In The Atlantic, B.R. Myers looks at the follies of Sunshine and cautions President-elect Obama against making the same mistakes as Kim Dae-jung. Money quote:
To hope that a new administration in Washington can build trust with the North Koreans where their most sympathetic blood-brethren have so abjectly failed would be to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme. Let us hope that in his effort to avoid repeating George W. Bush’s mistakes, Obama does not simply end up repeating Kim Dae Jung’s.
Be sure to read the rest on your own.
(HT to Korea Economic Reader)
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for linking that piece Marmot. Reading the Atlantic over the last few years I never really noticed that B.R. Myers was their authority on Korean issues but often found myself nodding in agreement at what he wrote. His takedown of the clown of Korean studies, Bruce Cumings, was one for the ages. I’m glad to see him savage Leon Segal – author of the execrable ‘Disarming Strangers’ – in this issue.
I’ve been trying to find some copies of a couple of North Korean novels Myers has mentioned over the years in his articles but don’t really know how to get my hands on them. One is ‘The Barrel of a Gun’ (총대) and the work cited in this article, ‘World of Stars’ (별의 세계). I’m told they can be found in Chosen Soren bookstores in Japan but I can’t read Japanese and the Japanese friends I have aren’t too keen on buying North Korean propaganda. Is there any way to acquire either work in the US or South Korea? I imagine they’re banned under the National Security Law but I do recall seeing a review of 총대 in the Hanky21 several years ago. They must have gotten their copy somewhere…
I think they are available at the North Korean Information Center in downtown Seoul
Cumings really is a pathetic and pitiable character. But in the world of academia, being desperately wrongheaded, especially when it comes to coddling Communists, has never been a disadvantage — it’s rather a pre-requisite these days!
Thanks Sperwer.
I never knew such a place existed. Their website lists both works but I don’t know if they’re available to the public. The security classification for both is listed as ‘special’. Regardless, I’m now closer than ever to getting my hands on some badly written North Korean agitprop.
Mr. Carr,
How Cumings reputation hasn’t been destroyed yet is beyond me. How can someone be so wrong, so often in his ‘expert’ predictions and keep a loyal following in the academe? Anyway, in case you never saw it, here’s the relevant section from the September 2004 Atlantic in which Myers puts Cumings in his place:
“You’ve just finished your life’s work, a bold new history of the Watergate burglary in which you manage to prove that the White House was out of the loop, but the ink is hardly dry when an eighteen-minute tape surfaces in a Yorba Linda thrift shop, and soon the whole country is listening to Nixon gangsta-rap about how he personally jimmied the door open. It’s every revisionist’s nightmare, but Bruce Cumings, a history professor at the University of Chicago, has come closest to living it. In a book concluded in 1990 he argued that the Korean War started as “a local affair,” and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia. In 1991 Russian authorities started declassifying the Soviet archives, which soon revealed that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event. Initially hailed as “magisterial,” The Origins of the Korean War soon gathered up its robes and retired to chambers. The book was such a valuable source of information on Korea in the 1940s, however, that many hoped the author would find a way to fix things and put it back into print…..
The mixture of naiveté and callousness will remind readers of the Moscow travelogues of the 1930s, but Cumings is more a hater of U.S. foreign policy than a wide-eyed supporter of totalitarianism. The book’s apparent message is that North Korea’s present condition can justify neither our last “police action” on the peninsula nor any new one that may be in the offing. It is perhaps a point worth arguing, particularly in view of the mess in Iraq, but Cumings is too emotional to get the job done. His compulsion to prove conservative opinion wrong on every point inspires him to say things unworthy of any serious historian—that there was no crime in North Korea for decades, for example—and to waste space refuting long-forgotten canards and misconceptions. Half a page is given over to deriding American reporters who once mistook Kim Il Sung’s neck growth for a brain tumor—talk about a dead issue.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200409/myers
I have read Brian’s piece. He is pretty close to the truth… Only close, but not exactly right.
The truth is that “nothing changes” in the means and goals of propaganda. But during the last 10-15 years many things have changed in the hearts and minds of 22 million people who are supposed to believe this propaganda. Note these are two different things!
