February 15, 2005

Kim Jong Il
General Secretary Workers’ Party of Korea
Pyongyang,
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il,

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the occasion of the February 16 national celebration in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We take advantage of this occasion to reassert our steadfast solidarity with the Korean people’s continuing efforts to win national sovereignty and reunification amid unrelenting military threats and efforts by U.S., Japanese, and other imperialist governments to tighten the financial and economic squeeze against the DPRK and commit acts of piracy against its vessels in ports and on the seas the world over. Just this week the big business press boasted of Tokyo’s new measures that would effectively bar DPRK flagships from its ports.

The U.S. capitalist rulers will never forget and have never forgiven the Korean people for dealing them their first ever military defeat, just over half a century ago—an historic event celebrated, along with other such victories by the toilers, by revolutionaries and oppressed people the world over.

Washington’s demands on the DPRK, Iran, and other semicolonial countries to abandon nuclear enrichment programs needed to produce electrical power reek of imperial arrogance. A majority of the world’s working people have no access to modern forms of fuel or electricity. This fact alone illustrates the vast disparity today in social and cultural conditions created and reproduced by the social relations of capitalism. We defend efforts by the DPRK and governments of other oppressed nations in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas to bridge this gap, one that keeps growing, by extending access to electricity to billions who live without it. Such advances strengthen the capacity of the toilers to organize and advance politically. And the development and use of nuclear technology is necessary to make this possible.

We unconditionally support the right of semicolonial nations threatened by imperialism to arm and defend themselves by whatever means necessary and effective. Here too, imperialism shows enormous hypocrisy. America’s propertied rulers—whose government is the only one ever to use nuclear weapons, against the Japanese and Korean residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—press full steam ahead in their efforts to achieve nuclear first-strike capacity, including the initial deployment last year (in collaboration with Tokyo) of a land- and sea-based antiballistic missile weapons system. At the same time, U.S. finance capital is escalating its belligerent demands that north Korea dismantle its nuclear program.

This summer, the Young Socialists, along with thousands of young people from organizations around the world, will attend the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students in Caracas, Venezuela. The gathering will be a chance for young people opposed to imperialism to advance support worldwide for ongoing struggles of workers resisting the bosses’ assaults, of peasants and farmers fighting for land, of oppressed peoples fighting for national liberation, of women and their supporters fighting for emancipation. Speaking on behalf of millions the world over, they will demand an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, Afghanistan, the Korean peninsula and its waters, and wherever else they are trampling on national sovereignty, as well as Washington’s threats against the peoples of Venezuela, Iran, the DPRK, and elsewhere.

Among these demands, support for the Korean people’s just call for reunification, sovereignty, and dignity will be advanced unconditionally by members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, Young Socialists, and many others not only in Caracas but the world over.

Fraternally,

s/Jack Barnes
Jack Barnes
National Secretary
Socialist Workers Party

s/Olympia S Newton
Olympia Newton
Young Socialists  
 
 
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