End sanctions on Democratic Korea!

 by New Worker correspondent

Korean solidarity activists returned to Whitehall on Saturday to demand an end to British sanctions against Democratic Korea in July and an end to all the other sanctions imposed on the DPR Korea by US imperialism, the European Union and America’s lackeys in Japan and south Korea.
    NCP leader Andy Brooks and other comrades including London organiser Theo Russell, joined the picket called by the Korean Friendship Association on 26th September by the gates of the road leading to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, just a stone’s throw from Downing Street and the heart of government.
    In a lengthy interview with a London journalist Dermot Hudson, the KFA chair, explained why they were picketing the Foreign Office. He denounced the unjust sanctions imposed by the British government and defended the human rights record of Democratic Korea against false accusations.

Who Started the Korean War?

Seventy years have passed since the Korean war – but the USA is still struggling to distort the truth of its outbreak. So who started the Korean war?
    In August 1945, the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, in co-operation with the Soviet troops, launched the general offensive to liberate Korea and brought Japan to its knees. The defeat of Japan upset American dreams of placing the whole Korean peninsula under US control and using it as a springboard for its strategy of world domination. Unable to realise its wild ambition, the USA put forward a so-called “practical solution” for occupying half of the Korean peninsula.
    Under instructions from US President Truman, the State-War-Navy Co-ordinating Committee prepared a draft for the Soviet and US troops to disarm the Imperial Japanese army with the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula as the dividing line. Truman approved it on the spot. It became “General Order No 1” that was issued to the Allied Powers on 13th August. In fact, the 38th parallel as a dividing line in Korea was never the subject of international discussions; it was unilaterally contrived by the USA.
    According to this order, the advance contingent of the US 24th Army Corps arrived at Kimpho Airport on 4th September 1945 and the corps landed in Inchon, Pusan and Mokpho between 8th September and mid-October.
    Referring to this, even Americans say that Wall Street’s war against the Korean people started practically from September 1945 when its generals landed in south Korea.
    The USA rigged up and expanded the south Korean puppet army and trained it in the American way with a view to keeping the balance of forces at a “ratio of ten to one” over the north Korean army. It also seized its prerogative of supreme command over the puppet army.
    From 1945 to 1949, the USA gave south Korea military aid worth over a billion dollars. Whilst stepping up the combat readiness of the puppet army, it deployed its reinforced forces in the areas along the 38th parallel whilst building new or repairing positions and military roads on a large scale.
    At the same time, the US imperialists egged the puppet army on to launch armed provocations against north Korea along the 38th parallel. Their armed provocations from 1947 to June 1950 numbered over 5,150.
    Such provocations were not simple ‘armed clashes’, they were ‘test wars’ committed repeatedly with a focus on the directions of main attack according to military action plans for the ‘northward expedition’.
    Fujishima Udai, a Japanese commentator, said on 4th July 1975: “The US scheme to unleash a war in Korea did not kick off unexpectedly on 25th June 1950, which is usually called the day of the outbreak of the Korean war. It started from 1947 right after the Second World War.”
    After rounding off war preparations, the US imperialists buckled down to action. Truman sent Secretary of Defence Johnson, Chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Bradley and State Department Advisor Dulles to Seoul and Tokyo on the pretext of discussing a “peace treaty” with Japan so as to ultimately secure the preparations for war against north Korea.
    Dulles arrived in Seoul in mid-June 1950 and made final examination of the war preparations of the puppet army in a trench along the 38th parallel. Giving instructions to south Korean puppet leader Syngman Rhee, he said he came here with Truman’s order to inspect the preparations for a “northward march” with his own eyes and kick it off if everything was okay. He added that there was no need for further delay.
    On 25th June 1950, the south Korean puppet army, in combat readiness under the direct command of the American Military Advisory Group, launched a sudden armed invasion of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) all along the 38th parallel.
    But the US imperialists suffered an ignominious defeat in the war at the hands of the Korean people who turned out in the heroic struggle to defend the destiny of their country and nation.
Naenara

Kim Il Sung: a life dedicated to the people

by Andy Brooks - General Secretary NCP

IT HAS LONG BEEN a Marxist tradition to elevate the lives of comrades whose daily work was an example to others, developed and advanced Marxist-Leninist theory or led the struggle for liberation. Kim Il Sung was all of these. A fighter, a thinker and a leader, Kim Il Sung was an outstanding communist of the 20th century whose name will forever be remembered as the founder of the modern Korean communist movement that began amongst the patriotic youth of Korea when he was a student in the 1920s.

Kim Il Sung was born into a world dominated by the great colonial powers of Europe, the United States and Japan. In Korea the old feudal rulers had been ousted by the Japanese imperialists and the peninsula turned into a colony of Japan.

Wherever there is oppression there is always resistance and Korean patriots tried to fight-back in whichever way they could. Some nationalists, those representing the landowners and bourgeois elements looked to Nationalist China and America for help. Others were inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

In the 1920s the Korean communist movement was riddled with divisions that had left them isolated from the masses. Kim Il Sung condemned those who simply hoped to rely on outside forces or those who strove for the recognition of others, as a disgrace to the Korean nation.

