The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves - and Why It Matters

I bought this book against my better judgement, based on the glowing reviews. Negative reviews received complaints for not giving examples of what makes Myers maddening, so here they are:

pp. 28-29-- On Korean behavior under Japanese rule, Myers posits an either/or choice of reluctant collaboration born of fear, or full indoctrination in "a winning racial team. No one familiar with human nature can doubt that the latter assumption is more likely to be true." (Fear followed by self-justification seems like an option to me.) Myers cites "widespread over-compliance" as further proof of enthusiasm. "Widespread over-compliance" is proof of what? It was also seen, for example,in China's Great Leap famine and Cultural Revolution. Survivors of these times cited a complex mix of behaviors and motives, including fear and/or enthusiasm--but Myers is not an and/or person. (He also uses this logic to condemn North Koreans as willing victims.) The complex situation under Japanese rule could use some revisionist coverage, the way the history of Nazi-occupied Europe has received a more nuanced, critical view in recent decades. Myers doesn't do nuance.

p. 29-- Myers tells us "on August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, emboldening the USSR to enter the war with Japan." Myers doesn't explain in which alternate universe the Bomb, rather than the Yalta conference, caused Stalin to declare war on Japan exactly 3 months after Germany surrendered.

p. 54--On the North Korean famine:"Many migrants remember a widespread yearning for war with America during the famine". Unlike many of Myers' assertions, this one has a footnote, so I turn to see if there is a new book on North Korean migrants/refugees I need to add to my reading list. No migrant: the footnote reads: "War is a common 'flight-from grief device' in tribes going through extreme hardship. Turney-High, 'Primitive War'". Harry Holbert Turney-High was a cavalry officer and anthropologist who thought "war is the most exciting exercise in the world". He was a real nut, but not a North Korean. (North Korean "war fever" has been described elsewhere, including in Martin's "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader"--but as a response to relentless official war-mongering. It's odd for a book supposedly devoted to state propaganda to instead cite famine as the cause. The pages leading up to this conclusion do describe government war rhetoric; this pivot to "human nature" is typical Myers.)

p. 58--Myers claims many South Koreans "feel a nagging sense of moral inferiority to their more orthodox brethren" (meaning North Koreans). No footnote--Myers could be basing this on an opinion poll, anecdotal remarks by his students, or telepathy.

p. 61--"The South Korean electorate's disaffection with the Sunshine Policy played an important role in helping the conservative candidate win in November." Pre-election polling does not bear this out. The most important issues were jobs, jobs and jobs; see Lankov,"The Real North Korea",pp. 173-174.

p. 62--"the South Korean public lashed itself into another of its xenophobic frenzies" over American beef--only someone who hates America could worry about mad cow disease. (Myers is consistent in attributing all anti-American attitudes to a xenophobia hardly less pronounced in the South than the North. American foreign policy, especially during the Park and Chun years, is not mentioned.)

p. 75--Finally, Myers turns to analyzing actual North Korean propaganda. "An especially common motif is the deep forest, which psychologists regard as a universal archetype of the instincts. Informed as they are by our traditional mistrust of spontaneity, our fairy-tales and legends tend to depict the forest as a menacing place of witches and wolves. North Koreans, with their celebration of pure racial instincts, treat it as a safe and womb-like place that affords them an insurmountable advantage over the enemy." This is psychobabble. European forests had actual wolves, and fairytale forests had both menacing and helpful beasts, as well as magic trees and such. (Myers' psychologists cut off toes and heels to shoehorn fairy-tales and legends into their theories. Don't ask me where you'll find "traditional mistrust of spontaneity" in our tales celebrating impulsive simpletons and rash heroines.) Korean forests did afford guerrillas advantage over Japanese and American enemies, but Myer substitutes psychoanalysis for history.

pp. 91-92--Myers calls North Korean film romance "reminiscent of Bollywood". This gave me a start, as I imagined wet sari numbers and a North Korean A.R. Rahman--but this is not what Myers means. I'm not sure what he does mean, but he's clearly no expert on Bombay Masala.

p. 108--Just one head-scratching part of the 'maternal Kim Il Sung' argument:"artists and writers...play up the feminine aspects of Kim Il Sung's appearance--the soft, pale face, the dimpled smile, the expansive bosom"--wait-a-minute, expansive bosom?! He's got a fat belly, but not gynecomastia. Myers has few genuinely maternal examples to offer us. He mostly repeats his belief that a fat man looks like a woman, and anything remotely nurturing (including rushing an injured person to the hospital) is maternal behavior.

p. 112--Having psychoanalyzed all and sundry from the first page, Myers stops to admit, "I am not qualified to analyze the cult (or anything else) from a psychological standpoint, but just enough should be written here to counter the reader's skepticism that sane people could give themselves over to the adoration of a male mother figure. Sigmund Freud wrote of every child's yearning for a phallic mother, a truly omnipotent parent who is both sexes in one, and Ernest Becker agreed that the hermaphroditic image answers a striving for ontological wholeness that is inherent to man". If Freud is your idea of an authoritative source, buy this book now. (All that passage did for me was remove any shred of curiosity I had about Becker's books.)

