The Winds of War

IN A WEEK in which we’ve been remembering the hundreds of thousands killed when the Americans nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, we’ve heard the new US president mouthing off with his usual threats against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Donald Trump, emboldened no doubt by last weekend’s shameful decision of the United Nations Security Council to impose even more sanctions against the beleaguered beacon of socialism in Asia, bragged that: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the US. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” But US threats count for little these days, least of all with the Korean People’s Army, who responded in turn by threatening to nuke the strategic US nuclear base on the Pacific island of Guam.

In the past the Americans have used the UN Security Council as a rubber-stamp for imperialist aggression against the former Yugoslavia, and regime change in Iraq and Libya. And Democratic Korea would clearly have been next if the DPRK did not now possesses nuclear missiles that can cross the Pacific and hit the American mainland.

As Lindsey German, the leader of the Stop the War movement said that Trump’s statement: “has been enough to strike fear into the hearts of millions of people. Unfortunately the world has already seen what Trump and his predecessors have been capable of, and it does not bode well for the future.”

She rightly said: “The alternative to war is demilitarisation and negotiation, something Trump refuses to contemplate... there are international agreements in favour of nuclear disarmament and of stopping proliferation. All Trump’s recent actions shows he will ignore them as the US continues to control the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world.

“This is a frightening point in world history and one where the populations of an increasingly crisis ridden world have every interest in stopping war. It is time to build a big movement against this.”

Democratic Korea has had no choice but to develop its nuclear energy programme and its own independent nuclear deterrent. The DPRK threatens no one. Its enemies are close by. US nuclear-armed warships are stationed off the Korean coast and thousands of US troops are in the south of Korea as well as in Japan. US imperialism wants to make the Pacific Ocean an American lake. US imperialism wants to perpetuate the division of Korea to justify the occupation of the south and ultimately to extinguish socialism in the Korean peninsula. All communists must stand by Democratic Korea and condemn all imperialist aims and threats.