Animal Rights Activists

"It all comes down to what neither the softliners nor the hardliners want to acknowledge: this is a successful right-wing state, not a failed communist one."

"By forbearing to march behind the yin-yang flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the South Korean athletes are making a bigger sacrifice than the North Koreans, in whose iconography the banner of the DPRK ranks lower than the party standard, which in turn ranks much lower than the Supreme Commander's standard, the flag of the personality cult."

"The whole point of the military-first policy was not so much to whip up support for the military as to de-ideologize the economic sector, to make it possible to dismantle the command economy without dismantling the authority of the whole system."

"Western observers focus more on the regime's economic failures than the North Koreans themselves do. Remember that it was only in recent modern times that Western societies began expecting the state to secure constant economic growth and rising prosperity. Well into the 20th century people expected little more from the state than that it protect them from foreign powers, and expand the influence or territory of the nation. Prussia was remarkably like North Korea in many ways, yet we remember it as a very successful state. If we judge North Korea by its own standards — instead of by the communist standards we hope its people judge it by — we must admit it has performed very well."

"It’s time we all acknowledged the genius of the North’s propaganda apparatus, however much distaste we feel about it. It works with the grain of human nature. Kim Il Sung’s first speech in Pyongyang in October 1945 went down terribly, because he lacked the natural charisma to make plausible the biographical legend the Soviets had chosen for him. But the propaganda apparatus quickly made clear that by swallowing his legend, the whole nation could regard its own colonial past in a nobler light. In celebrating the leader as the embodiment of ethnic virtues, 25 million people celebrate themselves. Which is not to say the cult hasn’t cooled a lot."

"[I]f we’re going to jeer at North Korea for being a de facto monarchy, we must also acknowledge the main advantage of such a system: no divisive squabbling over who has the right to rule. On my book tour for “The Cleanest Race” I used the example of my British mother: a firm supporter of the monarchy with different estimations of the various royals. She doesn’t like the idea of Charles becoming king, but accepts that it will and must happen."

"[R]elative lack of popularity is not as important as the lack of popularity of a president in South Korea, where there is no bedrock state support to keep people patriotic even when they dislike a leader. But we Americans are more like the North Koreans in that regard. Does our patriotism rise and fall depending on who is in the White House? If we don’t like a president, do we start finding America’s enemies more likeable? No. We should therefore not assume that Kim Jong Un’s relative lack of stature means that support for the state is weakening."

"[W]e're entering the most dangerous phase in the region in decades. I'm really not all that hopeful."

"[A]lthough the “far left” Justice Party is ostensibly in the opposition, 77% of those who support it say that President Moon is doing a good job."

"As I said, the North Koreans are arming out of the conviction that the U.S.-South Korean alliance and not the South Korean popular will is the main obstacle in the way of a North-dominated re-unification."

"[T]he support which Kim Jong-un enjoys is not a mere matter of coercion."

"To assume that the two Korean administrations do not already see each other as confederates, and behave accordingly, albeit discreetly, is like assuming that a man and woman planning a marriage are not yet having sex. When we ask for Moon’s help in getting the other half of the peninsula to denuclearize, we are in effect asking this fervent nationalist to help remove the future guarantor of a unified Korea’s security and autonomy. Why should he comply? The only remaining point of the US-ROK alliance is to ease the transition to a confederation — which would obviate that alliance altogether. The recent news of South Korean violations of sanctions (and of a presidential award just given to the main importer of North Korean coal) is merely illustrative. It’s trivial in comparison to the basic truth staring us in the face: No true liberal-democratic ally of the United States would think of leaguing up with an anti-American dictatorship, let alone one still in the thrall of a personality cult."

"The difference between East Germans and North Koreans is day and night."

"Now, North Korea is simply an ultra-nationalist state and that means that Kim Il-sung was and is seen as the perfect embodiment of racial virtues. In other words, he's the perfect embodiment of Korean purity and naivete and motherly solicitude and that image really is not so different now. I don't believe that Kim Jong-un's image is that different from Kim Il-sung's; there are certain differences of emphasis I think Kim Jong-un is to a higher degree a military first leader than Kim Il-sung was and perhaps even than Kim Jong-il was."

