| The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters |  | Author: B.R. Myers
Publisher: Melville House
Category: Book
Buy New: $45.00
as of 7/30/2010 01:45 CDT details
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 284,106
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 208
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 7.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 1933633913
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.375095193
EAN: 9781933633916
Publication Date: January 26, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Understanding North Korea through its propaganda
What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them?
Here B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn—from the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in terror of “the Iron General.” In a concise but groundbreaking historical section, Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled.
What emerges is a regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid nationalist, “military-first” state on the far right of the ideological spectrum.
Since popular support for the North Korean regime now derives almost exclusively from pride in North Korean military might, Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear program. The implications for US foreign policy—which has hitherto treated North Korea as the last outpost of the Cold War—are as obvious as they are troubling. With North Korea now calling for a “blood reckoning” with the “Yankee jackals,” Myers’s unprecedented analysis could not be more timely.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
 The Cleanest Race May 10, 2010
Raymond W. Ninness (Bedford, New Hampshire)
4 out of 24 found this review helpful
Perhaps the hardest read I have ever experienced!! The Author does all he can to try and assure the reader that he is highly educated, and intellectually superior to anyone reading the book. And therefor can write in such an intricate and rambling manner, as to confuse issues and make reading and understanding this book all but impossible.
The subject is an important one, toward understanding North Korea, but unfortunately, the Author lost his audience with his writing style, or lack thereof..
 Worth Reading April 18, 2010
William M. Simonton
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I remember reading North Korean publications (in Korean) in late 1976 and 1977 pretending to take a second BA to finish ROTC, because of the Vietnam War it was popular for liberals and leftist to be anti-Park Chung Hee (ROK) and that North Korean Kim Il Song was just a nationalist and the bad things about him was US propaganda and so when I would tell these people about all the propaganda basically deifying Kim and I would be told by the grad students that I was believing South Korean propaganda and when I would say it was a North Korean publication, they would then say I didn't translate it correctly and even after I would tell them that the translation was with Prof. Lukcoff, they wouldn't believe it. Prof. Myers mentions B. Cummings who I remember in U of Washington paper (1975) reading him saying that Park Chung Hee's export driven economic development was selling out the Koreans to US corporations and banks and would leave Korea bankrupt. Of course the opposite happened. I haven't followed North Korean propaganda for years but the pictures of the propaganda were interesting for us that can read them (I wish there were more). Prof. Myers ideas connecting the themes with wartime Japanese propaganda was interesting but I wish the book had more examples and his connecting both Kim's appearance with oddly, a motherly appearance, non-communist and non-Confucian nature of the propaganda, was again very interesting but I wish there were more examples. I read the book in two nights which for me is quick. The book had one idea that disturbs me, the propaganda is believed by the masses and so the North will not collapse because of its internal problems. I have been hoping since 1994 that it would collapse and Korea could be peacefully reunified.
A different analysis of North Korea April 16, 2010
Michael A. Duvernois (Minneapolis, MN United States)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
There's probably more analysis of the sexual politics and iconography of North Korea than most folks need, but even so, this is an important contribution to understanding the weirdness above the 38th parallel. I would recommend a variety of books to read to try to understand North Korea, but this is an especially important book for really taking in the mythologies of North Korea and understanding them. We often have a tendency (perhaps a projection even) to discount belief in propaganda. Mostly notably, few discussion of Bin Laden take seriously his belief in his own statements. This discounting of propaganda, in the North Korean context, has lead to dramatic failures of serious negotiations. Agreements and treaties have been made without understanding that the propaganda ("we're using the other parties to the treaty") in fact reflect what the North Korean leadership truly believes.
The author hopes that by understanding the mythology, the iconography, and the propaganda of North Korea we can understand the very real beliefs of the North Korean leadership. As has been pointed out many times, Mein Kampf was ignored as propaganda, but contained a very real set of beliefs and planned actions which guided Hitler through the war and the Holocaust. If only people would read the beliefs as they are believed...
A useful perspective April 16, 2010
Al Bacone (SoCal, USA)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Other reviews have adequately summarized the content of the book, so I'll avoid detailed criticism here. I can not be certain how close Myers' views are to reality, but I can say that this is the first model of North Korean culture I've read that makes cohesive sense of the regime's behavior and the startling lack of Soviet-style jadedness in the people that support it. As I said, we can't be sure if Myers is right here or not, but he makes a compelling case and offers a valuable perspective.
 I haven't laughed like that for a long time... March 20, 2010
I. Malenko (Northern Ireland)
7 out of 50 found this review helpful
The reason I decided to read this book, was my curiosity about the extent and the nature of Korean nationalism and my desire to understand it better(unfortunately, there is very little choice in reading for those of us who don't share the hatred drummed-up in the West towards this little and amazing country).
The reason I gave this book "2" and not "1", is because I don't "hate it": it would be too much honour to it to take it THAT seriously:-)
As I read this book, at first I was smiling, but by the time I reached the middle of it, I was already laughing out loud. It was so funny. For instance, does the author not realize that the view of the United States and its politics that he claims is exclusively North Korean, is being shared widely by so many people of different ethnic backgrounds across the globe? :-)
In general, the book is quite poorly written: it looks like the author got his idea first and then collected and "pulled by the ears" exclusively the facts that support his view and suited him. Just to give you an example, he claims that "all foreigners are being portrayed ugly in North Korean propagands posters" and at some distance from Koreans. I can personally send him photo of a poster from a North Korean nursery where European and African children are fraternizing and holding hands with North Korean children, and nobody is painted "ugly". This book simply doesn't make an impression of balanced and un-biased scientific research: unfortunately, it is propaganda in itself, only a Western one. While blaming North Koreans for being "racists" and "irrational", author's own open hatred towards North Korea is literally spilling out of almost every sentence. That is not the way to conduct a real research.
Reading this book helped me to overcome an illusion that somebody who knows Korean language would have a deeper knowledge and understanding of this culture than those who do not. The author has proven quite successfully that it doesn't necessarily have to be the case and that unfortunately, Americans are a bit like creatures from another planet: no offense, but they really don't seem to understand the rest of (non-Western) world, even if they managed to learn other languages.
After reading the reviews of this book on this site I also have a strong feeling that none of the readers who wrote these reviews, have actually ever been in DPRK ("North Korea" in Western slang) themselves. Well, I have, and more than once. And I can tell you that I never had a feeling of being treated with contempt because of my race/nationality, not even once. I never had a feeling that people looked down at me; in fact, I made some good friends who understand me better than many Westerners.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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