• International E-seminar in Celebration of the 80th Birth Anniversary of General Kim Jong Il

THE year Juche 111 (2022) is an extremely meaningful year in which we celebrate three important anniversaries: the 80th birthday of Chairman Kim Jong Il, the 110th birthday of President Kim Il Sung and the 10th year of respected Comrade Kim Jong Un being at the helm of the Party and state of the DPRK.

But it is also a year in which winds of war blow stronger than ever before, owing to the vicious maneuvers of the imperialists and their stooges to unleash a Third World War.

Many events have occurred in these ten years since Chairman Kim Jong Il passed away and great Comrade Kim Jong Un has been elected to the top posts of the Party and state. All these indirectly confirmed the justness, validity and vitality of the scientific, revolutionary line adopted by the Workers' Party of Korea and the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to step up socialist construction and self-reliant national defense: without a strong pillar capable of assuring the right to existence and development of the sovereign state, no country and no nation will ever be able to escape destruction, misery, and ruin. Yet at the beginning of the present century we saw the tragic end of such countries as Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.

While the former committed the serious mistake of relying on a foreign big power to ensure its salvation from the US imperialist aggression, the two latter took the same wrong decision of giving up their developing nuclear arsenal for deterrence. Thus they were all reduced to ashes by the imperialists, who first try madly to disarm independent countries and then invade them to overthrow their legitimate governments and submit them into the orbit of the so-called Washington Consensus. Although the former Yugoslavian people and the Iraqi and Libyan people are heroically struggling against the imperialists and all reactionary forces, they still have to tread a long and thorny path to regain their lost countries. However, this is definitely not the case with socialist Korea.

Thanks to the wise and far-sighted guidance of great leader Comrade Kim Jong Il, the Korean communists already noticed the danger of renouncing one's own right to self-defense towards the mid-2000s. If the former Libyan Jamahiriya announced the dismantlement of its nuclear arsenal in December 2003, the DPRK proclaimed to the world its possession of the A-Bomb in February 2005 and successfully tested it on October 9, 2006. This, together with the victorious nuclear test of May 2009, laid strong foundations for the military miracle which was brought out throughout the 2010s on Korean land under the staunch guidance of Marshal Kim Jong Un.

Great General Kim Jong Il was indeed an iron-willed commander, a genial strategist and a very skilled diplomat. He conceived and applied the Songun idea and Songun politics always relying on the people and finding himself among them, often saying to officials accompanying him in his tour of field guidance that one should even grow flowers on a rock, if this was the wish of the people. His revolutionary outlook was the perfect embodiment of President Kim Il Sung's lifetime motto «The People Are My God». He confidently confessed to an official, to whom he unbosomed his heart about the heavy decision to invest a colossal sum of money in the national defense, that he would have told the people everything once they will have emerged victorious, and that they would have understood him. History proved him completely right.

Great leader Comrade Kim Jong Il is truly the eternal incarnation of Juche Korea: he guided the setup of the TV service in the whole territory of the DPRK in the 1960s, he upgraded the scientific socialist analysis of imperialism in his masterpiece The Characteristics of Modern Imperialism and Its Aggressive Nature, he defended and enriched the common treasurehouse of Marxism-Leninism against modern revisionism, he synthesized the revolutionary ideas of President Kim Il Sung together with the idea, theory and method of Juche in a new stage of communist thought under the theoretical system of Kimilsungism, and published a noteworthy number of works on literature and art, whose like nobody has ever seen in the profound theory of communist science. We from the Juche Idea Study Center of Italy have integrally translated into Italian and published on our website two of these works, namely, On the Art of Music and On Juche Literature, on the anniversaries of their respective publication. The other ones will follow accordingly.

We should all strive in order to make this meaningful year a year of general advance and further dissemination of great Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism among our peoples, for the rebirth of the international communist movement on an updated, superior theoretical foundation. We should also struggle to thwart the maneuvers by the imperialist to provoke a new world war, which may escalate in a thermonuclear war, by displaying to the full our revolutionary mettle and spirit of proletarian internationalism, as Chairman Kim Jong Il did throughout his life.