Understanding North Korea through its propaganda

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.

麥爾斯

麥爾斯生於紐澤西州，在百慕達、南非與德國三個地方成長。他在德國杜賓根大學獲得北韓研究的博士學位。在出版極具爭議的《讀者宣言》（A Reader’s Manifesto, Melville House, 2002）之前，他已完成了《韓雪野與北韓文學》（Han Sorya and North Korean Literature, Cornell East Asia Series, 1994）這部金日成時代北韓文化的先驅研究。目前他在南韓東西大學國際研究系擔任系主任。他是《大西洋月刊》（The Atlantic）的特約編輯，同時也為該刊撰寫文學評論。麥爾斯定期為《紐約時報》（New York Times）、《華爾街日報》（Wall Street Journal）與其他學術刊物撰寫有關北韓的文章。