Vol. 81/No. 35 September 25, 2017
SWP: US out of Korea! For a Pacific free of
nuclear weapons!
On Sept. 8 Steve Clark sent a message of solidarity to the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists reprinted here. The party pledged to continue its decadeslong fight against Washington’s threats and attacks against the DPRK and for reunification of Korea and a Korean Peninsula, Pacific and Asia free of nuclear weapons. On Sept. 11 Washington backed off of the harshest sanctions referred to in the message, winning UN Security Council approval for a less severe resolution.
The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the 69th anniversary of the 1948 founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We pledge our unconditional solidarity with the Korean people’s struggle to reunify their country, partitioned by Washington in 1945. The US government then waged a murderous and losing war against the DPRK from 1950 to 1953, and sixty-four years later still refuses to withdraw its troops and weaponry, sit down for talks, and sign a peace treaty.
We condemn Washington’s plan to press the UN Security Council to stiffen trade and banking sanctions against the people of the DPRK, as well as the US government’s executive order prohibiting US citizens from visiting North Korea after September 1.
The tightened sanctions are set to include a ban on shipments of crude and refined petroleum and natural gas, and to authorize the US and other governments to commit piracy on the high seas by interdicting North Korean ships and taking “all necessary measures” to block the import of weapons or fuel. We join with Koreans on both side of the 38th parallel in opposing this month’s expansion by Washington and Seoul of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system and high-powered radar in South Korea.
The importance of the DPRK’s long-standing call for a nuclear-free Pacific has been underlined in recent weeks by the decision of the US and South Korean regimes to go ahead in August with the yearly provocative Ulchi Freedom Guardian war games; by their September 4 live-fire bombing drills over the Korean Peninsula; and by threatening language coming from the White House and Pentagon. The hypocrisy of Washington’s scaremongering about a nuclear Pyongyang is placed in stark relief by the fact that US imperialism itself deploys the earth’s largest and most deadly nuclear arsenal in the Pacific, including 60 percent of the US Navy’s sixty-nine nuclear-armed submarines.
Working people the world over aspire to an earth that’s free of these and other weapons of mass destruction. Such a world would open the most favorable conditions for struggles by workers and farmers against the ever-growing carnage produced by capital’s global system of exploitation and oppression — from Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Turkey; to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India; to factories, mines, and fields in the United States and other imperialist countries.
As members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party talk with workers at their doorsteps, workplaces, and union gatherings to discuss a working-class course in response to today’s deepening capitalist political and social crisis, we speak out against Washington’s ongoing wars and demand an end to US sanctions and embargos against the DPRK, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.
On this anniversary of the DPRK, the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists join with others across the world to demand: US troops, ships, planes, and THAAD missile and radar systems out of Korea! For a Korean Peninsula and Pacific and Asia free of nuclear weapons!
Korea is one!
Comradely,
Steve Clark
for the National Committee
Socialist Workers Party
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