North Korea's Juche Myth Paperback – October 1, 2015

Professor Brian Myers is a specialist in North Korean ideology and literature who works in South Korea. This book seeks to chart the history of a concept, ‘Juche’, as it is often rendered, untranslated in English. He demonstrates how the word has come to play an outsized role in how North Korea is understood by some sections of the academic and policy community. His conclusions are stark: Juche is a largely meaningless concept, devoid of real content, designed mainly to make the leadership look good on the world stage and achieve various foreign policy aims.

On the face of it, this is a boring if important project, but Myers is very gifted writer, and his extensive and thorough use of Korean language sources make for a fascinating and often gripping read. Ironically, as a fellow Korean speaker, student of North Korea and reader of North Korean sources, I can attest to the fact that this is no easy task: North Korean sources of the kind that Myers cites are extremely repetitive and dull, and such thorough going research would surely have required countless and largely thankless hours of work.

He is often searing in his criticism of those who have taken North Korean ideological grandstanding seriously, and this makes for refreshing and interesting reading. He is also not afraid to take on the claims of those who he broadly agrees with and admires when he disagrees with them. In the main, at least so far as this reviewer is concerned, he is basically fair, though sometimes one gets the feeling that he takes old claims and misguided remarks sometimes just made in passing a bit too seriously. Nonetheless, his directness and frankness in this regard makes the book all the more compelling.

Understandably, Myers’s combative, clear and frank approach to the issues he writes has made him both accessible to the general reader and controversial in the academy. But another reviewer who claims that Myers does not publish in academic journals is spreading falsehoods, just check Google Scholar or Wikipedia for the references.

I supposed this will be the opposite of the previous review,

In "The Juche Myth", B.R. Myers takes aim at the intellectual consistency of North Korea's official ideology, its history and progression from the 1960's to the present. Myers makes the argument that Juche is a sham doctrine whose value is only to impress people by its presence, rather than by its contents. Consequently, the real ideology of North Korea, at least since the early 1990's is that of a military-first state not too dissimilar from Imperial Japan or the fascistic regimes in Europe.

To be clear, this book is a work of intellectual history, but I think it is a demonstration of skill that Myers can pen a book about the writings of an ideology as notoriously dry and boring as Juche Thought, and do so in a way that is not only expansive in its scope, but very accessible in its readability. If you have read his 2010 book "The Cleanest Race", and have an interest in North Korea, then you will enjoy and benefit from this book.

The following review was sent to me with a request to put it up on Amazon.com. While I agree with much that is written here, I did not write it myself:
Contrary to a certain esteemed co-reviewer, I hold the (admittedly somewhat eccentric) view that a customer review should provide information primarily about the reviewed book, rather than the author’s other publications, the author’s educational background, the institutional structure of the publishing house, or the author’s competitors. In accordance with this principle, I would define the type of this book as a scholarly monograph solidly based on extensive empirical research but written in a markedly polemical style. As such, North Korea’s Juche Myth partly reproduces certain common patterns of North Korean studies but also provides some refreshingly new perspective. Determined to refute some specific views (which are popularly labeled as “revisionist”), the author created more an anti-antithesis than a neutral synthesis. In this one particular respect, the book’s approach has much in common with the “revisionist” publications it criticizes, because some of the latter (such as North Korea: Another Country by Bruce Cumings) were also strongly focused on refuting certain specific views about North Korea. Judging from an earlier customer review, it can also be predicted with reasonable certainty that the polemical aspects of Myers’ book will give a further push to the good old hamster wheel, the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-anti-antithesis.
Nevertheless, the novelty of the factual information provided by North Korea’s Juche Myth certainly deserves attention even if one may not agree with the author’s polemical approach. Having examined a wide range of primary sources (such as North Korean press articles, Kim Il Sung interviews, and the declassified reports of Soviet bloc diplomats), nearly all relevant scholarly monographs, and even a bit of oral history, Myers painstakingly tracked down and documented the evolution of North Korea’s chuch’e sasang, from the mid-1950s to the present. Actually, the very recognition of this evolution is a major contribution to scholarship, because – thanks to the diligent efforts of North Korean propaganda – it is often assumed that the birth of chuch’e sasang in December 1955 (or even earlier) was akin to that of Pallas Athena (who emerged fully armed and battle ready from Zeus’ head).
Myers convincingly demonstrates, among others, that (1) the term chuch’e sasang originally meant “subject thought” (rather than “self-reliance” or “subjectivism”), and it can be philologically traced back to the Japanese translation of the German philosophical word Subjekt; (2) the term was in use not only in North Korea but also in Park Chung Hee’s South Korea; (3) Kim Il Sung was hardly the sole or principal creator of chuch’e sasang, for Kim Ch’ang Man and others played a more decisive role in the formulation of the concept; (4) the extensive use of chuch’e sasang in North Korean propaganda started only in the early 1960s, and it still took considerable additional time to place it into the center of the regime’s formal ideology; and (5) the North Korean leadership preferred to keep chuch’e sasang in a state of deliberate vagueness, instead of creating a coherent system of abstract ideas that may be reinterpreted, creatively applied to different conditions, and distinguished from the personal deeds of its founder.
The view that the regime’s chuch’e propaganda was a mere smokescreen aimed at alleviating both Soviet and South Korean suspicions seems to be overstated, because the Soviet bloc diplomats invariably regarded chuch’e sasang as an implicitly hostile concept that rejected the principle of supranational socialist integration. Still, it is correct to say (as Myers does) that chuch’e sasang (as a philosophy distinguished from nationalism and Communism) served mainly external propaganda aims, and it did not provide a driving force to actual North Korean policies. In fact, the considerable tactical flexibility of the North Korean leadership indicates that not only chuch’e sasang but even ethnic nationalism (which Myers considers the real driving force of the DPRK) was used by the regime in an opportunistic and manipulative way.
In my opinion, these factual elements of the book are sufficiently valuable to render North Korea’s Juche Myth an important contribution to North Korean studies, all the more so because it is fairly compatible with, say, Dae-Sook Suh’s Kim Il Sung (though admittedly not with Han S. Park’s North Korea). If the book is to be criticized, the criticism should be aimed at refuting the author’s observations, arguments, and conclusions one by one, rather than summarily dismissing the book on the basis of the author’s academic background, his publisher, and other ad hominem issues. “Brûler n’est pas répondre,” Camille Desmoulins said.

During the 70's and 80's I translated from Korean N. Korean propaganda and always thought that Juche was BS and for foreign consumption. The book also had numerous interesting research. Please read the footnotes.

A worthy follow up and analysis of the new north Korean race based belief system