"In fact, as I said before, North Korea is a far-right ultra-nationalist state and therefore its personality cult is very different from the personality cult that you had in the Soviet Union or in China. The cult of Mao Zedong; Stalin and Mao were essentially teacher figures because the whole point of Marxism-Leninism is to instill political consciousnesses into the spontaneous masses. As you as you may know, Marx believed that revolution was pretty much preordained, that it was going to come about as a result of the contradictions in capitalism and Lenin came along and said "No, that's not really so easy. That's not how it happens because when the proletariat starts to get angry, the capitalists fob them off with raises and, and they strike and they get an increase in their wages and they call back into the capitalist trap." So the whole point of a communist party was to basically turn the childlike proletariat into thinking adults, politically conscious adults. So Stalin and Mao Zedong were both teacher figures and Stalin was of course a smiling figure but he wasn't a particularly approachable one and the focus of his personality cult were his eyes because his eyes seen as the windows to his perfect grasp of this omnipotent science of dialectical materialism."

"I need to say first of all that foreigners are wrong in regarding the DMZ as the "Last Frontier of the Cold War" which is sort of separating a failed and anachronistic communist state from a proud high-tech capitalist one."

"Journalism is the most Americanized of all professions, and nothing is more American than the belief that economic matters trump ideological ones. There is very little talk of ideology in coverage of any country. Western journalists here see a poor North facing off against a rich South and laugh at the notion that the former might have serious designs on the latter. They don’t seem aware of what I call the South’s state-loyalty deficit."

"If anything, the North Koreans are probably going to be more inclined to behave themselves in the run up to the election in May. They do not want to do anything that would help a conservative candidate and a North Korean nuclear test would force either Moon or Ahn or both those candidates to make some kind of hard-line statement which they could of course back on and probably would go back but it would at least delay the resumption of unilateral aid to North Korea and Kim Jong-un quite possibly want that."

"The North Koreans have pretty much laid down the whole sequence of the events that they plan in order to bring about their goal [of taking over South Korea]. First, a nuclear threat to U.S. territory, then an American failure of nerve, then a peace treaty, then withdrawal of U.S. troops, then confederation, then unification [under the North Korean regime]. This can be pieced together and inferred from the leaders' own speeches, from North Koreans' inner-track propaganda, in other words everything from wall posters to political novels. We've heard this from captured North Korean operatives who've divulged their ideological training to South Korean intelligence. So, we do need to take it very seriously and we do need to understand this is a long game that the North Koreans have been playing since the 1980s."

"[W]hen their propaganda lines up with their behavior in the real world it would be very foolhardy to ignore it."

"Moon and his party are on South Korea's nationalist left and Ahn Cheol-soo is the liberal figurehead of a nationalist left party that is barely distinguishable from Moon's. Now, each candidate, each of two candidates have a team of North Korea "experts" but those are almost all unrepentant former advocates of the sunshine policy of accommodation and appeasement of North Korea. There is no ideological difference between those two parties to speak of."

"So the question we have to ask ourselves in 2017 is: Why does North Korea risk its long-enjoyed security by developing long-range nukes? Why is it doing the one thing that might force America to attack, to accept even the likelihood of South Korean civilian casualties? And the only goal, the only plausible goal big enough to warrant the growing risk and expense is the goal North Korea has been pursuing from day one of its existence? And I can ask you Matthew what that goal is; I'm sure you know. It's the unification of the peninsula. More concretely, North Korea wants to force Washington into a grand bargain linking de-nuclearization to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. South Korea would then be pressured into a North-South confederation, which is a concept the South Korean left has flirted with for years, and which the North has always seen as a transition to unification under its own control."

"The U.S. was never stronger, North Korea never weaker than in 1994, yet even then the fear of an artillery attack on Seoul prevented an air-strike on Yongbyeon. You can put it another way and say that the very success of the nuclear program, the fact that it has gone this far, proves that it was never necessary for North Korea's security in the first place."

"Those who treat "axis of evil" remark and the bombing of Libya as watershed traumas in the North Korean psyche are really lampooning their own narrative, because if a regime has spent 50 or 60 years defying, humiliating and threatening a trigger-happy superpower like the United States, and the greatest shocks it has been dealt in return have been a rude line in a speech and an attack on a completely different country, its safety clearly does not depend on developing a new kind of weapon. Its conventional artillery must have been protecting it very well indeed."

"To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place."

"South Koreans would rather see their state's security compromised than risk their own prosperity. Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate."

