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North Korea Has The Right To Self Defense!
While the whole world has suffered as a result of the murderous policies of U.S. imperialism, the Korean people have, like a number of other peoples including the American Indians, faced a U.S. imposed holocaust. In what Americans call the “Korean War” more than thee million people died as a result of the U.S. invasion and war against the Korean people from 1950 to 1953.
North Korea Has The Right To Self Defense!
Liberation News statement on North Korea’s Nuclear Test
By Steven Argue
In the 1950’s the U.S. led UN aggression against the people of Korea murdered well over three million Koreans. Likewise it was the U.S. that carried out the atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
And let us not forget that the U.S. invaded Iraq not because they had weapons of mass destruction, but because they did not. That invasion has caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, set up an Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people.
Another war on the Korean Peninsula would be a disaster for the people of Korea and the people of the entire region. Kim Jung Il and the North Korean government have done the responsible thing in keeping North Korea's defenses strong.
U.S. Hands Off North Korea!
While the U.S. government carries out its wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, they have called North Korea part of the “axis of evil” and are arrogantly asserting that North Korea does not have the right to defend themselves from U.S. attack with nuclear weapons even as members of the Bush administration have spoken openly of war against North Korea.
In response to the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism and its threats aimed at North Korea, North Korean President Kim Jung Il has paraded the capabilities of the North Korean armed forces and declared that their million-person army is prepared to fight a U.S. invasion. In addition, in January 2003. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty with the Korean Central News Agency stating, “We have realized that as long as the United States does not abandon its hostile policy against the North, efforts to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear free [are] nothing more than an illusion. We will further boost our already mighty military power.”
The U.S. never allowed independent inspections of whether or not the U.S. actually withdrew Nuclear weapons in 1992 anyway, and they have kept nuclear bombers and submarines within striking distance of North Korea as well.
Socialists defend and support the right of North Korea to possess nuclear weapons for their own defense against the arrogant militarism of U.S. imperialism.
While the whole world has suffered as a result of the murderous policies of U.S. imperialism, the Korean people have, like a number of other peoples including the American Indians, faced a U.S. imposed holocaust. In what Americans call the “Korean War” more than thee million people died as a result of the U.S. invasion and war against the Korean people from 1950 to 1953.
Japan had been the colonial occupiers of the Korean peninsula for 35 years prior to their defeat in World War Two. Anti-colonial resistance to the Japanese occupation succeeded in establishing the communist government in North Korea in 1945. In the south of Korea the U.S. moved in and set up a capitalist police state. The repressive police of the Japanese occupation of Korea were then recruited by the U.S. occupiers into this puppet government in attempt to keep the South Korean people down for U.S. imperialism.
In 1950 a massive peasant revolt against the U.S. puppet government swept South Korea. North Korea responded to the peasant uprising and the intolerable puppet government in the south by sending in troops in to reunify their country. In the South the North Korean armed forces were greeted as liberators.
The U.S. responded to the Korean people with the saturation bombings of Korean cities, the use of napalm, attacks on irrigation dams in order to cause flooding, and the slaughter of countless unarmed civilians. Over three million people were killed in this U.S. attempt to prevent the Korean people from deciding their own government. In addition, U.S. troops were quickly driven out of China as the U.S. attempted to expand the war from Korea into China in order to try to destroy the 1949 Chinese communist revolution led by Mao Tse-tung.
Due to the U.S. attack on China and the Chinese entry into the “Korean War”, the war ended in a stalemate. North of the 38th parallel the Communist government led by Kim Il Sung was established under the military encirclement of the U.S. imperialists and a starvation embargo. South of the 38th parallel the U.S. set up a capitalist dictatorship backed by the continuing presence 37,000 U.S. troops.
In 1980 U.S. forces orchestrated the bloody Kwangju massacre where an insurrectionary revolt of the working class was put down by the U.S. backed South Korean dictatorship with tanks and the lives of 2,000 people.
In fact, the South Korean government was an open military dictatorship from the time the U.S. established it up until 1987, when the militant labor movement forced reforms that began to free some political prisoners and forced the capitalists to hold elections. Still, the U.S. backed government of South Korea is one that presently jails socialists for publishing banned books and for their participation in the union movement.
Aware of the role played by the U.S. occupiers in their country, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans protested in December 2002 demanding U.S. troops get out. Protesters have also shown sympathy for the North. A December 28th, 2002 New York Times article quotes a protester saying, “If North Korea would be threatened by the United States with nuclear weapons, North Korea can also have them.”
While the pro-war Democrat Party of the U.S. points out the supposed danger of North Korea, socialists support the right of Korean self-determination and self-defense. The concept of self-defense is a basic understanding for survival against a cruel and inhumane enemy such as the United States and should be understood as a basic right for North Korea. Socialist revolutionaries stand with the heroic resistance of the Korean people to U.S. imperialism and point out that the Korean people are better off for it.
The collectivized planned economy of North Korea has benefited the people. The socialist planning in North Korea built up a modern industrial base that out-performed the south up until the mid 1970s. The inability of U.S. imperialism to conquer the North Korean revolution also strengthened the hand of the workers movements throughout Asia and the world.
Today the economies of both North and South Korea are in bad shape.
During the cold war the U.S. and Japan aided the South Korean economy in order keep it afloat and to try to prevent conditions that may have led to the revolutionary reunification of Korea. That has now changed. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 hit the South Korean economy hard, but when the South Korean capitalist class turned to the U.S. and Japan asking for a bailout they were denied. With the Soviet Union gone priorities have shifted and the U.S. and Japan no longer want to prop up the South Korean capitalists because they also see them as economic competitors.
North Korea’s economy is even more desperate. While facing an economic blockade from U.S. and Japanese imperialism, North Korea lost its biggest trading partner with the capitalist counter-revolution that took place in the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1992 China betrayed the North Korean working class by cutting off shipments of cheap oil as a concession to South Korea in order to gain trade and diplomatic relations. The lack of cheap fuel oil has disrupted the production of electricity. As a result much of the North Korean economy has collapsed including steel production because of the lack of electricity. In 1995 North Korea began to be hit extremely hard by a series of natural disasters that have caused extreme famine.
The Chinese Communist Party’s betrayal of the North Korean working class in exchange for trade with South Korea flows directly from their adherence to Stalin’s Theory of Socialism in One Country. This was a theory in which Stalin broke from the earlier policy of revolutionary internationalism held by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky in order for Stalin to gain trade relations with the capitalist countries. This policy of betrayal of the workers for trade with capitalist countries, a policy also adopted by Mao and Fidel Castro, was the thinking behind many betrayals. These ranged from the Chinese attempted invasion of Communist Vietnam to Castro’s support for the capitalist Mexican government when it gunned down leftist students in 1968, to Stalin’s betrayals of the Spanish, German, Greek, and Chinese revolutions as well as his misdirection of the U.S. Communist Party, getting them to support the capitalist Democrat Party as the supposed “lesser of two evils” rather than supporting the building of an independent party of the working class.