There was much, much more that bothered me than these few nits I've picked. As for the big picture: Myers is not the first writer to notice the legacy of Japanese colonization on Korean culture. His accusations of racism are so hyberbolic as to end up seeming, well, racist. The argument that North Korea is not Stalinist or communist seems pointless. These terms are nearly meaningless from misuse at this point. I'd rather read a more extensive analysis of what North Korea is. Unfortunately, most of Myers' analysis is of the sort I've quoted.

This book is not entirely worthless. I enjoyed reading the summaries of North Korean state myth, what Myers calls "the Text". He makes a few interesting allegations. For example, he claims Japanese collaborators were more common in the government of the North than the South after 1945. I will have to confirm this elsewhere, given his unreliable footnotes. Others have complained of the book's brevity. Do you really want MORE of this? I found the wide margins useful for penciling in my objections (I only write in books I hate). There are some wonderfully awful official North Korean illustrations. If you find a cheap copy, it might be worth getting just for "the Text" and the pictures.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves--and Why it Matters by B. R. Myers is unlike any other western book I have read on North Korea. Almost if not every myth propagated by the west about the DPRK is reanalyzed through the eyes of a North Korean, but Myers provides only minimal evidence to back his claims. Without these solid sources The Cleanest Race seems just as sensational as the propaganda it refutes. Having made such dramatic claims the author has written an embarrassingly slight book: barely 159 pages of text padded out onto pages with exaggeratedly wide margins. The eighteen pages of endnotes where Myers cites his evidence often refer to merely one page of an article or a poster as seen in a North Korean magazine. The sources in the endnotes cannot be verified without having access to North Korean literary sources; Myers has made his sweeping remarks yet left an impossible task for fact-checkers.

On page two of the actual written text (really page twelve after all the title and contents pages are accounted for) the author errs in writing the oft-misspelled ad nauseum [italics in the original text, which make the error all the more glaring]. At the end of the preface Myers writes "Responsibility for all errors in this book is mine." which left me with a sense of incredulity regarding the claims that were to come.

In The Cleanest Race Myers attempts to show how North Koreans view themselves through their own propaganda. He differentiates between propaganda about the DPRK for the international press versus propaganda intended for domestic consumption. Some ridiculous claims are made, such as:
"Contrary to what so many outsiders take for granted, the leader depicted in official propaganda is hardly a father figure at all, let alone a patriarch."

Myers claims that the English translations of the Great Leader Marshal Kim Il Sung as a "fatherly leader" are in fact mistranslations, and the correct Korean uses a parent-neutral title. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant as the artwork depicting Kim Il Sung is unquestionably parental in nature. He is often seen holding the hands of adoring young children, and when I visited children's palaces [1] throughout the DPRK, a younger Kim Il Sung is portrayed in official artwork as a playful figure with small children literally crawling all over him as a toddler would do with his own father.

Another western myth about the Mass Games is that they are "grim Stalinist exercises in anti-individualism that foreigners...often misperceive them as". Myers goes on to explain that in fact the Games are "joyous celebrations of the pure-bloodedness and homogeneity from which the race's superiority derives". There is no doubt in my mind that this explanation is also true, but not at the expense of the other theory.

The only remark that I could not complain about is his assertion that the DPRK must always keep the anti-American propaganda turned on internally, while for the rest of the world it can gain points by thawing out the invective. Even when receiving humanitarian aid from the United States, the North tells its people that it is only war reparations which are owed to them as the victors of the Korean War. The DPRK would theoretically cease to exist if it could get along with the United States. The mouse that roared would in effect be the mouse that became dinner. Even when relations between the two countries do genuinely appear to be softening, the DPRK is as guaranteed as clockwork to throw a spanner in the works in order to justify its right to exist.

For such an insubstantial book it had quite a lengthy bibliography. I spent literally a couple hours poring over the additional sources and looking at various on-line book retail websites. I eventually ordered four titles, so I commend the author for his wide range of research. Myers however wrote very little if one was to base the length of his book on the research that went into preparing it. Unfortunately for those who do not read Korean about one third of the sources are meaningless, as the titles and authors had been transliterated into the Roman alphabet. My eye swept down two pages' worth of works of transliterated titles by various authors named Kim.

