DPRK defends socialism

OUR BOURGEOIS leaders have, predictably, been wailing over the fate of Jang Song Thaek, the leader of a counter-revolutionary faction inside the Workers Party of Korea, who was condemned to death last week for plotting to overthrow the government of the DPR Korea.

These people, who rejoiced when Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by a kangaroo court comprised entirely of his enemies; these people who gloated when Muammar Gaddafi was lynched by a Nato-funded mob, now talk about the “extreme brutality” of the north Korean government for executing a self-confessed traitor who wanted supreme power for himself and the destruction of the DPRK’s socialist system.

Despicable human scum Jang who was worse than a dog, as the Pyongyang’s Daily Worker put it, was shot last week after being found guilty of treason, economic sabotage and gross corruption.

Jang was the leading member of the Workers Party of Korea in charge of economic relations with China, including the establishment of special economic zones on the border between the two countries. He used his position to embezzle vast amounts of money to live the high life abroad and reward his followers who were helping him plan a coup.

At his trial Jang admitted that he had set up a secret slush fund from money siphoned off from public works to reward his cronies and finance his own decadent capitalist lifestyle. In 2009 Jang took at least €4.6 million from his secret coffers to spend on gambling, womanising and drugs while supposedly having medical treatment in a foreign country.

But Jang’s motives went far beyond simply lining his own pockets to fund a corrupt and degenerate life-style.

The Jang group deliberately sabotaged economic planning in the DPRK to aggravate problems and foster discontent amongst the masses and the armed forces — discontent Jang’s clique then intended to exploit to win support for his plan to seize power on a “reformist” platform that they believed would then soon win international recognition.

This was acknowledged by Lord Alton of Liverpool, the Catholic Liberal-Democrat peer who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea. The former Liberal MP, known mainly for his campaigns against abortion rights, said Jang Song Thaek had been viewed as a “real hope for reform”. He told the BBC: “I saw him at a distance at an official gathering after he’d been rehabilitated in 2006 and from the people I spoke to who knew him he represented for many the real hope for reform in North Korea.

“Jang Song Thaek’s execution, I think, is a bloody and vivid and brutal reminder of the inherent and cruel nature of a regime that has always modelled itself on Stalin’s USSR and the gulags which housed some 300,000 people.”

Well Stalin and the Bolsheviks taught us many things and one of them was that the class struggle intensifies as society advances towards socialism. The other was that the greatest danger to the communists and the revolutionary movement was not from those openly opposed to socialism but from the hidden enemies who worm their way into the party’s trust, who pose as defenders of the working class and supporters of the socialist system while secretly working to reverse it and restore capitalism.

We also know what this leads to. Mikhail Gorbachov destroyed the Soviet Union from within and then boasted that his life’s work was done, while the counter-revolutions in the people’s democracies were all led by social-democrats and hidden enemies masquerading as communists within the ruling parties of eastern Europe.

The destitution of the working class that followed is a “vivid and brutal reminder of the cruel nature” of capitalism that has forced millions of Poles to come to Britain for work and millions of others to emigrate to western Europe from the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe.

The Korean people have closed ranks around Kim Jong Un and the Workers Party of Korea. They have taken firm and decisive measures to deal with Jang and smash his group to safeguard the people’s government and ensure that the country continues to build a modern socialist republic dedicated to the welfare of all working people.

New Worker editorial
19th December 2013