Mick Hartley

B.R.Myers' ground-breaking 2009 book The Cleanest Race argued that the familiar descriptions of North Korea were wide of the mark. The Kim dynasty, invariably characterised as Communist or Stalinist, was in fact guided by a paranoid, race-based nationalism with roots in Japanese fascist thought.

His latest book, North Korea's Juche Myth, published last year, seems to have slipped under the radar somewhat. I don't recall seeing a review anywhere here in the UK. 

For decades the North Korean regime has preached a virulent race-nationalism to its own people. At the same time, however, it has succeeded in making outsiders believe that it is guided by a solipsistic, inward-directed ideology of self-reliant communism. This in turn has nurtured the wishful assumption that the regime no longer has serious designs on South Korea. In this book, his follow-up to The Cleanest Race (2009), B.R. Myers shows that although the myth of Juche has done great service for the regime at home and abroad, the ideology’s content has never played a significant role in policy-making or domestic propaganda. The North Korean nuclear program must be grasped in the context of the regime’s true ideological commitment, which is not to self-reliance, but to “final victory” over the rival state….

Myers makes a convincing case that what the DPRK has boasted for decades to international audiences as its unique guiding ideology of self-reliance is actually a sham doctrine, bearing no relevance to the actual policies of the DPRK, either domestically or internationally…

Now Stephan Haggard takes a look – in two parts:

One of the more interesting findings of Myers’ book is the extent to which juche-like ideas—and even the term itself—were more prevalent in [South Korean dictator] Park Chung Hee’s efforts to provide an ideological justification for his seizure of power. The following from Park’s inauguration speech in 1963 bears quoting in full because it is virtually indistinguishable from the later formulations that are peddled by the North Korean regime:

“To promote this great reform movement….we must first unfold an individual spiritual revolution in ourselves. Our citizens, starting with each individual, must foster an autonomous subject consciousness (chajujok chuch’e uisik), firmly establishing a spirit of independence and self-help, according to which one realizes one’s own fate….”

Such vaguely humanist formulations were visible in two other purportedly foundational formulations of the concept: in a speech Kim Il Sung gave in Indonesia in 1965 (the so-called Aliarcham speech) and in prepared remarks he provided to questions posed by some Japanese journalists in 1972. But as Myers argues persuasively, in neither case were these ideological statements related in any way to domestic political developments. Rather, they increasingly became a stylized ideological discourse designed to shore up Kim Il Sung’s reputation abroad among the ideologically gullible. These ranged from Joan Robinson—whom Myers attributes the error of seeing juche as North Korean as opposed to Korean nationalism—to Eldridge Cleaver, to fringe splinterists who were paid handsomely for their sycophancy….

The North Koreans appeared to have stumbled on the external benefits of having their own obfuscatory ideological line, particularly if it could play to the biases of potential sympathizers; here, of course, is where Myers’ rubs engagers the wrong way. In the formulation of the concept provided to a group of Japanese journalists in 1972, Kim Il Sung waxes loftily about how a thorough understanding of the idea would require endless study of the underlying texts. As Myers notes in another one of his acid formulations, “this sort of bluster has remained integral to the juche discourse ever since. No matter what text one consults, one is made to feel, through a kind of infinite regress, that the argumentative groundwork must have been laid somewhere else (p. 121).”

The explanation offered to the Japanese—cooked up by Hwang Yong Jop—consisted in little more than some humanist platitudes that are vaguely reminiscent of the early Marx: man is the master of his fate, the masses are key to any revolution, one must pay attention to local historical conditions, and so on. We genuinely wonder whether all of the little groups that are established abroad devoted to Kim Il Sung-Kim Jong Il-Juche thought genuinely absorb the massive “collected works” spit out by the national publishers or whether they were initially simply bought and paid for; Myers provides ample and humorous anecdotes with respect to the latter.

But juche did come to have an important domestic political role in the succession. Although this story has been told before, Myers gets it particularly right because of his insight into how ideology should be conceived as propaganda. Kim Jong Il’s fascination with culture was partly just the whim of a spoiled autocrat’s kid; if you think this is an exaggeration, read the marvelous account of the North Korean film industry by Paul Fischer entitled A Kim Jong Il Production. But by positioning himself as the keeper of the juche flame, Kim Jong Il was able to define a political position that left any adversaries bereft of ideological breathing room

And what was going on in the so-called “inner track” as Kim Jong Il climbed the ladder to succession had nothing to do with juche. Rather, Kim Jong Il was formulating the true ideological core of the regime, namely unconditional loyalty to the leader, unconditional loyalty to his revolutionary thought, and above all, unconditional loyalty to his every instruction. As Myers points out, juche actually does not even appear in any of these crucial formulations, most notably in the Ten Principles outlined in 1967 and made public in the inner track in April 1974. The Orwellian nature of the exercise barely needs comment: an ideological system that Myers translates as “Subject Thought” reaches its culmination in a set of ten commandments in which the subject is eviscerated, realized only through complete submission to the Leader.

Although Myers has little sympathy for engagers who place some weight on the mysteries of juche as a driver of North Korean behavior, he is particularly disdainful of the way that South Korean leftists and intellectuals get sucked in. As he points out, the appeal is precisely that the Americans—the central adversary for a significant portion of the student movement—can’t possibly understand the mysteries of Korean nationalism that juche thought is tapping.

Myers basically sees the period from the famine forward as a period when juche undergoes secular decline at home, just as it is being treated with increasing seriousness among commenters abroad.Juche gets fewer and fewer mentions as other formulations—military-first, strong and prosperous nation, the byungjin line—rotate across the ideological marquee. As Myers concludes, the fact thatjuche never served as an orienting ideological concept for the regime does not diminish its importance: “By crediting Kim Il Sung with an original, world-renowned doctrine, the propaganda apparatus enhanced his prestige, undermined internal challenges to his rule, strengthened pride in the DPRK and helped save the regime’s face when its patron-states collapsed.”

I doubt somehow that Myers work will be featuring on the reading list of the Juche Idea Study Group of England.

Joan Robinson (para 3 above) was a Cambridge economist and early useful idiot:

Robinson made several trips to China, reporting her observations and analyses in China: An Economic Perspective (1958), The Cultural Revolution in China (1969), and Economic Management in China (1975; 3rd edn, 1976), in which she praised the Cultural Revolution. In October 1964, Robinson also visited North Korea, which implemented social reforms and collectivisation at the time, and wrote in her report "Korean Miracle" that the country's success was due to "the intense concentration of the Koreans on national pride" under Kim Il-sung, "a messiah rather than a dictator". She also stated in reference to the division of Korea that "[o]bviously, sooner or later the country must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism."…

The Cultural Revolution in China is written from the perspective of trying to understand the thinking that lay behind the revolution, particularly Mao Zedong's preoccupations. Mao is seen as aiming to recapture a revolutionary sense in a population that had known only, or had grown used to, stable Communism, so that it could "re-educate the Party" (pp. 20, 27); to instil a realisation that the people needed the guidance of the Party and much as the other way round (p. 20); to re-educate intellectuals who failed to see that their role in society, like that of all other groups, was to 'Serve the People' (pp. 33, 43); and finally to secure a succession, not stage-managed by the Party hierarchy or even by Mao himself but the product of interaction between a revitalised people and a revitalised Party (p. 26).

On the whole, the book emphasises the positive aspects of Mao's "moderate and humane" intentions…