While some may consider such policies pragmatic in a world dominated by the capitalist market, the short-term gains of these betrayals, and others, destroyed potential trade with new revolutionary nations through a policy of leading the world revolution.
It says much about the superiority of the socialist economic model that the poor and isolated Soviet Union was able to build up a strong economy that met the people’s needs. This was true despite the Soviet economy being twice destroyed, first by the invasion of the U.S. and many other imperialist countries directly after the 1917 revolution, and secondly with the Nazi invasion of World War Two. More impressive, is that an industrial economy was built without the economic imperialism that created the wealth of the advanced capitalist nations of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. Many forget that the wealth and obscene consumption of the world’s resources that the U.S. likes to parade and pretend was ordained by god has arisen largely from the super exploitation and miserable poverty imperialism has inflicted on the people of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere in the so-called third world. While the advanced capitalist countries do not meet the needs of the people, the full failure of capitalism can be seen in the “third world” colonies run by the IMF and World Bank, bullied by the U.S. military and by the armed forces of the smaller local capitalist classes.
Likewise the current situation in the former Soviet Union is a lesson in the negative. Since Yeltsin’s capitalist counter-revolution in 1991 all indicators of a decent standard of living have dropped. These indicators include life expectancy, infant mortality, income, and literacy.
In the face of the current economic crisis the North Korean leadership has, however, made important mistakes by introducing market reforms that have negated some of the advantages of the socialist economy. Despite facing famine, food rationing has been eliminated. Such food rationing prevented famine from occurring in Cuba in their worst days of economic crisis in the mid 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union. In addition profiteering off of speculation has been legalized in North Korea with a 550 percent rise in the price of rice. Housing rents and utility charges have also been introduced.
The North Korean government is also promoting two Chinese style free trade zones where foreign capitalists are free to invest and exploit workers. While some may argue that these free trade zones are a necessary act of desperation on the part of the North Korean government, they are also a major step towards the destruction of the socialist economy. Cuba, facing a similar situation as North Korea with the destruction of the Soviet Union, has been able to gain foreign investment for projects that have helped the Cuban economy, but they have done it with strict controls on worker’s exploitation coupled with the controlling ownership of the projects remaining in Cuban hands.
Ultimately an essential ingredient needed for Cuba and North Korea to break out of their economic isolation is the world socialist revolution. Possibilities that would have a major impact include a socialist revolution in a more advanced capitalist country and/or a political revolution in China that preserves the Chinese socialist system built out of the 1949 revolution. Today preserving socialism in China includes extending it into the free trade zones with the nationalization of foreign capitalists and bringing back socialist agricultural policies destroyed by the privatization of agriculture carried out by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, a policy that has devastated most of the peasantry and only enriched a few. In addition a national health care plan would have to be implemented to respond to the fact that the earlier socialist health care system was tied to work units such as factories, schools, and people's communes and has disintegrated with China’s market reforms. To carry out these revolutionary socialist changes will mean breaking the power of the brutal Chinese Communist Party and instituting worker’s democracy combined with instituting an internationalist policy of world socialist revolution.
As with North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam the program for political revolution in China to bring about real worker’s democracy and better policies for the promotion of international socialism also includes the defense of these revolutions in the face of imperialist attack and their defense against internal capitalist counter-revolution.
Adding to North Korea’s economic problems has been their understandable fear of a U.S. attack. George Bush’s statements about North Korea being part of the “axis of evil” and the Bush administration’ s bold statements discussing the possibilities of war with North Korea have, as has the presence of 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, forced President Kim Jong Il to continue to put a large amount of North Korea’s resources into the military. Blame for this rests on the shoulders of U.S. imperialism, not with Kim Jung Il.
Another potential U.S. war on the Korean peninsula is a war that must be stopped. It should be the right of the Korean people to decide their own government without U.S. intervention, as it should be the right of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to decide their own future as well.
While many who have participated in the anti-war movement in the streets are looking towards electing Democrats as the solution to the latest rash of imperialist wars, the Democrats do not support immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and have an even harder line on North Korea than Bush. In fact Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, counter-posed an attack on North Korea to the planned U.S. attack on Iraq stating, “The threats from North Korea and from international terrorism are more imminent”. This has been the line of other Democrats as well.
Resist imperialism in the streets, in the barracks, in the factories, and on the docks!
U.S. Troops Out Of Korea! U.S. Hands Off The North!
U.S. and British Troops Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan!
For Korean Reunification and Socialist Democracy Through Political Revolution In The North, Socialist Revolution In The South!
End U.S. and British imperialism through socialist revolution!
Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
Cuban statement, as part of the Non-Aligned Movement, on North Korea’s Nuclear Test
[Translator' s note: Ever since I joined the YSA as a sophomore in college back in the sixties, I have been a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. I greatly regret not having visited Cuba in the past, and I deplore the draconian penalties, threatened fines of over $6,000, against those US citizens who visit Cuba now without US government permission. That said, I have to report that Cuba's statement on the North Korean nuclear test in Granma, the Cuban CP daily paper, never
once mentions imperialism and is bereft of even a scintilla of Marxism. The Cuban statement makes it clear why Trotsky despised pacifism: it is a profound disservice to working people to imply that the US government will ever "exercise moderation," or possesses any concern about "the threat posed for humanity by the permanent existence of nuclear weapons." On the contrary, this threat is a major component in continuing US efforts to bend other governments to its will. Like Venezuela's statement on North Korea, the Cuban position reflects a mincing, flaccid, illusionary pacifism lacking a single point of contact with the real world of class conflict and popular struggles. -- Yosef M]
From Granma [Havana] 10-14-2006
At noon on Friday, October 13, 2006, the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting at the UN headquarters in New York, with Cuba presiding, approved the following declaration on the nuclear test carried out on October 9 by the Korean People's Democratic Republic.
Declaration by the Non-Aligned Movement on the nuclear test in the Korean Peoples' Democratic Republic:
1. The Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement expressed its concern when it recognized the complexities coming from the nuclear test on the Korean Peninsula, which underscores the need to work even more vigorously to achieve the Movement's objectives of disarmament, including the elimination of nuclear weapons. The Movement exhorts the parties involved in the region to exercise moderation, which contributes to regional security; to discontinue nuclear tests and not to transfer materials, equipment [or] technology related to nuclear weapons.
2. The Movement expresses its desire that the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula may be accomplished and continues to support the resumption of Six-Party Talks as soon as possible. The Movement firmly believes that diplomacy and dialogue through peaceful means must continue with a view to achieving a long-range solution on the Korean nuclear question.
