An old tune from the BBC

THIS WEEK the BBC unveiled plans to start beaming daily propaganda broadcasts to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and expand its “World Service” to Russia, India and the Middle East to provide better coverage to countries where there is a “democratic deficit in impartial news”.

The BBC faces further cuts and scrabbles around to defend itself from calls from within the Cameron government and the corporate media to privatise or break the Corporation. The people are told to accept cuts, make sacrifices and accept unemployment and poverty under the austerity regime. But the BBC will have no problem in getting the millions needed to join the Americans’ new psychological warfare offensive against any country that stands in the way of imperialism.

The British Broadcasting Corporation is one of our supposed “national treasures” whose aims are to educate, inform and entertain the public that funds it through the licence fee. Under the motto “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation” the Corporation claims to be a pillar of impartiality and a reliable source of independent news at home and abroad. That was never the case back in the 1920s when the BBC was founded and it is certainly not the case now.

The Jimmy Savile affair has shown how easy it was for a dishonest and manipulative man to use the BBC as a cover for his sinister activities. Unfortunately for the last 68 years, the corporation has been happy to allow its name to be used as cover by the British and US intelligence services which operate with the same characteristics as Savile but to far more deadly effect.

From the beginning the Corporation has served the interests of the British ruling class at home and abroad. The BBC poses as impartial but when the chips are down it simply becomes the mouthpiece of the ruling class as it did during the General Strike in 1926 or the miners’ strikes in 1972 and the 1980s. When the Cold War began the BBC, whose “World Service” was directly funded by the Foreign Office until April 2014, worked in tandem with the CIA to spread lies and disinformation to the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies that emerged following the defeat of the Axis in 1945.

In those days the BBC ran a sophisticated operation. Third World diplomats would joke that while Radio Moscow and the Voice of America broadcast were “95 per cent truth and five per cent lies” the BBC was “97 per cent truth and only three per cent lies”. These days, with constrained budgets and the general “dumbing down” that the bourgeoisie encourages to stifle dissent, the BBC has abandoned any attempt at caution or subtlety. Imperialist and Zionist propaganda is relayed at face value and any old rubbish from anti-communist defectors is paraded as unvarnished truth.

Last month Korea was on the brink of war following provocations from the south Korean regime. It was averted following high-level negotiations between the north and southern sides. It ended with the puppet regime agreeing to halt its provocations in the Demilitarised Zone, giving the go-ahead for a reunion of separated families and relatives and offering to resume talks to lift economic sanctions on Democratic Korea.

The agreement was a set-back for reactionary south Korean leader Park Geun Hye and her venal clique that serves the interests of US imperialism. Now some of them want to turn the clock back.

US imperialism is planning to raise the issue of “human rights” in Democratic Korea at the United Nations this autumn and a new hate campaign is being prepared to back it up. The BBC plan is clearly part of this US-led propaganda offensive against the DPRK.

But no one in Democratic Korea wants to hear the recycled lies of the south Korean puppet regime on their radios and none of us should be forced to pay for this nonsense.


New Worker editorial
11th September 2015

Defending Democratic Korea!

By New Worker correspondent

 WHILE LONDONERS braved the rain to attend the Notting Hill Carnival or the many other fairs and festivals held across the capital on Bank Holiday Monday, supporters of the Korean revolution picketed the south Korean and US embassies to demand the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from south Korea.

taking the message to the puppet regime

The protest began outside the south Korean puppet embassy at 2.00 pm to condemn the joint American-puppet regime war-games that have heightened tension on the Korean peninsula and denounced the recent arrest of a number of pro-reunification patriots in south Korea.

KFA Chair Dermot Hudson said that a war was narrowly averted in Korea last week thanks to the patient and peace loving efforts of the DPR Korea. In order to avert war permanently US troops must be withdrawn from south Korea and there must be an end to exercises such as Ulji Freedom Guardian.

The picketers then moved on to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square at 4.00 pm to continue the protest and denounce the human rights violations by the US and its crimes against the Korean people.

...and Grosvenor Square

Comrades, including NCP leader Andy Brooks and Daphne Liddle and Theo Russell from the Central Committee, took part in the KFA demonstrations together with other supporters of Democratic Korea.

The UK Korean Friendship Association (KFA) organises solidarity meetings and protest pickets in London throughout the year. The KFA also works side by side with the Friends of Korea committee which also holds regular events in the capital.

