Vol. 71/No. 9      March 5, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the occasion of your February 16 national holiday. We reaffirm our commitment here in the United States to stand alongside working people and youth on both sides of the 38th parallel for a unified Korea free of Washington's troops and weapons. We campaign in solidarity with the Korean people and others the world over to demand an immediate end—with no conditions—to all threats and sanctions by Washington, Tokyo, and their allies against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. We condemn the imperialists' cynical manipulation of needed food and fuel as diplomatic bargaining chips.

To this day, the U.S. government refuses to end the state of war against the DPRK it has kept in place since 1953—more than half a century!—when Washington was forced to accept the armistice which registered the defeat of its murderous efforts to dominate the entire Korean peninsula. The U.S. rulers maintain some 30,000 troops on Korean soil as well as nuclear-armed warships and submarines in the surrounding waters. Washington has not only blocked U.S. banks from doing business with the DPRK's foreign banking partners, but has successfully pressured other governments, especially those in Asia, to follow suit. Under the so-called Proliferation Security Initiative, Washington, Paris, Tokyo, and their allies have declared their "right" to carry out acts of piracy against north Korean ships, intercepting and boarding those they accuse of carrying "suspect" cargo. And the U.S. government is increasing military cooperation with Tokyo on "anti-missile systems" and moving to increase its "interoperability" with imperialist armed forces in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and across Europe.

The United States government, with backing from its "coalition of the willing," is carrying out the largest escalation of the war in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. In addition to deploying tens of thousands more troops in Iraq, the imperialist powers are sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, building up their joint naval armada of aircraft carriers and other warships in the Arab-Persian Gulf, raining bombs on Somalia, intervening militarily in the Philippines, and bolstering their military forces in other theaters of their "global war on terrorism." As Washington, Tokyo, Canberra, London, Paris, Ottawa, and their brethren jointly conduct wars—simultaneously stepping up their own rivalry over shares of world resources and markets—they destabilize the global order the imperialist victors themselves imposed coming out of World War II. And they incite internecine bloodletting and the fragmentation of nations and peoples the world over.

Washington's wars abroad are of a piece with their war against the rights and the living and job conditions of working people at home. But the employers' unceasing pressure on wages, job safety, social security, and trade-union rights is generating consequences the bipartisan bandits never foresaw. As the working class resists these assaults, the political stakes are posed more sharply. For example, the response of working people throughout the upper Midwest to large-scale immigration raids at meatpacking plants late last year—refusing to be cowed, looking for ways to fight back, turning for defense to the unions and to coworkers—bolsters the confidence and prospects for increasing unity in action of the working class and its allies in mutual defense.

In this process, the struggles of working people in the United States are strengthened by the Korean working people's unflinching fight to reunify your country some five decades after its forcible partition by Washington. On the occasion of your national holiday, the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists reiterate our demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops and conventional and nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula and surrounding waters. We support the DPRK's call for the denuclearization of Korea. We demand that Washington normalize relations and unfreeze north Korean assets abroad. Now! No strings attached!

And we add our voices to working people the world over in declaring: Korea will be one!
 
 
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