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Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes
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Brian Reynolds Myers , usually cited as B. R. Myers, is an American professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, best known for his writings on North Korean propaganda. He is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Myers is the author of Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature , A Reader's Manifesto , The Cleanest Race , and North Korea's Juche Myth . Wikipedia  

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Brian Reynolds Myers: 149   quotes 2   likes

Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes

“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.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, On the February 8 Parade and the Olympics (February 2018)

Personality

“A major problem is the characterization of the 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

2010s, Interview with The Conversation (September 2017)

War , Problem , Thinking

“Judging from the yin-yang flag's universal popularity in South Korea, even among those who deny the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea, it evidently evokes the [Korean] race first and the [South Korean] state second. There is therefore none of the parodying or deliberate desecration of the [South Korean] state flag that one encounters in the countercultures of other countries.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Universe , Country

“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

2010s, Interview with Isaac Chotiner (February 2017)

“Americans are therefore wrong in assuming — and this was another line of argument against my RAS lecture — that South Koreans have struggled too long and too bravely for human rights ever to knuckle down to the North. There was no significant opposition here to the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha for criticizing the orthodox history of the so-called comfort women, and that took place under Park Geun-hye.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Women , History

“To misperceive the DPRK as a communist state – either of the Stalinist or indigenized kind – is therefore to misunderstand and miscalculate its behavior. I often encounter resistance to this point when lecturing to American audiences. Conservatives do not want communism let off the hook for creating this state, and liberals do not want Washington let off the hook for bullying it. Politically correct college students object to the attribution of racism to non-whites.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Behavior , Communication

“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

2010s, Interview with Isaac Chotiner (February 2017)

“Americans can't handle the truth.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Truth

“You don't prove a point with nationalists; you cannot make nationalists happy.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Happiness

“Whatever "Cold War system" there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been. I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens' realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power. This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

War , Family

“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.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

“North Korea fears an improvement in relations.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Fear

“This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, South Korea's Collective Shrug (May 2010)

“Korean nationalism is its emphasis on the vulnerability of the race.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, North Korea's Race Problem (February 2010)

“The average Korean alive in 1945 was to a far greater degree the product of Japanese rule than the Choson Dynasty.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

Source: 2010s, North Korea's Juche Myth (October 2015), p. 24

“[S]ent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Question

“[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

2010s, On Some Counter-Arguments (October 2017)

Imagination , Learning , Victory

“Pyongyang watchers consider the regime to be so hungry for economic growth, progress and other goodies as to have no pride, no mission, and no commitment to victory, real victory. It's all eros and no thymos. On this error rests our administration's hope for denuclearization.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Hope , Error , Victory

“North Korea kept harassing the South, and one day they just clicked: Tell me that isn't a stalker's dream writ geopolitical.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Dreams

“North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with Colin Marshall (February 2015)

“The difference between East Germans and North Koreans is day and night.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with the Reuters War College (April 2017)

Night

“[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)

Time

“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)

Success

“[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)

Fate

“[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)

History

“[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)

War , Thinking

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

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Future , Dependency

“[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)

Pain , Thinking , Reality , Time

“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)

People , Support , Housing , Dependency

“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)

Support , Success

“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)

Fight

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

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

War

“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)

Way , Imagination , Understanding , Reading

“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)

People , Question , Knowledge , Parting

“[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 "The Top North Korean Expert Explains What Happened to Kim Jong Un's Uncle" 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
2010s

People

“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)

Help

“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)

People , Appearance

“The DMZ does not divide the last bastion of communism from a liberal democracy; it divides a radical nationalist state from a moderate nationalist one.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

"North Korea, Nuclear Armament, and Unification" http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2017/07/03/north-korea-nuclear-armament-and-unification/ (21 July 2017)
2010s

Democracy , Communication

“If South Koreans want a league with the North, we Americans can only wish them well. The problem is that the current military alliance may embolden them to take this step without proper thought — and then embolden them to nullify the framework as soon as they sour on it. How the North is likely to respond can be imagined, considering the two deadly acts of aggression that followed the South’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy in 2008.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Imagination , Problem

“These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

People , Housing

“Were Kim Jong Il to abandon his ideology of paranoid, race-based nationalism and normalize relations with Washington, his personality cult would lose all justification, while his impoverished country would lose all reason to exist as a separate Korean state. The problem for U. S. negotiators is therefore not one of sticks versus carrots; the regime in Pyongyang will neither be bullied nor sweet-talked into committing political suicide.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, North Korea's Race Problem (February 2010)

Problem , Suicide , Personality , Country

“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

2010s, Interview with Colin Marshall (February 2015)

“"What belongs together, is growing together again," Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany — or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn’t take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Grass , Training

“[T]he 1919 uprising is memorialized in the North without a public holiday as an example of how badly things go when a nation lacks a parental leader. This doesn’t stop propaganda from claiming the protests originated under the influence of Kim Hyŏng-jik, the father of Kim Il Sung, who himself impressed everyone at the age of six by … but never mind. The Blue House is unlikely to quibble with this version of history on the day itself. With these meshing tendencies and measures the ruling camp evidently hopes to bond with the Kim regime over a shared anti-Japanese tradition, to present today’s ROK and DPRK as branches of the same Shanghai tree, put nationalism above liberal-democratic principles, and minimize opposition to all these things. No less obvious is the larger goal.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Age , Hope , History , Parent

“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.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, South Korea's Collective Shrug (May 2010)

People , World , Evil

“South Korea is a very capital-centric country.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with Colin Marshall (February 2015)

Country