The Cleanest Race B.R. Myers Talk 20100211

 The Cleanest Race  B.R. Myers Talk 20100211 

https://www.c-span.org/video/?292562-1/the-cleanest-race

The Cleanest Race

B.R. Myers takes an in-depth look at North Korean society and the domestic propaganda to which its citizens are exposed. 

Myers argues that 

• North Korea is a paranoid, military-dominated nationalist state 
• with a government that is influenced heavily by Japanese fascism. 

He spoke at the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

오디오 파일

20100211 BR Myers.m4a

A couple of days ago and my publisher said why don't you try to outrun the storm by heading north to New York? And and I thought, I don't think so. So I I drove S instead and I went to Richmond and got the plane. Out of there. You know, I live in Pusan which is Harbour Town on the South Coast of South Korea and I never see snow there and I was really looking forward to seeing it. This time, but I don't care if I never see any snow again in this state.

OK. What can you hear about North Korea that you haven't heard 1000 times before? Really only the most important thing, which is what do the North Koreans think and how do they see themselves in the? World around them. 

I'd like to start with an analogy. Let's imagine that the house next door to where you live has been empty for some time, and finally somebody has come to move into it. And you lookout your window and you see them unloading assault weapons. You know, I don't know. Grenade launchers as well. Bazookas, you name it. Now, this is America, so it's probably all perfectly legal. And and, but as you lie awake at night, having put your house on the. Market. You're probably asking yourself certain things, and I don't think you're asking yourself. What kind of cognac that man drinks, or who's going to inherit the house after he? Guys and I don't think you're all that interested in how many calories his kids are getting every day. You're probably more interested in what he thinks, how he sees himself, what he's teaching his kids, and This is why I find it so baffling that in the United States, although we fought one war with the North Koreans losing 54,000 people in the process. And although we came very close to fighting another war in 1993 and 1994, and although we've been locked in this increasingly dangerous nuclear standoff with the North Korea, not interested in what ideology they have and why they're doing all this. And in the meantime, we're sort of compulsively accumulating hard facts. And then we wonder why we still don't understand this country. It's it's almost as if we didn't know that Iran was an Islamic country. It really wouldn't matter how much intelligence we were able to gather about Iran. Its behaviour would still baffle us. And this is the problem that we have in North Korea. And This is why today I'd like to talk to you about North Korean ideology. I realise that sounds like a kind of dull topic, so I've I've I've chosen the parts of my book that I think lend themselves more to a visual presentation like this. There is some heavier stuff in the book. Well, but I I thought I'd keep it out of the talk today. 

Ideology is especially important because this regime and this man that you see here in this picture enjoy a much higher degree of mass support than we tend to assume. We tend to think of North Korea as a country that's in a sort of permanent lockdown. That survives purely by dint of its repressiveness alone, and that's just not the case. 

And I think the evidence for this lies in the North Korean border itself, now on the left, you have the East German border, which I remember very well. I was a student in West Germany. And I would go to Berlin quite often on the train, and we'd have to go through this border and on the right you have the North Korean border and you can see they're very different. This is, of course, the border to China and not the DMZ to South Korea. But still, it's a very easy border to cross and. A very interesting statistic is that 50% of those who do cross this border into China bribe their way back into the. Country. Now, nobody tried to bribe their way back into the Soviet Union or into back into East Germany, so I would warn you against taking the hyperbole of a lot of these North Korean refugee NGO's seriously. They like to talk about the Underground Railroad that is helping North Korean migrants to safety. Well, I don't know of any slaves bribing their way back onto the plantation. So we need to realise that this is a country that that survives not by dint of repressiveness alone, but because it is able to inspire its people still. So that's what I want to talk to you today. About is how does it inspire its people? 

Well. I want to stay in the here and now, but I I we need to go back into history a little bit and I want to talk about Juche because Juche is actually not the main ideology in North Korea.

 Juche, was a reaction to the to this man here [Mao] to the Chinese personality cult, which began exploding in the mid 1960s, the North Koreans felt the need to match this cult claim for claim, so mounts its own claim that he was a poet of course, and he enjoyed quite a a good deal of international renown for his poetry. So the North Korean personality. Bolt suddenly remembered plays which Camel song had allegedly written in his youth, of which no mention had been made. Till then, Mao Zedong had the long March for which he was very famous, on which he'd led his troops, and the North Korean historians suddenly remembered the arduous March that Kimo sang had taken his troops on Mao Zedong had Maoism as a world famous ideology, and this claim, of course, forced the North Koreans to come up with something that they called. 

You have thought now this is kind of a dry topic. I've written a lot of academic papers about it, but it doesn't really lend itself to A to a talk like this, but I just want to give you an. People. Of what this sham doctrine looks like? Because it is a sham doctrine, it exists to be praised and not to be read. It exists really only to enable the claim that Kimo Sung is a great ideologue and this is just an excerpt from it. A representative excerpt by my dad. I recognise this prose style because this is how I used to write in college when I had a term paper due the next day and I had to fill 10 pages and at the same time make sure that the professor didn't actually read them. So. I would just repeat things over and over again and make it as dull and stodgy as possible, and that's what you see in this. Called Juche thought, now the regime, when it actually has a message that it wants to put across it, can do this very well. These are the best propagandists in the world. This is the most ingenious propaganda apparatus in the world, and it knows that when it wants to get a message across, that's not the way to do it. This is the pros they use to fill those books by lines so that people can look at those. Books by us and say our Kimilsong is just as great an ideologue as mouths. One was, 

but in North Korea ideology is not so much learned from the leaders as learned about the leaders. In other words, what people are taught in so-called political study sessions are the fantasy biographies of the two camps. It's not so much what the Kim said as what they did. In other words, just one more interesting fact. The North Korean encyclopaedia. Tree on the Juche tower. Is twice as long as the entry on teacher thought. And that really tells you all you need to know about touché thought, which I don't really want to talk more about today. 

