Kim Jong-un shuns traditional calendar to bolster personality cult
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Despots around the world have often tried to impose themselves on their societies’ systems for reckoning time. Now North Korea has abandoned its unique calendar, in a further indication of the growing confidence of its supreme leader, Kim Jong-un.
The newspaper of the Korean Workers’ Party, as well as state-run Korean Central Television, have recently stopped using the Juche system for counting the years in favour of the Western Gregorian calendar.
Beginning last month, the state-run Rodong Sinmun, or Workers’ Newspaper, and KCTV have dated their stories 2024, rather than Juche 113.
Juche is North Korea’s ideology of self-reliance, and the Juche calendar begins with the birth of the country’s first president, Kim Il-sung, in 1912, which is taken to be Year 1.
It was one of the ways in which his successors glorified the founder after his death, creating a near-divine figure from whom they derived their own authority. However, in recent years Kim has watered down the Kim Il-sung cult and stealthily begun to replace it with one that centres on himself.
Content retrieved from: https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/kim-jong-un-shuns-traditional-calendar-to-bolster-personality-cult-g0z775h38.
