We’ve all seen the headlines: “Kim Jong Un executes this official,” “Kim Jong Un purges that minister,” and whatever else the Western media can squeeze out. According to outlets like Radio Free Asia, simply existing inside the Workers’ Party of Korea or the government is a death sentence waiting to happen. Kim Jong Un is supposedly wiping people out left and right for the smallest imaginable reasons. The sources for these claims are always unverifiable and dubious. South Korean intelligence will make an assertion and cite some “unknown source in Pyongyang,” then the story gets picked up by Western media and spreads like wildfire. However, there is a noticeable trend behind these sensationalist headlines: many people who were claimed to have been executed by Kim Jong Un have apparently risen from the dead. Hyon Song-wol Take pop star Hyon Song-wol for example. In 2013, South Korean media reported that a group of pop stars had been mass executed by a machine gun wielding firing squad, wi...
In the West, the DPRK is often called "the hermit kingdom." It's claimed that the DPRK is an isolationist state that has cut itself off from the rest of the world and refuses to engage with the international community, but is this really the case? It's true that the United States, South Korea, the European Union, the United Nations, and others have attempted to force the DPRK into isolation through decades of brutal economic sanctions. The country has more than 2,000 sanctions.¹ However, these attempts by imperialist nations to isolate the DPRK don't mean that the DPRK or the Juche Idea are isolationist. A closer look at the evidence reveals the opposite. The Juche Idea is Internationalist Those who say that the Juche Idea is an isolationist philosophy seem to not only be ignorant of the actual content of the Juche Idea, but they also conflate self‑reliance and isolationism. They lack a correct understanding of what independence means in the Juche Idea. Kim Jong...