Liberation Day in London

Hyong Hak Bong, Dermot Hudson and Andy Brooks

By New Worker correspondent

KOREA’S liberation day was marked in style last week by comrades and friends at a seminar in central London on Thursday 13th August. NCP leader Andy Brooks joined other Korean solidarity workers in stressing the importance of the Workers Party of Korea and great leader Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla army in ending 35 years of Japanese enslavement in August 1945.

Other speakers included Dermot Hudson, Theo Russell and David Munoz from the Korean Friendship Association that organised the evening meeting at the Cock Tavern in Euston to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Korea.

 The meeting was honoured by the presence of Hyong Hak Bong, the DPRK’s London Ambassador, who said that the liberation of Korea was the greatest gain of the Korean people and the greatest exploit achieved by the great leader President Kim Il Sung. And many in the audience took the golden opportunity to ask the Democratic Korean ambassador about the current situation and the DPRK’s nuclear deterrent during the discussion that followed.

After a round-table discussion the seminar formally concluded with the unanimous agreement to send a congratulatory message to Democratic Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But it continued informally during the party that followed to celebrate the anniversary of Korea's liberation.

The UK Korean Friendship Association (KFA) organises solidarity meetings and protest pickets in London throughout the year. The KFA also works side by side with the Friends of Korea committee which also holds regular events in the capital.

Echoes Down The Centuries

REVIEW

ECHOES DOWN THE CENTURIES by Kim Il Sung

By Dermot Hudson

PRESIDENT Kim Il Sung’s life spanned most of the 20^th century and he led the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for nearly 50 years. He was giant of the international communist movement and also an international statesman of great renown. During his life he met Stalin. Mao Zedong, Ché Guevara, Tito, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno as well as western politicians including former US president Jimmy Carter.

Che and Kim Il Sung

This well written and lively book provides a fascinating set of memories of these meetings. They take on an additional significance in the year of the 70^th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule and the 70^th anniversary of the foundation of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

This short book is not only informative about the life of  great leader President Kim Il Sung but also is full of information about the international policy of the Workers’ Party of Korea, which provides some valuable insights into the WPK’s relationship with the international communist movement and the other socialist countries.

As is known to many, the Workers’ Party of Korea, led by Kim Il Sung, not only maintained a policy of independence but consistently upheld the unity of the international communist movement. Even when the differences in the socialist camp reached an extreme point near to open armed conflict Kim Il Sung made sure that the DPRK maintained relations with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, meeting various Soviet leaders including Yuri Andropov as well as Mao Zedong and Zhou En Lai of People’s China.

with Mao Zedong

In 1975 Kim Il Sung met Mao Zedong for the last time as Mao died a year later. During the meeting Mao told the Korean communist leader that he hoped that Kim Il Sung would lead the international communist movement and world revolution after he passed away.

Although the DPRK maintained good relations with the USSR it maintained a position of independence and opposed the revisionist stance of the Soviet Union after 1956. This brought the DPRK into conflict with the revisionist Khruschov leadership as the DPRK was, as the book says, a strongly anti-imperialist, counter-revisionist nation with a staunch spirit of independence. The Soviet revisionists put all kinds of pressure on the DPRK and there were one or two open attacks on Democratic Korea in the Soviet media (though these were rare compared to those on China and Albania).

 One form of pressure was trying to push the DPRK into joining the Council For Mutual Economic Assistance, CMEA or Comecon as it was known in the west. The DPRK, believing in building an independent national economy under the banner of Juché and self-reliance, resisted this. Khrushchov not only urged the DPRK to join CMEA but even mobilised the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia to make the DPRK join CMEA. When this failed the Soviet leadership sent Yuri Andropov, who later became the leader of the USSR, to meet Kim Il Sung.

Syrian leader Hafez Al Assad in the DPRK

 Andropov used clever arguments for joining CMEA. President Kim Il Sung rebuttuted them all one by one. He also pointed out that a Soviet journalist had slandered the DPRK’s slogan of building an independent national economy and that this was bad manners. Andropov was forced to concede that it was and apologised.

 President Kim Il Sung put matters in the simplest form saying self-reliance means standing on your own feet. What’s wrong with our self-reliant stand?  Of course President Kim Il Sung was proved right by history.

Under the leadership of the Soviet revisionists the CMEA countries sank into stagnation and in the end the USSR collapsed and the CMEA countries were no more. It was a very wise decision of the DPRK not to join CMEA!

