Kim II-sung?

[safeduck]

What are the pros and cons of Kim II-Sung? What is your own opinion on him also? thanks.

[Q]

Pro: He's dead.

Is this meant to be serious?

[Tommy4ever]

He had quite an interesting early life in China fighting as a partisan against the Japanese, being part of the embryonic communist movements in China and Korea and later in the Red Army. He apparently barely spoke Korean when the Russians put him in charge of NK. Rest is history ...


Made a personality cult that even made Enver Hoxha blush (that's Enver, ''PRAISE STALIN!'' Hoxha). Also isolated NK and led them towards their current near total isolation from the world.

[The Intransigent Faction]

His leadership of "socialism" in North Korea was the biggest con of all.

[Sam_b]

Also isolated NK and led them towards their current near total isolation from the world.

One man alone did not isolate North Korea. the analysis is too simplistic here. Obviously the war and the actual make up of the WRP were also concisive factors, no?

[Rafiq]

Sam b is unquestionably correct, Kim Jong merely adjusted his policies to the material conditions manifested during the Korean War and the "fall of communism" twenty five years back.

[X5N]

There are no cons, for even in death the Eternal President leads the great socialist nation he fathered to victory against the Imperialists.

[Ismail]

Made a personality cult that even made Enver Hoxha blush (that's Enver, ''PRAISE STALIN!'' Hoxha).Hoxha called Kim Il Sung a "vacillating revisionist megalomaniac" in his Reflections on China. In that same work he wrote, "In Pyongyang, I believe that even Tito will be astonished at the proportions of the cult of his host, which has reached a level unheard of anywhere else, either in past or present times, let alone in a country which calls itself socialist." Furthermore in The Khrushchevites Hoxha recalled his 1956 visit to the DPRK, "On September 7 we arrived in Pyongyang. They put on a splendid welcome, with people, with gongs, with flowers, and with portraits of Kim Il Sung everywhere. You had to look hard to find some portrait of Lenin, tucked away in some obscure corner."


Also isolated NK and led them towards their current near total isolation from the world.Kim Il Sung actually had good diplomatic relations with most countries on earth. He was on friendly terms with Tito, the Soviets, the Chinese, Fidel Castro, etc. This is because of his opportunist foreign policy which stressed good relations with just about everyone (he even traded with the USA at times) over an actual revolutionary foreign policy. As noted by other posters, though, the "fall of socialism" in 1991 isolated the DPRK and it became a symbol of how "archaic" communism is, similar to the situation in Cuba only Cuba is more accommodating to foreign investors and tourism.

Here's a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the DPRK: http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/KoreaNS.htm

[cheguvera]

it is silly we are expecting socialism from royals.North korea has a royal family. Stalin & these kind of buggers fucked the meaning of socialism.

[Prometeo liberado]

Without a doubt you can summise that the graduated outcome of family leadership of a revolutionary party under a Total War atmosphere leads to nothing out of the ordinary. Lack of a cohesive internationalist foreign policy is a direct result of a miserable, self-preservationist, domestic policy. If the ranks of a "revolutionary socialist" party is not fully versed in the ever changing currents of world capital and its affects on the people then they will become fully versed on enslavement of the people and propagation of the leadership that created this vapid system.

[Ismail]

it is silly we are expecting socialism from royals.North korea has a royal family. Stalin & these kind of buggers fucked the meaning of socialism.I don't see how you go from the Kims to Stalin. Stalin didn't really trust "Asian communists" like Mao that much and their leaderships have little in common. He no doubt wouldn't have looked kindly upon Juche had Kim presented it the way he did IRL.

Also Che viewed Stalin in a positive light, so... yeah.

[Geiseric]

Well that analyses, Ismail, describes most "socialist" or "communist" governments post WW2.

[Ismail]

When did he? I have only heard lukewarm quotes taken from his early years.If anything he admired Mao more for his siding with china during the split (though that isn't a definitive colleration).Not like the Chinese didn't praise Stalin following the Sino-Soviet split.

