Reviews for The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

The average rating for The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-20 00:00:00 Richie Rubin The Cleanest Race is a short but very interesting and informative book on North Korea, and its unique approach to its subject makes it an important one. Most available books on world's most reclusive country tend to analyze its history and political system; many are stories of defectors who managed to escape. But there's perilously little material focused on North Koreans as a society - how is it different from other societies of this world, and how is it similar? How do North Koreans see their country and themselves, and how do they see the world around them? B.R. Myers attempts to answer these questions by analyzing North Korean propaganda. Instead of focusing on external broadcasts from Korean Central News Agency aimed at South Korea and the rest of the international community, Myers focuses on internal propaganda written/performed in Korean and aimed specifically at North Koreans, which surrounds them like a cocoon. Myers guides his readers through the various propaganda films, books and novels of North Korea - which he refers to collectively as "The Text" - to understanding of the North Korean national character, which is deeply troubling. Although originally established as a Soviet satellite with central characteristics of one - undemocratic single-party system, centrally planned economy, personality cult of its leaders - Myers argues that North Korea is driven by an ideology resembling traditional Japanese fascism than any form of communism. References to Marxism-Leninism - foundation of European communism and the Soviet Union - have been removed from the country's constitution in 1972, and in 2009 all references to communism in general have been removed entirely. What is the first striking difference between North Korea and other communist countries is the virulent racism and discrimination of foreigners. The Soviet Union was a diverse, multi-national state, originally established with hopes of a world socialist revolution, which would expand to Germany, Britain, France and eventually establish global socialism. Even after western communists failed to gain power and Joseph Stalin implemented the doctrine of "Socialism in One Country" as the official state policy, The Soviet Constitution allowed for bringing new republics into the Union (which happened after World War 2 with annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), and foreign policy emphasized international friendship between socialist nations. The official effort of the Soviet Government was to eliminate nationalism, which it believed to be counter-revolutionary and contrary to class struggle, and establish a state where all nationalities were accommodated equally and free to pursue socialism. This is best seen in Lenin's open denunciation of traditional Russian nationalism, and creation of individual republics and autonomous regions for the Soviet Union's many nations to protect them from Russian domination, and his efforts at promoting non-Russians in the Communist Party to balance its leadership and counter the large Russian presence within the party. Despite his initial opposition, after Lenin's death Stalin further expanded on these ideas and introduced the supranational concept of Soviet People - nations united under the banner of socialist patriotism and guided by Marxism-Leninism. In contrast, nationalism plays a central role in North Korean society and is actively encouraged by the government - Myers presents plenty of official propaganda which portrays North Koreans as a unique race, characterized by innocence and spontaneity - clean and pure. Racial mixing is considered a treachery, and the hatred of foreigners extends even to friendly communists - Myers cites a brutal attack on a black Cuban family in Pyongyang and beating of Soviet women married to North Korean officials. North Korean women who married eastern European aid workers were accused of betraying the race; those who return pregnant from China, the country's main supporter and protector, are forced to submit to abortions. While nationalism, racism and discrimination of foreigners also exists in South Korea, the difference between both countries is incomparable. In a widely reported 2006 meeting between the North and South Korean delegations, the topic of race-mixing was raised by Northern officials. The Southern delegation replied that the non-Koreans living in their republic were "but a drop of ink in the Han River" and do not cause a problem in peaceful co-existence; to which the Northern diplomat responded: "Since time immemorial, our nation has been a land of abundant beauty. Not even one drop of ink must be allowed to fall into the Han River. North Koreans pride themselves on purity of their bloodline, their homogeneity and mono-ethnicity, which is completely irreconcilable with Marixism-Leninism. Even South Korea is constantly refereed to as a corrupt "Yankee Colony", and anti-Americanism is the official policy of the North Korean state. Contrary to other communist regimes - which claimed to oppose the ruling bourgeoisie and desired to free the oppressed social masses to estabilish the dictatorship of the proletariat - North Koreans don't make a distinction between bad American capitalists and good Americans workers and peasants. The propaganda uniformly presents all Americans in a racist, deriding and quasi anti-Semitic fashion - dark-skinned, sunken-eyed, hook-nosed - and as "jackals in human form", with other descriptions rendering them further sub-human and comparable to animals in their degradation. