature into a stage of moral authority. In the past, it was the “mountain of the nation.” Today, it is the “crisis of the planet.”
Climate change itself is an undeniable global reality. However, certain narratives employ “environmental correctness” as a form of moral authority — one that stimulates guilt and seeks to control the public.
Where past leaders borrowed white horses and mountains to justify power, modern propagandists construct a new form of moral superiority through the symbol of “the end of the Earth.”
My final answer to the Polish student’s question is this: “Propaganda offers you the illusion of community, but in return, it demands your critical reason.”
Across this long arc of propaganda from the Harz to Paektu, and now to the discourse of climate change the only weapon we possess is persistent doubt: the determination to strip away the fog of myth and to see nature as nature, and human beings as human beings.
The only key that can break the prison of propaganda is not the quantity of information, but the power of the question.
The process by which information brainwashes people is a form of sophisticated psychological engineering. Propaganda does not merely tell lies; it penetrates the gaps created by loneliness and anxiety. It offers a seductive sense of belonging: “You are not alone, you are part of this bloodline” thereby paralyzing reason.
When information repeatedly stimulates the brain, people come not only to believe it as truth but to identify it with their own sense of self. From that moment, criticism of the propaganda is perceived as an attack on oneself, and the process of indoctrination is complete.
Yet, even such a solid wall of indoctrination develops cracks. As Peter Pomerantsev emphasizes, victory in an information war does not come from flooding people with
When the fog over the Harz Mountains lifted and Germans realized it was not a surveillance stronghold, but simply an ordinary mountain, they awakened from illusion.
Likewise, when North Koreans encounter external information and begin to see not the myth of “Baekdu spirit” but the reality of their own hunger, the spell of propaganda begins to break.
The unravelling of brainwashing does not begin with grand ideology, but with a single, simple, deeply personal question: “Is that really true?”
If propaganda uses the illusion of community to indoctrinate us, then we must reclaim individual agency to break free from it.
The courage to see nature as nature and history as history, the ability to pause amid a flood of engineered information and think for oneself, these alone can strip Mount Paektu of its chains, transcend the fear of climate propaganda and lead us toward genuine freedom.
In the end, information can confine us, but the questions we ask of that information can set us free. Then, how do we dispel this dense fog of propaganda?
While the process of indoctrination is a form of intricate psychological engineering, the solution lies, paradoxically, in “truthful external information.”
For north Koreans, outlets such as Voice of America-Korea and Radio Free Asia-Korea are more than mere broadcasts. They are windows that prove the existence of another world.
• The power of truth: They convey both the internal reality the regime hides and the outside world.
• Relief from isolation: They deliver a real sense of solidarity – “You are not alone.”
• The beginning of questions: They plant the smallest doubt – “Is that really true?”
Totalitarianism does not simply implant lies; it restricts the boundaries of reality. Thus, the first crack begins not with a grand event, but with a single question.
As many north Korean escapees testify, they did not believe at first, but through repeated exposure, doubt eventually emerged.
Propaganda creates certainty through repetition. But truth, too, creates doubt through repetition — and that doubt ultimately becomes the starting point that shakes the system.
Jihyun Park, a British Korean Conservative politician and regular contributor to the Korea Regional Review, is a North Korean escapee who fled twice from the country — in 1998, which resulted in a forced repatriation, and in 2008, which was successful. She is a senior fellow for human security at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.
