What the North Koreans are up against

This is what the North Koreans are up against at the six-power talks that have been taking place in Beijing:

First, there is the belligerent Bush administration, which has made it very clear that if it got the chance it would crush the independent socialist state in Korea, which has resisted colonial and imperialist rule for over a century now, and reduce the country to a vassal in the name of “regime change.”

Bush made a big deal of adding the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to his short “axis of evil” list, in effect saying to the Koreans, “You’re next.” This was back in the days when he thought he was going to vaporize any resistance in Iraq and then move on to other conquests.

The latest tactic of the Bush administration is to bolster its relations with Japan, the colonial power that earned the undying hatred of the Korean people for over three decades of cruel oppression and exploitation.

What do the Koreans see when they sit down with the U.S. delegates and try to have a discussion about ending the Penta gon’s occupation of the Korean peninsula, removing the nuclear threat from the whole area, and signing a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which still has not been resolved more than 50 years after the 1953 cease-fire?

They see a country that is involved in two totally unjust wars right now, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of young soldiers—not to speak of the Iraqi and Afghan people—to achieve its economic and geopolitical goals of world domination.

They see a country that has most of the world’s nuclear weapons, and even dropped two on hundreds of thousands of civilians at the end of World War II, that is now drafting plans for modernizing and upgrading its nuclear arsenal, that refuses to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons—yet is telling the Koreans they had better not have any of their own weapons in self-defense.

They see right-wing ideologues who, like John Bolton, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN, don’t conceal their hatred and contempt for the rest of the world. In fact, Bolton even revels in it, as his now-dissected record makes clear. As for Korea, he personally insulted the leader of the country when he was there supposedly as a “diplomat.”

Under these conditions, one must admire the sagacity, self-restraint and patience of the North Koreans in even sitting down with representatives of the imperialist power that has tried for so long to either belittle or crush them.

Let us hope that their efforts are not wasted on political neocons who only know how to insult and threaten. All the Korean people—north and south—want the U.S. troops out and real peace in the area so their long-separated families can be reunited and cooperation can grow between the two halves of the country.

If maneuvering, threats and arrogance frustrate a positive outcome of these talks, the onus will be completely on the imperialist U.S.-Japan alliance.