Opinion

April and the Day of the Sun come every year without fail, but the people feel growing yearning for President Kim Il Sung with the passage of time.

Kim Il Sung was the father of the people who devoted his all to the country, happiness of the people and prosperity of all generations to come for decades from his teens to his advanced age of over 80.

“The people are God” was his cherished view and maxim of his life.

He started the revolution by going among the people and solved all state affairs to meet the desires and demands of the people by prioritizing their interests in the whole period of his revolutionary activities.

He put his heart and soul into providing the people with affluent life already in the period of building a new Korea after the country’s liberation from Japanese military rule.

Under his leadership the law on agrarian reform which reflected the centuries-old desire of the farmers to do farming on their own land all their lives and the law on the nationalization of industries which turned workers into masters of factories were proclaimed.

As he valued the personal safety of the people more than anything else, he ensured that the universal free medical care system was enforced at state expense during the fierce Fatherland Liberation War.

Many touching stories are told about the field guidance tour of the President who walked a long way for improving the people’s living standards.

One day in July 1961, he visited the then corn processing factory in Changsong County.

On his way he came to a halt in front of the corn meal storage tank, held a handful of corn meal and examined it for a while before asking an official whether it was favoured by the people.

When he heard that they liked it, he asked him again to see it carefully. And he pointed out the defects in the processing of corn meal one after another, saying that the crushed particles of the grain were not even and there was much corn powder.

And he said to the officials that their loyalty to the Party, to the working class and to the people should always be found not in faraway places, but in the details of life.

In such a way, the President’s days went by and they got together to make his whole life.

The demands and interests of the people were the standard of all his thinking and practice and to share joys and sorrows with them was his consistent principle of leadership.

As he took the people’s happiness as the greatest pleasure that can be compared to nothing, he devoted even holidays and Sundays for the good of the people.

The life of the President, who adopted “The people are God” as his lifetime motto and thoroughly applied it to the revolutionary leadership, shines as a noble life of the popular leader.