Published this little messterpiece in my MySpace blog around a half-hour ago or so, and decided to publish it here, for reasons I give in the MySpace intro to the editorial.
If you like, just ignore part, or all, of the whole stinkin' mess, and scroll down to the figure pics instead.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, keep goin' down, down, down the page, and may God help you, 'cos you're in for kinda a long read, Buckaroo.
Just hope y'all think it's worth the time.
An Unusual Take On North Korea's Bomb Test
Current mood: Amused and Bemused
Category: Amused and Bemused News and Politics
The following op-ed piece on the recent North Korean nuclear test by one F.Red Bergen was sent to me to-day by a Yahoo Marxist-Leninist news group to which I subscribe.
The reason am posting it here in my blog, is that, for many Americans, any Marxist-Leninist take on ANY issue, much less this one, is rarely, if ever seen.
Personally, I find Mr. Bergen's take to be marred by two major problems; one's stylistic, in that he trots out the usual cliches of poor Marxist-Leninist rhetoric like so many badly whipped circus ponies on command.
The other's an internal contradiction between the expressed unconditional defence of the DPRK that Mr. Bergen states that all revolutionaries should have and make, and his attacks on the DPRK's upper strata for its privileged life-style at the expense of so-called ordinary North Koreans.
The contrast between that opening statement, and the latter sentiment into which Mr. Bergen launches half-ways into the essay are just a teeny startling to me.
Personally, am no fan of Kim Jong-Il and his feudal fief. Am also no fan of the Bush Administration and its policies and actions, either.
My own take on this whole matter is that the DPRK(short for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, for those of you out there who've neither read nor heard the North Korean government's name for itself and its country), far from being a bunch of nuts, as has been often portrayed in the US media, is letting the US know, in a pretty clear fashion, that enough's enough with the Six-Power Talks, indirect negotiations bullshit.
What the North Koreans have wanted with the US all along is for us to sit down with them, in direct and bi-lateral talks, and jaw-jaw about the DPRK's nuclear power and weapons issues, as well as American troop levels in South Korea, and probably a number of other items that I don't even begin to have a clue about.
Me, I think that we should do just that, end the whole "Axis of Evil" crap that this Administration has been preaching ever since 12th September, 2001, and, along with the Six-Power Talks' partners(the Republic of Korea, aka South Korea, China, Japan and Russia)consulting, hash out a serious, no-bullshit deal with the DPRK, and make sure that, however this deal's worked out, the North Koreans, the Americans, and everyone else on board for this, sticks to it.
If the DPRK tries anything cute after the deal's worked out, it should face serious international, diplomatic and economic sanctions, and I think even China, whose leaders were made saps of by the North Korean nuclear test, would support those.
What they won't support, and I wouldn't blame 'em, is a US-led invasion of the DPRK.
'Sides, we don't have the trained and equipped troop levels we'd need to invade the North and not have it turn into a cluster-fuck, because of our on-going committments cum cluster-fucks in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have got so many of our Regular, Reserve and National Guard troops pinned down in those places already.
'Nuff said by me.
Look at the piece below, and decide what you think of it, its author's opinions, and my bullshit above for yourselves.
Yours, D., who's been listenin' to DPRK music the whole damn time I've been writin' this.
The latest tune to pop up on my personal DPRK Hit Parade in closing this out is "Wish Of Health"( for the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il)by the Ponchonbo Electronic Ensemble, a DPRK pop music band.
Anyway, am gonna get afore I bores ya with more such shee-ite.
Yours Again, D.
Working Class Emancipation Editorial
North Korea nuke test: A justified measure of self-defense
A powerful nuclear deterrent can help keep the imperialist
menace at
bay, but only political revolution in the north and socialist
revolution
in the south will protect the deformed workers state in the
North and
advance the Korean revolution.