3. In light of this action, the Movement reaffirms its positions of principle with respect to nuclear disarmament, which continues to be its highest priority, and on the questions connected to nuclear non-proliferation in all its aspects, and emphasizes its concernat the threat posed for humanity by the permanent existence of nuclear weapons, and their possible use or threatened use. It also reiterates its deep concern at the slow advance toward nuclear disarmament and the lack of progress by states possessing nuclear weapons in the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals. It stresses the need for states possessing nuclear weapons to fulfill the unequivocal commitment that they incurred in the year 2000 to achieve the total elimination of nuclear weapons and, in this sense, it underscores the urgent necessity of beginning negotiations without delay.
4. The Movement emphasizes its principles and priorities in the matter of disarmament and international security, as adopted in the 14th Conference of the Heads of State or Government of the Non-Alinged Movement, held in Havana, Cuba, September 11-26, 2006.
Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
Liberation News statement on North Korea’s Nuclear Test
By Steven Argue
In the 1950’s the U.S. led UN aggression against the people of Korea murdered well over three million Koreans. Likewise it was the U.S. that carried out the atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
And let us not forget that the U.S. invaded Iraq not because they had weapons of mass destruction, but because they did not. That invasion has caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, set up an Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people.
Another war on the Korean Peninsula would be a disaster for the people of Korea and the people of the entire region. Kim Jung Il and the North Korean government have done the responsible thing in keeping North Korea's defenses strong.
U.S. Hands Off North Korea!
While the U.S. government carries out its wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, they have called North Korea part of the “axis of evil” and are arrogantly asserting that North Korea does not have the right to defend themselves from U.S. attack with nuclear weapons even as members of the Bush administration have spoken openly of war against North Korea.
In response to the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism and its threats aimed at North Korea, North Korean President Kim Jung Il has paraded the capabilities of the North Korean armed forces and declared that their million-person army is prepared to fight a U.S. invasion. In addition, in January 2003. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty with the Korean Central News Agency stating, “We have realized that as long as the United States does not abandon its hostile policy against the North, efforts to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear free [are] nothing more than an illusion. We will further boost our already mighty military power.”
The U.S. never allowed independent inspections of whether or not the U.S. actually withdrew Nuclear weapons in 1992 anyway, and they have kept nuclear bombers and submarines within striking distance of North Korea as well.
Socialists defend and support the right of North Korea to possess nuclear weapons for their own defense against the arrogant militarism of U.S. imperialism.
While the whole world has suffered as a result of the murderous policies of U.S. imperialism, the Korean people have, like a number of other peoples including the American Indians, faced a U.S. imposed holocaust. In what Americans call the “Korean War” more than thee million people died as a result of the U.S. invasion and war against the Korean people from 1950 to 1953.
Japan had been the colonial occupiers of the Korean peninsula for 35 years prior to their defeat in World War Two. Anti-colonial resistance to the Japanese occupation succeeded in establishing the communist government in North Korea in 1945. In the south of Korea the U.S. moved in and set up a capitalist police state. The repressive police of the Japanese occupation of Korea were then recruited by the U.S. occupiers into this puppet government in attempt to keep the South Korean people down for U.S. imperialism.
In 1950 a massive peasant revolt against the U.S. puppet government swept South Korea. North Korea responded to the peasant uprising and the intolerable puppet government in the south by sending in troops in to reunify their country. In the South the North Korean armed forces were greeted as liberators.
The U.S. responded to the Korean people with the saturation bombings of Korean cities, the use of napalm, attacks on irrigation dams in order to cause flooding, and the slaughter of countless unarmed civilians. Over three million people were killed in this U.S. attempt to prevent the Korean people from deciding their own government. In addition, U.S. troops were quickly driven out of China as the U.S. attempted to expand the war from Korea into China in order to try to destroy the 1949 Chinese communist revolution led by Mao Tse-tung.
Due to the U.S. attack on China and the Chinese entry into the “Korean War”, the war ended in a stalemate. North of the 38th parallel the Communist government led by Kim Il Sung was established under the military encirclement of the U.S. imperialists and a starvation embargo. South of the 38th parallel the U.S. set up a capitalist dictatorship backed by the continuing presence 37,000 U.S. troops.
In 1980 U.S. forces orchestrated the bloody Kwangju massacre where an insurrectionary revolt of the working class was put down by the U.S. backed South Korean dictatorship with tanks and the lives of 2,000 people.
In fact, the South Korean government was an open military dictatorship from the time the U.S. established it up until 1987, when the militant labor movement forced reforms that began to free some political prisoners and forced the capitalists to hold elections. Still, the U.S. backed government of South Korea is one that presently jails socialists for publishing banned books and for their participation in the union movement.
Aware of the role played by the U.S. occupiers in their country, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans protested in December 2002 demanding U.S. troops get out. Protesters have also shown sympathy for the North. A December 28th, 2002 New York Times article quotes a protester saying, “If North Korea would be threatened by the United States with nuclear weapons, North Korea can also have them.”
While the pro-war Democrat Party of the U.S. points out the supposed danger of North Korea, socialists support the right of Korean self-determination and self-defense. The concept of self-defense is a basic understanding for survival against a cruel and inhumane enemy such as the United States and should be understood as a basic right for North Korea. Socialist revolutionaries stand with the heroic resistance of the Korean people to U.S. imperialism and point out that the Korean people are better off for it.
The collectivized planned economy of North Korea has benefited the people. The socialist planning in North Korea built up a modern industrial base that out-performed the south up until the mid 1970s. The inability of U.S. imperialism to conquer the North Korean revolution also strengthened the hand of the workers movements throughout Asia and the world.
Today the economies of both North and South Korea are in bad shape.
During the cold war the U.S. and Japan aided the South Korean economy in order keep it afloat and to try to prevent conditions that may have led to the revolutionary reunification of Korea. That has now changed. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 hit the South Korean economy hard, but when the South Korean capitalist class turned to the U.S. and Japan asking for a bailout they were denied. With the Soviet Union gone priorities have shifted and the U.S. and Japan no longer want to prop up the South Korean capitalists because they also see them as economic competitors.
North Korea’s economy is even more desperate. While facing an economic blockade from U.S. and Japanese imperialism, North Korea lost its biggest trading partner with the capitalist counter-revolution that took place in the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1992 China betrayed the North Korean working class by cutting off shipments of cheap oil as a concession to South Korea in order to gain trade and diplomatic relations. The lack of cheap fuel oil has disrupted the production of electricity. As a result much of the North Korean economy has collapsed including steel production because of the lack of electricity. In 1995 North Korea began to be hit extremely hard by a series of natural disasters that have caused extreme famine.
