https://socialistaction.org/2017/03/28/the-story-of-north-korea/
The story of North Korea
/ 20 hours ago
Secretary Of Defense Ash Carter
By ADAM RITSCHER
The U.S. government’s hysterical campaign against North Korea is likely
to escalate as the Kim Jong-un regime works toward perfecting a
nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile. The Trump
administration is considering its military options to try to stymie the
tests, including missile strikes against North Korean missile bunkers
and re-arming South Korea with nuclear weapons.
The U.S. has already taken harsh measures to isolate and punish the
North Koreans. The Pentagon, for example, has ordered frequent cyber and
electronic strikes against North Korea’s missile launches. The New York
Times reported in its March 4 edition that U.S. sabotage efforts, in a
program begun by the Obama administration in 2014, appear to have caused
a large number of the country’s rockets to explode or veer off course.
The failure rate of its intermediate-range Musudan missile is 88 percent.
Of course, as the drums of war beat ever louder, North Koreans remember
that the U.S. even considered dropping an atomic bomb on them in the
Korean War of the early 1950s. In the article below, a version of which
appeared in Socialist Action newspaper in 2012, we look more closely at
Korea’s history.
To understand the current conflict, you have to understand something
about Korea’s history. The story of the Korean people is a long and rich
one, but one of the prevailing themes of their history has been their
centuries-old struggle against foreign domination. To many Koreans, the
current stand-off is yet another chapter in a long book of foreign meddling.
For centuries, the Koreans have fought to free their country from the
rule of their more powerful neighbors, namely China and Japan. While
originally China was the main aggressor, in modern history it was Japan
that most actively sought to colonize the Koreans.
Japan’s first major invasion of Korea took place in 1592. However, it
wasn’t until the early 1900s that Japan was able to definitively conquer
Korea. By this time Japan had become a rising industrial power, and in
the wake of its defeat of Tsarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of
1905, Japan was given the nod by the other imperial powers to gobble up
Korea as war booty.
By 1910, Japan had subjugated Korea, and turned it into a colony. While
a small layer of the Korean elite were groomed to be local lackeys for
the Japanese occupiers, the vast majority of Koreans were treated like
mere slaves—forced to grow food, mine minerals, and manufacture cheap
goods for the Japanese homeland.
This brutal occupation was met by a number of popular rebellions that,
unfortunately, were all ultimately unsuccessful.
In 1925, in the wake of the inspiring Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the
Korean resistance gave birth to an embryonic communist movement. Forced
to work underground, many of its early activists were killed by the
Japanese occupiers. The brutal repression by the authorities forced the
young communist movement to take up arms in self-defense. Small bands of
revolutionaries around the country came together to try and defend their
communities, and from time to time to strike out at police and military
installations.
The Japanese response was to organize sweeping military offensives that
drove many of these revolutionaries to the far north of the country, and
over the border into the neighboring Manchuria region of China.
While hundreds of thousands of Koreans found themselves in Manchuria, it
provided no refuge, as the advancing Japanese imperialists were hot on
their heals. Using the deposed ruling family of the old Chinese empire
as their puppets, the Japanese set up a puppet state in Manchuria that
they dubbed Manchukuo. The presence of hundreds of thousands of Japanese
soldiers, and a government filled with Japanese rather than Manchurian
officials, made clear who really ruled “Manchukuo.”
The Korean resistance to Japanese occupation continued, however, both
within the Korean peninsula and in Manchuria. Within Manchuria Korean
communists, soon found themselves not only hounded by the Japanese, but
also often by the Chinese Communists, who looked on Koreans as possible
collaborators of the Japanese, and who killed thousands of them in
various purges. Despite this, the Stalinist-led Communist International
insisted that the Korean communists submit to the leadership of the
Chinese Communist Party, and as a result, the bands of Korean resistance
fighters in Manchuria came under Mao Zedong’s nominal control.
One of the most important leaders of these Korean resistance bands was
Kim Il-Sung—the future leader of North Korea. While Kim Il-Sung’s feats
were later grossly exaggerated when he become North Korea’s leader, it
is true that he led one of the more successful bands of revolutionaries,
and engaged in a number of armed actions with the Japanese.
By the end of the 1930s, Kim Il-Sung and most Korean communist leaders
found themselves forced to take refuge in Soviet Siberia after a series
of massive Japanese military offensives against them. Here the Korean
fighters would sit out most of the rest of the Second World War, as the
Soviets were hesitant to anger the Japanese by letting the Koreans use
the USSR as a base of operations. Not until the Soviet Union declared
war on Japan in August of 1945 did Kim Il-Sung and company get to cross
the border again, and then it was as part of the baggage train of the
Soviet armies that quickly occupied Manchuria and the northern part of
the Korean peninsula in the final few weeks of the war before Japan
surrendered.
