The following message was sent to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by Steve Clark, writing on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists April 13.
The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send greetings on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s April 15 national holiday. We stand in solidarity with the seventy-three-year-long struggle to reunify Korea, which Washington partitioned after World War II as it drowned popular uprisings of Korean working people in blood.
We welcome recent steps that have opened the road to agreement by Seoul, Beijing, and Washington to sit down at the table with the DPRK for talks. We demand that Washington, after almost sixty-five years, sign a peace treaty ending the murderous war the US imperialist rulers inflicted on the Korean people from 1950 to 1953.
We demand an immediate and unconditional end to US-initiated economic and financial sanctions against the DPRK. We call on Washington to withdraw all US troops and weapons from Korea. And to end, once and for all, the annual Foal Eagle/Key Resolve joint US- South Korean military maneuvers, which are taking place again this very month.
On top of these direct violations of Korea’s sovereignty, the US government has far and away the largest “strategic arsenal” in Asia, deploying 60 percent of the navy’s sixty-nine submarines, equipped with both conventional and nuclear missiles. The stakes have never been higher in ensuring a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and Japan, including an end to Washington’s nuclear “umbrella” and deployment of nuclear-armed warships and submarines in the surrounding seas and skies.
Rising struggles by teachers and school workers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and elsewhere across the United States — supported by other workers, unionists, and students — are among the signs of a political awakening among working people whose lives and livelihoods have been ravaged by world capitalism’s economic and political crisis. It is working-class and farm families in the US, too, who are hit hardest by deaths, injuries, and ruined futures as cannon fodder for Washington’s brutal military actions and wars against fellow working people in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
As Socialist Workers Party members and Young Socialists fight alongside other workers and trade unionists; as we campaign on their doorsteps and porches; as we join protests demanding “Amnesty Now! Stop the Deportations!” demonstrations against cop brutality and killings, and protests in defense of women’s rights — we explain that assaults on working people at home are inflicted by the same wealthy families who plan and benefit from Washington’s reactionary foreign and military policies against our sisters and brothers the world over.
It is among workers and farmers like these that the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists explain why all of us must raise our voices to demand: End all economic and banking sanctions against the DPRK by Washington and every government in the world! US troops, ships, planes, and missile and radar systems out of Korea! For a Korean Peninsula, Japan, and surrounding skies and waters free of nuclear weapons!
On this DPRK national holiday, we join the courageous and embattled Korean people in affirming:
Korea is one!