Free The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers Page A

regularly made claims—of bumper harvests, for example—which everyone knew to be untrue.
    While ignoring North Korean ideology, the West has assiduously, almost compulsively, added to its pile of “hard” information on the country. Much of this has come from experts in nuclear or economic studies. Aid workers have alsocontributed accounts of their experiences in the country. An international network of Google Earth users is busily identifying structures visible in aerial photographs. 1 Despite all this, experts continue to describe North Korea as “puzzling,” “baffling,” a “mystery”—and no wonder. Hard facts cannot be put to proper use unless one first acquires information of a very different nature. If we did not know that Iran is an Islamic country, it would forever baffle us, no matter how good the rest of our intelligence might be.
    Unfortunately a lack of relevant expertise has never prevented observers from mischaracterizing North Korean ideology to the general public. They call the regime “hard-line communist” or “Stalinist,” despite its explicit racial theorizing, its strident acclamation of Koreans as the world’s “cleanest” or “purest” race. They describe it as a Confucian patriarchy, despite its maternal authority figures, or as a country obsessed with self-reliance, though it has depended on outside aid for over sixty years. By far the most common mistake, however, has been the projection of Western or South Korean values and common sense onto the North Koreans. For example: Having been bombed flat by the Americans in the 1950s, the DPRK
must
be fearful for its security, ergo it
must
want the normalization of relations with Washington.
    These various fallacies have combined to make the West worry less about North Korea’s nuclear program than about Iran’s. The word Confucianism makes us think of Singapore, Asian whiz-kids, and respect for the elderly; how much trouble can a Confucian patriarchy be? Self-reliance does not sound too dangerous either. Communism has a much less benign ring to it, of course, but if there is one thing weremember from the Cold War, it is that it ended peacefully. For fifteen years the perception of a communist North Korea has sustained the US government’s hope that disarmament talks will work with Pyongyang as they did with Moscow. Only in 2009, after the Kim Jong Il regime defied the United Nations by launching a ballistic missile and conducting its second underground nuclear test, did a consensus begin to emerge that negotiations were unlikely ever to work. Yet the assumption prevails that the worst Pyongyang would ever do is sell nuclear material or expertise to more dangerous forces in the Middle East. All the while the military-first regime has been invoking kamikaze slogans last used by imperial Japan in the Pacific War.
    In this book, therefore, I aim to explain North Korea’s dominant ideology or worldview—I use the words interchangeably—and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism
and
the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. Far from complex, it can be summarized in a single sentence:
The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader
. More must be added perhaps, if only to explain that “therefore” to an American reader, but not much more of importance. I need hardly point out that if such a race-based worldview is to be situated on our conventional left-right spectrum, it makes more sense to posit it on the extreme right than on the far left. Indeed, the similarity to the worldview of fascist Japan is striking. I do not, however, intend to label North Korea as fascist, a term too vague to be much use. It is enough for me to make clear that the country has always been, at the very least, ideologically closer to America’sadversaries in World War II than to communist China and Eastern Europe. This truth alone, if properly grasped,