Juche

And the idea that you see these people almost literally on their knees in front of him, And attributing things to him that would make a member of the Kim family in North Korea blush is pretty astounding.

That North Korean political philosophy was Juche, where it's all about the dear leader and the Kims created the world and the sun rose when Kim Il-sung was born.

All those weird sort of things that we look at as very alien to Western and American political culture.

They really are racing toward a world like that.

Maybe it's time for, maybe it's time to bring back authoritarian, uh, communism.

Maybe it's time to, to finally acknowledge the Kims and that Juche communism was in fact the superior being, because they, the only people that have stood up to the bourgeois in the West are the Kim family following the precepts of Juche communism.

Folks, I'm joking.

Yeah, you get deep on that one.

It was actually economically more developed than South Korea in the 1950s.

Kim Il-sung, the leader, created an ideology called Juche.

How many of you know what's Juche? Yeah, some of you.

And it was an ideology that taught people to think that North Korea could be self-reliant on its own, without any help from neighboring countries.

So that led to a desire to lessen its dependence on the USSR and China in the 1970s.

And the closest real examples of the trade neutral version are

North Korea under Juche, Albania under Hoxha, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

And the reason Daniel says they're not inspiring is that they're not.

Juche is the purest modern attempt at autarky, and it produced a famine in the 90s that killed somewhere between 600,000 and a million people, depending on whose estimate you take.

That's the honest baseline.

Autarky as a national project has a body count.

And yet you have this Islamic republic, this Islamic regime in Tehran getting help from and aligned with a supposedly Marxist anti-religion system in China and then Putin's revanchism, and it just...

And then North Korea with Juche and Kim Il Sung is that this, ideologically, they all kinda have roots a little bit in anti-Westernism, to be sure, but it, they should by all rights be hating each other, and yet the cooperation is really the kind of cooperation among authoritarian states we have not seen since the Cold War, arguably ever.

So what's your take on this? Is this a marriage of convenience? Is there something about the nature of the authoritarian state that there's actually much more durability to these alignments? What are the strengths and weaknesses that each of these authoritarian systems brings to this...

I mean, we call it the CRinks.

My atheist listeners, this is one of yours.

To be honest, the Juche philosophy functions as a kind of belief system.

So I was looking for some North Korean music and I came across this.

This is possibly the most well-known piece of North Korean music.

That's a means to secure their interests, but it, but it's not their core interest.

Their core interests are, is the continuation of the Kim regime, the prestige, uh, and legitimacy of their Juche philosophy, uh, and three, you know, some modicum of economic development as they define it.

Um, it's not the s- our same definition of, you know, broad, uh, prosperity, but they, they do want economic benefit.

And the question for us is, if nuclear weapons are a means by which they achieve those interests, can we enter a period of diplomacy, a period of imbalance in, in, as they term it, their external environment? To achieve, uh, progress on denuclearization to preserve their core interests.

And it occupies time.

The Juche calendar, introduced in 1997, reset year one to Kim Il-sung's birth in 1912.

Time itself was declared to begin with his birth.

Though interestingly, the calendar appears to have fallen out of use recently, but for two decades, the year you wrote on a document was a theological claim.

It's not belief.

It's submission.

Let's talk about the Juche ideology itself.

How does that fit into the divinity branding? Juche is the official state ideology.

Uh, if you don't know Anna Louise Strong, you should definitely check out some of her work.

Um, but on the Patreon, I had promised that after we finished that book, I would read some actual Juche itself, some actual works of Kim Il-sung, the founding philosophies of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the DPRK, North Korea, whatever you wanna call it.

[laughs] Um, so a lot of us in the US don't get exposed to much [laughs] from the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, like, at all, right? All we are really fed is a ton of propaganda about that nation.

And so much so that even I- I've heard communists and, and people on the left, or they consider themselves decently read socialists, say things about DPRK that, "Oh, it's a, a monarchy.

Um, there was a desire really from both sides to unify the peninsula, and that led to the civil war that the Americans did a lot of terrible things during.

He-- So as head of state, um, he set about transforming North Korea into a, a, I mean, really rebuilding, right? This industrialization and rebuilding that had to happen because the Americans destroyed every building in North Korea, right? And so there was a lot of work to do.

And so this is where he introduced the philosophy of Juche, which means self-reliance.

And then, of course, this article is very biased, and it talks about trying to develop its economy with little to no help from foreign countries.