A Response to Twitterati
— B.R. Myers

The venom with which so many North Korea scholars, observers and hobbyists now rail against the notion of a unification drive suggests that the issue is a very personal and emotional one for them. Otherwise, if the idea were as preposterous or hopelessly outdated as they claim to think, they would be content to sit back and let the course of events prove it wrong – much as I did in 2011/2012 when everyone else was predicting that Kim Jong Un would break with the military-first policy and reach out to Washington.

At the beginning I derived their anger from the fear that awareness of the North’s unification drive might induce Donald Trump to order a strike on the country. I therefore made clear in my RAS speech that it conduces more to a peaceful resolution of the crisis than the conventional wisdom, and called on the United States to address the ideological problems inside the alliance instead. This only made everyone angrier.

Oddly enough, the most furious people are on the softline or apologetic part of the Pyongyang-watching spectrum. They never get this worked up when North Korea is called a gangster state, a drug-running operation or a giant gulag. Nor do they express such fervent opposition to (say) imperialist proposals for the US and China to get together and decide the fate and political character of the peninsula on their own.

No, it seems that the craziest, most reprehensible thing one can possibly say about North Korea is that it wants to unify the peninsula with as little bloodshed as possible. And apparently the worst thing one can say about the South Koreans — “INSANE” “psychobabble” even – is that the North might have reason to believe they wouldn’t fight to the death against such an effort. (Needless to say, I never said South Koreans are ready to “give away” their republic, as “T.K.” is no doubt well aware.)

I repeat: it is self-styled progressives and liberals who find these ideas so scandalous. True, I have often clashed at conferences with South Korean conservatives who bristle at my emphasis on the North’s nationalism. Being nationalists themselves, albeit of a more moderate sort, they think it makes the regime look too respectable, dignified, legitimate. I am told to chalk up the unification drive to a communizing urge — “it sounds scarier that way,” I was helpfully advised — or to the regime’s evil desire to cause as much suffering as possible. But the other side of the spectrum now seems far more upset.

Particularly striking is the general tendency to identify the idea as my personal thing. “T.K.” has not yet questioned the sanity of South Korea’s Minister of Unification, though he too is alarmed by increasing signals that Pyongyang wants to use its nukes to take over the peninsula. And many quite moderate analysts in South Korea have been saying much the same stuff since the 1990s. But for the Westerners now raging on Twitter, this is my trademarked idea. (As it becomes harder and harder to refute, the tendency will no doubt go in the opposite direction.)

Now, these are very America-centric people, which is one reason why my call for a more inter-Korean understanding of the nuclear crisis bothered them so much in the first place. Even when young Europeans begin to study Korea they first turn West and not East, the better to view the peninsula through the orthodox US-academic prism. (The proud inaugural issue of the new European Journal of Korean Studies was advertised as containing a lead-off article by an Ivy League professor; take a wild guess which one.) No idea merits discussion, it seems, until an American expresses it.

But the more obvious explanation for the pretended assumption of my original and exclusive authorship is that it’s much easier to identify the idea with one person, and then engage in ad hominem attack, than to do the work of refutation.

My natural tendency is simply to ignore this stuff. Show me a persona non grata, and I’ll show you a persona non give a shit — which is to say that I’ve always found my outsider status more of a liberating force on my research than anything else, and don’t want to give it up. I hate to think how I would have prevaricated and fudged things had I been one of the boys. Something else I’ve learned: Arguing with people in an intellectual rut is the quickest way to end up in one yourself.

But unfortunately we aren’t talking Etruscan pottery here. The issue of North Korea’s intentions is one of enormous and immediate importance to the lives of millions of people. I have therefore decided to respond to the ad hominem attacks in order to force the other side to begin taking the effort to refute my arguments. And no, just apodictically stating that North Korea has no interest in unification (as is done en passant in many articles) is not refuting anything. Many people seem to regard their own gut feelings as reliable instruments of political analysis; if they can’t imagine something happening, if they just don’t see it, they rush to Twitter to announce the news. But that’s not refutation either.

Vague and indignant noises have long been made about my allegedly unscholarly approach to North Korea. Apparently I am to be dismissed as a researcher of literature or comparative literature who applies that “incredibly weak methodology” to everything. No textual examples are ever provided of this.

It is of course true that I wrote the first — and for many years only — English-language history of the North Korean cultural scene, in which I focused on the propaganda writings of Kim Il Sung’s chief iconographer: Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994).

