Provocative ... A fascinating analysis. --Dwight Garner, The New York
Times
The first full-length study of the North Korean worldview to draw on
extensive research into the regime's domestic propaganda, including
films, romance novels and other artifacts of the Kim dynasty personality
cult ...
What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and
the world around them? From Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il to current leader
Kim Jong-un, it's been hard to define a consistent ideology amongst
North Korea's Supreme Leaders.
But you can reach a more profound understanding of North Korea through
its propaganda, says renown North Korea analyst, and Atlantic
contributing editor B.R. Myers.
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 support for the North Koriean regime now derives almost
exclusively from pride in North Korean military might, Myers argues that
Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear
program. The implications for Western foreign policty -- which has
hiterhto treated North Korea as the last outpost of the Cold War -- are
as obvious as they are troubling.
