Like it would be uncarved? That was created a century ago. Nothing to be proud of. I’m not moving the goalposts, I’m pointing out it doesn’t matter. The point isn’t the statue/picture, it’s the obligation.
They have pictures of the dear leader everywhere TODAY. The point is they are forced to venerate them now.
If it doesn’t really matter, and everything is the same, go to Pyongyang, and denounce then in public. Compare that to denouncing a past or even current president either at Mount Rushmore or on Pennsylvania Ave.
The DPRK has only existed as a political entity for 75 years. Kim Il-sung is their founding father. He died in 1994.
Do you expect them to not venerate him to some extent? The WPK ejected the Japanese and Amerikan imperialists who raped and murdered millions of Koreans – who stripped them of their national and cultural heritage, their language, their names, their fucking humanity. The WPK brought that all back. Kim Il-sung was chairman and president. The last president before the position was abolished, hence the title “Eternal President”.
Kim Jong-il was his son and helped manage to maintain Korean sovereignty in the face of the collapse of most of the socialist world, in the face of the west turning its guns towards the now destabilized smaller socialist nations. He died in 2011. He was general secretary of the WPK.
If Abraham Lincoln died 12 years ago, how do you think Amerikans would treat his memory? If George Washington died 30 years ago…
I do not know why I waste my time. Maybe for those reading this actually interested in learning, for those reading this that are not so horribly racist as to utterly dehumanize an entire people. Your complete ignorance of the ways Amerikan civil religion permeates this nation is very telling, as is your abstraction between Amerikan and Other civil religions.
I live on Washington street. It borders Monroe street and Jefferson street. All literal slaveowners. Yet you take umbrage with a nation’s reverence for the man who helped lead his people in liberating themselves from people with mindsets just like yours… in living fucking memory! Those poor, brainwashed Koreans. They just need to be Westernized/Japanized/liberalized/vaporized/insert-whatever-racist-bullshit-you-believe-here, right? Not like they’re human beings with the agency to make their own fucking choices. Fuck you.
Hey, thanks for writing this up. I really enjoyed the passion that you’ve used to write this.
