North Korea: Communist monarchy

[lpetrich]

Korea was split in two at the end of World War II, like Germany. In 1945, Kim Il-Sung became the leader of the northern part, and he was the leader of that part until his death in 1994. His son Kim Jong-il succeeded him and declared him the "Eternal President" of the nation. In 2011, Kim Jong-Il died, and he was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-Un.

This is unlike the usual practice in Communist countries, where the top members of the country's Communist Party select a leader's successor. But it is much more like what a monarchy does, and many people, including myself, call North Korea a Communist monarchy because of that.


In 2013, North Korea's leaders revised its "Ten Principles of the One-Ideology System" to give the Kim dynasty a hereditary claim to power.

Clause 2 of Article 10 states that the party and revolution must be carried "eternally" by the "Baekdu bloodline," referring to the Kim dynasty. The North inserted new clauses stipulating the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, which contains the pickled corpses of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, as a sacred place to protect the images of the two leaders.

At the same time, the phrase "completion of communist achievements" has been deleted, switching the focus purely to establishing absolute rule. In other words, the North has become a kingdom ruled by the Kim dynasty.

(The Twisted Logic of the N.Korean Regime - The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea - opinion > editorial)

North Korea's leaders have also edited references to Communism out of their Constitution, and they no longer show off big pictures of Marx and Lenin and other non-Korean Communist leaders. But even though they call their ideology Juche rather than socialism or Communism or Marxism-Leninism, they still have their super-Stalinist policies.

Baekdu refers to Mt. Baekdu or Paekdu on the Korean-Chinese border, a volcano with a lake in its peak crater. North Korean hagiographers claim that Kim Jong Il, NK's second leader, was born on the slopes of that mountain. Also, that when he was born, a swallow sang, a bright star and a double rainbow appeared in the sky, and winter turned into spring.

North Korea's Kim dynasty: the making of a personality cult | World news | The Guardian -- the Kim dynasty is the subject of an official personality cult that is grotesque even by Stalinist or Maoist standards, a cult that includes lots of miracle-working. So North Korea has reinvented god-kings.


BTW, "Kim" is a very common Korean last name. So most of the numerous Kims in Korea and elsewhere have no connection to the Kim dynasty.

 

[LordKiran]

Despotic Monarchy sounds more accurate imo. Communism refers to a specific way of ordering your society that is exclusive with a Monarchy such as the stratification of society and separating people into social and political classes. Communist Khmer is a good example of this. The goal of the Khmeri Communists was to turn everyone into farmers so that society might be purified of modernity and its social institutions. Terrible as this was you can at least see the attempt towards the removal of class barriers. NK actively creates and enforces those barriers.

I don't think its accurate or fair to refer to NK as Communist anything. Its just a straight up despotic monarchy where the people are slaves beholden to a god-king.

 

[lpetrich]

How North Korea Brainwashes Children To Conform to “Kimism”

When conservative believers jeer and jab at atheism, they frequently point to North Korea as an example of what a perfect atheist state looks like.

Next time that happens, just send them a link to this article from yesterday’s Washington Post.

Author Anna Fifield explains how the country’s schoolchildren are force-fed the idea that their leaders are divine beings. “Kimism” is a religion in all but name.

The article: North Korea begins brainwashing children in cult of the Kims as early as kindergarten - The Washington Post

The personality cult that permeates every aspect of North Korean life has become an ideology in itself. It revolves around Kim Il Sung, portrayed as an anti-Japanese revolutionary hero and founding father who remains North Korea’s “eternal president” more than two decades after his death.

His son, Kim Jong Il, was, according to North Korean myth, born on a sacred mountain, under a bright star at night. (In reality, he was born in Siberia.) Since Kim Jong Il’s death in 2011, Kim Jong Un has taken over the family business.

It starts very early:

“The milk would arrive and we would go up one by one to fill our cups,” recalled Lee [a recent defector].

“The teachers would say: ‘Do you know where the milk came from? It came from the Dear Leader. Because of his love and consideration, we are drinking milk today.’ I didn’t really ask questions. Somehow I just knew not to.”

Children’s books convey the ideology, too. The Butterfly and the Cockerel, for example, tells the story of an irascible, bullying rooster (the United States) outwitted by a small, virtuous butterfly (North Korea). Teachers don’t just teach history, they teach “revolutionary history.” And all music, storybooks, novels and artwork relate to the Kims.

