Brian Reynolds Myers: State

Brian Reynolds Myers is American professor of international studies. Explore interesting quotes on state.
Brian Reynolds Myers: 298 quotes2 likes

“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)

“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)

“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)

“[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)

“[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)

“[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)

“[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)

“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)

“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

&quot;North Korea, Nuclear Armament, and Unification&quot; http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2017/07/03/north-korea-nuclear-armament-and-unification/ (21 July 2017) <br class="br">2010s

“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)

“North Korea cannot normalize relations with the United States.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

“Western observers focus more on the regime's economic failures than the North Koreans themselves do. Remember that it was only in recent modern times that Western societies began expecting the state to secure constant economic growth and rising prosperity. Well into the 20th century people expected little more from the state than that it protect them from foreign powers, and expand the influence or territory of the nation. Prussia was remarkably like North Korea in many ways, yet we remember it as a very successful state. If we judge North Korea by its own standards — instead of by the communist standards we hope its people judge it by — we must admit it has performed very well.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

“[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)

“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

&quot;South Korea: The Unloved Republic&quot; https://web.archive.org/web/20150609101401/http://www.asiasociety.org/south-korea-unloved-republic (14 September 2010), Asia Society <br class="br">2010s

“North Korea’s interest in confederation is in first disarming and then eliminating the rival state.”

Brian Reynolds Myers

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

“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)

“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)