Understanding Mother of all Koreas

Review by Bill Doughty

Part of the Mansudae Grand Monument

North Korea says it wants a "blood reckoning" with the United States. B. R. Myers says believe them.

Myers, who bases his analysis on North Korean source materials, is author of "The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – And Why It Matters" (MelvilleHouse 2010).

Unlike many other experts, Myers sees little value in freedom-loving people in the South smuggling CDs and DVDs to the North because most of the people in the DPRK are true believers who support the racist, military-first, repressed Juche philosophy of the Kim regime as their religion. "The masses' adoration of (founder) Kim Il-Sung has always been real." The true believers think it is just a matter of time before the people in the South will want to be reunited under the North's conditions.

According to Myers, compared with its communist neighbors, the North's system of government is closer to that of Imperial Japan during the colonial era, when the Japanese military occupied the peninsula, as it had several times for hundreds of years. The appeal of Soviet Russia or Communist China had nothing to compare with the hardcore racist nationalism of a century ago. The three Kims are "living symbols of the homeland." The culture is not Confucian either. "Confucius demanded rigorous self-cultivation through study; the Kim regime urges its subjects to remain as childlike and spontaneous as possible."

Kim Il-Sung celebrates the Chinese leaving North Korea in 1958.

Today, Kim Jong-Un looks remarkably like his grandfather in Kim Il-Sung's younger years, but the grandson is arguably more reckless. 

As opposed to being patriarchal, North Koreans' allegiance to the Kim regime, according to Myers, is matriarchal, with Kim Il-Sung seen as the mother of all Koreans, an appealing image to nationalists in the North. 

Myers says, "Far from being complex," the North Korean worldview "can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure blooded and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader," a strikingly similar worldview to that of fascist Imperial Japan.

"Kim Il Sung's peculiarly androgynous or hermaphroditic image also seems to exert a far more emotional attraction than any of the unambiguously paternal leaders of Eastern Europe were able to ... Sigmund Freud wrote of every child's yearning for a phallic mother, a truly omnipotent parent who is both sexes in one, and Ernest Becker agreed that the hermaphroditic image answers a striving for ontological wholeness that is inherent to man. This may explain why Jesus and Buddha are far more feminine and maternal figures in the popular imagination than in the original scriptures of Christianity and Buddhism. The North Koreans' (pure) race theory gives them extra reason to want a leader who is both mother enough to indulge their unique childlikeness and father enough to protect them from the evil world."

Kim Jong-Un is in the middle of a cult of personality and "hero" worship.

The book opens with an epigraph from a North Korean dictionary with a 109-word definition of "mother," that includes references to the Party and Comrade Platoon Leader and "a metaphor for the source from which something originates." The definition for "father" is six words: "the husband of one's birth mother."

"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 political spectrum."

Though published seven years ago, this book predicts the line of succession through Kim Jong-Il to his son, current dictator Kim Jong-Un, and says to expect more, not less, nuclear proliferation, a storm of madman-like threats, and increased hatred toward the United States.

The worst thing that could happen to the Kims, Myers writes, is that the North Korean people stop seeing the West as a threat.

"The regime is worried that the masses might cease to perceive the United States as an enemy, thus leaving it with no way to justify its rule – or even to justify the existence of the DPRK as a separate state."

But there's a case for cautious optimism as the North's crazed propaganda and beliefs – that Myers calls "the Text" – runs a risk of losing credibility:

"It is but a matter of time before most North Koreans realize that their southern brethren are proud of the state, indifferent to the Dear Leader's very existence, and content to postpone reunification indefinitely. Such revelations may not bring down the regime at once, but they will certainly bring down the Text."

But that, along with a goal of diplomacy with the Kim regime, might be wishful thinking. Myers writes, "The unpleasant truth is that one can neither bully nor cajole a regime – least of all one with nuclear weapons – into committing political suicide."

In a recent interview with the Conversation, which grants free use of its content, B.R. Myers assesses the risk of war and reiterates some of the key points in "The Cleanest Race." The interview concludes:

B.R. Myers

How likely is a war?

"I agree with those who say 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 US troops are here. 

"On the other hand, the North’s legitimacy derives almost wholly from its subjects’ perception of perfect strength and resolve. This makes it harder for Pyongyang to back down than it was for Moscow during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

"Also, the 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."