The butchers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are up in arms
(literally)
because North Korea apparently tested a nuclear bomb. Once
again,
Washington and Wall Street are threatening to drag the world
into a
nuclear holocaust because North Korea dares to defend itself
against
their threats of invasion and regime change. Let's remember
that,
contrary to the claims of Bush and his Democratic partners in
crime,
Iraq and Afghanistan were not invaded because they had "weapons
of mass
destruction". They were invaded because they didn't.
We revolutionaries are for the unconditional defense of North
Korea,
because the post-World-War-II liberation of Korea destroyed
capitalism
in the North, driving out the capitalists and big landlords, and
created
a workers' state that was deformed from the start by a
conservative
bureaucracy on the Stalinist model. Soviet troops drove the
Japanese
imperialist invaders out of the North in the summer of 1945,
installing
the government of Kim Il Sung, but in the South, the US
occupiers
installed the tyrannical regime of Syngman Rhee, a brutal US
puppet who
massacred and tortured suspected Communists and trade-union
activists.
The isolation and impoverishment of the stalled Korean
revolution was
increased by the US-led Korean war, in which the US leveled
North Korean
cities with saturation bombing and an official policy of gunning
down
civilians from the air (see the declassified memo dated July 25,
1950
from US Air Force colonel T.C. Rodgers to General Timberlake, in
the US
National Archives). Over three million Koreans were killed by
the US and
allied imperialist forces under cover of a United Nations
"police action."
In 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. A 1950 letter from US
ambassador
to South Korea John J. Muccio to Assistant Secretary of State
Dean Rusk
proves that the slaughter of these civilians by the 7th US
Cavalry
regiment was consistent with a policy approved at the highest
levels of
the US military "If refugees do appear from north of US lines
they will
receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing
they will
be shot," writes Muccio, reporting on a decision of the US
generals on
the night before the massacre. This puts the lie to the
Pentagon's
earlier claim that the massacre was "an unfortunate tragedy" and
"not a
deliberate killing." The memo was reported by the Associated
Press in 1999.
The North Korean regime under Kim Jong Il is known for its fiery
denunciations of US imperialism, which the capitalist media,
including
Bush's liberal critics, play up with a heavy helping of
anti-Asian
racism, doing their part for the war propaganda effort. But
aside from
its occasional military exercises, which are entirely justified
by the
nuclear-armed menace poised on its southern border, the
Stalinist North
Korean bureaucracy pursues a policy of conciliation with
imperialism. It
cannot do otherwise. The Stalinist bureaucrats, a privileged
caste of
North Korean society, fear workers' democracy in industry and
agriculture, because it would do away with their obscene
privileges and
autocratic brutality. Instead of allowing for democratic
planning and
adjustment of the economy, they substitute economic development
by
arbitrary command. Such clumsy maneuvers lead to crises, in
which they
must turn to foreign investment to correct the disastrous
results,
continually weakening the social and economic basis for
socialism that
was gained at the end of the Second World War with the help of
the
Soviet army.
The bureaucratic dictatorship in Pyongyang cannot defend the
workers'
state no matter how many nuclear weapons it has, because the
bureaucrats
around Kim Jong Il have all the appetites and aspirations of
capitalists
without the social base of private property that could satisfy
these
appetites. They are a deadening, conservative social layer
suffocating a
still-living revolutionary class, and they fear that to mobilize
the
workers and poor farmers in defense of their lands and factories
would
unleash a force that would sweep them away, too. North Korean
workers
and peasants must know that their future lies not in
"self-reliance", a
bureaucratic euphemism for the starvation and isolation imposed
by the
imperialists on the Korean people, but in proletarian revolution
in the
South, in Japan, and in the heart of imperialism, the United
States. A
new political leadership is needed in the DPRK, committed to
world
revolution, which is the only hope for the survival of the North
Korean
workers' state. The task of overthrowing the
counterrevolutionary North
Korean bureaucracy is in the hands of the Korean workers and
poor
farmers, and they must have the full solidarity of workers and
youth in
the US and other imperialist countries. We call on workers and
youth in
the US to make every effort to defend North Korea against
imperialist
attack, and fight for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal
of US
troops from Korea.
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