OK, now to go back a little bit into history. Do we have any Koreans here today or any Koreans? Yeah, you guys. Koreans. Yeah. OK, now if if you live in Korea as I do, then you you you may well be a fan of these historical Korean TV dramas. And if you watch them, you will have people maybe 1000 years ago talking about the Korean nation or the Korean race the minjung. And actually the word minjok did not appear in the Korean language until the Japanese brought it to the Korean people. And as Professor Carter Eckert of Harvard University has said, there was no strong sense of belonging to a Korean nation until very late in the 19th century. In other words, the Koreans were not nationalists, they were xenophobic. But there's a difference between xenophobia and nationalism. As you can see from this map, this is a Korean map from 1402. The Koreans at that time believed their country to be on the outskirts of this great Chinese cultural realm. They they saw themselves in a sort of permanent student position to the great Chinese. Teacher. 

So. In 1910, of course, Korea was annexed. Here, you see the Korean soldiers, and for the first few years of the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Japanese ruled their subjects so heavy handedly that this nascent Korean nationalism bubbled over into a big demonstration in 1919. Which frightened the Japanese and after that the Japanese relaxed some of the repressive policies that had inflamed the Koreans. And they decided to Co opt Korean nationalism instead of trying to stamp it out. And they did so in a very ingenious way. They did so with a campaign called Naisen Ittai in Japanese, or Nesson. Iche in Korean, which means Japan and Korea as one body. Now you see from that. Map on the left. Japan and Korea both painted the same colour on the school map. The message that the Japanese spread in Korea was that you Koreans and we Japanese, we may have drifted apart over the millennia, but we are actually one people. We go back to the same defined progenitor team move. We all have this uniquely pure racial bloodline, and this bloodline makes us uniquely pure. Makes us also uniquely pure hearted and morally superior to people in other races so. This is another postcard. This is a postcard from the period on the right you have Japan and on the left you have have Korea in a three legged race around the world. The legend says let's cooperate together. 

Now, is anybody here from Texas? You're from Texas? Great. Well, the reason I ask is I'm not losing my mind. The reason I ask is I used to live in New Mexico, and the Texans would come over in the summer to Ruidoso some places like that, and you'd see the bumper stickers. Would have the the flag of Texas and the United States flag, and the slogan was proud Texan, proud American. And this is really the kind of attitude that the Japanese were aiming for in Korea. They wanted the Koreans to be proud of their Korean Ness. They actually urged them to take pride in their history. In their culture, in their dialect, they didn't want to call it the language, but at the same time they wanted them to be proud of belonging to this greater Yamato whole and 

this idea actually went down much better than South Koreans today, and N Koreans today would like to acknowledge. And by the end of the 1920s, most educated Koreans in big cities were voluntarily speaking Japanese in their own homes. They were cheering Japanese newsreels, which showed the victories over over the. Chinese and.

Go on.

Of course, the average Korean at that time was uneducated, illiterate. He didn't have a radio, so those people had to be brutally coerced into complying with Japans demands for prostitutes or soldiers and things like that. And I don't mean to downplay the brutality, but the middle and upper classes which were deriving the benefits of this new order. They really subscribe to it fully. So here you see those two groups. 

There you have your the average Korean peasant on the left and on the right you have a very famous. Korean dancer. I don't know if anybody knows who she is chasing, he who introduced the short Tomball body of the short hairstyle to Korean women in the 1930s. And you can see here that although she was a collaborator, although she donated enormous sums of money to the Japanese Empire to the Imperial Army, I'm sorry. You can see from her. Child's Korean dress that she was still proud of her Koreans at the same time. OK, in 1945, as you know, the Korean Peninsula was divided and there's a common misperception in the West and in South Korea that while South Korea was ideologically tainted by maintaining so many Pro Japanese former collaborators or Tina Pop. North Korea started out completely fresh. North Korea purged itself of all these former pro Japanese collaborators and made a completely new start. 

And that's just not true. In fact, North Korea was more welcoming of former intellectual collaborators than Seoul was, at least in Seoul. Some of them went to prison like in Guangzhou or Chennai. In North Korea, no former Pro Japanese intellectual collaborator ever went to prison, and in fact. These people there, you see chessen here again. Kim. Kim Sadyang, Iggy Young song. Young these really egregious pro Japanese propagandists went to North Korea in 1945 and were welcomed with open arms. And they took over leading positions in the cultural apparatus in North Korea. And this is significant because no kind of denazification. Process. Ever. Their place 

they did not receive any kind of indoctrination and Marxism. Leninism because the Workers Party itself did not know anything about Marxism Leninism until about 1948. So in the meantime, these propagandists were expected to start inspiring the people with with the with the love of the regime. And they did this quite naturally in the same way that they've been doing it under the Japanese. So basically, the Japanese ushered the Koreans into this uniquely pure race. And in 1945, the Koreans. Take the Japanese out of. It. Koreanized thing, the Japanese symbols that they had learned during the colonial period. So that's it for the historical part of my talk, 

I want to get into the present now with the worldview and the world view to which the North Koreans subscribe. Derives primarily from a race theory constant theory, as you would say in German, though that, and a notion of the race as being unique and superior to all other ones. So when I say they koreanized the Japanese symbols, Japan had this sacred Mount Fuji. And the Koreans decided to elevate Mount Baekdu, the highest peak in on the Korean Peninsula, to sacred status, which it had not enjoyed before 1945. 

Many South Koreans today wrongly think that they've always venerated Baekdu. They only start this quite recently and tangun the empera tango on the. 

Who started the Korean race? Allegedly thousands of thousands of years ago, he became a historical figure almost overnight, and there you see the. Same bloodline extending back thousands of thousands of years. The myth being that despite the numerous invasions which the peninsula endured over the centuries, the Korean race was able to preserve its its pure bloodline, its unique homogeneity, and you can see that homogeneity pictured. 

