Liberation of Korea, Undying Exploit of President Kim Il Sung

Over sixty years have passed since Korea was liberated on August 15, 1945 from the Japanese imperialists’ military occupation (1905-1945).

Kim Il Sung who set out on the road of revolution in his teens led the anti-Japanese armed struggle for 15 years before liberating Korea, a historic event that brought about a turn in the Korean people’s destiny and heralded the birth of socialist Korea. His exploit of liberating Korea is still shining along with the strengthening and development of socialist Korea.

Post-liberation Korea turned into a people’s country, the first of its kind in its 5,000-year-long history.

Before liberation, the Korean people had had to undergo the distress of the ruined people amid all manner of exploitation, suppression, ill-treatment and contempt under the colonial rule of the Japanese imperialists. More than 8.4 million young and middle-aged Koreans had been drafted and forced to toil and moil on battlefields and in other places, over one million of them cruelly murdered and 200,000 Korean women forced into sex slavery as “comfort women” of the Japanese army. The Korean people had not been allowed to use their own language. They had been forced to change even their names into Japanese ones. The Korean nation had seemed to fall never to rise again.

Kim Il Sung then saved the nation by liberating Korea and turned the northern half of the Korean Peninsula into a genuine people’s land-there was founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-where the popular masses became masters of the state and society and everything served them. In the DPRK the people are provided with all manner of political rights and liberty and ordinary working people are elected deputies to the people’s assemblies of all levels. As the owners of means of production, people are provided with the right to work and enjoying a creative working life to their hearts’ content. The word “tax” is never on their lips because they are benefiting from the free medical care system and the free educational system. All the people are living happily while forming a great harmonious family.

After its liberation Korea turned into a powerful socialist state.

Only after liberation could the Korean people developed their own economy. In the early post-liberation days, there was laid a solid foundation for the development of the national economy through the land reform and the nationalization of major industries in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.

Though everything was destroyed during the Korean War (1950-1953) started by the US imperialists with an ambition to dominate the Korean Peninsula after their occupation of its southern half, the DPRK creditably completed the post-war rehabilitation and construction, carried out the socialist transformation of relations of production in urban and rural areas. And it put into practice socialist industrialization in a short period of 14 years. The country thus turned into a powerful socialist one independent, self-sufficient and self-reliant in national defense. At the end of last century the imperialist took the advantage of the collapse of the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries in Eastern Europe to concentrate anti-socialist offensives upon north Korea. In the ensuing serious crisis, other would have crumbled ten, nay a hundred times. The socialist country, however, remained unperturbed as it had a foundation of the independent national economy it had consolidated for decades. In August 1998 when it was widely rumored in the international community that the “collapse of socialist Korea” was a matter of time, the country startled the world by launching its first artificial satellite Kwangmyongsong 1.

Now it is successfully carrying out the tasks for the building of a great, prosperous and powerful socialist nation. There have appeared in succession new factories based on up-to-date science and technology as required by the age of information industry and new edifices; and general technical reconstruction has been pushed ahead with.

After its liberation, Korea turned into an invincible bulwark of independence.

From the end of the 19^th century to the early 20^th century, Korea remained a country ruined owing to sycophancy and dependence on outside forces. Without self-confidence, it had not strengthened itself but tried to sustain itself by relying on powers only to be finally occupied by Japan.

After its liberation there appeared a state with strong independent spirit- the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-in the northern half of the Peninsula. With the Juche idea founded by President Kim Il Sung-the idea that the master of one’s own destiny is oneself and that one has the power to carve out one’s own destiny-as the firm guideline in its state building and activities, the DPRK squarely rejected the interference and pressure from foreign forces and firmly defended its national sovereignty and dignity.

After Korea’s liberation unique Korean-style progressive democracy was built in north Korea, instead of that of the United States or the Soviet Union. The DPRK creditably defended its sovereignty and dignity by defeating the United States, that had boasted itself to be the “strongest” in the world, for the first time in history in the Korea War in the 1950s. After the war, it pursued the unique economic construction line of giving priority to the development of heavy industry and developing light industry and agriculture simultaneously. And it chose to build its own independent national economy though the great-power chauvinists forced socialist countries to build an “integrated economy” of the socialist nations as a whole. All the facts clearly show how strong the DPRK is in the spirit of independence.

At the end last century, in particular, the DPRK carried its point, saying all its say openly against the United States that had pretended to be the "only superpower" in the world after the “end of the Cold War”. It thus came to exalt itself as a small but great country, the one strong in the spirit of independence, which nobody dares to antagonize on the international arena.

President Kim Il Sung’s exploit in liberating Korea will shine for ever along with the eternal prosperity of socialist Korea.