Brian Reynolds Myers

"For decades the basic message has been, "Dump the leadership, because it lives high on the hog while you toil and starve." That’s the sort of sloganeering that might help undermine a communist state. It won’t work in a far-right, ultra-nationalist state. The pomp that surrounds Kim Jong Un is the whole nation’s pomp, as it were. I have urged American officials who ask me about propaganda to encourage a nationalist approach to it, stressing the North’s disgraceful dependence on China, contrasting the North with an internationally respected South that has really put Korea on the map.I’m not sure this will be enough though. The crucial issue, from a nationalist North Korean’s perspective, is likely to be: Which of the two states is more intent on righting the wrongs foreigners have done to us? Which state wants to unify the peninsula, the nation? And the South all too obviously allows the North to play the heroic role of the sole unifying force. Park Geun-hye made efforts to rectify that neglect but it was too little, too late. And now a very different president is in power."

"Martin Luther said you could show some people the line “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and they’d take it to mean, “in the beginning the cuckoo ate the hedge-sparrow.” I know the type. Many of our Pyongyang watchers would have us believe that when North Korea says no to talks it means yes to talks, that war means peace, and final victory over the Yankee colony means lasting co-existence – but never vice versa. Only unpleasant rhetoric, it seems, is to have its meaning inverted. Friendly noises are to be taken at face value, and fondly remembered no matter how many missile launches ensue."

"[A]crobatics are very much an American thing. No one does wishful thinking like we do. I don’t see South Korean progressivists pretending that the regime’s every word and deed can be boiled down to the same reassuring message. In fact, part of the reason many of them feel a sneaking admiration for the North is because it follows through on its Yankee-defying rhetoric. But that’s another topic."

"While I too may be wrong about North Korea’s intentions, I’m neither lying nor guessing. Granted, it’s not easy figuring out what any country wants. America? Damned if I know anymore. The beginning of political wisdom is the recognition that no government’s discourse can be trusted. That goes also for the regime our softliners consider uniquely guileless. And the beginning of I.R. wisdom is the realization that foreign-service officials lie especially often. I had to laugh when I first heard of a news magazine called The Diplomat; it’s like calling a porn magazine The Prude."

"So I’m going to say this once again: North Korea’s immediate goal is the withdrawal of US troops. Its ultimate goal is the unification of the peninsula under the star flag. And yes, it has good reason to believe this can be done without a war."

"We Anglophones tend to use the words nation and state more or less interchangeably, but when one nation is divided into two states, it’s important to stick to the Koreans’ own practice of distinguishing clearly between nationalism (minjokjuŭi) and patriotism / state spirit (aeguksim, kukka chŏngsin, kukkajuŭi, etc). Historians do this even in English when discussing the Weimar Republic, where nationalism undermined support for the state — and for liberal democracy — just as it does in South Korea today."

"A major problem is the characterization of the [Jae-in Moon-led] government in Seoul as liberal, as if it were no less committed to constitutional values and opposed to totalitarianism than the West German social democrats were in the Cold War. This makes Westerners think, "North Korea can't take over the South without a war, but it knows it can’t win one, therefore it must now be arming only to protect itself.""

"Many intellectuals here [in South Korea] admire the North for standing up to the world. It’s a right-wing sort of admiration, really, for a resolute state that does what it says. More common than admiration are feelings of shared ethnic identity with the North. We are perhaps too blinkered by our own globalism to understand how natural they are."

"I’m sure the ease with which bare-footed Vietcong marched into Saigon in 1975 now strengthens Pyongyang’s conviction that the “Yankee colony” will not last long after the colonisers pull out. In South Korea, meanwhile, conservatives are now loudly invoking the story of South Vietnam’s demise. They say, “There too you had a richer, freer state, and it fell only a few years after US troops pulled out. Let’s not make the same mistake”. They point worriedly to President Moon Jae-in’s own remark that he felt “delight” when predictions of US defeat in Vietnam came true."

"Foreigners assume that because of the war, the two sides must dislike each other more than West and East Germans did. The opposite is the case. Some of my students say, “The North would never attack us, we’re the same people,” as if the war never happened. And North Korea would now be just as committed to unification if it hadn’t."

"[T]he North’s ideology glorifies the heart over the mind, instincts over consciousness, which makes rash decisions more likely to be made, even quite low down the military command structure. There is therefore a significant danger of some sort of limited clash at any time. But that has always been the case."