President Kim Il Sung met the great Latin American and Cuban revolutionary Major Ernesto Ché Guevara on the 2^nd December 1960. He told Ché that the DPRK and Cuba were comrades in the same trench and that he could ask for anything. Ché was very impressed with the internationalism of President Kim Il Sung. He was to write later that the DPRK was the socialist country he most admired. The profound and lofty internationalism of President Kim Il Sung greatly inspired Ché who dedicated himself to liberating Latin America from imperialist oppression and died a heroic death in Bolivia. Later on President Kim Il Sung wrote a work on the occasion of the 1^st anniversary of Ché’s death and the DPRK has a kindergarten named after Ché.

...and Marshal Tito

President Kim Il Sung was also the friend of Chilean Socialist leader Salvador Allende, whom he met in 1969. The following year Allende won the Chilean presidential election.

 Kim Il Sung later met a delegation from Allende’s Popular Unity coalition on the 23 February 1972 just 18 months before the Chilean coup. The book recounts how President Kim Il Sung advised the head of the Chilean delegation that the question of taking control of the army and police needed to be dealt with. Sadly, this advice was not heeded and on the 11^th September 1973 General Pinochet mounted a fascist coup on behalf of the US and murdered Allende.

Finally one anecdote that caught my eye was the one about Madagascan President Didier Ratsirika asking about how to solve unemployment. President Kim Il Sung replied that the DPRK had wiped unemployment out by about 1946.

All in all a very good book that provides a lively account of the DPRK’s diplomatic relations and work to further the international communist and world revolutionary movement.

It is available online on the Naenara website or can be ordered through the Korean Friendship Association.

Celebrating the liberation of Korea

Hyong Hak Bong, Michael Chant, Andy Brooks and John McLeod

 by New Worker correspondent

THE 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Korea was celebrated in style on Saturday 8th August at London’s historic Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green. Friends and comrades gathered to hear all the members of the Friends of Korea committee highlight the defeat of the Japanese Empire by the guerrilla army commanded by great leader Kim Il Sung and call on the United States to sign a peace treaty with Democratic Korea and end the conflict on the Korean peninsula once and for all.

This was followed by a report on the current situation from Ambassador Hyong Hak Bong from the London embassy of the DPR Korea and general discussion. The event ended with a Korean musical interval and the informal discussion over drinks that always follows amongst friends of the Korean revolution.

The Friends of Korea committee brings together all the major movements active in Korean friendship and solidarity work in Britain today. The committee includes the New Communist Party, Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (ML), Socialist Labour Party (SLP), Juché Idea Study Group and the UK Korean Friendship Association (KFA).

It is chaired by Andy Brooks. The secretary is Michael Chant and the committee includes Dermot Hudson of the KFA and John McLeod of the SLP. The committee organises meetings throughout the year, which are publicised by the supporting movements and on the Friends of Korea blog.

• DPRK’s Role in Maintaining Peace
  in East Asia against US Imperialist Hostility - See more at: http://www.rcpbml.org.uk/wwie-15/ww15-24.htm#fourth
   70th anniversary of VJ Day and the liberation of Korea (Workers Weekly)

Celebrating Korea’s victory over imperialism

By New Worker correspondent

FRIENDS and comrades marked the 62^nd anniversary of the Korean people’s victory in the Fatherland Liberation War in London on Saturday 18th July. The meeting, called by the Korean Friendship Association and the Juché Idea Study Group heard an opening from Dermot Hudson of the KFA and a report-back of a recent trip to the DPR Korea by Shaun Pickford.

Dermot Hudson said: "The Fatherland Liberation War referred to as the Korean War in the imperialist countries was provoked by the US imperialists on 25^th June 1950 and lasted three years. It was a most intense war, one of the fiercest wars of the 20th century. Indeed it was a third world war in miniature in which the two systems in the world, capitalism and socialism fought each other.

“The  US imperialists along with troops from 15 of their vassal states attempted to destroy the young Democratic People's Republic of Korea in its cradle, an obscene and barbarous war in which a big power and its minions tried to pulverise into submission a small country.”

 Dermot also spoke about the 21st anniversary of the demise of great leader President Kim Il Sung: "President Kim Il Sung was a great man, a great leader, a great philosopher who created the Juché Idea and authored the Songun idea.

“He wrote over 1,800 works,  and was the father of modern Korea, indeed Korea is the Kim Il Sung nation. He was respected as one of the outstanding leaders of the international communist and working class movement.”

