Vol. 73/No. 16      April 27, 2009

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the occasion of your April 15 national holiday. In face of recent and ongoing efforts by Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul to crank up military and economic pressure against the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], we continue to stand in solidarity with the Korean people’s decades-long struggle to reunify your country and end the imposition of U.S. troops and armaments, including nuclear weapons.

It is the U.S. imperialist government that introduced nuclear arms and delivery systems on Korea’s soil, and maintains them throughout the region, despite the DPRK’s longstanding call for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Yet U.S. President Barack Obama has the imperial arrogance and temerity not only to declare that the DPRK’s recent satellite launching poses “a threat to the northeast Asian region and to international peace and security,” but to reaffirm Washington’s intention to continue deploying and expanding its deceptively named “ballistic missile defense” programs, today targeting peoples and governments of Korea and Iran above all.

The U.S. rulers are jointly developing these strategic weapons systems with their allied class of exploiters in Japan. Just this week the White House announced plans to add nearly $1 billion to spending on these programs, and both Washington and Tokyo maintain Aegis missile-equipped warships off Korean waters.

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists condemn efforts by the U.S. and Japanese governments and their allies to pursue punitive United Nations Security Council sanctions against the DPRK, once again seeking to choke off the Korean people’s access to food, fuel, and financing for needed imports. We stand with Koreans on both sides of the U.S.-imposed border in rejecting Seoul’s submissive and provocative decision in March to join imperialism’s so-called Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), under which Washington and its allies claim the right to conduct piracy on the high seas by stopping and boarding any vessel “suspected” of transporting materials to produce “weapons of mass destruction.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. military, with bases strung across Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, is sending some 20,000 additional troops to wage war in Afghanistan, launching growing numbers of murderous missile attacks inside Pakistan, and still deploying more than 140,000 soldiers in Iraq even as it announces plans to draw down its forces over the next few years. This is the government whose head of state dares to vilify the DPRK as “a threat” to “international peace and security”!

The capitalist rulers confront their deepest global crisis of production and trade since the depression that culminated in the second interimperialist slaughter of the last century. Hundreds of millions are being thrown out of work worldwide, and employer and government assaults are mounting against the wages, safety and health conditions, and political rights of working people. Social relations between capital and labor are being transformed not only in the United States but across the capitalist world, preparing to drive down the living standards of the working class to a degree not experienced for well more than a half a century. Relations among the world’s leading imperialist powers and strongest semicolonial bourgeoisies are also undergoing shattering changes, as nationalist rivalries over markets and low-cost labor, trade protectionism, competitive currency devaluations, and anti-immigrant demagogy spread and intensify.

Over time, defensive struggles and mobilizations by working people will mount around countless demands for immediate protection from the devastating consequences of the workings of the market system. As such battles unfold, growing numbers of workers and our allies will gain experience and be tempered in class combat, expanding our social and political consciousness. More will be open to seeing and acting on the need for proletarian revolution—the need to build revolutionary workers parties and a mass social movement capable of taking state power out of the hands of the capitalist ruling families.

It is among workers and youth engaged in such struggles, in the United States and the world over, that the Korean people will find support and solidarity in your efforts to reunify your homeland, which was brutally partitioned by Washington more than six decades ago.

On the occasion of your April 15 national holiday, the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists stand together in demanding: No to sanctions against the Korean people! End Washington’s abuse of food and fuel as political weapons! U.S. troops, “anti-ballistic missile” ships, and weapons—conventional and nuclear—out of Korea and the Pacific! Denuclearize the region! Korea is one!
 
 
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