Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes

[A]lthough the “far left” Justice Party is ostensibly in the opposition, 77% of those who support it say that President Moon is doing a good job.

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.

"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.

[U]ntil the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany's size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero.

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.

"Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung": This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in 1960. It’s not to be taken too literally or narrowly; one gets the larger meaning. But it’s not that much larger. When dissidents and demonstrators called for freedom of speech in the past it was usually nationalist, anti-American and pro-North speech they had in mind.

Since Moon's takeover the peninsula has become less like divided Germany than ever. The ROK has abandoned the competition for legitimacy, instead ceding the North’s superiority on nationalist grounds while reaffirming that these matter more than liberal democratic ones. I’m not sure a league will ever come about, but if it does, it will hitch a proudly radical nationalist state to an unloved, moderate-nationalist one too shamefaced to celebrate its own founding. If the South is already unwilling to criticize the North, or to renew a commitment to its own constitutional values, it’s hardly likely to mount a strong defense of human rights later on.

Whatever "Cold War system" there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been. I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens' realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power. This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension.

[T]he main threat to the South's security is the general lack of public identification with the ROK and its values, as opposed to any widespread vulnerability to the personality cult.

The North knows it cannot enjoy true security so long as the South is enjoying itself next door, be it ever so harmless in military terms and even free of US troops.

[W]hat the dictatorship wants is presented as something we should want more. Most calls for subversion enrage the North. Not these though. Never these.

[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.

[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.

[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.

Pyongyang watchers consider the regime to be so hungry for economic growth, progress and other goodies as to have no pride, no mission, and no commitment to victory, real victory. It's all eros and no thymos. On this error rests our administration's hope for denuclearization.