WW COMMENTARY

Why People’s Korea should be defended

By Stephen Millies

Is there another country more demonized by the U.S. government and corporate media than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as north Korea?

The 1% need to lie about oppressed countries and peoples to justify wars and massacres.

The lies told about John Africa and the MOVE organization paved the way for the May 13, 1985, holocaust in Philadelphia. Five children and six adults were killed after Philadelphia police — helped by the Pentagon and FBI — dropped a bomb on the MOVE house.

The only adult survivor, Ramona Africa, was then sent to prison for seven years.

From 1950 to 1953, all of Korea was turned into a MOVE house by the Pentagon. At least 3 million Koreans were killed. Hundreds of thousands were burned alive by napalm. The 400,000 people in north Korea’s capital of Pyongyang had 420,000 bombs dropped on them.

South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that south Korean puppet Syngman Rhee executed 100,000 to 200,000 political prisoners.

Despite these massacres, the U.S. war machine wasn’t able to conquer the DPRK. Chinese volunteers fought beside their Korean sisters and brothers. Among the Chinese soldiers who gave their lives for Korea was Mao Anying, a son of Mao Zedong.

Wall Street continues to occupy south Korea and targets north Korea with nuclear weapons.

The U.S. Army’s Yongsan Garrison occupies 620 acres in the middle of Seoul, south Korea. It’s as if a foreign army occupied Central Park in New York City. What sort of independence is that?

146 years of U.S. aggression against Korea

The capitalist media won’t tell you that the heavily armed U.S. merchant ship “General Sherman” tried attacking Pyongyang in 1866. The invaders were thrown back.

Ulysses S. Grant, whose troops won the U.S. Civil War, capitulated to the defeated Southern slavocracy after he became president, refusing to give land to formerly enslaved people who had tilled it for generations. Yet he sent warships to Korea in 1871, trying to open it up to U.S. markets. More than 200 Korean soldiers were killed defending their country.

This U.S. invasion helped open the door for Japanese aggression against Korea in 1876. In 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt practically gave Korea to Japan in the peace treaty he brokered between the Russian czar and Japanese emperor.

At least a quarter of the human beings incinerated by the U.S. in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were Korean slave laborers. The same U.S. military-industrial complex that dropped these atom bombs refused to drop any bombs on the German railroads that the Nazis used to transport millions to their deaths in Auschwitz.

Socialists should defend the oppressed

The history of the Korean people fighting back should be known and spread widely by socialists. But very little of that appears in a long article called “Socialism in one dynasty,” by David Whitehouse, recently published by the International Socialist Organization in their newspaper, the Socialist Worker.

Instead, Whitehouse attacks People’s Korea, using gossip and phrases lifted from the capitalist media. He also complains that in the DPRK, “the state has to provide health care, education and housing, because there are no institutions outside the state. …” (socialistworker.org, Jan. 12)

This sounds like Ron Paul or the Tea Party attacking Medicare and Social Security. Millions of poor people and unemployed workers would love it if they were provided by the government with jobs, health care, education and housing instead of being fired and evicted by the capitalists.

One of the article’s sources is Atlantic magazine, which was a big cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Michael Kelly, the Atlantic’s editor, was killed while participating in the assault.

The Whitehouse article attacks WWP, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Party for Socialism and Liberation for defending the DPRK. He calls it “satire” that WWP sent condolences to the Workers’ Party of Korea upon the recent death of its leader, Kim Jong Il.

As communists in the belly of the imperialist beast, Workers World Party respects all leaders of people fighting the U.S. empire.

Mocking oppressed people and their leaders is nothing new. John Africa, Marcus Garvey and Kim Jong Il were all ridiculed by the capitalist media. It should be ABC that socialists shouldn’t repeat the slanders of the 1%.

Korea and Cuba, two revolutionary beacons

Korea has a rich revolutionary history. Two million Koreans joined the March 1, 1919, movement for independence from Japanese rule. More than 7,000 were killed.

The Korean people launched an armed struggle for freedom. The most famous guerrilla commander was communist leader Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of north Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong Un. After Che Guevara toured the world in 1960, he said that the most remarkable person he met was Kim Il Sung.

But you won’t find any pictures of Che Guevara in the Socialist Worker newspaper. Cuba, like People’s Korea, isn’t considered to be socialist by this grouping. In fact, there isn’t any country that had a socialist revolution that’s considered socialist by the ISO.

The group supported the Libyan “rebels” who lynched Black people while serving as front men for the U.S./NATO invasion of the African country.

Leningrad, the cradle of the Russian Revolution, endured a 900-day siege during World War II. At least 1 million people died there of starvation and disease. But Leningrad never surrendered to the German imperialists.

The DPRK has been besieged for decades. Great hardships have been endured since the Soviet Union was overthrown in 1991. The U.S. was able to cut off much of the north’s foreign trade, including oil supplies. But Koreans, like the people of Leningrad, will never surrender.

In a besieged fortress, unity is essential. The Workers’ Party of Korea won’t allow imperialists to split their country. That is why the DPRK should be congratulated for its swift action in naming Kim Jong Un to succeed Kim Jong Il as the leader.

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