The cleanest purest race.

Yes, that is indeed how the North Koreans think about themselves, and a staggering number of South Koreans, as well, if the occasional foreigner-bashing newspaper article is anything to go by. You’ll have to read B.R. Myers latest book on the topic, The Cleanest Race (affiliate link), to know what I’m talking about though (but don’t fret, it’s a thin read and full of pictures to break up the action for the time-pressed).

I’ve been on a mad DPRK (North Korea, by its other name) of late, obsessed with Bush’s Axis of Evil, its nukes, Pyongyang as a model socialist urban paradise, the Juche (joo-chay) Idea, and the whole kamikaze-like notion of a last-man-standing Stalinist dictatorship that willingly treats its citizens like randomly-acting incorrigible tots, observable in the insert photo above.

As I flip through the pages of this book and Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, I’ve been shocked to discover things I hadn’t known about Koreans of all political stripes (how did I remain so oblivious for so long?) and their attitudes towards people from the outside which – to toss about a phrase – borders on the fascistic. Having said that and given the potentially incendiary nature of that comment, that wasn’t the point of this morning’s post. Calling someone a fascist is truly bad form, isn’t it?

The Myers book raises a lot of questions:

• what do we really know about what’s going on inside North Korea? Given the high-profile captures and incarcerations of Current.com crusading investigative journalists Laura Lim and Euna Lee and coupled with the recent release of US-Korean missionary-evangelist (why is it always Koreans who engage in this sort of annoying activity?) Robert Park to American custody in Beijing — apparently not as much as we think.

• when North Korean asylum seekers and refugees wash up on Chinese shores or land in wealthy South Korea, despite their gratitude at escaping poverty, they still harbor deep-rooted sympathies for the maternal-like protective cocoon of Kimilsungism and the Parent Leader (pictured below in bronze). Do we really know the extent to which North Korea’s citizens will go to protect their nation against aggression? When a nation loses its chief international sponsors like the Soviet Union and must finally fend for itself, in reality, not just through propaganda, how does this affect a society?

• when a nation’s citizens fully accept their role as subservient children requiring instruction from a motherly figure, what happens when their “mother” (in the form of Kim Jong Il, pictured below) passes or is otherwise forcibly removed?

• given that the Sunshine Policy is now a dead letter since 2008, how must this result in the escalation of tensions between the two Koreas? How will China react to what’s taking place on the divided peninsula and what sort of role can they play in attempting to quell the tension?

I’m nearly done with the read, but I suspect when done I’ll continue to have more questions than answers.

What’s your experience?

UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens writes a scintillating review for Salon.com

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