The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists join the Korean people in celebrating the 55th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). We reaffirm our solidarity with the struggle of Koreans worldwide for national sovereignty and our commitment to join them in forcing U.S. military forces out of Korea, including from Korea’s territorial waters and airspace, and reunifying the country.

The founding of the DPRK in 1948 was the fruit of decades-long struggles by Korean workers and peasants against Japanese colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and local exploiters in the factories, mines, and on the land. Fewer than two years later, Washington—which organized the partition of Korea at the close of World War II—carried out a massive invasion and air assault aimed at destroying the DPRK and reestablishing imperialist domination over the entire peninsula. By their resistance between 1950 and 1953, the Korean people dealt U.S. imperialism its first-ever military defeat, opening the way for the workers and peasants of Vietnam and Cuba to score such triumphs in the decades to come.

For more than half a century, the working people of Korea, arms in hand, have defended their sovereignty and pressed forward toward national reunification. They have held firm in the face of U.S. imperialism’s economic embargo, nonstop slanders against the DPRK, and ongoing military threats and provocative “exercises” involving the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in the south. Over that same period, students and working people in the south have fought bloody battles to win union rights; to defend their ability to engage in politics and to hold, discuss, and proclaim any views, including communist ones; and to mobilize massively in the fight to reunify Korea.

The U.S. government continues to step up harassment against the DPRK on economic, military, “special operations,” and diplomatic fronts. Having recently completed the annual Ulji Focus Lens war maneuvers with south Korean forces, Washington—together with Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, and other governments —is beginning new naval exercises in openly declared preparation to carry out piracy on the high seas against ships deemed to be carrying “weapons of mass destruction.” U.S. officials repeatedly state that north Korea and Iran are primary targets of such trial runs.

At the same time, Washington used the five-party talks in Beijing last month—without the U.S. government beginning the dismantling of its worldwide offensive nuclear armada, which hangs over the entire world like a sword of terror—to demand that the DPRK unilaterally cease its development of any nuclear defense or even nuclear power development. The U.S. rulers, who have used nuclear weapons against the Korean and Japanese people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, issue the hypocritical call for “a nuclear-free peninsula” while arrogantly maintaining their half-century-long refusal to sign a peace treaty with the DPRK or to offer even a single guarantee against military aggression. At the same time, the imperialist government in Japan has announced plans to build a U.S.-designed “missile-defense shield” over the next several years—another step toward advancing the more and more openly discussed nuclear ambitions of Tokyo’s so-called “Self-Defense Forces.”

Over the next several weeks, socialist workers and youth in the United States have a special opportunity to explain our opposition to the imperialist war drive and expose Washington’s lies before a wider-than-usual audience. Joel Britton, the Socialist Workers candidate for governor of California, an election that has become the focus of worldwide interest, is telling the truth about the so-called Korean nuclear crisis—a “crisis” concocted in Washington and Tokyo—and calling on the labor movement, farmers organizations, and all popular movements to extend unqualified and unconditional solidarity to the Korean people.

As part of advocating an action program to defend toilers in the U.S. in the face of the imperialist march to economic depression and more and bloodier wars, Young Socialists for Britton and other supporters of the Socialist Workers campaign are demanding: No to all imperialist military provocations and threats! End the economic embargo! Normalize diplomatic relations with the DPRK! All U.S. troops, air, and naval forces out of Korea!
 
 
Related article:
Beijing joins Washington in six-party talks to press north Korea to drop nuclear defense  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home