Korean solidarity in Derby

By New Worker correspondent

Dermot Hudson opening the meeting

Comrades and friends met in Derby last week for a Korean solidarity meeting at the Alexandra Hotel, a pub in a city steeped in railway history and the home of Rolls Royce’s civil nuclear and aerospace plants. There was a very good attendance for the meeting called by the Korean Friendship Association to report-back on the last KFA delegation to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 2018.

            UK KFA Chair Dermot Hudson, who opened the event, said: Today the DPRK is the most demonised and abused country on earth with lies about the country being produced on an industrial scale. Much misinformation comes from the south Korean puppet propaganda machine which is then recycled by the Western mainstream or if you like bourgeois or imperialist media who in some cases print stories which they know are untrue.

“Then you have shadowy outfits and think tanks that are closely linked to the CIA and the south Korean National Intelligence Service. One example is ‘NKNews’ , an internet based news service that includes on its staff former US and south Korean army officers . The head and founder of  ‘NK News’ Chad O Carroll, who worked for the CIA-linked Marshall Fund, had previously been writing on the so-called colour revolutions in Libya, Tunisia and other Middle Eastern countries but was suddenly reinvented as “north Korea expert “

            Other members of last year’s KFA delegation to Democratic Korea told the audience about their experience in seeing the DPRK for the first time, or as one of them said: “You will no doubt be hearing in detail from others about all the places of interest that we visited, but I will just end on this. As the American journalist Lincoln Steffens said after spending time in the early days of the Soviet Union ""I have seen the future, and it works".

A lively Question and and Answer session followed revolving around human rights , religion , popular participation , democracy, political parties in the DPRK , travel to the DPRK , the Juche idea and tourism.

Suggestions were made about linking KFA to other solidarity campaigns, Refreshments were served  and a large amount of literature was sold.  This was the first sortie into the East Midlands by the KFA. It clearly won’t be the last...