“The Cleanest Race” & The Importance Of Fact-Checking Ideologies
Tags: Socialism, North Korea, Propaganda, Asia, Cold War

For over 70 years, we have been taught that North Korea is a communist state, a Stalinist hell, created by the Soviets to spread global communism. Humans are wont to take things at face value, so this general understanding of the nation was taken as such and still to this day. Ordinary people, hardcore conservatives, and tankies alike still buy into this myth that the DPRK is a run-of-the-mill Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, communist, socialist…whatever-you-want-to-call-it, nation stuck in time — a living fossil that instills fear and bewilderment to the outside world.

Traditional explanations for why North Korea is the way it is today have generally fallen flat due to flimsy logic. The people who tout said-explanations are basically still stuck in a Cold War-type viewpoint that glosses over some pretty critical details. Whether it’s the fact that the North Korean government suddenly forced its citizens to divorce foreign spouses in the 1960s or Cuban diplomats in the 1960s were almost lynched by paranoid North Korean mobs or that Marxist-Leninism has long-since been removed from the DPRK constitution, the discourse has gone very much the same way.

Andrei Lankov, a Russian who’s been to the DPRK many times, and Brian Reynold Myers, who has studied Korea extensively, have both been invaluable to blowing away the Cold War illusions about North Korea that persist to this day. Every dumbass conservative and tankie, even non-Americans, do not hold the kinds of credentials these two, or many East Asians in general, have. They don’t speak or understand Korean, let alone any other languages besides their own, and cannot get past ideological worldviews that ignore culture. My own Korean is poor, to say the least, although I can read hangul and have amassed a somewhat decent vocabulary (mainly because it translates so neatly from Japanese), though I am more than qualified to tell off the swaths of Che shirt-wearing mouthbreathers who don’t know what Widaehan-Suryeongnim means or that they are widely dismissed by their darling as Miguk-nom. Just like their ignorant, far-right counterparts, they take bad translations like “Dear Leader” and “dotard” at face-value and repeat them verbatim like they do other badly-translated words.

In short, North Korea has ad-libbed Imperial Japanese propaganda down to symbols and imagery for decades to their own people while telling the world they are building a socialist utopia and are victimized by American imperialists (South Korea has done something very similar, albeit with a dramatic decrease with the advent of democracy in the early 1990s). Their worldview is colored by beliefs in their own racial and cultural superiority and militarism with nary a mention of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao in their thought processes. The sheer isolation the country imposes on itself is based on an ideology that seeks to absolutely minimize all foreign influences, as this would contaminate their pure race. The superficial Juche ideology doesn’t even play much of a role in their worship for the Kims; the word Juche, itself, literally means “subject” in Korean, as in, the subject of a book or a conversation, although it can be twisted according to another meaning: “main body”. Imperial Japan is not as studied as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, although it’s worth nothing that it was a lot worse there than people realize and the way their military thought and behaved is strikingly identical to what we see not only in North Korea today, but also Thailand and Burma/Myanmar.

It’s important to look beyond state propaganda to see what the people of a nation really believe, as there is often a huge different between that which is meant for foreigners and that which is meant for its own civilians (which almost always goes untranslated). Unfortunately, ethnic and nationalist chauvinism plays out even in countries with a nominally tolerant or superficially enlightened government. Domestic propaganda in present-day Russia, for instance, recycles and regurgitates a vomit of nostalgia glorifying the Kievan Rus, Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and Orthodox Church all at once while telling foreigners that they are victims of Western imperialism. American propaganda tells the world it is fighting for freedom and democracy while telling people here that “we are a Republic, not a democracy”, that our foray in Afghanistan is the only thing preventing World War III, and that our homeless are the envy of the world.

B.R. Myers was prudent enough to research and compare the racist ideologies of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa with North Korea. I believe this is worth applying to others like Turkey, Israel, Pakistan, among others. People who believe in notions of racial superiority are an unrepentant lot and depend on gish-galloping and torrents of lies to exhaust their detractors’ patience. This isn’t to say Internet trolls always represent what the government believes, although they quite often do and these can very well be the secretly-held beliefs of their politicians. Hasbara trolls, Wumao, Turks, and various others do a great job at saying politically-incorrect things that their own governments are often too skittish to say openly.

Cynically, you can conclude in the logical extreme that all countries are racist, all countries are nationalistic, and they’re all bad, though I believe this to be factually wrong for too many reasons to count. Xenophobia exists everywhere, but not every country has the military might or the desire to convert their xenophobia into a grandiose ideology with which to back a dictatorship. Unless you personally know and interact with people from other parts of the world, it’s not easy to know what they think over there and you might have to do your own research, which often involves learning words in other languages and using Google Translate. Many state ideologies are based on xenophobia, lack of debate or discussion, and a hypersensitivity to outside commentary, so indulging in this xenophobia by identifying with them is counterproductive. If you take sides with the Chinese government, you’re taking the side of anti-Japanese, anti-European, anti-Desi racism and if you take sides with Turkish government, you’re taking the side of anti-Orthodox Christian bigotry, anti-Arab racism, anti-Kurd racism, and so on.

Don’t blindly accept any narrative handed over to you, whether by the media, by some nutjob on the street, your family, or whoever. Always fact-check from various sources to settle on a set of viewpoints. Governments always lie and not just to their own people and it’s important to figure out what these lies are, why they lie, and to understand their “true form”.