Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes
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Up close, North Korea is not Stalinist - it’s simply racist.
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Those who haven’t yet grasped the ideological realities of the Korean peninsula probably never will.
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North Korea kept harassing the South, and one day they just clicked: Tell me that isn't a stalker's dream writ geopolitical.
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Americans can't handle the truth.
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Just after Kim Jong Il's death, the official news agency put out an article saying that under Kim Jong Il's rule, the people had been like naive children without a care in the world.
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Confucianism is all about tempering your instincts with intellectual discipline, with book learning.
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Although the 'far left' Justice Party is ostensibly in the opposition, 77% of those who support it say that President Moon is doing a good job.
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These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail.
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Korean nationalism has not only energized the North’s march to nuclear armament, but also exerted a growing appeal on people in the South - the ideological discourse of which republic has received even less attention than the North’s. The average American knows only that in the 1980s liberal democracy replaced authoritarianism here in South Korea.
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South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel. Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak.
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At 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.
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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.
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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.
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Triteness of content has not necessarily hurt ideologies in the past. There are very few original or profound ideologies on the political scene.
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The once-marginal myth that the South Korean republic came into existence in Shanghai in 1919 as a nationalist state has become orthodox with remarkable speed.
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Let me highlight the fact, then, that a mistrust of outsiders – as manifested by and in states for thousands of years – is very different from an ideology asserting that one uniquely pure race is morally superior to all others. Such thinking was by no means the norm even in European fascism. It runs directly counter to Marx.
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Not for nothing did Eldridge Cleaver say that the North Korean police made him miss the Oakland police.
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Until the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany's size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero.
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South Koreans are more comfortable with Americans who behave like Americans.
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The North knows it cannot enjoy true security so long as the South is enjoying itself next door, be it ever so harmless in military terms and even free of US troops.
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Moon camp: You can talk as loudly as you want, and the Americans won’t pay the slightest attention. Least of all Trump. As far as they’re concerned, the North Koreans are communists, and you’re liberal democrats.
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What the dictatorship wants is presented as something we should want more. Most calls for subversion enrage the North. Not these though. Never these.
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The difference between East Germans and North Koreans is day and night.
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By forbearing to march behind the yin-yang flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the South Korean athletes are making a bigger sacrifice than the North Koreans, in whose iconography the banner of the DPRK ranks lower than the party standard, which in turn ranks much lower than the Supreme Commander's standard, the flag of the personality cult.