2024.8.16.
Life and Future
The most important for human being is neither life nor wealth. It is just the motherland.
President
He wrote in his reminiscences "With the Century" as follows:
"Man experiences many sorrows in his lifetime. The greatest of them is the sorrow of leaving one’s country as a stateless person. However great a sorrow one feels when leaving one’s birthplace, it cannot be compared with the sorrow one experiences when leaving one’s homeland."
As his saying teaches, the most precious in the world is precisely the motherland and the destinies of individuals are included in the destiny of motherland.
Without the motherland, nobody can lead a genuine life and see hope.
Therefore, the stateless people wandering are compared with a fallen leaf or a pebble stone on a road.
The President set out on the road of revolutionary struggle with firm resolve not to return before Korea had become independent and liberated the motherland and glorified it in the world by devoting themselves lest our people should be forced to suffer miserable fate of stateless people.
Even today, the earnest instruction of the President teaches us that our life and future is unthinkable without the motherland.
Moment and Thousand Years
Inscribed on a page of "With the Century", reminiscences written by President
The President, in his reminiscences, said that the sovereignty of a nation lost in a moment could only be recovered in a thousand years was an important lesson he had learned during the 20 years of the revolution against the Japanese.
He went on:
I mean that it is easy to lose a country, but difficult to win it back. It is a grim reality of the world that it takes decades or even centuries to restore a country which was lost in an instant.
His golden teachings reflecting the truth of patriotism make the people recollect the delight of August 15 when the enthusiastic cheers of hurrah of national liberation rocked the whole country.
Korea’s Liberation – it was a new dawn of the national restoration.
The President was a peerless hero who achieved the great cause of national liberation for which the Korean people desired so impatiently overcoming manifold sorrows and sufferings.
It was a precious patriotic asset gained in return for so costly self-sacrifice and blood.
Many fighters dedicated their youthful days and lives to getting back the usurped country in a blizzardy alien land far away.
On the day of triumphal return to the country, the President recollected with deep emotion his kinsmen, close friends and comrades died in a foreign land.
Therefore, he included in the meaningful expressions "moment and thousand year" the lessons and the reality of the world gained braving the bloody untrodden path for the national liberation during 20 years of anti-Japanese revolutionary war.
The national ruin is an instant and restoration of a country takes thousand years.
His precious instructions make us keep deep in our minds the valuableness of the country that must never be lost.
Patriotic Fortress
To lose nation is as good as dead.
This sentence is not a line written on the page of a historic book.
Our people keenly felt about the pains and disgrace of stateless nation through their practical experience in the first half year of last century.
In retrospect, the Korean revolution has advanced by the strenuous efforts and self-sacrifice of the genuine patriots who loved ardently their country and nation from the very first.
The first generation people of our revolution were the genuine patriots who resolutely embarked on the road of revolution for retaking the country deprived by the Japanese imperialists before sympathizing with any profound principles and theories of the revolution.
Firm succession to their patriotic soul and spirit made our revolution achieve only miracles and victories in the grim periods of revolution.
It is the philosophy taught by the history of our revolutionary struggle that the revolutionaries must become the patriots knowing the country and the people before the revolution and devoting themselves to them.
The President, in his reminiscences "With the Century", wrote that he frequently told the young people that a ruined nation is as good as dead, that if they do not want to be a stateless people, they must go all out to defend the country, and that in order not to end up as slaves they must make the country more prosperous and collect even one more piece of rubble to build the defences higher.
Such earnest instructions of his instill our people with deep meaning that our country will be more prosperous only when all of the social members devote their sweats and patriotic conscience to building higher the fortress of national prosperity.
Rodong Sinmun