Common Genes? Why Radical Korean Views on Race May Remind You of You-Know-Who

I meant to take note of The Marmot’s translation of North Korea’s latest blast of Herrenvolk rhetoric:

It claimed USFK influence over the last 60 years eroded the unique speech, writing, dress, food culture and lifestyle of the Korean people. “U.S. soldiers indulge in bestial sexual assaults against South Korean women, and have polluted the bloodlines of our race, which remained unbroken for 5,000 years, and sullied the purity of the race,” it said.

This is useful context for its watered-down South Korean counterpart, courtesy of senior a ruling party MP. The Marmot also usefully points out that North Korea’s doctrine of racial superiority goes beyond theory, begins in the womb, and gets much worse after that. A Marmot commenter added a quote from a white supremacist site that I’m not going to name here, but whose rhetoric is strikingly similar.

Today, we see this charming little comment being carried in from the cold North by a young hottie whom the North chose as a cultural ambassador and the South has embraced and featured in TV commercials:

In an interview with a local broadcaster at the scene of the shoot, Cho thanked her fans, saying she knew she had many in South Korea as well. However, the dancer told (sic) her country’s party line on cultural and racial purity by saying Lee was “beautiful, but with her dyed hair and everything, she doesn’t look like a Korean woman.”

Take note, of course, that it’s the Chosun Ilbo describing this as repeating “her country’s party line,” which is may well be.

So is there any logical reason to invoke history’s most abused analogy? Actually, I mean to present some evidence for it. How persuasive you find it depends on whether you believe what Hwang Jong-Yop–who defected from the North in 1997 and is often credited as the father of North Korea’s juche ideology–told Jasper Becker in the latter’s new (and superb) book, Rogue regime:

Hwang repeatedly claims that Kim Jong Il has been a keen student of Hitler and his methods. “He worshipped Germany’s Hitler from an early date and wanted to become such a dictator as Hitler,” wroteHwang in one article published in the monthly magazine Chosun. The Suryong doctrine certainly seems to be a replica of the Nazi Party’s Fuehrerprinzip, which transformed Hitler into the divine executor of Germany’s national destiny and hence the source of all laws. The rules of the Worker’s Party are almost the same as those listed in the Organization Book of theNational Socialist Party of Germany.

I can think of several different ways to explain this–presuming it’s true–but the ones that makes the most sense to me are that (1) Nazism borrowed heavily from Fascism, which borrowed heavily from Marxism, which begat Stalinism, which begat juche; and (2) that Nazi racial theory may not have been the father of North Korea’s, but Nazi ideology finds fertile ground in the xenophobic and racially hostile soil of North Korea. Less well known is that Stalin’s great purge of 1937 was modeled after the Nazi Night of the Long Knives in 1934, or that Josef Goebbels, the most intellectual of the Nazi leaders, represented the “left” wing of the Nazis and occasionally betrayed his own admiration for Stalin.

Overall, I’d call it more a case of parallel evolution than North Korean adoption of Nazism, but–forgive this analogy–Nazi Germany and today’s North Korea certainly share some common genes. Either way, racial purity seems to be increasingly brazen in the North and increasingly accepted in the South.

And either way, it shows: