Trump: ‘We will totally destroy North Korea!’

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Trump made this unprecedented threat not in a tweet or off the cuff remark but in a written speech before the United Nations General Assembly. No other country in the UN has ever openly stated its intention to destroy another country. Coupled with his earlier threat to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea, this threat must be seen as one that at least includes the possibility of a nuclear attack.

It is true Trump set conditions for this to be carried out, specifically that North Korea would threaten the U.S. or its allies. But he left vague what this means. He has repeatedly said that the U.S. would not tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea with the ability to deliver a weapon to the United States.

North Korea is already a nuclear-armed state. Its re­ cent missile tests demonstrate that it is well on its way to be able to hit the U.S., and it already has the capacity to hit Guam. North Korea has repeatedly said it will continue its nuclear and missile program unless the United States finally puts an end to the Korean War by signing a peace treaty with the North.

No U.S. politician, from Bernie Sanders on the left to the most extreme rightist Republican (take your pick), is ready to do anything that even moves in that direction. On the contrary, with bipartisan support the U.S. just completed its annual belligerent “war games”

in South Korea, whose aim is to threaten the North.

These “games” include the South’s army, but that army is under the command of the U.S. occupying force.

South Korea’s new president, Moon Jai-in, was elect­ ed on the promise of seeking dialog with the North, and restricting the deployment of the U.S. Thaad anti-missile system. But Trump bullied Moon into revers­ ing himself on both. Now the South is deploying a spe­ cial commando with the avowed public goal of assas­ sinating the North’s leadership.

One purpose of Trump’s threat to destroy North Ko­ rea is to force China to stop supplying oil to the North, which would devastate its economy, in the hopes that this would force the latter to abandon its nuclear pro­ gram. In all likelihood, this will not come to pass.

China does not want the North to collapse, which would be the case with an oil embargo for any length of time. That would lead to a U.S. invasion, resulting in a united Korea as a militarized client state of the U.S. on its borders. Even if Xi groveled before Trump and cut off the oil, a desperate North, facing collapse, is likely to strike back.

It should be recalled that when President Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on Japan as part of the inten­ sifying rivalry between the two powers at the time, Japan replied by striking at the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, triggering World War II in the Pacific.

It is obvious that the increasing tensions between North Korea and the U.S. pose a very serious dan­ ... Rohingya (continued from page 4: “Stop the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims!”) racism of the British colonial mindset, which has not dis­ appeared. Myanmar has the lowest life expectancy and the second-highest rate of infant and child mortality in Southeast Asia. It is estimated that an average worker earns about $1.76 a day. Poverty and exploitation cre­ ates excellent spawning grounds for racist hate under Although attacks on Rohingya voting rights and citi­ zenship began earlier, the right to vote as a citizen was formally removed in 1982 with the Citizenship Law, with absurd exceptions like voting only for military candidates. The Rohingya are widely called Bengalis by chauvinist Buddhists and other bigots.

After the junta was “dissolved” in 2011, the country has seen a rise in fascistic Buddhist extremism. During WWII, reactionary Buddhist forces sided with Buddhist Japan during the Japanese occupation.

The military refuses to use the term “Rohingya,” prefer­ ring to portray them as job-stealing migrants from Ban­ gladesh, thus dividing workers with racism. Rohingya describe round-ups of Muslim youth to perform forced labor for the Army.

Although some monks have spoken out against racism, reactionary monks spew filth. Racist leader Ashin Wi­ rathu, a Buddhist monk, said, “Muslims are like African carp. They breed quickly and they are very violent and they eat their own kind … the national religion needs to be protected.” Wirsthu likened Muslims to “mad dogs” and “cannibals.”

Wirathu and others have spurred a movement known as “969,” which calls for Buddhists to band together to ger, and Trump has just upped the ante with his UN speech.

North Korea has solid reasons for fearing a U.S. at­ tack, given Washington’s hostility going back to the end of WWII. After the defeat of Japan, which had been the colonial power in Korea, the U.S. tried to oc­ cupy the peninsula as the spoils of war. However, it was only able to occupy the southern part of Korea, since the USSR occupied the northern. This stalemate explains why there are two Koreas.

What became South Korea was ruled by the U.S. mili­ tary directly from 1945 to 1948. Meanwhile, the So­ viet Union withdrew its armed forces from the North. In 1948 Washington’s military staged phony elections in the South, installing the first in a long line of dicta­ tors up until 1987.

At the end of the war, the U.S. also tried to occupy parts of China, much of which had been occupied by Japan. China was the big prize the U.S. coveted. How­ ever, this plan had to be scrapped because of a mass uprising in the U.S. armed forces called the “bring us home” movement, which balked at invading what was viewed as a U.S. ally. The U.S. had influence with the government run by the Nationalists.

Then in 1949 the Chinese Revolution completely tore the country out of the U.S. imperialist’s hands. China now became Washington’s enemy. The U.S., us­ ing hostilities between North and South Korea as the pretext, invaded Korea in 1950 and quickly moved deep into the North and threatened to continue into China. China countered by sending its army into Ko­ rea, blocking the U.S. advance.

At that point U.S. President Truman considered us­ ing atomic weapons against the Chinese and North Koreans. Nine nuclear bombs were transferred to the U.S.-occupied Japanese island of Okinawa, along with bombers to deliver them. Fortunately, Washington defend their faith and to do business only with other Buddhists. The numerology of the “969” movement re­ fers to the virtues of the Buddha, the practices of the faith and the community.

