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elfsThe Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters attempts to decode the North Korean state religion, a religion that is obscured by the fact that very few outsiders even speak, much less read, Korean (I guess there just isn't enough anime from South Korea for there to be an otaku community in the west). Author B. R. Myers does speak and read Korean, and has assembled what he knows. His excerpts and analysis show that internal propaganda for North Korea is wildly different from that distributed to the West, and what that difference means.
Myers calls internal propaganda "The Text," and makes references to it. His chapters start with his summary of The Text regarding a specific issue-- Who are the North Koreans?, Who is Kim Jung Il?, What of the South Koreans?, What of the United States?-- and then proceeds to show, through extensive excerpts from internal North Korean propaganda, including officially permitted popular books and movies, what The Text disseminated through North Korea says.
The title comes from an quote from official North Korean propaganda, worked into one of his summaries: "The Korean people are the cleanest, purest, and therefore most virtuous race on Earth. Our purity is like that of a child, and therefore our innocence is also that of a child. Only a truly strong leader can protect us from the stain of outside influence." This is the basis of North Korea's entire ideology: that Koreans are pure, uncorrupted, and child-like in their innocence, and they deserve to stay that way, because innocence is pleasure, while maturity and adulthood are painful.
Myers' work is pretty comprehensive, although there are times when takes other historians and analysts to task for their own lack of criticality; he has his eye particularly on leftist historians who try to excuse North Korea, and find solidarity between it and the USSR. He also takes to task South Korean and Chinese historians who interpret North Korea as an extreme example of Confucian polity. Myers claims that nothing could be further from the truth; there is nothing of "fraternity" and the masculine "fatherland" concepts, nothing of the economic benefits of solidarity, nor is there honoring of ancestors and paternal authority; instead, there is familial feeling, always centered on a cthonic maternal ideal, and the people are not to worry too much about the economy and looking forward (the Soviet concept), or the ancient traditions (the Confucian ideal), but instead to hold fast to their individual pasts, to hold to their childhoods and the all-engulfing mother-love of the motherland.
Myers also points out that we misinterpret Pyongyang. Many in the free world see the immense status of the Kim family, and the enormous buildings with their broad, automobile-free streets, as somehow attempting to make the visitor feel small. What Myers points out is that these instead make the North Korean visitor feel big-- look at how powerful his state is, to have raised such monuments. Without the transcendent individualizing religions that arose in the West with a paternalistic god-concept, the North Korean attaches his need for immortality, his own fear of an existential end, by emphasizing his role in the immortality of the state. The North Korean propaganda machine has done a masterful job of conflating the persistence of the state with the purity of the race.
For Myers, Pyongyang is not a "leftist" institution at all, but one of the extreme right: a fascist state propped up by an earnest racism that comes from the top down. Myers also emphasizes that the topmost tiers of the North Korean political system believe in the racial purity as much as the ordinary people do; the Dear Leaders have always had more popular support than we suppose in the West; and that their propaganda has, since the end of WWII, emphasized that there is no chance whatsoever for rapprochement between Korean and the "mongrelized" world, because there is no chance for compromise between purity and corruption. North Korea is on a knife's edge: it needs not to die of economic collapse (and the Chinese can't afford it to); it also needs not provoke a war, but to be true to its ideals it cannot ever be seen by its own people to be seeking peace.
One thing Myers does well is show that the South Koreans are not so far behind the North Koreans in their racism and centrism. This is one of the reasons there is so little South Korean entertainment reaching American shores-- their own ideology allows only for small, dull conflicts. South Korean kids entertain themselves by imagining how violent the rest of the world is, compared to tranquil Korea.
The book is a solid read, and only 200 pages long, filled with long out-takes from North Korean literature translated into English for the first time. There are also hundreds of illustrations of posters and movie stills, showing that as recently as 2006 the North Korean government was reminding its people that Americans poison Korean babies and run over schoolchildren for entertainment. It's a pretty scary book that leaves you with one impression: the North Koreans really believe what they say they believe, and any attempt to negotiate with them "in good faith" is doomed, because they believe that no good faith is possible with a world that seeks their corruption.
