Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes

In South Korea, which is a much less conservative environment, politicians do not take their wives around with them as much as their American counterparts do. Showing pride in your wife is thought of as juvenile bad form. There's a special pejorative for people who do it.

Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I.R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied. This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.

[M]emory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was.

Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief.

North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea.

The DMZ does not divide the last bastion of communism from a liberal democracy; it divides a radical nationalist state from a moderate nationalist one.

[T]here’s much more to far-rightism than fascism. See the Nationalkonservativen in Weimar Germany.

The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here's a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it's part of Asia.

Seoul doesn't have the will to "De-Kim Il Sungify" North Korea.

Americans are therefore wrong in assuming — and this was another line of argument against my RAS lecture — that South Koreans have struggled too long and too bravely for human rights ever to knuckle down to the North. There was no significant opposition here to the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha for criticizing the orthodox history of the so-called comfort women, and that took place under Park Geun-hye.

The DPRK derives its legitimacy from the myth that the anti-Japanese hero Kim Il Sung was all right-thinking citizens' choice as the man to found and lead the new Korea after liberation in 1945... Until the mid-1960s the USSR was credited with defeating Japan, but since then propaganda has claimed that Kim and his guerillas freed the race on their own. That this is known to be untrue by those who lived through the time is of minor importance. The painful historical reality of mass collaboration (and the military insignificance of all armed Korean resistance to colonial rule) is precisely what made the Kim myth so attractive.

The North Koreans have pretty much laid down the whole sequence of the events that they plan in order to bring about their goal [of taking over South Korea]. First, a nuclear threat to U.S. territory, then an American failure of nerve, then a peace treaty, then withdrawal of U.S. troops, then confederation, then unification [under the North Korean regime]. This can be pieced together and inferred from the leaders' own speeches, from North Koreans' inner-track propaganda, in other words everything from wall posters to political novels. We've heard this from captured North Korean operatives who've divulged their ideological training to South Korean intelligence. So, we do need to take it very seriously and we do need to understand this is a long game that the North Koreans have been playing since the 1980s.

[W]hat really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time.

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.

North Korea is a unique socialist country in that its ruling ideology is conveyed through what is written about its leaders, not by them, and the message could hardly be simpler. Foreigners bad, Koreans good, Leader best.