Nearly everything that’s being said about the pathology of the North Korean regime today is either false or already common knowledge. Brian R. Myers is a brilliant exception, one of the few who still informs us through his extraordinary command of two languages. He sets his fluency in Korean to work on the study of North Korean propaganda, often revealing truths that certain policy circles would rather not hear, as they suggest conclusions those circles would rather not reach. You will also note how I step gently in any criticisms of Myers’s arguments, because he’s also one of the best living writers of the English language on any topic, and if you doubt the damage that one Brian Myers’ fisking to can do to a person’s academic reputation, have a look at what’s left of left-wing historian Bruce Cumings after Myers finished with him. It’s the stuff of educational films shown to high school students for shock effect.

Recently, Myers has become particularly strident in his determination to purge (apologies) the term “Stalinist” from descriptions of contemporary North Korea. His latest piece in the Wall Street Journal speaks to a subject most of us would otherwise be tempted to dismiss — North Korea’s latest amendments to its constitution. Many of those amendments, after all, purport to guarantee individual rights that don’t exist in practice. To Myers, however, the new document’s shift away from emphasizing communism represents an open declaration that North Korea is, in Myers’s provocative phrasing, a “national-socialist” state:

These changes do not reflect a sudden shift in policy. Despite the world media’s tradition of referring to North Korea as a “hardline communist” or “Stalinist” state, it has never been anything of the sort. From its beginnings in 1945 the regime has espoused—to its subjects if not to its Soviet and Chinese aid-providers—a race-based, paranoid nationalism that has nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism. (This latter term was tellingly dropped from the constitution after the collapse of the East Bloc.) North Korea has always had less in common with the former Soviet Union than with the Japan of the 1930s, another “national defense state” in which a command economy was pursued not as an end in itself, but as a prerequisite for rapid armament.

North Korea is, in other words, a national-socialist country—one lacking imperialist ambitions, to be sure, but one that must still be seen on the far right and not the far left of the political spectrum.

Myers is correct to challenge the often trite reporting of North Korea, so much of which is written by journalists who appear to have little understanding of, or interest in, the North Korean people or the conditions in which they must somehow endure (the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and the New York Times’s Choe Sang-Hun come to mind). I do not think that Myers necessarily intended to draw moral equivalence to Nazi Germany, but if he did, neither system has an obvious advantage in terms of its depraved cruelty or the proportion of its subject population it murdered, though Nazi Germany is clearly responsible for far more deaths.

Myers speaks an important truth when he argues that North Korea is both nationalist and racist, and those are truths that matter. Americans with a superficial understanding of North Korea see Kim Jong Il is a ridiculous, porcine anachronism, more an object of ridicule and pity than a legitimate threat. But this is prosaic nonsense: for a regime that has already practiced mass murder on North Koreans and indoctrinated its subjects to dehumanize non-Koreans, it’s hardly unthinkable that that regime would transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists who would use them against us. I do not follow Myers so far as to concede that North Korea was never Stalinist, but decades ago, North Korea’s Stalinism evolved into something unique — an eerie, cultish, theocratic form of totalitarianism that isn’t quite like anything that has ever existed, but which is at least as fascist as it is Stalinist.

There is some evidence that fascist regimes were one source of direct inspiration for Kim Jong Il. High-level defector Hwang Jang Yop, a principal author of the Juche ideology, suggests at Page 73 of the British journalist Jasper Becker’s “Rogue Regime” that Kim Jong Il drew inspiration from Hitler:

Hwang [Jang Yop] 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,’ wrote Hwang in one article published in the monthly magazine Chosun. The Suryong doctrine certainly seems to be a replica of the Nazi Party’s Fueherprinzip, 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 the National Socialist Party of Germany.

One might dismiss Hwang as a disgruntled former employee. Still, the visual similarities between Nazi Germany’s mass calesthenics and North Korea’s wierdly beautiful and hideously abusive Arirang Festival are striking. Myers is probably also correct when he argues that the ethos of North Korea’s personality cult is more similar to Japan’s state Shinto than to Stalin’s Russia. After all, State Shinto was the system under which most of North Korea’s founders had grown up before Stalin’s tanks rolled south, with Kim Il Sung riding along. Even here, North Korea’s deification of its holy family has outdone the source of its inspiration. In what other fascist or communist regime would we see such a highly developed political caste system, or succession within a royal family?

It is the ferocious racism of the North Korean regime that may be most contrary to our preconceptions of a “communist” or “Stalinist” state. Myers, almost alone among North Korea watchers, gets this, perhaps because North Korea seldom emphasizes its racial views in its English-language external propaganda. The message still filters through. A November 2007 Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) editorial, for example, exalted Korea’s long history as a “resourceful homogenous (sic) nation” and decried the fact that, “due to outside forces … its purity is fading away in the southern half of Korea under the foreign cultural domination.”

