Brian Reynolds Myers: Trending quotes

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Brian Reynolds Myers: 298 quotes2 likes

“[R]ace theory is at variance with all Korean traditions; not for nothing did the national language lack a word for race until modern times.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

“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

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

“[T]he next few months will decide the fate of the peninsula.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)

“[O]ne's political ideology is inextricable from one's view of history.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, "Heaven is Helping Us": More from the Nationalist Left (August 2018)

“[I]f Kim Il Sung had won the war, Korea today would not look like North Korea. I think it would still be a much less free and prosperous place than the South is now, but it would resemble China and Vietnam more than the North now does. Its system has been shaped by the need to distinguish itself, to seal itself off from the rival state, and to pursue nuclear armament.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

On why the North Korean regime is so oppressive
2010s, North Korea's Unification Drive (December 2017)

“North Korea's future depends on a large extent on South Korea's future.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2012)

“[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

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

“The DPRK derives its legitimacy from the myth that the anti-Japanese hero Kim Il Sung was all right-thinking citizens' choice as the man to found and lead the new Korea after liberation in 1945… Until the mid-1960s the USSR was credited with defeating Japan, but since then propaganda has claimed that Kim and his guerillas freed the race on their own. That this is known to be untrue by those who lived through the time is of minor importance. The painful historical reality of mass collaboration (and the military insignificance of all armed Korean resistance to colonial rule) is precisely what made the Kim myth so attractive.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

“The surrender of something attained heroically and at great cost — something to which the well-being of entire generations has been sacrificed — is far more dangerous to a government than not having it to begin with.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, And Then What? (June 2018)

“[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

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

“Far-right states derive mass support from the perception of their success in dealing with internal or external enemies; economic matters, though certainly important, do not bear directly on state legitimacy as they do in far-left states.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

Source: 2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

“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

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

“To North Korea, diplomacy is another form of war.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

&quot;Stranger Than Fiction&quot; https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/opinion/stranger-than-fiction.html The New York Times (13 February 2005) <br class="br">2000s

“Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there anymore than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, League Confederation Goes Outer-Track (September 2018)

“The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here's a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it's part of Asia.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2000s, Mother of All Mothers (September 2004)

“[I]f indigenousness were the key to state longevity on the peninsula, the Japanese would not have taken Korea so easily in 1910. Take it they did, of course, and their propaganda soon reached far more Koreans than had ever heard of the ancient sages.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, North Korea's State Loyalty Advantage (December 2011)

“1990s, North Korea was the main recipient of American aid in Asia.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2012)

“In South Korea, which is a much less conservative environment, politicians do not take their wives around with them as much as their American counterparts do. Showing pride in your wife is thought of as juvenile bad form. There's a special pejorative for people who do it.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

As quoted in &quot;The Top North Korean Expert Explains What Happened to Kim Jong Un&#x27;s Uncle&quot; https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115948/br-myers-purge-kim-jong-uns-uncle (16 December 2013), by Isaac Chotiner, New Republic <br class="br">2010s

“Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance’s demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades. But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North’s standpoint it’s precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state’s long collusion with the Yankees so heinous.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)

“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

2010s, Still the Unloved Republic (December 2016)