Saturday 15 April will be the 94th anniversary of the birth of Korean leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994. Kim Il Sung was a great revolutionary leader who guided the Korean people through the fight against the occupation forces of Japan throughout the 1930s until victory in 1945.
Subsequently, he led the Korean people to establish a state independent of imperialism, and in their victorious fight to defend that state against the brutal imperialist aggression of the 1950-53 Korean War.
He formulated the strategy for reunifying Korea notwithstanding the unremitting efforts of imperialism to prevent this, a strategy now beginning to bear fruit. After his death, these principles Kim Il Sung developed have been brilliantly continued by his successor Kim Jong Il.
When under the leadership of Khrushchev, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took the revisionist road of ‘market socialism’ and compromise with imperialism, the Korean people had to face the struggles ahead independently of the their longtime Soviet friend. Comrade Kim Il Sung reminded them of the Juche idea – that every revolution, revolutionary party and individual must be primarily self-reliant, uniting with others wherever, but only so long as, this advances the revolutionary cause:
“It is impossible to make a revolution by depending on other countries. Dependence will lead to mistrust of one’s own strength and also prevent efforts to make the best use of the domestic resources of one’s own country. Self-reliance means building socialism and accomplishing on one’s own by every means. This is the only way to be loyal to internationalism and to contribute to the common cause of socialism.” (‘The organisational and ideological work of the party’, March 1962, in Selected Works, Vol III, p328, FLPH Pyongyang, 1971)
As a result of the commitment of the Korean leader, parties and people to self-reliance in pursuit of socialism, Kim Il Sung was able to say, when other communists were following the Soviet party down the slippery slope of revisionism: “Let certain people renounce Marxism Leninism and take the revisionist path, but we cannot allow ourselves to waver and compromise with imperialism. There is a revolutionary song which says: ‘Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.’ This expresses our invariable determination. We must continue with the revolution and resolutely fight against imperialism to the end.” (Ibid)
The CPGB-ML has taken up the challenge of keeping the red flag flying, notwithstanding the period of darkest reaction which has engulfed the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In recognition of the priceless contribution that Comrade Kim Il Sung made to the revolutionary movement all over the world, and his revolutionary spirit that still pervades the Korean people, enabling them to maintain their revolutionary and anti-imperialist stance against all the odds, we extend our warmest greetings on this anniversary to Comrade Kim Il Sung’s party, the Workers’ Party of Korea, to its present leader, Comrade Kim Jong Il, and to the valiant people of the DPRK.
