Jonathan Cheng
speaker
201 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Jonathan Cheng’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Unlike Khrushchev coming after Stalin and saying we need to rename Stalingrad and we need to pull down some statues of Stalin.
We need to de-Stalinize.
Unlike Deng Xiaoping coming along in China and saying we need to go in a different direction.
We need to take down some of these Mao statues.
We need to de-Mao-ify.
There's never been any such process like that taking place in North Korea.
And if they were to look back at
the track record of these three countries, I think Kim Jong Un would look at it and say, we made the right choice.
Certainly did.
The first takeaway is that North Korea is at heart a religious society.
It is a nation state with all the trappings of a nation state, but we need to understand that it is a religious society built around worship
of Kim Il-sung, the state founder, and his successors, including the current leader Kim Jong-un.
I think it helped explain why there is so much devotion, so much willingness to endure hardship, and why all attempts to steer North Korea onto a different course have not succeeded over the decades.
The second takeaway I would say is that North Korea in its current form is not going away anytime soon.
The third takeaway is that Kim Il-sung understood it's more powerful, perhaps, to recognize the importance of religion, of faith, of belief.
Because only faith, unlike fame, power, sex, money, uniquely speaks to a question that I think every person has at some point, which is a simple question.
What happens after we die?
Faith purports to answer that.
And if you can get people to believe in your faith, in your cosmology, in the doctrines and the rituals that you've created, I think you can make people do almost anything.
And Kim Il-sung understood that deeply.
Showing 161–180 of 201 · page 9 of 11
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