It is because the Korean nation-first spirit is the noble thinking and feeling that does not allow any racist and chauvinist elements.
Leader Kim Jong Il said:
“The excellence of our nation that we emphasize has nothing in common with racism or national chauvinism.”
The Korean nation-first spirit is, in a word, the pride that emanates from the greatness of the Korean nation and the noble thinking and feeling that find expression in the high sense of self-consciousness and will to add luster to the greatness of the Korean nation. In other words it is the pride of having the great leader, receiving leadership of the great Party and living in the most superior socialist system with the great Juche idea as a guiding ideology. It is also the noble thinking and feeling to glorify national honor, not pessimistic for being backward and not contented over the success but make continuous innovation and advance.
First, the Korean nation-first spirit has nothing in common with racism. Racism is the reactionary bourgeois ideology that defines superiority and inferiority of a nation according to its biological or ethnic characteristics.
Arguing that national characteristics are defined by racial ones, bourgeois ethnologists classify people according to skin colors, namely white people as a “higher race” and colored people as a “lower race”. They say that only a high race can create advanced civilization.
The Korean nation-first spirit does not assert that the Korean nation’s biological structure is more developed than that of others. By nature, there can never be “higher race” and ‘lower race”. All the races are endowed with inexhaustible creative intelligence and ability.
The low level of civilization of nations who were under the colonial subjugation in the past is not due to any inborn ability, but is the consequence of the imperialists’ predatory policy and their policy of keeping colonial people in ignorance.
The people in the countries, who were despised by the imperialists as a “lower race”, have now become the masters of their destiny and they are now making brilliant successes in the building of a new life and steadily raising the level of their civilization. It clearly proves groundlessness of the bourgeois ethnological doctrine.
Next, the Korean nation-first spirit has nothing in common with national chauvinism.
National chauvinism is a reactionary ideology of the exploiting class and the imperialists to look down upon other nations and reject them.
In the past the Japanese imperialists clamored about the “mission” of “leadership” over other nations by claiming the superiority of the “Yamato race” and the German fascists attempted to exterminate other nations and dominate the world by advertising the “superiority” of the “Aryan race”. Today the US imperialists are working viciously to dominate the world and enslave many nations by infusing “globalization” and insisting the “supremacy” of the white race and the “leading role” of the United States in the world. This is just national chauvinism.
However, the Korean nation-first spirit never looks down upon other nations nor rejects them. It not only values the good traits of different nations but also respects their independence. What it is opposed to is not the pride of various nations in their national excellences but dominationism that ignores them and tramples them down.
After all, the Korean nation-first spirit is associated with the noble thinking and feeling of respecting and trusting other nations and it constitutes a fair and reasonable thinking and feeling that does not tolerate any kinds of chauvinistic elements.
