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Brian Reynolds Myers

183 quotes

“North Korea is very much sui generis. It is best seen as being on the cusp between far right and far left. In European political terms I would call it a Strasserite state, after the leader of the Nazis' left wing. Which is to say it is a race-oriented, militaristic state with socialization of assets.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "The Top North Korean Expert Explains What Happened to Kim Jong Un's Uncle" (16 December 2013), by Isaac Chotiner, New Republic
“Triteness of content has not necessarily hurt ideologies in the past. There are very few original or profound ideologies on the political scene.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The left wing and the right wing in this country [South Korea] are equally invested in keeping alive the myth of a far-left North Korea. This is what exasperates me. I realize that I'm up against so many different constituencies, each of which has an interest in maintaining the myth of North Korea as a far left state.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“South Korea is a very capital-centric country.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They have a much more positive view of the country than I do.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They can't understand why any American in his right mind who's not escaping a jail term or something, would voluntarily want to come to [South] Korea and live here.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[South] Koreans are more comfortable with Americans who behave like Americans.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Germany, it's, let's say it's 5:59 and you're heading for the bakery or whatever and it's due to close at 6. The German will walk right up to that door and close it right in your face, they will lock it on the other side of that glass door with a shrug, like "sorry". A [South] Korean would never do that, ever. And, and this is what I like about them.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The average Korean alive in 1945 was to a far greater degree the product of Japanese rule than the Choson Dynasty.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e must at least stop acting as if the only motive for North Korea’s armament too preposterous to discuss were the one that the country has reiterated, and acted in accordance with, for the past seventy years. Our initial response to 9/11 was to reduce it to a protest against U.S. support for Israel. Only recently have we begun to understand that the jihadists quite literally want the whole world. It is wishful thinking to assume that the ultra-nationalists in Pyongyang, who are far better armed than Islamic State, do not at least want the rest of their ethnic homeland.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Has the Republic of Korea ever been more obviously unloved than in this year of "Hell Chosun"?”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Americans saw Watergate as a threat to their republic. They countered by following constitutional and legal procedure to the letter. In [South] Korea, many people appear unwilling to separate the political system from the wrongdoings of politicians.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“South Koreans would rather see their state's security compromised than risk their own prosperity. Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who treat "axis of evil" remark and the bombing of Libya as watershed traumas in the North Korean psyche are really lampooning their own narrative, because if a regime has spent 50 or 60 years defying, humiliating and threatening a trigger-happy superpower like the United States, and the greatest shocks it has been dealt in return have been a rude line in a speech and an attack on a completely different country, its safety clearly does not depend on developing a new kind of weapon. Its conventional artillery must have been protecting it very well indeed.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The U.S. was never stronger, North Korea never weaker than in 1994, yet even then the fear of an artillery attack on Seoul prevented an air-strike on Yongbyeon. You can put it another way and say that the very success of the nuclear program, the fact that it has gone this far, proves that it was never necessary for North Korea's security in the first place.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moon and his party are on South Korea's nationalist left and Ahn Cheol-soo is the liberal figurehead of a nationalist left party that is barely distinguishable from Moon's. Now, each candidate, each of two candidates have a team of North Korea "experts" but those are almost all unrepentant former advocates of the sunshine policy of accommodation and appeasement of North Korea. There is no ideological difference between those two parties to speak of.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hen their propaganda lines up with their behavior in the real world it would be very foolhardy to ignore it.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If anything, the North Koreans are probably going to be more inclined to behave themselves in the run up to the election in May. They do not want to do anything that would help a conservative candidate and a North Korean nuclear test would force either Moon or Ahn or both those candidates to make some kind of hard-line statement which they could of course back on and probably would go back but it would at least delay the resumption of unilateral aid to North Korea and Kim Jong-un quite possibly want that.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The worse the quality of the paper is, the more seriously you should take the propaganda printed on it because that poor-quality paper indicates it's being distributed on a large scale inside the country.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I need to say first of all that foreigners are wrong in regarding the DMZ as the "Last Frontier of the Cold War" which is sort of separating a failed and anachronistic communist state from a proud high-tech capitalist one.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, North Korea is simply an ultra-nationalist state and that means that Kim Il-sung was and is seen as the perfect embodiment of racial virtues. In other words, he's the perfect embodiment of Korean purity and naivete and motherly solicitude and that image really is not so different now. I don't believe that Kim Jong-un's image is that different from Kim Il-sung's; there are certain differences of emphasis I think Kim Jong-un is to a higher degree a military first leader than Kim Il-sung was and perhaps even than Kim Jong-il was.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The difference between East Germans and North Koreans is day and night.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he support which Kim Jong-un enjoys is not a mere matter of coercion.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We really need to understand that the North Koreans are not as traumatized by things like the "Axis of Evil" remark or things like this Vinson flotilla as some people in the Pyongyang-watching community seem to think.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I said, the North Koreans are arming out of the conviction that the U.S.-South Korean alliance and not the South Korean popular will is the main obstacle in the way of a North-dominated re-unification.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The South needs to retire the conventional civic religion here, which is anti-Japanese pan-Korean nationalism in favor of a collective identification with constitutional principles.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e're entering the most dangerous phase in the region in decades. I'm really not all that hopeful.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[R]elative lack of popularity is not as important as the lack of popularity of a president in South Korea, where there is no bedrock state support to keep people patriotic even when they dislike a leader. But we Americans are more like the North Koreans in that regard. Does our patriotism rise and fall depending on who is in the White House? If we don’t like a president, do we start finding America’s enemies more likeable? No. We should therefore not assume that Kim Jong Un’s relative lack of stature means that support for the state is weakening.