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Korean nationalism is its emphasis on the vulnerability of the race.
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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.
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The main threat to the South's security is the general lack of public identification with the ROK and its values, as opposed to any widespread vulnerability to the personality cult.
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The 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.
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The world isn't going to become an Islamic caliphate, but that doesn’t stop the Islamists from pursuing that as a goal.
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Seoul doesn't have the will to 'De-Kim Il Sungify' North Korea.
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Show me a persona non grata, and I'll show you a persona non give a shit.
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Koreans in both the north and the south tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil.
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Withdrawal of U.S. troops, then confederation, then reunification under the North Korean regime.
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Usually the South Korean left is blamed for the public's lack of patriotism, but it is the right who made blood nationalism a state religion.
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Strong racial pride always entails intense awareness of an inferior other. For the North Koreans, foreigners are inferior - even the friendly ones.
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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.
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I'm not a writer. I like being a reader.
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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.
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If South Korea is going to survive, and keep the peace on the peninsula, its citizens need to start conveying support for their state.
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North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea.
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The average Korean alive in 1945 was to a far greater degree the product of Japanese rule than the Choson Dynasty.
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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.
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In a confederation the South must accept the ultra-nationalist Kim Il Sung cult, whereas the North must acknowledge only the South’s superior prosperity and technology - and one of the main goals of confederation is to eliminate that gap as rapidly as possible. (It will be as much a matter of pulling the South down as the North up.)
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The next few months will decide the fate of the peninsula.
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Up close, North Korea is not Stalinist - it’s simply racist.
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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?
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Race theory is at variance with all Korean traditions; not for nothing did the national language lack a word for race until modern times.
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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.