Im totally happy to hear explanations as to why it’s not a racial superiority thing, I was just given to understand that N. Korea has an insane racial dogma and that the Hom Sovieticus was all about racial evolution.
Which was very trendy at the time. Doesn’t mean it aged well.
I would encourage you to actually read about these topics and especially look at all at primary sources.
The idea of the New Soviet Man was simply that people are formed by their material conditions, so a new set of conditions in a society that fosters pro-social values and development would produce people who were different from those raised under the Czar or in liberal states. It is absolutely not a race thing. If you want to hear about eugenics being cool, try post-exile Trotsky (fuck him, he was a crank).
With the DPRK, I’ll need a reference because otherwise it just sounds like one of the countless things just invented by South Korea or the US to slander them. My guess is that they just have their own version of the New Soviet Man as a matter of cultural inheritance from their involvement with the Soviet Union.
I expect the Homo Sovieticus misunderstanding on my part is a result of the terrible US high school system and some blending of Trotsky into mainstream Sovietism, thanks for the clarification!
If you read the article, there is an allusion to there being a book on the subject, but the only direct evidence presented is that quote from Kim Jong-Il, so I tried googling it and the result is basically three other sites plagiarizing the article and nothing else. If you are wondering, I placed the quotes on the second clause only because of the spelling of “homogenous” being variable, as you’ll notice from the suggested search.
So basically “there’s a book about it” is what is left of the claim. I do also find the history a bit weird since Koreans were treated as chattel by Imperial Japan and to this day the more reactionary parts of Japanese culture regards them as a foreign and inferior race, while mainstream Japan glosses over how much of Japan’s population is ethnically Korean to make its own claims of homogeneity.
Do I need to try to dig up a digital copy of that book?
Edit: full disclosure, Trotsky supporting eugenics is a pretty obscure thing, I mostly just mentioned it as a dig at him. I doubt it really influenced the New Soviet Man perception even though he basically did assert that if America went socialist, there would be a New Socialist Man within 100 years that would actually be the product of eugenics, unlike in the Soviet case.
Im totally happy to hear explanations as to why it’s not a racial superiority thing, I was just given to understand that N. Korea has an insane racial dogma and that the Hom Sovieticus was all about racial evolution.
Which was very trendy at the time. Doesn’t mean it aged well.
I would encourage you to actually read about these topics and especially look at all at primary sources.
The idea of the New Soviet Man was simply that people are formed by their material conditions, so a new set of conditions in a society that fosters pro-social values and development would produce people who were different from those raised under the Czar or in liberal states. It is absolutely not a race thing. If you want to hear about eugenics being cool, try post-exile Trotsky (fuck him, he was a crank).
With the DPRK, I’ll need a reference because otherwise it just sounds like one of the countless things just invented by South Korea or the US to slander them. My guess is that they just have their own version of the New Soviet Man as a matter of cultural inheritance from their involvement with the Soviet Union.
I expect the Homo Sovieticus misunderstanding on my part is a result of the terrible US high school system and some blending of Trotsky into mainstream Sovietism, thanks for the clarification!
While I’m equally unsure about the DPRK racial purity thing since you’ve challenged it I did find this article from Berkeley discussing it’s roots in Japanese fascism.
If you read the article, there is an allusion to there being a book on the subject, but the only direct evidence presented is that quote from Kim Jong-Il, so I tried googling it and the result is basically three other sites plagiarizing the article and nothing else. If you are wondering, I placed the quotes on the second clause only because of the spelling of “homogenous” being variable, as you’ll notice from the suggested search.
So basically “there’s a book about it” is what is left of the claim. I do also find the history a bit weird since Koreans were treated as chattel by Imperial Japan and to this day the more reactionary parts of Japanese culture regards them as a foreign and inferior race, while mainstream Japan glosses over how much of Japan’s population is ethnically Korean to make its own claims of homogeneity.
Do I need to try to dig up a digital copy of that book?
Edit: full disclosure, Trotsky supporting eugenics is a pretty obscure thing, I mostly just mentioned it as a dig at him. I doubt it really influenced the New Soviet Man perception even though he basically did assert that if America went socialist, there would be a New Socialist Man within 100 years that would actually be the product of eugenics, unlike in the Soviet case.