Since the Kim’s kingdom is built on lies, they cannot stop lying without seeing their system collapse. But it does not mean that the people cannot stop believing. Although the regime continues forcing the people to believe and follow, this can continue only as long as the people are fully dependent on the regime. That’s why the conservative group in Pyongyang, with their recent anti-market revenge, does everything to keep the population poor, weak and obedient.
This can continue very long but not indefinitely because the subtle change is happening everyday. Every contact between N.Koreans with the outer world matters. Every bit of truth which penetrates the country harms the foundation of the system. In other words, the Sunshine Policy was doing the right thing.
But Brian’s argument that “nothing changes in North Korea” is incorrect. I would say, “nothing
changes in the North Korean propaganda methods” and this is what will ultimately kill the regime.
LP
Corpy, Thank you for the kind comments. As for the books you ask about, you can borrow them from the North Korea Resource Center for (I think) 2 weeks. If you are not in Korea, your best bet is buying them from one of the booksellers in Japan or Korea who have been authorized by Pyongyang to sell them. I think the S.Korean sellers are Daehun Seojeok. Incidentally Ryeoksa eui taeha (1997) is even more informative in regard to North Korea’s “attack diplomacy” (as the regime calls its own negotiation style) than Barrel of a Gun.
rspasanu/LP: My article in Atlantic Online argues that “nothing has changed” in the NK regime’s attitude to South Korea: even during the Sunshine Policy years the S.Korean government was reviled in Pyongyang’s domestic propaganda. Now, this is obviously not the same as arguing that nothing has changed or will change in the minds of the people! Indeed, the number one threat to the regime now is the growing awareness among the masses not that S.Korea is richer (the regime has openly admitted this since 2000), but that the S.Korean people are proud of their republic and do not want reunification; that is a truth that gravely undermines the whole paranoid-nationalist personality cult. And when Kim Jong Il dies, the North Korean masses will quickly find out (as of course they were to isolated to find out after Kim Il Sung’s death) that there isn’t a moist eye in the South Korean house; this will be an enormous blow on top of the propaganda apparatus’s other problems.
Prof. Myers,
Thank you for the leads. I’m currently in the US but my fiancee is in Seoul and she’s getting in touch with Daehun. Their website doesn’t list any of the novels mentioned but we’re hoping they might be able to acquire them.
If you don’t mind too much I’d like to ask when the book you mentioned in your RASK lecture might be coming out? I think you’ve really struck something critical about understanding North Korea and its view of the world through reading its literature and, as evidenced by the difficulty in acquiring those works, its a field that has been neglected by other scholars. Whatever its commercial prospects your book should go a long way in changing attitudes about the philosophical structure supporting the North Korean state from the conventional dual interpretations of Stalinism or Confucianism taught in most American universities. This should come as a breath of fresh air to all the undergrad and grad students sitting through lecture after lecture on the same tired material.
For any others looking to find the books mentioned in the comment thread the following links should help:
Unification Ministry’s North Korean Resource Center (Library):
http://unibook.unikorea.go.kr/new2/
대훈 서적 (South Korean bookseller specializing in North Korean books):
http://daehoon.booksetong.com/
코리아 북 센터 (North Korea affiliated bookseller in Japan):
http://www.krbook.net/index-k.htm
Corpy: My agent is talking to publishers at the moment. Of course, the speculation about Kim Jong Il’s health means that there’s no point rushing the thing into print. I may well have to change a lot of the text into the past tense! As for those NK books, I see that S.Korean and Japanese sellers seem to shy away from N.Korea’s agitation propaganda (anti-US, anti-SK invective, war fiction) in favor of integration propaganda (relatively innocuous narratives about life in N.Korea). In S.Korea the National Security Law may have something to do with this.
Corpy: One more thing. I would never advocate cheating the Workers’ Party out of royalties; Kim Jong Il’s Hennessy bottles don’t grow on trees. But here are two interesting pieces of completely unrelated information. a) Your fiancee is presumably entitled to borrow books from the NK Resource Center and b) there are plenty of photocopy shops in the area.
I certainly wouldn’t want to do my part to throttle back that river of royalty cash flowing north…
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