Hello I wonder if anybody recognises where that. Picture comes from. Anybody from reading the news recently, it's from the new. North Korean currency and you can see from those faces those people look like clones and that really is kind of the message because according to the North Korean regime, the unique strength and unity of of North Korea derives from the modernity of the Korean race. And these mass games that I think you've all seen on TV and maybe some of you have seen that documentary A state of mind. They're commonly misperceived in the West as Stalinist exercises in anti individualism. We mistakenly think the goal is to stamp out their sense of self, to make them all behave in the same way, and that's actually not the case. These mass games are great, joyous celebrations of the racial homogeneity from which the strength of the race. Arrives the North Korean looks at these displays and sees thousands and thousands of girls at the same height. The same builds the same skin colour, the same hairstyle, and feels a pride in the homogeneity of the race. The logic is a bit funny for us, you know, to to think that because the race is homogeneous, it's uniquely pure. And this is kind of the logic because. Koreans are all alike. They are much kinder to each other than than people in more heterogeneous nations.

Here's another interesting slogan from a North Korean magazine. I always say that North Korean propaganda is a bit like a fascist idea of what Communist propaganda should look like because you've got the left wing terminology being used to put across. A race based message which is actually incompatible with Marxism, Leninism. I can't stress that often enough. This is not a nationalist tinged Marxism like you had in Yugoslavia.

 This is a way of looking at the world in almost exclusively racial categories and and nothing could be further removed that Marxist basic. The idea of workers of the world unite. Now, these aren't Nazis, mind you. OK, no claim is made to physical superiority to being Uber mentioned or anything like that. Rather, just like the Japanese before them in the colonial period, the Koreans claim a moral superiority. They claim they're inherently better, purer, more moral than people. In other countries, the difference to Japanese nationalism is this, where the Japanese believed that their virtue had protected them over the centuries. As you can see here in this depiction of the divine winds which destroyed the Mongolian fleet. 

Korea, of course, had a very different history from Japan. Korea had been invaded very often, so the Koreans believed that their virtue had made them an easy prey. Over the centuries, they believed that they had been invaded so often and abused so often by foreign powers 

because they were just too good, too kind to survive in in. Much evil in the geopolitical surroundings and of course the. Way of this, this inclination to look at themselves as the children on the world stage is tied together with the perceived need for a parental leader who will protect them and indulge them and allow them to be themselves without fear of invasion. So this brings us to the leader. 

And again, just to just to make clear. 

• The personality cult is not the basis of this worldview. The worldview comes out of. 
• The Kim Cult comes out of the world view itself, logically, organically, so to speak. 
• Now, this Kim cult is quite obviously derivative of the Hirohito cult that was propagated in the 1920s and 1930s in Korea. 

I can give you lots of examples, but here's one that I can I can show you quite easily. On a slide. There you have Hirohito pictured on his White Horse. Which was or the symbol of racial purity. The Japan the Yamato races racial purity and of course, Kim Il Song was also shown on the White Horse and even the terminology is the same. Both leaders were referred to as Great Marshall and in Korea the the word was the same as well as the striking to me that they didn't even feel the need to change the terminology. 

And of course, Kim Jong-il is also shown on the White Horse, although the as you know, the sunglasses kind of ruined the effect a little bit, but he's often videotaped and and and pictured riding on. White horses as well. 

Now Stalinism is really another word for Marxism. Leninism. What is Marxism? Leninism. Well, Marx himself. Marx said that communism was inevitable. He said that capitalism was doomed to collapse no matter what. So the revolution was going to happen anyway. And Lenin. Came along and Leonard said no, I don't think so, because the masses are not particularly intelligent. They're not particularly critical thinkers. So if they're left to their own devices, these workers will fall very easily into the trap of trade unions, into the trap of demanding wage increases and getting a little bit more every year from the capitalists. So in order to keep the masses on message, so to speak, in order to keep the masses fighting for the revolution. They need a communist. Party and this idea is at the heart of of culture under under Stalin as well. The party's role is to make the spontaneous masses grow up, in other words, to instil revolutionary consciousness into them. 

And that's why Stalin and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union were always depicted as fatherly teacher figures. And as you can see from this picture, what do you think is the focal point here in the picture? What part of style? And space. Are you supposed to be? Looking at the eyes, right, because the eyes are the symbol of of his unique mastery of dialectical materialism is supposedly omnipotent science, which was going to, you know, transform the world. 

Whereas. in North Korea, the belief was and is that the Korean people should remain naive. It's only logical really, if you're born pure. If you're born better than everybody else, it follows that you don't really need to be tempering your instincts with book learning. That way you'll only dilute. Them. So it's better for the people to traits to stay true to their pure instincts. For which reason Kimo Sung and the Workers Party are not fatherly teacher figures. Instead they are parallel protector figures, and as you can see here, from this picture the focus is not on chemo Sam's eyes which which you can't really make out very well. In this picture, the focus is on his, his bosom or his poem. To use the Korean word. If you read North Korean poetry, the poets are often talking about the desire to rest their faces against this expansive chest and be enveloped in in the parental leaders embrace. 

Here's another. Example. This is what Stalin does at night. You know, he gets ready to teach the people the. Next day. And that's what Kim Sung does. Late at night, I showed this slide to one of my classes in South Korea and the kid at the back of the class said maybe. He's taking the coat off. But he's not. What do you find? A lot of the North Korean studies because unfortunately, very few people in North Korean studies or these people, these North Korea, think tanks in Washington, DC, can actually read Korea. I'm not saying my Korean is is any great shakes, but I find it very odd that you could be a think tank pulling down a huge salary for, for expertise on North Korea and not be able to read. The Korean language, I mean, imagine being at a an Italy think tank. Say you you can't read Italian. I don't think that would be acceptable. 

Anyway. One of the mistranslations that you find so often in in writing on North Korea is this phrase, father leader actually the word. 어버이 I will ask the Koreans present. That doesn't mean Father does. Avoid now in, in, in Korea. It's not Father's Day. It's parents day. OK, so Kim's son is not referred to as the Father leader. He's referred to as. The. Parent leader and that's quite odd, isn't it, if you're referring. To. A man not as a father, but as a parent. It's quite obvious that you're actually trying to play up his maternal side, and that's exactly what. They do in North Korea. Kim Jong-il himself is on record as saying that Kim IL Sam's motherly qualities were the key to his success. 

