What especially touched me.
No!
Wherever the Korean comrades guided us to during our fourteen day visit of the DPRK, whichever building we entered, everywhere we saw pictures of Kim Il Sung. Kindergarden, school, university, public building, everywhere were little exhibitions, which showed life and work of Kim IL Sung. Seeing this it became clear to me how much respect and love the Korean people had preserved and still preserve for their big leader and revolutionary Kim Il Sung. On many pictures I could see how Kim Il Sung talked with children, students, with workers that were producing, with farmers in the fields, with soldiers protecting their socialist country, how he was welcomed in their midst as a friend and comrade. Kim Il Sung was one of them, inseparably connected to them. All his life long Kim Il Sung served his class, the proletariat.
No, that is no personality cult!
What does personality cult really mean?
Whenever nowadays in our so very modern, capitalistic world some people on the left use the word personality cult they forget that this term was determined by the class-enemy. They forget to consider this term from the class-point of view and to answer the question: “What is useful for whom?”
Adversaries in the 50ies of the last century used this monstrous word for the first time to degrade the merits of J.W. Stalin, the brilliant leader of international proletariat, the victorious general in the “Great Patriotic War”, the man of learning, who developed creatively the Marxist-Leninist theory and enriched many other sciences by his profound works.
If the reproach of personality cult lacks any basis concerning comrade Stalin, then it is equally absurd to apply it to comrade Kim Il Sung.
The same way we have to see the statement that Kim IL Sung is said to be a dictator. Didn’t the bourgeois ideologists with help of their totalitarian theory maintain the thesis that fashist dictatorship would be the same as communist dictatorship? Here we have to ask again:” What is useful for whom?” If a good many people on the left are taken in by this bourgeois ideology, they should read once again the “Communist Manifesto”, “Critics of Gothaer Programme” and “State and Revolution”, then think it over and free themselves from the ideology of the class-enemy!
A dictator?
Kim IL Sung – a criminal for the Korean people? In a country without prisons, where crime-rate is nothing but a fraction of that we know in Germany? The socialist Korea – a prison? Kim IL Sung and the Party of Labour restrict the freedom of North-Korean people?
What a good many people on the left in Germany don’t know is the existence of the “border” between the socialist and the capitalist Korea at the 38th parallel. This “wall” however had been erected from the South-Korean part at the instigation of imperialism. Yet as long as there is this border construction no one from the socialist North had fled to “freedom” in the South. Karl Marx had already written that after proletarian revolution people’s freedom would be more complete than any bourgeois freedom. Why? People are free of any kind of capitalist exploitation!
At Kumsusan-Memorial-Palace, the mausoleum of Kim-Il-Sung, we joined the queue of thousands of Koreans, who had come to pay their last respects to Kim Il Sung. At the glass sarcophagus, me too, respectfully bowed to Kim Il Sung. Several times I had a thick lump in my throat. I, a communist from Germany had experienced for a fortnight how successfully the Korean people under the guidance of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and the Marxist-Leninist Party of Labour of Korea had been building up socialism and were defending it against all attacks of imperialism.
However here, in Kim Il Sung mausoleum, I felt the close ties between the people and the leader of the Korean revolution, Kim Il Sung. When the korean comrades showed a video about the last weeks of Kim Il Sung, his passing away and the grief the whole Korean people was seized with, I had tears in my eyes. I looked reound (back). I was not alone with my feelings.
Achim Churs