The construction of the monolithic system started in earnest in the 1960s when the purge of all Kim Il-sung’s opponents was completed and Juche ideology came to the fore as a political ideology to facilitate the establishment of the monolithic system. Juche literally means the “main body”, “subject”, “independent stand” or “spirit of self-reliance”. It was originally developed as a political slogan to symbolize North Korea’s rejection of the Soviet Union’s policy of de-Stalinisation in the mid-1950s. In a speech delivered in April 1965, Kim Il-sung (1965) outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche “independence in politics” (jaju), “self-sufficiency in the economy” (jarip),and “self-reliance in national” (jawi). He thus implied that the North Korean people must have independence in thought and politics, economic self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in defence, and that state policy must reflect the will of the masses. In this respect, the concept of Juche is apparently akin to a human-oriented philosophy. It soon developed into a system that decreed that the masses, in order to fulfil their duty, must submit to the duidance of the suryeong. In this way, a human-oriented philosophy was systematically converted into a suryeong-oriented philosophy,which later became a crucial part of “kimilsungism”.