At Last, At Last My Visit to the DPRK!
The author and a friendly guide in front of "Monument to
the Victorious Great Fatherland Liberation War"
Chairman of the Songun Politics Study Group (USA)
Chairman of the US Solidarity Committee to Support the AINDF and the South Korean People's Struggle
Yearning for the Sun
For years and years I have worshiped and adored the Korean revolution and upheld most defiantly the correct guidance of Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung and Supreme Commander Comrade Kim Jong Il, wishing very much to visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), to study amongst them, to see the sites I read about in books, to live the lifeblood of its masses, and to know the anti-US struggle for reunification from more than pictures. All struggles for national liberation and for socialist construction are struggles worth supporting, but because of its advanced vanguard theories of Juche idea and Songun policy, most of all I longed with much aching and torment to see socialist construction in Korea one day.
Even as a very young man living in abject poverty, I kept a picture of leader Kim Jong Il at my bedside. I had read his many classics like "Abuses of Socialism are Intolerable", "On Preserving the Juche and National Character of the Revolution and Construction", and "Socialism is a Science".
I would often go to local university libraries on days when I did not find work at the various day labor bureaus in order to hunt down classic pamphlets from and about Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung and the Juche Idea and try and find places to celebrate his April 15th birthday.
I yearned for Korea as if it were my very own motherland and corresponded with many south Korean revolutionaries and also Juche Songun followers around the world. These people have always shown me a great deal of love and patience. They invested theoretical and material support in our efforts to build a Songun group within the US imperialist epicenter and were always the first to defend our integrity from the attacks of the degenerate "left" wing of imperialism when it repeatedly attacked and attempted to isolate us.
Watching the progressive ideas around us rapidly erode and make illusions about the ever-militaristic nature of imperialism, while Korea stood firm, some of us began to understand the practical superiority of Songun and Juche even before anyone in the US of our era, and began to study and more correctly systematize them internally. Now today we are the small locomotive that could which sets out on the arduous road to reach the peak of the mountain.
Socialism is the lifeblood of the nation, but more than this it is also the the highest aspiration of humanity in its quest for unity and independence, the ultimate collective response to immortal socio-political integrity. Seeing the Korean people fight for the defense of socialism while standing in sharp contrast to the US imperialist occupation of south Korea caused me to yearn for the Sun of Baekdu, birthplace of leader Kim Jong Il and to one day exchange views with my Songun comrades face to face.
Regardless of how this might seem to anyone in the western world, I cannot stop feeling that if war were to break out on the Korean peninsula, I could be anything but one of those tens of millions of human bombs and bullets for leader Kim Jong Il. When I was in Pyongyang an elderly south Korean Kimilsungist fighter reassured me that none of the anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters had wealth and privilege either and told me not to compromise my principles and revolutionary activities at any and all costs. These words made me yearn to forever be in the bosom of Songun motherland, and even while I am the child of two country folks in the US imperialist epicenter, to always at heart be a Korean, also. This father-figure of mine for a number of years then asked me about the quest of Black people in the US imperialist epicenter and requested I send greetings from them to all the Black Liberation fighters.
I had repeatedly attempted to visit north Korea and to share my story and learn from its leadership but a combination of bitter poverty and imperialist embargo politics cramped my attempts. Finally visiting Korea for me is an experience I will never forget.
Finally being in the land of red flags, the land of the morning calm topographically most reminded me of Oregon and Washington, the overwhelmingly most beautiful areas within the continental USA, but compares spiritually to nothing I have ever seen or felt. I spent my first full day in Korea at the tomb of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, yearning for the Red Sun of all mankind and seeing him persevered for dexterity. I only hope most of all that am I to be a father as my father and his father were, that my children like me should see the body and tomb of the immortal founder of Juche idea and to always yearn for revolution and socialist construction.
I saw most of the monuments to the anti-Japanese and anti-American wars of liberation. Even at the kind request of my guide I couldn't stop crying while visiting the Sin Chon county museum. I felt the need to be a witness to the mass murder by American imperialist pigs of north Korean women and children during their war of aggression. I wrote something in the guest book congratulating Songun Korea on finally having tested nuclear bombs so that no such crimes should ever again happen to this innocent nation of family-oriented modesty and socialism.
These monuments deeply impressed me about the civilizational project being built in Korea, and of the kind guides who toured me around them I cannot complain, but I must say this is not what most impressed me, not even the immense palaces built for children to play and adults to study. It is the Korean people themselves who are the greatest national treasure. If their nation's exports of consumer goods and other things is modest because of embargoes and refuses to compromise or abandon socialism, then these things are dwarfed by the lessons of the Korean people under Juche tutelage these many decades.
Leftists in the west teach decadent Hollywood concepts offending basic principles of popular classes solidarity, promote assimilation to the point of cosmopolitanism and national nihilism, spread degenerate sexual ideas while openly lauding the destruction of healthy family life, turn up their noses at the very peasants and farmers which provide them with food and in place of anti-imperialism promote liberalism and individuality. No such ideas exist in Korea.
The Korean people don't even have to really deal with complex issues like abortion because men and women are taught to respect one another's bodies and to treat all forms of social interactions as those worthy of human life, not merely animal life. Wives and husbands respect one another, making divorce and extreme rarity. Male violence is ruthlessly opposed. Chastity and purity are encouraged not condemned. Rape and child molestation are practically unknown. Unnatural fetishes which thrive in the west have no room to express themselves or spread.
The Juche idea corrects the theoretical limitations of the previous Marxist ideas on family life by showing that the family unit is the cell of society. It once and for all demonstrates that, while capitalist and feudalistic family relations are reactionary, this does not mean that the family unity itself is reactionary. Likewise, the Juche idea is neither narrow nationalism. However, neither is it a concept which sees the nation as merely a product of capitalist development which will one day whither away.
I saw the purity of the Korean women and felt deep and bitter flaws in my own behavior and culture. It made me yearn for something I'd never seen before and had come to concede must exist only in Utopian social theory and rhetoric
Luck was on my side in that the Koreans has arranged for me to engage in an ongoing study course with the Korean Association of Social Scientists (KASS) and a number of laudable academics. Firstly they went through and defined Juche idea and its socio-historical basis and principles, and then we studied the theoretical problems of building socialism with the army as the hard core in the Songun era. They patiently gave their comments to all of my questions ranging from their thoughts on various socialist experience, to the role of armed struggle to difficult questions about sexuality and multiculturalism.
They asked me how I felt Juche could be concretely applied in the USA. I told them that it quite possibly it could not until the Chajusong spirit was applied towards those peoples conquered in the history of American colonial expansion. We talked on and on about my views on the short to medium-term issues of building relations between the USA and the DPRK to long-term prospects for revolution in the place of my birth. Many of the people I had talked to had never in their lives met an American, and as they are a full generation older than I, treated me as if I were a cub under their tender care.
I saw the old women dancing and playing traditional drums on Moran Hill celebrating the last years of their lives on the anniversary of the WPK while their husbands drank rice wine enjoyed a smoke with their friends and engaged in harmless working class merriment.
My driver was a very kind man to take my guides and me to a number of scenic areas and to see hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of farmland. Regularly one would see young Korean People's Army (KPA) soldiers of about 19 years of age with proud smiles on their faces while they harvested rice and corn.
When I was deep in the natural areas many international Juche Songun delegations picnicked beside some local working class mountain families. It was eventually discovered that I was American and I was offered every kind of tasty treat from trout porridge to packaged snack goods to oranges. None of these people had ever in their lives met an American, let alone heard one jokingly ask if they get many people from America coming to their region to learn about the Songun politics of leader Kim Jong Il?