The Chinese Communist Party’s betrayal of the North Korean working class in exchange for trade with South Korea flows directly from their adherence to Stalin’s Theory of Socialism in One Country. This was a theory in which Stalin broke from the earlier policy of revolutionary internationalism held by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky in order for Stalin to gain trade relations with the capitalist countries. This policy of betrayal of the workers for trade with capitalist countries, a policy also adopted by Mao and Fidel Castro, was the thinking behind many betrayals. These ranged from the Chinese attempted invasion of Communist Vietnam to Castro’s support for the capitalist Mexican government when it gunned down leftist students in 1968, to Stalin’s betrayals of the Spanish, German, Greek, and Chinese revolutions as well as his misdirection of the U.S. Communist Party, getting them to support the capitalist Democrat Party as the supposed “lesser of two evils” rather than supporting the building of an independent party of the working class.
While some may consider such policies pragmatic in a world dominated by the capitalist market, the short-term gains of these betrayals, and others, destroyed potential trade with new revolutionary nations through a policy of leading the world revolution.
It says much about the superiority of the socialist economic model that the poor and isolated Soviet Union was able to build up a strong economy that met the people’s needs. This was true despite the Soviet economy being twice destroyed, first by the invasion of the U.S. and many other imperialist countries directly after the 1917 revolution, and secondly with the Nazi invasion of World War Two. More impressive, is that an industrial economy was built without the economic imperialism that created the wealth of the advanced capitalist nations of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. Many forget that the wealth and obscene consumption of the world’s resources that the U.S. likes to parade and pretend was ordained by god has arisen largely from the super exploitation and miserable poverty imperialism has inflicted on the people of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere in the so-called third world. While the advanced capitalist countries do not meet the needs of the people, the full failure of capitalism can be seen in the “third world” colonies run by the IMF and World Bank, bullied by the U.S. military and by the armed forces of the smaller local capitalist classes.
Likewise the current situation in the former Soviet Union is a lesson in the negative. Since Yeltsin’s capitalist counter-revolution in 1991 all indicators of a decent standard of living have dropped. These indicators include life expectancy, infant mortality, income, and literacy.
In the face of the current economic crisis the North Korean leadership has, however, made important mistakes by introducing market reforms that have negated some of the advantages of the socialist economy. Despite facing famine, food rationing has been eliminated. Such food rationing prevented famine from occurring in Cuba in their worst days of economic crisis in the mid 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union. In addition profiteering off of speculation has been legalized in North Korea with a 550 percent rise in the price of rice. Housing rents and utility charges have also been introduced.
The North Korean government is also promoting two Chinese style free trade zones where foreign capitalists are free to invest and exploit workers. While some may argue that these free trade zones are a necessary act of desperation on the part of the North Korean government, they are also a major step towards the destruction of the socialist economy. Cuba, facing a similar situation as North Korea with the destruction of the Soviet Union, has been able to gain foreign investment for projects that have helped the Cuban economy, but they have done it with strict controls on worker’s exploitation coupled with the controlling ownership of the projects remaining in Cuban hands.
Ultimately an essential ingredient needed for Cuba and North Korea to break out of their economic isolation is the world socialist revolution. Possibilities that would have a major impact include a socialist revolution in a more advanced capitalist country and/or a political revolution in China that preserves the Chinese socialist system built out of the 1949 revolution. Today preserving socialism in China includes extending it into the free trade zones with the nationalization of foreign capitalists and bringing back socialist agricultural policies destroyed by the privatization of agriculture carried out by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, a policy that has devastated most of the peasantry and only enriched a few. In addition a national health care plan would have to be implemented to respond to the fact that the earlier socialist health care system was tied to work units such as factories, schools, and people's communes and has disintegrated with China’s market reforms. To carry out these revolutionary socialist changes will mean breaking the power of the brutal Chinese Communist Party and instituting worker’s democracy combined with instituting an internationalist policy of world socialist revolution.
As with North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam the program for political revolution in China to bring about real worker’s democracy and better policies for the promotion of international socialism also includes the defense of these revolutions in the face of imperialist attack and their defense against internal capitalist counter-revolution.
Adding to North Korea’s economic problems has been their understandable fear of a U.S. attack. George Bush’s statements about North Korea being part of the “axis of evil” and the Bush administration’ s bold statements discussing the possibilities of war with North Korea have, as has the presence of 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, forced President Kim Jong Il to continue to put a large amount of North Korea’s resources into the military. Blame for this rests on the shoulders of U.S. imperialism, not with Kim Jung Il.
Another potential U.S. war on the Korean peninsula is a war that must be stopped. It should be the right of the Korean people to decide their own government without U.S. intervention, as it should be the right of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to decide their own future as well.
While many who have participated in the anti-war movement in the streets are looking towards electing Democrats as the solution to the latest rash of imperialist wars, the Democrats do not support immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and have an even harder line on North Korea than Bush. In fact Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, counter-posed an attack on North Korea to the planned U.S. attack on Iraq stating, “The threats from North Korea and from international terrorism are more imminent”. This has been the line of other Democrats as well.
Resist imperialism in the streets, in the barracks, in the factories, and on the docks!
U.S. Troops Out Of Korea! U.S. Hands Off The North!
U.S. and British Troops Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan!
For Korean Reunification and Socialist Democracy Through Political Revolution In The North, Socialist Revolution In The South!
End U.S. and British imperialism through socialist revolution!
Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
Cuban statement, as part of the Non-Aligned Movement, on North Korea’s Nuclear Test
[Translator' s note: Ever since I joined the YSA as a sophomore in college back in the sixties, I have been a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. I greatly regret not having visited Cuba in the past, and I deplore the draconian penalties, threatened fines of over $6,000, against those US citizens who visit Cuba now without US government permission. That said, I have to report that Cuba's statement on the North Korean nuclear test in Granma, the Cuban CP daily paper, never
once mentions imperialism and is bereft of even a scintilla of Marxism. The Cuban statement makes it clear why Trotsky despised pacifism: it is a profound disservice to working people to imply that the US government will ever "exercise moderation," or possesses any concern about "the threat posed for humanity by the permanent existence of nuclear weapons." On the contrary, this threat is a major component in continuing US efforts to bend other governments to its will. Like Venezuela's statement on North Korea, the Cuban position reflects a mincing, flaccid, illusionary pacifism lacking a single point of contact with the real world of class conflict and popular struggles. -- Yosef M]
From Granma [Havana] 10-14-2006
At noon on Friday, October 13, 2006, the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting at the UN headquarters in New York, with Cuba presiding, approved the following declaration on the nuclear test carried out on October 9 by the Korean People's Democratic Republic.