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, North Korea's godfather, is ridiculed by the propagandists as "having happened without a single shot" - which emphasizes the strength of North Korea's military-first policy and the iron grip of the regime over its people. Xenophobic, race-based nationalism is the essence of contemporary North Korea, where people pride themselves on their innocence; it is best seen in their approach to sex - when one North Korean falls for another, it's only because the other is a model citizen who is devoted to the state; propaganda encourages and promotes chastity and modesty of model North Korean women, and never depicts lovers touching one another and behaving in an adult way - this celibacy aims to reflect the one of a child. All eventual unions are completely heterosexual - there is absolutely no place for homosexuality, which is universally condemned as a "characteristically American perversion", for which there is no place among the pure Korean people. Communist societies provided free higher education for their citizens as a mean to empower the working class; North Korea encourages the complete opposite - its citizens are encouraged to remain in the state of intellectual ignorance dressed up as Korean innocence, be forever the faithful children under the kind eye and guiding hand of their Dear Leader. The cult of personality of North Korean leaders, the Kim family, is also an interesting and unique case. Cult of personality surrounding Stalin, Lenin and other communist leaders focused on their devotion to the communist cause, but also stressed their contribution - real and falsified - to scholarly work, not limited to Marxism-Leninism. Both Stalin and Lenin have given countless speeches and were genuinely concerned with ideas, actively participated in debates and were prolific writers, and were portrayed as such. This is not the case with North Korea's Dear Leader - as the propaganda emphasizes the innate innocence of North Koreans, the Kims are not allowed to be shown as thinkers - all their ideas are supposed to spring from their uniquely Korean spontaneity. The Leader cannot be displayed as if he were engaging in any intellectual behavior, which is why portraits of Kim Il-sung usually display him with blank eyes. Contrary to the patriarchal character of Stalin, named by propagandists as "The Father of Nations", the elder Kim's role is more matriarchal - since all North Koreans are by their own nature an innocent, child-like race, they need a leader who will act like a mother (fathers are largely absent in North Korean propaganda). Therefore Kim is presented as a caring, nurturing figure, personally attending to soldiers and holding them to his bosom, making sure that they have proper food and clothing. Although the Japanese are shown as a hostile, imperial power, Myers argues that the North Korean propagandists borrow heavily from Japanese myths. Contrary to personality cults of communist leaders - which emphasized their rise to the top of the party through hard work and dedication to the communist cause - Kim Il-sung was portrayed as a messianic figure, destined to lead Korean people to socialist victory and ultimately unify the peninsula under his rule. Dear Leader is often portrayed similarly to the Japanese emperor - embodiment of all virtues of his race, which makes it perfectly logical that his decisions should not be questioned and that he should be obeyed. Mount Paektu, North Korea's highest peak, was given the same mystical character as the sacred Japanese Mount Fuji, and was appropriately chosen as the place where the Dear Leader was born. For the propagandists the love for the Dear Leader is pan-Korean - even when reports began to surface in the North that the Yankee colony of South Korea enjoys a much higher standard of living, the propagandists changed their tune accordingly: South Koreans owe their material wealth because of Dear Leader's selfless military-first policy and the heroic North Korean citizens, which is the only thing stopping the yankees from plunging them into another war, and that no amount of wealth can silence the yearning of the southern brethren for freedom and moral purification under the Dear Leader's rule. When North Korea was hit by a disastrous famine in the mid 1990's the official reason given by the government was that the teachings of Kim were not properly followed; American food aid was presented as a tribute to the nation by frightened Americans, while at the same time official posters advocated for revenge against the "yankee vampires". Myers argues that such animosity can be explained by the fact that the regime needs a hostile threat from the U.S. to justify its existence - contrary to the former communist states, who participated in peace talks and signed peace treaties, and whose official foreign policy argued for world peace, the North Korean government depends on threats of war from both America and its yankee colony for its very existence. Actually signing a peace treaty would not strengthen its rule but possibly fuel the fire for an internal revolution against it. The Cleanest Race present a fascinating portrayal of North Korea, a country which is a totalitarian society but at the same time far and away from the bastion of communism it is so often portrayed to be. It's racist-based, military-first ideology puts it in the extreme right of political spectrum rather than the far left associated with communist societies. It's incredibly informative and very readable, and will doubtlessly prove valuable for any reader interested in the inner dynamics of North Korea, and provide as a great companion for Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea - a record of six refugees from the country, which offers a very personal perspective.