A U.S. War Against North Korea Would Be an Utterly UNJUST IMPERIALIST WAR—And Threaten the Whole World!
Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime BEFORE They Incinerate Humanity!

April 19, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

There is a very real threat right now of aggressive U.S. threats against North Korea turning into a horrific U.S. war, including use of nuclear weapons.

In Washington, DC, Trump threatened North Korea in godfather fashion, “They gotta behave.” Meanwhile, in a visit to the “demilitarized” zone between North and South Korea, Mike Pence declared that the “era of strategic patience is over.”

What the fuck does that mean!?!

The U.S. invaded Korea in 1950 and waged a war of mass murder that killed three million people and razed to the ground almost every building in the north. Since then the U.S. has stationed 30,000 troops in South Korea. Trump openly talks about making North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “disappear.” And this fascist imperialist is now warning a small country to “behave”?

The U.S. already has severe sanctions on North Korea and is threatening to tighten the noose. They’ve implied that they’re waging “cyberwarfare” against North Korea, including targeting their missile program. They’re setting up anti-missile “defenses” in South Korea that are provocatively aimed at North Korea and their main backer, China. All this has been fucking “patience”?

And now the U.S., under the fascist Trump/Pence regime, intends to break with its past behavior and “patience” with something more hyper-aggressive, with “all options on the table”? What do threats of “all options” mean from a regime headed by a man who has asked, “If we have them [nuclear weapons], why can’t we use them?”

A sign of how serious all this is: the government of Japan said it is working on plans to “evacuate” 60,000 Japanese now in South Korea in the event the crisis escalates. And China’s foreign minister raised the possibility of “war break[ing] out on the peninsula.”

While exactly where all this is headed can’t be predicted, there is a certain “logic” that is driving things in an extremely dangerous direction. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” call concentrates the aim of those heading the U.S. now to dramatically enforce and strengthen American domination over other powers and the world as a whole. They are moving to profoundly and violently recast the way things have been for decades. They are rewriting the rules on use of military force, including nuclear war—not whether to threaten the use of nukes but how overtly to do so.

This is a regime that cannot allow even a perception of “weakness” and “lack of resolve.” In the face of North Korea’s refusal to cave in to U.S. demands, Trump/Pence may decide on a “preemptive” attack or use a manufactured incident—like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident justifying U.S. escalation in the Vietnam War.

While Kim Jong-un heads an oppressive regime, as a source of oppression, repression and violence in the world, including as a nuclear threat to humanity, North Korea’s impact is microscopic compared to what the U.S. imperialists have done for decades—and now in a greatly heightened way with the Trump/Pence regime. Given the history of the Korean War and what the U.S. has done up to today, it’s not irrational for the North Korean regime to think the U.S. would initiate an enormously destructive war of aggression. And as they have pointed out, Libya’s Qaddafi made a “deal” with the U.S. and other powers to shut down “weapons of mass destruction” programs, thinking that would keep his power intact—and they still massively bombed the country, overthrew his regime, and had him killed.

In this intense situation, some intended move—or even a miscalculation—by the U.S. or North Korea could quickly spiral out of control and engulf the whole Korean Peninsula in war. The U.S. not only has tens of thousands of troops in South Korea but huge nuclear-armed naval forces in the area and tens of thousands more troops in Japan. North Korea reportedly has some missiles that can reach South Korea and Japan, as well as vast array of artillery trained on the South. In addition, it claims it is close to developing missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. A U.S. war against North Korea could lead to millions of lives lost in the region, and it could spread beyond that. And if the nuclear “genie” is pulled out of the bottle in Korea, what is to prevent its use elsewhere by the U.S., and other nuclear powers?

Whatever the justification claimed by the U.S., such a war would be an utterly unjust IMPERIALIST WAR. And it would threaten all of humanity with nuclear incineration.

As communists, we are working for a world without nuclear weapons. And when the revolution comes to power in the U.S., the new socialist state would dismantle the nukes in the imperialist arsenal and refuse to produce or use such weapons. (For a visionary and concrete blueprint for this socialist society, get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian and adopted by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party.) But in the world today—where the U.S. is armed to the teeth with nukes, has used them, has consistently refused to pledge not to use such weapons first, and now has a president who openly hankers to use them—the U.S. is absolutely in the wrong to demand of anyone else that they must disarm.

The situation is extremely urgent. People everywhere must oppose the U.S. imperialist aggression in Korea. But there is an especially big, historical responsibility for people living in the U.S. A military attack by the U.S. would be a horrible war crime committed in the name of the people in the U.S. The people must begin right now to not just refuse to go along with the Trump/Pence threats but to actively and militantly oppose them. The best possible outcome for humanity would be the prevention of such a war and, in any case, the defeat of the U.S.’s unjust bullying and threats.

The fascists in power cannot be allowed to consolidate their hold on power. DRIVE OUT THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME BEFORE THEY EXTERMINATE HUMANITY!

 

       

 

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