SPEAKING at the Brics Group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) conference in China, President Putin said of the North Koreans: ‘They’d rather eat grass than give up their nuclear programme.’
Putin was explaining why the pursuit of further sanctions against North Korea is ‘useless’. He also warned that the US and its running dogs, like the UK ruling class, who are ramping up the ‘military hysteria’ are risking a global catastrophe.
However, as is well known, the imperialist powers know no other way of proceeding than to seek to destroy all those who are brave enough to stand in their way – after all, they are the only ones that have actually used nuclear bombs – not against the Japanese armies but against the Japanese people in 1945.
In fact, they rearmed surrendering Japanese soldiers in South East Asia to try and defeat the nationalists stopping the reimposition of the old empires. The use of nuclear weapons against Japan was, in fact, meant to be a lesson for Stalin and the victorious Red Army on the kind of weaponry that the imperialist powers had and were prepared to use.
It is on record that before the USSR acquired nuclear arms the western powers, following Churchill’s Fulton speech in 1946 opening up the ‘Cold War’, were discussing the prospect of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR.
Russia acquiring nuclear weapons post 1945 was a matter of life and death for the working class of that country, and of the world. The drive of the North Koreans to acquire nuclear arms must be seen in the same way – as the only way open to the North Korean people to prevent a repeat of the Korean war onslaught on the North that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed millions of homes.
The North Korean people want to be able to defend their country and to show the US and UK ruling classes that they cannot be attacked with impunity! The facts are plain, with the coming to grief of the imperialist onslaught on Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 – which produced ISIS, and with the defeat of their effort to overthrow Assad in Syria from 2011 onwards, the US, the UK and the EU are already mobilising against Russia and have begun to impose ramps of sanctions on it on the grounds that it is interfering in US elections, while the US government has already taken over the Russian consulate in San Francisco.
In fact, they have been treating Russia in the same way as they are treating North Korea, ever since the successful Russian Revolution of 1917 that brought an end to the Czarist empire – the prison house of the nations – and began the world socialist revolution of the working class while giving an enormous boost to the struggle for national liberation.
A weakened imperialism after the Second World War was unable to prevent the victorious revolutions in Yugoslavia, China, North Korea and then Vietnam. The world revolution is still a work in progress. With capitalism facing a worldwide economic, political and military crisis, imperialism is now fighting for its life, manoeuvring to strike at its enemies from Russia to China, from Venezuela to North Korea, and from the UK to the US working class.
It would obviously be very stupid of the Stalinist bureaucracy to give those that wish to dig the grave of the Russian and Chinese revolutions a helping hand. This is why Putin has been forced to dismiss the idea of a joint attack on North Korea. However, we cannot forget that historically Stalin thought that Hitler would not attack the USSR and refused to believe it for days even after the attack started. The bureaucracy is always vulnerable to the manoeuvres of imperialism.
Only the working class can really assist the besieged people of North Korea, Venezuela, Syria and Palestine by carrying forward the world socialist revolution to its victory in the western capitalist states.
It is the historical task of the working class to disarm the imperialist powers by overthrowing capitalism in Europe and the US. We must build the revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International to lead the rapidly developing World Socialist Revolution to its victory right up to the establishment of the World Socialist Republic!