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-15 00:00:00 Joanne Crockett June 12, 2018 saw a momentous event in world politics, an event that future historians will single out as a defining event of the twenty first century, an event the like of which has never been seen before in relations between sovereign states, not in this century, not in the last century, not in the whole of recorded human history. I am of course referring to the 2018 North Korea - United States summit.. Why was this summit so different from all past summits, past conferences, conclaves, councils, seminars or any other meeting between heads of state ever? Why so unlike Yalta or Potsdam or Munich or Camp David or Sharm el-Sheikh? Was it the participants - a vicious dictator meeting the 'leader of the free world'? Was it the circumstances - a summit held to prevent the almost certain outbreak of nuclear war triggered by the twitter rivalry of 'Little Rocket Man' and a US President ready to press his "…Nuclear Button…" which is "…much bigger and more powerful…"? The first clue to the unique nature of this summit came a few days before it took place. You can see this clue on prominent display in the picture below. The clue is not the letter inside the envelope of course - President Trump thought it was a great letter, although he never read it - but the big shiny envelope itself. Historians of early generations read the Zinoviev Letter, the Letter from Birmingham Jail or Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt. Historians of the Trump administration will pass over the letter's contents and instead ponder the size of the envelope and the abundantly shiny reflective properties of the paper out of which it was made. They will remark on its resemblance to envelopes used during the Oscar ceremony or when announcing the winner of Miss World. The next clue to the special nature of the 2018 North Korea - United States Summit comes in the form of a trailer produced by "Destiny Pictures" and distributed by that well known source of popular light entertainment, the White House. Click through to the video below to see what is one of the most incredible videos your taxes ever paid to produce. I think we are close to the real nature of the 2018 North Korea - United States Summit (I'll use its popular name from now on: Comic Yalta). This is the first time in history that an international summit was not the serious meeting of sovereign states that it pretended to be but instead was what it looked like to all the world: the pilot episode of a poorly produced reality TV show. For the first time in history a major international summit meeting was held with no substance at all. None. No sherpas, no agreement, no agreed press statement, no objectives, no resolution. Nothing at all; just two individuals of doubtful moral character hanging out in a room for forty five minutes pretending to each other and to the world that they were having a world changing international summit meeting. This has actually happened in our lifetimes. It might even happen again. Trump didn't have to prepare for Comic Yalta because he has performed in a reality TV most of his working life, and to a record breaking audience since November 2016. The DPRK has been preparing Kim for his role on set for decades as well. The sole objective of Comic Yalta was to entertain the populations of Korea, America, Japan and other countries and make the people feel good for a few hours. This, not co-incidentally, is also the purpose of most prime time TV. And by all accounts Comic Yalta has succeeded; Kim looks secure and Trump's popularity his ticked up. Not "panem et circenses" exactly, more "porcus crustum et linum rapio" ("McDonalds and Netflix" - or the closest I could get with google translate). How can I be so certain that Comic Yalta was nothing more than reality TV? Might it not have been a sincere attempt by both parties to serve up World Peace, with a chunk of Nobel Prize on the side? Well, besides that envelope, Destiny Pictures and everything about Comic Yalta looking like a cheap TV program, we have this book, being an excellent review of North Korean domestic propaganda. DPRK propaganda for the home market is very different from propaganda aimed at the world outside and, as the author notes in his introduction, is often ignored on account of being either inaccessible or just too weird. 'The Cleanest Race' argues convincingly that domestic DPRK propaganda is built on Japanese propaganda from the time Korea was a Japanese colony when both countries saw their citizens as ethnically superior to the rest of the world. As a result at its heart it is deeply racist and fascistic. Other races - particularly the Americans - are inferior while the Korean people are pure blooded and virtuous, albeit too virtuous to survive in an evil world without a great parental leader. "...We have all seen clips of the Arirang mass games in which scores of children of the same height, body type and hairstyle dance and leap in unison. These games are not the grim Stalinist exercises in anti-individualism that foreigners (such as the makers of the aforementioned documentary) often misperceive them as, but joyous celebrations of the pure-bloodedness and homogeneity from which the race's superiority derives..." This ethno-centric ideology is broadly held in the DPRK and sustains the popularity to the regime. "...Paranoid nationalism may well be an intellectual void, and appeal to the lowest instincts'there is nothing in North Korean ideology that a child of twelve cannot grasp at once'but for that very reason it has proven itself capable of uniting citizens of all classes.." Typical of authoritarian regimes, other races are portrayed as subhuman and worth of extinction. It is interesting to see how DPRK writers portray ethnically inferior Americans, as this excerpt from a popular novel about the deliberate poisoning of Korean children by American missionaries shows: "...the Americans' evil can be "read" in their big noses, large breasts and sunken eyes. The old jackal's spade-shaped eagle's nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen's teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf-cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake that has just swallowed its skin. Their six sunken