Stalinist adulation of the late North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il, by the National Executive Committee of the ANC Youth League should come as no surprise. (See Abner Mosaase, "The ANCYL's tribute to Kim Jong Il", Politicsweb, 22 December).

The racist massacre of the amaNdebele in Zimbabwe, carried out by Robert Mugabe's ZANU regime in its "Gukurahundi" programme (to "wash away the chaff") in the 1980s, was performed under the guidance of military training by North Korean instructors.

In its fawning on this regime, the NEC of the ANCYL tells all one needs to know about itself and its programme for South Africa.

A helpful obituary analysis by David Blair of the deceased "Dear Leader" discussed the "two principal strands of the impoverished state's official ideology: militarism and an obsession with racial purity." It is worth reading with care.

As Blair reports, a country "in which people eat roots and berries to avoid starvation has built a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

"Instead of being the world's last Communist state, North Korea is best understood as a murderous laboratory for the utopian fantasies of the fascist Right. Its official propaganda glorifies the moral superiority of the Korean race, as compared with the decadence and depravity of the outside world. The North Korean people are portrayed as being almost childlike in their innocence and purity - so different from the amorality of their neighbours, supposedly corrupted by Western materialism and the corrosive influence of America."

David Blair continues that in the book, The Cleanest Race, a study of North Korean propaganda, Brian Myers summed up the state's official ideology as follows: "The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader."

How interesting that the zealots in the executive of the ANC Youth League should have come full circle - to the doctrine of blood purity, and a racist ideology which would put the propagandists of the apartheid regime to shame.

Let them wriggle out of that.

Shame on them, on the eve of the ANC's centenary year.

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