Creation of North Korea
Once the war ended, the Allied powers decided to divide the Korean
peninsula between the North, which would be occupied by the Soviets, and
the South, to be occupied by the United States. No consideration was
given to the will of the Korean people, and despite their decades of
heroic resistance against the Japanese, they weren’t even nominally
consulted on the matter.
Both the Soviets and the U.S. quickly set about creating puppet
governments in their new protectorates. Unlike the U.S. though, the
Soviet army soon withdrew from North Korea, leaving a new regime headed
by Kim Il-Sung in place.
Kim Il-Sung’s regime in many ways resembled the new Stalinist regimes in
Eastern Europe. Ostensibly they were multi-party “people’s democracies”
in which the Communist Parties were simply part of coalition
governments, but in reality the Stalinists were in firm control.
The other parties that made up the North Korean government, such as the
Chongdois Chongu Party and the Social Democratic Party were soon reduced
to hollow shells with little autonomy and even less influence. They
became little more than window dressings. Similarly, within the Korean
Communist Party (later renamed the Korean Workers’ Party), Kim Il-Sung
quickly pushed out any potential rivals and assumed undisputed control
of the party and the government.
Despite the growing repressiveness of the Stalinist regime in the North,
the Communist Party continued to have broad support in the U.S. puppet
state in the South. The Communist Party counted hundreds of thousands of
members and sympathizers, and despite the U.S. occupiers‘ best efforts
to ban and repress the party, it continued to grow. Already beginning in
1945 it was organizing armed resistance in a number of parts of the
country. Some of these guerrilla battles involved up to tens of
thousands of South Korean revolutionaries taking on U.S. occupation
forces and attacking pro-Japanese landlords and other collaborators.
Back in the North, with Stalin’s active support, Kim Il-Sung was rapidly
building up his military forces. In 1950, in a bid to re-unite the
Korean people, the North Korean army invaded the South. This attack come
on the heals of a series of skirmishes and incursions between the North
and South Korean militaries.
At the same time that the North invaded, hundreds of thousands of South
Koreans rose up against the U.S. occupation. The result was the near
total collapse of the Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul, which was forced to
flee while the U.S. military itself was nearly ejected from the
peninsula. Within the span of only a few weeks, U.S. forces had been
pushed back to a tiny corner of the peninsula around the city of Pusan.
While one can criticize the tactics used by the North Koreans to
re-unify their people, the fact remains that re-unification was nearly
universally supported. The Syngman Rhee regime, comprised of numerous
Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation, was extremely
unpopular. It ruled only through U.S. military backing. The rejection of
the majority of the South Korean people of this state of affairs was
powerfully demonstrated by the popular uprising in support of the
Northern invasion, and the large-scale defections of many South Korean
soldiers to the North.
The will of the Korean people, however, mattered little to the
imperialists holding court in Washington, D.C. President Truman and his
generals quickly mobilized reinforcements for the beleaguered troops
trapped in Pusan, and then launched a massive amphibious landing behind
North Korean lines, forcing the North Koreans to retreat.
The U.S. military, joined by a number of other pro-imperialist armies
(British, South African, Turkish, French, Canadian, Australian, Greek,
Dutch, Thai, Belgian, New Zealander, Luxembourgian, Columbian,
Ethiopian, and Filipino) under the guise of the United Nations, pursued
the North Koreans past the former border and into the North.
Aided by devastating carpet bombings and massive use of napalm, the
United Nations forces devastated the North. Its cities were literally
leveled—with whole neighborhoods left with no buildings standing. Tens
of thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands fled in terror
before the advancing U.N. forces.
Intending to completely conquer North Korea, the imperialists were dealt
a stunning blow in 1951 when an army of Chinese soldiers came to the aid
of the North Koreans, and changed the course of the war yet again. U.S.
and UN forces were pushed back down the peninsula, back to a line near
the original border—where the war would drag on for another two years in
the form of bloody trench warfare.
In the end the imperialists had to cry “uncle” and agree to a ceasefire.
This represented a partial victory for the Korean people—but the cost in
lives and destruction had been astronomical and the peninsula and its
people were left divided.
In the wake of the war, the U.S. poured significant resources into
rebuilding South Korea, and supported a string of brutal dictators who
vigorously repressed the labor, socialist, and student movements. The
North Koreans, in comparison, received far less reconstruction aid from
the Soviets and Chinese.
