North Quotes - page 45
![[I]f Kim Il Sung had won the war, Korea today would not look like North Korea. I think it would still be a much less free and prosperous place than the South is now, but it would resemble China and Vietnam more than the North now does. Its system has been shaped by the need to distinguish itself, to seal itself off from the rival state, and to pursue nuclear armament. (Brian Reynolds Myers)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/08/brian-reynolds-myers-armament-534308.webp)
[R]elative lack of popularity is not as important as the lack of popularity of a president in South Korea, where there is no bedrock state support to keep people patriotic even when they dislike a leader. But we Americans are more like the North Koreans in that regard. Does our patriotism rise and fall depending on who is in the White House? If we don't like a president, do we start finding America's enemies more likeable? No. We should therefore not assume that Kim Jong Un's relative lack of stature means that support for the state is weakening.
Brian Reynolds Myers
North Koreans can frequent black markets and still consider themselves good citizens, as was impossible in the communist East Bloc. So the situation now is more like Japan or Germany in 1944, say, than like East Germany in the 1980s. Widespread government corruption? Check. An entire population of economic criminals? Check. Constant griping about the state, the party, even some joking about the leader? Check. Even good Nazis had their Hitler jokes. A general readiness to fight for the state? Well, there's certainly more readiness in the North than in the South.
Brian Reynolds Myers
Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don't want to live up there anymore than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.
Brian Reynolds Myers
Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance's demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades. But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North's standpoint it's precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state's long collusion with the Yankees so heinous.
Brian Reynolds Myers
If South Koreans want a league with the North, we Americans can only wish them well. The problem is that the current military alliance may embolden them to take this step without proper thought - and then embolden them to nullify the framework as soon as they sour on it. How the North is likely to respond can be imagined, considering the two deadly acts of aggression that followed the South's abandonment of the Sunshine Policy in 2008.
Brian Reynolds Myers
"What belongs together, is growing together again," Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany - or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn't take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will.
Brian Reynolds Myers
[T]he 1919 uprising is memorialized in the North without a public holiday as an example of how badly things go when a nation lacks a parental leader. This doesn't stop propaganda from claiming the protests originated under the influence of Kim Hyŏng-jik, the father of Kim Il Sung, who himself impressed everyone at the age of six by ... but never mind. The Blue House is unlikely to quibble with this version of history on the day itself. With these meshing tendencies and measures the ruling camp evidently hopes to bond with the Kim regime over a shared anti-Japanese tradition, to present today's ROK and DPRK as branches of the same Shanghai tree, put nationalism above liberal-democratic principles, and minimize opposition to all these things. No less obvious is the larger goal.
Brian Reynolds Myers
![[I]n a confederation the South must accept the ultra-nationalist Kim Il Sung cult, whereas the North must acknowledge only the South's superior prosperity and technology - and one of the main goals of confederation is to eliminate that gap as rapidly as possible. (It will be as much a matter of pulling the South down as the North up.) (Brian Reynolds Myers)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/31/brian-reynolds-myers-confederation-534331.webp)
Western observers focus more on the regime's economic failures than the North Koreans themselves do. Remember that it was only in recent modern times that Western societies began expecting the state to secure constant economic growth and rising prosperity. Well into the 20th century people expected little more from the state than that it protect them from foreign powers, and expand the influence or territory of the nation. Prussia was remarkably like North Korea in many ways, yet we remember it as a very successful state. If we judge North Korea by its own standards - instead of by the communist standards we hope its people judge it by - we must admit it has performed very well.
Brian Reynolds Myers
[T]he peninsula flag means two very different things to the two Koreas. In the South it symbolizes a desire for peaceful co-existence, or at most for a unification of equal partners in the reassuringly remote future. In wall posters above the DMZ it has always symbolized the southern masses' yearning for "autonomous unification", meaning absorption by the North. It's worrying to think how inner-track propaganda is certain to misrepresent the South Koreans' eschewal of their state flag for this of all symbols - and at this of all events.
Brian Reynolds Myers
[T]he new line that the Taehan minguk was not founded in August 1948, but instead came into existence when a provisional government was formed in Shanghai in 1919. I don't need to remind anyone of the internationally accepted criteria for statehood. The Blue House seems more interested in downgrading the republic that fought the North than in making a serious case for the statehood of something else. The original modest budget for the 70th anniversary of the ROK's founding has already been cut. The joint North-South commemoration of the March 1st uprising's 100th anniversary next year is likely to make the festivities this August 15 look subdued in comparison.
Brian Reynolds Myers
Foreigners assume that because of the war, the two sides must dislike each other more than West and East Germans did. The opposite is the case. Some of my students say, "The North would never attack us, we're the same people,” as if the war never happened. And North Korea would now be just as committed to unification if it hadn't.
Brian Reynolds Myers
Let's remember not only how many South Koreans were killed, injured or abducted during a war the North started, but also that one of the most shocking parts of that conflict for people who experienced KPA occupation was seeing neighbors emerge on day one as fully-formed, snitching supporters of the enemy. Many bore titles in the underground organizations to which, it turned out, they had belonged for years. In several recorded cases they denounced people who were shot on the spot. That trauma sits deep.
Brian Reynolds Myers
[A]crobatics are very much an American thing. No one does wishful thinking like we do. I don't see South Korean progressivists pretending that the regime's every word and deed can be boiled down to the same reassuring message. In fact, part of the reason many of them feel a sneaking admiration for the North is because it follows through on its Yankee-defying rhetoric. But that's another topic.
Brian Reynolds Myers
