North Korea's Juche Myth : Myers, B R 2015

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North Korea's Juche Myth   2015
by B R Myers (Author)
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For decades the North Korean regime has preached a virulent race-nationalism to its own people. At the same time, however, it has succeeded in making outsiders believe that it is guided by a solipsistic, inward-directed ideology of self-reliant communism. This in turn has nurtured the wishful assumption that the regime no longer has serious designs on South Korea. In this book, his follow-up to The Cleanest Race (2009), B.R. Myers shows that although the myth of Juche has done great service for the regime at home and abroad, the ideology's content has never played a significant role in policy-making or domestic propaganda. The North Korean nuclear program must be grasped in the context of the regime's true ideological commitment, which is not to self-reliance, but to "final victory" over the rival state. The book's appendix contains an English translation of the oldest extant version (from 1960) of Kim Il Sung's so-called Juche speech of 1955; this as an effort to discourage the prevailing academic practice of relying on more recent, "emboldened" versions instead. Press Reaction: "Makes a compelling case for its own interpretation of Juche .... should draw attention back to Myers' contrarian arguments about the nature of the North Korean regime, which deserve to be taken seriously by anyone interested in the DPRK." - Columbia Political Review

 "Relying for the most part on Korean language sources, Myers makes a convincing case that what the DPRK has boasted for decades to international audiences as its unique guiding ideology of self-reliance is actually a sham doctrine, bearing no relevance to the actual policies of the DPRK, either domestically or internationally.... A detailed dissection of philosophical, political and historical documentation....

 The whole book is rich with citation and influences from psychology, the history of ideas, political history and literature.... [Myers'] criticism of Bruce Cumings, among others, has earned him vitriolic criticism in return. However, most of the time the remarks are aimed at what others perceive to be Myers' views of North Korea, rather than at the argument he makes, based on his knowledge of the language and the primary sources that indeed corroborate most of his thesis." - Gianluca Spezza, NK News, October 2015
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About the Author
B.R. Myers was born in the US and educated in Bermuda, South Africa and Germany, where he received a Korean Studies Ph.D. with a thesis on North Korean literature. He now specializes in the research of North Korea's ideology and propaganda, subjects on which he has written for peer-reviewed academic journals in the US, Canada and South Korea, as well as for the New York Times, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. His book Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) was the first English-language academic book on North Korean cultural history. He is also known for "A Reader's Manifesto" and other essays on literature and animal rights in The Atlantic. His book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (2009) was praised by Christopher Hitchens as "finely argued and brilliantly written," and by South Korea's Yonhap News Agency as "perhaps the most significant work on [North Korea] since Kim Jong Il came to power." It has since been published in French, Chinese, Korean, Czech and Polish versions. Myers teaches in the international studies department at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.

Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Createspace Independent Publishing Platform (1 October 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 300 pages
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars I'm sure a very good book if you were to read all of it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 January 2018
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I'm sure a very good book if you were to read all of it, but I personally only read the intro and chapter one as I found it a bit of a difficult read. I felt that the language could have been simpler to be honest. Not very enjoyable at all. Sorry
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Tybalt
5.0 out of 5 stars Useful for students of international relations or North KoreaReviewed in Canada on 14 July 2016
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A clear and precise analysis of North Korean official ideology (within the country and without) and how it represents itself to the world. Fascinating and forcefully argued.
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Charles M.
5.0 out of 5 stars An ideology for PosturingReviewed in the United States on 3 February 2016
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I supposed this will be the opposite of the previous review,

In "The Juche Myth", B.R. Myers takes aim at the intellectual consistency of North Korea's official ideology, its history and progression from the 1960's to the present. Myers makes the argument that Juche is a sham doctrine whose value is only to impress people by its presence, rather than by its contents. Consequently, the real ideology of North Korea, at least since the early 1990's is that of a military-first state not too dissimilar from Imperial Japan or the fascistic regimes in Europe.