Nevertheless, the North was able to slowly rebuild. Benefiting from
having most of the peninsula’s mineral resources, and having been the
site of most of the industries that the Japanese had built during their
occupation, the North Korean economy was able to boast significantly
higher growth and output compared to the South throughout the 1950s,
’60s, and into the 1970s.
North Korea as also careful to remain neutral in the political rift that
developed between the Chinese and Russian Stalinists during the
Sino-Soviet split that began in the late 1950s.
It was during this time (1955) that Kim Il-Sung and his cohorts first
put forth their famous “Juche” theory. Juche preached self-reliance and
independence at all costs. It made a virtue out of autarky. While
initially it was described as a Korean addition to Marxist thought, by
1972 Kim Il-Sung had replaced all references to Marxism-Leninism in
North Korea’s constitution with Juche, and it was soon described as
having “superseded” Marxism-Leninism.
While still referring to themselves as socialists, the North Korean
Stalinists rejected Marxism and Leninism as European notions. In
essence, Juche became the ideological framework for a particularly
nationalistic, and even xenophobic, form of Stalinism.
Despite what it called itself, though, North Korea remained a
degenerated workers’ state. Capitalism had been expropriated, but the
workers had been denied democratic control of the society by a
self-serving, parasitic bureaucracy surrounding Kim Il-Sung.
North Korean famine
By the 1980s it had become clear that South Korea had economically
surpassed North Korea. By brutally repressing labor and students, often
at gunpoint, the South Korean ruling class had succeeded in turning
their country into an up and coming economic power—one of the so called
“Asian Tigers.” South Korean capitalists, taking advantage of cheap
labor, generous U.S. aid, and Japanese investment, were able to become
major producers in the field of steel, ship-building, automobiles, and
electronics, among other things.
Meanwhile, North Korean industry was unable to advance beyond a 1960s
level of technology. Internationally isolated, things went from bad to
worse when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991. Cut off from
the subsidized oil that the Soviets had provided, energy poor North
Korea went into a serious crisis. Many factories were idled for lack of
energy, and electricity blackouts became common.
Agriculture was similarly affected by a decrease in the amount of
fertilizer and other chemical inputs that North Korea’s failing
industries were able to provide. But these problems would be dwarfed by
the natural disasters that were to follow.
In 1995, a devastating series of floods destroyed thousands of acres of
cropland and knocked out roads, dams, and railroad tracks. There was a
drop of 50% to 75% in the nation’s harvest, and matters were made worse
by an ensuing drought. Food, which had already become scarce in the
early 1990s as a result of the economic crisis, now became almost
impossible to obtain. By 1996 the country was in the grips of famine,
and it’s estimated that between 1996 and 1999 anywhere from 200,000 to 3
million people died.
The response of the international community was slow and woefully
inadequate. The U.S. likes to brag that when news of the famine hit,
only China stepped forward and offered more aid than it did. But given
that the total amount of aid given in 1995 amounted to only $8 million,
less then the cost of half a dozen cruise missiles, the U.S. should be
ashamed. Despite their claims to the contrary, the slow and checkered
reaction of the imperialists to this devastating human catastrophe was
clearly a case of using food as a weapon.
Nuclear & missile stand-off
Kim Il-Sung, who had ruled North Korea since its founding, died in 1994
at the beginning of the crisis. He was succeeded by his son, Kim
Jong-Il, who continued his father’s absurd cult of personality, which
reached such extremes that it would have made even Joseph Stalin or Mao
Zedong blush.
Kim Jong-Il inherited a state in near total economic ruin. The state-run
economy had broken down to such a point that the state no longer even
bothered to try to nationally distribute food, requiring instead that
each local area become completely self-sufficient in food production or
starve.
Kim Jong-Il’s response to this crisis was to rely almost exclusively on
the military. He put forth a new ideology called Songun. Songun, which
is meant to supersede the old Juche philosophy, is based on the notion
that the military, not the working class, is the revolutionary
foundation of the state, and that all resources necessary should go to it.
It was during this time that North Korea began to accelerate its nuclear
program. Having begun in the 1980s with a small Soviet research reactor,
the North Koreans went on to build their own primitive reactor in
Yongbyon in an attempt to reduce their need to import petroleum.
It was also during this time that the North Korean regime dramatically
ramped up its arms sales. North Korea had built up a significant arms
industry way back in the aftermath of the Korean War. While much of
their output was of obsolete Soviet and Chinese designs, much of it
reverse engineered with little support from either, they came to produce
a wide range of military equipment—from small arms all the way up to
tanks and even submarines. They also succeeded in reverse engineering
old Soviet Scud missiles, from which they went on to produce a whole
family of single and multi-stage missiles.
