opinion

Patriotism is a powerful driving force for the advance of our state.

When the country was just liberated, patriotic minds of the people pushed ahead with the building of a new Korea.

Among the patriotic deeds of those days were the patriotic rice donation movement which was launched on a nationwide scale after Kim Je Won, a peasant in Jaeryong County, donated to the country in December 1946 30 straw bags of rice out of the crops he gathered in the first year after the land reform, and the Pothong River improvement project, the first grand nature-remaking project of our country, which was carried out by the patriotic labour of the Pyongyang citizens. Though it was a huge project which the Japanese imperialists had failed to do in ten years, the Korean people worked a miracle of finishing it in a matter of 55 days after the country’s liberation under the guidance of General Kim Il Sung.

Such patriotic minds made a great contribution to the victory in the war and earned our country the name “Chollima Korea” in the post-war period.

The difficulties facing the DPRK in the present course of its advance are no less severe than the trials experienced in the past decades.

Last year, too, difficulties and unfavourable conditions stood in our way. But thanks to the patriotic spirit of the Workers’ Party members, sincere working people and service personnel who dynamically pushed forward a new phase of prosperity and development with their strong redoubled efforts true to the Party’s idea and leadership, 2023 was glorified as a year of great turn and change both in name and reality when the DPRK left a great footprint in the glorious course of its development in the efforts to improve the national power and to enhance the prestige of the country.

The Ninth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, which significantly reviewed the year 2023, estimated it as the greatest political success which can never be compared with anything else that the large ranks of patriots with the warm mind to think first of the Party, revolution and country and to be helpful to the country to relieve it of its difficulties grew up in the course of the vigorous mass patriotic movement, and put forward the slogan “Unite on the strength of patriotism!”

There is no major or minor work and one’s own or others’ work in patriotism.

The patriotic mind of devoting sincere efforts with ardent enthusiasm to do their utmost for the prosperity and development of the country has become the ideological sentiment of all the people as well as a national trait.

Young people are volunteering to work at major sectors for implementing the decisions of the Party plenum and many housewives are actively supporting socialist construction and going out to work.

Innovations and leaps forward are being made in every production unit.

The strength of the Korean people aspiring after patriotism and united with it is enormous, and this is a powerful driving force propelling the advance of the state.