Sharing the video of Zoom meeting held on January 12, 2021.

Title: ‘North Korea – A Failed Revolution if not a Failed State’
Speaker: Michael Seth

One way to understand the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is to see it as a failed revolution, chronically on the verge of being a failed state. A revolutionary state which once carried out a radical egalitarian agenda has developed into one of the most inequitable societies on the face of the earth, a land where most led desperate lives of hunger, darkness and deprivation while a tiny elite lived in luxury. A state founded on the universalist belief of Marxist-Leninist socialism has become a cult society based on an ideology of racial-nationalism. A revolutionary regime that sought to be in the vanguard of human progress presides over an impoverished society. A revolutionary state whose aim was to achieve national unity became the chief obstacle to that unity. A regime that once sought international respect was now universally reviled. Seven decades after its founding, the main accomplishment of the Kim Il Sung’s state was that it had manage not to disintegrate into chaos as some outsiders had expected.