"Americans saw Watergate as a threat to their republic. They countered by following constitutional and legal procedure to the letter. In [South] Korea, many people appear unwilling to separate the political system from the wrongdoings of politicians."

"Has the Republic of Korea ever been more obviously unloved than in this year of "Hell Chosun"?"

"[W]e must at least stop acting as if the only motive for North Korea’s armament too preposterous to discuss were the one that the country has reiterated, and acted in accordance with, for the past seventy years. Our initial response to 9/11 was to reduce it to a protest against U.S. support for Israel. Only recently have we begun to understand that the jihadists quite literally want the whole world. It is wishful thinking to assume that the ultra-nationalists in Pyongyang, who are far better armed than Islamic State, do not at least want the rest of their ethnic homeland."

"The worse the quality of the paper is, the more seriously you should take the propaganda printed on it because that poor-quality paper indicates it's being distributed on a large scale inside the country."

"The average Korean alive in 1945 was to a far greater degree the product of Japanese rule than the Choson Dynasty."

"North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea."

"In Germany, it's, let's say it's 5:59 and you're heading for the bakery or whatever and it's due to close at 6. The German will walk right up to that door and close it right in your face, they will lock it on the other side of that glass door with a shrug, like "sorry". A [South] Korean would never do that, ever. And, and this is what I like about them."

"South Koreans are wonderfully tolerant of a foreigner with differing views when the discussion is in Korean, and no foreigners of importance are around. They lose their tempers when they see someone exporting information which — however widely discussed in the Korean press — is thought best kept "in country.""

"[South] Koreans are more comfortable with Americans who behave like Americans."

"We really need to understand that the North Koreans are not as traumatized by things like the "Axis of Evil" remark or things like this Vinson flotilla as some people in the Pyongyang-watching community seem to think."

"They can't understand why any American in his right mind who's not escaping a jail term or something, would voluntarily want to come to [South] Korea and live here."

"The South needs to retire the conventional civic religion here, which is anti-Japanese pan-Korean nationalism in favor of a collective identification with constitutional principles."

"They have a much more positive view of the country than I do."

"South Korea is a very capital-centric country."

"The left wing and the right wing in this country [South Korea] are equally invested in keeping alive the myth of a far-left North Korea. This is what exasperates me. I realize that I'm up against so many different constituencies, each of which has an interest in maintaining the myth of North Korea as a far left state."

"For most North Koreans the state equals the race, equals the country. This is where the North has been so much more successful than what I call the "Unloved Republic" of South Korea. There, as in Weimar Germany, the state is seen as having betrayed the race. When Moon Jae-in looks back on the history of the ROK he holds up only the anti-state riots and protests as high points."

"Triteness of content has not necessarily hurt ideologies in the past. There are very few original or profound ideologies on the political scene."

"North Korea is very much sui generis. It is best seen as being on the cusp between far right and far left. In European political terms I would call it a Strasserite state, after the leader of the Nazis' left wing. Which is to say it is a race-oriented, militaristic state with socialization of assets."

"In South Korea, which is a much less conservative environment, politicians do not take their wives around with them as much as their American counterparts do. Showing pride in your wife is thought of as juvenile bad form. There's a special pejorative for people who do it."

"North Koreans can frequent black markets and still consider themselves good citizens, as was impossible in the communist East Bloc. So the situation now is more like Japan or Germany in 1944, say, than like East Germany in the 1980s. Widespread government corruption? Check. An entire population of economic criminals? Check. Constant griping about the state, the party, even some joking about the leader? Check. Even good Nazis had their Hitler jokes. A general readiness to fight for the state? Well, there’s certainly more readiness in the North than in the South."

""What belongs together, is growing together again," Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany — or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn’t take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will."

"South Koreans are very nationalist, too, because in South Korea nobody cares if the North Korean people starve to death, but they get very nervous about the Chinese people investing heavily in North Korea and they get very worried about the prospect of China maybe taking over North Korea. In other words, they only worry about North Korea in terms of nationalist problems and nationalist questions."

"Communism is all about breaking down nationalism, about uniting workers around the world, and North Korea has always been about the opposite, it’s been about racial purity and pride, so remember North Korea was isolated even inside the old east-block, even inside the Soviet block."

"South Koreans do not consider the integrity of their state important enough to go to war for."