North Korean media have claimed that an Austrian publishing house published one of former dictator Kim Jong Il’s books shortly before an important anniversary.
State-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in an Oct. 4 report that Alwa & Deil Publishing House in Vienna, Austria, “brought out in booklet [form]” a pamphlet that the former North Korean dictator published in 1990. It said the copy shop did this on Sept. 26 “ahead of the 72nd founding anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea” that was celebrated on Tuesday, Oct. 10.
In this undated footage, people celebrate the 72nd anniversary of the founding of North Korea’s Workers’ Party in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Screenshot via Reuters)
Felix Langfelder, an account manager at Alwa & Deil, said in an email that, despite their name, they are not a publishing house.
“We are NOT the publisher, which is the North Korean embassy in Vienna,” he wrote.
He said they were merely taking an order put in by Yu Chol Pak, who is listed on the Federal Ministry of Europe’s website as the third secretary to the North Korean ambassador in Austria.
“The Workers’ Party of Korea Organizes and Guides All the Victories of Our People” was printed in English by North Korea’s foreign language publishing house in 1993.
The book exalts the North Korean Workers’ Party as the “the decisive guarantee for the victory of the socialist cause” and warns that its revolutionary nature must never be modified or “it will lose its originality.”
North Korea frequently makes claims about how other countries adore it’s “Juche” style of Marxism-Lennenism, and has boasted of their leaders’ books being published in Russia, Kuwait, and “in different countries,” the Pyongyang Times states.
From NTD.tv
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