Part 1 - LA36 KB articles 1988 98 and cuttings 128 001

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Independent politics and the Juche Idea Paper presented by Keith Bennett to the seminar called by the Institute for Independence Studies, December 16 1995 Dear Friends from the Korean Juche Academy and other Korean visitors, Comrades and Friends, I would like first to thank the Institute for Independence Studies, and particularly its Secretary, Hugh Stephens, for taking the initiative to organise this timely and important seminar and for having invited me to speak. For those of us who, over a number of years, have been students of the Juche Idea, and for all friends of Korea generally, it is a pleasure and privilege to have a delegation from the Juche Academy visiting London so that we might learn from them, exchange views and deepen our ties of mutual understanding. I think these sentiments are shared by those who have taken the trouble to come here today, despite the many pressures on everybody's time and the onset of the Christmas festivities. Our seminar is being held in a significant and fitting place. As many will know, this building has been connected to the radical, democratic, working class and socialist movements of London, Britain and the whole world for some two centuries. It was here that Lenin edited editions of Iskra, and the Great October Socialist Revolution and many other milestones in humanity's long march towards independence and freedom are recorded in the priceless collections of the Marx Memorial Library. I believe that all this adds weight to our deliberations today. The October Revolution changed not only a country but also the world. Particularly, its salvoes and reverberations echoed across the Asian continent, which was already plunging headlong into the anti-colonial national liberation struggle. And as President Kim Il Sung so graphically relates in the opening pages of the first volume of his reminiscences, 'With the Century', Korea was by no means an exception to this great historical trend. Under the guidance of such outstanding patriots as Mr Kim Hyong Jik, the father of great President Kim Il Sung, the Korean national liberation movement, which had been dogged by defeat and despair, started to find a new road whereby the leadership of the struggle would be vested in the hands of the working masses and where the freedom of the country would open the way towards the building of a new society based

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