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	Workers Vanguard No. 960	4 June 2010

Defend North Korea Against U.S. Imperialism!

MAY 31—Seizing on the March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, off North Korea’s west coast, the Barack Obama administration and U.S. imperialism’s junior partners in Seoul have sharply escalated their threats and provocations against North Korea. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, touring Asian capitals, denounced the incident as an “unacceptable provocation” by the North. South Korea’s right-wing president, Lee Myung-bak, announced that his government is cutting off nearly all trade with North Korea and pressed for a United Nations Security Council resolution that could result in new sanctions. The U.S. and South Korea announced joint naval exercises, to be held in June, that would include training to intercept North Korean merchant ships accused of carrying “banned cargo.”

As Marxists, our attitude regarding this affair is determined not by claims of who was responsible for the sinking, the cause of which is shrouded in mystery, but by class considerations: Despite being saddled with a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, North Korea is a workers state based on the overthrow of capitalist rule. It is in the vital interest of the proletariat internationally to stand for the unconditional military defense of North Korea against the capitalist South, U.S. and Japanese imperialism, and also against internal capitalist counterrevolution. This includes defending North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons capacity.

The U.S. imperialists have tried to crush North Korea ever since capitalist/landlord rule was overthrown there following World War II. At that time, gigantic social upheavals swept the Korean peninsula, facilitated in the North by the presence of the Soviet Army. This resulted in freeing that part of the country from imperialist domination and establishing proletarian, collectivized property relations.

Under the aegis of the UN, the U.S. and its imperialist allies devastated the peninsula in the Korean War of 1950-53, killing some three million people in an effort to crush not only the social revolution in Korea but also the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Following a massive Chinese military intervention on the side of the North, the war ended in a stalemate at the 38th parallel. Ever since, U.S. imperialism has maintained a strong military presence in the South, helping to prop up a series of murderous military regimes for more than three decades. More recently, due to its economic development, South Korea has been able to modernize its own military, enabling the U.S. to reduce its forces. Nevertheless, some 26,000 U.S. troops remain stationed in South Korea as a dagger pointed at both the militant South Korean working class and the North Korean bureaucratically deformed workers state, whose very existence is a reminder to Washington of its failure to “roll back Communism” in East Asia. All U.S. troops out of Korea now!

Whatever actually happened on the night of March 26, it is clear that the “official” story stinks. After first downplaying North Korean involvement, and then claiming that the ship may have been sunk by a mine dating from the Korean War, U.S. and South Korean officials took nearly two months to issue their report (yet to be made public) claiming that a North Korean torpedo was responsible. When a member of the investigation team asserted that it appeared that the Cheonan’s sinking was an accident and that evidence allegedly implicating the North had been tampered with, prosecutors called him in for questioning and the Defense Ministry demanded that the National Assembly eject him from the investigation for “arousing public mistrust” (Bloomberg Businessweek, 29 May).

Meanwhile, as reported by the North Korean Central News Agency (28 May), a military spokesman for the Pyongyang regime denounced the incident as “a fabrication and charade orchestrated by the south Korean puppet authorities.” Indeed, South Korea’s “investigation” has about as much credibility as Washington’s declarations following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was fabricated in order to escalate the dirty U.S. war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. And who can forget the bogus U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” which served as the pretext for the U.S.-led 2003 invasion. But even if the North Korean navy did sink the Cheonan, it would have been an act of defense against repeated provocations by the U.S. and South Korea.

The location where the ship went down, slightly to the west of Baengnyeong Island, is in an area that for years has been a staging ground for South Korean provocations against the North. Less than ten miles from North Korea’s west coast, Baengnyeong Island is closer to North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, than any other portion of South Korean territory. The waters off the island were separated off from North Korea by the “Northern Limit Line,” a totally artificial “border” that was unilaterally drawn by the U.S. occupiers following the Korean War and never recognized by the North. That imperialist maneuver served its purpose. In 1999, a North Korean ship went down, with 20 sailors lost, after being hit by South Korean fire. In 2002, North Korea suffered at least 30 casualties from a firefight with Southern warships. And last November a North Korean patrol boat was heavily damaged, with at least one sailor killed, after South Korean vessels fired thousands of rounds of ammunition. Notably, the incident involving the Cheonan was preceded by military exercises involving some 26,000 U.S. and South Korean troops just south of these same waters.

