August 15 is the day of Korea’s liberation from the Japanese military occupation.
President Kim Il Sung , the great leader of the Korean people, achieved the cause by leading the anti-Japanese armed struggle to victory. It was an event of historic significance that put an end to the history of the ruined nation and opened up a new era of Juche Korea.
The Korean people look back upon the decades-long proud history of their country resplendent with victory and glory, with growing yearning and reverence for the President.
The Korean people had been harassed by backwardness and poverty due to the feudal fetters that lasted for hundreds of years. The Japanese military occupation (1905-1945) drove them to a miserable fate of colonial slavery. In order to maintain and strengthen their colonial rule over Korea, the Japanese imperialists, from the first day of their occupation, built up the fascist repressive machinery and severely arrested the independent development of the Korean people in reliance upon it. Having seized such Korea’s economic arteries as agriculture, fishery, forestry and mining industry, they committed criminal acts of plundering all its natural resources at random, with the result that Korea was reduced to a base for raw and other materials and a commodity market for the sake of Japan.
When the destiny of Korea was faced with a life-and-death crisis, Kim Il Sung embarked on the road of revolution with a high ambition to win back his lost country. He organized and commanded to victory the twenty-year-long anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle and defeated the Japanese imperialists.
With Korea’s liberation, the political, military and economic foundations of the Japanese imperialists were thoroughly eliminated and major fetters impeding the independent development of the Korean nation completely abolished. Thanks to the successful enforcement of the agrarian reform, the nationalization of major industries and other democratic reforms, all sectors of the national economy, including industry and agriculture, have attained a new, higher level. Later on, the Korean people carried out the cause of building the party, the army and the state in a short period of time, achieved the brilliant victory in the three-year-long Fatherland Liberation War and brought about a great upswing one after another in the postwar reconstruction and socialist construction, thus laying lasting foundations for the building of a thriving country.
After occupying Korea the Japanese imperialists pursued merciless repressive policies, stripping the Korean people of their elementary rights to existence and harshly oppressing their socio-political activities for social progress. Not content with the destruction and plunder of the Korean nation’s precious spiritual and cultural wealth created in the time-honoured history of 5 000 years, they forced the Koreans to change their names in a Japanese fashion. In the whole period of their occupation of Korea, they killed more than one million Koreans and took by force 8.4 million young and middle-aged Koreans to battlefields and sites of slave labour, where they lost their lives or became crippled. Korean women numbering 200 000 were drafted to serve as sexual slaves for the imperial Japanese soldiers.
Korea’s liberation brought about radical changes in shaping its people’s destiny.
The Koreans, who had been subject to all kinds of subhuman humiliation and insult, could lead an independent and creative life as the masters of their own destiny and full-fledged masters of the state and society, completely free from their status as colonial slaves of the Japanese imperialists. They were empowered to freely take part in the political activities of the state, with the rights to elect and to be elected, and waged a vigorous struggle to build a democratic, independent and sovereign state.
They carried out the socialist industrialization in a matter of 14 years and built socialist system independent in politics, self-sufficient in the economy and self-reliant in national defence. They are now speeding up the building of a socialist power, foiling the imperialists’ isolation-and-stifle schemes. Credit for these achievements is inconceivable apart from the President’s exploits in liberating Korea.
His august name and immortal exploits will remain etched in the memory of the Korean people, along with the 5 000-year-long history of the Korean nation.
