Without their pride and willingness to sacrifice for a common goal, Koreans would speak Japanese or Chinese today. Defiantly, through a millennium or two of attack and occupation, they held on to their language and even their gene pool. When I lived in Seoul in the 1980’s, intermarriage, to a Japanese or an American or whomever, was rare and an occasion for scorn or, at best, pity. The taboos are lessening — earlier this year, the government lifted a ban against mixed-race Koreans serving in the military — but as a recent article in The Asia Times noted, “A foreigner, even another Asian, stands out.” More so on the other side of the DMZ: not long ago, a North Korean general chastised South Korea for even allowing intermarriage.

There was, in those days, a club that supported Koreans training for stunts that would get them into The Guinness Book of World Records ... [in order] to have South Korea itself inscribed as the country with the most world records.

We are obliged to focus on Islamism and the terrorist threat it has produced, to study Arabic and the work of Sayyid Qutb, but we should not fail to consult Kennan, Clausewitz or Thucydides either.