So when people tell you that North Korea is a Confucian patriarchy, they they really couldn't be further. From the truth. This is not a Confucian society at all. Kim Jong-il as well, even when he's depicted in military uniform, he comes across more as a sort of Salvation Army matron. He looks very feminine and in photographs he looks like a like a South Korean housewife or an ajima. And here of course you have him with with his expansive breast as well, that soldiers want to lay their faces against and and. We tend to think that this personality cult is so absurd because he doesn't look like our idea of a general, he say general to an American, and we think MacArthur and Eisenhower, we think people don't look at all like this, but actually this image exerts a strong psychological appeal on the people of North Korea. And just to make clear that I'm not. Actually reading anything into these pictures because North Korean propaganda is not subtle when they want to make a point they come across, they come right out and say it. So they do say literally they have our money. Kim Jong Un tango name our great Mother General Kim Jong. Yeah. OK. That's not all they call them, of course they do. Call them on occasion. Father leader as well. But he's also being referred to as the parent increasingly and always his maternal qualities are at the forefront. He's always described as travelling around military bases, worrying about whether the soldiers are warm enough, whether they're eating enough and so on. He's not an educating figure. The party is also referred to quite literally, as the mother party. And this is the attitude that is expected of North Korean citizens. I cry out forever in the voice of a child. Mother. I can't live without mother. One of the signs that's often held up during parades is we cannot live away from his breast in being Kim Jong Un. So the symbolism really could not be more explicit. So here's pretty much the cosmology at the top. You have the motherland, the Albany choke. Book. Of the fatherland. And then you got the mother general. Then you got the mother party. And then you have this child race. And then he said now if you were to show this slide to a social psychologist, even to somebody who had no idea about North Korea, he would say, well, I see an absence of. Father symbols. I see an absence of a father principle I see only mother authority figures. I would expect this to be a country which behaves very spontaneously and instinctively on the world stage, and that is of course what we see with North Korea. We see this pattern of events from the Panmunjom axe murders in 1976, when the North Koreans. Arrested taxes from American soldiers and hacked them down the Rangoon bombing in 1983 in which the North Koreans alienated one of their few remaining friends on the world stage. The Burmese, and then the. This bombing of the Korean airliner South Korean airliner in 1987, the year before the Olympic Games, all this kind of behaviour, which really is nothing at all like the sort of behaviour that we experienced from our Cold War adversaries, can only be understood in the context of this race based ideology, which stresses the need to follow. The instincts of the Korean people. The outside world, if we could talk about this for a bit because there's a misperception among a lot of people that the North Koreans only hate the Americans, that they only distrust the Americans. That's not. True. Because if you believe your race. To be uniquely pure. It follows from that that all other races are inferior to you, and this is the message that they get across. They get it across a little bit more subtly. Than than other things. So if you look at this picture, unfortunately it's black and white. I think you can still make it out quite well. This is a depiction of the 1989 Youth games. In Pyongyang, in other words, these are friendly foreigners who have visited Pyongyang and are cheering this fantastic city that they're looking at. The first thing that strikes you is there's only one Korean. In that crowd. Namely, the guide. So in other words, the the cleanest race has to be kept apart from these foreigners, lest they be defiled. The other thing that strikes you is that, say, the dress of the people you have, those two African women and the the Caucasian women in the foreground, they are dressed in ways which which, even today in in North Korea are considered very indecent. You have these two blonde women in the foreground. They look to us normal and attractive, but in North Korea, wearing your hair like that is considered slovenly. It's considered a sign of bad morals. The other interesting thing is that no matter which direction the foreigners are looking at, their faces are partially obscured by this sort of menacing shadow. The only person in the crowd who's face is evenly lit. Who is attracted by Korean standards is the only Korean person. In that crowd. Of course, the Americans are are the real villains in North Korean propaganda. Kim Jong-il has been quoted as saying. Just as a Jackal cannot become a lamb, the Yankees cannot change their savage nature. Now you couldn't get a less Marxist idea than that the Soviets were always very careful to draw distinction between American capitalists and American proletarians, between white Americans and black Americans, between even between men, and between American women and children when they were talking about military topics. For example, you don't see any of this in North Korea. All Americans are inherently. Generate due to their ranks according to the North trends, this is one of the ways in which they get it across. The interesting thing about this is that. Although they have Caucasian facial features, they have black skins and I think that this is because North Korea does not want to alienate its few remaining friends in the world, most of whom are in Africa, like Zimbabwe. But at the same time it wants to communicate the contaminated nature of American racial stock to its people. So you see depictions. Like this? Here's another one just to show you that they demonise women and children. As well. This is a depiction of a Korean. Woman trying to confront the American missionary family which murdered her child. So you see the emphasis on Caucasian facial features on what Koreans perceive to be sort of typically white faces. You have the the big noses and the sun canals and so on. Here's the poster that I started off this slideshow with the. The legend reads 100,000 times. Revenge on the Yankee vampires and I I put the the year in which this poster appeared next to it because that was the year in which North Korea. Is America's main aid recipient in Asia. They were receiving enormous sums of money from the United States at. That. Time, and ironically enough, that was when they wrapped up their anti American propaganda. I think the the the implications of that are pretty clear that they need this enemy figure in order to to rally the people around the regime and they take this stuff seriously. You know, I went to the. Resettlement facility for North Korean refugees, which is in Kyunggi province in Seoul. I was walking down the hallway and it was a bit like being in high school again because all the girls were sort of recoiling from me in horror and I said to my guy I said, you know, what's what's going on here. And he said, yeah, you know, they've they've been indoctrinated with anti Americanism and they managed to talk to one of. The young girls. After I had done the rounds and she said, yeah, you did a lot of bad things on the peninsula and I expected her to say the carpet bomb. Of North Korea, which really was, I think, unconscionable, and