The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [59]
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I have dwelt in this book on the continuity between the imperial Japanese worldview instilled into colonial-era Koreans and the official North Korean worldview that immediately succeeded it. This racialism is utterly irreconcilable with Marx and Lenin; not for nothing was the DPRK almost as isolated from the rest of the East Bloc as it still is from the West. But while drawing a clear line between North Korean ideology and communism, we should not overlook that which distinguishes the former from Japanese and (even more so) German fascism. The Text has never proposed the invasion of so much as an inch of non-Korean territory, let alone the permanent subjugation of foreign peoples. This is not to say that it does not propose military action against the US either as a pre-emptive strike or as revenge for past crimes. (I have already mentioned the wish-fulfilling posters of the US Capitol being blown to pieces.) But this is not the same as wanting to re-shape the world. Where the Nazis considered the Aryans physically and intellectually superior to all other races, and the Japanese regarded their moral superiority as having protected them throughout history, the Koreans believe that their childlike purity renders them so vulnerable to the outside world that they need a Parent Leader to survive. Such a worldview naturally precludes dreams of a colonizing or imperialist nature.
This does not make North Korea any less of a threat to South Korea—or vice versa. At present the DPRK’s main security problem is not America, but the prosperity of the other Korean state, whose citizens are content to prolong the division of the peninsula indefinitely. This is another reason why Pyongyang cannot normalize relations with Washington: the Text would never survive the North Korean masses’ inevitable realization that it was their own blood brothers and not the Yankees who had been blocking reunification all along. From the North’s perspective, America’s friendship would be—to paraphrase something Burke once said of revolutionary France—more dangerous than its enmity.
Pyongyang therefore 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 US-DPRK relations on whoever happens to be in the Oval Office, thinking him either too soft or too hard on Pyongyang. The right talks in moralistic terms of Kim Jong Il’s evil and perfidy in refusing to disarm, with no apparent understanding that he cannot disarm and hope to stay in power. The left, meanwhile, continues to call for bold American trust-building measures.1 In doing so, it overlooks the failure of the ROK’s Sunshine Policy (a decade of generous and unconditional aid) to generate even a modicum of good will from the North. To expect Washington to succeed with Pyongyang where the South Korean left failed is to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme. The unpleasant truth is that one can neither bully nor cajole a regime—least of all one with nuclear weapons—into committing political suicide.
Much hope in the West centers on the infiltration of heterodox culture into the DPRK, but here too it would be folly to extrapolate from Cold War history. Blue jeans will not bring down this dictatorship. Race-based nationalism does not need to fear cultural subversion as much as Marxism-Leninism did. Hollywood films were all the