The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 74/No. 46      December 6, 2010

 
U.S. hands off North Korea!
(editorial)
 
Working people the world over shouldn’t be taken in by the big-business media’s portrayal of Pyongyang as the aggressor in the recent exchange of fire between North and South Korean forces. U.S. imperialism is to blame for the instability on the peninsula and in the broader region. It’s Washington’s policies that pose a constant threat to the people of Korea.

The U.S. imperialists, along with their client regime in Seoul, have ceaselessly organized provocations against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The November 23 artillery fire by the North Korean military took place as 70,000 South Korean troops, under U.S. command, were conducting massive military maneuvers simulating an invasion of the North from an island 10 miles off the North Korean coast.

The imperialist call for worldwide condemnation of North Korea is the latest in what has been decades of military and economic aggression by Washington against the Korean people. It was Washington that imposed a partition between the north and the south after World War II. It was Washington, under UN cover, which went to war against Korea in 1950 after working people in the north carried out a socialist revolution.

Washington has callously denied the North Korean people normal access to food, fuel, and financing to develop their economy.

The Obama administration demands governments throughout the world punish North Korea for its nuclear program, while the U.S. government maintains the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, including weapons deployed in the northwest Pacific.

Washington’s military and economic provocations against Korea are of a piece with its stepped-up war in Afghanistan and attacks on the people of Pakistan. They are also of a piece with the attacks on workers’ standard of living in the United States that are intensifying as the bosses try to shore up their profits amid a crisis-ridden capitalist system.

Working people should demand an end to all sanctions against the Korean people and withdrawal of all U.S. troops, ships, and weapons—conventional and nuclear—from the Korean Peninsula and the Pacific. We should extend solidarity to the decades-long fight of the Korean people for reunification.
 
 
Related articles:
S. Korean military provokes Pyongyang  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home