Declaration by the Non-Aligned Movement on the nuclear test in the Korean Peoples' Democratic Republic:
1. The Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement expressed its concern when it recognized the complexities coming from the nuclear test on the Korean Peninsula, which underscores the need to work even more vigorously to achieve the Movement's objectives of disarmament, including the elimination of nuclear weapons. The Movement exhorts the parties involved in the region to exercise moderation, which contributes to regional security; to discontinue nuclear tests and not to transfer materials, equipment [or] technology related to nuclear weapons.
2. The Movement expresses its desire that the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula may be accomplished and continues to support the resumption of Six-Party Talks as soon as possible. The Movement firmly believes that diplomacy and dialogue through peaceful means must continue with a view to achieving a long-range solution on the Korean nuclear question.
3. In light of this action, the Movement reaffirms its positions of principle with respect to nuclear disarmament, which continues to be its highest priority, and on the questions connected to nuclear non-proliferation in all its aspects, and emphasizes its concernat the threat posed for humanity by the permanent existence of nuclear weapons, and their possible use or threatened use. It also reiterates its deep concern at the slow advance toward nuclear disarmament and the lack of progress by states possessing nuclear weapons in the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals. It stresses the need for states possessing nuclear weapons to fulfill the unequivocal commitment that they incurred in the year 2000 to achieve the total elimination of nuclear weapons and, in this sense, it underscores the urgent necessity of beginning negotiations without delay.
4. The Movement emphasizes its principles and priorities in the matter of disarmament and international security, as adopted in the 14th Conference of the Heads of State or Government of the Non-Alinged Movement, held in Havana, Cuba, September 11-26, 2006.
Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
Add Your Comments
Comments
(Hide Comments)
It would have been an interesting read but for the slogans that are heard all over Cuba and communist countries everyday, in and out, around the clock. If you take out the "imperialist" slogans, you can probably cut the story in half and THEN it would be a nice read.
I wasn't able to get through the whole article.
Just a thought, maybe you should move from this imperialistic US and live in North Korea, or Cuba, or Venezuela for that matter. Umm, didn't think so...
Jorge
I wasn't able to get through the whole article.
Just a thought, maybe you should move from this imperialistic US and live in North Korea, or Cuba, or Venezuela for that matter. Umm, didn't think so...
Jorge
My slogans obviously were not “imperialist” slogans, as you state, they were anti-imperialist slogans.
The term “imperialist” is scientific and accurate. I will not stop using it in order to not offend your “America, love it or leave it” chauvinism against those who demand the boot of U.S. imperialism be removed from the necks of the people of the world.
The term “imperialist” is scientific and accurate. I will not stop using it in order to not offend your “America, love it or leave it” chauvinism against those who demand the boot of U.S. imperialism be removed from the necks of the people of the world.
Hey Jorge, if you think the role of imperialism is so good why don't you go live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Kuwait, or Colombia? Didn't think so.
Steven,
One of the most comforting things I learned while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence was that the U.S. would be idiots to attack N. Korea. Bush may talk big and take on this and that Third-World country, but North Korea is too dangerous to mess with. Their troops are too well-trained (they've probably had nukes for years . . . ) and the U.S. troops in South Korea are there to only hold on for a week till reinforcements arrive (with much loss of life and limb). So when North Korea pits one superpower against another to see how it can best be taken care of, it's easier for the superpowers just to give them aid to stand down.
Steven, I'm with you on the U.S. being out of all these countries. I'm no isolationist. I just firmly believe that the U.S. almost never goes to a country to just "help" them. It's all about us and that has to stop.
One of the most comforting things I learned while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence was that the U.S. would be idiots to attack N. Korea. Bush may talk big and take on this and that Third-World country, but North Korea is too dangerous to mess with. Their troops are too well-trained (they've probably had nukes for years . . . ) and the U.S. troops in South Korea are there to only hold on for a week till reinforcements arrive (with much loss of life and limb). So when North Korea pits one superpower against another to see how it can best be taken care of, it's easier for the superpowers just to give them aid to stand down.
Steven, I'm with you on the U.S. being out of all these countries. I'm no isolationist. I just firmly believe that the U.S. almost never goes to a country to just "help" them. It's all about us and that has to stop.
So what's your point Magon? Do you deny:
"In the 1950’s the U.S. led UN aggression against the people of Korea murdered well over three million Koreans."
Do you deny:
"It was the U.S. that carried out the atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima."
Do you deny:
"And let us not forget that the U.S. invaded Iraq not because they had weapons of mass destruction, but because they did not. That invasion has caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, set up an Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people."
Do you deny:
"Another war on the Korean Peninsula would be a disaster for the people of Korea and the people of the entire region. Kim Jung Il and the North Korean government have done the responsible thing in keeping North Korea's defenses strong."
Do you think that calling for the following equals support for Kim Jung Il's regime?:
"For Korean Reunification and Socialist Democracy Through Political Revolution In The North, Socialist Revolution In The South!"
"In the 1950’s the U.S. led UN aggression against the people of Korea murdered well over three million Koreans."
Do you deny:
"It was the U.S. that carried out the atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima."
Do you deny:
"And let us not forget that the U.S. invaded Iraq not because they had weapons of mass destruction, but because they did not. That invasion has caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, set up an Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people."
Do you deny:
"Another war on the Korean Peninsula would be a disaster for the people of Korea and the people of the entire region. Kim Jung Il and the North Korean government have done the responsible thing in keeping North Korea's defenses strong."
Do you think that calling for the following equals support for Kim Jung Il's regime?:
"For Korean Reunification and Socialist Democracy Through Political Revolution In The North, Socialist Revolution In The South!"
It is the ultimate hypocracy for the US...the only country ever to use a nuke on a civilian population...to demand that anyone else NOT have nuclear weapons.
It is the ultimate folly to assume the US is always the good guy..and that therefore we should be allowed.
It is the ultimate folly to assume the US is always the good guy..and that therefore we should be allowed.
Liberation News calls for Political Revolution in all of the deformed workers' states:
The Concept of Political Revolution
By Steven Argue
In the Trotskyist movement, the term political revolution refers to an upheaval in which the government is replaced, or the form of government altered, but in which property relations are predominantly left intact. The revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848 are often cited as political revolutions.
Political Revolutions are contrasted with social revolutions in which old property relations are overturned.
The Trotskyist movement advocates political revolution, as opposed to capitalist counter-revolution, in the countries with deformed workers states. Such political revolutions are envisioned to overthrow undemocratic governments of bureaucratic privilege, replacing them with governments based on workers' democracy while maintaining state owned property relations.
