Thinking outside the box

B.R. Myers has written a controversial book on North Korea, "The Cleanest Race". Myers (no friend of the North Korean regime) believes that Kim Jong Il still has widespread popular support, and that Kim Il Sung had even more. This observation, if true, would explain a lot of things. Why is North Korea one of the few Communist regimes which has neither reformed itself (like China) nor collapsed (like most of the others). Myers believes that the Korean Workers' Party has survived by skilfully manipulating nationalist sentiments among the North Korean population (like Cuba?).

In fact, Myers goes much further than this. He argues that the North Korean regime has never really been Communist or Marxist. Rather, it has always been a nationalist and racist regime, more similar to fascism than to Communism. Its legitimacy isn't based on securing a high standard of living through a centralized planned economy, but rather on preserving the moral and racial purity of the North Korean people. Such a goal is possible even in isolation and relative poverty. Myers does believe that the regime is heading for a legitimacy crisis, but it will be based on the failure of its nationalist goals, rather than on the fact that South Korea has a higher standard of living.

Most of Myers book is a detailed analysis of North Korean propaganda, especially the bizarre personality cults of "the Great Leader" Kim Il Sung and "the Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il. The cult of Kim Il Sung, according to Myers, is based on the Japanese emperor cult of Hirohito before Japan's defeat in World War II. The cult has strange "matriarchal" traits. The leader is a slightly androgynous, effeminate mother figure, embodying Korean virtues such as spontaneity, childishness and purity. He is surrounded by innocent children, rides a White horse symbolizing purity and acts in a motherly way towards soldiers and citizens. Very often, his first wife Kim Jong Suk is depicted as more masculine.

The Marxist-Leninist "Juche" ideology is dismissed by Myers as mere window-dressing for foreign consumption. The domestic propaganda emphasizes the purity of the Korean "child race", opposition to miscegenation, and various nationalist myths. There is even a sacred mountain, Paektu, where both the first Korean emperor and Kim Il Sung were supposedly born (compare Fuji in Japan). Apart from the strangely maternal and decidedly non-Confucian cult of the first Kim, there is also more masculine propaganda, consisting of bellicose attacks on the United States. Myers believes that North Korean opposition to the US is at bottom nationalist rather than Communist. He points out that Korean propaganda at least implicitly portrays Americans as racially impure and explicitly as homosexual.

Myers is less clear on what kind of threat North Korea poses to the US or South Korea. At times, he writes as if the North Koreans believe in their own propaganda and are ready to cross the DMZ any moment. At other times, he more realistically proposes that the regime wants neither a full scale war nor a lasting peace, since it derives its strength from the present situation of managed high tension and extortion. (The fact that China and Russia wants North Korea as a buffer against the US sphere of influence, is surely another important factor for the DPRK's longevity.)

Not being an expert on matters Korean, I can't really judge "The Cleanest Race", but a few objections nevertheless came to me while reading it. First, why is Juche dismissed by Myers as sheer window-dressing? Juche emphasizes self-reliance, self-determination and self-defense, all three principles being perfectly compatible with nationalism. Kim Il Sung's attacks on "servilism" is part of Juche, and this includes opposition to alien culture, something pointed out by Kim himself in interviews with foreign correspondents. Juche is also somewhat similar to Maoism, surely a close ideological cousin of the DPRK. Further, Myers downplays the nationalist traits of other Communist regimes. Thus, he claims that Soviet propaganda during World War II made a distinction between Nazis and ordinary Germans. That's not the standard position, which says the opposite: Stalin adapted to Greater Russian nationalism and pan-Slavism during the war, a war whose purpose was to kill "Germans", not simply "Nazis". Stalin even used maternal images: Mother Russia! Other Communist regimes which used virulent nationalism as a tool include Bulgaria, Romania and Cambodia. All three regimes attempted to assimilate or even exterminate national minority groups. Romania's Ceausescu also used "royal" symbols derived from the Roman Empire. I don't doubt that the North Korean regime is intensely nationalist, but is that enough to call it "fascist", even apart from the fact that the term itself is somewhat slippery?

When Kim Il Sung died, somebody told me that the personality cult surrounding him was actually based on *Korean* emperor cults. Myers finds parallels to the Japanese emperor cult. Since Japan got parts of its culture from China via Korea, one wonders where the Japanese emperor cult originally comes from? Is it indigenous? Or is it actually a foreign borrowing? (Or did it fall down from the kami at Mount Fuji?)

Despite these questions, I nevertheless give the book four stars. It's interesting, easy to read and thinks outside the box. If for good or for worse, remains to be seen...

Originally published in 2010, hence the anachronisms!