Nothing could be a more hypocritical or more self-serving coverup of the U.S. government's aggressive aims in Korea.

Of course, this is the primary function of the Nobel Peace Prize. With a few notable exceptions, it has been awarded to representatives of brutal capitalist governments--from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Menachem Begin of Israel and F.W. de Klerk of South Africa--and apologists for the "peaceful" maintenance of imperialist domination. Kim's prize is par for the course.

The Nobel committee added a twist by awarding the peace prize to the president of south Korea but not to the president of north Korea, Kim Jong Il, both of whom met in June and agreed on steps toward closer economic cooperation and eventual reunification.

Kim Dae Jung is Washington's man in south Korea. Since his election in 1997, his job has been to keep working people there in check and to defend the interests of south Korean capitalists as well as those of his mentors in Washington and Wall Street. He serves this role effectively by playing on his credentials as a former political prisoner of the previous U.S.-backed military dictatorship there. While talking about human rights and democracy, Kim's regime has unleashed baton-wielding cops against auto workers and others protesting mass layoffs and other austerity measures demanded by imperialist bankers.

As for Clinton, far from contributing to peace, his eight-year record is that of a war president.

In a message addressed to Kim Jong Il on the occasion of the founding of the Workers Party of Korea, a national holiday of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), U.S. Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes explained that under Clinton's administration, Washington has "restated its intention to keep tens of thousands of U.S. troops on Korean soil. It continues to conduct military exercises on Korean territory, in defiance of protests such as those by the peasants of Maehyang Ri. And the Clinton administration, with bipartisan backing, continues its drive to establish a National Missile Defense system, rationalized on the basis of the lie that there is a 'real and growing threat from Iraq and North Korea.' The truth is that the U.S. rulers are driving to establish a nuclear first-strike capacity for the first time in the nuclear age."

It's the U.S. government that, through its brutal war against the Korean people in 1950-53, partitioned the nation and continues to enforce its division despite overwhelming support among the Korean people for reunification.

In his letter to the president of the DPRK, Barnes saluted "the decades-long resistance of the Korean people to the heinous assaults of U.S. and Japanese imperialism and this people's determination to continue to fight for the reunification of your country. We welcome the fact that over the past year the working people of north Korea have begun to emerge from the worst effects of a half decade of flooding and other natural disasters, exacerbated by Washington's relentless economic sanctions and brutal use of the food weapon. These are among the factors that have forced the government in south Korea this year to sit down with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for historic talks."

Working people in the United States have a particular responsibility to point to Washington as the source of war threats, including nuclear war, and brutalization of working people in Korea. We should demand the withdrawal of all U.S. troops and weapons from Korea, the immediate normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between Washington and Pyongyang, and unconditional and massive food aid for north Korea.  
 
 
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