I remember several discussions on this list about the Korean issue. Because of
them, I went searching for information on the subject and found North
Korea/South Korea by John Feffer on Bookshare. It supported my view that
Progressives never saw the issue fairly, most probably because the Korean war
occurred in the midst of the heart of the cold war and everyone's view was so
corrupted by American propaganda. The parallels between Korea and Vietnam seem
so obvious to me, but not to anyone else on this list, or almost anyone else.
But both countries were divided up by western powers and both countries became
sites of proxy wars between East and West.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey ;
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2017 10:24 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The story of North Korea
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
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March 28, 2017 in Anti-War, East Asia, International. Tags: Korea
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