Click on the headline to link to a Workers Vanguard article U.S. Imperialism Hands Off North Korea!, dated January 17, 2003.
COMMENTARY
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM- WHEN YOU LET THE GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE –WATCH OUT-AND DON’T CRY ABOUT IT
In a recent blog commenting on Massachusetts Senator John Forbes Kerry’s emerging presidential campaign for the elections of 2008 (see October 2006 archives, dated October 13th) this writer commented on Mr. Kerry’s hue and cry over the fact that North Korea had recently detonated some small nuclear devise and his call for America to take ‘appropriate action’ including, presumably a preemptive first strike against that country. That position has also been echoed by others in the liberal and Democratic Party establishments. At that time I wrote that I would have further comments later. Here goes.
The hard realities of international politics and military policy in the year 2006 are that any “third world” countries that are in the crosshairs of the American imperialists(or other imperialists) need nuclear weapons in order to survive. I warned from the start this commentary would not be pretty. The two destructive wars in Iraq over the past 15 years, where a marginally harmful figure to imperialists interests like Saddam Hussein was dealt severe conventional military blows, when the West even had a tiny thought that he had the potential (in some distant future) to produce such weaponry dramatically brings that point home. In the current one-superpower world dominated overwhelmingly by a far-flung American military presence this fact cannot have been lost on any leader of a small nation-least of all Kim Jung Il of North Korea.
Western imperialism’s hypocrisy over the occurrence of the blast and the media’s treatment of it, replete with vintage film footage reminiscent of old Soviet May Day parades, like some central event of the presumably long past Cold War seems strikingly irrational in the context of current American military capabilities.
Let me cite the standard leftist comments on such hypocrisy. While such comments might seem tired and reflect an old Cold War reality they nevertheless should underline any leftist response to the international situation today. Hell, for all practical purposes it is starting to look like that kind of world again. To begin- America, after all, let the genie out of the bottle when it first developed the atomic bomb for use in the waning days of World War II. Those who let the genie out of the bottle should not cry- over 60 years later- when some upstarts come along, use the simplification of that technology to develop their own weaponry and want to play in the same sandbox.
Commentators , in defending American leadership of an exclusive nuclear club, have placed great emphasis on the deterrent effect, based on mutually assured destruction, of the then escalating nuclear arms race during most parts of the Cold War which ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Two comments should disabuse the reader of the notion of firm stewardship by American imperialism over that time. One, the Americans ruling class did in fact use nuclear weapons on essentially defenseless and defeated people in Japan. And has been the only power in history to do so. Two, the American imperialists today have several thousand serious nuclear weapons with the capacity to launch them anytime, anywhere and if history is any judge with little compunction to use them. “Third World” tin-pot dictators, quasi-socialist bureaucrats and other assorted rulers are not the only ones that should be worried by such facts. Damn, I am worried too.
Among the first political activities that I engaged in as a youth was the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I admired the struggles of the British Labor Party to make Great Britain a nuclear-free zone during the height of the Cold War. As an advocate today for a socialist world that youthful dream still holds sway in the back of my mind- but now with a much better understanding of the nature of world politics and far less naiveté about the nature and intentions of the American capitalist system. Iraq today is only the most graphic example of the ruthlessness of that system. However, unlike such groups as the hard-line Stalinist Workers World Party which apparently wants the North Korean U.S. political franchise (for what it is worth) I do not see Kim Jung Il as one of nature’s noblemen. Nor is North Korea a “workers paradise” by any stretch of the imagination. However it is up to the workers and peasants of North Korea (along with their brethren in the South) to take care of that question of "regime change" and move forward to a socialist society. That task cannot be outsourced under the bloody dictates of international imperialism and its hangers-on. Until that future socialist time , however, make no mistake I join others, including the Workers World Party, in demanding- HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA!
Revised October 20, 2006
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