Myers calls internal propaganda "The Text," and makes references to it. His chapters start with his summary of The Text regarding a specific issue-- Who are the North Koreans?, Who is Kim Jung Il?, What of the South Koreans?, What of the United States?-- and then proceeds to show, through extensive excerpts from internal North Korean propaganda, including officially permitted popular books and movies, what The Text disseminated through North Korea says.
The title comes from an quote from official North Korean propaganda, worked into one of his summaries: "The Korean people are the cleanest, purest, and therefore most virtuous race on Earth. Our purity is like that of a child, and therefore our innocence is also that of a child. Only a truly strong leader can protect us from the stain of outside influence." This is the basis of North Korea's entire ideology: that Koreans are pure, uncorrupted, and child-like in their innocence, and they deserve to stay that way, because innocence is pleasure, while maturity and adulthood are painful.
Myers' work is pretty comprehensive, although there are times when takes other historians and analysts to task for their own lack of criticality; he has his eye particularly on leftist historians who try to excuse North Korea, and find solidarity between it and the USSR. He also takes to task South Korean and Chinese historians who interpret North Korea as an extreme example of Confucian polity. Myers claims that nothing could be further from the truth; there is nothing of "fraternity" and the masculine "fatherland" concepts, nothing of the economic benefits of solidarity, nor is there honoring of ancestors and paternal authority; instead, there is familial feeling, always centered on a cthonic maternal ideal, and the people are not to worry too much about the economy and looking forward (the Soviet concept), or the ancient traditions (the Confucian ideal), but instead to hold fast to their individual pasts, to hold to their childhoods and the all-engulfing mother-love of the motherland.
Myers also points out that we misinterpret Pyongyang. Many in the free world see the immense status of the Kim family, and the enormous buildings with their broad, automobile-free streets, as somehow attempting to make the visitor feel small. What Myers points out is that these instead make the North Korean visitor feel big-- look at how powerful his state is, to have raised such monuments. Without the transcendent individualizing religions that arose in the West with a paternalistic god-concept, the North Korean attaches his need for immortality, his own fear of an existential end, by emphasizing his role in the immortality of the state. The North Korean propaganda machine has done a masterful job of conflating the persistence of the state with the purity of the race.
For Myers, Pyongyang is not a "leftist" institution at all, but one of the extreme right: a fascist state propped up by an earnest racism that comes from the top down. Myers also emphasizes that the topmost tiers of the North Korean political system believe in the racial purity as much as the ordinary people do; the Dear Leaders have always had more popular support than we suppose in the West; and that their propaganda has, since the end of WWII, emphasized that there is no chance whatsoever for rapprochement between Korean and the "mongrelized" world, because there is no chance for compromise between purity and corruption. North Korea is on a knife's edge: it needs not to die of economic collapse (and the Chinese can't afford it to); it also needs not provoke a war, but to be true to its ideals it cannot ever be seen by its own people to be seeking peace.
One thing Myers does well is show that the South Koreans are not so far behind the North Koreans in their racism and centrism. This is one of the reasons there is so little South Korean entertainment reaching American shores-- their own ideology allows only for small, dull conflicts. South Korean kids entertain themselves by imagining how violent the rest of the world is, compared to tranquil Korea.
The book is a solid read, and only 200 pages long, filled with long out-takes from North Korean literature translated into English for the first time. There are also hundreds of illustrations of posters and movie stills, showing that as recently as 2006 the North Korean government was reminding its people that Americans poison Korean babies and run over schoolchildren for entertainment. It's a pretty scary book that leaves you with one impression: the North Koreans really believe what they say they believe, and any attempt to negotiate with them "in good faith" is doomed, because they believe that no good faith is possible with a world that seeks their corruption.