To be clear, this book is a work of intellectual history, but I think it is a demonstration of skill that Myers can pen a book about the writings of an ideology as notoriously dry and boring as Juche Thought, and do so in a way that is not only expansive in its scope, but very accessible in its readability. If you have read his 2010 book "The Cleanest Race", and have an interest in North Korea, then you will enjoy and benefit from this book.

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William M. Simonton
5.0 out of 5 stars During the 70's and 80's I translated from Korean N ...Reviewed in the United States on 21 September 2016
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During the 70's and 80's I translated from Korean N. Korean propaganda and always thought that Juche was BS and for foreign consumption. The book also had numerous interesting research. Please read the footnotes.

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Craig Urquhart
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in Canada on 3 September 2016
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Fantastic book. Delivered quickly.
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B. R. Myers. North Korea’s Juche Myth. Busan: Sthele Press, 2015. 289 pp.    

 

Reviewed by Balázs Szalontai, Korea University (Sejong Campus) 

 

 

     In his latest monograph, Brian R. Myers, a specialist of North Korean culture, ideology, and propaganda, critically re-examines both the intellectual content and actual political use of North Korea’s official doctrine, chuch’e sasang (Japanese: shutei shiso; translated by Myers into English as “subject thought”). Solidly based on a wide array of primary and secondary sources (including the declassified reports of Soviet bloc diplomats and more than a hundred North Korean publications in Korean), the book consciously avoids the pitfalls of retrospective narratives. 

Adopting a chronological approach, the author carefully documents each stage in the historical evolution of chuch’e propaganda, and demonstrates that the widespread use of the term in North Korean political discourse started considerably later than it is often assumed. Myers points out that the theoretical speeches Kim Il Sung had supposedly made in the 1930s were fabricated in the 1970s, and reveals that the first sustained effort to propagate chuch’e was made only years after Kim’s well-known “chuch’e speech” (28 December 1955). On the basis of these observations, he reaches the logical conclusion that the emergence of chuch’e sasang as an articulated doctrine postdated, rather than predated, the formulation of North Korea’s distinctive political course, and thus it could not have provided a guiding influence to the latter. Myers also offers persuasive evidence, both from archival and oral history sources, that Kim Il Sung was neither extensively involved in the creation of the doctrine nor particularly interested in discussing it in depth.  

     Anxious to expose the various distortions in North Korea’s state-controlled mytho-history, 

Myers creates a strongly worded and frequently ironical counter-narrative. In his opinion, these distortions, particularly if they found their way into foreign academic works, sorely need correction, all the more so because the overestimation of chuch’e’s importance in North Korean diplomacy might mislead foreign policy-makers, too. To his credit, the author does identify a number of factual inaccuracies in the relevant foreign academic publications. For instance, he traces the origins of the chuch’e word to the Japanese translation of the German philosophical term Subjekt (Japanese: shutai), demonstrating that its usual translation as “self-reliance” is imprecise. 

At the same time, the polemical aspects of the book are somewhat counterproductive, not the least because the author’s determination to refute North Korea’s dominant narratives occasionally tempts him to downplay the trauma caused by Japanese colonial rule and the naisen ittai policy, or to overstate chuch’e’s compatibility with contemporaneous Soviet policies.         

     By subjecting Kim Il Sung’s “chuch’e speech” to rigorous textual analysis, Myers convincingly disproves the views that this speech per se launched a new ideology, let alone aspired to supersede Marxism-Leninism. As he points out, the use of the word chuch’e is interwoven with terms borrowed from Soviet and Chinese propaganda (47), and presented as if it were in conformity with “proletarian internationalism.” “Hanging incongruously over the speech is a distinctly Chinese ‘smell’” (53), Myers notes – a justified observation, particularly if one takes into consideration that the political use of chuch’e was introduced by Kim Ch’ang-man (a Yan’an Korean leader), rather than Kim Il Sung (33-34).   

