Juche

What is Juche in our Party's ideological work? What are we doing? We are not engaged in any other country's revolution, but precisely in the Korean revolution. This, the Korean revolution, constitutes Juche in the ideological work of our Party.

1982 [1955 December 28], Kim Il Sung, “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work”, in Kim Il Sung – Works, volume 9, translation of original in Korean, pages 402-403

The Peasants Union, he said, was a chuche-type revolutionary organization the basic mission of which was to struggle against Japanese imperialism and landlords and for the country's liberation and independence, with the revolutionary idea of the great leader as its unswerving guideline, and a revolutionary mass organization embracing broad segments of the peasant masses with the poor peasants and hired farmhands as the hardcore.

[1983 April 5 [1983 March 10], Kim I-hun, quotee, “Lecture Marks Formation of Peasants Union”, in Korean Affairs Report, number 275, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, sourced from Pyongyang KCNA, →OCLC, N. Korea/Politics and Government, pages 134–135

Though Juche Thought is enshrined in the constitution as one of the country's guiding principles, the regime has never shown any indication of subscribing to its universal-humanist bromides: “man is the master of all things,” “people are born with creativity and autonomy,” etc. I do not mean to imply that if an ideology is not lived up to, it is ipso facto a sham. […] But Juche is not even professed in earnest, and no wonder; its central notion of the masses' mastery of their fate runs counter to the sacrosanct notion of a uniquely vulnerable child race in the Leader's protective care. […] The pseudo-doctrine of Juche continues to serve its purpose all the same. It enables the regime to lionize Kim Il Sung as a great thinker, provides an impressive label for whatever policies it considers expedient, and prevents dissidents from judging policy on the government's own ostensible terms.

2011 [2010], B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves—And Why It Matters, Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, →ISBN, pages 46-47

Beginning in 1966, North Korea's internal and external propaganda started to promote the word [Juche] with extreme vigour. The problem was that Kim Il-sung never received a higher education and was not particularly well versed in any branch of philosophy, including Marxism. For him, Juche was little more than a means to assert North Korea's independence from Moscow. And the system of total obedience to the Leader he was creating prevented his underlings in the ideological departments from reformulating it into a more intelligible form. Thus, when it came to explaining what ‘Juche’ thought actually is, North Korean ideologues limited themselves to just one sentence: ‘Man is the master of all things’, repeated and rephrased over and over.

2025, Fyodor Tertitskiy, Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung, London: C. Hurst & Co., →ISBN, page 161