Christopher Hitchens on Brian Myers’s “The Cleanest Race”
All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that–to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the “wider” society–must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more “authentically” Korean.
There are times when I think the North Korean people are more comprehensible than the South Korean people. The careful observer of reports from North Korea these days will see a people disillusioned with the official ideology, unburdening themselves of lies as quickly as they can find the truth, and mostly concerned about money, food, and the small comforts that substitute for hope as we know it (see, e.g., this post by Horace Jeffery Hodges for another description of this, via a Japanese journalist). This is, for all its limitations, at least rational.
What is neither rational nor explicable is how so many South Koreans, despite all the comforts their system and society afford, reserve a degree of sympathy and even reverence for North Korea’s system of government, or refuse to perceive how evil it is. Racism and its frequent companion, anti-Americanism, certainly have significant constituencies on the South Korean street, among radical groups, and among the politicians who sympathize with them.
The only thing that explains the residual appeal of Kim Jong Il’s death cult in both Koreas is the racist xenophobia of which Myers speaks. That element of North Korea’s ideology will survive after all of its other elements die.
Hat tip: Robert Koehler.
I’m halfway through this book, and it could’ve been an even shorter book. The first part deals with North Korean history up to the present.
As far as racial images, it does speak about Koreans being innately good and pure, and Koreans being a ‘child race;’ and, I remember the part where the Cuban diplomat was attacked. He and his group were targets of racist epithets.
There are marked similarities between the people on either side of the DMZ indeed!
We saw this same phenomenon–minus the racism–in the early 80s with the Western European nuclear freezeniks. They hated America for the same reasons that adolescents hate their parents, and in the same way.
Thanks for the link.
Jeffery Hodges
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Just finished it. I must say it’s one of the more peculiar approaches to understanding North Korea that I’ve come across. It’s easy reading, but it makes a number of interesting points about the North Korean ideology and how it’s suffused with race.
Some scholars have claimed that the early South Korean state had similarities to Imperial Japan: a belief that the population/people were one big family headed by a father-figure leader, for example. (Some have called this “corporatist states.”)
So, the early North Korean state, for all its ideological differences with the early ROK, was also a corporatist state and also borrowed some of Imperial Japan’s imagery and ideas.
Both Korean republics, virulently anti-Japanese (and many within both still so until now) and yet both copied the imperial metropolis.
The irony.
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/11315/The+Cleanest+Race+How+North+Koreans+See+Themselves+And+Why+It+Matters.aspx Excellent video where Mr. Myer’s presents his ideas from his book.