     Still, I interpret the “bloc-conformist” aspects of the chuch’e speech somewhat differently than Myers, who argues that “in evidence is little more than an innocuous pride in indigenous tradition, something then standard across the East Bloc.” (54). In my opinion, Kim cloaked his message in such Soviet-inspired terms so as to alleviate Soviet suspicions, and thus deprive his Soviet Korean rivals of Moscow’s support. (As Myers points out, the dictator did achieve this aim.) Certain other aspects of the speech diverged from contemporaneous East European propaganda, however. While the Soviet-dominated East European regimes did call for the cultivation of “progressive” national traditions, they utilized such propaganda mainly in competition with anti-Communist opponents (as Kim also did in the second half of his speech, expressing interest in expanding Pyongyang’s political influence in South Korea). No known victim of the pre-1960 East European intra-party conflicts was attacked on the grounds that he had imitated Soviet practices at the expense of national identity. On the contrary, the main tendency was to disassociate the culprits from the USSR or present them as anti-Soviet elements. 

     Nonetheless, Myers aptly distinguishes the political use of the chuch’e term from cultural nationalism as such. He points out that in 1955-1960, there was a partial but not complete overlap between the two phenomena, with the latter being more pronounced than the former. Myers attributes the post-1959 emergence of chuch’e propaganda to the leadership’s pride over North Korea’s economic achievements and to its efforts to impress South Korean public opinion. In my view, these considerations did play an important role, but since the first peak of chuch’e propaganda, combined as it was with a campaign against sadaeejuui (“flunkeyism”), occurred in the second half of 1960 and early 1961, Kim Il Sung’s intention to shield the DPRK from the effects of the Sino-Soviet split probably also influenced this new trend. Chuch’e propaganda continued to undergo substantial fluctuation, however, for in 1962-1964, it was partially overshadowed by a demonstrative emphasis on Sino-North Korean friendship, while in 1965, the temporary improvement of Soviet-DPRK relations induced the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) leaders to curtail it.         

     Analyzing the speech Kim Il Sung made in Jakarta on 14 April 1965 (which is commonly regarded as the second milestone in the development of chuch’e), Myers persuasively argues that it was strongly influenced by Kim’s intention to reassure China that Pyongyang “had not realigned itself as squarely with Moscow as appearances might suggest” (91). Indeed, the speech railed against “modern revisionism” and the “international division of labor” (i.e., the COMECON), and condemned the domestic and external “revisionists” who had opposed Kim’s collectivization and heavy industrialization drive in the mid-1950. These charges had far more in common with Beijing’s standpoint than with Moscow’s, and thus Myers’ later comment (“Kim had not said anything particularly daring even by East Bloc standards,” 93) seems to be less accurate than his earlier observation.  

     Following the intra-party purges of 1967-1969, chuch’e sasang became a major (but not predominant) component of Kim Il Sung’s personality cult, and increasingly propagated abroad. Myers correctly places this propaganda offensive into the context of Pyongyang’s diplomatic strategy. Determined to isolate South Korea, the DPRK sought to portray Kim Il Sung as an original thinker, and to render chuch’e sasang acceptable to non-Communist audiences. The book persuasively explains why these considerations induced Kim to introduce a “’human-oriented’ version of Juche” (119) first to Japanese journalists, of all people. North Korea’s readiness to woo Japan and a wide range of non-Communist states had much in common with China’s global diplomatic efforts to get Taiwan expelled from the UN, and certain new aspects of Kim’s cult seem to have been directly inspired by Chinese Maoist practices. Still, Myers also draws attention to the differences between chuch’e sasang and Mao Zedong Thought, stressing that the writings of the supreme leader played a less important role in the former than in the latter (113, 149).  