A 2006 KCNA editorial condemned South Korea for permitting miscegenation:

Pyongyang, April 27 (KCNA) — A strange farce to hamstring the essential characters of the Korean nation and seek for “multiracial society” is now being held in south Korea. In this regard Rodong Sinmun today runs a signed commentary, which censures the farce as an unpardonable bid to negate the homogeneity of the nation, make south Korea multiracial and Americanize it. To deny the peculiarity and advantages of the homogeneous nation now that dominationism and colonialism are posing a threat to the destiny of weak nations is a treacherous act of weakening the spirit of the nation, the commentary says, and goes on: The south Korean pro-American traitorous forces advocating the theory of “multiracial society” are riffraffs who have not an iota of national soul, to say nothing of the elementary understanding of the view on the nation and social and historic development. [....]

The theory of “multiracial society” is a poison and anti-reunification logic aimed to emasculate the basic idea in the era of independent reunification. The anti-national logic is advocated in south Korea, contrary to the aspiration of the fellow countrymen. This is ascribable to the criminal attempt of the pro-American elements including the Grand National Party to make the north and the south different in lineages, block the June 15 era of reunification and seek the permanent division of the nation and the manipulation of the U.S. behind the scene. The commentary calls upon the people from all walks of life in south Korea to decisively reject the anti-national moves of the sycophantic traitorous forces to tarnish the lineage of the Korean nation and obliterate it, bereft of the Juche character and national character.

In May 2006, North Korean Major General Kim Yong-Chul haranged his South Korean counterparts for failing to safeguard Korea’s racial purity:

“Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance — I am concerned that our singularity will disappear.” Instead of contradicting him, the South Korean delegation said such dilution of the bloodline was “but a drop of ink in the Han River,” adding this would cause no problems “if we all live together.” [....]

“Since time immemorial, our nation has been a land of abundant beauty. Not even one drop of ink must be allowed to fall into the Han River,” Kim thundered.

“Our history shows that we were able to maintain the purity of the Korean race even while living together with the Jurchen and the Manchurians of the region,” Han countered. “That may be true,” Kim pressed on, “but from Old Chosun” — the earliest Korean kingdom that ended in 108 BC and spanned from western Manchuria through the northwestern regions of the Korean Peninsula and according to legend started in 2333 BC ? “through the Middle Ages and the modern era, it is undeniable that we existed as one unified race.”

A 2005 KCNA editorial said this:

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.

And that is not all.

The challenge of translation blurs the malice of North Korea’s racial ideology: the Korean word minjok translates to both “race” and “people,” leaving it to the reader to find his own meaning in the name, for example, of the North Korean propaganda web site Uriminjokkiri — meaning either “among our race only,” or “among our people only.” The racial element of North Korean ideology probably found easy acceptance among North Koreans, and plenty of South Koreans as well, including leaders of the left-wing, nationalist, and anti-American Uri Party, which was also South Korea’s ruling party from 2004 to 2007. No long-term foreign resident of South Korea would honestly suggest that xenophobia and racism are uniquely North Korean characteristics. Just ask Hines Ward.

North Korea’s actions are far more telling, and chilling, than its words. The regime is sufficiently dedicated to preserving the purity of the Korean race that, according to the accounts of multiple defectors, it kills any children born to or carried by North Korean refugee women repatriated from China, and whose babies are presumably half Chinese.

To Myers, North Korea’s racial propaganda and its acquisition of nuclear weapons are claims to legitimacy and moral supremacy for a regime that hasn’t earned them through other means, such as by unifying Korea or providing for its people.

It is also possible to overstate the essential truth of Myers’s thesis, something he risks by trying to cleave pedantic distinctions between socialist statists of the “left” and the “right,” a distinction that, more often than not, is without much functional difference. Myers’s argument that North Korea is not — indeed, has never been — Stalinist appears to rest on assumptions that Stalin’s rule was marked by Marxist orthodoxy and the rejection of nationalism and racism, but that is not what a closer examination of Stalin’s rule tells us.

Kim Jong Il’s regime still shows some of its Stalinist genes, chiefly in its perfection of the police state and the cult of personality, the methods of its labor camp system, and its use of the nation’s food distribution system as a tool of class warfare. It is also true that Soviet and Soviet-trained officers established the DPRK on a Stalinist model of organization, and launched several Stalinist purges shortly after consolidating power. The Russian North Korea expert Andrei Lankov has described that history in his book, “North of the DMZ.”

The history of Stalinism is replete with examples of ethnic cleansing against Kalmyks, Ukrainians, Chechens, Ingush, and Koreans, to name just a few. Stalin was also a venomous anti-Semite whose final years were marked by the “revelations” of the so-called Doctors’ Plot, which, according to Khrushchev, was to lay the groundwork for the mass deportations of Soviet Jews. When the war ended, he cleansed the land east of the Oder of ethnic Germans. Stalin was a nationalist when nationalism served Stalin’s interests. During World War II, Stalin’s propaganda ceased to emphasize communist ideology, extolled the virtues of defending Mother Russia, and drew comparisons between Soviet troops and the defenders of Moscow in 1812. North Korea’s ideology was never internationalist, but then, even Stalin had “socialism in one country” when it suited him.

