Full text of a speech delivered by Kim Jong Un at the Ninth Congress of Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League on August 28, 2016, as reported and translated by the Korean Central News Agency.
Dear youth delegates,
Feeling satisfied that the Ninth Congress of Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, which is held in the stirring period when young people across the country are expediting general onward march to implement the decisions of the Seventh Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea, is doing its work successfully, I warmly congratulate all the youth delegates attending this congress.
I also extend warm thanks and militant greetings to young people across the country, who are working miracles and feats at the posts of national defence and at the sites of building a powerful socialist country and thus fulfilling their honourable mission and duty as the young vanguard of the Party.
I congratulate the members of the overseas Korean youth delegations attending the congress, and offer my warm compatriotic greetings to the overseas young compatriots, including those in Japan, and the youth and students in south Korea who are struggling for the independent reunification of their motherland and the prosperity of their nation.
The Ninth Congress of Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League constitutes a landmark event in defending and adding eternal brilliance to the great Comrades Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s idea of and exploits in the youth movement and developing the youth league into invincible vanguard ranks as required by the new era.
The 70 years of the youth league is a history of brilliant victories of the great leaders’ original idea of prioritizing young people and their wise leadership. It is also a history of the ardent loyalty and patriotic devotion with which the young people of Korea have supported the Party, the leader, the country and the people.
Having made a start of the youth movement early in the flames of the anti-Japanese revolution, Comrade Kim Il Sung expounded the Juche-oriented idea of the movement and guided it at its every step, lavishing great trust and affection on young people.
By dint of the line of prioritizing young people and his outstanding and seasoned leadership, Comrade Kim Jong Il developed the youth league into an organization that is unfailingly loyal to the Party and the leader and trained young people into reliable successors in carrying forward the lineage of Paektu, into warriors in accomplishing the revolutionary cause of Juche, thus opening a new heyday for the youth movement.
That they regarded prioritizing young people as the most important of all state affairs and made it a strategic revolutionary line in the whole course of leading the revolution, and, by wisely leading the implementation of the line, gave a perfect solution to the youth problem for the first time in history and built a youth power without parallel in the world is an outstanding exploit performed by our great leaders.
Indeed, the youth movement of Korea is the glorious Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist youth movement pioneered and developed by dint of their great ideas and wise leadership, and ours is Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s youth power built thanks to their ennobling trust and affection.
The proud decades of victorious advance of the Juche-oriented youth movement are associated with the invaluable blood and sweat and heroic exploits of the young people who fought self-sacrificingly for the Party, the leader, the country and the people.
In the gigantic and worthwhile struggle for achieving the country’s prosperity and people’s happiness, our young people have been educated in a revolutionary way and trained spiritually and physically, and have developed into a large, matchless contingent forming a thousand-fold, tens-of-thousand-fold fortress around the Party.
Our young people are patriots and heroes whom we can be proud of before the world; that they have a large contingent of such trustworthy young people is a great blessing for the Workers’ Party of Korea and a source of pride for Korea, and this assures the great strength of our dignified state and its bright future.
Today the youth league is faced with the heavy yet honourable task for ushering in a golden age of the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist youth movement by developing itself into the eternal youth organization of the great leaders as required by the new era of the Juche revolution and displaying its might as the Party’s advance force and wing in the efforts for implementing the decisions adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Party.
If the youth league is to fulfil the sacred mission and duty it has assumed for the times and the revolution, it should model itself on Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism.
Modelling the entire youth league as well as the entire Party and the entire army on Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism is the path our revolution should follow and the basic guarantee for accomplishing the revolutionary cause of Juche.
It should hold fast to ideological education among young people as its main task and fully prepare all of them as genuine Kimilsungists-Kimjongilists.
The youth league organizations at all levels should lay great stress on educating young people in the greatness of our leaders with the aim of preparing them as the young vanguard unfailingly faithful to the Party and the leaders. They should also step up education of young people in Kim Jong Il’s patriotism, revolutionary faith, anti-imperialist and class consciousness, and socialist morality, so that all of them become true patriots with ardent love for their country, hot-blooded fighters with indomitable revolutionary faith and unwavering anti-imperialist and class consciousness, staunch champions of the class struggle and cultured social beings with a high degree of cultural attainments and ennobling moral traits.
The youth league organizations and young people should become the vanguard and shock brigade in building a powerful socialist country.
