Imperialist Saber Rattling Over Rocket Launch

Defend North Korea!

APRIL 7—As the leaders of the U.S. and West European imperialist powers gathered in France and Germany to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the anti-Communist NATO alliance, North Korea launched a rocket intended to put a satellite into orbit. The April 5 launch has been seized upon by the U.S. and Japanese imperialists to increase economic and military pressure against North Korea and raise a hue and cry over Pyongyang’s nuclear capability. An array of military might was ready to go into action in the waters between North Korea and Japan and in the skies off the North Korean coast. Two U.S. destroyers—the USS McCain and USS Chafee—equipped with Aegis technology intended to track and destroy missiles had left Sasebo port in southwestern Japan. For its part, the Japanese government sent its own Aegis-class destroyers and threatened to fire Patriot missiles supposedly targeting “debris” that might fall on Japan. South Korea also dispatched an Aegis-equipped destroyer off the east coast to monitor the launch.

Japanese prime minister Taro Aso denounced the launch as “an extremely provocative act,” while U.S. president Barack Obama, speaking in Prague, asserted, “North Korea broke the rules once again by testing a rocket that could be used for long range missiles.” He added, “Now is the time for a strong international response.” Both the U.S. and Japanese imperialists are calling for a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning North Korea.

As Trotskyists, we call for the unconditional military defense of the North Korean deformed workers state, as well as the deformed workers states of China, Cuba and Vietnam, against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. North Korea’s rocket launch has been hysterically characterized by most bourgeois commentators as the product of a bizarre, deranged and rogue dictatorship. But North Korea’s rocket launch is not only rational—its Taepodong-2 rocket could indeed be critical to making nuclear weapons deliverable, acting as a deterrent against U.S. imperialism’s unrelenting threats. For the defense of the workers state, a historic gain of the international working class, nuclear weapons are necessary.

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 actually carried out nuclear holocaust, incinerating some 200,000 Japanese people in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This slaughter was not only aimed at Japan, but, in fact, primarily intended as a threat against the Soviet Union, the world’s first workers state, born through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the only successful workers revolution to date. In his Prague speech, Obama arrogantly intoned, “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” I.e., the U.S. imperialist mass murderers have the “moral responsibility” to ride roughshod over any country that would stand up to them.

The U.S. capitalist rulers have tried to crush North Korea ever since capitalist/landlord rule was overthrown there under the protection of the Soviet Army following World War II. In their drive to “roll back” not only the social revolution in Korea but also the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the U.S. and its imperialist allies, under the aegis of the UN, devastated the Korean peninsula in the Korean War of 1950-53, killing some three million people. During this war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff deliberated about using nuclear bombs, and came close to it several times. The U.S. imperialists’ war drive was finally stopped by the heroic struggle of Korea’s workers and peasants, with the aid of a massive Chinese military intervention. But from 1957 to 1991, the U.S. kept a stockpile of nuclear weapons close to the Demilitarized Zone, designed to intimidate the then non-nuclear North. The Korean War ended with a cease-fire, but the U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty. There are still some 28,500 U.S. troops in capitalist South Korea alongside the South Korean military, dedicated to destroying North Korea. U.S. troops out of Korea now!

The defense of the North Korean and other deformed workers states against imperialism is undermined by the rule of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies, whose policies are encapsulated in the dogma of “building socialism in one country,” expressed as Juche (self-reliance) in North Korea. The Stalinists oppose the fight for international proletarian revolution and instead pursue the futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. A case in point is the Beijing bureaucracy’s treacherous partnership with the U.S., Japan and others in the attempt to disarm North Korea. In 2006, after Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test, China criminally voted for sanctions against North Korea in the UN Security Council as well as for the UN resolution banning all ballistic missile tests by the North Korean regime. While not condemning North Korea’s April 5 rocket launch, Beijing is pressuring Pyongyang into resuming the “six-party talks”—involving the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas—whose aim is none other than to disarm North Korea. Beijing’s craven appeasement of the imperialist drive against North Korea is particularly dangerous to China’s own defense.

Since the early 1990s, North Korea has suffered from widespread malnutrition, the absence of access to critical resources and the decay of its industry. This is the direct product of the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, which had been the North’s main economic partner. At the same time, Kim Jong Il’s nepotistic and mythologized regime heads a parasitic, Stalinist bureaucratic caste whose extreme nationalism and class-collaborationist politics undermine the defense of North Korea. In 2007, Pyongyang agreed to shut down its nuclear facilities in exchange for fuel aid and steps toward the normalization of relations with the United States and Japan, revealing their dangerous illusions that these imperialists can be appeased. The North Korean Stalinists have also long called for “peaceful reunification” with the South, which is a recipe for reunification on the basis of capitalist wage slavery.

What is desperately needed is the forging of a Leninist-Trotskyist party with a proletarian internationalist perspective to lead the struggle for the revolutionary reunification of Korea—for socialist revolution in the South and workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats in the North. The fight for revolutionary reunification must be linked to the struggle for proletarian political revolution in China and the extension of proletarian power to Japan, the industrial heartland of Asia, as well as to the U.S. imperialist colossus.