Christopher Hitchens once described the traditional concept of Heaven as very much like North Korea.


Although the first Communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, disliked personality cultism, his successor Joseph Stalin got into it in a big way, first of Lenin, then of himself. After Stalin died, his successors turned him into what he had turned so many Communist officials into: an official nobody. However, they continued their Lenin personality cult until the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of Communism there.

Some other Communist leaders have also been big on personality cultism, notably Mao Zedong and Nicolae Ceausescu and Enver Hoxha, but others have had little taste for it, like Pol Pot.

Various non-Communist leaders have also had cults of personality, like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Saparmurat Niyazov. Most recently, we've been seeing a personality cult of Vladimir Putin: Meet the Rappers Behind the Smash Hip-Hop Ode to Putin (Two expats from Africa have one of the biggest songs in Moscow with "I Go Hard Like Vladimir Putin") and BBC News - In pictures: The 12 Labours of... Putin, just like Hercules. Including fighting a hydra with heads named "USA", "Canada", "Japan", and "European Union".


North Korea has clearly reinvented god-kings, complete with hereditary succession. Thus making it a Communist monarchy. Its official ideology is Juche, more or less "self-reliance". But in recent years, they've been de-emphasizing their connection to Communism in general, dropping the word from their constitution ( Constitution of North Korea), and omitting pictures of Marx and Lenin and the like from their official Big Events.

 

[lpetrich]

Despotic Monarchy sounds more accurate imo. ... Its just a straight up despotic monarchy where the people are slaves beholden to a god-king.

That's how it works out in practice, I'm sure.

but by Communism I meant Marxism-Leninism, what's usually meant by Communism in the context of a Communist country.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Despotic Monarchy sounds more accurate imo. Communism refers to a specific way of ordering your society that is exclusive with a Monarchy such as the stratification of society and separating people into social and political classes. Communist Khmer is a good example of this. The goal of the Khmeri Communists was to turn everyone into farmers so that society might be purified of modernity and its social institutions. Terrible as this was you can at least see the attempt towards the removal of class barriers. NK actively creates and enforces those barriers.

I don't think its accurate or fair to refer to NK as Communist anything. Its just a straight up despotic monarchy where the people are slaves beholden to a god-king.

Ya, it's weird how attempts to set up communist countries tend to end up with a despotic tyranny for reasons completely unrelated to communism. It's too bad there isn't some kind of common factor at work which could account for that trend.

 

[LordKiran]

Despotic Monarchy sounds more accurate imo. ... Its just a straight up despotic monarchy where the people are slaves beholden to a god-king.

That's how it works out in practice, I'm sure.

but by Communism I meant Marxism-Leninism, what's usually meant by Communism in the context of a Communist country.

The problem with this is you end up with a shitty situations like this where you have people who struggle to divorce the works of Marx from the political entities he inspired decades after he was dead. You can say that some of his ideas are untenable in the real world and I wouldn't disagree but it's important to keep in mind that Marx is unlikely to have agreed with what the Soviet state and other governments like it became. It'd be like blaming Neitzsche for his ideas inspiring or being made to fit the ideology of Nazism.

Despotic Monarchy sounds more accurate imo. Communism refers to a specific way of ordering your society that is exclusive with a Monarchy such as the stratification of society and separating people into social and political classes. Communist Khmer is a good example of this. The goal of the Khmeri Communists was to turn everyone into farmers so that society might be purified of modernity and its social institutions. Terrible as this was you can at least see the attempt towards the removal of class barriers. NK actively creates and enforces those barriers.

I don't think its accurate or fair to refer to NK as Communist anything. Its just a straight up despotic monarchy where the people are slaves beholden to a god-king.

Ya, it's weird how attempts to set up communist countries tend to end up with a despotic tyranny for reasons completely unrelated to communism. It's too bad there isn't some kind of common factor at work which could account for that trend.

Hey if you want to argue that chasing communism (or indeed any utopian ideal) is like chasing perfection then I won't argue but lets call things what they are. If you could have your brain wiped of your particular historical contexts and took a fresh look at NK, you would never guess that this place was supposed to be communist. Terrible as communist china, cambodia, and soviet was you can at least see the influence of marxist ideals in the way they ordered their societies. No such pretenses exist with NK its just old school despotism.