which really did, I think, constitute a war crime. It was conducted with so much indifference to North Korean civilian life that I think this is something we as Americans, need to come to terms with, regardless of how we think about North Korea. But the North Koreans, interestingly enough, don't talk about that very much because it conflicts with the personality. Walt Kimmel son could not have been a very protective motherly leader if he allowed the country to be completely flattened on his watch. So instead of that kind of thing they focus on on, on the completely fictional, outrageous like this alleged murder of a Korean child by by American missionaries. And this girl that I talked to said in response to my question. Yes, you Americans did a lot of bad things once the Korean child stole a Peach from the American missionaries orchard and she. Was. Murdered. And they seemed like very trivial stories to us. But this is the kind of thing that they used to whip up anti Americanism in North Korea. And far from showing any signs of fear of the United States in their propaganda, they actually show these kind of wish fulfilling posters of the American capital being destroyed. So America is is ridiculed as a kind of paper tiger whose day will come. Now just to talk about the military first policy, which is the policy that the North Korean regime is now propagating. Here's a picture of North Korea right after Kemal Son died in July 1994. You see the weeping N Koreans looking to Kim Jong-il for salvation, so to speak. Now look at the skies. You have these grey skies, which are a symbol of the changing times on the world stage. In other words, Kim Jong-il inherited. A situation that was much more difficult than his. Father. Had this was the message that the propaganda apparent just put across because they knew with the famine coming, they could see the famine on the horizon, they knew they could not present Kim Jong-il as a kind of all round figure who was just as good at economic matters as in military matters. They knew that they had to disassociate. Yes. From the whole economic problems as quickly as possible, and they did this through the military first policy, the message of which was basically Kim Jong Ill saying to his people, you know, guys, I'd like to keep feeding you. But the threat from the United States has never been greater than it is now. So I'm going to be travelling around the country visiting military bases. 24/7 in the meantime, you've just come to feed yourselves. This is interesting because this was not proclaimed after George Bush's axis of evil speech, as many people wrongly think this was proclaimed in January 1995, which was weeks after the agreed framework had been signed between the Clinton administration and Kim Jong-il. A weeks after Bill Clinton had sent a kind of grovelling letter. To Kim Jong-il, promising full compliance with this treaty and weeks after American aid had become coming into the country, in other words, this military first policy was not a response to a perceived increase in the threat from the United States. It was a response to the economic crisis. It was their only way of getting out of this economic crisis. And it actually worked for them. It got them through it very well. Even today, many N Koreans refugees believe that the famine was America's fault. The problem is this. Where Kim IL Sung's legitimacy as a leader had rested on two pillars, namely economic success and military strength, Kim Jong UN's legitimacy as a leader rests exclusively on military. Strength on that one pillar and this is the problem really at the heart of this nuclear standoff that we're in right now, we're basically trying to persuade Kim Jong Ill to climb down from this pillar without offering him any, any other place to go. I'll get back to a little bit later. Now this is how the North Korean propaganda apparatus tries to pick tries to present South Korea to the North Korean people. The North Koreans now know that South Koreans are richer. They know this because the information cordon that once isolated North Korea from the rest of the world is in ruins. So many N Koreans now. Have access to South Korean DVDs. Some of them are even watching South Korean TV. If they live in the South of North Korea. Some of them are watching Chinese TV, so the government cannot persist in this ludicrous lie that all the South Koreans are starving to death. So the North Korean regime says yes, they are better off than we are. And here you can see them. With their cameras and their motorcycles and so on. And they're nice cars. But for all their material wealth, the South Korean people are still deeply ashamed of living under the Yankee yoke, and they long to rest their faces in in Kim Jong UN's bosom as well. So here you see them S Koreans cheering this image of Kim Jong-il on the screen. And this was the message that the North Koreans were putting across throughout South Korea's sunshine policy, which was a kind of accommodation as policy during which the South Koreans were trying to to bribe the North Koreans into behaving into behaving better. This message worked pretty well for a while when you had left wing governments in power in South Korea, which were doing their best to help the North Korean government keep face, they were doing their best to avoid provoking North Korea. They didn't criticise North Korea too strongly. The problem really began in 2007. With the election of e-mail back to the presidency in South Korea because he was the anti Pyongyang candidate. And he won pretty pretty easily, so obviously. That reality of the mailbox election was in direct conflict with the image of South Korea, which the North Korean regime had been trying to present to its people. And and the propaganda apparatus was so stunned by this election that they didn't even know what to say about it. For the first few months, they just didn't mention it. And then in 2008, you had mass South Korean protests against the import of American beef. And S Koreans from all walks of life took to the streets with signs denouncing e-mail back as a traitor and denouncing the Americans for trying to poison South Korean children with their diseased beef and. And these protests could not have come at a better time for North Korea because they really played into the new propaganda line. Which was that the young buck had kept his intentions secret from the electorate. But of course those beef protests fizzled. Out. And that's when North Korea resorted to that string of military and nuclear provocations that we saw in the first half of last year. Because this country really has nothing else with which to inspire its people with pride then shows that military or nuclear strength. I just want to say something about the. Succession. We now know. Pretty well who the next leader is going to be. It's going to be one of Kim Jong-il's sons called Kim Jong. Unfortunately, we don't know very much about him except that he was allegedly educated in Switzerland, but it's not really important who the guy is. The important thing is what kind of a leader he is already being celebrated as my. Ohh. Was that this new leader was going to be presented as a kind of new leader, maybe an economy first kind of leader that isn't happening. He's being presented as a young general and added to that, North Korea has enshrined the military first principle in the Constitution. It's deleted the word communism from the Constitution as well. So this regime is looking at this military first. Paradigm for the long haul, in other words. So to return to this graph, it's not really important whether the next leader is Kim Jong-un or whether it's Kim Jong.

