Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes

Ultra-nationalism is an appealing ideology; the Third Reich fought to the end, even sending their children into battle... We should not underestimate its appeal.

I want to be here for unification.

This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously.

Koreans in both the north and the south tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil.

South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel. Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak.

Were Kim Jong Il to abandon his ideology of paranoid, race-based nationalism and normalize relations with Washington, his personality cult would lose all justification, while his impoverished country would lose all reason to exist as a separate Korean state. The problem for U.S. negotiators is therefore not one of sticks versus carrots; the regime in Pyongyang will neither be bullied nor sweet-talked into committing political suicide.

Japan's racialized worldview equated virtue with strength, the North Koreans are taught that their virtue has rendered them as vulnerable as children in an evil world — unless they are protected by a great leader who keeps a watchful eye on military readiness. Unfortunately for the United States, there is no place in this for any improvement in relations between the two countries.

Korean nationalism is its emphasis on the vulnerability of the race.

[S]trong racial pride always entails intense awareness of an inferior other. For the North Koreans, foreigners are inferior — even the friendly ones.

Up close, North Korea is not Stalinist — it’s simply racist.

Korea’s race-centric ideology was inspired by that of the fascist Japanese who ruled the peninsula from 1910 until the end of World War II. Having been taught by their colonizers to regard themselves as part of a superior Yamato race, the North Koreans in 1945 simply carried on the same mythmaking in a Koreanized form. This can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and so too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader. This paranoid nationalism might sound crude and puerile, but it is only in this ideological context that the country’s distinguishing characteristics, which the outside world has long found so baffling, make perfect sense.

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

Like Goethe and Spengler I’m convinced that history has an inner, organic logic which can’t be grasped purely in terms of causality.

Show me a persona non grata, and I'll show you a persona non give a shit.

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.