THE CLEANEST RACE

[Mr. Blonde]

...is a book written by an American professor here in Korea:

I've wanted to pick it up for a bit now, and I think i'll try to in Seoul this weekend. I just found this lengthy article tonight that piqued my interest on it.

It's long as fuck, and since most of you are lazy fucks in regard to international politics ("tl;dr, lol DISREGARD I SUCK COCKS), i've taken the liberty of cherry picking some notable quotes from the interview:

Juche Thought is a jumble of humanist cliches like "Man is the master of all things." This fake doctrine has absolutely no bearing on North Korean policymaking. While people are wasting their time trying to make sense of Juche Thought, the regime is propagating this race-based nationalism. Another problem we have in the United States, a little bit, is political correctness, inasmuch as we are uncomfortable attributing racist views to non-white people.

That last part is very important, and something i've experienced traveling over here for the first time in my life, and something that I imagine will become pretty important in the multiculturalism capital of the world, the USA in the next 20 or so years.

[North Korea's militaristic government] started as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, and by the early 1990s, when the Eastern bloc collapsed, China told North Korea that it would have to start paying hard currency for imports. At that time, the regime knew that it would have to disassociate the leader from economic matters. The logical way for them to do that in 1995 was to tell the people that the threat from the United States was now so big that their leader would not have time for economic matters anymore, that he would have to be a military-first leader and occupy himself completely with military issues.

The irony, of course, is that 1995 was actually the best time ever in relations between America and North Korea. The agreed framework had just been signed, and economic aid from the United States was actually coming into the country. It's really ironical, because on the one hand Kim Jong Il had to make the Americans believe that North Korea was ready to change, and at the same time Kim Jong Il was trying to whip up anti-Americanism on the home front.

Even the North Koreans who escape from the country — and they are very small in number, those who choose to stay outside North Korea — still subscribe broadly to this racially-based way of looking at the world. They are still fans of Kim Il Sung, even if they think that Kim Jong Il is a bad man.

North Korea is a nationalist state, and nationalism is generally much more impervious to outside or conflicting sources of information than, say, Marxism/Leninism was. You only need to look at South Korea, really. South Korea is a completely open state where citizens can access news from around the world any time on the internet or through their media, and yet South Korea is the second most nationalist country in the world, North Korea being the first.

(You would not believe the stares I get when I walk around with a Korean girl, i've almost flipped shit multiple times)

One of the interesting things about the state media in North Korea's view of the South is that they do not conceal the wealth of South Korea, which is just staggeringly greater than that of the North. It's revealed without the population hemorrhaging to the South. How is that?

It's because they have a very good way of spinning that wealth. The North Korean government says that the South Koreans are wealthy because Kim Jong Il's military-first policy has kept the Americans from launching another devastating war on the peninsula. That's one way in which they spin it, and they of course claim that the South Korean masses, for all their wealth, are deeply ashamed of living in a Yankee colony and want nothing more than to live under Kim Jong Ill

I really don't believe that the North Korean regime will ever feel completely secure until it has eliminated South Korea as a competitor....We know from North Korean refugees that they are building ever more tunnels to South Korea in order to make it easier to invade South Korea should the time come. I don't subscribe to the view that North Korea would never dream of invading South Korea. I think it's crazy enough to try it, and we need to be better prepared for that.

The people who live in Kaesong itself are working in the same kinds of factories and collective enterprises as the people in the rest of the country, and as a result, of course, they are not earning a lot of money. You can see, as soon as you enter the city, that people there are much, much shorter than they are in South Korea. The average North Korean man is shorter than the average South Korean woman.

This is not like East Germany, where you had a first society of people paying lip service to Marxism/Leninism and then you would go to their homes and they would lock the doors and bring out their foreign books and their Beatles music and things like that. It isn't that kind of a society, really. There is a certain disagreement with the regime, but there is widespread consensus that the North Koreans really are the purest race in the world, and that the Americans really are inherently evil and so on.

If your read North Korean newspapers, there is no mention at all of any kind of crime in North Korea. There are no real villains in North Korean popular culture either, because how could you have a North Korean villain? The kind of conflict you have in North Korean narratives is between a perfect character and a character who has perhaps some minor character flaws.