Kim Il Sung saw the uselessness of the sectarians, flunkeyists, dogmatists and factionalists who called themselves communists in the 1920s. So he decided to form a communist movement from the youth and the grassroots of the villages and factories.

Kim Il Sung stressed that a revolutionary movement was not something to carry on with the approval of others but a work to be done out of one’s own conviction. Problems should be solved by oneself, he said, and only when the struggle was waged well would others recognise it.

In words as relevant today as when they were written Kim Il Sung said: “Factionalism is a product of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideologies, particularly of self-heroising, fame-seeking and careerism. It has nothing in common with the revolutionary ideas of the working class”.From student leader to guerrilla commander Kim Il Sung grasped the fundamental principles of Marxism and applied the lessons of the Great October Russian Revolution to the concrete conditions of the Korean people, who were slaves of the Japanese Empire. The “Young General”, as he soon was called, gathered a group of young communist men and women prepared to take on the might of the Japanese army.

Over the years that small band of heroes grew into a people’s army that humbled the Imperial Japanese Army in 1945 – a victory that led to the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And it was that People’s Army that fought US imperialism and its lackeys to a standstill during the Korean war and forced the American imperialists on their knees begging for an armistice in 1953.

Kim Il Sung was a great commander in war and a great leader in peace. In the north of Korea, so brutally partitioned by imperialism, he built a modern communist movement dedicated to serving the working people of Korea and he led the people in the mass struggle to build a new life after they had won their freedom in 1945.

The Workers Party of Korea with Kim Il Sung at the helm led the battle for land reform, education and socialist construction in the 1950s and 60s and then pushed forward on the engineering, technical and scientific fronts to build a modern socialist republic where every individual worker is master of his or her own life.

In western Europe communists understood the economic case for scientific socialism but ignored the philosophical aspects of the teachings of Marx and Engels. Though the role of mass action was clearly understood, the role of the individual was often ignored. Though the achievements of the Soviet Union led by Lenin and Stalin were studied, they were often not properly understood.

Kim Il Sung not only grasped Marxism-Leninism but he applied it to the concrete conditions of the Korean people. He knew that once the masses realised their own strength they would become unstoppable. He knew that serving the people was the be-all and end-all for the Korean communists and for the Workers’ Party of Korea that he launched in 1945. He developed Korean style socialism into the Juché idea – which elevates the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as its economic theories – and focuses on the development of each individual worker, who can only be truly free as part of the collective will of the masses. In the western world Juché is simply described as “self-reliance” but it is much more than that. Kim Il Sung said that working people could only become genuinely emancipated if they stood on their own feet. But the Juché idea doesn’t negate proletarian internationalism. The Soviet Union, People’s China and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe all closed ranks behind Democratic Korea during the Korean war. The Korean people responded with their trade and assistance whenever they could, while Korean experts and advisers helped the Vietnamese, the Arabs and the Africans struggling to break the chains of colonialism and continue to do so today.

In the world communist movement Kim Il Sung steered a careful path during the Sino-Soviet ideological conflict remaining on good terms with the Soviet and Chinese parties.

Unlike British communist leaders in the past, and indeed many others in Europe and beyond, Kim Il Sung stressed that Marxism-Leninism goes far beyond simple economic formulas and the Soviet “model”.

Kim Il Sung knew that material prosperity and ideological strength were of equal importance to the people. He called this the twin towers. Though both couldn’t advance simultaneously, when progress in one was made the other had to be advanced to catch up.

This was pointed out by Stalin in the 1930s when he told Soviet shock workers, the Stakhanovites, that working people had benefited concretely from the revolution. All previous revolutions had failed but: “Our proletarian revolution is the only revolution in the world which had the opportunity of showing the people not only the political results but also material results” Stalin declared.

“It is a good thing, of course, to drive out the capitalists, to drive out the landlords, to drive out the Czarist henchmen, to seize power and achieve freedom. That is very good. But unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone. In order to live well and joyously, the benefits of political freedom must be supplemented by material benefits”. Stalin said.

But Stalin’s revisionist successors abandoned the ideological tower and failed to even maintain the material benefits for the Soviet masses.

And after the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and the eastern European socialist countries, an enormous setback for communism globally, when parties were becoming demoralised and failing around the world, Kim Il Sung stopped the rot by summoning a global conference of communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang in 1992.

When Kim Il Sung passed away his successor, Kim Jong Il, told the Korean people and the world that they could “expect no change from him” and with Kim Jong Il at the helm, the Workers’ Party of Korea has won great victories in recent years. Natural disasters have been overcome.

Diplomatic isolation has been broken, the intrigues of US imperialism have been exposed and Korean rockets reach for the stars.

Kim Il Sung, the great leader of the Korean revolution, died in 1994 but his work lives on in the Workers’ Party of Korea and in the colossal achievements of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea today. 

this article was first published in the New Worker in April 2009

Song of General Kim Il Sung on 26th Anniversary of Demise

Playing with fire on the Korean peninsula

Democratic Korea dramatically countered recent south Korean provocations by blowing up the empty north–south liaison office in the border town of Kaesong this week. This dramatic piece of street art was clearly intended to send a message to the Seoul regime that has resorted to old Cold War tricks along the de-militarised zone that divides the Korean peninsula.