Stalin was not too opposed to fascism or Nazism to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler or violate the Versailles Treaty by hosting the secret training of the first panzer units. When Stalin’s spies warned him in advance of Hiter’s 1941 invasion, Stalin’s unprintable reaction — followed by ordering one of his best spies shot for spreading disinformation — suggests that he sincerely believed in a more-or-less enduring accord with Hitler.

Stalin was no paragon of Marxist economics. His New Economic Policy was a retreat from state control over the means of production, just as North Korea was forced to recognize, to a degree and for a while, the dissolution of state control during the Great Famine. In both cases, state control was reestablished after there were fewer mouths to feed and matters stabilized again.

But then, the ideological parentage of Kim Jong Il’s regime is nearly as tangled as that of his own children. By some accounts, Stalin’s inspiration for the Great Purges of the 1930’s was Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Hitler was greatly influenced by the ideology of an Italian former communist newspaper editor who blended nationalism with socialism and found a place for an obedient church in his state (a role that even Kim Jong Il allows). In the 1930’s, Josef Goebbels helped Hitler steal votes from the communists by incorporating May Day, state control of factories, and class envy into Nazi ideology. In a 1925 open letter to German communists, Goebbels wrote, “[W]e are fighting one another although we are not really enemies.” On his accession to power, Hitler abolished labor unions, but then, so did Stalin in every practical sense.

Stalinism, Nazim, fascism, Ba’athism, State Shinto, and Juche all had common genes, characteristics, and principles: the devaluation of individual life and dignity; the supremacy of the state and its military; the deification of an infallible dictator (and all gods are jealous); extreme nationalism; the persecution of ethnic minorities; and as much state control over the economy as current conditions can tolerate. And who is to say what Stalinism might have become without Khruschev? If Yakov, Vassily, or Svetlana had had the wherewithal to continue their father’s reign, might the Soviet Union have evolved in the same way that North Korea did? The unfolding failure of socialist economics suggests few other ways to maintain national cohesion. What else might Dear Leader Vassily Stalin have had to fall back on?

Myers ends with an admonition to those who impute rationalism upon Kim Jong Il and who continue to believe that he can be forced to negotiate his own disarmament:

Kim is aware that he cannot disarm without committing political suicide. This unfortunately means that negotiations with Pyongyang, whether bilateral or multilateral, can never bear the sort of fruit that détente with the Soviet Union did.

Some in Washington have suggested that negotiations can nonetheless be an effective adjunct to sanctions, the hope being that the U.S. can chatter away with the Kim regime until it finally collapses from a lack of funds. But if North Korea is not a communist country, there is no reason to expect it to fold like one. Party propaganda derides the old Soviet Union for nothing so much as the way it went down “without a shot.” With the Dear Leader’s uranium centrifuges spinning every hour, running out the clock seems a very dangerous strategy indeed.

If Myers is right about this — and I believe he is — then what are our alternatives to those we know won’t work? Not even sanctions will likely persuade Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear programs voluntarily and verifiably, although I am not yet ready to abandon the idea that concentrated and sustained sanctions could fracture and collapse the regime.

Unfortunately, the sanctions we’ve imposed thus far may be a good start, but they’re probably calculated to pressure the regime, not to collapse it. There are many more sanctions we could impose but haven’t, probably because the current political leadership doesn’t understand that voluntary disarmament is anathema to the regime. So what are the alternatives? Myers had already told us why we can’t accept North Korea’s nuclear status and the likelihood that it will proliferate to terrorists. Few suggest that we should invade and accept tens of thousands of deaths as a likely consequence, along with reviving the regime’s decaying claims to legitimacy. The politically expedient course would be to continue a less-than-whole-hearted and perishable sanctions effort while hoping, until eternity, for the least-bad outcome.

What remains is for us to catalyze change within North Korea by combining economic constriction with political subversion. Myers appears to discount the amount of discontent within North Korea, but clearly, many North Koreans are discontented: look at the rising number of North Koreans who are voting against Kim Jong Il with their feet, or their growing willingness to express their discontent with hunger, corruption, and restrictions on market trading. What North Koreans still lack is a coherent idea of what kind of system would replace the existing one, or how its accession would change their lives in a way worth the risk of their lives. America could do much to advance that process by increasing its funding and technical assistance to North Korean broadcasters in exile, and to organizations of dissidents in exile who are trying to expand their reach back into their homeland. Once North Koreans understand how much better their lives could be under a reunified, democratic Korean government, North Korea’s change to something more transparent and less menacing will be inevitable.

Joshua Stanton is an attorney in Washington, D.C.