Understanding North Korea through its propagandaA newly revised and updated edition that includes a consideration of Kim Jung Il's successor, Kim Jong-On   What do the North Koreans really  believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them?  Here B.R. Myers,  a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first  full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into  the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts  of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn—from  the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in  terror of “the Iron General.” In a concise but groundbreaking historical section,  Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist  thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled.  What emerges is a  regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of  Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid nationalist, “military-first”  state on the far right of the ideological spectrum.  Since popular support for the  North Korean regime now derives almost exclusively from pride in North Korean military  might, Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear program.  The implications for US foreign policy—which has hitherto treated North Korea as  the last outpost of the Cold War—are as obvious as they are troubling. With North  Korea now calling for a “blood reckoning” with the “Yankee jackals,” Myers’s unprecedented  analysis could not be more timely.

Cleanest Race, How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters PDF

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