Monday 21 September 2020

On the August 1956 Factional Incident -special article by Dr Dermot Hudson , BGSJI, ASSPUK and UK KFA

 "Traitors to the revolution also appeared during socialist construction in our country after the war. Choe Chang Ik, Yun Kong Hum, Ri Phil Gyu and others attempted to place obstacles in the way of our people’s forward movement. Having failed to realize their factional scheme, they chose to betray the Party and their motherland. As they dropped away, our revolution made a fresh upsurge and ushered in the era of Chollima. Since then the world has called our country Chollima Korea."

                                KIM IL SUNG 'With The Century' 

Recently , an ultra leftist website in Norway has revived the subject of the August 1956 Factional incident in People's Korea , earlier some ultra-leftists in another country also dragged up the issue and showering praise on one of the factionalist chieftains praising them to the skies . At the same time the notorious anti DPRK website  the Daily NK, which is funded by the US CIA and south Korean National Intelligence Service, has also praised the factionalists who tried to overthrow the leadership of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK). In many times the factionalists can be considered to be an accident of history and irrelevant as they failed to overthrow the leadership of the WPK .

   Of course with the open anti-DPRK reactionaries like he Daily NK their motive in praising such factional scum is very obvious ; it is to disparage , slander and defame the supreme leadership of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea , vilify the socialist system  and heap calumnies on the great Juche Idea . With the ultra left at best  they are undermining solidarity by creating confusion and at worst pursuing their dogmatic anti Juche agenda by spreading absurd falsifications about the history of People's Korea and the WPK.

Factionalism is hated by Korean people and has a long history . Factionalism in Korea went back to before the beginning of the communist movement in Korea in the 1920s . Factionalism was usually combined with the habit of looking up to big powers , fawning on them and advocating dependence on them . In the 1900s the feudal ruling class in Korea instead of building up industry and national defence forces to counter the menace of Japanese instead split into factions each worshiping foreign powers such as Japan, Tsarist Russia , China and the US . As a result Korea lost its independence and became a colony of Japan , something that was to last for four decades .The bourgeois nationalist movement was no better , it split into factions , each of them not looking to the Korean people for support or trying to mobilise them but instead pinning their hopes on different big powers such as the US and Japan.

     This practice was carried over into the early communist movement in Korea. Instead of uniting and going down among the masses , the communist movement split into factions , largely drawn from people of petty bourgeois,middle class and ruined gentry origin who indulged in empty talk divorced from the masses . Each faction vied with the other to win recognition from the COMINTERN or Third International . As a result the Korean Communist Party was dissolved in 1928.

  The great leader comrade KIM IL SUNG instead of relying on existing factions  ,formed a communist nucleus from revolutionary anti imperialist youth and went deep down among the popular masses.He formed the Down With Imperialism Union as the starting point of the anti Japanese armed struggle .The DIU is the historical root of the WPK.It was the first communist revolutionary organisation which organically combined the struggle for national liberation and independence with the struggle for class emancipation.Thus the two were fused together.

After liberation in 1945 the building of a new People's Korea began and the Workers Party of Korea was founded on the 10th of October 1945 . For the sake of unity as well a gesture of magnanimity  comrade KIM IL SUNG took a broadminded stance and allowed factionalists positions in the leadership even though they had done nothing in the struggle for the liberation of Korea .

 However just as a leopard cannot change its spots , the factionalists did not change their ways but instead worked to undermine the country and party from within. It was during the fierce Fatherland Liberation War against the US imperialist aggressors that the factionalists first showed their hand and their true nature The Pak Hon Yong-Li Sung Yop spy clique who were agents of the US imperialist Central Intelligence Agency were exposed at a Plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the WPK. These factionalists  betrayed the country , caused losses in the war and  planned to overthrow the leadership. The great revolutionary leader  Marshal KIM IL SUNG smashed them and saved the DPRK from being sold out to US imperialism and turned into a colony of the US.

