It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

KIM IL SUNG: CONFUCIAN GENTLEMAN:

It happened in Juche 49 (1960) when the construction of Okryu bridge was completed. The constructors asked the president to write the calligraphic sign board of the bridge. According to the repeated petitions of the constructors the president wrote "Okryugyo" with a writing brush in India ink at a breath. Looking it for a while, the president said to officials to bring it to professionals for correction. The officials concerned invited an old man who had a profound knowledge of calligraphy and requested him to correct it without saying who wrote it.

After studying it, he rose up from the seat and politely said: "I have never seen such a wonderful calligraphy. It was written by a great man. It is not proper for me to correct it." When the officials requested another calligrapher, he also said same words.

Many of the descriptions of North Korea--"totalitarian," "Stalinist," "dictatorship"--are valid to some extent but they often mask the fact that the regime of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il is also Korean and is regarded and defended as such even by the people who suffer under the rule of the Kims. And, I might add, a growing number of South Koreans feel the same.

UPDATE: KIM JONG IL AGREES:

It was the dear leader Comrade Kim Jong-il who regarded it as a serious question that these evils still had effect on the students of the university whose basic mission it was to equip the students firmly with the great leader's revolutionary thought, the Juche idea, and train them to be the revolutionaries of a Juche type.

One day he keenly felt the need to renovate their study attitude promptly.

That day his classmates were arguing about the origin of the Korean nation. They were arguing against one another, each parroting the classical proposition of Marxism-Leninism that nations were formed only in the age of capitalism. They went so far as to bring forth preposterous arguments.

One of them argued that a nation was the product of capitalist age according to the classics and that the Korean nation, therefore, should be considered to have been formed during the years of Japanese imperialist rule.

Another student refuted: "The socio-economic structure of our country under Japanese imperialist rule was not capitalistic in the true sense of the word. So the Korean nation should be viewed as having been formed after the liberation."

A third questioned sarcastically: "If so, does it mean that a capitalist system was established in our liberated country?"

The argument dragged on without any solution. The lengthy argument came to an end only when Kim Jong-il had explained the great leader's teaching that ours was a homogeneous nation who had lived in the same land, speaking the same language, from the ancient times.