Tomorrow, North Korea celebrates Songun day and, in this column, I would like to speak about the history of this concept and how it, essentially, lost all of its meaning over time.

The word Songun (선군, 先軍) did not exist in the Korean language until 1997. It literally means “military first”: “first”, not in the sense of first, second and third, but in the sense of it being given the utmost priority.

The time when the word was first introduced was an age of famine – the absolute worst economic conditions since the end of the Korean War. The death