We hummed L'Internationale and made nearly a dozen toasts to Korean re-unification and normalized relations between or peoples. All of the wives were taking my picture and a sweet little girl of about 12 or 13 continuously wanted to serve me and learn about the Songun group in the USA. She reminded me of one of my baby sisters when they were her age. I couldn't stop feeling that I loved Korea which has shown itself and its humanity to me most with grace and nobility.
Confronting the imperialism of my birth-land and in support of Korean re-unification and independence
One does not fully appreciate the great sorrow of the Korean people because of the US imperialist partition of their country until one has visited Panmunjom. I was escorted there by a friendly KPA officer along with a number of other foreign allies and delegates. He asked me about the state of the US leftists and communist forces, and I told him that they were mostly all opportunistic and revisionist. I also told him that I deeply wanted to shake hands with a KPA officer for a number of years. He was beyond kind and actually made sure that enough KPA soldiers were around to protect us from the enemy, as south Korean puppet troops were watching me with binoculars and taking several photos before retreating to the building to which they were stationed.
I was taught the history of the division of the nation by outside imperialist powers, about the realities of the DPRK-ROK border even after the historic June 15th accords and asked to please relay to the people living within the US imperialist epicenter that Korea wishes to reunify itself free of outside interference.
One could see the immense tensions which daily occur. On also sees the clear spiritual and material superiority of the KPA over the enemy ROK puppet troops who would bounce around like frogs and had a sort of psychotic hyperactivity, in sharp contrast to the smooth and majestic KPA soldiers.
At one point in Panmunjom I was actually able to step 5 feet into ROK territory because an international treaty allows both the DPRK and the ROK to travel freely in a handful of small shed-like structures in order to conduct negotiations directly in the center. With a smile I thought "Well look at me I made it to south Korea" and then realized again the pains of American imperialist inspired division and that brief smile went away.
Throughout Korea nothing is a shredding wound digging deeper than the wounds of national division. This division has caused the repression of a number of patriotic and revolutionary forces throughout the south and encourages the students and others to fight harder against the GI mercenary goons who occupy and repress them.
Even as they build socialist construction and defy imperialism the south Korean brethren are always on the minds of the north Koreans. They like to say that Songun Politics is a treasure sword protecting both the south and the north and that their guns and bombs are not turned against fellow countrymen but against the American occupiers and their Grand National Party lackeys. It was none other than this Songun miracle which forced imperialism to back off enough so that the Koreans could talk and reconcile peacefully and independently usher in the June 15th, Juche 90 (2001) accords.
A nuclear bomb as if a miracle sent from heaven!
I was in Pyongyang during the glorious and historic testing of a nuclear bomb and always will be enthusiastic about this occasion, because it defied the imperialists and the White House. This is an experience I will never forget.
The Korean nation is deeply lauding the nuke-and-lifeline stance and looking up to Marshal Kim Jong Il for making it possible. Songun Korea has never invaded anyone, has never threatened unprovoked attacks on America and is not an imperialist country. The are defending themselves from a ruthless and ever-militaristic force via self-assertion and the ability to inflict losses on the enemy as a form of implied deterrent force.
I support completely Korea's right to build nuclear bombs and weapons of mass destruction. In fact, I was give the opportunity to tell the Korean people many of us in the US imperialist epicenter support their nuclear stand when I was being interviewed for a documentary on the study of Juche and Songun around the world.
When understanding Songun politics, which correctly places priority in military affairs in all circumstances we need to understand that the root of Songun politics is immortal Juche idea. It is only the Juche idea which sees humanity as the master of the universe and a force capable of shaping its own destiny and desire for independence collectively. None other than this Juche love of the people, in the form of a very real and very human-centered socialism, holds aloft the gun above the hammer, sickle and brush - and this under the wise leadership of Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, lodestar of the 20th century and Supreme Commander Comrade Kim Jong Il, lodestar of the 21st Century.
I have finally been to the land of Juche socialism and the Songun fortress of anti-imperialist independence with triumphant feelings of vindication will always deeply love Korea in a special and peculiar way which mere words regretably are inadequate to explain.