That work is also, as far as I know, the only American book on North Korea published during Kim Il Sung’s lifetime to have remained consistently in print ever since – which isn’t bad for a doctoral thesis. Let this serve as a reminder that my assertions in regard to the country, however much controversy they arouse at the beginning, tend to hold up very well over time. I have made my share of mistakes, but I know of no Pyongyang watcher of comparable seniority with a better track record than mine.

In any case, I haven’t researched literature per se for decades, instead focusing on ideology and propaganda as a whole. My discussion of these subjects is not only much more extensive than that undertaken by any Western political scientist writing on North Korea, but also much more political-scientific in its approach. In addition, I make far heavier use of untranslated primary materials than anyone else I can think of; more North Korean sources are cited in a single chapter of North Korea’s Juche Myth than in entire well-funded tomes on the country.

I hereby challenge anyone to compare the length, content and methodology of my writings on Juche with Bruce Cumings’ or Han S. Park’s and to argue anything different. But of course it’s much easier to dismiss my latest book on the grounds that it was self-published.

Let me digress here to explain why I put North Korea’s Juche Myth out myself. 1) I was aware of how a colleague’s manuscript had been brazenly plagiarized in the pre-publication stage, and by someone I had every reason to expect would be asked to vet my own. 2) I did not want a relatively short book put out at some outrageous library-bilking price by the likes of Routledge. 3) Due to the book’s relevance to the nuclear crisis I wanted it out as fast as possible. 4) Having funded my own research – out of principle I have never applied for or received a grant in my life – I needed to recoup my costs with a greater percentage of the profits than a publisher would have given me. 5) Books count for very little in South Korea’s tenure system, so I had nothing to lose. 6) I believed that the book would be judged on its own merits. Naïve, I know – but this was a year before the non-reaction to the Tyranny of the Weak scandal woke me up to the field’s true priorities.

Speaking of which scandal: None of the people who have long professed to find me unscholarly registered the slightest indignation when the field’s most hyped-up North Koreanist was revealed (by me among others) to have fabricated sources on a scale never before seen in Asian Studies. None of those who find me so arrogant thought it arrogant of him to engage — over several years — in systematic plagiarism of a professor earning a tiny fraction of the money he himself was getting. On the contrary, the victim and I were scolded for drawing attention to the scandal. To this day I remain the only one of the many reviewers of Tyranny of the Weak to have withdrawn his recommendation of it. The blurbs and rave reviews by established scholars are all still there on Amazon.

In closing, then, let me urge everyone who is outraged by the notion of a North Korean unification drive to calm down and engage in the work of argument, of refutation. I dare say there are much better forums for that than Twitter.

For the last time: The issue is not whether the South Koreans really would yield to the North, but whether the North Koreans have sufficient reason to believe they would. In this context I also want to call on journalists to cease filtering out news they perceive as bolstering the case I and others are now making. It was remarkable, for example, how many reporters (and academic analysts on blogs) said nothing about Kim Jong Un’s many references to unification in his New Year’s address.

UPDATE (9 January 2018)

“T.K” (whose real name is apparently Nathan Park) has responded to my post as best he knows how: in a series of tweets, each one throwing out a different point without actually arguing it. Among them, however, is one that says:

As I said before, I think Myers largely gets N. Korea correct.

I take this to mean that he and I are in agreement as to North Korea’s intentions, which, as I have repeatedly said, is the main issue here.  What angers him, it seems, is my refusal to rule out the possibility that North Korea could ever succeed in subjugating the South.

This is yet another of the many contradictions I see in softline or progressive discussion of North Korea. On the one hand these people are at great pains to argue that it’s not such a bad place after all, and that it gets better, more South-like, every year: cell phones, pizza shops, gourmet coffee, ski resorts, and so on. They sneer at the old conservative propaganda that showed North Koreans with horns and red skins, and stress that people up there are no different from people down here when you get right down to it. Those who travel there themselves can’t seem to get enough of the place. On the other hand they think it “INSANE” to cast doubt on South Koreans’ readiness to fight the North to the death.

“T.K.” apparently finds it absurd of me even to suggest that South Koreans could assent to North-South confederation. I have written a blog post on the subject, but let me point out again here that Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun both committed themselves to the joint pursuit with Kim Jong Il of some form of league (the South’s weaker term) or confederation (the North’s stronger one) during their visits to Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007. No public outrage ensued.  In fact, in 2010 Lee Myung-bak’s refusal to implement the summit agreements was held up by many as a cause of the North’s twin attacks.