Imperialist Japan, which carried out a particularly vicious 40-year colonial occupation of Korea that ended with Japan’s defeat in World War II, has fully backed the provocations against North Korea. Japanese media are replete with calls for joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea, as this would force the North to be in “constant preparation for war” and further devastate the economy. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the social-patriotic Japanese Communist Party (JCP) joined in the reactionary chorus, with the JCP denouncing North Korea’s “unlawful and violent military action” (Akahata, 22 May).

Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who had run for office promising that the U.S. military base in Okinawa would be removed, last week pointed to “the situation on the Korean peninsula” and the need for a “deterrent force” as reasons for agreeing to keep the U.S. base. That decision sparked a renewed uproar in Japan, where thousands have repeatedly protested against the U.S. presence in Okinawa, and impelled the SDP to leave the coalition government. As revolutionary opponents of U.S. imperialism, we demand the removal of all U.S. bases and troops from Japan, which constitute a particular threat to the North Korean and Chinese deformed workers states. The Spartacist League/U.S. joins with our comrades of the Spartacist Group Japan in proclaiming: Smash the counterrevolutionary alliance of U.S. and Japanese imperialism through workers revolution on both sides of the Pacific! Not a penny or a man for the bourgeois military!

The greatest menace to the workers and oppressed of the world is U.S. imperialism, whose rulers have not only acquired the means to destroy the world several times over but have carried out nuclear holocaust, incinerating some 200,000 Japanese people in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Obama’s recently released “Nuclear Posture Review” continues to target North Korea for a nuclear strike by labeling it a violator of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the face of such threats, it is not only rational but necessary for North Korea to continue its development of nuclear weapons and adequate delivery systems to deter imperialist attack.

The defense of the North Korean and other deformed workers states is undermined by the rule of their nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies, whose policies are encapsulated in the dogma of “building socialism in one country.” Opposing the fight for international proletarian revolution, the privileged bureaucracies instead pursue a futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. So far, despite intense pressure from the U.S., Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has refused to condemn North Korea for the sinking of the Cheonan. But in 2006 and again in 2009, the Chinese Stalinist regime criminally voted for sanctions against North Korea in the UN Security Council following missile tests by Pyongyang. The 2009 sanctions encouraged UN member states to inspect North Korean cargo vessels and airplanes “suspected” of transporting military materiel.

Likewise, Beijing has treacherously sought to pressure Pyongyang into resuming the “six-party talks”—involving the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas—aimed at disarming North Korea. Beijing’s craven appeasement of imperialism not only imperils North Korea but dangerously undermines the defense of China itself—the main target of the imperialists’ drive for capitalist counterrevolution.

The extreme nationalism of Kim Jong Il’s nepotistic regime similarly undercuts North Korea’s defense. The Pyongyang Stalinists have long called for “peaceful reunification” with the South—a recipe for reunification of Korea on a capitalist basis. Many South Koreans feel a sense of solidarity with the North based on strong nationalist sentiments fed by a century of Japanese and American imperialist overlordship. Indeed, it is reported that a quarter of the population does not believe Seoul’s line on the Cheonan. But Korea is divided along class lines. Korean nationalism, promoted by both the North Korean bureaucracy and the South Korean left, serves to tie the powerful and combative South Korean proletariat to its own ruling class. We fight for the revolutionary reunification of Korea, through socialist revolution in the South and workers political revolution in the North.

The defense of China and North Korea, as well as the Vietnamese and Cuban deformed workers states, is inseparable from the fight for socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist societies, importantly for Asia in the industrial powerhouse of Japan, and in the belly of the U.S. imperialist beast. The International Communist League dedicates itself to forging the proletarian vanguard parties needed to carry out this task.