United States pounding war drums against North Korea
The U.S. ruling class is escalating its attacks on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the government of the northern part of Korea, with a repugnant stream of distortions and lies designed to whip up white nationalist furor among the general Euro-American population against the people of Korea.
The United Nations, that tried and true instrument of U.S. imperialism, has released a vile “investigation” indicting the Korean government of “human rights violations” and laying a case for imperialist invasion of Korea.
This is the same UN that provided a legal cover for the NATO bombing of the Libyan Jamahiriya, another ‘human rights violator’, in 2011, in a U.S.-led military holocaust against the people of Libya that culminated in the brutal rape and lynching of Muammar Gadaffi.
Steadily pounding the drums of warfare, the U.S. imperialist media over the past several months has even set its crosshairs on African celebrity athlete Dennis Rodman who visited the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and extended his friendship to Kim Jong Un and the Korean people.
Rodman was met with a barrage of slander and criticism, including from neocolonial basketball player turned Golden Beach police officer, Shaquille O’Neill.
U.S. imperialism is the source of every contradiction in Korea
The bourgeois media depict North Korea as a ruthless dynasty under which the masses of the people suffer in starvation and poverty, “brainwashed” by the North Korean regime to “worship” their leader, Kim Jong Un.
A response to this absurd and offensive lie must begin with a look at the history of the Korean nation itself.
The use of the term "North Korea” obscures the reality of what is going on in Korea. There is no "North Korean" nation that is distinct and contrary to the "South Korean" nation.
There is ONE Korean nation. What is known as "North Korea" is simply half of Korea that is not controlled by U.S. imperialism.
Conversely, what is known as "South Korea" is the half of Korea that is under neocolonial domination by the U.S.
Any contradiction faced by the people of north Korea must be understood in this context. When the bourgeois media puts out statistics from the DPRK detailing the poverty, hunger and destitution faced by some of the people there, they fail to mention that what we are looking at is a people who are only in possession of HALF of their land and resources! U.S. imperialism is the source of EVERY contradiction faced by the people of north and south Korea.
This split between the north and south has its origins in the Second Imperialist War.
Imperialism always takes it upon itself to carve up the nations of the world into untenable microstates whose false colonially imposed borders serve the specific geopolitical interests of the imperialists.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela has said, the Second Imperialist War – or what bourgeois historians call "World War II" – was nothing but a war between bandits, a war by contending factions of imperialism to re-divide their stolen territory.
In the Pacific this manifest itself in a struggle between the U.S. and Japan for control of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. had seized control of the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and Samoa, and was eyeing the Korean peninsula with bloodlust.
From 1910 to 1945 the Japanese government established colonial rule over Korea. The Japanese colonizers were driven out by the heroic Korean resistance, led by the charismatic and fearless Kim il-Sung.
During the time of Japan's reign in Korea, Japan used means of sheer terror and violence to extract the resources and slave labor of the Korean population, with help from sell-out Korean landowners and industrialists.
In the wake of Japan's defeat in Korea, the U.S. and the Soviet Union both invaded Korea. On August 10, 1945 the U.S. military divided Korea in half into two occupation zones, divided along the 38th parallel. The U.S. intended to control the capital, Seoul, and offered the northern half of Korea to the Soviets, who accepted.
Meanwhile, the Koreans fought like hell to take back their land. An independent Korean government at Seoul had been established weeks after Japan's defeat, called the Korean People's Republic, born from the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence and the People's Committees on the countryside.
The U.S. refused to recognize this government and made designs to overthrow it. They set up a colonial occupation regime in the south that was fiercely resisted by the Korean population who wanted to re-unify their national homeland and expel the invaders.
In 1946 U.S. imperialist president Harry Truman sent a cabinet member to Korea to inspect the situation, only to return with the alarmed report that "communism could get off to a better start in Korea than practically anywhere else in the world."
The U.S. worked double time to suppress the people's government. They established a neocolonial South Korean army in 1948, comprised of officers who had served in the Japanese Imperial Army.
The Koreans rose up, liberating their lands town by town, raising up the flag of independence and calling for the unification of Korea and the expulsion of Japanese collaborators and U.S. imperialists.
Horrific counterinsurgent repressive tactics were used by the U.S. to crush the people’s resistance. Over 200,000 Koreans were rounded up, over 70,000 kept in concentration camps euphemistically referred to as "guidance camps."
In the south, the U.S. installed a brutal puppet dictator named Syngman Rhee, who had lived in the U.S. for four decades and was a trained imperialist ideologue with a Ph D from Princeton.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum was Kim Il Sung, who continued to lead the anti-colonial Korean guerrilla campaign of resistance. Under Kim il Sung's leadership the Korean freedom fighters sought total self-determination. They wanted Korea for the Koreans – not for the U.S., not for the Japanese, not for the Soviets or the Chinese.
In the north, a central government was established led by Kim il Sung. This new government received wide popular support from the Korean masses. They initiated programs for land reform, taking the land back from the landlords. On September 9 1948 the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded.
The Korean War: genocidal imperialist terror against the Korean people
The Korean resistance made gains in 1950, liberating the south from foreign rule, sparking the formation of people's committees and land reform initiatives all over the country.
That was when the U.S. intensified their brutal, genocidal war of occupation in Korea. Under the hideous reign of terror imposed by the U.S., over three million Koreans were murdered by the year 1953. Every building in the north was flattened by U.S. bombs, forcing the Koreans to live in caves.
The ferocity of the U.S. war on Korea cannot be understated. The U.S. dropped more bombs on Korea than all of the bombs dropped in Europe during the Second Imperialist War.
In addition to the fighting Korean resistance, it was the political and military leadership and intervention of Chairman Mao and his commitment to internationalism that rallied the whole Chinese people to unite and fight with the Korean people to defeat the “imperialist Yankees.”
The U.S. dropped more napalm on the Koreans than they would later use during the invasion of Viet Nam.
The U.S. razed irrigation dams, cutting off water supply to 75 percent of the north's agricultural production.
In spite of the brutality inflicted by the U.S., in the three years following the end of the U.S. bombing campaign, north Korea made rapid advancements.
The Korean resistance led by Kim il Sung and his philosophy of “Juche” – which roughly translates to "self-reliance" – inspired anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.
Che Guevara visited the DPRK in the 1960s and was moved and impressed by the heroic spirit of the Korean people and their will to fight for independence and freedom.
Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver authored the foreword to a book of Kim Il Sung's collected speeches. In 1971 he wrote "the DPRK has demonstrated to the world the great power of the people organized and guided by unwavering revolutionary leadership." Articles in the Nation of Islam's newspaper praised Kim il Sung.
It is the struggle of the Korean people for national liberation and self-determination from U.S. colonial domination that is the historical basis for the U.S. military aggression towards the North Korean government.
Victory to the people of Korea in their struggle for unification and total liberation!
Death to U.S. imperialism!
