Marking the birth of Kim Jong Il

Dermot Hudson pays tribute to Kim Jong Il

By New Worker correspondent

A HIGHLY successful meeting of the Korean Friendship Association was held last weekend  in London to mark the 70^th anniversary of the birth of Kim Jong Il. Dermot Hudson, chair of the Juche Idea Study Group, highlighted Kim Jong Il’s contribution to theory and ideology on his 1982 work On the Juche Idea, in which Kim Jong Il brought together and systematised the Juche theory, and his 1994 thesis Socialism is a Science. He stressed that Kim Jong Il’s strong leadership “averted the very real prospect of another war on the Korean Peninsula” and concluded with the words: “Kim Jong Il is immortal”.

 Dr Hugh Goodacre, a lecturer at London University, described how the Juche theory first emerged in the 1950s to defend the independent nature of Korean socialism when divisions were appearing in the international communist movement. He said Juche was “a new way of looking at social history, in which the masses become the subject of history and the struggle for a new society draws on their intellectual and creative spirit”, which draws on the most advanced ideas including Darwinism and dialectical materialism.

   Shaun Pickford, secretary of the Juche Idea Study Group, recalled the resistance to the Japanese occupation after 1910 and Kim Il Sung’s leading role in the armed struggle, leading to the creation of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army in 1932, which went on to liberate all of Korea in 1945. Kim Jong Il, he added, was a crack marksman and fighter pilot said to be “expert with both the gun and the pen”. A lively discussion followed, looking particularly at the role of the leader in the Korean revolution and the Worker’s Party of Korea.