Military crackdowns on Rohingya in 1978 and 1991-2, prompted hundreds of thousands to flee to Bangladesh. Violence erupted in 2012, leaving villages torched, up to 300 dead, and 140,000 fleeing their homes in terror. It was the worst example of ethnic cleansing in the region in decades. Cops merely watched the spiraling violence. Thousands died at sea trying to escape.

An example of Rohingya displacement for profit is the destruction of the settlement in Kyaukphyu, off the coast of Rakhine state. It will be part of a multi-billion-dollar Special Economic Zone (SEZ), built with the involvement of CITIC Group from China and Japanese engineering company Nippon Koei. During the 2012 riots, more than 14 hectares of the Rohingya settlement were burnt to the ground and cleared for private development. The SEZ, a five-year tax-free zone, is based around the Chinesefunded $2.5 billion energy pipelines that will transport oil and natural gas to Yunnan province, exploiting newly found gas deposits.

Change for the worse The Rohingya enjoyed many democratic rights from 1948 to 1962 and played a role in post-colonial govern­ ments. Myanmar, also known as Burma, has endured decades of brutal military rule, especially after a 1962 military coup.

U.S. sanctions over “human rights violations” have been used cynically - as in Haiti - to impose neo-liberal aus­ terity and to politically direct the human rights struggle into safe, i.e. pro-imperialist, channels. With the eas­ ing of sanctions in 2011-12, Myanmar passed a foreign investment law in 2012 designed to facilitate U.S. and Western economic penetration with big tax write-offs.

(Left) North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

decided against using them, which would have meant a major war with China and the Soviet Union.

The war continued until 1953, when a cease-fire recognized that it had become a stalemate. The North and South were again divided along basically the same lines as before the U.S. invaded. An armistice was signed, but not a peace treaty. The U.S. and its puppet regime in the South remain in a state of war with the North.

China withdrew its troops from the North, but the U.S. has maintained its occupation force in the South up to the present. Washington continued its hostile stance toward the North since, including its “war games” prac­ tices for invasion of the North.

In 1958, the U.S. stationed tactical and strategic nuclear weapons in the South, aimed at the North, which would also be used against China and the Soviet Union in case of a general nuclear war. At its height, there were 950 U.S. nuclear warheads in South Korea. The U.S. weapons were removed in 1991 as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction treaty. The U.S. threat against the North then resided in the atomic weapons in the U.S. Naval fleet in the western Pacific, as well as other parts of Washington’s nuclear arsenal.

Beside the enormous inequality between small North Korea and the heavily armed U.S., there is the gross hypocrisy of Washington. The U.S. was the first country to develop atomic weapons and tried at first to keep a monopoly on them. That began the nuclear arms race.

The U.S. is the only country to unleash atomic weap­ ons against civilians, in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The purpose of those bombings had nothing to do with Japan, which had already been de­ feated, but to demonstrate that the U.S. had the inhu­ manity and will to repeat such bombings of cities, first as a threat against the Soviet Union before the latter developed its own nuclear weapons, then also against China, which did likewise, but also against any poten­ tial enemy of the U.S.

The U.S. has never renounced the first use of nucle­ ar weapons, and is opposed to any possible treaty to abolish such weapons.

Trump’s belligerent “America First” speech at the UN aimed at the rest of the world and included much more than the threat to destroy North Korea. He made stepped-up threats against Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Ven­ ezuela among others, but that is beyond the scope of this article. n Myanmar’s rich assets include jade, rubies, teak wood and a major oil pipeline to China still under construction in the North—all made possible with cheap Burmese la­ bor. Reports include youths forced into labor by the cor­ rupt military.

To outflank China, Myanmar’s biggest investor and re­ gional powerhouse, Obama’s imperialist “pivot to Asia” restarted U.S. “non-military” aid in Mayanmar, which saves the regime money on civilian projects, eases po­ litical pressure on the military, and frees up funds for repression. Since Obama’s and Clinton’s photo-ops in Myanmar, the dictatorship received about $375 mil­ lion in (supposedly) non-military U.S. aid through fiscal 2014.

The U.S. dominated World Bank has issued hundreds of millions in new loans on condition of maintaining a so-called “business friendly” (pro-U.S.) economy. More­ over, the U.S. has re-established the U.S. Agency for In­ ternational Development (USAID) in the country, a giant funding agency and notorious CIA conduit. All that sent the regime a green light that it had Western backing, even after the 2012 massacre of hundreds of Rohingya (see July 2015 Socialist Action).

So far, despite regime propaganda, the Rohingya armed groups are not Islamic jihadists or anti-Buddhist. Resis­ tance forces, encompassing the Rohingya and other eth­ nics, should unite on a working class platform to fight for self-determination. New U.S./UN sanctions or even U.S./ UN so-called “humanitarian aid,” a la post-earthquake Haiti, will only tighten imperialism’s grip. A socialist strategy capable of smashing racism and imperialism is urgently needed.

In the U.S., antiwar, antiracist, and labor forces must step up to defend the Rohingya. Gaining support in the Muslim community is key. The Islamaphobic Donald Trump and the bigots in Myanmar can only be defeated by mass action! n SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2017 5