You nerds trying to rehab this social imperialist need to read what he actually says. He’s a chauvinist of the highest degree. Keep in mind NJR lives in a country that is at war currently with DPRK, has killed millions of Koreans & is an imperialist superpower.

Myers says that the DPRK’s governing ideology has been misunderstood by the United States. We think of it as “authoritarian communist,” thanks to its all-powerful state and various Stalinist trappings. But Myers says this is misleading: The regime is closer in character to fascism, because of its racism and nationalism (Stalinists have many unappealing qualities, but they do not build their ideology around race and nation). The communist elements, Myers says, are window dressing. Even Kim Il-Sung himself knew little about Marxism, and he dismayed the Russians when they quizzed him on it. And strictly speaking, the regime operates as a monarchy. Myers says that “socialism” is not the right term, because it doesn’t describe the self-image we see in the state’s propaganda, which heavily emphasizes the purity of North Koreans and their need for a protective parent-leader. Demick acknowledges that Kim Il-Sung “rejected traditional Communist teachings about universalism” and “was a Korean nationalist in the extreme” who treated Koreans almost as a “chosen people.”

For example, personally, I find Myers’ explanation appealing. If I’m being honest, though, that’s probably partly because it lumps Kim Jong Un in with right-wing fascists, and distances him from the left. I’ve always felt that “socialists” have no more responsibility for dictatorships that call themselves socialist than democratic republicans have for, well, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Since I oppose dictatorships universally, pointing out that there have been “leftist” dictatorships poses no actual challenge to my politics. Instinctively, though, I confess that I’d feel relieved if Kim Jong Un was lumped in with the right rather than the left.

He is quoting Brian Reynolds Meyers and agreeing with him on the DPRK, even after admitting to knowing basically nothing about the country earlier in the article. Thousands of social imperialist nerds are reading this and nodding along, cementing their ridiculous chauvinist worldviews and failing their revolutionary duties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_Myers

Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963), usually cited as B. R. Myers, is an American professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, best known for his writings on North Korean propaganda. He is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Myers is the author of Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell, 1994), A Reader’s Manifesto (Melville House, 2002), The Cleanest Race (Melville House, 2010), and North Korea’s Juche Myth (Sthele Press, 2015).

Myers was born in New Jersey, near Fort Dix. His mother is British, and his father was a U.S. Army officer from Pennsylvania who served in South Korea as a military chaplain, often helping out local orphans.

Myers spent his childhood in Bermuda and his high school youth in apartheid-era South Africa, and received graduate education in West Berlin during the early 1980s, occasionally visiting East Germany. He earned an MA degree in Soviet studies at Ruhr University (1989) and a PhD degree in Korean studies with a focus on North Korean literature at the University of Tübingen (1992). Myers subsequently taught German in Japan and worked for a Mercedes-Benz liaison office in Beijing during the mid-1990s.

This guy is a Liberal. Stop trying to make NJR cool, he’s never going to be cool