RAS Lecture on “Understanding N. Korea through its Propaganda” this Tues Eve

The Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society will hold its first semi-monthly Lecture-Meeting of February this Tuesday the 13th, at 7:30 pm, in the 2nd-floor Resident’s Lounge of the Somerset Palace Residence (near Anguk Station, downtown).  All in English, for free and open to the public, as always; more info: 763-9483 and http://www.raskb.com/  (includes map for the Somerset, and a complete description of the talk).

This one should certainly be interesting to some of us: Prof. Brian Myers of Dongseo University in Busan, researcher of & writer on North Korea’s official culture, will speak on “Child-Race in an Evil World: Understanding North Korea Through its Propaganda.”

He will argue that North Korean propaganda has always read “like a fascist’s guess of what communist propaganda should look like.”  This, he says, is no coincidence; the country’s official culture was established in the 1940s by middle-aged intellectuals who were far more familiar with imperial Japanese propaganda — having written much of it themselves — than with Marxism-Leninism.  That propaganda had ushered the Koreans into a morally superior Japanese-Korean or “imperial” race.   In 1945 the Koreans simply ushered the Japanese out of it.  They continued to regard themselves as uniquely virtuous by dint of a pure and ancient bloodline, but that bloodline was now theirs alone, the Dangun myth achieving orthodoxy at last.

During the lecture Myers will be underscoring his points with colorful slides of North Korean paintings and posters.  This touches on several subjects we’ve discussed here on the Hole, so should provide some good food-for-thought. Make it over there if you can…