Arts & Culture, Books, Features - Friday, February 12, 2010 5:59 - 0 Comments

Book Review: “The Cleanest Race” by B.R. Myers

Brian Myers is an American academic based in Pusan who has a remarkable and original (at least in Anglophone scholarship) thesis regarding what North Korea "is". The standard media line is that North Korea remains the last hardline Stalinist dictatorship in the world. Indeed, whilst China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba remain as constitutionally communist regimes, they are relatively mild in their human rights abuses, and they are to varying degrees pursuing economic reform along Neoliberal lines. Many scholars continue to refer to pre-Soviet collapse North Korea as a "National Stalinist dictatorship", with its own Korean eccentricities certainly (the bizarre personality cult for one).