To achieve breakthroughs in the vanguard of the struggle to this end is the basic duty proper to our young people who make up the Party’s militant reserve and the most vigorous of our social forces.
All our young people, upholding the militant tasks advanced by the Seventh Congress of the Party, should honour their valuable title of heroic youth in our era, in the worthwhile struggle to build a powerful socialist country.
“Let us fully demonstrate the resourcefulness and gallantry of the heroic youth in the general offensive for building a powerful socialist country!”—this is the militant slogan the youth league and young people should hold high in the present times.
Young people should be the death-defying corps in the struggle to defend their socialist country, faithfully supporting our Party’s Songun-based revolutionary leadership.
They are the advance force in carrying out the Songun revolution and the main force in safeguarding the country. All of them, bearing in mind our Party’s idea of prioritizing arms, should regard national defence as their most sacred duty and the highest expression of patriotism, and valiantly turn out in the struggle to defend the socialist country. The young service personnel of the Korean People’s Army and the Korean People’s Internal Security Forces, as befit the combatants defending the outposts of the anti-imperialist military front, the lifeline of our revolution, should firmly grasp the weapons of the revolution and the class and safeguard the defence lines of the country and its socialist system. At any time in the future we will surely confront the US imperialists, the sworn enemy of our people; they should create a new miracle of achieving victory in this life-or-death showdown.
Youth and students should all cultivate ardent patriotism and a staunch spirit of defending the country, and take part in military training with a sincere attitude. In times of emergency they should take up arms and turn out as one in the all-people resistance to defend their beloved country, native homes and workplaces against the aggression of the enemy and their destructive and subversive moves.
All our young people should resolutely counter the enemy’s schemes for ideological and cultural infiltration with great ideological and mental strength and unshakeable revolutionary faith, and take a tough stand to prevent any alien ideology and culture and unnatural lifestyle from penetrating our interior.
They should uphold the self-development-first banner on all fronts for building a powerful socialist country and display their valiant offensive spirit and youthful courage in achieving new miraculous and innovative successes one after another.
In implementing the Five-Year Strategy for National Economic Development they should raise fierce flames for collective competition, thereby setting new standards and new records and overfulfilling their daily, monthly and quarterly quotas for the national economic plan.
The youth league organizations should push ahead with the Songun Youth Torch Prize movement, the youth shock brigade movement and other mass movements, the advantages and vitality of which have been confirmed in practice. They should launch vigorous campaigns in which one overtakes and learns from others and swaps experiences with them, and raise fierce flames for performing great exploits. Then new miraculous and innovative achievements will be made wherever young people are working, and youthful vigour will pervade the entire country.
The youth league should carry out with credit major construction projects that will make a significant contribution to developing the economy and improving the people’s living standards, fully demonstrating the might of youth shock brigade.
The more vigorously young people advance in response to the Party’s call demonstrating the might of the youth construction units, the more vibrantly the entire country will be seething and the greater progress will be made in implementing the cause of building a powerful socialist country.
Young people should become the vanguard and pioneer in building a sci-tech power.
Young scientists and technicians, keeping their feet firmly planted on this land and looking out over the world, should devote their creative wisdom and enthusiasm to the campaign to surpass the cutting edge, with a view to raising our country to the status of a sci-tech power as soon as possible. Young people should take the lead in making all the people well-versed in science and technology, and become masters of invention and technical innovation, rendering a positive contribution to modernizing the production lines and ensuring the domestic production of raw materials, fuel and equipment. Students should learn hard and accumulate knowledge, always holding books in their hands, and thus prepare themselves to contribute to promoting national prosperity by developing cutting-edge science and technology.
Young people should become creators of socialist civilization and the vanguard in building a civilized power.
They should play the core, vanguard role in building our country into a civilized socialist power as soon as possible by developing art and literature, sports and all other sectors of socialist culture in a comprehensive way.
All of them, cherishing national pride and self-confidence that our own culture and lifestyle are the best, should hold dear all tangible and intangible heritage achieved by the preceding generations, and add lustre to our style of socialist culture. As demanded by the era when the general offensive for building a powerful socialist country is gaining momentum, they should bring the culture of heroic youth into full blossom and make the songs of revolution and struggle resound wherever they live and work.
They should make strenuous efforts to tighten moral discipline. They should all respect their revolutionary forerunners, teachers and seniors, promote communal unity and family harmony, and observe public morality and order of life on a voluntary basis.
