Brian Reynolds Myers: South (page 3)

Brian Reynolds Myers is American professor of international studies. Explore interesting quotes on south.
Brian Reynolds Myers: 298   quotes 2   likes

“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

“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

“[I]n 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.)”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

“[T]he peninsula flag means two very different things to the two Koreas. In the South it symbolizes a desire for peaceful co-existence, or at most for a unification of equal partners in the reassuringly remote future. In wall posters above the DMZ it has always symbolized the southern masses' yearning for "autonomous unification", meaning absorption by the North. It's worrying to think how inner-track propaganda is certain to misrepresent the South Koreans' eschewal of their state flag for this of all symbols — and at this of all events.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

Peace , Thinking , Future

“[T]he new line that the Taehan minguk was not founded in August 1948, but instead came into existence when a provisional government was formed in Shanghai in 1919. I don't need to remind anyone of the internationally accepted criteria for statehood. The Blue House seems more interested in downgrading the republic that fought the North than in making a serious case for the statehood of something else. The original modest budget for the 70th anniversary of the ROK's founding has already been cut. The joint North-South commemoration of the March 1st uprising's 100th anniversary next year is likely to make the festivities this August 15 look subdued in comparison.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Housing

“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.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

"South Korea: The Unloved Republic" https://web.archive.org/web/20150609101401/http://www.asiasociety.org/south-korea-unloved-republic (14 September 2010), Asia Society
2010s

Religion

“[A] peculiar pattern has repeated itself every few weeks or so since Moon took office. It goes like this. First the Blue House is caught in some statement or act of disloyalty to the spirit of the alliance — like appointing an unrepentant former enforcer of North Korean copyrights to the second most powerful post in the government. (I don’t mean the prime minister.) South Korean conservatives then shout in chorus, “The Americans won’t stand for this!” Whereupon the White House rushes to say, in effect, “Oh yes we will!””

Brian Reynolds Myers

It seems to revel in making pro-American, security-minded South Koreans look foolish.
2010s, "Heaven is Helping Us": More from the Nationalist Left (August 2018)

Housing

“The North wants unification under its own flag, while South Korean progressives want the two states to coalesce over decades of mutually beneficial economic cooperation.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

“South Koreans do not consider the integrity of their state important enough to go to war for.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

War

“I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, "Conspiracy Theory"? (August 2019)

“Let’s remember not only how many South Koreans were killed, injured or abducted during a war the North started, but also that one of the most shocking parts of that conflict for people who experienced KPA occupation was seeing neighbors emerge on day one as fully-formed, snitching supporters of the enemy. Many bore titles in the underground organizations to which, it turned out, they had belonged for years. In several recorded cases they denounced people who were shot on the spot. That trauma sits deep.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, "Conspiracy Theory"? (August 2019)

War , Support , People , Parting

“We Anglophones tend to use the words nation and state more or less interchangeably, but when one nation is divided into two states, it’s important to stick to the Koreans’ own practice of distinguishing clearly between nationalism (minjokjuŭi) and patriotism / state spirit (aeguksim, kukka chŏngsin, kukkajuŭi, etc). Historians do this even in English when discussing the Weimar Republic, where nationalism undermined support for the state — and for liberal democracy — just as it does in South Korea today.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, On Experts and Exegetes (September 2017)

Democracy , Support

“Journalism is the most Americanized of all professions, and nothing is more American than the belief that economic matters trump ideological ones. There is very little talk of ideology in coverage of any country. Western journalists here see a poor North facing off against a rich South and laugh at the notion that the former might have serious designs on the latter. They don’t seem aware of what I call the South’s state-loyalty deficit.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with Isaac Chotiner (January 2018)

Loyalty , Country

“[A]crobatics are very much an American thing. No one does wishful thinking like we do. I don’t see South Korean progressivists pretending that the regime’s every word and deed can be boiled down to the same reassuring message. In fact, part of the reason many of them feel a sneaking admiration for the North is because it follows through on its Yankee-defying rhetoric. But that’s another topic.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, On Experts and Exegetes (September 2017)

Thinking , Feeling , Parting