While crude by modern standards, North Korean missiles were cheap, and
available to any regime willing to pay for them. As a result, during the
1990s the North Koreans became one of the world’s leading exporters of
short and medium range ballistic missiles, with many of them going to
countries on the U.S. bad side, like Iran and Syria.
The combination of North Korea’s developing a nuclear industry, together
with ballistic missiles, sent Washington into a tizzy. Nothing
infuriates imperialists more than when third-world countries dare to arm
themselves with weapons that might actually be able to deter imperialist
bullying. Despite the fact that the U.S. has for decades openly kept
nuclear weapons in South Korea, and on naval vessels in the region, the
U.S. hypocritically denounced the North Koreans for their nuclear program.
The North Koreans insisted that they had the right to defend themselves,
and indicated that what they were after was a non-aggression pact from
the U.S., a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, and energy aid.
For our part, Socialist Action agrees that North Korea has the right to
develop nuclear energy, and nuclear weapons for that matter, as much as
we find both things distasteful. Given the threat that the U.S. poses,
North Korea has the right to defend itself, and to create a deterrent to
possible aggression.
After a series of United Nations resolutions and attempts to further
isolate North Korea economically and diplomatically, in 1994 the Clinton
administration finally agreed to sit down with the North Koreans and
work out a compromise. Frustrated by its inability to stop the North
Korean regime, the U.S. imperialists offered them a deal. In exchange
for shutting down their nuclear reactor, and agreeing to allow
inspectors in, the U.S. would provide a certain amount of petroleum and
assistance in providing alternative nuclear technology that could be
used for generating electricity, though not weapons-grade material.
This deal held for several years until the U.S. broke it. The U.S. began
to reduce the amount of oil delivered to North Korea, and under the Bush
administration the spigot was cut off completely. The North Koreans then
restarted work on their reactor and in 2006 tested a nuclear bomb.
What has followed since then has basically been a broken record, in
which the U.S. screams and hollers, and the North Koreans holler back.
Very little new is ever said or proposed. Since 2009 the North Koreans
have tested another bomb and test fired a number of missiles, and the
U.S. has responded with more efforts to tighten the noose around North
Korea’s neck.
The U.S. campaign against North Korea
The recent escalation [in 2012] has resulted in the U.S. and UN saying
that they will begin boarding and searching North Korean ships suspected
of transporting arms for export, which the UN sanctions now prohibit.
The North Koreans have stated that any boardings of its ships will be
taken as a declaration of war.
Meanwhile, back home, American workers are being fed a steady diet of
anti-North Korean horror stories. While careful to never mention the
U.S. violations of its agreements with North Korea, or the presence of
U.S. nukes in the region, a steady torrent of stories about North
Korea’s threats and deceptions bombards us. A considerable degree of
fear is being drummed up about North Korean missiles, and a possible
nuclear attack, reminiscent of the war mongering carried about against
Iraq in 2001, and against Iran today.
There is no denying the fact that North Korea is indeed a brutal
Stalinist dictatorship, which represses its own people and puts the
interest of the ruling bureaucracy and its armed forces above all else.
Nevertheless, it is not the job of the United States to police the
Korean peninsula.
The world’s major manufacturer, distributor, and user of weapons of mass
destruction—of the nuclear, chemical and biological varieties—has no
standing in our view to make demands on any nation. It has no right to
dictate the internal policy of any country. Only the Korean people
themselves have the right to determine their country’s policies, and to
overthrow their government—both North and South. It is the Korean people
alone who can create a just solution to the problems they face, on both
sides of the DMZ.
The bully tactics of U.S. imperialism are not meant to improve the lot
of the Korean people, or to protect them from nuclear war. Rather, its
policies are geared towards increasing its own power and position in
East Asia to the detriment of the working people of the region.
While we do not lend any political support to the North Korean regime,
Socialist Action unconditionally defends North Korea against any and all
U.S. aggression. We reject the notion that imperialism has any role to
play whatsoever in the region. We call on all antiwar activists to join
us in opposing all U.S. and UN military, economic, and diplomatic moves
against North Korea. Hands Off North Korea! Self-determination for the
Korean People!
Photo: U.S. aircraft patrolled near North Korea in 2016. Mark Wilson /
Getty Images
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March 28, 2017 in Anti-War, East Asia, International. Tags: Korea
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