“North Korean Juche Ideology Lecture” Claim Creating a Stir

A claim that a lecture during the first Civil Servants Workers School hosted by the Korean Government Employees Union on September 2 included contents of North Korea’s Juche Ideology, is causing a stir. Law enforcement authorities obtained the lecture script and began investigations on November 12.

Yu Se-hwan, a National Assembly secretary and a former legislative inspector, claimed in a posting titled, “The Civil Servants Union Teaching Juche Ideology” on his personal website, “Park Se-gil, chairman of the National Alliance for Democracy and Reunification of Korea, gave a lecture titled ‘Philosophy which can change the world – for the world where people are the masters’ and taught the union members about North Korea’s Juche ideology.”

Secretary Yu claimed that within Park’s lecture script, “the understanding of the object development principle” was a direct take on the Marx Lenin’s materialistic dialectic, “human-centered world view,” and that the “people-centered historical view” was a praise of North Korea’s Juche ideology. He also claimed that the script’ section, “a reformative mass policy line – how we can prepare all the people,” described the current situation as the “great turning point for the national unification,” and that this is a direct copy of the North Korean unification policy line strategy.

Park’s lecture script is posted on the Korean Government Employees Union website

Professor Ryu Gil-jae of the graduate school of North Korean Studies in Kyungnam University commented about the script, “People-centered historical view… is mentioning the core part of Juche ideology.”

Professor Yu Ho-yoel of Korea University’s North Korean Studies Program said, “[The script] including the ‘human-centered world view,’ the philosophical discipline, implementation methods, and objectives are from Juche ideology.” He added, “I can’t tell the lecture’s intentions and can’t judge whether the lecture was a Juche ideology lesson by just reviewing one script. However, the lecture subsequently delivered a Juche ideology message.”

On the other hand, Sejong Institute researcher, Jung Sung-jang said, “The script in question is based on the Juche ideology, but it is missing many parts including the ‘Suryungron’ (a theory of a leader), a core part of the Juche ideology debate, so the lecture cannot be viewed as a praise of the North Korean system.”

Park was amazed at these claims about his lecture saying, “[They] should compare the script and tell the similarities and differences in a context with a broad view. Just looking at one part of the script and accusing it of being Juche ideology is absurd.” He also said, “I am not even a Juche ideology expert. The objective of the lecture was to suggest a discipline and a direction for the workers on how the workers activism should be conducted.”

Park was born in 1962 in Youngdong, Chungbuk. He entered Seoul National University as a philosophy major but was expelled due to involvement with student activism. He is a central member of the Korea Democratic Labor Party. He is an author of the “Re-written Korean Modern History,” which is reviewed as a National Liberation (NL) line’s history book.

One insider of the Korean Government Employees Union remarked, “The education and promotion department invited Chairman Park as a lecturer,” and, “I don’t think the government employees would tolerate it at all if he ever praised North Korea during his lecture.”

One senior union member from the Gyeongnam area said, “About 80 people attended the lecture and it didn’t strictly follow the title of the material. It was a general philosophy lecture about ‘why we study philosophy’ and ‘how we can implement philosophy in real situations.’” Another attendee said, “The lecture was so difficult to understand and boring that so many members fell asleep.”

In the meantime, the police got hold of the lecture script in question and began reviewing it for possible national security law violations. A member in the Supreme Public Prosecutor`s Office also admitted that they are “investigating the document to see if it matches the Juche ideology.”