By BA
Not a day goes by without the drum beats of war being sounded in distant Washington and / or New York, at one forum or another by the United States of America (USA) against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), also known popularly as North Korea.
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The two countries of North and South Korea, officially known as the Republic of Korea (ROK) have been one nation through millennia of history. Thus, it is no surprise that there is a perennial impulse towards a unification of the peoples of the two countries, which has not been permitted to happen essentially by the USA, which has a large army stationed on the soil of South Korea.
For over a century now, the Korean people have been waging a war for national liberation from one imperialist occupation force or another. The Korean people came under the occupation of Japanese imperialism in 1910. Japanese imperialism carried out most bestial massacres of the Korean people, the scars of which have never healed. In 1945, as the Second World War was coming to an end, Japanese forces were forced to flee from Korea. The Korean people were on the verge of liberating their homeland. However US imperialism used its military forces present in South Korea to prevent the complete liberation of Korea. It supported a puppet military dictatorship in South Korea which unleashed brutal reign of terror against patriots all over South Korea who were fighting for liberation and unification.
Seventy years ago, on September 8, 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established. In 1950, US launched a no holds barred war against the Korean people, carrying out carpet bombing of the cities of North Korea, and using chemical warfare. Millions of Koreans were killed in this war, which lasted till an armistice was signed in 1953.
Up until today, the 38th parallel remains the border dividing the Korean nation, with a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as an armistice stays in place, with no peace treaty signed and with technical state of war between the two countries. The people of the Korean peninsula deeply desire peace and reunification. Against this background, one may ask, why is there a perennial state of war, and the question is who benefits from this state of war? And more importantly who would be the loser should this turn into a hot conflict and what can and needs to be done?
North Korea strives for its dignity and political survival which is its right. The only force that can and should have the right to decide the future of North Korea are its people. Interference in its internal affairs by US and its allies, cannot be accepted by peace loving peoples of India or the rest of the world.
While increasing the drum beats on a daily basis, the US is sending the message that it will not stop at anything to bring North Korea to its knees. It even has been overtly and covertly been using nuclear blackmail, and threats to wipe out the North Korean army and its installations, knowing very well that there would be a massive loss of civilian life.
The ruling circles in the USA fully know that they are playing with fire, and are continuing to do so for a variety of reasons. These include the creation of a massive diversion as they are faced with perennial crisis of their economy, destruction of manufacturing and agriculture, joblessness and financial instability on the one hand, and the creation of a fake enemy on the other which can be used if the crisis should get out of hand. By threatening North Korea, they are also sending a message to China that there is no red line that they are unwilling to cross in the preservation of their pre-eminence in the global world order.
And finally, with the vast integration of the military and industry in the USA, perpetual war is necessary to keep the engine running, to place more orders for armaments and weapons and to bleed the exchequer dry. A hot war could be a pretext to pass on this bill elsewhere and to recover these costs from other parties. It may also be noted that all US Governments, irrespective of whether there is a Democratic or Republican President, or whichever party is in majority in the Houses of Congress, have carried out the same policies.
The observations above may be viewed in the light of a recent `scare’ in Hawaii when a alert went out of an all-out attack which lasted well over a half-hour. This sent a wave of panic across the population, and was later attributed to a worker sending out an alarm by mistake! It is impossible to believe that this could have been an innocent mistake. It is an attempt to create a `new normal’ where a nuclear strike by the US would be acceptable to the US population. Simultaneously, there are constant reports bragging about the technical superiority of the US and its ability to take out every single gun pointed from the North to the South through GPS and the use of various kinds of artillery. There is also constant talk of the use of `bunker busters’ and some time ago, the so-called `mother of all bombs’ weighing over 10 tonnes was tested in Afghanistan.
In the light of all this, it is not unthinkable that just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the opening salvos of the Cold War, to threaten the Soviet Union and the worlds peoples with nuclear holocaust, that today North Korea could be used as the target for the opening salvos of a new war in Asia. That said, there will be no winners in this war. There will only be losers. The losers would, of course, be the people of Korea as the destruction would not be limited to the North, the people of Russia and China, and indeed the people of Japan, all of who have historically close ties, who would have been dragged to their destruction by an alien power that is protected by its geographical separation. And finally, the losers would be all the peoples of the world, including the people of the USA, who would become the target of everyone’s hate.
All the people of the world should oppose the war plans against North Korea unitedly. US must be forced to withdraw from the Korean peninsula. The people of North Korea and South Korea must be allowed to carry out peaceful reunification of their nation, without outside interference.
