The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

by B. R. Myers
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

by B. R. Myers

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

"Provocative ... A fascinating analysis." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
The first full-length study of the North Korean worldview to draw on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the Kim dynasty personality cult …
 
What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them? From Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il to current leader Kim Jong-un, it’s been hard to define a consistent ideology amongst North Korea’s Supreme Leaders.
 
But you can reach a more profound understanding of North Korea through its propaganda, says renown North Korea analyst, and Atlantic contributing editor B.R. Myers.
 
Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn, from the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in terror of "the Iron General." In a concise but groundbreaking historical section, Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled.
 
What emerges is a regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid, nationalist, “military-first” state on the far right of the ideological spectrum.
 
Since support for the North Koriean regime now derives almost exclusively from pride in North Korean military might, Myers argues that Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear program. The implications for Western foreign policty — which has hiterhto treated North Korea as the last outpost of the Cold War — are as obvious as they are troubling.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781935554349
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Publication date: 12/20/2011
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

B.R. Myers was born in New Jersey and raised in Bermuda, South Africa and Germany. He has a Ph.D. in North Korean Studies from the University of Tübingen in Germany. His books include Han Sorya and North Korean Literature (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) and A Reader’s Manifesto (Melville House, 2002). At present he directs the international studies department at Dongseo University in South Korea. In addition to writing literary criticism for the American magazine The Atlantic, of which he is a contributing editor, Myers regularly contributes articles on North Korea to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and academic publications.
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