The story of North Korea

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The U.S. government’s hysterical campaign against North Korea is likely to escalate as the Kim Jong-un regime works toward testing an intercontinental ballistic missile. The Trump administration is considering its military options to try to stymie the tests, including air 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 pro­ gram 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.

As the drums of war beat ever louder, North Koreans re­ member that the U.S. even considered dropping an atomic bomb on them in the Korean War of the early 1950s. In the article below, we look more closely at Korea’s history. A much longer version of the article can be found at www. socialistaction.org.

One of the prevailing themes of the history of the Korean people has been their centuries-old struggle against foreign domination. 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. The 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. The brutal repression by the au­ thorities forced the young communist movement to take up arms in self-defense. The Japanese response was to orga­ nize 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. But Manchuria provided no refuge. 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.

Within Manchuria Korean communists soon found them­ selves not only hounded by the Japanese, but also often by the Chinese Communists, who looked on Koreans as possi­ ble collaborators of the Japanese, and who killed thousands of them in 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 resis­ tance bands was Kim Il-Sung—the future leader of North Korea. While Kim Il-Sung’s feats were later grossly exag­ gerated 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 Japa­ nese.

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 10 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2017 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 Au­ gust 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 occupied Manchuria and the northern part of the Korean peninsula in the final 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, occupied by the Soviets, and the South, to be occupied by the United States. No consideration was given to the will of the Korean peo­ ple; 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 Stalinist regime headed by Kim IlSung in place. Within the Korean Communist Party (later renamed the Korean Workers’ Party), Kim Il-Sung soon 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. Beginning in 1945, it organized armed resistance against U.S. occupa­ tion forces and attacked pro-Japanese landlords and other collaborators.

In 1950, in a bid to re-unite the Korean people, the North Korean army invaded the South. At the same time, hun­ dreds of thousands of South Koreans rose up against the U.S. occupation. The Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul was forced to flee, and U.S. forces were 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 reunification 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 will of the Korean people, however, mattered little to the imperialists 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 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 leveled, tens of thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands fled in terror before the advancing UN forces. But the imperialists were dealt a stunning blow in 1951 when an army of Chinese soldiers came to the aid of the North Koreans.

U.S. and UN forces were pushed back down the penin­ sula, 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 agree to a ceasefire, but the cost in lives and destruction had been astronomical and the peninsula and its people were left di­ vided. In the wake of the war, the U.S. poured significant (Photo) Refugees flee Korean War battles in 1951. resources into rebuilding South Korea, and supported a string of brutal dictators who vigorously repressed the la­ bor, 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. Bene­ fiting from having most of the peninsula’s mineral resourc­ es, and having been the site of most of the industries that the Japanese had built during their occupation, the North Ko­ rean economy was able to boast significantly higher growth and output compared to the South throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and into the 1970s. Capitalism had been expropriated, but the workers had been denied democratic control of the society by the self-serving, parasitic bureaucracy surround­ ing Kim Il-Sung.

By the 1980s it had become clear that South Korea had economically surpassed North Korea. South Korean capi­ talists, taking advantage of cheap labor, generous U.S. aid, and Japanese investment, were able to become major pro­ ducers of steel, ships, automobiles, and electronics, among other things.

Meanwhile, North Korean industry was unable to advance beyond a 1960s level of technology. Internationally isolat­ ed, 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 thou­ sands 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 ensu­ ing drought. By 1996 the country was in the grip of famine, and it’s estimated that between 1996 and 1999 anywhere from 200,000 to 3 million people died.

Nuclear & missile stand-off Kim Il-Sung, who had ruled North Korea since its found­ ing, died in 1994 at the beginning of the crisis. He was suc­ ceeded by his son, Kim Jong-Il, who continued his father’s absurd cult of personality while inheriting a state in near total economic ruin.

It was during this time that North Korea began to acceler­ ate 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 imported petroleum.

North Korea 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. During the 1990s North Korea became one of the world’s leading missile exporters, with many going to countries on the U.S. bad side, like Iran and Syria.

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 and missile programs. The North Koreans insisted that they had the right to defend them­ selves, and indicated that what they were after was a non-aggression pact from the U.S., a nuclear-free Korean penin­ sula, and energy aid.

After a series of United Nations resolutions and attempts to further isolate North Korea economically and diplomati­ cally, in 1994 the Clinton administration finally agreed to sit down with the North Koreans and work out a compro­ mise. 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 gener­ ating 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. U.S. campaign against North Korea American workers are being fed a steady diet of antiNorth Korean horror stories. There is no denying the fact that North Korea is a brutal Stalinist dictatorship, which represses its own people and puts the interests of the rul­ ing bureaucracy and its armed forces above all else. Nev­ ertheless, it is not the job of the United States to police the Korean peninsula. Only the Korean people have the right to determine their country’s policies, and to overthrow their government—both North and South.

The bully tactics of U.S. imperialism are not meant to im­ prove the lot of the Korean people, or to protect them from nuclear war. Rather, its policies are geared towards increas­ ing 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 U.S. aggression. We call on all antiwar activists to join us in opposing all U.S. and UN military, economic, and diplomatic moves against North Korea. n

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