eyes seemed … like open graves constantly waiting for corpses..." An example of the success of DPRK propaganda efforts is the famous canard that North Korean citizens believe that American food aid is nothing of the sort but rather tribute paid by the US to the Korean people. This seems hardly credible to someone outside DPRK but the book explains why this can be true; the North Korean people have been fed a complex but believable narrative about the US and South Korea over the years that can justify such a belief. In the eighties and nineties it became increasingly clear that South Korean standards of living were outpacing those of the North. The ever increasing flow of communications from South to North showing better material lifestyles in the south - the tapes, videos, DVDs, broadcasts - was difficult to stop. DPRK propaganda rose to this new challenge, with the narrative that Kim Jong-il I had swung to a "military first" strategy, which meant the DPRK forgoing material luxuries in order to focus on a military build up that would protect both North and South Korea from increased Yankee military aggression: "…the southern masses are acutely aware that were it not for the DPRKs military first policy, the Yankees would long since have plunged them into another ruinous war., They owe their material comfort to the self sacrifice not only of the Dear Leader, but of all the heroic citizens of the DPRK…" Even the Korean famine in the 1990s was built into the narrative: "...if anything, the famine may have strengthened support for the regime by renewing the sense of ethnic victimhood from which the official worldview derived its passion. Many migrants remember a widespread yearning for war with America during the famine..." But while the DPRK propagandists have fed these narratives they have boxed themselves more and more into a corner, giving themselves less room to maneuver while they try and produce a coherent story. As a result the greatest security risk they have been facing more recently comes not from America, but from the prosperity of South Korea. As the author states, the Kim regime would not survive the realization that it was not the Yankees who were blocking reunification all long but their own blood brothers in the south: "…Pyongyang negotiates with Washington not to defuse tension but to manage it, to keep it from tipping into all-out war or an equally perilous all-out peace. Ignorant of this, because ignorant of the North's ideology, Americans tend to blame problems in the US-DPRLK relationship on whoever happens to be in the Oval Office, thinking him either too soft or too hard on Pyongyang…" Trump, as ignorant of DPRK ideology as he is of everything outside his own field of vision at any particular moment, gave the North Koreans exactly what they wanted - status on the world stage as equal to America, recognition as a nuclear armed power, concessions on military maneuvers - and all for nothing. Amazingly works by DPRK propagandists written years before Comic Yalta anticipated a time when the DPRK could be seen by the world as equal to America, as illustrated by this excerpt from a North Korean propaganda novel which imagines a conversation between US and DPRK nuclear negotiators: '...Gallucci: "We respect you. The future peace not only of the Korean peninsula but also of Asia, the Pacific Region, depends on us, on the US and [North] Korea." Mun: "Whose words are those? Yours?" Gallucci. "The words of the White House." Mun: "That amounts to saying that we're a superpower too." Gallucci: "That's right, you're a superpower. A superpower like America!" Now Korea was on an equal footing with the United States, the world's only superpower. Asia's small country Korea, which had once lost its luster on the world map..." So when Trump salutes a North Korean general it makes perfect sense - the propagandist's lie that North Korea was equal to America was never a lie after all. This long DPRK propaganda video made after Comic Yalta shows the salute. But the Koreans have no intention and never had any intention of keeping their word. Why would a superior race make promises to degenerate animals like the Americans? "…Let us turn now to [DPRK domestic propaganda's] treatment of the ongoing nuclear dispute. Here too the contrast to Soviet propaganda is stark. Where Moscow always professed a respect for international law, the North Koreans reject the notion that a pure race should be bound by the dictates of an impure world. [DPRK domestic propaganda] thus cheerfully admits that the DPRK joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985 only to "use" it for the country's own ends, whereupon it "ignored" or "scorned" the treaty's stipulations…" Why would a superior race ever be scared of the degenerate Americans? "...Suffice to say that there is no trace of fear of any adversary in [DPRK domestic propaganda] (One is struck by the contrast to anti-American propaganda in East Germany during the 1980s, which constantly raised the specter of nuclear war.) On the contrary, the child race is depicted as itching for a "holy war" or sŏngjŏn'once a common term in Pacific War propaganda'in which to kill Yankees and reunite the motherland..." So there we have it. Comic Yalta's main achievment was to keep the people entertained until the next distraction comes along. Already we have No sign of North Korea dismantling nuclear weapons programme, Mattis admits. Ironically talking to the North Koreans and curtailing military maneuvers was a good idea from the point of view of avoiding accidentally triggering a nuclear war, but that was not the original plan of Comic Yalta because there was no plan. But given the success of its pilot episode, this reality show can run and run, keeping us on the edge of our seats until the White House production company and Destiny Pictures, who don't even know how the series will turn out themselves, screens a final, unexpected denouement.