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f we’re going to jeer at North Korea for being a de facto monarchy, we must also acknowledge the main advantage of such a system: no divisive squabbling over who has the right to rule. On my book tour for “The Cleanest Race” I used the example of my British mother: a firm supporter of the monarchy with different estimations of the various royals. She doesn’t like the idea of Charles becoming king, but accepts that it will and must happen.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For most North Koreans the state equals the race, equals the country. This is where the North has been so much more successful than what I call the "Unloved Republic" of South Korea. There, as in Weimar Germany, the state is seen as having betrayed the race. When Moon Jae-in looks back on the history of the ROK he holds up only the anti-state riots and protests as high points.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole point of the military-first policy was not so much to whip up support for the military as to de-ideologize the economic sector, to make it possible to dismantle the command economy without dismantling the authority of the whole system.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“North Koreans can frequent black markets and still consider themselves good citizens, as was impossible in the communist East Bloc. So the situation now is more like Japan or Germany in 1944, say, than like East Germany in the 1980s. Widespread government corruption? Check. An entire population of economic criminals? Check. Constant griping about the state, the party, even some joking about the leader? Check. Even good Nazis had their Hitler jokes. A general readiness to fight for the state? Well, there’s certainly more readiness in the North than in the South.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It all comes down to what neither the softliners nor the hardliners want to acknowledge: this is a successful right-wing state, not a failed communist one.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Kim Jong Un is Chosun, as the slogan goes, then his decline in popularity must be the state’s too? But it doesn’t work that way. We all need to give our lives a sense of significance, of a meaning that lives on after our deaths. The North Koreans get that from their nationalism, which is one with their patriotism. If they lose that, what do they have?”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revolutions are usually a matter of people picking up the power of a state in disintegration, a government that has lost the will to enforce its laws. Of the two states on the peninsula, I see the South as closer to fitting that bill. There were recent reports of demonstrators around the THAAD site stopping and checking police cars.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]t the risk of sounding like a broken record: this is a far-right, militarist state. Such states tend to experience uprisings only when they have failed by militarist or nationalist standards, as the Argentinian junta did in 1982.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]crobatics are very much an American thing. No one does wishful thinking like we do. I don’t see South Korean progressivists pretending that the regime’s every word and deed can be boiled down to the same reassuring message. In fact, part of the reason many of them feel a sneaking admiration for the North is because it follows through on its Yankee-defying rhetoric. But that’s another topic.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While I too may be wrong about North Korea’s intentions, I’m neither lying nor guessing. Granted, it’s not easy figuring out what any country wants. America? Damned if I know anymore. The beginning of political wisdom is the recognition that no government’s discourse can be trusted. That goes also for the regime our softliners consider uniquely guileless. And the beginning of I.R. wisdom is the realization that foreign-service officials lie especially often. I had to laugh when I first heard of a news magazine called The Diplomat; it’s like calling a porn magazine The Prude.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So I’m going to say this once again: North Korea’s immediate goal is the withdrawal of US troops. Its ultimate goal is the unification of the peninsula under the star flag. And yes, it has good reason to believe this can be done without a war.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We Anglophones tend to use the words nation and state more or less interchangeably, but when one nation is divided into two states, it’s important to stick to the Koreans’ own practice of distinguishing clearly between nationalism (minjokjuŭi) and patriotism / state spirit (aeguksim, kukka chŏngsin, kukkajuŭi, etc). Historians do this even in English when discussing the Weimar Republic, where nationalism undermined support for the state — and for liberal democracy — just as it does in South Korea today.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A major problem is the characterization of the [Jae-in Moon-led] government in Seoul as liberal, as if it were no less committed to constitutional values and opposed to totalitarianism than the West German social democrats were in the Cold War. This makes Westerners think, "North Korea can't take over the South without a war, but it knows it can’t win one, therefore it must now be arming only to protect itself.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many intellectuals here [in South Korea] admire the North for standing up to the world. It’s a right-wing sort of admiration, really, for a resolute state that does what it says. More common than admiration are feelings of shared ethnic identity with the North. We are perhaps too blinkered by our own globalism to understand how natural they are.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m sure the ease with which bare-footed Vietcong marched into Saigon in 1975 now strengthens Pyongyang’s conviction that the “Yankee colony” will not last long after the colonisers pull out. In South Korea, meanwhile, conservatives are now loudly invoking the story of South Vietnam’s demise. They say, “There too you had a richer, freer state, and it fell only a few years after US troops pulled out. Let’s not make the same mistake”. They point worriedly to President Moon Jae-in’s own remark that he felt “delight” when predictions of US defeat in Vietnam came true.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Foreigners assume that because of the war, the two sides must dislike each other more than West and East Germans did. The opposite is the case. Some of my students say, “The North would never attack us, we’re the same people,” as if the war never happened. And North Korea would now be just as committed to unification if it hadn’t.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he North’s ideology glorifies the heart over the mind, instincts over consciousness, which makes rash decisions more likely to be made, even quite low down the military command structure. There is therefore a significant danger of some sort of limited clash at any time. But that has always been the case.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“North Korea knows a nuclear war is unwinnable. I also think it fancies its chances of a peaceful takeover too highly to want to risk a premature invasion while U.S. troops are here.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he establishment of a belligerent force’s intentions is always an urgently important matter in itself, regardless of how likely its ultimate victory may be, as America should have learned on December 7, 1941. As for the boundaries of our imagination being the boundaries of the possible, here’s another date: 9/11.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have tried to draw attention to South Korea’s dangerous state-loyalty deficit, by which I mean citizens’ lack of a sense of identification with their republic. In doing so I have noted the obvious parallels with South Vietnam, another state fatally weakened by nationalism. On this point too, I seem to be talking to the wall. Even Americans interested in the nuclear crisis feel no need to learn about party politics in South Korea. It’s a thriving, prosperous democracy, and that’s all that matters.”
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source