[1] There are children's palaces in all North Korean cities. These are grand facilities where children can learn and participate in extracurricular activities such as dancing, calligraphy, music instruction, singing and so on.

The Cleanest Race is a fascinating analysis of North Korean propoganda and explains the North Korean view of itself. I've read several books on North Korea including Escape from Camp 14 and Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader. Both were very well written. But The Cleanest Race is an integral part of the discussion. The writer discusses the maternal - not paternal - role of the leader in the NK myth. Kim Jung Il as mother, the citizens as children. It details evidence of North Korean race supremacy over all others, a view I had not heard before reading this book. It dissects propoganda movies, posters, songs and other communications.

No other regime on earth has this kind of stranglehold on its people, their minds and the entire country. Certainly, beyond violence, propoganda and a "cultural story" are an important part of this control on current and future generations.

This book is a great addition to the library of any North Korea watcher. It's intellectually and philosophically stimulating while adding real value to the discussion of who North Korea is and how they may react under pressure such as we are seeing in April 2013.

An absolutely splendid book. I am not a Korea specialist and ordered this book on a whim, but once I opened it I couldn't put it down. Myers hypothesizes that we in the West have fundamentally misunderstood the Kim regime and that, as a result, we consistently adopt the wrong policies with respect to the DPRK, and in chapter after chapter he delivers convincingly on that hypothesis. Myers argues that by shoehorning the Pyongyang regime into the "totalitarian dictator" model, we overlook the depth to which the regime's politics and ideology are rooted in Korean identity. The Kims, he argues, have not created a "fascist" dictatorship but a dictatorship predicated on a sense of racial purity and superiority that validates their self-imposed "hermit" status and their claims to leadership not only of North Korea but of a notional unified Korea that spans the peninsula. By dealing with the regime on our terms -- as a rational actor nation-state amenable to the usual carrots and sticks (we'll embargo you, we'll provide you with humanitarian aid), we miss important diplomatic opportunities and squander others. When we think we've "won," the North sincerely believes we've lost. Myers wants us to see the strategic interaction between the DPRK and the West (and even China) through the DPRK's eyes, rather than our own.

Very enlightening book, seems that the DPRK is more akin to a racist-fascist state than a socialist one and may also be the most 'religious' state in the world with the Kim dynasty, like earlier Japanese emperors, worshiped as 'living gods'. Hatred of Japan lives on in both Koreas, yet oddly enough, the the North adopted an awful lot from their Japanese occupiers. Having been published in 2011, the book is 7 years behind current events, thus Kim Jong Un and his nuclear advances are not covered. But overall, the book is well worth reading - 5 stars.

This is one of, if not THE, most astute and highly readable explanations of the world view embraced by North Korea. The North Korean "art" of propaganda as a key instrument in the maintenance of the State is presented through history, examples from literature and media, policy postures and clearly referenced psycho-social references. A superior work, Myers is a scholar who presents insightful and illuminating explanations that question and dismiss conventional interpretations that have informed naive and counterproductive U.S. policy (and continue to do so under Obama). Highly readable, this work quickly informs and orients the new inquirer into the mythological foundation which is the basis of North Korean self-justification and existence. It is a humbling
Work that serves to inform "hope."

At first glance the idea of investigating a nation via its official propoganda does not seem useful, but in the case of the two Koreas- a people driven by conformity- it provides a valuable key to their elusive mindset.

Myers traces the government narrative of Korea back to the Japanese colonial era and earlier.

This is another book with fascinating research that sheds much light on the motivation and belief systems of todays Koreans, and the legacy of racism and xenephobia that has been encouraged and manipulated by its leaders for centuries.

This book provides much insight into the ROK as well as the DPRK. The same racial myths permeate both societies. The only difference is that the South is changing, while the north is trapped with attitudes that belong to prehistory.

Excellent book well researched and well written.

A little bit scary, not re what the NKs might do to the West, but what they're doing to themselves. The author makes the case that, rather than following a strictly Communist (Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao) ideology, NK's ideology is modeled after that of fascist (pre-WWII) Japan. Interesting idea, though I don't know enough about the subject to confirm or refute the author's contention. Nonetheless, an interesting read. Will probably be up there with DVDs of "The Interview" on a list of things you wouldn't want to bring into NK in the unlikely case that you ever decide to vacation there. (nb: I hear that the "Ghost Hotel" of Pyongyang still has vacancies; see http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/22/nobody-s-home-at-the-hermit-kingdom-s-ghost-hotel.html.)

This book changed the way I view North Korea. After reading it I have better understanding of what makes them tick. I may not agree with them but I see where they are coming from. It has helped me get a better feel for the latest rhetoric coming out of the North.