In the early days of the ongoing crisis in the Korean Peninsula I wrote a short blog and mentioned that I couldn’t recall the source but North Korea was not acting without provocation. The US and world media repeatedly portrays the affair as very one sided. In today’s Wall Street Journal for example it again reminds us of the “deadly North Korean artillery attack on the South…”
All I remember was that North Korea warned the South to stop military drills in an area that is not only very close to the North Korean coast but also in what is widely accepted as a disputed area. I see now that South Korea has admitted that it fired shells in to disputed waters and while the killing of the two civilians and two South Korean Marines is regrettable, the global reporting on this event overwhelmingly blames the North for starting it, but its appeal to halt these operations was rejected.
Another source of tension is the US's refusal to reopen the six nation talks until the North abandons its nuclear program. Why should they? The US doesn't ask Israel to do so. And even if the North Korean regime has reached the point of insanity, the more wiser position would be to state that there is a disagreement there but talk. US foreign policy is a disaster and the greatest threat to global stability, putting not only the lives of people abroad at risk but US citizens as well.
There is no doubt that the Stalinist remnant in the North is a repressive, totalitarian regime and given the closed nature of the system it is very difficult to ascertain exactly what the political situation is there. Much speculation has surrounded the recent change of leadership and whether or not this signifies a breaking apart of the regime which makes it even more dangerous.
But as we have pointed out on this blog these last few days, it is useful to reflect on events that led to the present situation, particularly the War in the early 1950’s, a war in which the mighty US imperialism waged a massive assault on this society with catastrophic results.
The US, who is really pulling the strings when it comes to the South, has escalated things by continuing the war games in the area since the skirmish. We can only imagine what the US would do with China and Venezuela having war-games in the Caribbean. There is a big enough flap over trade between the two. And when Soviet ships and weaponry were being taken to Cuba, the US was prepared to start World War Three despite having missiles in Turkey across the border from Russia. Like the reporting we get about the role of the US, and its lap dog, Britain in the Middle East, the coverage of the Korean events is totally biased.
The amount of money US capitalism spent developing South Korea as a buffer against the spread of the Chinese revolution after 1949 surpassed by far the aid it gave to the whole continent of Africa, were it not for this, South Korea may well have taken the path of Vietnam and the North to avoid ending up as a source of cheap Labor for US corporations.
The crisis of the working class is one of leadership. This has been said many times before and is ever more true today as capitalism slides in to one crisis after another. Any worker that thinks seriously for a minute about the situation can see we are heading in to a brick wall under the leadership of the global capitalist class with the US bourgeois trying to hang on to their dominant grip on the steering wheel. Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America, Central Asia, the entire globe is unstable with potential explosions everywhere; capitalism also has a crisis of leadership but unfortunately for all of us, they are at the helm. It is a sign of the deepening crisis when a contractor in the Irish protests who had to fire 100 workers calls for the Irish to emulate their French neighbors. Contractors are not exactly a militant section of society.
The increasing response to this offensive of capitalism is uplifting, but cannot remain as simple protests forever, at some point, if the vacuum is not filled by a united and powerful global working class movement that can transform society along democratic socialist lines, then the forces of reaction will offer their alternative as the only solution.
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