I find this particular paragraph to be rather enlightening.
EDIT:
Having read the rest of the article about the book and taking a moment to stew on it, I can say without any qualm that the North Korean Problem is here to stay, no matter how many "Great Leaders" come and go. I think that what is most frightening about these revelations is that North Korea is what Nazi Germany might have become if they had taken the isolationist route and sat and stewed for half-a-century. There is not going to be a peaceful end with this regime or the personality cults of its leaders, past and present. On the face of our Earth, these people will be like cancer, quietly festering and hoping for a chance to metastasize. Ideally, they hope to do so by fomenting a socialist revolution, preferably in South Korea. Realistically, they'll just start something that will end badly for anyone that gets involved.
And when it does happen... we can probably look forward to an insurgency that makes Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan look like a picnic in the park by comparison.
Quote:The official worldview is not set out coherently in the leaders'Scary stuff indeed.
writings. These are more often praised than read. 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.) Unlike Soviet citizens under Stalin, or
Chinese under Mao, North Koreans learn more about their leaders than
from them. It is not in ideological treatises but in the more
mass-oriented domestic propaganda that the official worldview is
expressed most clearly and unselfconsciously. I stress the word
domestic. Too many observers wrongly assume that the (North) Korean
Central News Agency's English-language releases reflect the same sort of
propaganda that the home audience gets. In fact there are significant
differences. For example, where the DPRK presents itself to the outside
world as a misunderstood country seeking integration into the
international community, it presents itself to its own citizens (as I
will show later) as a rogue state that breaks agreements with impunity,
dictates conditions to groveling U.N. officials, and keeps its enemies
in constant fear of ballistic retribution. Generally speaking the
following rule of thumb applies: the less accessible a propaganda outlet
is to the outside world, the blunter and more belligerent it will be in
its expression of the racist orthodoxy.
EDIT:
Having read the rest of the article about the book and taking a moment to stew on it, I can say without any qualm that the North Korean Problem is here to stay, no matter how many "Great Leaders" come and go. I think that what is most frightening about these revelations is that North Korea is what Nazi Germany might have become if they had taken the isolationist route and sat and stewed for half-a-century. There is not going to be a peaceful end with this regime or the personality cults of its leaders, past and present. On the face of our Earth, these people will be like cancer, quietly festering and hoping for a chance to metastasize. Ideally, they hope to do so by fomenting a socialist revolution, preferably in South Korea. Realistically, they'll just start something that will end badly for anyone that gets involved.
And when it does happen... we can probably look forward to an insurgency that makes Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan look like a picnic in the park by comparison.