A Reverend on Trial: Debating the Proper Place of Christianity in the North Korean Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-405
Author(s):  
Sandra H. Park

Abstract As the early North Korean state (1945–50) sought to groom “proper” revolutionary subjects, many Christian leaders publicly confronted the state. When Presbyterian minister Cho Ponghwan upset revolutionary sensibilities with political commentaries during an evangelical circuit around Hwanghae Province, the people’s courts tried him as a reactionary. This article draws on surviving court records in the North Korean Captured Documents collection to elucidate the pedagogic aims that the state invested into Cho’s trial. Instead of dismissing the people’s courtroom as revolutionary excess, I engage Cho’s trial as an intelligible debate over early North Korea’s secularizing project. Beyond discipline, I demonstrate that the state laboriously instructed Christians on embodying desire for the revolution and refraining from transgressing the state-drawn boundary between religion and politics. Yet, due to the instability of this boundary, the courts also used Cho’s trial to articulate and assert the state’s sole authority over defining and redefining this boundary as a way to manage the sacred in North Korean society. Reading along and against the state’s pen, this article excavates the North Korean people’s court as a crucial site for ironing out the state pedagogy on the reactionary and the sacred in a postcolonial, socialist revolution.

English Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Eun-Young Jang ◽  
Eun-Yong Kim

Mee-Soo was a good student in North Korea. She came to South Korea in her early teens, and South Korean state policy for North Korean defectors enabled her to gain entry into a decent university in Seoul. She majored in Business Management and, when she had to choose her sub-major, she chose Accounting over Marketing and Human Resources because she thought she could avoid English. Achieving CPA (Certified Public Accountant) status was the goal for Accounting majors. Passing a score of 700 in the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) was a requirement to take the CPA exam. Mee-Soo worked hard studying for TOEIC and took the test ten times. Her score rose from the 400s to the 600s, but she could not pass the 700 threshold and was left behind while other South Korean students passed the English requirement. She could not even begin to study for the CPA exam itself. She once sighed and told me (one of the authors), ‘I wish I could have a life without English.’ I responded, ‘I didn't think English would be so important to North Koreans in South Korea.’ To this, Mee-Soo exclaimed, ‘It is a matter of survival.’ Given there have now been over 70 years of separation between North and South Korea since the Korean War, it is unquestionable that North Korean migrants face and struggle with a variety of troubles in their attempts to settle into South Korean society. In this context, why does English constitute a ‘matter of survival’ for North Koreans when there are so many other critical issues for these individuals, who crossed several borders at the risk of their lives? This phenomena, that ‘English’ represents a major difficulty for North Korean defectors in their process of settling in South Korea (Jung & Lim, 2009), constitutes an interesting linguistic phenomena in an intra-ethnic contact. However, by itself, this statement somewhat simplifies how English actually affects the migrant group. Instead, its influence works in a surprisingly diverse number of ways across different ranges and layers within the North Korean population, depending on their regional and social background, age, time of migration, and possibly many other factors. A meaningful pattern we discuss here is the changing relations between English and North Korean migrants according to age; it is the North Korean young adults who seem to be particularly affected by English and disproportionately in need of English teaching. We also note, though, that this pattern itself is changing, as we are seeing the recent increase of children of North Korean migrants born and educated in South Korea or in China.


2018 ◽  
Vol 123 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Schmid

Abstract The Cold War is far from over on the Korean Peninsula. Korean history—especially for the northern half—remains deeply shaped by the legacies of transnational anti-communism even as historians who study socialism in other settings have shed many of the Cold War–era assumptions about the extensive power of the state. By putting North Korea in a comparative perspective with other socialist countries such as the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the German Democratic Republic, this article suggests ways of integrating the constitutive power of social forces beyond the state into our histories of North Korea, as seen through an examination of population movement. Beginning with the dissolution of the Japanese Empire, the mobility of people has always been a politicized issue between the two Koreas. Historians have taken up this issue, yet dependence on sources produced by the North Korean state has led many narratives—however harshly critical of the regime—to reproduce within their own analytical frameworks key assumptions originally produced in Pyongyang in support of the personality cult. The result has been a cartoonish depiction of the North Korean state. By using a diverse set of public media as sources, this article shows that due to conflicting interests of migrants, factory managers, and central economic planners, many North Koreans moved into the cities despite administrative injunctions and the admonishments of Kim Ilsung. Asking questions about the limits of the state, rather than assuming its totalitarian capacity, becomes one way of escaping the historiographical legacies of the Cold War even as the politics of division continue to rage on the peninsula.