     “Contrary, then, to the Western assumption that Juche equals Korean nationalism, it was conceived and formulated in large part to hide the de facto ideology from outsiders, or at least to dress it up as a belief in every country’s need to do its own thing” (122), Myers argues. Indeed, the vagueness and fluidity of chuch’e sasang was quite in accordance with the KWP leaders’ penchant for telling different things to different people, enabling them to find common ground with the various non-aligned countries, and alternatively downplay or highlight their commitment to “proletarian internationalism.” Still, it is partly inaccurate to say that the DPRK formulated chuch’e sasang in a way that would make it appear compatible with the ideology of its Communist allies: “Moscow and Beijing […] needed to know that Kim was not straying from the Marxist-Leninist fold.” (121). Actually, the very idea that chuch’e was of universal applicability created more friction in Soviet-DPRK relations than North Korean nationalism per se. During the 1970s, the KWP leaders frequently used chuch’e to dissuade foreign Communist parties from cooperating with the USSR. Since chuch’e’s opposition to supranational integration strongly resembled the Chinese charge of “Soviet hegemonism,” the Soviets concluded that a country’s readiness or unwillingness to approve chuch’e was a litmus test of its loyalty to the Kremlin. For instance, Yugoslavia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia expressed praise for chuch’e, whereas the pro-Soviet 

Mongolian, Cuban, and Vietnamese leaders pointedly ignored or even criticized it. The Cubans went so far as to specifically distinguish chuch’e from their policy of “adapting Marxism-Leninism to Cuban conditions.” 

     If, however, the entirety of chuch’e sasang is distinguished from its selective use for diplomatic purposes, it is justified to say – as Myers does – that “Juche was not meant to become a political force overseas” (133). Notably, the chuch’e study groups created abroad paid little, if any, attention to the affairs of the host countries; instead, they were focused on the problems of the faraway Korean Peninsula. In this respect, chuch’e stood in a sharp contrast with Maoist ideology, which continued to provide inspiration for armed insurrections in Peru, the Philippines, Nepal, and India long after it had been abandoned by the Chinese leaders. A partial exception was chuch’e’s shortlived popularity among the members of the chamintu wing of the South Korean student movement, but, as Myers notes, it was “anti-Americanism and admiration for North Korea” that “led to interest in the dictator’s thought, and not vice versa” (172).  

     At the same time, chuch’e sasang did not provide practical guidance to North Korean policymaking, either. The fact that the DPRK’s own chuch’e research institute was created much later than the analogous institutes abroad (152) revealed that chuch’e sasang’s principal raison d’être was external, rather than internal, propaganda. If ideology is defined as a coherent system of abstract ideas which may be reinterpreted and creatively applied to different conditions, it is indeed questionable whether chuch’e sasang, let alone “Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism,” ever became a genuine ideology. Myers correctly stresses that the absence of theoretical debates over chuch’e (which again distinguished chuch’e sasang from Marxism and Maoism) was “yet another indication of the sterility and fraudulence of doctrinal discussion” (154), a feature that revealed that chuch’e sasang was to function as a mere instrument of propaganda, rather than a guiding  ideological force.   

     Myers points out that the central slogan of chuch’e sasang – “man is master of all things” – was neither a North Korean theoretical invention nor an idea peculiar to Asian cultural traditions. He likens this principle to the “voluntarist hyperbole” (125) of Stalinist and Maoist propaganda – an insightful observation that helps to explain not only the ideological roots of the concept but also the reservations that Soviet diplomats held about it. The origins of this slogan may be traced back to 1960, when Kim Il Sung declared that political work played a more important role in the increase of production than any other factor. Since this statement implied the subordination of material incentives to moral and ideological ones, it was clearly at odds with post-1953 Soviet policies but in conformity with Maoism.  

     In Myers’ opinion, North Korea’s perennial aid dependence gave the lie to chuch’e’s call for an “independent economy,” too. While he acknowledges the regime’s “autarkic tendencies” (33), he concludes that the KWP leaders never seriously intended to forego foreign aid. As he correctly points out, the slogan of charyok kaengsaeng (“revitalization through one’s own strength,” a term patterned upon the Chinese zili gengsheng) has often been misinterpreted as “self-reliance” (19). 