The WPK launched its struggle against modern revisionism in 1955. The WPK saw the struggle against modern revisionism as being very closely tied up to the struggle to defend independence and to avoid copying other countries, or in, other words, to establish Juche. .

As Comrade KIM IL SUNG said:

"In 1955, therefore, our Party set forth the definite policy of establishing Juche, and has been persistently urging an energetic ideological struggle to carry it through ever since. The year 1955 marked a turning point in our Party's consistent struggle against dogmatism. It was also at that time, in fact, that we started our struggle against modern revisionism that had emerged within the socialist camp. Our struggle against dogmatism was thus linked up with the struggle against modern revisionism".

Comrade KIM IL SUNG in his famous and celebrated work 'On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work' (December 28, 1955), pointed out that a faction within the WPK, on returning from a visit to the Soviet Union, had demanded that Korea should drop its slogan against US imperialism on the grounds the USSR was following the line of easing international tension. This was an early manifestation of attempts by factionalists within the WPK to spread revisionism.

It was in 1956 that things reached a very critical stage. Khrushchev had made his speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU heralding the onset of modern revisionism (revisionists surfaced in a number of parties and tried to destroy, for example, the CPGB) and the imperialists launched a fierce international anticommunist campaign. Within Korea, the fascist Syngman Rhee puppet regime went wild, talking of a 'March North'. The DPRK had only just completed the post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation of the economy after the devastation caused by the war. The factionalists who had been lurking in the WPK seized the chance to try and overthrow the leadership with the backing of outside revisionists. Indeed the CPSU fraternal delegate to the 3rd Congress of the WPK (who was none other than a certain L. I. Brezhnev) made a veiled attack on the WPK leadership. All the old factions combined , both 'pro-Soviet' and 'pro Chinese' . They were united by nothing else than a desire to seize power and to make People's Korea dependent on other countries.

Events came to a head in August 1956, when the factionalists tried to stage their coup under the manipulation of the great power chauvinists and revisionists. Their aim was to deny the Party's leadership role and paralyze the dictatorship of the proletariat. They also wished to stamp out the revolutionary conditions of the WPK forged in the flames of the anti-Japanese armed struggle. They even intended to proclaim Korea a pro-American 'neutral nation'. However, Comrade KIM IL SUNG led the people to smash the anti-Party counter-revolutionary factional clique. The WPK launched internally an anti-factional, anti-revisionist struggle. Comrade KIM IL SUNG attacked factionalism and revisionism at a Party Conference on March 6 1958. Referring to factionalism, he said:

"No faction is better or worse than any other. All come from the same mould; they are all products of capitalist influence in the working class movement. And they are a poison that destroys our Party and the working class movement in Korea".

 As to Kim Du Bong who is being praised by some . he had in fact advocated placing the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly higher the Workers Party of Korea ,basically overturning the leading role of the Party and the dictatorship of proletariat , a clear cut revisionist anti-socialist position. As to the so-called Yanan faction , the pro China flunkeys , in reality they had their origins not in the Chinese Communist Party but in the bourgeois KMT !

Some of the factionalist traitors fled to the revisionist USSR later and lived there . When the USSR finally collapsed in 1991 , some of the factionalists became agents of the south Korean puppet regime , a sorry end indeed.

Had the August 1956 factionalist traitors not been defeated the DPRK would not exist today , it as simple as that . By establishing Juche  , by defeating the factionalists and flunkeys and the revisionists  the WPK under the guidance of President KIM IL SUNG and Chairman KIM JONG IL  was able to build an independent power , a socialist paradise , a state that is independent , self-sufficient and self -defensive . The DPRK not only industrialised and improved living standards but became a nuclear power of Juche and an ICBM power . The factionalists have been proved wrong a 100 times and a 1,000 times.

Dr Dermot Hudson

Chairman British Group for the Study of the Juche Idea

Chairman UK KFA 

President Association For the Study of Songun Politics UK




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