#minjok

Propaganda claiming that "DPRK is racist" relies on willful mistranslations by imperial clerks who ignore DPRK's own English translations and transplant DPRK's language into the linguistic landscape of racialized capitalism. Thus, empire's racism is projected onto the DPRK.

Perhaps the most common willful mistranslation is that of the Korean word "minjok." Although DPRK itself translates minjok as "nation," anti-DPRK propagandists incorrectly translate it as "race."

There should be no debate about how to translate minjok as it appears in DPRK texts. Looking at the English and Korean versions of Kim Jong Il's 2002 speech "On Having a Correct Understanding of Nationalism," we can see that minjok in Korean corresponds to nation in English.

Despite DPRK's clear translation of minjok as nation, anti-DPRK propagandist B.R. Myers popularized the mistranslation of minjok as race by using it as the basis of his 2010 book The Cleanest Race.

Myers's reliance on mistranslation has been criticized in reviews. Suzy Kim writes: "The overriding problem throughout Myers’s book [is] translation. For his race theory of [DPRK] ideology to work, Myers translates the term minjok as race, but these terms are not synonymous."

Although Myers popularized the minjok=race mistranslation, he wasn't the first to distort DPRK language in an attempt to show "racism." For example, mistranslations of nationalism-related words also appeared in a 2006 article from RoK's pro-US Chosun Ilbo English edition.

In the article, titled "Two Koreas' Top Brass Resort to Racist Mudslinging," DPRK General Kim Yong-chol (who recently visited RoK for the 2018 Winter Olympics' closing ceremony) is reported to have used the word race, when he actually used the word nation.

(To be fair, the minjok=race mistranslation is also attributed to the RoK official [Han Min-koo, who became Park Geun-hye's defense minister], which makes me think the article was probably translated by one of the thousands of "all nationalism is bad!" expats who live in RoK)

Additionally, the phrase "pure lineage" that Chosun Ilbo attributes to DPRK's Kim Yong-chol would more accurately be rendered as "kinship descent" per the above-mentioned Kim Jong-il speech. "Pure lineage" is a projection of the racism of Korea's US occupier.

In addition to the mistranslation, Chosun Ilbo made no attempt to situate Kim Yong-chol's words in any kind of context other than US-style racialized thought.

Kim and his RoK counterpart were discussing the latter's statement that "many bachelors from [RoK's farming] areas marry women from Mongolia, Vietnam and the Philippines." Kim was surely aware that these international marriages often amount to RoK-government-sponsored human trafficking.

In this context, it's easy to see that Kim Yong-chol's remark about "not even one drop of ink" falling into the Han River was likely not referring to an influx of impure blood, but to the practice of buying and selling women.

Thousands of DPRK citizens, predominantly women, have fallen victim to human trafficking. It shouldn't be controversial for Kim Yong-chol to speculate on how national unity could be weakened by human trafficking.

Despite the errors in this Chosun Ilbo *English* article, Myers included it in The Cleanest Race, which is telling, given that he loves to pat himself on the back for his use of Korean-language primary sources. This should call into question his other sources and translations.