A Revolution Derailed

Korea’s history helps greatly in understanding what’s going on today. The Japanese empire occupied Korea from 1910 until its World War II defeat in 1945. While partially industrializing the country, Japan looted its natural resources, undermined its ancient culture, and brutally repressed popular uprisings.

The Korean independence movement against Japan spawned many of Asia’s first communists, inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution. Though massacred and imprisoned during Japan’s colonial rule, tens of thousands of them escaped and joined the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which was also fighting Japanese occupiers. Other exiles were trained in the Russian military.

During World War II, by the time U.S. forces landed in Korea in September 1945, local revolutionary committees organized by the communist movement had already ousted Japanese administrators and set up a People’s Republic to govern the country. They had also begun desperately needed land reform for the peasants.

However, against the will of the Korean people, the Allies arranged for Korea’s division, with the USSR controlling the North and the U.S. the South.

The two occupiers handpicked the leaders of the two regions, much as the U.S. chose Karzai for Afghanistan not too long ago. Stalin selected exile Kim Il Sung to head North Korea precisely because Kim had no ties to the native Korean communist movement.

The U.S. appointed exile Syngman Rhee to head up South Korea. An anti-communist Korean nationalist, Rhee was educated at Harvard and Princeton and proved to be a willing right-hand man for imperialism. Land reform was ruthlessly suppressed and police-state methods were used against left publications and organizing for reunification and workers’ rights.

The Korean War ignited when the North invaded the South in 1950 to achieve reunification, which was supported by the overwhelming majority of Koreans in both parts of the country. The militarily superior U.S. responded with a fierce bombing campaign that destroyed every building more than one story high in the North. It dropped napalm everywhere, and seriously considered using nuclear weapons.

Astonishingly, with the help of Chinese soldiers, North Korean forces drove the South Korean and U.S. forces back to the 38th parallel. It was a shocking, first military defeat for the U.S. and a valuable lesson for the rest of the world — the new superpower was not invincible.

For a time, with help from the Soviet Union, material conditions in the North improved much faster than in the South. But the small country’s economy eventually sank, hit hard by punishing U.S. trade and finance blockades, dissolution of the USSR in 1991, devastating famine, and China veering off toward capitalist restoration. No matter how much North Korea believed in the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country, it disproved it, unable to withstand profound economic and political isolation.

Blows from outside and in.

Now, modern capitalism itself is going through a stunning recession. People worldwide are outraged at the austerity programs sucking their lives away.

Among them are South Korean workers with a militant history. Nearly two-thirds of them have no regular job. Farmers and unions in Korea and the U.S. are protesting the NAFTA-like Korean Trade Agreement being considered in the U.S. Congress.

North Korea, meanwhile, is impoverished. A third of its children under 5 are malnourished, death rates have increased by 30 percent since 1993, and three-fourths of its factories are idle. Sixty years of severe economic embargoes sponsored by the U.S. and the U.N. explain most of these grim facts. They also help to explain the Stalinist regime’s development into a military cult centered around the Kim dynasty. Democratic rights and civil liberties are nonexistent but for a privileged few.

Ninety percent of North Koreans who “defect” to escape these conditions are women. In rural China, they are often trafficked for near-slave labor, forced marriages, or prostitution. When China “repatriates” them to North Korea, they are forced into infamous labor camps.

Dismal U.S. motives.

Why is the U.S., so tolerant of other tyrannical regimes, obsessed with North Korea?

U.S. competition with China for the exploitation of East Asia’s enormous labor and consumer markets is sharpening, and it wants to be able to establish military bases on China’s borders. It also needs enemies of mythical proportions to sustain its military budget and war on terrorism. And if those enemies are “communist” and insist on developing nuclear power, so much the better for justifying the new McCarthyism.

Nobody is a fan of nuclear proliferation. But it is the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. to try to restrict North Korea’s nuclear development when the USA itself is the only country to have actually used nuclear weapons against another country. North Korea sees nuclear weapons as a necessary defense against U.S. aggression, and it has the right to defend itself.

North Korea may formally still be a workers’ state, since economic planning and ownership remain mostly in state hands. But it is a severely deformed workers’ state headed down the “free market” road that Russia and China have traveled. This is far removed from Marxism’s democratic, egalitarian, and internationalist standards, and from the shared prosperity that defines genuine socialism.

Korea’s revolution is unfinished. It will require solidarity among the workers of East Asia and the U.S. to begin again to accomplish in the 21st century what Korean radicals fought for in the 20th.

Halt U.S. and South Korean war maneuvers against North Korea.

U.S. out of South Korea; bring the troops and warships home.

End U.S.-sponsored sanctions.

For a reunified, socialist Korea with workers’ democracy!  

Contact Monica Hill at fsnews@mindspring.com.