Talk on North Korean Ideology

[Cynical Cat]

Here is a talk by an American writer living in South Korea on North Korean ideology. It is, he argues, neither Communist nor Confucian. It is instead, he argues, a race based ideology that was based on Japanese efforts to foster and then co-opt Korean nationalism in the early 20th Century when Korea was a Japanese possession.

There's a lot more to it than that and after listening to him I'm going to try and track down his book.

[frigidmagi]

You know the Koreans had their own Imperial cults. They didn't need the Japanese to teach that part to them.

Couple other bits.

Juche is fairly coherent, it's self-sufficiency and self-reliance taken to batshit insane levels. Is the North Korean government following this? Oh Hell No, but then the USSR wasn't following Marxist ideology very well was it?

Other then that, this is interesting and I encourage people to watch it.

[frigidmagi]

Another edit: I was really surprised to find that most of our Korean experts don't speak Korean. Way to drop the ball guys.

[Charon]

Is that fact really that surprising though? I've heard that most of the people in the think tanks involved with Iraq didn't even know there were Sunni and Shi'ite. And that when a private citizen involved in building schools in Afghanistan gave a briefing to several important U.S. Senators they actually learned more about the country in his one hour long speech than all of their briefings in years.

[The Minx]

Whaaat?

How much do these guys at "think tanks" get paid, anyhow? I wonder whether I could get a job there. At least I knew that there were Sunni and Shiites in Iraq before the war began. Small wonder that Bush managed to screw it all up with advisers such as these.


Anyway: OP link is really interesting. I didn't know that the state control of information had broken down so much and that the maternal aspect of the state was so important.

I'm not surprised that the state there is so heavily dependent on military justification for its existence or that they're more properly fascist than communist. They've even taken the word "communist" out of their constitution. How about that.

With so little room to maneuver, I wonder whether it's only a matter of time before they either trigger a war or collapse. But if collapse is immanent (or if China agrees to help hasten it) like that guy suggests, won't North Korea just trigger the war anyway? If the leaders there feel that everything is about to collapse around them anyway, what would they have to lose by starting a war?

[frigidmagi]

I've heard that most of the people in the think tanks involved with Iraq didn't even know there were Sunni and Shi'ite. And that when a private citizen involved in building schools in Afghanistan gave a briefing to several important U.S. Senators they actually learned more about the country in his one hour long speech than all of their briefings in years.

I'm a little sceptical about that given that a brand new Lt in the Marines (Military Intelligence aka the oxymoron) gave my unit a brief before the war and went over in deep detail the divides between the Sunni and Shi'ite in Iraq and their different beliefs. If the military could pull that off on a platoon level, I expect the rest of the government to be able to explain that to policy makers.