Brian Reynolds Myers - North Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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