"North Korea knows a nuclear war is unwinnable. I also think it fancies its chances of a peaceful takeover too highly to want to risk a premature invasion while U.S. troops are here."

"[T]he establishment of a belligerent force’s intentions is always an urgently important matter in itself, regardless of how likely its ultimate victory may be, as America should have learned on December 7, 1941. As for the boundaries of our imagination being the boundaries of the possible, here’s another date: 9/11."

"I have tried to draw attention to South Korea’s dangerous state-loyalty deficit, by which I mean citizens’ lack of a sense of identification with their republic. In doing so I have noted the obvious parallels with South Vietnam, another state fatally weakened by nationalism. On this point too, I seem to be talking to the wall. Even Americans interested in the nuclear crisis feel no need to learn about party politics in South Korea. It’s a thriving, prosperous democracy, and that’s all that matters."

"[H]istorians are going to look back on the North Korean nuclear crisis, and wonder why it took us so long to see what was always staring us in the face. Here we have a rapidly arming country that keeps pledging to eliminate a rival state, which it invaded in 1950 and attacked twice only 7 years ago, and most Western observers still think it can’t possibly be serious. They believe it’s nuclearizing only to formalize a de facto security from American attack that its artillery, aimed squarely on this city, has afforded it for decades."

"South Korea has its most pacifist administration ever... [P]eople here [in South Korea] do not identify strongly with their state. No public holiday celebrates it, neither the flag nor the coat of arms nor the anthem conveys republican or non-ethnic values, no statues of presidents stand in major cities. Few people can even tell you the year in which the state was founded. When the average [South Korean] man sees the [South Korean] flag, he feels fraternity with [ethnic] Koreans around the world."

"[I]f Kim Il Sung had won the war, Korea today would not look like North Korea. I think it would still be a much less free and prosperous place than the South is now, but it would resemble China and Vietnam more than the North now does. Its system has been shaped by the need to distinguish itself, to seal itself off from the rival state, and to pursue nuclear armament."

"The example of East Germany exerts a far greater cautionary effect on the North Koreans than Qaddafi’s fate does. The Honecker regime took what Americans and South Koreans keep recommending to North Korea as the “pragmatic” way out of its problems: It began opening up to the West, quasi-formally recognized the rival coethnic state’s right to exist, and focused on improving its own citizens’ standard of living. We all know how that ended."

"In divided Germany you had liberal democracy versus communism. In divided Korea it’s moderate versus radical Korean nationalism, a difference of degree inside one big ideological community. It’s a huge difference, of course, but moderates always feel a certain admiration for radicals in all ideologies and religions. This admiration has been reflected in movies here that show North Korean women as purer, more chaste, and North Korean men as more resolute, handsome, and cooler than their South Korean counterparts. This year we have seen North Korean defectors appear in films as criminals or even murderers, which is in line with how the local press has long treated defectors as bad elements."

"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."

"[A] common chant during the candlelight demonstrations here last year was “The people are above the constitution,” a statement most Americans would have a problem with. The very proposal of a North-South confederation runs counter to the South Korean constitution, which does not recognize the dictatorship in the North at all."

"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."

"[T]he peninsula flag means two very different things to the two Koreas. In the South it symbolizes a desire for peaceful co-existence, or at most for a unification of equal partners in the reassuringly remote future. In wall posters above the DMZ it has always symbolized the southern masses' yearning for "autonomous unification", meaning absorption by the North. It's worrying to think how inner-track propaganda is certain to misrepresent the South Koreans' eschewal of their state flag for this of all symbols — and at this of all events."

"[T]hose who haven’t yet grasped the ideological realities of the [Korean] peninsula probably never will."

"[S]ent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters."

"Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance’s demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades. But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North’s standpoint it’s precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state’s long collusion with the Yankees so heinous."

"The North wants unification under its own flag, while South Korean progressives want the two states to coalesce over decades of mutually beneficial economic cooperation."

"[S]tart by reading Pareto; elites routinely do things that in retrospect look politically suicidal."

"[N]o Blue House can win Pyongyang’s trust without distancing itself from the US ally to a significant degree. At the very least it must present itself as neutral in the nuclear stand-off, but even that probably isn't enough. As Chamfort said, "Anyone placed at exactly the same distance between yourself and your enemy will always appear closer to your enemy." The South Koreans can play go-between only if they restrict themselves to mediating with Washington on the North's behalf."