They should contribute to economic construction and defence building with a sturdy physique developed amid the wind of mass-based sports and defence sports, and take the lead in turning the whole country into a socialist fairyland.
They should wage a proactive struggle to achieve the independent reunification of the country and global independence.
It is the young people, the sons and daughters of the nation and the future of the country, who ought to stand in the vanguard of the effort to accomplish the great national cause of putting an end to the long-standing suffering of national division and building on this land a dignified and prosperous reunified country.
All the Korean young people in the north, in the south and abroad should hold aloft the banner of national independence and great national unity, join their minds and purposes on the patriotic road of reunification and fight in solidarity and collaboration. In this way, they can smash the obstructive moves of the US imperialists and other anti-reunification forces and open up a broad avenue to national reunification.
Holding high the three charters for national reunification, the historic June 15 North-South Joint Declaration and the October 4 Declaration, provided by the great leaders, as grand programmes for national reunification, the youth league and young people should stand in the vanguard of the struggle for the independent reunification of the country and render positive support and encouragement to the struggle of the youth and students in south Korea for anti-US independence and national reunification and to the patriotic struggle of the overseas young compatriots.
The youth and students in the south should wage a dynamic struggle to thwart the moves of the United States and its followers for aggression and war, who are attempting to bring a nuclear holocaust to our nation, and to have the historic agreements common to the nation respected and implemented. By doing so, they can open up a new phase for the development of inter-Korean relations and national reunification.
Those in Japan and other overseas Korean young people should, with pride and self-respect of being members of the dignified Korean nation, render characteristic contributions to the patriotic cause for the independent reunification of their country and prosperity of their socialist motherland.
The youth movement of Korea is closely related to the world youth movement, and the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist Youth League is faced with an important task for contributing to securing genuine international justice and realizing the cause of global independence by strengthening unity and cooperation under the unfurled banner of anti-imperialist independence with the progressive young peoples of the world, who champion independence.
The youth league should apply the idea and principles of our Party’s foreign policy to cementing anti-imperialist solidarity, friendship and unity with the world’s progressive young peoples and proactively contributing to the development of the world youth movement.
In order to usher in a golden age in the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist youth movement, the youth league should strengthen its organizations and enhance their militant functions and role in every way possible.
The major link in the whole chain of the efforts for developing the youth league is to strengthen its primary organizations, which are its grass-roots organizations and basic combat units. The youth league committees at all levels should go down to the primary organizations on a regular basis, improve the qualifications and capabilities of the primary officials and help them in a responsible way so that the officials can work with the youth league members effectively. In particular, city and county youth league committees, the guidance units at the lowest level, should properly get acquainted with the work of their primary organizations, effectively guide them and give them positive help.
Youth league organizations should intensify the organizational life of their members so as to ensure that this life is turned into a course of a school in which they are educated and trained in a revolutionary way.
The youth league should direct great efforts to strengthening the organizations of the Children’s Union, its successor, and educating the union members properly.
Youth league committees at all levels should regard guidance over the work of the Children’s Union as one of their tasks, and ensure that school education, family education and social education are closely linked for educating the Children’s Union members. In this way they can prepare all the members and organizations of the Children’s Union to be the children’s vanguard faithful to our Party.
It is important to build up the ranks of the youth league officials and further enhance their sense of responsibility and role.
All the youth league officials should be well aware of their tasks in the struggle to usher in a golden age of the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist youth movement, and execute them creditably.
Party guidance over the work of the youth league should be further improved.
The organizations and officials of the Party should bear in mind the intention of the Party Central Committee to prioritize the work with young people and intensify their policy-oriented guidance and political leadership in order to ensure that the work of the youth league in their respective regions and units is conducted properly in line with the Party’s ideas and intentions.
A Party-wide campaign should be launched to create model, exemplary units in Party guidance over the work of the youth league and generalize their experience so as to make sure that loving young people and rendering positive support to the work of the youth league becomes a trait of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
The climate of prioritizing and loving young people should pervade the whole country.
A broad vista is open before the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist Youth League and our young people storming ahead along the course of the Korean revolution indicated by the Party Central Committee, and the eternal brilliant future of the youth movement of Korea is assured.
Let us all struggle dynamically for the accom-plishment of the Juche-oriented socialist cause, for the modelling of the youth league on Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism and towards the bright future of the youth power.
Glory to our resourceful, heroic and trustworthy five-million-strong young vanguard!