Helium balloons carrying anti-communist propaganda leaflets have regularly been launched into the DPR Korea by what the puppet regime calls “defectors”. But everyone knows that these people, more accurately called “riff-raff” and “human scum” by the north, are agents of south Korean intelligence, which itself is but an arm of the CIA.

During the height of the Cold War the Americans and their local lackeys used balloons to drop dollars and propaganda across the armistice line drawn up at the end of the Korean war in 1953. Donald Trump’s summits with Kim Jong Un raised hopes of a new page in inter-Korean relations. But despite the fine words, the Americans have done nothing apart from stepping up their blockade of the DPRK.

 The south Korean leaders are now regretting their rash actions. They’re calling for fresh talks to end the tension. But without a genuine desire for normalisation it is difficult to see how such talks can begin.

The liaison office established in 2018 had operated as a de facto south Korean embassy when the new Seoul regime posed as a supporter of peace and re-unification. It was closed in January. Now it’s just smoke and rubble.

US pressure repulsed!

Kim Jong Un opening a factory on May Day

By our Asian affairs correspondent

US imperialism stepped up its destabilising efforts in Asia last week, spreading baseless rumours about the health of Democratic Korean leader Kim Jong Un and launching new provocations against People’s China around the Xisha islands in the South China Sea. Some believe that the war lobby, the cross party ‘deep state’ that represents the most aggressive sections of the US ruling class, is using the Trump administration’s disarray over the coronavirus crisis to pursue their old Cold War plan for total US hegemony on both sides of the Pacific.

In Washington, President Trump dismissed reports that Kim Jong Un was gravely ill as “fake news”. He said he could not “tell you exactly” the status of Kim’s health, though he did have a “very good idea” about his condition. “But I can’t talk about it now,” Trump said. “I just wish him well.”

The Democratic Korean leader’s reported absence at the 15^th April birthday celebrations of the great Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung fired speculation in south Korea that Kim Jong Un had contracted COVID-19 or had suffered a crippling heart attack. But all these bogus stories clearly came from reactionary circles within south Korean intelligence who ultimately report to the US army of occupation and the CIA.

This week Kim Jong Un opened a fertiser factory on May Day and sent a message of gratitude to workers building tourist facilities in the coastal town of Wonsan. He’s also sent greetings to Syrian President Bashar Assad, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

South Korean intelligence has a long track-record of spreading lies and disinformation about the north. In 1986 they claimed that Kim Il Sung had been shot dead. A few hours later Kim Il Sung was publicly seen at Pyongyang airport greeting a Mongolian delegation.

Meanwhile, the Chinese navy drove a US warship out of Chinese territorial waters off the Xisha islands, telling them they’d be better off focusing on dealing with COVID-19 prevention and control at home rather than destabilising regional security and peace overseas. A similar illegal incursion in Chinese waters off the Xisha islands happened in March, which was denounced in Beijing as hegemonic behaviour.

Chinese war-planes and naval forces followed the US guided missile destroyer USS {Barry} when it trespassed into China's territorial waters off the Xisha Islands on Tuesday, said Colonel Li Huamin. They followed and monitored its course, identified the ship, warned and expelled it, Li said.

The USA’s provocative actions seriously violated international law and related norms, seriously violated Chinese sovereignty and security interests, and intentionally increased regional security risks, Li said.

“We urge the US side to focus on the epidemic prevention and control on its homeland, contribute more to the international fight against the pandemic and immediately stop military actions against regional security, peace and stability,” Li said.

Chinese troops will resolutely fulfil their duty, safeguard national sovereignty and security as well as peace and stability in the South China Sea, Li said.

A Chinese military expert who requested anonymity told the media that the USA was eager to show that it still had the military capability even amidst multiple COVID-19 outbreaks inside its military, but this has further exposed the USA’s own fear that it is losing presence in the region.

China was ready to defend itself against US military provocations even in its prime, and expelling a destroyer is a warning to the USA, showing the Chinese military is capable of and determined in safeguarding sovereignty and territorial integrity, the expert said.

Day of the Shining Star in London

Michael Chant speaking

by New Worker correspondent

People battled their way through Storm Dennis to celebrate the Day of the Shining Star at a meeting in central London last weekend, organised by Korean Friendship Association (KFA) and the Friends of Korea (FoK) committee.

KFA Chair Dermot Hudson introduced the meeting, stressing the importance of the Day of the Shining Star and increasing solidarity with People's Korea. FoK Secretary Michael Chant, General Secretary of the RCPB-ML, spoke about the injustice of the sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), stressing the fact the UK is still maintaining the European Union (EU) sanctions against the DPRK despite leaving the EU!

A contribution from the DPRK’s London Embassy was read out. Part of it read: “February 16 is the birthday of Kim Jong Il, eternal Chairman of the National Defence Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. When the day comes round every year, many people of the world recall him with deep emotion.

“Kim Jong Il devoted his whole life for the cause of global peace. He led the struggle to build a new world free from aggression and war upholding the banner of anti-imperialist independence.”