Talk:Brian Reynolds Myers

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can you translate some of your sources since most people on this site don't know korean --Edward the eight (talk) 13:47, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I will translate everything within this month. Umaru16 (talk) 22:05, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I just finished translating! Please check. Umaru16 (talk) 07:48, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Can someone explain how translating민족 as 'race' is any worse than 'volk/peoples'? 'Volk'/'Völkisch' is literally the same term that the Nazis used, if anything it sounds *more* fascist to me than using 'race'. 109.42.115.93 (talk) 06:05, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

I explained pretty much the same sentiment to Umaru once, and how the articulation about the race/volk aspect comes off as having an opaque-at-best to contradictory-at-worst meaning in English regardless of what's intended. I think the gist of the idea is race was never much of a topic in Korea historically in the same way it was in the West, but that they did have an idea of themselves as a distinct "people", probably culturally, and that this was used as a base to resist Japanese imperial-fascism. Chillpilled (talk) 13:01, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Chillpilled's explanation is correct. 民族 means the same thing as the German word "Volk"(="ethnic people"). There is a big ideological difference between German Nazism and Japanese ultranationalism. Imperialist nationalists in Japan emphasized "state" rather than "Volk," as the emphasis on "Volk" could lead to Korean independence. At the time, Japanese ultranationalists were technically more of an extrem "statist"/"state nationalist" than a German-style racial nationalist, and needed to make Koreans, another etnic group, "Japanese state-nation". Because of this historical context, far-right "ultranationalism" in Japan is called "state nationalism" (國家主義) or "extreme state nationalism" (超國家主義) and paradoxically, Volk-based nationalism is often more related to [anti-imperialist] left-wing politics than [racist] far-right in Northeast Asia; Maoists are populist and value "Volk" (民族; nation) over "state" (國民 or 國家; nation) because "state" is oppressive and reminiscent of Japanese fascist-imperialism and KMT-fascism, and traditional Japanese nationalists are elitist and value "state" over "Volk", advocating State Shinto.

B.R. Myers does not consider this Northeast Asian context at all and insists on a dichotomous perception that "civic/state nationalism is good and ethnic nationalism is evil" in Europe-U.S. According to Myers' absurd logic, Japan's far-right "statists" are not fascists because they define a nation based on "state"-citizens, but rather "Volk" far-left Maoists and the North Korean government are fascists. Myers is very, very pro-Japanese, so he condemns minjok(民族=Volk) nationalism in North Korea and Moon Jae-in, but he condemns not 'state' ultra-nationalism in Shinzo Abe and the LDP. Northeast Asia is not Europe; "Volk"/"people" is highlighted by left-wing nationalists in South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan and China, and "state"/"country"(國家) is highlighted by far-right nationalists in Japan and China. Umaru16 (talk) 10:46, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

In summary, "German Volk" stands for Nazism in Germany, but does "Korean Volk" stand for Korean nationalism in resistance to Japanese imperialism, fascism, and "statism" in Korea. Umaru16 (talk) 10:57, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

This is a tough distinction to make properly, especially between multiple language barriers. It doesn't help that since COVID, the North Koreans' fear toward the outside world seems to have reached its all-time peak, which is an attitude that can easily devolve into racism and similar attitudes. Something that could be emphasized is how, until very recently, there were almost zero non-Asian people in northeast Asia, and there was less a history of colonialism against Africans, indigeneous Americans/Australians, and people of the Middle East, so Western "race as science" (i.e. racialism, phrenology, etc) had less political utility. This would more-so be the case since, to my understanding, the different groups in northeast Asia see each other as belonging to basically the same "race", just different cultures. This was my understanding after seeing that people in Japan (if I remember correctly) refer to other northeast Asians with a different word than they use to refer to people of European descent. Though on a cursory search, I did find this wiki page suggesting the Japanese were starting to lay the groundwork for their own adaptation of Western racialism: An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus. The late date at which it was finished (July 1943, well into WWII) suggests to me it could have just been post-fact justification rather than their original motive. Though, the page Yamato people suggests this framework was budding earlier than that. The way they seem to have tried to mimic Western racialists reminds me a bit of how the perpetrators for the Rwandan genocide took cues straight from the Nazis, right down to studying Goebbels's exact propaganda tactics. Chillpilled (talk) 12:09, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese are all of the same race, and because "Volk" is often used in Asia by anti-imperialists who oppose 'pan-Asianism,' it is absurd to translate the word "Volk" used by Koreans into "race". Asian racial nationalists traditionally insist on 'pan-Asianism' centered on China or Japan, but Korean nationalists consider themselves as different "Volk" (lit. 'ethnic group', not 'race') from Chinese/Japanese. Koreans are of the same Rasse as Japanese, but they are of a different Volk. (Rasse means race in German.) Umaru16 (talk) 23:00, 7 August 2024 (UTC)