[Marxism] Strong defense of Korean unity, N. Korea national sovereignty from US-SWP-

[Fred Feldman]

U.S. hands off Korea!
No to sanctions, acts of piracy!
Withdraw all U.S. troops and weapons!
(lead article)
 
The following statement by the National Committee of the Socialist
Workers Party was released October 11 by the party's national secretary,
Jack Barnes.

The Socialist Workers Party calls on working people in the United States
and throughout the world to oppose the rapidly accelerating threats
against north Korea by the U.S. rulers and their "coalition of the
willing," a coalition stretching from Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing, to
Moscow and capitals across Europe. The U.S. government and its allies
are already tightening sanctions against north Korea and choking off its
access to credit and currency. They are pressing the United Nations
Security Council to legitimize boarding north Korean ships to "inspect"
and "interdict" imports and exports and lay the basis for military
action. [See news article]

STATEMENT BY
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY
NATIONAL COMMITTEE

With some 10,000 weapons in its nuclear arsenal and nuclear-armed
warships in the Pacific, it is Washington that poses the threat of
nuclear annihilation to the people of Asia and the world. It is the U.S.
government, not the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), that
has entered the fifth year of its war in Afghanistan and is nearing its
fourth year of combat in Iraq.

And it is Washington and its allies who for half a decade, through the
U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative, have imposed their "right"
to board ships and seize cargo-to carry out piracy on the high
seas-against any country the imperialist rulers label a "rogue nation."
Washington's demand for "inspection" of all cargo in or out of north
Korea-a de facto naval blockade, an act of war by any standard-ups the
ante on the danger of military strikes against the DPRK on land as well.

It is under this same banner of "nuclear nonproliferation" that
Washington joins with its allies in Europe and Asia to seek to prevent
semicolonial countries from developing the energy sources needed to
expand electrification to develop modern industry, farming, and
education and culture. The major capitalist powers arrogantly insist
that they, and only they, will decide which governments can or cannot
develop large-scale nuclear energy without being reliant on other
nations for nuclear fuel. Today Korea is in imperialism's sights.
Tomorrow, Iran. The next day it will be others.  
 
Washington carves up Korea
In August 1945 Washington called attention to its new position as the
world's dominant imperialist power by unleashing nuclear weapons-for the
first and, so far, only time in history-against the people of Japan.
Only weeks later, with the complicity of the Stalinist regime in Moscow
and support from Stalinist parties around the globe, the U.S. rulers, in
flagrant disregard for Korea's national sovereignty, carved the country
in two. In the northern half the workers and farmers deepened the
revolutionary mobilizations that had swept the entire peninsula at the
end of World War II, carrying out a radical land reform, expropriating
the capitalists and landlords, and establishing a workers state.

In 1950 Washington invaded north Korea under the United Nations flag in
an effort to destroy the DPRK and deal blows to the unfolding revolution
in China. Not only did the U.S. government threaten the use of nuclear
weapons during the Korean War, it murderously flattened-literally flat
tened-the north and set it ablaze through bombardment. By 1953, however,
the U.S.-led invaders had been pushed back to Korea's 38th parallel by
the combined forces of Korean and Chinese troops, dealing U.S.
imperialism its first military defeat in history.

Ever since then Washington has deployed tens of thousands of U.S. troops
and armaments on south Korean soil. It has carried out annual "war
games" with the capitalist regime in Seoul. It has imposed imperialist
diplomatic isolation on the DPRK. It has wielded economic and currency
sanctions-the inhuman weapons of food, fuel, and energy-to starve and
freeze the toilers in the north. And it has encouraged the strategic
rearmament of Japan.

All these measures and others are a constant reminder of U.S. finance
capital's unremitting military threats against Korean workers and
farmers in both halves of that partitioned country. To this day
Washington maintains a massive conventional and strategic nuclear
arsenal in and around the Korean peninsula.  
 