"[W]hat more authoritative, trustworthy source could one ask for than the South Koreans? Whether Kim Dae Jung, Roh Moo Hyun or Moon Jae-in, the message to Washington has always been: "Trust us; we know these guys much better than you do.""

"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.""

"[T]he next few months will decide the fate of the peninsula."

"Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I.R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are."

"The surrender of something attained heroically and at great cost — something to which the well-being of entire generations has been sacrificed — is far more dangerous to a government than not having it to begin with."

"No one ever said the regime’s legitimacy reposes in the nukes themselves. It rests on a commitment to the unyielding defense and unification of the Korean nation."

"Moon camp: You can talk as loudly as you want, and the Americans won’t pay the slightest attention. Least of all Trump. As far as they’re concerned, the North Koreans are communists, and you’re liberal democrats."

"Korean nationalism has not only energized the North’s march to nuclear armament, but also exerted a growing appeal on people in the South — the ideological discourse of which republic has received even less attention than the North’s. The average American knows only that in the 1980s liberal democracy replaced authoritarianism here [in South Korea]."

"North Korea kept harassing the South, and one day they just clicked: Tell me that isn't a stalker's dream writ geopolitical."

"Pyongyang watchers consider the regime to be so hungry for economic growth, progress and other goodies as to have no pride, no mission, and no commitment to victory, real victory. It's all eros and no thymos. On this error rests our administration's hope for denuclearization."

"[T]he new line that the Taehan minguk was not founded in August 1948, but instead came into existence when a provisional government was formed in Shanghai in 1919. I don't need to remind anyone of the internationally accepted criteria for statehood. The Blue House seems more interested in downgrading the republic that fought the North than in making a serious case for the statehood of something else. The original modest budget for the 70th anniversary of the ROK's founding has already been cut. The joint North-South commemoration of the March 1st uprising's 100th anniversary next year is likely to make the festivities this August 15 look subdued in comparison."

"[M]emory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was."

"[T]he 1919 uprising is memorialized in the North without a public holiday as an example of how badly things go when a nation lacks a parental leader. This doesn’t stop propaganda from claiming the protests originated under the influence of Kim Hyŏng-jik, the father of Kim Il Sung, who himself impressed everyone at the age of six by … but never mind. The Blue House is unlikely to quibble with this version of history on the day itself. With these meshing tendencies and measures the ruling camp evidently hopes to bond with the Kim regime over a shared anti-Japanese tradition, to present today’s ROK and DPRK as branches of the same Shanghai tree, put nationalism above liberal-democratic principles, and minimize opposition to all these things. No less obvious is the larger goal."

"[W]hat the dictatorship wants is presented as something we should want more. Most calls for subversion enrage the North. Not these though. Never these."

"The North knows it cannot enjoy true security so long as the South is enjoying itself next door, be it ever so harmless in military terms and even free of US troops."

"[T]he main threat to the South's security is the general lack of public identification with the ROK and its values, as opposed to any widespread vulnerability to the personality cult."

"Whatever "Cold War system" there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been. I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens' realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power. This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension."

"Since Moon's takeover the peninsula has become less like divided Germany than ever. The ROK has abandoned the competition for legitimacy, instead ceding the North’s superiority on nationalist grounds while reaffirming that these matter more than liberal democratic ones. I’m not sure a league will ever come about, but if it does, it will hitch a proudly radical nationalist state to an unloved, moderate-nationalist one too shamefaced to celebrate its own founding. If the South is already unwilling to criticize the North, or to renew a commitment to its own constitutional values, it’s hardly likely to mount a strong defense of human rights later on."

""Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung": This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in 1960. It’s not to be taken too literally or narrowly; one gets the larger meaning. But it’s not that much larger. When dissidents and demonstrators called for freedom of speech in the past it was usually nationalist, anti-American and pro-North speech they had in mind."

"Americans are therefore wrong in assuming — and this was another line of argument against my RAS lecture — that South Koreans have struggled too long and too bravely for human rights ever to knuckle down to the North. There was no significant opposition here to the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha for criticizing the orthodox history of the so-called comfort women, and that took place under Park Geun-hye."

"[U]ntil the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany's size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero."