Chapter 9 of Almost Nowhere is up here

jadedviol:

nostalgebraist:

In the original, serialized version, Pinocchio dies a gruesome death: hanged for his innumerable faults, at the end of Chapter 15. At the request of his editor, Collodi added chapters 16–36, in which the Fairy with Turquoise Hair (or “Blue Fairy”, as the Disney version names her) rescues Pinocchio and eventually transforms him into a real boy, when he acquires a deeper understanding of himself, making the story more suitable for children. In the second half of the book, the maternal figure of the Blue-haired Fairy is the dominant character, versus the paternal figure of Geppetto in the first part.

Pinocchio died for our sins, and was then resurrected through divine (i.e. editorial) intervention

Pinocchio, son of the carpenter, Geppetto, that is Guiseppe, that is Joseph.

(via jadedviol)

In the original, serialized version, Pinocchio dies a gruesome death: hanged for his innumerable faults, at the end of Chapter 15. At the request of his editor, Collodi added chapters 16–36, in which the Fairy with Turquoise Hair (or “Blue Fairy”, as the Disney version names her) rescues Pinocchio and eventually transforms him into a real boy, when he acquires a deeper understanding of himself, making the story more suitable for children. In the second half of the book, the maternal figure of the Blue-haired Fairy is the dominant character, versus the paternal figure of Geppetto in the first part.

Pinocchio died for our sins, and was then resurrected through divine (i.e. editorial) intervention

xhxhxhx:

nostalgebraist:

xhxhxhx:

nostalgebraist replied to your post: �� North Korea

have you read b r myers?

I have! I didn’t enjoy it!

I’m sure the North Koreans would like to reunify the peninsula under their leadership, but they aren’t stupid. And I know they condemn the South Koreans for moral and physical corruption. Those are the only cards they have left. Well, that and American war crimes.

But I don’t think you get much analytic purchase by saying, “Oh, these Koreans, they really love chubby dopes. They’re a childlike people. They see the Kims as their mothers. They aren’t really Stalinists; they’re just fascists. You can tell. It’s all in their propaganda.” It’s absurd, and it doesn’t give you anything.

It’s like watching Der Ewige Jude, laundering that into a general theory of “the German personality”, and spinning off predictions about Hitler’s foreign policy. You aren’t going to get very far. And if you try, you’ll probably end up saying something silly.

I thought Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea was a far more persuasive account of North Korean state and society – and a better book, too.

I didn’t take Myers to be writing about what the Korean (or even just North Korean) people are really like.  He’s writing about the values conveyed in their propaganda.

I don’t think you can learn everything from propaganda, but I do think you can learn something, especially about the validity of comparisons to other states where propaganda has played a big role.  If North Korea’s propaganda looks nothing like Stalinist propaganda, does that necessarily mean North Korea “is not Stalinist”?  Well, no (these are messy categories), but it ought to give one pause.

It’s like watching Der Ewige Jude, laundering that into a general theory of “the German personality”, and spinning off predictions about Hitler’s foreign policy. 

If we eliminate the part about “the German personality” (since Myers is not theorizing about the Korean personality), and broaden the scope of the first part to Nazi propaganda in general as well as Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches, and imagine this written earlier – well, this might have been a valuable corrective.

In the 20s and early 30s, it was easy for foreign journalists – if they didn’t dismiss Hitler as unstable and therefore easy prey for other German leaders – to round him off a more familiar (“the German Mussolini”) or more “reasonable” type of political actor (“oh, all that anti-semitic stuff is just to rally the base, he doesn’t take any of it too seriously himself … ”).  They weren’t prepared for the “merely cultural” stuff, the Romantic irrationalism, the racial theories, to have direct consequences for state action, ones not predictable from their political expediency alone.  But they did.

I think Myers sees himself as providing this sort of angle on North Korea.  What if the “merely cultural” stuff isn’t so “mere” at all?  In some states, after all, it isn’t.

I didn’t take Myers to be writing about what the Korean (or even just North Korean) people are really like.  He’s writing about the values conveyed in their propaganda.

Here is the beginning of the book:

The most important questions regarding North Korea are the ones least often asked: What do the North Koreans believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them?  

And although you might think that’s limited to the regime’s worldview, a little bit later we read this:

In fact, the propaganda apparatus in Pyongyang has generally been careful not to make claims that run directly counter to its citizens’ experience or common sense. 

What is more, this ideology has generally enjoyed the support of the North Korean people through good times and bad. Even today, with a rival state thriving next door, the regime is able to maintain public stability without a ubiquitous police presence or a fortified northern border. Sensationalist American accounts of the “underground railroad” helping North Korean “refugees” make it through China to the free world gloss over the fact that about half of these economic migrants—for that is what most of them are—voluntarily return to their homeland. The rest remain fervent admirers of Kim Il Sung if not of his son. Though we must never forget the men, women and children languishing in Yodŏk and other prison camps, we cannot keep carrying on as if the dictatorship did not enjoy a significant degree of mass support. 

And at the end of the book, we read this:

Paranoid nationalism may well be an intellectual void, and appeal to the lowest instincts—there is nothing in North Korean ideology that a child of twelve cannot grasp at once—but for that very reason it has proven itself capable of uniting citizens of all classes, and inspiring them through bad times as well as good ones.

So when Myers writes “the Koreans believe that their childlike purity renders them so vulnerable to the outside world that they need a Parent Leader to survive,” I assume he wants us to understand that means the Koreans believe it, not that this is one of the “values conveyed in their propaganda”. 

And although you might ask us to “eliminate the part about “the German personality” (since Myers is not theorizing about the Korean personality),” the book itself seems to be endorse something essential about the Korean people, north and south:

Like the colonial government before it, the regime knew how to exploit the Korean people’s traditional tendency to conform. 

Koreans in both republics generally agree that they are a uniquely homogenous, i.e. pure-blooded people whose innate goodness has made them perennial victims of foreign powers. 

Although South Koreans are glad that they compromised their nationalist principles for wealth and modernity, many of them feel a nagging sense of moral inferiority to their more orthodox brethren.

But we should beware of assuming that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year.) 

I still remember the revulsion I felt when I read this:

Similarly, every act of kindness depicted is meant to demonstrate the unique goodness of the race. When a mother in the historical film Sea of Blood (P’ibada, 1968) skips supper so that her child may eat, much as mothers around the world do every day, the North Korean viewer sheds a tear at the unique intensity of a Korean mother’s love.†

† When I was screening the film to my South Korean graduate students, one of them turned smilingly to me during this part and said, “Typical Korean mother!”

I’m not the only one who thinks Myers is practicing his own ethnic essentialism. See, for example, Gerd Jendraschek’s review:

One major problem is Myers’ recurrent insinuation that South Korea still practices a milder version of North Korea’s racist ethnocentrism. Here, Myers tries to corroborate his analysis of the North Korean mindset, which he accesses only indirectly via propaganda materials, by invoking anecdotal evidence from the South. The racist worldview is so appealing to Koreans, he reasons, that even the democratic and open South cannot resist pursuing it. 

I would not have a problem with Myers’ analysis if he made appropriately limited claims for it, and his arguments were well-founded. But Myers’ analysis is biased and blinkered. It mishandles its comparisons to Stalinism and fascism, misconstrues its history, and ignores material reality – the reality that North Korea is a socialist state allied to socialist states.

I think Suzy Kim hits some of the right notes in her review essay, “(Dis)orientating North Korea,” Critical Asian Studies 42:3 (2010), 481–495:

Ultimately a serious gap in Myers’s argument is that he never interrogates potential differences in ideological content with changes in the form of propaganda, and what, if any, discrepancy there might be between representations and lived realities. He never contextualizes the different kinds of sources he is using. […] Nor does he address what the connection is between the propaganda that he is using and the reality of North Korean lives. In fact, the Text becomes a straw man Myers constructs to serve his own argument. 

You asked months ago whether anyone knew of any criticism of Myers, since it seemed so convincing to you. I didn’t find anything at the time – I hardly found any coverage of Myers at all – and since I hadn’t read the book, I wasn’t motivated to find it. 

Now I’ve read Alzo David-West’s “North Korea, Fascism and Stalinism: On B. R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 41:1 (2011), 146–156, and it’s an admirably thorough takedown.

On the thoroughly Stalinist character of the regime and its propaganda:

The facts are that the regime of Kim Il Sung – who served with the Soviet Army from 1941 to 1945 – was under Soviet supervision from 1945 to 1948 and tutelage until 1950, adopting orthodox Stalinist political, organisational, institutional, economic, cultural and bureaucratic apparatuses and, importantly, Stalin’s conservative nationalist programme of ‘‘socialism in one country,’’ which North Korea still upholds. The relevant Korean terms are hannara sahoejuuˇi (one-country socialism) and urishik sahoejuuˇi (our-style socialism). To paraphrase Jae-Cheon Lim (2009: 19), North Korea was intensively Sovietised.

Convinced that there is nothing Stalinist in North Korea and that the ‘‘Stalinist–Confucian model’’ is a Western fabrication, Myers contrasts Soviet and North Korean narratives on absolute terms, refusing association with socialist realism (Myers, 2010: 16, 79, 81). That is curious since he cites the manuscript of Tatiana Gabroussenko’s Soldiers on the Cultural Front, based on her 2004 doctoral dissertation (Gabroussenko, 2004), which stated that socialist realism was successfully implanted in North Korea from 1945 to 1960. Myers does not reveal Gabroussenko’s findings to his readers. Rather, he says things like, ‘‘The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction.’’ One is to imagine this ‘‘lack of conflict’’ has something to do with Japanese fascism, Myers referring to colonial-era ‘‘Japanese schmaltz’’ (Myers, 2010: 91, 92). Historian Charles K. Armstrong (2003: 180) has said that North Korea was constructed at the ‘‘height of Zhdanovism.’’ A year into the Soviet occupation, Stalin’s cultural Tsar Andrei Zhdanov, whom Kim Il Sung met on 14 August 1945 and several times after (Korean News, 1998; I. S. Kim, 2003), promulgated the totalitarian literary theory of ‘‘conflictlessness’’ (bezkonfliktnost’) in the Soviet Union. Hyun Soo Lim (1988-89: 177-93) has discussed the guiding role of Zhdanovism in North Korean literary policy. Suffice it to say that ‘‘conflictlessness’’ in North Korean literature reflects a faithful adoption of Stalinist-Zhdanovist principles in a distinctively national form of socialist realism. Given the Stalinist historical, economic and political foundations of North Korea, it is not surprising to find that much of what Myers describes in North Korean propaganda – conflictlessness, cult of personality, infantilisation, maternalism, militarism, monumentalism, nationalism, racism, rightism, xenophobia – is characteristically Stalinist. That is confirmed in Soviet studies scholarship (see Daniels, 1993: 77-8, 83-4; Gerner and Hedlund, 1989: 201-6; Tucker, 1990: 591-2; Ulam, 1998: vii-xiii; Wood, 2004: 74). 

On its Maoism:

Besides Juche, the other great omission in Myers’ book is the deep influence of Maoism in North Korea. Reading The Cleanest Race, one will learn that relations between China and North Korea worsened when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and that Chinese troops made several incursions across the North Korean border (Myers, 2010: 43). Yet one would never know that Kim Il Sung was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member in the 1930s and fluent in Chinese; that his Soviet occupation-approved policies of the united front and mass party in the 1940s were borrowed from Mao; that the North Korean leader and his Manchurian guerrillas, who took power after the North Korean Great Purge (1956- 60), were once part of a CCP military unit; that North Korean soldiers fought in the Chinese Civil War from 1945 to 1950; that China had a military presence in North Korea from the Korean War (1950-53) to 1958; that Kim Il Sung sided with Mao against the so-called ‘‘de-Stalinisation’’ campaign in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; and that North Korea adopted the Maoist mass line and military line in the early 1960s (J. C. Lim, 2009: 17-19; Koh, 1978: 626-43). Myers briefly mentions emulation of the Chinese Great Leap Forward (1956-61) and says North Korea ‘‘kept pace’’ with Mao’s personality cult (Myers, 2010: 41, 44). Still, the intimate history with Maoism is overlooked, not to mention Maoist anti-Westernism, Great Han chauvinism, isolationism, nationalism, voluntarism and xenophobia, all of which have strong parallels in North Korea.

On the dubiousness of Myers’ analogies to fascism:

Not considering the historical and sociological facts of Stalinism, argument by analogy is as far as The Cleanest Race goes with the claim that North Korean ideology is the offspring of Japanese fascism. But even if there are similarities, how does Myers account for the significant differences – structural, economic, political and ideological – between North Korea and fascist Japan? The answer is ‘‘He doesn’t.’’ Employing the diminutive ‘‘some observers’’ in reference to Charles K. Armstrong, who is identified in the endnotes and bibliography (the book has no index), Myers rejects for a more extreme position Armstrong’s view that the Kim cult borrowed ‘‘elements’’ from the Hirohito cult. ‘‘They [the personality cults of Kim Il Sung and Emperor Hirohito] are fundamentally alike, because they derive from a fundamentally similar worldview,’’ Myers (2010: 109; italics in original) declares. The Cleanest Race provides no historical evidence to corroborate that proposition, nor analysis of the mystical handbook of Japanese fascism, Kokutai no Hongi (1937). Besides, the point about fundamental alikeness is logically wrong. Practices are not by necessity fundamentally ‘‘alike’’ simply by way of derivation from ‘‘similar’’ sets of ideas. Personality Cult A is not equal to Personality Cult B just because Worldview A is approximately equal to Worldview B. Another illogical statement is seen when Myers says, ‘‘A personality cult comes into being when a one-man dictatorship presents itself as a democracy’’ (2010: 98). That makes no sense, given that Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito opposed democracy.

Working with an abstract idea of Japanese fascism, Myers problematises his claims when he briefly quotes Zeev Sternhell on ideology (Myers, 2010: 16). The fascist studies scholar has advanced a definition of fascism that contradicts its application to North Korea. One may turn to Sternhell’s essay ‘‘Fascism: Reflections on the Fate of Ideas in the Twentieth Century’’ (2000). Here, fascism is an antiinternationalist, anti-materialist and anti-rationalist ideology that exalts the force of the will, race being incidental; fascism disdains democracy, liberalism and socialism; and fascism preserves the social and economic structure of capitalism as its basis. Despite the fact that North Korean ideology espouses voluntarist, undemocratic and nationalist conceptions, its economic basis and objectives – nationalised property, state planning and ‘‘socialism in one country’’ – distinguish it from fascism. As Sternhell (2000: 158) states, ‘‘Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism were all single-party regimes, but they were very different dictatorial systems, and worlds apart in the objectives they set themselves.’’

The point of all this is that Myers doesn’t prove his thesis – that North Korean ideology is fundamentally fascist – because he doesn’t exclude the far more plausible alternative theses:

The claim of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – and Why It Matters is that this is a work that finally engages in ‘‘ideological matters’’ in North Korean studies (Myers, 2010: 12). But centred inordinately on ideology and fascisising North Korea, the book does not examine what ‘‘North Koreans really believe,’’ as the dust jacket advertises. Erich Fromm (1961: 130), whose authority Myers appeals to, said, ‘‘[I]t is the very nature of ideology that it deceives not only others, but also those who use it. Hence the only way of recognizing what is real and what is ideology is through the analysis of actions and not in accepting words for facts’’ (emphasis added). Myers takes the ‘‘Text’’ for fact, performs amateur psychoanalysis and does not work through North Korean studies scholarship, much less colonial-era and North Korean documents, letters and testimony, to prove his claims. He speaks of ‘‘a xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from Japanese fascist myth’’ and ‘‘the continuity of the imperial Japanese worldview … and the official North Korean worldview’’ (Myers, 2010: 47, 166), but there is no comparative analysis with Japanese sources. Extrapolating from propaganda, Myers (2010: 32) also quotes a 1981 North Korean history, which recounts Kim Il Sung saying that those who worked for Japanese institutions should not be doubted or ostracised. That is insufficient. Ethnic-racial identity is undoubtedly glorified in North Korea. What is unacceptable is to source that glorification exclusively in the Japanese fascist mythos rather than in the convergence of the colonial-fascist experience, anti-Japanese nationalism, Stalinist and Maoist influence, and the development of national-Stalinism.

I do not disagree that reading Mein Kampf is useful. But we aren’t reading Mein Kampf. Myers tells us not to.

So-called Juche Thought functions at most as an imposing row of book-spines, a prop in the personality cult. (A good way to embarrass one’s minders in the DPRK is to ask them to explain it.) 

Only when talking of Juche Thought does the regime express itself in this peculiar style, which is far too repetitive and dull not to be so by design.

Though Juche Thought is enshrined in the constitution as one of the country’s guiding principles, the regime has never shown any indication of subscribing to its universal-humanist bromides …

… Juche is not even professed in earnest …

But how could foreign scholars read the English-language versions of the official Juche discourse without realizing how empty it is?

And so we don’t actually read those imposing books that sit on every Korean’s shelf, like Juche 101, History of Revolutionary Activities of President Kim Il Sung. What would we see if we read that? Would we see the childlike simplicity Myers has taught us to expect? Or would we see something else? 

Here’s the preface:

Kim Il Sung, the great leader of the Korean people, was the author of the Juche idea and Songun idea, pioneer of the revolutionary cause of Juche, founder of socialist Korea and eternal President of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

[…]

He led the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal democratic revolution, socialist revolution and socialist construction to victory, thus establishing a socialist system, in which the masses of the people have become the masters of everything and everything serves them, and a powerful socialist country, independent, self-supporting and self-reliant in national defence. By frustrating at every step the imperialists’ and other hostile forces’ schemes to isolate and stifle the DPRK, he staunchly defended the Korean style of socialism centred on the masses and demonstrated its might across the world. 

I don’t see what we get out of pretending that this state – installed by the USSR, rescued by the PRC, and communist from tip to toe – is fascist, rather than socialist.

And I don’t see why we’re supposed to ignore what the regime says to itself so that we can read what it says to its people. I’m going to quote something Stephen Kotkin said about Stalinism:

The revelation of the communist archives, the secret of the communist archives is that behind closed doors they spoke the same way to each other when nobody else was listening as they spoke in their public propaganda. They spoke about class warfare, kulaks, rich peasants, finance capital, bourgeois revolution, socialist revolution, privately that’s how they spoke. It turns out the secret archives have shown that the communists behind closed doors were communists. That’s the big revelation, and that turns out to matter.

On that note, read the DPRK’s public statements. Not their novels, their posters, their murals, their motion pictures. Their public statements. Read, say, Kim Jong Un’s 2018 New Year’s Address, and tell me what you see. Does it sound like Myers’ racial fantasia? 

Here’s a passage, taken more or less at random:

My warm, comradely greetings go also to our defence scientists and workers in the munitions industry who made devoted efforts all the year round, to demonstrate to the world that the plans and decisions of the Party Central Committee are a science and a truth and that they automatically mean their materialization.

Last year we also made notable headway in carrying out the five-year strategy for national economic development.

As a result of our vigorous endeavour to establish the Juche orientation in the metallurgical industry, an oxygen-blast furnace of our own style was built at the Kim Chaek Iron and Steel Complex to maintain regular production of pig iron by relying on anthracite, and prospects were opened up for consolidating the independent foundations of the chemical industry and attaining the five-year strategy’s goal for the output of chemical products.

Numerous light-industry factories in such sectors as textile, footwear, knitwear and foodstuff industries raised high the banner of Juche orientation and made proactive efforts to propel the modernization of several production lines by means of our own technology and our own equipment. By doing so, they provided a guarantee for making the range of consumer goods varied and improving their quality.

The machine-building industry, by upholding the banner of self-reliance and relying on science and technology, creditably attained the Party’s goal for the production of new-type tractors and trucks, and thus laid solid foundations for speeding up the Juche orientation and modernization of the national economy and the comprehensive mechanization of the rural economy. The agricultural sector, by actively introducing scientific farming methods, increased the ranks of high-yield farms and workteams and reaped an unusually rich fruit harvest in spite of unfavourable climatic conditions.

Our service personnel and people built magnificent Ryomyong Street and the large-scale livestock farming base in the Sepho area, and completed the task for the first stage of the forest restoration campaign, thereby demonstrating the might of great army-people unity and the potential of the socialist independent economy.

Is this a fascist vision of racial conquest?

Now here’s Adolf Hitler’s January 1937 speech to the Reichstag:

The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute therefore the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood. A very simple statement; but it involves a principle that has tremendous consequences.

This is probably the first time and this is the first country in which people are being taught to realize that, of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it.

And thus it happens that for the first time it is now possible for men to use their God-given faculties of perception and insight in the understanding of those problems which are of more momentous importance for the preservation of human existence than all the victories that may be won on the battlefield or the successes that may be obtained through economic efforts. The greatest revolution which National Socialism has brought about is that it has rent asunder the veil which hid from us the knowledge that all human failures and mistakes are due to the conditions of the time and therefore can be remedied, but that there is one error which cannot be remedied once men have made it, namely the failure to recognize the importance of conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and character which are God’s gift and God’s handiwork. It is not for men to discuss the question of why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize the fact that it punishes those who disregard its work of creation.

Unspeakable suffering and misery have come upon mankind because they lost this instinct which was grounded in a profound intuition; and this loss was caused by a wrong and lopsided education of the intellect. Among our people there are millions and millions of persons living today for whom this law has become clear and intelligible. What individual seers and the still unspoiled natures of our forefathers saw by direct perception has now become a subject of scientific research in Germany. And I can prophesy here that, just as the knowledge that the earth moves around the sun led to a revolutionary alternation in the general world-picture, so the blood-and-race doctrine of the National Socialist Movement will bring about a revolutionary change in our knowledge and therewith a radical reconstruction of the picture which human history gives us of the past and will also change the course of that history in the future.

And this will not lead to an estrangement between the nations; but, on the contrary, it will bring about for the first time a real understanding of one another. At the same time, however, it will prevent the Jewish people from intruding themselves among all the other nations as elements of internal disruption, under the mask of honest world-citizens, and thus gaining power over these nations.

Is this a Stalinist vision of socialism in one country?

I think the questions answer themselves.

(via xhxhxhx)

2017 felt like a lacuna in my life.  Technically, I did a bunch of things in 2017, and even some things that are now benefitting (or otherwise affecting) me in 2018 – but none of those were new things.  Just following through on plans I had in 2016, many of which took a very long time to get anywhere.  Or losing track of plans from 2016 (like Almost Nowhere), which I am now picking up again.

It feels like in 2016 I had a direction I was going in, and then 2017 was one of those movie title cards reading “A YEAR PASSED,” and now the plot has picked up again, as I am finally far enough along on my self-appointed path for things to become interesting again.  Natural enough for the audience watching the movie, but weird for me, since a year really did pass.

Did something similar happen to anyone else?  I was reading through some old posts and chat logs and stuff, and I kept having to remind myself that things dated 2016 were over a year ago.  They don’t feel like yesterday, but the time between them and now still doesn’t feel quite real – it’s like when you wake up after eight hours of sleep and you’re aware that time has passed, but you don’t remember the previous evening as “eight hours ago” the same way you would remember midday as “eight hours ago” in the evening.  But presumably 2017 was not a fake year for most of you, and posts and chatlogs from 2016 feel a full year+ old to you.

xhxhxhx:

nostalgebraist replied to your post: �� North Korea

have you read b r myers?

I have! I didn’t enjoy it!

I’m sure the North Koreans would like to reunify the peninsula under their leadership, but they aren’t stupid. And I know they condemn the South Koreans for moral and physical corruption. Those are the only cards they have left. Well, that and American war crimes.

But I don’t think you get much analytic purchase by saying, “Oh, these Koreans, they really love chubby dopes. They’re a childlike people. They see the Kims as their mothers. They aren’t really Stalinists; they’re just fascists. You can tell. It’s all in their propaganda.” It’s absurd, and it doesn’t give you anything.

It’s like watching Der Ewige Jude, laundering that into a general theory of “the German personality”, and spinning off predictions about Hitler’s foreign policy. You aren’t going to get very far. And if you try, you’ll probably end up saying something silly.

I thought Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea was a far more persuasive account of North Korean state and society – and a better book, too.

I didn’t take Myers to be writing about what the Korean (or even just North Korean) people are really like.  He’s writing about the values conveyed in their propaganda.

I don’t think you can learn everything from propaganda, but I do think you can learn something, especially about the validity of comparisons to other states where propaganda has played a big role.  If North Korea’s propaganda looks nothing like Stalinist propaganda, does that necessarily mean North Korea “is not Stalinist”?  Well, no (these are messy categories), but it ought to give one pause.

It’s like watching Der Ewige Jude, laundering that into a general theory of “the German personality”, and spinning off predictions about Hitler’s foreign policy. 

If we eliminate the part about “the German personality” (since Myers is not theorizing about the Korean personality), and broaden the scope of the first part to Nazi propaganda in general as well as Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches, and imagine this written earlier – well, this might have been a valuable corrective.

In the 20s and early 30s, it was easy for foreign journalists – if they didn’t dismiss Hitler as unstable and therefore easy prey for other German leaders – to round him off a more familiar (“the German Mussolini”) or more “reasonable” type of political actor (“oh, all that anti-semitic stuff is just to rally the base, he doesn’t take any of it too seriously himself … ”).  They weren’t prepared for the “merely cultural” stuff, the Romantic irrationalism, the racial theories, to have direct consequences for state action, ones not predictable from their political expediency alone.  But they did.

I think Myers sees himself as providing this sort of angle on North Korea.  What if the “merely cultural” stuff isn’t so “mere” at all?  In some states, after all, it isn’t.

deusvulture replied to your post “typicalacademic commented on cryptovexillologist’s post “Until ten…”

I believe this link doesn’t work because of your privacy settings

on a blog with exclude-from-searches on I think the only way to direct people to a tag is to tag the post with it

Huh?  I can follow the link (1) from the dash while logged in, (2) while viewing http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/ in an incognito tab (not logged in), (3) while viewing http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/ in Firefox (not logged in), (4) while logged in as an alt account.

The only thing that doesn’t work is clicking the link while viewing my tumblr in the little sidebar thing that pops up when you click my icon.  But I can still successfully open it in a new tab, just not in the same tab.  I think this is just a tumblr bug related to that sidebar view?

ETA: ohhhh the problem is that it doesn’t work on mobile.  Nothing works on mobile.  I’ll tag the post then

typicalacademic commented on cryptovexillologist’s post “Until ten minutes ago, @typicalacademic thought Peter Molyneux and…”

@nostalgebraist​ you’ve mentioned this before but I never actually looked up Charles Fourier until now and I love this

http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/tagged/the-other-fourier

You may have noticed me posting terse “new chapter is up” notes on this tumblr a few times, but I might as well say something slightly more substantial. 

I am writing fiction again, after stopping for nearly a year!  It’s more of my ongoing project Almost Nowhere, which I started way back in October 2016, wrote at a glacial pace, and then stopped writing entirely.

When I stopped, in March 2017, there were 5 chapters.  Then, just over the past three weeks, I’ve written and posted a new chapter every week, so there are 8 now.  That’s a lot faster than I was writing it before!

I don’t know if I’ll keep up with the chapter-a-week thing – it’s less an update schedule and more the result of me committing to working on it every weekend, and then frequently wanting to finish a chapter once I’ve started writing it.

But, while you may not be able to count on a new chapter each week, I can tell you that I have momentum for this project, I’m working on it every weekend, and I’m thinking about the plot/world/characters very regularly, the way I was when writing Floornight and TNC (which I wrote comparatively quickly).

So, if you had avoided this story because or because you didn’t want to wait (following the earlier update rate) a month or two between chapters, or (later) because it looked like it’d been abandoned, this may be a good time to start it or catch up with it.

Also, I really value it when people say things about a story while I’m writing it (either as AO3 comments, or here, or whatever) – not just because I like attention or whatever (although there is that), but my fiction tends to do a lot of hinting and implying as opposed to just stating, and I am actually never clear on what actual human readers know at any point in the text (as opposed to the hypothetical reader in my head, who knows all the things I think I’ve made “sufficiently clear” and is otherwise uncertain between all the possibilities I think I’ve made “sufficiently plausible” etc.)  Instead, real reader inferences involve lots of categories like

“I thought I’d made this ‘obvious,’ but many generally perceptive readers miss it“

“I thought this was a fun riddle or easter egg, but everyone finds it obvious“

“Instead of the thing X that I thought I was aggressively hinting at, readers tend to conclude some thing Y instead, and read the story as aggressively hinting specifically at Y“

“People notice these fine-scale details that I thought would go overlooked, yet miss ‘bigger’ things that I had assumed would be comparatively easy to get“

Etc., etc.  And then there’s the auxiliary question of whether the level and type of ambiguity perceived by the reader – which is never exactly the level and type I assume they’ll perceive – interfere too strongly with investment in the characters and the “what will happen next?? stay tuned” kind of plot-enjoyment.

Anyway, hearing what people think is going on – not so much evaluative comments as theories, remarks on what (you think) we know so far, and the like – would fill in some blank spots for me, and would help me a great deal.  I know some of you have already been posting this kind of material, so let me express my gratitude for that now.

Again, you can read the thing here.  I wish I could come up with some exciting blurb indicating what it’s about, but I’m not sure how to say anything about the plot without nontrivial spoilers.  (This has also stumped me when I’ve tried to come with text for the AO3 “Summary” field.)