Talk:Workers' Party of Korea/Archive 1

message: Removed quotation marks.  Seen too many of them in old Taiwanese newspapers talking about the Beijing "government" and new Beijing newspapers talking about the Taiwanese "legislature".
Roadrunner 22:21, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Adam: Skepticism and irony are opinion.  They make the article POV and thus remove its encyclopedic value.  Implying skepticism and irony is even worse, because it introduces concealed opinion into the article and essentially turns it into propaganda.  If there's reason to distrust the official line, it's better to simply say why. -- Sekicho 17:20, Mar 6, 2004 (UTC)
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is the Korea Workers party active in the south???
The old Korean Communist Party was suppressed in the south during and after the Korean War. The DPRK presumably has agents in the south but I have never heard of communism having any domestic support there. There are plenty of radical students who like throwing rocks at police but they all become Daewoo executives when they graduate. Adam 05:26, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: The KWP isn't active in the South, but pro-DPRK groupings in the ROK and Japan established the National Democratic Front of South Korea, which supports the KWP line in the South. Here's their website if anyone wants a good laugh. http://ndfsk.dyndns.org/kuguk8/pym/0000/index.htm 172 11:53, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

message: I reacted to the describtion of KWP as "classical Stalinist". What is a classical stalinist (as opposed to what, a modern stalinist?)? I find that the semireligious Juche ideology and monarchical behaviour of KWP has rather little to do with classical marxism-leninism. In many ways the Korean WP is one of the least orthodox CPs as far as diverting from the original ideology is concerned. The fact that the regime in DPRK is totalitarian does not alone make it stalinist per se.
Also, isn't the official English translation of the party name Workers' Party of Korea and not KWP?  --Soman 15:16, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose that "classical Stalinism" was meant to distinguish it from the ruling parties of the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Vietnam or Laos which some may regard as Stalinist (in that they are "bureaucratiised" Communist parties in the mold of the CPSU after Stalin took power) and also refers to the presence of a personality cult which is largely absent from Cuba (where you can hardly find a poster with Castro's image), Vietnam or Laos. However, I agree that ideologically the KWP cannot be described as "classical" or "orthodox" Stalinist or Maoist (indeed, Stalin would probably regard North Korea as "Titoite" for having developed its only "national Communist" variant rather than slavishly follow the Stalinist model - in any case I don't think North Korea ever refers to Stalin in its propaganda and I don't even think Stalin's works are widely available in North Korea (or Lenin's for that matter)). Perhaps it would be better to describe North Korea as the closest thing still existing to a Stalinist state? The party  might also be considered Stalinist in that it is anti-revisionist and rejected the reforms of Khrushchev and his successors. 
AndyL 05:12, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  classical stalinism?