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.

Crisis in Korea

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THE DEMOCRATIC People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) demonstrated its nuclear prowess on 4th July this week with the successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the American mainland. The DPRK leader, Kim Jong Un, clearly chose Independence Day to make the point to America’s ruling circles who are playing with fire on the Korean peninsula.

    Donald Trump responded with yet another of his incomprehensible Tweets while his chief minion, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, threatens to impose more sanctions on Democratic Korea and those that trade with the north, and the chief American general in the occupied south claimed that only “self-restraint” was keeping the United States and south Korea from going to war over the missiles that the US imperialists claim are a direct threat to themselves and their regional lackeys. But who is threatening whom?

    The Korean peninsula has been divided since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The south remains a puppet of US imperialism whose 29,000 strong garrison can quickly be reinforced from Japan.

    The Workers Party of Korea has led the Korean revolution, performing tremendous feats in socialist construction, defeating US imperialism, beating the US-led economic blockade and overcoming natural disasters to become a nuclear power and a modern socialist society that serves the people throughout their lives. The revolutionary struggle was led by great leader Kim Il Sung and dear leader Kim Jong Il. Today leader Kim Jong Un follows their footsteps at the helm of the Party that is leading the drive to build a thriving socialist republic.

    The ballistic missile test and the Democratic Korean nuclear missile programme as a whole are defensive responses to decades of American threats, provocations and sanctions, and an intensifying US-led build-up toward war.

    Everybody knows that the Americans have surrounded the DPRK with a nuclear-armed armada. Every year the US imperialists and their south Korean lackeys hold war-games in the occupied south that simulate an invasion of Democratic Korea, and everyone knows that it has been the Americans who have ratcheted up tension on the Korean peninsula with the deployment of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) missiles that clearly threaten the security of Russia and People’s China.

    The DPRK 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. United States 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’s military and diplomatic ‘pivot,’ or ‘rebalance’ toward Asia is simply a cover for a new bid to control both sides of the Pacific Rim and extend American hegemony throughout Asia. US imperialism can never forgive the DPRK for being the first country since the Second World War to defeat it on the battlefield, setting an example for all people fighting for independence and self-determination.

    The Americans and their south Korean lackeys are working constantly to try to isolate the DPRK and the movement for national reunification. Peace campaigners and trade unionists have been jailed under south Korea’s fascist National Security Law — and the joint US—south Korean military exercises aimed at invading the DPRK take the Korean peninsula ever closer to a cataclysmic nuclear war.

    US imperialism wants to perpetuate the division of Korea and ultimately to extinguish socialism in the Korean peninsula. We must stand by the DPRK and condemn the imperialist aims and threats.

New Worker editorial
7th July 2017

Park Geun Hye must go!

A SINGLE protester outside the Russian embassy or a handful of Arab stooges at a peace rally makes headlines in our national press. A north Korean diplomat defects to the south Korean regime in London and its national news for weeks on end. A few thousand anti-Trump protesters on the streets in the United States hits the headlines all over the western world.

But when over a million south Koreans take to the streets to denounce their corrupt, puppet president and call for her resignation it barely gets a mention in the august pages of the bourgeois media.

Last weekend over a million demonstrators took to the streets of Seoul, the capital of south Korea, to demand that puppet president Park Guen Hye stands down.

Members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), student groups and religious bodies gathered at Seoul Square to hold the 2016 people’s all-out rally. Some 150,000 KCTU members along with students from one hundred universities and people from all walks of life turned out for the protest, the biggest since 1987, and marched to the presidential palace to demand Park Guen Hye’s resignation.

Workers are downing tools throughout the country, which has been occupied by US imperialism since 1945, whilst the KCTU prepares for a general strike to demand Park’s resignation and the release of their leader, jailed for five years on trumped-up charges last year.

Park Guen Hye, the daughter of the former dictator who was shot by a member of his own faction in 1979, heads the reactionary and rabidly anti-communist Saenuri Party that does the bidding of US imperialism. The down-trodden south Korean masses, doubly oppressed by their local exploiters as well as those from the US, are sick to death of this corrupt regime led by Park, a venal politician involved with a shadowy religious cult leader who used her influence over the president to embezzle public funds.

Whilst all of this is going on the masses in the democratic north of the divided Korean peninsula are rallying to the latest call of the Workers Party of Korea to sharpen their defences against imperialism and continue to build socialism in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The DPRK was branded by the American imperialists as part of the “axis of evil”, and one of the “outposts of tyranny” that include Cuba, Syria and Iran, and was topped by Iraq until that country was invaded by US-led imperialism in 2003. The US army and its south Korean puppets rehearse the invasion of the north in annual war-games and the south Koreans have developed a cruise missile of their own targeted on the DPRK.

In the face of these renewed threats the DPRK has had no alternative but to develop a nuclear deterrent to defend its socialist system. At the same time it has pledged that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons — and it has also vowed never to threaten the use of nuclear weapons nor allow the transfer of nuclear technology to other countries.

Whilst corrupt south Korean politicians grovel to the Americans for their share of the loot the masses in Democratic Korea, with Kim Jong Un at the helm, are relentlessly advancing into the future to build socialism and fulfil the dream of all Koreans, the peaceful re-unification of the country.

New Worker