Mick Hartley

I've mentioned B.R.Myers before. He's the author of The Cleanest Race (published in the US but not yet here), which argues that it's a mistake to think of North Korea as a Stalinist state; rather, with its emphasis on racial purity, it belongs on the far right of the political spectrum. Hitchens reviewed it here. Now, in Foreign Policy, Myers writes on North Korea's Race Problem:

North Korea's race-centric ideology was inspired by that of the fascist Japanese who ruled the peninsula from 1910 until the end of World War II. Having been taught by their colonizers to regard themselves as part of a superior Yamato race, the North Koreans in 1945 simply carried on the same mythmaking in a Koreanized form. This can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and so too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader. This paranoid nationalism might sound crude and puerile, but it is only in this ideological context that the country's distinguishing characteristics, which the outside world has long found so baffling, make perfect sense. Up close, North Korea is not Stalinist — it's simply racist.

To illustrate the article there's a slideshow of North Korean propaganda posters. This heroic tableau, for example:

[Image: Melville House Publishing and B.R. Myers]

"Kim Jong Il comforts a distraught nation after his father's death on July 8, 1994. In the background is the 66-foot bronze statue of the Great Leader that was erected on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang in 1972. Dark skies in depictions of this period symbolize the growing threat from without."

There's classic footage here of North Koreans reacting to the death of the Great Leader.