Chul.

Or whether it's Kim Jong Un or whether it's Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law, changes on tech, because whoever takes over is going to be. Faced with this same quandary, really. Which is how do we go from being a military first? Country to say an economy first country without losing all reason to exist as a separate state. And This is why it's so unrealistic for us to expect them to trade military strength for a mere aid deal. Let's say we increase their standard of living by 20% over the next five years, which would be an awful lot. That would not help Kim Jong-il politically, because North Korea would still be hopelessly behind South Korea in economic aspects and therefore North Korea would have no reason to exist as a separate Korean state. All that it has now, its only source of legitimacy, is the claim that it alone is standing up to the Yankee enemy, the race enemy. So to people who are optimistic about the the six party talks, the bilateral talks or which whichever talks are supposed to take place, I ask the question where does North Korea go if it disarms? What does it do with itself? How does it justify its existence? And none of the optimists who I've talked to has been able to? Give me. An answer and. They may not consider this a big problem, but we can be pretty sure that Kim Jong-il realises just how big a problem it is. And This is why I'm so pessimistic about the prospects for for arms talks because.

You can.

You can talk a regime into doing. A lot of things. But one thing, you can't make it do is commit political suicide. And this is where the left wing and the right wing and the centre in America are all wrong about North Korea, the left wing. Is wrong because. You cannot bribe or sweet talk a country into committing political suicide. The right wing is wrong because you can't bully it into doing. That either. The centre is wrong for thinking that you can get the Chinese to persuade them to do it. So what is the way out? I'm not really sure myself. I think if I were to propose any way out, it would be for us to to shift our diplomatic energy and resources from this very fruitless negotiation process, which really just buys time for Kim Jong UN's nuclear. Programme. To the Chinese, not in order to persuade the Chinese. To to work on the North Koreans. But in order to persuade the Chinese to allow North Korea to collapse. Now that wouldn't be an easy job. I think it would be quite a hard sell because a the Chinese don't want American troops standing on. The Yalu river. And B they don't want to lose all those really favourable economic deals. That they've concluded. With the North Koreans whereby they extract N Koreans minerals at very good prices, but you know. The example of German unification gives us some ideas. One of the things that we said to Gorbachev to get him to sign off on German unification was we promised not to station American troops east of the. But perhaps the promise not to station American troops north of the Hunt River might bring us something to the Chinese. I don't know. But the Chinese are rational people. And as difficult as it might be to to talk to them about North Korea, at least there's some prospect of success, which is more than can be said for what we're doing right now, which, as I said, is trying to get North Korea to to commit political suicide. Let's get from me now. Sorry it took a while. Thank you.

So Brian, thank you very, very much. That was enlightening and entertaining. If that's the right word. I mean, to see the pictures, to your talk, I found that very, very interesting. I have several questions from the audience, and I'll invite your questions.

Thank you.

To come up as we're starting the dialogue here, we have. A. Few minutes left and we'll go. A little bit. Longer after Brian. You'll indulge. Just. One question that occurred to me and also. Occurred to one of. Our members of the audience was when you're describing. This historical line from the Japanese colonial period and Korea you talked about the Koreans and that would be North and South Koreans. And then you're describing the culture and the thought that inspires the the North Korean. Culture. How do you distinguish North Korea from South Koreans?

There in terms of nationalism there, there is a good deal of agreement. I. Think if you talk to South Koreans today, you will find a general consensus that because the Korean people are are are perhaps not as. Planning or, or perhaps most rapacious as other nations that they suffered unduly throughout history, and there is still in South Korea among a lot of people, not among the younger people so much among the older generations a certain pride in the homogeneity of the Korean race and and women who choose to marry outside the race will will meet quite stiff. Position. But things are changing in South Korea, for one thing, and this myth of of of this pure nation is not believed quite as literally or or as permanently as it is in North Korea. So things are are changing in South Korea, whereas in North Korea it's really sort of an ossified. Race based nationalism.

How does the South Korean look at his or her North Korean counterpart?

Well. The South Koreans don't want reunification. Basically, they're not interested in that. And yet, at the same time, they feel quite guilty about it. In one of the ways in which they assuage their own guilt about this is to believe that North Korea is is simply on an earlier stage of development than South Korea is. So many S many S Koreans. When you go on a tour. West to North Korea, as I did two years ago. They will look around them at at all this misery really, and try to shrug it off by saying, well, it's like South Korea was under puck jumping. This is how South Korea was in the 1970s. There's really not a very high awareness of North Korea among S Koreans. There's not very much interest in North Korea. When I give classes on on North Korean matters at my university and. Most of the students. Want to be foreigners?

That's interesting. One question here from the audience. If somebody has left the North Korean regime and decides he or she wants to go back for whatever reason, are there barriers to entry? Are there punishments that that person expects to?

Well, there are evidently bad barriers that they wouldn't have to bribe their way back in, but on the other hand, I cannot believe that they're voluntary. So many of them are voluntarily returning to the country if they know that they're going to be punished. So the question that that in my mind is either the. Regime knows that they were gone for two years and it doesn't care or it doesn't know they were gone for a few years. Either way, really, is this a totalitarian state? I don't believe it is we. We have no experience historically of people wanting to return to totalitarian states to the same degree that they are in North Korea. And you know the the if you look at things like the ratio of. Policemen 2 average citizens. It's lower than than the ratio you'd find, say, in Chicago, so I don't believe that this is a country. As I said, the rules by repression alone.

Do N Koreans in your experience, do N Koreans believe this propaganda?

I think they do. Again, the evidence is. In the kind of people who are. Leaving the country. I would, I would guess from my own experience and from what I've read that about 90% of the North Koreans would choose to escape that country are from the least propagandised, least educated sector of society. The people who are more highly propagandised the middle class is the educated classes, the upper classes. They're not leaving. We're not seeing real intellectual dissidents. We're not seeing real intellectual immigrants from North Korea, and that points to me to to to a proof that this regime is still being quite successful and inspiring its people. What we've learned from social psychology is that we all need to attribute some kind of significance to. Lives and the North Korean regime does this, whether you're a bus driver in North Korea, whether you're working in the mines or whether you're a soldier, the regime gives everybody a part to play in this racial mission to kick the Yankees out of the peninsula, to reunite the nation. And and this seems to me to be quite successful. It looks to me much more successful than. The rival ideology in South Korea, which is a kind of orthodox consumerism where you're supposed to earn as much money as you can and buy as many brand name products as you can. That's not working in South Korea. You wouldn't have such high rates of suicide and depression. Among the people, and I think if you want to understand why the North Koreans aren't all rushing out of North Korea and trying to get to South Korea, but. I think you need to understand that but.