Still, the dichotomy between propaganda and actual policy-making may have been less stark than Myers thinks. Actually, North Korea’s aid dependency was strongly interrelated with its autarkic tendencies, because the leadership’s preference for import substitution over export-oriented industrialization perpetuated the DPRK’s trade deficit, which in turn reinforced Pyongyang’s habit of pressing for unilateral gains.   

     Since the mid-1990s, neither Marxism-Leninism nor chuch’e sasang has played a central role in the regime’s propaganda, undermined as they were by the breakdown of the autarkic command economy and overshadowed by the new conception of son’gun (“military first”) and the increasingly explicit manifestations of race-nationalism. As Myers points out, most of the external and domestic factors that once stimulated the rise of chuch’e propaganda are no longer in operation. Under such conditions, chuch’e sasang does not serve as a major source of legitimacy for the country’s current ruler, Kim Jong Un. In certain respects, these tendencies were comparable to the post-1990 shifts in Chinese political propaganda. Since the economic policies of the CCP were no longer based on Marxism-Leninism, the party leadership needed an additional source of ideological legitimacy, and found it in state-nationalism.   

     All in all, North Korea’s Juche Myth provides a refreshingly new perspective on the 

philosophical essence, political context, and historical evolution of chuch’e. Apart from providing an immense amount of highly relevant factual information, the book also offers some valuable lessons in the sphere of methodology. Namely, Myers points out that if one seeks to examine actual North Korean policies, the textual analysis of chuch’e brochures and published Kim Il Sung speeches is unlikely to provide more than a very superficial insight, partly because many of these publications were purposefully aimed at influencing foreign audiences, and partly because they were usually intentionally vague and tautological. To paraphrase Kim Il Sung’s quip to the journalists of Mainichi Shimbun (“To have a deep understanding of Subject Thought it is necessary to make a detailed study of our party’s policy”), the way to understand North Korean policies is not to make a detailed study of chuch’e sasang but to analyze the regime’s internal propaganda as well as its concrete actions.     

 

 

Book Review: “North Korea’s Juche Myth”

BY: BENJAMIN KATZEFF SILBERSTEIN

JULY 1, 2016BOOK REVIEWS

https://www.38north.org/2016/07/bksilberstein070116/

North Korea’s Juche Myth

By B. R. Myers. Busan: Sthele Press, August 2015. 289 pp.

North Korea's Juche Myth, by B. R. Myers

Analysts often invoke North Korea’s Juche ideology of “self-reliance” to explain everything from the country’s personality cult to its military belligerence. Some portray Juche as a logical result of North Korea’s geopolitical environment, and of the Korean peninsula’s history of invasion and subjugation by neighboring countries. When it comes to many of the questions raised about North Korea’s conduct, outsiders often will refer to Juche as part of the answer.

The “myth” of Juche’s role throughout North Korean history is the target of B. R. Myers’s latest book,[1] which asserts that conventional assumptions about the philosophy’s significance are plain wrong. As in his 2010 book, The Cleanest Race,[2] Myers seeks in North Korea’s Juche Myth to challenge fundamental assumptions about the DPRK. He argues that Juche was created primarily for the outside world, and that it has never served as a guiding ideology for the North Korean regime. By promoting what appeared to be a homegrown ideology, the DPRK sought legitimacy both in the West and in South Korea. Meanwhile, Kim Il Sung’s personality cult benefited from claims that the leader had crafted his own ruling philosophy. According to Myers, the regime never intended Juche to guide its own decision-making.

