Brian Reynolds Myers on Art

"The world's complacency about North Korea’s nukes is inspired in large part by memories of stodgy Soviets who had the bomb for 40 years and never used it."

"ntil the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany's size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero."

"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."

"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."

"By forbearing to march behind the yin-yang flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the South Korean athletes are making a bigger sacrifice than the North Koreans, in whose iconography the banner of the DPRK ranks lower than the party standard, which in turn ranks much lower than the Supreme Commander's standard, the flag of the personality cult."

"The U.S. was never stronger, North Korea never weaker than in 1994, yet even then the fear of an artillery attack on Seoul prevented an air-strike on Yongbyeon. You can put it another way and say that the very success of the nuclear program, the fact that it has gone this far, proves that it was never necessary for North Korea's security in the first place."

"t was the Yankees and not Korean “reds” – a tiny force even in their 1920s heyday — whom the Japanese authorities were most intent on infamizing. After Hirohito’s surrender all the main tropes went straight into the agitprop of the South Korean left. Thus did the Workers’ Party vilify Yankees as “bloodsuckers” when agitating Jeju islanders, who had been subjected to especially intense Japanese propaganda during the war."

"istorians are going to look back on the North Korean nuclear crisis, and wonder why it took us so long to see what was always staring us in the face. Here we have a rapidly arming country that keeps pledging to eliminate a rival state, which it invaded in 1950 and attacked twice only 7 years ago, and most Western observers still think it can’t possibly be serious. They believe it’s nuclearizing only to formalize a de facto security from American attack that its artillery, aimed squarely on this city, has afforded it for decades."

"Those who treat "axis of evil" remark and the bombing of Libya as watershed traumas in the North Korean psyche are really lampooning their own narrative, because if a regime has spent 50 or 60 years defying, humiliating and threatening a trigger-happy superpower like the United States, and the greatest shocks it has been dealt in return have been a rude line in a speech and an attack on a completely different country, its safety clearly does not depend on developing a new kind of weapon. Its conventional artillery must have been protecting it very well indeed."