Here's an interesting link on Che Guevara's economic views and their divergence from the Khrushchevite line: http://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv11n1/che.htm


Well that analyses, Ismail, describes most "socialist" or "communist" governments post WW2.Kim Il Sung was as much a revisionist as Ceaușescu (who Kim got along with), Gomulka, Zhivkov, Ulbricht and Honecker, etc.

[Blake's Baby]

What are the pros and cons of Kim II-Sung? What is your own opinion on him also? thanks.

Pro: he's dead.

Con: he spent a lot time when he was alive being a piece of shit.

As to my opinion, I think you can probably make it out from the forgoing.

[Renegade Saint]

Im sure there's another thread where people can feed their fetishes for long dead and irrelevant communists like Che and Hoxha. This is about a different dead/irrelevant 'communist' leader.

[Ismail]

Im sure there's another thread where people can feed their fetishes for long dead and irrelevant communists like Che and Hoxha. This is about a different dead/irrelevant 'communist' leader.Well not many people are talking about Kim Il Sung. Hoxha called Kim a pseudo-Marxist, which seems to be the general impression of him. Of course like Kim, Che also dabbled in "creative" "applications" of Marxism-Leninism. In Che's case it led to his death via "foco," in Kim's case it led to Juche, which winded up negating Marxism-Leninism.

It's also odd for you to call Hoxha "irrelevant" yet you're a member of the ISO. Not like Trotsky is super-"relevant" (whatever that means) either.

[Renegade Saint]

Well not many people are talking about Kim Il Sung. Hoxha called Kim a pseudo-Marxist, which seems to be the general impression of him. Of course like Kim, Che also dabbled in "creative" "applications" of Marxism-Leninism. In Che's case it led to his death via "foco," in Kim's case it led to Juche, which winded up negating Marxism-Leninism.

It's also odd for you to call Hoxha "irrelevant" yet you're a member of the ISO. Not like Trotsky is super-"relevant" (whatever that means) either.
:laugh:
The difference is that hundreds of groups and thousands of people world-wide still read Trotsky and trace their ideological roots to Trotsky. You could fit all the people who proclaim they 'stand in the tradition' of Hoxha in a largish phone booth.

[Ismail]

The difference is that hundreds of groups and thousands of people world-wide still read Trotsky and trace their ideological roots to Trotsky. You could fit all the people who proclaim they 'stand in the tradition' of Hoxha in a largish phone booth.There are parties that consider themselves supportive in the main of Enver Hoxha in countries like Ecuador and Tunisia, where they have seats in their respective countries' legislatures. The PCdoB was/is a significant communist party which abandoned its pro-Albania line in the early 90's, but is just one example of the fact that there were plenty of parties adhering to the Albanian line in the 70's and 80's.

In fact, speaking in terms of influence, pro-Hoxha parties were probably more influential than Trotskyist ones in the 1980's. Trotskyists had entryism into Labour in the UK, whereas pro-Hoxha parties had an armed presence in countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and in the 70's Brazil. There was also a pro-Albanian party in Nicaragua which had two seats in its legislature during the Sandinista period. In addition both Burkina Faso and Mali had significant pro-Hoxha movements, the former splitting over whether or not to support Thomas Sankara and the latter being involved in student and worker unrest against the military regime of Moussa Traoré.

The significance of the pro-Albanian movement worldwide was as such that even bourgeois nationalists toyed with it. Sinn Féin passed a resolution in the mid-80's calling Albania a model socialist country, and in the late 80's Meles Zenawi (then a guerrilla leader against the Mengistu regime) said the same. Of course both quickly pretended they never said those things soon after, but it still demonstrates the influence.

[MarxSchmarx]

I just came across this thread.

Ismail and Manic Expression - this thread has been severely derailed and I am splitting off the bulk of this Stalin-Hoxha-Che stuff here:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-che-and-t166643/index.html?t=166643

Continue your conversation there if you must, but this isn't the place. There will be verbal warnings to anybody who is inclined to see that this thread get derailed further.