In late 2012 Moon Jae-in pledged to implement confederation — note that he insisted on using the North’s term — during his presidency. He went on to win 48% in the election that year. (To hear his own camp tell it, he would have beaten Park Geun-hye if not for NIS meddling.) After reiterating his commitment to confederation in the presidential campaign of 2017, and stating that his concept of it was not significantly different from the North’s, Moon was elected with 41% of the vote. The Justice Party candidate, another supporter of confederation, got just over 6%. I should add that a large part of the People’s Party is known to support confederation too; see for example Pak Chi-won’s avowed, unconstitutional interest in becoming the South’s ambassador in Pyongyang.

As I made clear in my RAS talk and in an ensuing Slate interview — though “T.K.” appears to have missed those parts — the South Korean left has too much to lose to want a North Korean takeover. (Judging from the clothing and coffee cups I see at rival street demonstrations, the left’s rank and file is generally much more affluent than the right’s.) Those who support confederation do so precisely because they see in it the possibility to drag the process of unification out over years and even decades, at the end of which time, so the general hope, the two Koreas would coalesce as equal and like-minded partners. Needless to say, the expectation is that by that time the North would look and think a lot more like the South.

The problem is that North Korea would almost certainly demand (as its own propaganda and statements to diplomats make clear) the pull-out of US troops either before or in the first stages of confederation; and that it would then do what it has always pledged to do.

“T.K.” may well be right in believing that the South Koreans would never agree to the withdrawal of US troops, or that they would fight an aggressing North inside a confederation even after such an event. I have stronger doubts, perhaps because I live in South Korea and talk on these subjects not only with academics (some of whom are now in or connected with the Moon administration) but also with students both at my own and at other universities. But at the risk of repeating myself — and it is not a “dodge” but the very crux of the issue! — the question is what North Korea believes is likely.

At the very least it must be conceded that there is great potential for a disastrous miscalculation down the road — certainly great enough for the issue of the North’s intentions to merit calm and open-minded discussion right now. Again: Twitter is not the place for it.

UPDATE (3 September 2018)

I might as well publish all my responses to online criticism as updates to this Twitterati post, regardless of where they appear, unless they a) seem important enough to merit a new blog post or b) pertain to one of my posts in particular, in which case I will respond in an update underneath it.

Recently I was made aware of a strange Tumblr account devoted to the defense of North Korea against real or perceived criticism from virtually every foreigner in the discussion, including Tim Shorrock.

I come in for special attention on account of my “family history.”

Anti-DPRK Propagandist B.R. Myers Has a Family History of Oppressing Koreans

The above even includes a link to a photograph of my father’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

The assertion that he was General George Patton II’s “personal chaplain” is of course false. There is no such position in the US Army.

Also false is the assertion that my father claimed there were only “a few prostitutes” catering to all of USFK. This is belied in the very same Tumblr post by his statement that “a few prostitutes” would regularly arrive at the ville in Waegwan from Busan or Seoul.

It goes on:

Ultimately, B.R. Myers’s father did and said nothing to counteract the US military’s rape regime. He just encouraged soldiers to join a photography club instead.

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Considering Glenn Lynn Myers’s privileged position in the US colonial apparatus in Korea, it’s fair to ask whether a US military intelligence outfit chose B.R. Myers to continue his father’s work on behalf of empire.

A very tight close-up on a scan of a page is usually a sign that something in the textual vicinity contradicts the excerpter. Is that the case here? Let’s read on in the book in question:

Then, while driving in his jeep one night that winter, he came upon the Waegwan orphanage.

“There were over a hundred children there, and I couldn’t believe how shabby they looked,” [Myers] remembers. “They were barefoot — and it was cold outside. One kid had a belt made out of wire to keep his pants up. They didn’t even have anywhere to take a bath — they just had helmets filled with water occasionally dumped over their heads. And, of course, most of them were GI babies who’d been fathered by soldiers and just left at the police station.”

If was especially bad to be an orphan in Korea. “If you can’t trace your family back five or six generations, you’re nobody,” Myers notes. So he decided to add some theater to his anti-VD campaign: to raise awareness about the orphans’ plight in every crevice of the camp — and, true to his mission — use it as a reminder of sexual consequences.

Myers raised money among the soldiers to buy clothes and shoes for the orphans. He enlisted Army engineers to build them a proper bathhouse. At the end of every month, Myers sat at the head of the pay line with a “For the Orphans of Waegwan” donation can. Some of his in-your-face tactics hit too close. When Myers got permission from the mess sergeants to bring a group of children to the mess for Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, one of his commanders, a lieutenant colonel, lashed out.