While the Trotskyist movement does not recognize any political revolution to have occurred against the deformed workers states, it saw a strong possibility for that potential in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring of 1968, both crushed by Soviet invasion. Another uprising seen to have the possibility of sweeping in political revolution were the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Unlike the movements that led to capitalist counter-revolution such Yeltsin's 1991 coup in the USSR and Lech Wałęsa's Solidarnosc in Poland, these previous movements were not seen as having stated capitalist goals and were not seen as hostile to socialism. As such the Trotskyist movement opposed the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the 1968 invasion of Checkloslavakia, and the Tiananmen Square massacre as the crimes of Stalinist governments.
While there is general agreement among Trotskyists on these questions regarding Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and China, there is disagreement on questions regarding capitalist counter-revolution. Some Trotskyist groups cheered the fall of the Stalinist governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, even under the leadership of pro-capitalist forces. These groups included Socialist Action (US), Fourth International (ICR), the International Socialist Organization, and the Socialist Workers Party (US). Arguments put forward by some of these groups included the idea that the mobilizations and political space created by smashing the Stalinist bureaucracy could bring about the ability of the working class to carry out the political revolution as a step towards creating a truly democratic and egalitarian socialist society.
The Spartacist League (modern) held onto the historic position of Leon Trotsky in advocating only Political Revolution against Stalinism while also standing for the defense of the deformed and degenerated workers' states from imperialism and internal capitalist counter-revolution. They argue that their position has been proven correct by the drop of the standard of living of the people of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe including the lack of medical care and jobs. Internationally they point to the strengthened hand of U.S. Imperialism with the fall of the Soviet Union as a major cause of war, including the Anglo-American war in Iraq.
Today these debates continue regarding what some Trotskyists consider the deformed workers states of the Republic of Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the People's Republic of China.
The Concept of Political Revolution
By Steven Argue
In the Trotskyist movement, the term political revolution refers to an upheaval in which the government is replaced, or the form of government altered, but in which property relations are predominantly left intact. The revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848 are often cited as political revolutions.
Political Revolutions are contrasted with social revolutions in which old property relations are overturned.
The Trotskyist movement advocates political revolution, as opposed to capitalist counter-revolution, in the countries with deformed workers states. Such political revolutions are envisioned to overthrow undemocratic governments of bureaucratic privilege, replacing them with governments based on workers' democracy while maintaining state owned property relations.
While the Trotskyist movement does not recognize any political revolution to have occurred against the deformed workers states, it saw a strong possibility for that potential in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring of 1968, both crushed by Soviet invasion. Another uprising seen to have the possibility of sweeping in political revolution were the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Unlike the movements that led to capitalist counter-revolution such Yeltsin's 1991 coup in the USSR and Lech Wałęsa's Solidarnosc in Poland, these previous movements were not seen as having stated capitalist goals and were not seen as hostile to socialism. As such the Trotskyist movement opposed the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the 1968 invasion of Checkloslavakia, and the Tiananmen Square massacre as the crimes of Stalinist governments.
While there is general agreement among Trotskyists on these questions regarding Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and China, there is disagreement on questions regarding capitalist counter-revolution. Some Trotskyist groups cheered the fall of the Stalinist governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, even under the leadership of pro-capitalist forces. These groups included Socialist Action (US), Fourth International (ICR), the International Socialist Organization, and the Socialist Workers Party (US). Arguments put forward by some of these groups included the idea that the mobilizations and political space created by smashing the Stalinist bureaucracy could bring about the ability of the working class to carry out the political revolution as a step towards creating a truly democratic and egalitarian socialist society.
The Spartacist League (modern) held onto the historic position of Leon Trotsky in advocating only Political Revolution against Stalinism while also standing for the defense of the deformed and degenerated workers' states from imperialism and internal capitalist counter-revolution. They argue that their position has been proven correct by the drop of the standard of living of the people of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe including the lack of medical care and jobs. Internationally they point to the strengthened hand of U.S. Imperialism with the fall of the Soviet Union as a major cause of war, including the Anglo-American war in Iraq.
Today these debates continue regarding what some Trotskyists consider the deformed workers states of the Republic of Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the People's Republic of China.
The U.S. has not used a nuclear weapon since 1945, therefore it's safe to say we wouldn't use one unless necessary, which was the case in 1945. I know that liberals and radical socialists everywhere think 1,000,000 casualties fighting the Japanese is acceptable, but it's not. And seeing how we were not responsible for World War II, it's atrocious that everyone says we acted recklessly by ending it with the atom bomb, effectively cutting the war short possible 2 to 3 years.
Socialism and Communism will never work, and never have worked.... if they did, you'd never have seen mass attempts by Russians to get out of the Soviet Union and come to America or Western Europe during the Cold War. I mean, who the hell is ANYONE to now allow immigration out of a communist/socialist nation?
And the UN was not the aggressor in the Korean War either... the North invading the South caused the UN action.... who the hell is anyone to state that they should reunite as a socialist nation? You pigs...
Socialism and Communism will never work, and never have worked.... if they did, you'd never have seen mass attempts by Russians to get out of the Soviet Union and come to America or Western Europe during the Cold War. I mean, who the hell is ANYONE to now allow immigration out of a communist/socialist nation?
And the UN was not the aggressor in the Korean War either... the North invading the South caused the UN action.... who the hell is anyone to state that they should reunite as a socialist nation? You pigs...
So what's your point Magon? Do you deny:
"In the 1950’s the U.S. led UN aggression against the people of Korea murdered well over three million Koreans." (When one reckless and dangerous group of people (Communists) decide to steamroll an innocent group of people and force them into their warped and useless beliefs, they deserve the defense of the U.S. South Koreans still dont mind our presence there to defend them against the scum who oppress and brainwash an entire people)
Do you deny:
"It was the U.S. that carried out the atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima." (If I had to choose between 1,000,000 casualties in a mainland battle against the Japanese and continuing WW2 into as late as 1948, or the bomb, I'd drop the bomb. It ended the war and saved allied lives. Lest you forget, the Japs started the imperialist war in the Pacific, and it was the U.S. who was attacked without warning in 1941. We finished the job.... get over it)
Do you deny:
"And let us not forget that the U.S. invaded Iraq not because they had weapons of mass destruction, but because they did not. That invasion has caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, set up an Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people." (Okay shithead, let's do things your way and pull out, and reinstate Saddam Hussein.... )
Do you deny:
"Another war on the Korean Peninsula would be a disaster for the people of Korea and the people of the entire region. Kim Jung Il and the North Korean government have done the responsible thing in keeping North Korea's defenses strong." (North Korea is such an inept nation that they feel they need to impress the world with nuclear weapons to get respect. They are a rogue nation, without support from anyone in the world. They would never start a war cause it would end with them not existing anymore.)