The author quotes extensively from the Juche canon to argue that the doctrine lacks sufficient depth to guide North Korean leaders. Myers argues that observers who assume Juche to be of profound intellectual subtlety have not read the key texts in full. For example, what is the real meaning of the foundational Juche expression, “man is the master of everything and decides everything?” Meyers quotes a former South Korean dissident as believing many Juche texts are the intellectual equivalent of asserting, “If you raise a lot of chickens, you will get a lot of eggs.”[3] However, North Korean texts require a great deal of contextualization to appear logical, and Myers frames these attempts at interpretation as part of the problem. For instance, while analysts often interpret Kim Il Sung’s supposed first mention of Juche in a 1955 speech as an attempt to signal North Korea’s independence from the Soviet Union, Myers shows that Kim’s address ardently emphasized the strength of the Soviet-North Korean friendship.[4] Juche, on the other hand, was only mentioned relatively briefly.[5]

North Korea’s Juche Myth is not without problems, but Myers’s latest offering provides an important piece of scholarship.

Taking North Korea Seriously

The author’s fervent criticism of the North Korean regime will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his previous writings, but by taking its ideas seriously, he approaches the DPRK’s leadership with far more respect than many other scholars. Myers treats the regime as an actor with its own volition rather than a victim of historical circumstances, and he regards Juche as a consciously crafted concept rather than an ideology that evolved beyond deliberate human control. The North Korean regime holds true historical agency in the author’s view; it did not assume its current form in mere reaction to Western-imposed circumstances.

This approach marks a welcome step away from treatments of North Korean history as linear and inevitable. Myers firmly opposes defining the North Korean state along the lines of Adrian Buzo’s “guerilla state.”[6] While such models often seem to accurately describe North Korea, they too often trace the country’s current character to events that occurred decades ago—as if the regime made no conscious decisions along the way.[7] Myers shows that North Korea’s history is, in truth, a result of concrete choices that have rarely followed a linear historical pattern.

Understanding North Korea in Context

Myers makes another important contribution by comparing Juche to other communist thought systems that emerged in the early to mid-twentieth century. He shows that, contrary to popular belief, Juche does not have to be read as a diversion from Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Kim Il Sung and Stalin[8] both argued against dogmatically applying communist doctrine in the same way in all countries.[9] North Korea shared its nationalist rhetoric with countries like Romania, meaning that its emphasis on autonomy was not unique in the communist world.[10] This comparison ultimately reveals Juche to be far less mysterious and special than it may appear to contemporary observers. Myers argues that the philosophy was actually well in line with what North Korea’s international benefactors prescribed. The merits of this argument are open to debate, but the author takes a vital step of trying to strip Juche of its mystery and exoticism. While some may claim that Juche is too opaque and “too Korean” to be fully understood by Westerners, Myers shows that its basic tenets are neither unique nor uncommon among communist countries.

The Limitations of Written Sources

Myers deserves immense credit for surveying a vast amount of primary source material. Few other works of North Korean history and politics rest on such a broad source base as North Korea’s Juche Myth, with its bibliography of over fourteen pages of original North Korean sources. However, the author would have been well served by more extensively developing his argument about the differences in types of North Korean propaganda material.

While Myers theorizes about the different purposes of North Korea’s various publications, the reader is left wishing for a more extensive explanation. He specifies three “tracks” of North Korean propaganda: 1) an inner track of texts meant solely for North Koreans; 2) an outer track of domestically targeted propaganda written with an understanding that foreigners may also see it; and 3) an export track of propaganda meant for outsiders.[11] His book rests on the premise that the regime rarely invokes Juche in messages to its own people, but brings it up regularly in communications with foreign audiences, and it is therefore critical to ascertain the intended audience of the government’s various messages.

However, Myers does not fully explore how he distinguishes “inner track” from “outer track” sources. He appears to treat Kulloja magazine and Rodong Sinmun, for example, as though they are intended purely for North Koreans, but are readers to believe that the regime has never known that foreigners can acquire these publications? One only needs to go through the five-minute registration process at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, to access a nearly complete collection of Kulloja issues dating back to the mid-1940s or hop online to read through the latest updates to Rodong Sinmun.