“He pulled me aside and said, ‘This is our Thanksgiving, not theirs. What the hell are they doing here? You have no business doing this and you’ll pay for it’ — the implication being that he’d get me,” Myers remembers. “And this is a guy who’d just come from church!” (Growing Up Patton, 236-237)

Of course I heard all this many times growing up. Never did I sense on the part of my father any effort to whitewash the US Army’s connections to the sex trade. On the contrary! Note that while his account draws attention to the most abject victims of that trade, the people behind the Tumblr blog chose to overlook it — as they would not have, had they intended to drive home the negative effects of the US military presence.

Their goal instead is to show that I’m of particularly bad lineage — bad sŏngbun, to put it in North Korean terms.

It makes a change from the sort of ad hominem attacks I usually get. But those who want to defend North Korea against the charge of racism would do well to try a different approach.

UPDATE (17 September 2019):

The American behind the Tumblr account referred to above, whose name rhymes with the title of a famous science fiction movie, is back to harping in classic DPRK-style on my bad sŏngbun or bloodline as the offspring of a military officer. But this time it’s on Twitter, where he also says Myers “distorts the Korean language to weaponize it against Koreans.”

The evidence on display is my “mistranslation” of the Korean word p’um as bosom in The Cleanest Race. Yet he admits that this is one of the words given in the relevant entry of the Korean-English dictionary.

His main line of argument: in North Korea’s official English translations of reports on Kim Il Sung’s or Kim Jong Il’s doings, the noun p’um tends to be left out, leaving only the English equivalent of the attendant Korean verb anda/angida, namely to embrace/to be embraced.

This recalls how a European said years ago I should have translated ŏbŏi as father and not (literally) as parent, and  have translated choguk as Fatherland and not Motherland, despite the stock North Korean formula ŏmŏni choguk (Mother Homeland), because the more normal-sounding words are the ones he invariably hears from English-speaking guides and interlocutors on his visits to Pyongyang.

Why should I care about English-language export propaganda? My interest is in North Korean myth as received by North Koreans and not white people. That word p’um is there for a reason and cannot simply be ignored, however ridiculous it may look to some — though not to me — in a faithful English translation.

After all if one wants to say in Korean “The child was held/embraced by its father,” one need write only “Ai ga abŏji ege angyŏtta.” (See the headline “Child embraced/held by father” and the accompanying photograph here.) One cannot change it to “Abŏji ŭi p’um e angyŏtta,” without directing the listener’s attention to some degree to that part of the body.

The question is why p’um appears so often in personality-cult texts when the sense of an embrace or hug can be communicated without it. There are indeed references from colonial Korea to fathers holding children to their p’um, but this hardly disproves my point about the roots of the North’s official culture. Besides, as I make repeatedly clear in the relevant few pages of my book — from which Mr B quotes as selectively and misleadingly as from the book referred to in the last update to this blog post — the leader’s p’um is often praised without the verb in question.

So happy about the warm love he bestowed on us/ We buried our faces in his bosom. (From “The Leader Came to the Sentry Post,” quoted in The Cleanest Race, 106.)

The harder the cold autumn wind blows / the more I yearn for the warm bosom of the General. (From “Where Are You, General I Long For?” quoted in The Cleanest Race, 107.)

There can be no doubt that the Leader’s p’um is intended to function in the personality-cult “Text” primarily as a maternal attribute.  A Great Parent who lets grown men and women rest their heads on his chest, as Kim Il Sung does in the picture on the cover of my book, is behaving more like a traditional mother than a traditional father from the North Koreans’ perspective — which is a very different perspective from ours. (The list of South Korean male behaviors North Koreans consider laughably effeminate is a long one, as I know from defectors among my acquaintances.)

What, I wonder, though only with mild curiosity, is Mr B’s point? That Kim Il Sung is not inter alia a mother figure? Does he want to revive the old US-academic orthodoxy of North Korea as one great Confucian family, with Kim Il Sung as old-school patriarch? How then to explain what I call the “pointedly androgynous or — more accurately — hermaphroditic designation” (TCR, 105) of Parent Leader?

Kim Jong Il himself said his father’s motherly qualities of sensitivity and meticulous care were the key to his successful leadership. (See TCR,105.) I hasten to add, before some feminist or masculinist objection is made, that he (or his ghostwriter) considered these to be maternal and thus feminine qualities, not me.

Of course the Dear Leader was often praised on the same grounds, usually more extravagantly so. On at least one occasion he was apostrophized as “Our Great Mother, General Kim Jong Il.” (TCR, 125.)