Do you think that calling for the following equals support for Kim Jung Il's regime?:
"For Korean Reunification and Socialist Democracy Through Political Revolution In The North, Socialist Revolution In The South!" (Down with Communism.... who the hell are these leaders to tell people they cannot immigrate elsewhere where they will be FREE? Many millions were killed under Stalin and Hitler and yet you ignore that? You ignorant pompus ass)
"In the 1950’s the U.S. led UN aggression against the people of Korea murdered well over three million Koreans." (When one reckless and dangerous group of people (Communists) decide to steamroll an innocent group of people and force them into their warped and useless beliefs, they deserve the defense of the U.S. South Koreans still dont mind our presence there to defend them against the scum who oppress and brainwash an entire people)
Do you deny:
"It was the U.S. that carried out the atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima." (If I had to choose between 1,000,000 casualties in a mainland battle against the Japanese and continuing WW2 into as late as 1948, or the bomb, I'd drop the bomb. It ended the war and saved allied lives. Lest you forget, the Japs started the imperialist war in the Pacific, and it was the U.S. who was attacked without warning in 1941. We finished the job.... get over it)
Do you deny:
"And let us not forget that the U.S. invaded Iraq not because they had weapons of mass destruction, but because they did not. That invasion has caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, set up an Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people." (Okay shithead, let's do things your way and pull out, and reinstate Saddam Hussein.... )
Do you deny:
"Another war on the Korean Peninsula would be a disaster for the people of Korea and the people of the entire region. Kim Jung Il and the North Korean government have done the responsible thing in keeping North Korea's defenses strong." (North Korea is such an inept nation that they feel they need to impress the world with nuclear weapons to get respect. They are a rogue nation, without support from anyone in the world. They would never start a war cause it would end with them not existing anymore.)
Do you think that calling for the following equals support for Kim Jung Il's regime?:
"For Korean Reunification and Socialist Democracy Through Political Revolution In The North, Socialist Revolution In The South!" (Down with Communism.... who the hell are these leaders to tell people they cannot immigrate elsewhere where they will be FREE? Many millions were killed under Stalin and Hitler and yet you ignore that? You ignorant pompus ass)
(Photo: Japanese Girl With Skin Falling Off In Strips After Atomic Bombing)
The imperialist propagandists say that the mass incineration of the civilian populations at Nagasaki and Hiroshima was justified by saving the lives of American soldiers. These two bombs murdered 214,000 people, many of them children, and very, very few of them had anything to do with the conflict between the competing capitalist/imperialist powers of the United States, Germany, and Japan.
214,000 people, that’s 76 times the number of people killed in the September 11 attack.
The question of American lives being more important than those of the Japanese aside, it is well documented that Japan had contacted the United States and was on the verge of surrendering at the time of the atomic bombings. It appears that the true motivation for U.S. terror against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was aimed at the Soviet Union and the rest of the people of the world that might stand up to U.S. imperialism. It was a demonstration to show what kind of weaponry the United States had and the fact that the U.S. was crazy enough to use it to annihilate whole cities.
Call me and other “radical socialists” warped, but we just don’t see this kind of targeting of a civilian population for mass murder as justified. The United States is the only country in the world that has used atomic weapons, and it is the only country that has repeatedly threatened to use such weapons again.
Likewise the US/UN war against the people of Korea targeted the civilian population for death. Estimates range from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 Koreans dying as a result of that imperialist intervention in Korea. In one of a number of well known cases, on July 1950, at the South Korean village of No Gun Ri, US troops massacred 400 Korean civilians who were seeking shelter from US bombing and strafing under a railroad bridge.
The US occupiers, besides killing millions of people, installed the tyrannical regime of Syngman Rhee, a brutal US puppet who massacred and tortured suspected Communists and trade-union activists. Syngman Rhee was just one of many brutal capitalist dictators the United States government has imposed on the people of the third world.
Mike Kimetz seems to want to blame me for the crimes of Hitler as well. Adolf Hitler was a radical racist imperialist that believed in defending capitalism by any means necessary. He had the support of prominent capitalist families, including the Bush family in the United States. While capitalists supported and profited from Hitler, revolutionary socialists fought against him and were murdered by him.
Likewise, it was overwhelmingly the sacrifices of Soviet Union that destroyed Nazi Germany.
Stalin, however, was the gravedigger of the Soviet system. Socialism/communism must be democratic to run efficiently and meet the people’s needs properly. This is why Liberation News advocates Political Revolution in North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba. We are not Stalinists, but we do oppose U.S. intervention in Korea, and recognize the right of the people of North Korea to defend themselves from U.S. imperialism.
Had Iraq developed similar weapons 655,000 Iraqis would not be dead, and they would not be suffering under a US imposed Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people.
U.S. Hands Off Of North Korea!
U.S. Out of Iraq!
Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
The imperialist propagandists say that the mass incineration of the civilian populations at Nagasaki and Hiroshima was justified by saving the lives of American soldiers. These two bombs murdered 214,000 people, many of them children, and very, very few of them had anything to do with the conflict between the competing capitalist/imperialist powers of the United States, Germany, and Japan.
214,000 people, that’s 76 times the number of people killed in the September 11 attack.
The question of American lives being more important than those of the Japanese aside, it is well documented that Japan had contacted the United States and was on the verge of surrendering at the time of the atomic bombings. It appears that the true motivation for U.S. terror against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was aimed at the Soviet Union and the rest of the people of the world that might stand up to U.S. imperialism. It was a demonstration to show what kind of weaponry the United States had and the fact that the U.S. was crazy enough to use it to annihilate whole cities.
Call me and other “radical socialists” warped, but we just don’t see this kind of targeting of a civilian population for mass murder as justified. The United States is the only country in the world that has used atomic weapons, and it is the only country that has repeatedly threatened to use such weapons again.
Likewise the US/UN war against the people of Korea targeted the civilian population for death. Estimates range from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 Koreans dying as a result of that imperialist intervention in Korea. In one of a number of well known cases, on July 1950, at the South Korean village of No Gun Ri, US troops massacred 400 Korean civilians who were seeking shelter from US bombing and strafing under a railroad bridge.
The US occupiers, besides killing millions of people, installed the tyrannical regime of Syngman Rhee, a brutal US puppet who massacred and tortured suspected Communists and trade-union activists. Syngman Rhee was just one of many brutal capitalist dictators the United States government has imposed on the people of the third world.
Mike Kimetz seems to want to blame me for the crimes of Hitler as well. Adolf Hitler was a radical racist imperialist that believed in defending capitalism by any means necessary. He had the support of prominent capitalist families, including the Bush family in the United States. While capitalists supported and profited from Hitler, revolutionary socialists fought against him and were murdered by him.
Likewise, it was overwhelmingly the sacrifices of Soviet Union that destroyed Nazi Germany.
