Content area
Full Text
KEYWORDS: North Korea, North Korean studies, ideology, chuche, propaganda
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/2014874779
Since the 1960s, observers of North Korea have generally agreed tiiat die country is guided in its policy making by Kim Il-sung's /v/r//c [clmch: e] ideology. To quote a recendy published book, "there is no dispute that it has over die decades become die dominant leitmotiv tiiat shapes the ways in which die North's political, social and economic activities are organized."* 1 Whether tiiat "no dispute" bespeaks ignorance of my arguments against tiiis assumption or a disregard for them,2 the consensus remains so indifferent to countervailing views tiiat there is indeed no dispute in die sense of a dialectic. To my exasperation, I find myself cited witii approval as if I too belonged to tiiat consensus.3 One scholar has acknowledged tiiat opinion on juche now ranges from die belief tiiat it is a "quasi-religion" to die belief tiiat it is a "sham," but I was not surprised to see his endnote refer readers only to proponents of die former view.4 Professors and think-tank pundits, government diplomats and intelligence analysts continue to describe juche as a matter of course as North Korea's "guiding ideology."5 A few years ago die regime's crackdowns on open-air markets were chalked up to "neojuche revivalism."6
Looking back over the Western scholarship of the past half-century, one can see the assertions on /Mc/;,c-related matters growing more extravagant from one decade to the next, a development connected, I believe, to the fading of Communist theory from collective academic memory. Kim Il-sung's so-called juche speech of 1955, which American researchers in 1972 assumed had been "perfectly acceptable to die USSR,"7 is now described as having been "overtly ... anti-Soviet," "radically nationalistic," and so on.8 The declassified East Bloc archives' vindication of die earlier assessment continues to be ignored,9 as does die flattery of die USSR in die speech itself.10 (As an intellectual exercise I recommend substituting "LTSA" wherever die LTSSR is mentioned, and imagining Syngman Rliee as the speaker; no one would tiiink die tone anti-American or radically nationalist.) It has even been asserted that Kim "made no references to the classical Marxists Karl Marx ... and Vladimir Lenin," in die speech, his real goal having allegedly been to praise die Neo-Confucian...