But going back to North Korea for a moment. This belief in the ideology, isn't it coloured by the fact that at least what we read here in the West, there's such widespread starvation and there's political repression and difficulties that are that are. Quite insurmountable would be for for many of. Us, but what? We have that that colour their view on this year later.

Yeah. Really for I think it it's ironic really that that in a way we think more like Marxists than the North Koreans do because for us it's the economy, stupid. We look at all politics and all political differences in economic terms. Even look at the the rise of. Islamism in in economic terms, we think it comes from economic deprivation, despite the the enormous wealth of of the people who bankroll Islamic terrorism. Another important thing to keep in mind is that nationalism is as well suited to bad economic times as to good times when things go well. You can say it's because of the race. Because of its. Strengths and when things go badly, you can blame them on on on people outside the. Tree. So if this had been a Marxist Leninist regime, they would never have survived that famine because Marxism, Leninism, the whole. The reason for being was the promise to improve the material life of its citizens. But nationalism is not about that. Nationalism is about making few people feel proud for other reasons. And we know, say, from Nazi Germany or from Imperial. Japan to nations that were going gangbusters right up. To the very end. Then people can put up with an awful lot of deprivation if they feel it's for the for the. Well-being of the race.

The media could play a role. What about the media in North Korea? One question here how pervasive is the Internet if?

At all. And the Internet is not pervasive at all. They do allegedly have Internet cafes that are, of course, closely monitored, that some people can get into. There's a kind of intranet. Apparently in in North Korea, through which university students can communicate with each other, also of course under. Generation. Otherwise the Internet is not much of A force. But as I said, the information cordon has collapsed and an awful lot of DVD's and and videos and things like that are coming into the country. But I don't think we should attribute too much importance to them. I talked to one woman once who was very excited about having seen a Mickey Mouse backpack in Pyongyang. And I said to her, you know, the the Luftwaffe pilots in the Second World War flew into battle with Mickey Mouse, painted on their fuselages. My point is that because this is not a Marxist Leninist regime. But a nationalist one, it's more impervious to heterodox cultural influences like that I know from my own youth in South Africa that my most racist classmates, the ones who wanted to put a fence around the blacks and let them starve to death, were avid fans of reggae music and Bob Marley. And then, of course, you can be a racist and root. Your NFL team, which is 95% black and not see any contradiction in that. So I don't think that people should expect these DVD's, these smuggled products to bring about an enormous change in the way that people look at the rest of the world. The second most nationalist country in the world, in my view, is South Korea, which is completely open and completely wired. And and and also and still dominated by a very paranoid way of looking at the outside world.

Do you, Brian, do you have a point of view on the outlook for the North Korean economy?

For the North Korean economy, I'm not so sure. This recent currency reform, I'm not really sure what it was all about. I I tend to think. That reports of the opposition to that currency exchange, which took place last year, have been exaggerated a little bit because the average North Korean did not have $3000 under his pillow that he wanted to change anyway, and he was probably pretty happy to see these black market traders taken down the pegger too. My impression of it is that. Kim Jong-il probably did not impoverish his own power base. I don't think any leader in his right mind would be crazy enough to do that, so I have to assume that the people in the so-called core class in North Korea that the the favoured political class, but they knew this was coming and they were prepared for it and that it was merely an effort to impoverish. The sort of people who had. Acquired wealth in in unsanctioned ways.

It's often referred to North Korea's, referred to as the Hermit Kingdom. Do you look at the economy that way and what I mean by that question is, is, are they so cut, cut off from any kind of? Interchange any kind of commerce that it is almost our hermit economy or our Chinese there are the.

Yeah.

South Koreans there.

The Chinese are there, of course, and they are investing and and extracting the the North Korea's natural wealth from the country. It is, I believe, a hermit economy. I think I should turn off my computer. It is a harmony economy, but what I warn against is the common tendency to think that this is a country obsessed with self-reliance and. It's. Not North Korea has relied on outside aid ever since day one. I say it's more like a hikikomori estate. I don't know if anybody knows what hikikomori is. These are these Japanese youths that you read about in the newspaper, who do not want to leave their rooms. So their mother basically has to come and leave the food in front of the door for them. Why? Because they feel that they can maintain their independence better by relying. On their parents and then by working together with people that by actually going out into the marketplace. And North Korea is that kind of hikikomori state that believes that it can maintain its independence better by relying on the outside world for aid than by working together with the outside world, which would mean trade and and businessmen coming back and forth and all these other horrifying. Things to the. Regime. So it is still a hermit economy, but Kim Jong, you'll knows he has to make some concessions. What he does is he tries to open these special zones. He's trying to sort of seal off these areas to make sure that they don't sort of seep into the the country at large and he realises the sporadic. That's not working out very well. So you have this kind of flip.

It was once said that the relationship between Kim Jong. Sung and the Chinese. Yeah. Kim, the song. Thank you. And the Chinese was as close as. Lips to teeth.

Yeah, that's just not true.

Today, what about the?

Chinese relationship was never true the the It's interesting to read the Chinese archives from the Korean War and to see what what a bad relationship there was between the Chinese and the North Koreans. For one thing, the Chinese were furious in the North Koreans, they kept shooting American prisoners. The Chinese actually had to raise their guns at the North Koreans to get them to back off the the North Koreans did not even want to give the Chinese control over their railroad, which the Chinese needed in order to transport their troops effectively. So my point is, if they couldn't work together well during the Korean War when North Korea was relying on on on China for its very survival. How much less likely are the North Koreans to listen to the Chinese now when the North Koreans have have nuclear weapons? What I hear from from sources in China is that they're pretty much exasperated with the North Koreans. They're tired of of continuing to finance them, but they really don't see much of an alternative because they don't want the regime simply to come.