Shaun Pickford said: “I was able to return to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after an interval of three years and saw immense improvements in the cultural and living standards of the Korean People. All the progress that is being realised in the DPRK, is based on socialist principles and self-reliance.

“The Supreme Leader of the DPRK, Marshal Kim Jong Un, is working continuously for the welfare of the Korean people and spares nothing for the well-being of the workers, farmers and intellectuals. Such a leader as Kim Jong Un, cannot be found elsewhere in the world, as the DPRK leader is always putting the people first in everything”.

The meeting also received a message from Cllr Damien Biggs, East of England regional party secretary and National Executive Committee member of the Socialist Labour Party.

A very lively discussion followed with questions and answers and concluded with the adoption of a solidarity message to DPRK leader Kim Jong Un.

US embassy picketed

 By New Worker correspondent

MEMBERS and supporters of the UK Korean Friendship Association held a very successful picket – numbers double previous turn-outs –of the United States embassy on Thursday 25th June to mark the start of the Month of Solidarity with the Korean people and the 65th anniversary of the start of provocation of the great Fatherland Liberation War.

It was supported by the Association of Supporters of Songun Policies UK (ASSPUK), the Juché International Study Group of England (JISGE) and the New Communist Party including general secretary Andy Brooks and Central Committee member Theo Russell.

Members of the RCPB (ML) and the CPGB (ML) were also present.

Dermot Hudson, who chairs the UK KFA and the JISGE made a short speech introducing the picket explaining it was part of the Month of Solidarity with the Korean people and it was to mark the 65th anniversary of the start of the Korean War (Fatherland Liberation War).

US troops still occupy south Korea today. Comrade Hudson said that at the same time KFA members in Ireland were also picketing the US embassy in Dublin.

 Dermot Hudson also said: "The US imperialists, the ringleader of the world imperialism and international reactionaries, provoked a war in Korea on the 25th of June 1950 by instigating their south Korean puppets to attack the young Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“The US imperialists were hungry for profits and conquest. The US imperialists fought an unjust aggressive war against the Korean people.

“The US imperialists launched a war of conquest against the DPRK, a war to destroy the Juché-based people's democratic system in the DPRK as well to destroy socialism in Asia and the world.

“The Korean people, led by the great revolutionary leader Marshal Kim Il Sung, a true military strategic genius and ever-victorious iron-willed and brilliant fought a fierce anti-imperialist and anti-US struggle against US imperialism and the allied forces of international reaction.

“It was a fierce class struggle against the enemies of the people. The Korean people fought a national liberation war against the Yankee imperialist invaders, a war of justice for independence and freedom and also a war to reunify the sacred motherland.

“The Fatherland Liberation War of the Korean people proved to a crucible of the Songun idea.

“We condemn the appalling barbarity of the US imperialists during the Fatherland Liberation War.

“We denounce their crimes of massacring civilians, use of biological and chemical weapons: 35,383 people were murdered by the US at Sinchon-ri and 1,050 people at Susan-ri (one third of the population of the area), just to give a few examples.

“The US imperialists tried to exterminate the Korean people by carrying out the war that they had long planned.

“History will curse forever the US imperialists as sub-human savages and criminals as well as an enemy of humanity and progress. Indeed US imperialism is the ringleader of aggression and war, as proved by the recent racial violence and oppression of black people.

“It is the US that is the biggest human rights violator in the world.

“The US imperialists continue to occupy south Korea to this very day, ignoring the will of the Korean people and the voices of world progressives. The US imperialists have committed crimes in south Korea too numerous to mention, but these include murder, rape and theft.

“They are exploiting the south Korean people by taking huge sums of money in so-called "upkeep expenses".

“The US imperialists have introduced anthrax into south Korea in order to commit genocide against the Korean nation. This is a horrendous crime. The US imperialists have also tried to stifle the DPRK using the ‘human rights’ issue and used the United Nations against the DPRK."

Andy Brooks, general secretary of the New Communist Party, thanked everyone for coming saying it was a very successful. He said that US had caused the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula by reneging on agreements with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The following slogans were shouted: “US out of Korea,” “Yankee go home,” “Korea is one,” “Long live the Workers' Party of Korea,” “Long live Marshal Kim Jong Un,” “Long live the worker’s paradise of the DPRK,” “Down with US imperialism,” “Down with the fascist American regime”.