Below is a Feb. 15 letter from Steve Clark, on behalf of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, to the people of Korea on the occasion of their Feb. 16 national holiday.
The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the occasion of this February 16 national holiday of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We reaffirm our commitment to the Korean people’s fight to reunify their country and to end the partition that Washington, with Moscow’s complicity, imposed at the end of World War II and has maintained ever since at the cost of millions of Korean lives.
We welcome the DPRK’s recent proposals for joint North-South Korean participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, which was then followed by Washington’s and Seoul’s decision to postpone annual joint military maneuvers and war games. Those provocative and threatening “exercises” must now be ended once and for all. The US government must withdraw all troops and armaments from Korea’s soil, skies, and waters, including the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile batteries and espionage station deployed by the Donald Trump and Barack Obama administrations. In face of Washington’s massive and deadly submarine, naval, air, and ground-based ballistic missile systems across Asia and the world, we renew our call for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and Pacific.
We demand that the US imperialist rulers unconditionally sit down with the DPRK for talks and at long last, after almost sixty-five years, sign a peace treaty ending the barbaric and failed war it waged against the Korean people from 1950 to 1953. As Washington affirms today that its “maximum pressure campaign is going to continue and intensify” to punish the people and government of the DPRK, we demand an end to ever-tightening US and US-initiated “UN” economic, financial, and political sanctions — all of them, now!
In the United States and across much of the world, a political awakening is under way among tens of millions of working people whose lives have been devastated by the consequences of capitalism’s deepening economic and political crisis — and by Washington’s ongoing military operations and wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and beyond. Vanguard workers are seeking to increase solidarity and overcome capitalist-fueled competition and divisions by defending and strengthening our trade unions, demanding amnesty for immigrant workers, combating racial discrimination and cop brutality, and demanding dignity and an end to second-class treatment for women.
As socialist workers and youth talk with fellow workers on their doorsteps and elsewhere across the United States, we explain that it is this resistance and openness to discuss a working-class course — not entrapment in capitalist politics dominated by the Democratic and Republican parties (and its growing pornographication and rationalization of unleashing federal police power and prerogatives) — that offers a way forward for working people.
It is among workers and farmers such as these that growing support can be won for the demands the Socialist Workers Party — on this DPRK national holiday — is determined to fight for until they are won: End all economic and banking sanctions against the DPRK. US troops, ships, planes, and THAAD missiles and radar systems out of Korea. For a Korean Peninsula and Pacific Ocean free of nuclear weapons.
Korea is one!