But, but that might be a good segue into the discussion about maybe the six party talks that outlook and and US foreign policy. Sheryl Smith, who is comes on formulation senior Fellow and has written extensively about the issues on the peninsula called this American. Intractable problem. The North Koreans so are we. You know, when looking to the Chinese to be the the balance, the ballast I guess is the better word in that effort at negotiation and which is now totally broken down, is that a misplaced ambition on the part.

Of the US? Yeah, it is. I've talked to people who people who are actually involved. Appreciation process and they said basically the Chinese at these six party talks, they offer the milk and cookies and they don't really. Do anything to to to push North Korea, to negotiate in earnest. And I understand that because as I said before, the Chinese can have no more success in that endeavour than we can. The North Koreans aren't stupid. They know just how disastrous it would be for them to decide. Let's not forget just how much we're asking for North Korea anyway. I mean, Canada is not. A war like country. But if we were to say to the Canadians, if you cut your military in half, we'll raise your standard of living by 10% over the next 10 years, I think we can imagine what they say to us and how much less likely is it than the North Koreans are going to. Get rid of their last reason for for for remaining, so the six party talks. I think just they just found it on a completely wrong premise and I don't believe that the North Koreans can be negotiating in good faith. One way that we could find out would be to say to them, OK, let's not worry about fancy nuclear timetables or anything. What we want to see. From you is a show of good faith in your own propane. Under. It's not going to cost you anything to tone down the anti American propaganda for a couple of weeks if you think you know we're not pulling our side of the bargain, you can go back to doing it, but let's just see if if if you're in good faith here because if you. Really do want. To disarm. Why are you telling your people that there can never be peace with the United States? Why are you telling your people that revenge will be wrought? In the United States and. Let's say you change some of those messages. As as a show. Good faith. That's something I think we should be doing. We need to be going to the heart of the North Korean regime's problem, which is this pedestal literally can't climb. Down.

And that being the military that is still. That you just.

Right. The the claim to power they need before they can disarm, they need to be deriving their political legitimacy from something else. And we need to be able to see if they're doing.

In your knowledge about the North Koreans, what could that something else be?

I really don't know because I don't. I really don't see where they can go without devolving into a third rate or fourth rate. South Korea and this is the problem that many people in in, in the United States tend to look at North Korea as if it. Were Libya. You know Libya, as you know. And got rid of its nuclear aspirations and and decided to play nice with the United States. But there was no S Libya vying for legitimacy. Gaddafi remains the sole definer of what it means to be Libya, so he had more leeway North Korea. What can they do? You know, this is one of two Koreas that is trying to show that it has the sole exclusive right to rule the entire peninsula, and they can't simply admit to having made an enormous mistake. They can't. You know, agreed to to be in an economy that is where the South Korean economy was in maybe 1970.

Five, so the box gets smaller and smaller.

Right. The regime has pretty much painted itself ideologically. Into a corner.

The US has a few troops in South Korea and someone member of the audience asks should we withdraw? Troops through South Korea in your.

Opinion. Well, if you talk to any any expert on military strategy that they will say that it makes strategic sense to withdraw American troops from the peninsula because then you'd be better able to respond to a North Korean provocation. The situation right now is that we're kind of held hostage because anything we would do against North Korea could well. Inside the North Koreans to attack Seoul and they don't need nuclear weapons to flatten the soil, they could do. That with conventional weapons. So you know I I think that were we to withdraw American troops, it would not only make us better able to respond militarily, it would also put the Kim Jong Un regime under enormous pressure to do all those things that so far he's accused the Americans of preventing, namely unifying the peninsula, improving the standard of living among his people. And of course, he can't do that. And were we to pull American troops out, the North Koreans would very quickly realise that it wasn't the Yankees all along who were preventing reunification. It was the South Korean people who didn't want it. And that truth, I think, is going to really go to the heart of the personality cult. So this would be a hairy time because it would be a timer, which you'd expect the north. Grants to lash out and perhaps try to reunify the country by military means, but I don't think it's anything that the north that the South Koreans can't can't handle on their own.

What do Koreans, North and South or north or South? Whatever point, think of the Japanese?

Well, in South Korea. Interestingly enough, and this, this goes to the other point that I made about the cultural imports since the ban on Japanese culture was lifted in South Korea. By Kim dae. Jung Anti Japanese sentiment has actually increased in South Korea. I remember being in South Korea in the mid 1980s and there was a wrestling match on TV between a Japanese man and I think it was an American athlete and the people were rooting for the Japanese athlete and I asked my wife why. And she said well, because it's basically the same Asians, you know, we're rooting for the Asians. Where you white people and. That would be unthinkable now. You know, and that's how times have changed. Even though my Korean students, for example, are all listening to Japanese music and watching Japanese dramas, so this dislike of of Japan has actually increased. And and North Korea, of course it's they've always been sort of the race enemy #2. To the United States.

There is a question about Robert Park. The Christian activist who was released recently by the North Koreans, what are your thoughts on his comments and that episode?

Yeah, well, you know the the poor guy, I mean. I. Read about him crossing the border, saying. I'm an American. And the last thing you want to do as as as an ethnic Korean in North Korea is, say, I'm an. America that to them is just is just baffling. And the reports I heard was that he'd been severely beaten while in in North Korean custody. I don't think that these, these kinds of things are particularly helpful myself. I don't really understand what he set out to gain. I'm sure his heart was in. The right place, but. What you're doing there is basically putting the US State Department under pressure to try to get you out, which they have to do by making certain concessions to the North Koreans. So if you're doing that in order to try bringing the regime down, I think you're having the, the. Opposite effect, but do you?

Think it was a bit of an OWL branch. In.

The part of the north to let him go? No, I just don't think they really wanted to keep him. There. Yeah, just more trouble. And and This is why, of course, they didn't want to put those two journalists in in gaol last year either. The last thing they want is, is a foreigner or an outsider getting a look at how they treat their prisoners. So they're probably perfectly happy to let them go and response.

Most.

For for. Something you know?