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Vol. 74/No. 8      March 1, 2010

 
Socialists pledge support
for Korea reunification
 
The following is an excerpt from the message sent February 16 to Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers Party of Korea, by Steve Clark, on behalf of the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, and Ben Joyce, on behalf of the Young Socialists.

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the occasion of your February 16 national holiday. We reaffirm our solidarity with the Korean people’s intransigent fight to safeguard national sovereignty and achieve reunification. We salute the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s demand that the U.S. government begin immediate talks leading to a peace treaty to end the Korean War—a step that U.S. administrations of both imperialist parties have refused to take since the defeat in 1953 of Washington’s murderous war to politically and militarily dominate the entire peninsula.

Just a few days ago, the U.S. Department of Defense released its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, reaffirming that the DPRK and Korean people remain in Washington’s gun sight. U.S. military commanders announced this month that their troops in Afghanistan—on course to reach some 100,000 by this summer—are on the verge of launching the largest-ever offensive in that more-than-eight-year-long war. And while as recently as mid-2009 Washington rammed resolutions through the United Nations Security Council tightening sanctions against the DPRK for carrying out defensive ballistic missile tests, U.S. military officials—with typical imperial hypocrisy—announced in late January that the U.S. rulers are stepping up sales of anti-ballistic missiles to the royal houses in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Oman, while increasing the Pentagon’s own deployment of Aegis-missile-equipped warships in the Arab-Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, despite crowing by imperialist politicians and the press about a “recovery” from capitalism’s deep global economic and financial crisis, unemployment continues to climb, new and bigger debt crises stalk the capitalist world, and the expansion of productive plant and equipment remains stagnant. To counter declining profit rates, the capitalists are wielding protectionist measures against each other and against the semicolonial world, escalating nationalist measures and demagogy targeting immigrants, and increasing assaults on the living standards, social wage, unions, and political rights of working people at home and abroad.

As these attacks intensify and spread, they will meet resistance and organization by workers and farmers in the United States and worldwide. The receptivity today among vanguard layers of working people and youth to communist literature indicates that growing numbers can and will recognize the pressing need to build proletarian parties and a revolutionary social movement capable of taking state power—the power to govern, the power to make war—out of the hands of the capitalist ruling families. It is among workers and youth such as these that the Korean people will find allies in the struggle against imperialist oppression.  
 
 
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