now the DPRK can enjoy a little rest for now

  • unperson [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I copied and pasted it from the DPRK's own translation at (warning: you probably should not click this link without a VPN if you're in the Republic of Korea) http://naenara.com.kp/index.php/Main/index/en/politics?arg_val=constitution

    The articles you've been linking are from 2009, and the constitution in Naenara is the August 2019 consitution. You can tell (among other things) because it says 'Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism' instead of 'Juche', and because (sadly) the Taean Work System is officialy gone.

    I don't see the point of reading third-hand articles about their constitution instead of just reading the constitution itself. It's laughable that it can be a hot topic in the West whether or not the DPRK calls itself a socialist, revolutionary state, when they say so in every opportunity. They did remove, in 2009, the 3 mentions of communism they had. These were in the sections on the economy and culture, not in the first chapter I copied above.

      • unperson [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I've only seen you link this article: https://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSEO253213 which says September 28, 2009. Is there another one I haven't seen?

      • unperson [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Naenara is the website of the foreign languages publishing house of the DPRK. It's controlled by the Worker's Party of Korea. They also have http://www.korean-books.com.kp/en/

          • unperson [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            You should be extremely careful with Wikipedia: there's an edit war going on in the DPRK articles, with about half of them locked and policed by the admins to only include imperialist sources, including non-existent and fictional works in order to paint the DPRK dirty (notably, the songbun article), while other, smaller articles are free and have much better sourcing, mostly written by the user Jack Upland like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_North_Korea .

              • unperson [he/him]
                ·
                edit-2
                4 years ago

                North Korea is also governed by the Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System, which some claim have come to supersede the constitution and in practice serve as the supreme law of the country.

                This is one of the fictional articles. No such document exists in Korean, there's a similar one from an old speech by Kim Jong Il (I think) that you can find in korean-books but the content is completely different from what is claimed.

                  • unperson [he/him]
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    4 years ago

                    I realised I had nothing saved on this so I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get of the bottom of it. In the end I concluded the principles exist, although I was unable to find a list of these principles that was not published by the CIA and it's unclear how they are relevant in modern Korean society.

                    What confuses me is, why hide it so much? Even though the principles seem to be taught at school in DPRK, the speech where KJI supposedly codified these principles is in volume 4 of his collected works, which is not translated to English and I cannot find in Korean either on the Internet. I found two reviews of his collected works in korean, and the authors mention that they could not get volume 4. There's a South Korean website with the full text of KJI collected works, and the table of contents for volume 4 is censored and there's a note 'if you really need the full text, call this number'. Why does this happen, it's weird.

                    My research went way, way, way beyond the character limit so here's a link to it if you're interested: https://rentry.co/dk2ey