Brian Reynolds Myers Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

Koreans in both the north and the south tend to cherish the myth that of all peoples in the world, they are the least inclined to premeditated evil.

Brian Reynolds Myers
I don't particularly like South Korean literature.

Brian Reynolds Myers
They have a much more positive view of the country than I do.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Eastern European diplomats in the early 1960s were aghast at the North Koreans' assertions that a nuclear confrontation was nothing to be afraid of, and that the time had come for another invasion of the South. It is by no means certain that this sort of adventurist thinking has been abandoned. In a propaganda novel set in 1993, Kim Jong Il and his generals regard a likely American air strike on the Yongbyeon nuclear facility as the perfect opportunity for a "sacred war" (seongjeon) of reunification.

Brian Reynolds Myers
This is no time to get sentimental about our old ally. Seoul asks that U.S. troops stay, but at the same time it poses as a neutral mediator of the resulting tensions, often playing down the nuclear threat just as Pyongyang seems bent on playing it up; a disastrous miscommunication among the three parties seems all but preordained.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Koreans are more comfortable with Americans who behave like Americans.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Even as the regime tells the outside world it wants nothing but better relations with Washington, it tells its own people that better relations are neither desirable nor conceivable. In January of 2003 Pyongyang issued a taunting poster of a missile attack on the Capitol.Later that year, with the six-party talks in progress, an old tale of murderous missionaries was reprinted in four North Korean magazines, complete with racist caricatures.

Brian Reynolds Myers
What must be acknowledged is that Kim Jong Il has evinced a genius for propaganda ever since managing the efflorescence of his father's cult in the 1960s. Even so, he cannot cover his lack of charisma completely; it's as if Hitler died and left the Third Reich to Goebbels.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Throughout the 1950s the regime resorted to crude racism in its anti-American propaganda, often treating inset eyes, big noses, and other Caucasian features as the manifestation of villainy. To the consternation of the diplomatic community, little effort was made to enlighten people about the existence of friendly big-noses, even though—as this spring's Cold War International History Project bulletin makes clear—North Korea's cities were rebuilt and its people fed and cared for with enormous amounts of assistance from Eastern Europe.

Brian Reynolds Myers
In South Korea, which is a much less conservative environment, politicians do not take their wives around with them as much as their American counterparts do. Showing pride in your wife is thought of as juvenile bad form. There's a special pejorative for people who do it.

Brian Reynolds Myers
The Korean people have always been more outward-looking than their insecure leaders, and for centuries this was especially true of those in the northern part of the peninsula.

Brian Reynolds Myers
They can't understand why any American in his right mind who's not escaping a jail term or something, would voluntarily want to come to Korea and live here.

Brian Reynolds Myers
To North Korea, diplomacy is another form of war.

Brian Reynolds Myers
What a relatively sensible bunch of people the Soviets were. In the mid-1950s they opposed Kim Il Sung's brutal collectivization of agriculture; Kim brushed off their advice, only to demand food aid when a murderous famine ensued. The more the regime evinced its incompetence by relying on foreigners, the more it needed to restrict the people's contact with them. By the 1960s the party line had taken a turn that reminded a Soviet diplomat of Nazi Germany, as citizens who married Europeans were banished to the provinces for "crimes against the Korean race."

Brian Reynolds Myers
We can all breathe a little easier knowing that our most formidable adversary wants his virgins in the here and now.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Not for nothing did Eldridge Cleaver say that the North Korean police made him miss the Oakland police.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Seoul doesn't have the will to 'De-Kim Il Sungify' North Korea.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Usually the South Korean left is blamed for the public's lack of patriotism, but it is the right who made blood nationalism a state religion.

Brian Reynolds Myers
The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here's a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it's part of Asia.

Brian Reynolds Myers
This urge to give the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt is in marked contrast to the public fury that erupted after the killings of two South Korean schoolgirls by an American military vehicle in 2002; it was widely claimed that the Yankees murdered them callously.

Brian Reynolds Myers
North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Korea cannot survive forever on the public perception of state legitimacy alone. The more it loses its economic distinctiveness vis-à-vis the rival state, the more the Kim regime must compensate with triumphs on the military and nuclear fronts. Another act of aggression against the Republic of Korea may well take place in the months ahead, not only to divert North Korean public attention from the failures of the consumer-oriented 'Strong and Prosperous Country' campaign, but also to strengthen the appeasement-minded South Korean opposition in the run-up to the presidential election in 2012.

Brian Reynolds Myers
The Juche regime has received substantial U.S. aid since the famine, but the dominant slogans of anti-American prop-aganda remain.

Brian Reynolds Myers
Far from being a stabilizing factor on the peninsula, the U.S. presence serves only to rally the North Koreans around their military-first government.

Brian Reynolds Myers
To approach North Korea as if it were the détente-era Soviet Union is asking for trouble.

Brian Reynolds Myers
South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel. Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak.

Brian Reynolds Myers
If South Korea's dictatorships were America's running dogs, then North Korea was the Eastern bloc's house cat: intractable, convinced of its superiority, and to some observers a more independent creature, but never much good at feeding itself—even after the can openers started falling silent in 1989.

Brian Reynolds Myers
In Germany, it's, let's say it's 5:59 and you're heading for the bakery or whatever and it's due to close at 6. The German will walk right up to that door and close it right in your face, they will lock it on the other side of that glass door with a shrug, like 'sorry'. A Korean would never do that, ever. And, and this is what I like about them.

Brian Reynolds Myers
North Korea is a unique socialist country in that its ruling ideology is conveyed through what is written about its leaders, not by them, and the message could hardly be simpler. Foreigners bad, Koreans good, Leader best.

Brian Reynolds Myers