The Juche Ideas Study Group

At Semiskinned, Rob Hinckley quotes a horrified reaction to the film "Team America, World Police" from a [North] Korean Friendship Association forum.

Comrades! I am terrored! A film has just arrived on the markets of Cameroon, this film the American Police Team or some name that is similar. My nephew, purchased this and asked me to watch because he said is had something to do with DPRK. The shock I see! The general, beloved general, Kim Jong Il is a puppet character in this film and speaking the most offending things! He swears in English, kills his interpreter, and turns into a small insect at the end. They make the Dear Leader to be evil man, and lonely man. They find risible the undying love of the Korean people? They think the leadership of DPRK and the revolution is a joke? Forgive me for saying but makers of this film are bastard people! I denounce them and curse them! Bastard people! Can we not complain to someone about such slander? Why has not the KCNA denounced this piece of capitalist propaganda? To think that they make light of the general and debase his greatness!

What amazes me more than the fact that some poor Cameroonian sap is in thrall to Kim Jong Il is the fact that there are also UK commenters there who agree with him. What is it with these ultra-leftists that they can find anything remotely praiseworthy about Kim Jong Il's extended prison camp of North Korea?

I remember some years ago going to a fair in Finsbury Park where various left-wing groups had stalls displaying their wares, and gazing in disbelief at the leaflets glorifying Stalin (the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), maybe? I was never much good at the names of these ultra-left groupuscules). Were they serious, I asked this elderly Scottish lady? Stalin, for God's sake? Oh yes, she said, a great man....then lost interest in me as my incredulity showed: another sap duped by the lies of the imperialist war-mongering press. But even adoration of Stalin looks reasonable compared to people who can refer with a straight face to "the US puppet south Korean regime":

The Society for Friendship with Korea held its annual picket of the US embassy on Friday June 25, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War.

This picket was of particular importance this year in the face of the recent armed confrontation between the DPRK navy and the navy of the US puppet south Korean regime which resulted in the sinking of a north Korean navy vessel. It is extremely important to denounce the fact that US imperialism continues to harass the DPRK militarily 46 years after the conclusion of the Armistice agreement and that no peace accord has yet been signed, because US imperialism refuses to conclude any peace with communists. The possibility of the US renewing its attempts to capture the north by force is always present, although the unpleasant memories US imperialism has of its defeat in 1953 restrain it.

Naturally they reserve a special contempt for those other leftists lacking the requisite revolutionary purity:

It is significant that members of the CPB and NCP - organisations which still call for a Labour vote in spite of Labour's intimate involvement in the imperialist bombing of Yugoslavia - did not this year attend the picket. In theory they oppose imperialism, but when it comes to practical action - voting for anti-imperialist parties or picketing the embassy of the Labour government's ally, US imperialism, that's a different matter!

The Society for Friendship with Korea also held a meeting at London's Conway Hall on 8 July to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of the great Marxist-Leninist Korean leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung. This meeting was addressed by Comrades Dermot Hudson, Ella Rule and Hugh Stephens, who all gave interesting and informative presentations on the subject of important contributions of Comrade Kim Il Sung to the Korean and international communist movement. Comrade Dermot's contribution covered Comrade Kim-il-Sung's leadership of the Korean liberation struggle and the building of socialism; Comrade Ella's covered the special contribution made by the Korean revolution under Comrade Kim-Il-Sung's leadership to the emancipation of women; and Comrade Stephens focused on the Juche idea, which of course originated with Comrade Kim Il Sung. Summaries of these presentations will be produced in the Autumn issue of the Society's Bulletin.

There is even, you'll be pleased to hear, a Juche Ideas Study Group, led by one Shaun Pickford, "who made the long journey from Stoke On Trent", and "read out a speech entitled for "an Independent Peoples England" in which he stressed the need to apply the Juche idea to the UK".

I find all this in a way harder to understand than the extreme right. With neo-Nazis, you get what it says on the tin by and large. Whether they choose to question the reality of the holocaust or revel in it, they're openly racist, specifically anti-semitic, and will include a fair share of sociopaths as well as hangers-on just enjoying the thrill of being nasty. With these ultra-leftists, they're generally people you wouldn't find much exceptional about, apart from their politics, when it becomes quickly apparent that they're completely and utterly barking.

While idiots sing the praises of Kim Jong Il in the Juche Study Group, check out what people will do to get out of North Korea in this story from The Marmot's Hole, about a woman who escaped once, was captured and tortured to the extent that her feet had to be amputated, and escaped again on crutches.

Comments

[J.Cassian]

Well, there are plenty of thugs on the ultra-left but, you're right, they generally have to have a modicum of political power before they start cracking heads. Neo-Nazis are in there right away. I don't imagine there are too many Skinhead Study Groups where they sit round discussing the dialectical implications of the latest issue of "Bovver Boys Magazine".

Western Juche-ism is a bizarre phenomenon. It's not even "radical chic" - who in their right mind thinks Kim Jong Il looks cool? I've noticed many of its adherents come from countries like Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland; in other words the most affluent, stable nations in the world. The downside is that politics in those places is just a tad boring, so you get all these Walter Mitty fantasists longing for a bit of revolutionary excitement from far, far away. They remind me of the chartered accountant in "Monty Python" who wanted to be a lion tamer. I bet a lot of them have that accent too.

The death camps are still real though...

[Professor Froward]

"...the unpleasant memories US imperialism has of its defeat in 1953 restrain it." (http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/jul11999/dprk.html)

I love the way that piece talks about US imperialism as if it were a thinking being. Reification is one thing, but convincing yourself that an abstraction gets out of bed and makes coffee in the morning, now that takes real guts.

[The bizzle]

You have never been to North Korea - perhaps, if you had visited the country, you might have licence to make such comments.

It is rational to be empirical rather than speculative don't you think?
Enough heresy, lampooning and speculation – what use is that in the face of a good structural argument with evidence and proof?

[free person]

if North Korea was such a great place why can't their people come and go as they please? Why can't we visit there without being escorted and told where to go? Who in their right mind supports the 22 million person prison they are running and can with a straight face believe any of their ridiculous propoganda? Did Kim Jong-il shoot a 40 the first time he ever picked up a golf club according to their media? Who the hell believes this stuff and then can allow their thoughts and actions to imprision 22 million people?