Using Moscow, Beijing muscle
It is in face of this forcible division of Korea by imperialism, and its
unrelenting economic and military pressure, that the DPRK has asserted
the right to take the military steps it deems necessary to defend
itself. The aim of Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul in the so-called
six-party "negotiations" in recent years has been to bring to bear the
muscle of Moscow and especially Beijing-the DPRK's largest source of
trade and economic aid-to compel Pyongyang to unilaterally abandon its
nuclear research, enrichment, and testing programs while the U.S. atomic
arsenal, the world's largest, remains intact. And while plans for
nuclear-powered energy spread throughout the world, from Japan and India
to Finland, Russia, and the United States itself.

In response to the DPRK's announcement October 8 that it had carried out
a nuclear weapons test, the Chinese government's ambassador to the
United Nations agreed that "there have to be punitive actions" against
north Korea. Both Beijing and Moscow have already made clear they will
support stiffer sanctions. It remains to be seen, however, whether this
treachery will yet go so far as to bow to Washington's demand that such
punishment of the Korean people also fall under Chapter VII of the
United Nations charter, which makes mandatory sanctions "legally"
enforceable by imperialist-organized troops under UN banners. (These are
the same blue banners that for more than half a century have flown over
imperialist occupation forces in south Korea and the Demilitarized Zone,
the DMZ.)  
 
A matter of sovereignty
As a simple matter of national sovereignty, working people in the United
States and elsewhere have a fundamental class interest in supporting the
DPRK's right to self-defense. At the same time, the Socialist Workers
Party stands in solidarity with the DPRK's repeated calls for the
denuclearization of the Korean peninsula-and of the entire Pacific and
Asia. We demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and
armaments from Korean land and waters and the lifting of all economic
sanctions.

The imperialist rulers attack with particular ferocity those who refuse
to bow to their dictates. Just as they will not forget or forgive the
defeat handed them by the Korean people more than half a century ago,
they have also never forgiven the workers and farmers of Cuba for making
the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

The Cuban people and their communist leadership continue to set a
revolutionary internationalist example for toilers worldwide in linking
the defense of their own sovereignty and socialist conquests at home to
the advance of popular struggles in other countries. As president Fidel
Castro explained-in a December 1988 speech honoring Cuban
internationalist volunteers who had joined Angolan fighters in defeating
apartheid South Africa's invading forces-"Whoever is incapable of
fighting for others will never be capable of fighting for himself. And
the heroism shown by our forces, by our people in other lands, faraway
lands, must also serve to let the imperialists know what awaits them if
one day they force us to fight on this land here."

In a more recent speech, in November 2005, Castro explained why Cuba
depends for its revolutionary defense on the armed readiness and
political consciousness of Cuban working people, not on chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons. "We have never considered producing
nuclear weapons, because we don't need them," the Cuban president
explained. "Even if they were accessible, how much would they cost and
what sense would it make producing a nuclear weapon with an enemy that
has thousands of nuclear weapons?.

"We have a different type of nuclear weapon: it's our ideas," Castro
said-Cuba's revolutionary ideas and living example. "We possess a weapon
as powerful as nuclear power, and it is the magnitude of the justice for
which we are struggling.. That is why we have never even considered
producing them, nor have we ever considered seeking biological weapons.
What for?"

The Cuban government has taken the proletarian political high ground-and
thus the moral high ground-against the rapacious U.S. ruling families.
It has issued the call for a nonnuclear Caribbean, exposing the reality
that it is U.S. imperialism that poses a danger to the peoples of the
Americas and to humanity as a whole.

Like Washington's unending bipartisan economic warfare and military
pressure against Cuba, like its mounting threats against Iran, the
escalating threats by the imperialist parties today against the DPRK are
one front in what the U.S. rulers call a "long war." This decades-long
conflict has only begun with their bloody aggression against Iraq and
Afghanistan, and their open support of Tel Aviv's war against Lebanon.

In 1950 Socialist Workers Party national secretary James P. Cannon sent
an open letter to Democratic U.S. president Harry Truman condemning
Washington's brutal assault on the Korean people's struggle for national
sovereignty and unification. SWP members at that time-in factories, on
street corners, high school and college campuses, and in working-class
districts across the country-championed the demand: "Withdraw all U.S.
troops so the Korean people can have full freedom to work out their
destiny in their own way."

To that demand, we add today: No to sanctions! No to piracy against
north Korean ships! Remove all U.S. weapons from the Korean peninsula!
Denuclearize the Pacific and Asia!

Korea is one!
 s