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| 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 70th 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.