Antiquity ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 50 (200) ◽  
pp. 216-222
Author(s):  
Beatrice De Cardi

Ras a1 Khaimah is the most northerly of the seven states comprising the United Arab Emirates and its Ruler, H. H. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is keenly interested in the history of the state and its people. Survey carried out there jointly with Dr D. B. Doe in 1968 had focused attention on the site of JuIfar which lies just north of the present town of Ras a1 Khaimah (de Cardi, 1971, 230-2). Julfar was in existence in Abbasid times and its importance as an entrep6t during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Portuguese Period-is reflected by the quantity and variety of imported wares to be found among the ruins of the city. Most of the sites discovered during the survey dated from that period but a group of cairns near Ghalilah and some long gabled graves in the Shimal area to the north-east of the date-groves behind Ras a1 Khaimah (map, FIG. I) clearly represented a more distant past.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-348
Author(s):  
James Lucas da Costa-Lima ◽  
Earl Celestino de Oliveira Chagas

Abstract—A synopsis of Dicliptera (Acanthaceae) for Brazil is presented. Six species are recognized: Dicliptera ciliaris, D. sexangularis, and D. squarrosa, widely distributed in South America; D. purpurascens, which ranges from the North Region of Brazil (in the state of Acre) to eastern Bolivia; D. gracilirama, a new species from the Atlantic Forest of northeastern Brazil; and D. granchaquenha, a new species recorded in dry and semideciduous forests in Bolivia and western Brazil, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Furthermore, we propose new synonyms and designate lectotypes for eleven names. An identification key to the six accepted Dicliptera species in Brazil is provided.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-99
Author(s):  
Игорь А. Исаев

The article deals with one of the most important issues in the Soviet political and legal history. The choice of the political form that was established almost immediately after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Revolution of 1917, meant a change in the direction of development of the state. Councils became an alternative to the parliamentary republic. The article analyzes the basic principles of both political systems and the reasons for such a choice. The author emphasizes transnational political direction of the so-called “direct action” which took place not only in Russia, but also in several European countries.


Author(s):  
Ruzanna V. Miroshnichenko ◽  
◽  
Anna Yu. Lukyanova ◽  
Svetlana A. Fedorova ◽  
Svetlana V. Nedvizhaj ◽  
...  

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-321
Author(s):  
Lode Wils

In het tweede deel van zijn bijdrage 1830: van de Belgische protonatie naar de natiestaat, over de gebeurtenissen van 1830-1831 als slotfase van een passage van de Belgische protonatie doorheen de grote politiek-maatschappelijke en culturele mutaties na de Franse Revolutie, ontwikkelt Lode Wils de stelling dat de periode 1829-1830 de "terminale crisis" vormde van het Koninkrijk der Verenigde Nederlanden. Terwijl koning Willem I definitief had laten verstaan dat hij de ministeriële verantwoordelijkheid definitief afwees en elke kritiek op het regime beschouwde als kritiek op de dynastie, groeide in het Zuiden de synergie in het verzet tussen klerikalen, liberalen en radicale anti-autoritaire groepen. In de vervreemding tussen het Noorden en het Zuiden en de uiteindelijke revolutionaire nationaal-liberale oppositie vanuit het Zuiden, speelde de taalproblematiek een minder belangrijke rol dan het klerikale element en de liberale aversie tegen het vorstelijk absolutisme van Willem I en de aangevoelde uitsluiting van de Belgen uit het openbaar ambt en vooral uit de leiding van de staat.________1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation stateIn the second part of his contribution 1830: from the Belgian pre-nation to the nation state, dealing with the events from 1830-1831 as the concluding phase of a transition of the Belgian pre-nation through the major socio-political and cultural mutations after the French Revolution, Lode Wils develops the thesis that the period of 1829-1830 constituted the "terminal crisis" of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands. Whilst King William I had clearly given to understand that he definitively rejected ministerial responsibility and that he considered any criticism of the regime as a criticism of the dynasty, the synergy of resistance increased between the clericalists, liberals and radical anti-authoritarian groups in the South. In the alienation between the North and the South and the ultimate revolutionary national-liberal opposition from the South the language issue played a less important role than the clericalist element and the liberal aversion against the royal absolutism of William I and the sense of exclusion of the Belgians from public office and particularly from the government of the state.


2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 88-100
Author(s):  
V. R. Darbasov ◽  
◽  
M. Р. Solomonov ◽  

The article assesses the state of the heat economy of the Northern region. The purpose of the article is to reveal the reasons for chronic backwardness of the region's industry from the average Russian indicators. To achieve the goal, solved the following problems: the features of heat economy in the North, analyzes the housing development, production and consumption of heat energy, as the sources of heat energy and heat networks, and also reforms in the heat economy of the region, based on which conclusions on assessment of the heat economy of the region. In recent years, there has been a twofold decrease in the rate of renewal of fixed assets of the heat economy against the norm, low rates of introduction of the resource-saving technologies in the heat economy, and in general, in the housing and communal services of the region. The level of marginal balance of supply and demand in the heat energy market is determined. The article is written to correct the decisions of the Federal and regional Executive authorities in terms of ensuring the reliability of heat economy of the Northern region.


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