The book’s argument also would have benefited from further discussion of the differences between the propaganda types it surveys. Myers could have engaged and debated available literature on this topic: Sonia Ryang, for example, discusses extensively the different purposes of various publication types in North Korea in her 2012 book, Reading North Korea.[12] His claim that speeches and works by North Korea’s leaders are not important in the propaganda is also questionable. The leader’s biographies may be most central works in North Korean propaganda, but the speeches and works of the leadership still fill important functions. For example, publications such as academic journals regularly use them as a frame of reference, similar to how Soviet propagandists used writings by Lenin and Stalin to anchor their own writings in an acceptable tradition.[13]

Myers also approaches his source materials with a degree of inconsistency. For instance, he writes off some documents as relatively unimportant, including the writings and teachings of Kim Il Sung.[14] He suggests that how Kim lived his life was more important than what he wrote or said. Meanwhile, he accepts at face value a number of statements by Stalin and others that encourage nationalism and the creative adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to national conditions. The book’s argument would have been strengthened by more elaboration on the different purposes of the materials that he surveys, and the differing nature of rhetoric versus policy in general. Readers are expected to believe that Soviet policy truly encouraged nationalist diversions from Marxist-Leninist doctrine simply because that was the message of Moscow’s propaganda. But how did the Soviet Union’s stated position on this matter compare to its practices? The issue of ideology versus reality is complicated, and Myers does not quite do it justice. For example, certain archival materials from the 1940s hint at Soviet concern that North Korean communists were copying Soviet concepts without due thought, while other documents suggest that the Soviets were troubled by a lack of orthodoxy among North Korean communists on issues like land reform.

Finally, Myers writes in quite an engaging style, but he sometimes appears intent on creating conflict even where it is not necessary. He swiftly declares significant pieces of North Korea scholarship like Beyond Charismatic Politics[15] to be at fault for buying into the “Juche myth.” Charles Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak[16] takes the most flack. But neither book really paints Juche as the be-all and end-all of North Korean history. He also criticizes the New York Times’s Choe Sang-hun—one of the more knowledgeable English-language journalists writing on Korean affairs—as someone who is “anti-anti-Pyongyang,”[17] without providing examples to back up his claim.

Still, Myers’s contributions are far greater than his weaknesses in what is, overall, an important book. He urges readers to see that the Juche emperor is naked, and to question longtime assumptions on basic matters like periodization and interpretation. For those interested in studying North Korea, this book provides an intriguing and important exploration of the purpose and use of Juche.

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[1] Myers sets up a longer narrative example on the first page of the introduction. See B. R. Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth, 1st ed. (Busan, South Korea: Sthele Press 2015).

[2] B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010).

[3] Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth. 4–5.

[4] Myers, 52–53.

[5] Myers, 54.

[6] Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Myers levels an amount of unfair criticism toward Buzo, who can scarcely be accused of painting a romantic picture of the North Korean regime.

[7] For an example, see Hongkoo Han, “Colonial Origins of Juche: The Minsaengdan Incident of the 1930s and the Birth of the North Korea-China Relationship,” in Origins of North Korea’s Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development, edited by Jae-Jung Suh (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 33–63.

[8] As the British historian Mark Mazower has pointed out, Moscow was greatly perturbed by international communists who were too eager to situate themselves as mere followers of Soviet communism rather than builders of their own nations. See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1998), 254–255.

[9] Han, Origins of North Korea’s Juche, 32.

[10] Mazower, Dark Continent, 93.

[11] Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth, 9.

[12] Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012).

[13] One such journal is Kungje Yungoo. For a discussion on the editorial voice of Stalin and Lenin, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation (Princenton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[14] Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth, 134.

[15] Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012).

[16] Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013).

[17] Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth, 211.

B.R. MYERSBENJAMIN KATZEFF SILBERSTEINBOOK REVIEWJUCHEKULLOJANORTH KOREARODONG SINMUN