Stalin, however, was the gravedigger of the Soviet system. Socialism/communism must be democratic to run efficiently and meet the people’s needs properly. This is why Liberation News advocates Political Revolution in North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba. We are not Stalinists, but we do oppose U.S. intervention in Korea, and recognize the right of the people of North Korea to defend themselves from U.S. imperialism.
Had Iraq developed similar weapons 655,000 Iraqis would not be dead, and they would not be suffering under a US imposed Islamic government that has functioning death squads and torture chambers, taken away women's rights, shoots protesters down in the streets, and cannot meet the most basic needs of the Iraqi people.
U.S. Hands Off Of North Korea!
U.S. Out of Iraq!
Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
As for the claim that was made that the North Koreans started the war. To the Koreans they live in one country. Korea has only recently been divided. In the south the U.S. occupiers had set up a murderous dictatorship, a dictatorship that even resorted to hiring the police and torturers of the Japanese occupation. The Soviet Union that occupied northern Korea, on the other hand, put in power people that had resisted the Japanese occupation. The people in South Korea rose up against the United State’s puppet dictatorship in a popular rebellion. North Korea then intervened against the southern occupation and were greeted as liberators. To the Korean people this was a Korean affair. With advent of US intervention that started with a massive bombing campaign that left nothing standing, the north was then aided by Soviet and Chinese troops. In my opinion, blame for the war rests solely on the shoulders of the United States government for setting up a horrible dictatorship and then intervening in Korea’s internal affairs at a time when the Korean people had rejected the government the U.S. had imposed on them.
Is this a one sided view? Perhaps. But it is no more one sided than the official propaganda in the United States that claims that North Korea started the war. To me the Koreans, “North” and “South”, aren’t responsible for starting the war any more than George Washington was responsible for starting the war with Britain.
Is this a one sided view? Perhaps. But it is no more one sided than the official propaganda in the United States that claims that North Korea started the war. To me the Koreans, “North” and “South”, aren’t responsible for starting the war any more than George Washington was responsible for starting the war with Britain.
Painting: Picasso's 1951 “Massacre in Korea”
1950: 100,000 Executed by Imperialism's Korean Dictatorship
[The US war of aggression in Korea murdered 5 million Koreans. Part of that murder was the cold blooded executions of over 100,000 leftists and suspected leftists by the South Korean government in 1950. Over 54,000 U.S. soldiers died in the U.S. war to defend that murderous U.S. imposed regime. The following AP article exposes what many on the left have known about for decades, but has been hidden from the general public in the United States by the government and corporate media. -Steven Argue]
AP Probes 'Cold-Blooded Slaughter' in South Korea
By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press
Published: May 18, 2008 4:15 PM ET
DAEJEON Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The mass executions - intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners - were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were ``the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,'' said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.
That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is ``very conservative,'' said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.
In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.
Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped ``secret'' and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.
Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.
In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.
Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.
``Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,'' said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.
The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They ``knew nothing about communism.''
The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on ``mass civilian sacrifice,'' led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents - not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.
The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions - at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.
In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them ``illegal acts the then-state authority committed.''
The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.
The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.
In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.
The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a ``re-education'' organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.
North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began - ``bad security risks,'' as a police official described the detainees at the time.
The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials - to no obvious effect - but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean ``internal matter,'' even though he controlled South Korea's military.
Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.
The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.
White-clad detainees - bent, submissive, with hands bound - were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.
Trembling policemen - ``they hadn't shot anyone before'' - were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.
Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.
Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.
``Bodies were just piled upon each other,'' said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. ``Arms would come off when they turned them over.'' The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially ``forgotten.''
When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of ``waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil,'' his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as ``fabrication'' by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.
But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified ``secret'' and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide ``thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks'' by the South Koreans.
Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing ``the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon,'' 20 miles south of Seoul.
Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.
That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.
His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.
Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.
Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that ``orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top,'' that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.
But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the ``murderous barbarism'' of North Koreans.
Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.
``My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists,'' said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.
``My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband,'' she said. ``She suffered unspeakable pain.''
Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.
``I cried,'' he said. ``I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'''
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. ``Our investigative power is so meager,'' commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.
His immediate concern is resources. ``The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year,'' he said.
South Korean conservatives complain the ``truth'' campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.
The life of the commission - with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million - is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.
Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 - not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.
By exposing the truth of such episodes, ``we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families,'' the commission says. It also wants to educate people, ``not just in Korea, but throughout the international community,'' to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to ``prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press
1950: 100,000 Executed by Imperialism's Korean Dictatorship
[The US war of aggression in Korea murdered 5 million Koreans. Part of that murder was the cold blooded executions of over 100,000 leftists and suspected leftists by the South Korean government in 1950. Over 54,000 U.S. soldiers died in the U.S. war to defend that murderous U.S. imposed regime. The following AP article exposes what many on the left have known about for decades, but has been hidden from the general public in the United States by the government and corporate media. -Steven Argue]
AP Probes 'Cold-Blooded Slaughter' in South Korea
By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press
Published: May 18, 2008 4:15 PM ET
DAEJEON Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The mass executions - intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners - were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were ``the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,'' said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.
Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.
That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is ``very conservative,'' said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.
In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.
Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped ``secret'' and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.
Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.
In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.
Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.
``Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,'' said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.
The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They ``knew nothing about communism.''
The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on ``mass civilian sacrifice,'' led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents - not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.
The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions - at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.
In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them ``illegal acts the then-state authority committed.''
The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.
The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.
In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.
The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a ``re-education'' organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.
North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began - ``bad security risks,'' as a police official described the detainees at the time.
The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials - to no obvious effect - but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean ``internal matter,'' even though he controlled South Korea's military.
Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.
The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.
White-clad detainees - bent, submissive, with hands bound - were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.
Trembling policemen - ``they hadn't shot anyone before'' - were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.
Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.
Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.
``Bodies were just piled upon each other,'' said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. ``Arms would come off when they turned them over.'' The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially ``forgotten.''
When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of ``waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil,'' his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as ``fabrication'' by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.
But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified ``secret'' and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide ``thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks'' by the South Koreans.
Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing ``the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon,'' 20 miles south of Seoul.
Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.
That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.
His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.
Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.
Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that ``orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top,'' that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.
But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the ``murderous barbarism'' of North Koreans.
Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.
``My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists,'' said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.
``My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband,'' she said. ``She suffered unspeakable pain.''
Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.
``I cried,'' he said. ``I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'''
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. ``Our investigative power is so meager,'' commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.
His immediate concern is resources. ``The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year,'' he said.
South Korean conservatives complain the ``truth'' campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.
The life of the commission - with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million - is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.
Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 - not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.
By exposing the truth of such episodes, ``we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families,'' the commission says. It also wants to educate people, ``not just in Korea, but throughout the international community,'' to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to ``prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press
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