Vol. 74/No. 22      June 7, 2010

The charge that North Korean armed forces torpedoed a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors, is the latest pretext for what has been decades of aggression by Washington against the people of Korea. It was Washington that imposed a partition between the north and south after World War II. It was Washington, under cover of the United Nations, that went to war against Korea in 1950 after working people in the north carried out a socialist revolution. When Washington was defeated in 1953, it refused to sign a peace treaty with North Korea. Washington maintains tens of thousands of troops in the south to this day.

The U.S. imperialists, along with their client regime in Seoul, have ceaselessly organized military provocations against North Korea. They have imposed economic sanctions against Pyongyang to deny the people access to food, fuel, and financing to develop their economy. They have claimed the right to board ships to and from North Korea to inspect their cargo. Washington justifies this aggression as necessary to stop the North Korean “nuclear threat.” But it is Washington that introduced nuclear arms and delivery systems on Korea’s soil and maintains them throughout the Pacific.

Washington’s war drive against Korea is of a piece with its stepped-up drone attacks on the people of Pakistan, its widening war in Afghanistan, and its intervention in Iraq.

These attacks on working people abroad are an extension of the capitalists’ domestic policy. In order to boost their rate of profit and compete with rivals internationally, the U.S. employers are slashing jobs, and compelling those still working to produce more under less safe conditions. They are driving down wages and cutting back on health care and pensions. The U.S. government, from the federal to the municipal level, is closing hospitals, shuttering schools, and throwing tens of thousands of public employees into the streets. At the same time the U.S. rulers are increasingly curtailing workers’ rights, from the right to remain silent when interrogated by the cops, to the right to organize unions, to the right to speak out against government policy.

Defending North Korea from imperialist aggression is part of opposing the employers’ war on workers at home and abroad. End the sanctions against North Korea! Sign the peace treaty! Withdraw U.S. troops, ships, and weapons—conventional and nuclear—from the Korean Peninsula!
 
 
Related articles:
Washington, Seoul threaten N. Korea
S. Korea gov’t imposes trade sanctions
White House lays out plans to strengthen nuclear threat
Okinawans rally to close U.S. military facilities
Washington pushes new sanctions against Iran  
 
 
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