http://themilitant.com/2017/8119/811958.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 19 May 15, 2017
(Socialist Workers Party statement)
US hands off Korea! For nuclear free Pacific!
The following is a statement by Mary Martin, Socialist Workers Party
candidate for mayor of Seattle was released May 3.
The Socialist Workers Party calls for an immediate end to Washington’s
economic and financial sanctions against the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea. We demand that the U.S. government withdraw its more
than 28,000 troops from the Korean Peninsula, and U.S. planes and ships
from Korea’s skies and waters. We stand in solidarity with the more than
70-year-long struggle to reunify Korea, ripped apart by U.S. imperialism
at the end of World War II, as well as the Korean people’s aspirations
for a nuclear free Korean Peninsula and Pacific.
Ever since 1945, the Socialist Workers Party has never stopped fighting
to rid the world of the U.S. rulers’ murderous nuclear arsenal,
demanding that Washington dismantle its stockpile unilaterally. The SWP
has long called on Moscow and all others who hold nuclear arms to do so,
as well.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the U.S.
capitalist rulers have made some nuclear arms reductions to bolster the
deception they’re on a path to nuclear disarmament. That’s a
self-serving lie. They have no such intention.
Today Washington deploys thousands of nuclear weapons — more than enough
to incinerate every person on earth many times over. So does Moscow. The
U.S. rulers are modernizing their nuclear delivery systems. The Barack
Obama administration planned to build a new arsenal of smaller nukes,
claiming they would be easier to use and “more ethical!” Democratic and
Republican administrations alike claim that Washington’s nuclear arsenal
defends “our American interests.” But there is no “we.” Their military
forces defend the propertied rulers’ interests against us, the working
classes, both here and abroad.
Washington’s campaign that North Korea get rid of nuclear weapons, and
insistence that Tehran renounce them, is both cynical and hypocritical,
to say the least. But the development of nuclear arms and delivery
systems by these governments weakens the defense of the Korean and
Iranian people against Washington. It saps the fighting capacities of
the toilers in face of imperialism’s dictates, depriving them of the
political and moral high ground in the eyes of working people worldwide.
The leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution provides an example to
emulate.
“We have never considered producing nuclear weapons because we don’t
need them,” explained Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro in 2005.
Having such arms, he said, “would mean joining the game of nuclear
confrontation.”
The Cuban government doesn’t take this position because the revolution
faces no enemies or military threats. From day one of the revolution in
1959, Washington has worked ruthlessly and relentlessly to overthrow it.
“The one weapon we haven’t renounced,” Castro said, “is the ‘war of the
entire people’” — the mobilization and arming of the Cuban people,
politically and militarily. Counterposed to this, Fidel said, “a nuclear
weapon is a good way to commit suicide at a certain point.”
Working people in Cuba have something worth defending. “We possess a
weapon as powerful as nuclear power,” Castro said, “and it is the
immense justice for which we are struggling.”
Washington’s refusal to get rid of its nuclear stockpile is another
powerful reason to build a working-class leadership in the United States
that fights to overturn the rule of the capitalist warmakers and to
replace it with a workers and farmers government.
Related articles:
Washington, Beijing put squeeze on North Korea
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
