Roland Boer's Blog, page 35

How to trivialise news: reporting on the first official visit from the DPRK to South Korea

I have been intrigued for a while by another difference between corporate ‘news’ services (euphemistically called the ‘free press’) and sources from places like China or the DPRK (often dismissed as ‘state-run’). Apart from obvious ideological differences, what intrigues me is what counts as news in the different sources.

For example, the intense focus on the symptom-of-US-decline, Donald Trump, and his tweets simply does not appear in Chinese or DPRK news. Instead, they prefer to focus on su...

Workers’ Party of Korea t-shirt

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Everyone should have one!

‘Scream of terror of a loser’: the DPRK has the best phrases

Apparently, someone in the United States regime just before Christmas issued a statement about religious freedom, mentioning countries like DPRK, China and Iran as places without such freedom. The Pyongyang Times – a news outlet in English and French – has a couple of items in response. One of them quotes a spokesperson for the Religious Believers Council of Korea, who observes, correctly:

The US is engraved on the memory of the religionists in the DPRK as a group of satans and demons who bru...

On Recovering the term ‘Flunkeyism’

As I have been working with material from the DPRK, I came across a wonderful term, flunkeyism. In a basic sense, it means to pay undue reverence to and serve someone who is greater and stronger, exhibiting the characteristics of subservience.

The term came into central usage in the 1950s in the DPRK, when it gained a specifically negative sense. As the communists were seeking to construct socialism in Korean conditions, Kim Il Sung made a significant speech called ‘On Eliminating Dogmatism a...

Religion and Revolution in Korea: Kim Il Sung and Protestant Christianity

The following is another section from the final chapter of my new book, Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition. It deals with Kim Il Sung’s extensive engagements with Protestant Christianity. I have removed the copious references, since this will be published later.

Kim Il Sung may have championed Chondoism as a distinctly Korean religion focused on the good of the Korean people, but his personal background was Christian, or more specifically the Reformed tradition embodied in Pre...

Religion and Revolution in Korea: Kim Il Sung and Chondoism

The following is a section from the final chapter of my new book, Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition. It deals with Kim Il Sung’s extensive engagements with Chondoism, a distinctly Korean religion. I have removed the copious references, since this will be published later.

Article 68 of the socialist constitution of the DPRK (1948 and 1972, with revisions from 1992 to 2016) guarantees freedom of religion, although religion should not be used as an excuse to introduce foreign fo...

DPRK statement on human rights: religion

In completing my chapter on ‘Religion and Revolution in Korea’, I found a great site for downloading recent statements on a range of issues. Volume 9 concerns human rights, which articulates some of the main points from the constitution. Of interest for my current purposes is the following (pp. 54-55):

68. Provision of the Freedom of Thought and Religion

In the DPRK everybody is fully provided with the right to choose and follow their thought and religion according to their own free will.

Th...

An image for our time: the two Koreas as one

What an image!

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Ri Son Gwon, chair of the DPRK’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland (left), shakes hands with Cho Myoung-gyon, the Unification Minister of the Republic of Korea (right). This was at the meeting today in Panmunjom, in the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas.

And again:

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Amazing start to 2018, sidelining the international players and getting on with their own agenda. The footage of the gathering (found here) is stunning in its simplicity. And I was...

Moving fast: Inter-Korean talks to begin soon

Well, things move fast sometimes. After Kim Jong-un’s new year address, the south has moved to welcome the opportunity for renewed talks to defuse tensions on the peninsula. The southern Yonhap news has been making some extremely positive noises about the move, with the presidential office hailing the move and urging swift steps to restart talks.

This is a further signal that President Moon Jae-in actually has some spine. It began with his recent call to reconsider (and potentially tear up) a...

‘Comrades, friends, ladies and gentlemen’: Xi Jinping’s new year address

While I am on new year addresses by communist leaders, Xi Jinping has given an upbeat address as well. Notably, he has recovered the use of ‘comrade [tongzhi]‘ in all his addresses, after it had slipped out of common usage for a while. For example, in this speech, he begins with ‘Comrades, friends, ladies and gentlemen’. And he is known as ‘Comrade Xi Jinping’.

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