June 6 — It will do absolutely no good to try and reduce the significance of the meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Roh Tae Woo in San Francisco, as the Soviet press is now doing.
The very idea of the head of the USSR meeting and shaking the blood-stained hand of this fascist puppet of U.S. imperialism, who is universally hated by the Korean people, north and south, is enough to turn the stomach of anyone with any sympathy for the Korean struggle.
That photo of Roh Tae Woo and Gorbachev displayed on the front page of so many papers on June 5 was worth millions and millions of words to the imperialist bourgeoisie. And it was a Tass photo, just to rub it in.
How could a Soviet communist get himself to carry out an act so utterly uncomradely and downright hostile toward the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Can it really be true that a giant socialist country would conduct itself this way toward a socialist ally, befriending its mortal enemy, the enemy of all the Korean people? And, moreover, a puppet ruler who needs 48,000 foreign troops to protect and defend him?
The billions and billions of dollars that are spent on the U.S. armed forces in Korea are not there to defend south Korea against a bogus invasion from the north. They are there to defend this ruthless mercenary who has never winced at clubbing unarmed students into unconsciousness, dousing them with tear gas, and when that fails using bullets. For almost a year now an aroused and vigorous labor movement has staged virtually uninterrupted protests against Roh's anti-labor, anti-working class dictates, imposed by the multinational corporations.
Is this not known in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where for the first time in this century the banner of worldwide anti-imperialist struggle was unfurled? Was it not from that great historic beginning that the Chinese Revolution, the Korean Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the struggles in the Philippines, in India, the Middle East — in fact all over Asia — took their inspiration?
Was it not from there that internationalist friendship, proletarian class solidarity, and anti-imperialist unity became factors of world historic significance? Of course, no one has ever claimed it was all the work of the USSR. But the Bolshevik Revolution, with its consistent policy of anti-imperialist struggle, of giving aid and comfort to its friends and opposition to the enemy within the imperialist camp, did indeed open a new page in the history of humankind.
Is all this being undone now? Is it all being thrown into the dustbin of history? Is this new grouping of bourgeois reformers intent on relieving itself of every vestige of revolutionary international solidarity?
June 25 will be the 40th anniversary of the day when U.S. imperialism set upon its barbarous course of an imperialist venture in Korea, which almost set the whole world afire with the threat of nuclear war. Millions of lives were lost — including 55,000 Americans — in the savage bombardment against all of north Korea which left not one building there untouched.
Didn't the USSR as well as China feel obligated to aid and assist a socialist ally under fire? Was it not the joint efforts of Korea, China and the USSR, with the political and moral support of millions upon millions of workers and peasants, which finally forced the imperialist colossus back below the 38th parallel, after so much blood was spilt and so much destroyed?
So it has come to this. Along comes no less than the President of the USSR to shake the hand of the butcher in a symbolic act which can only be interpreted as an abandonment of the former role and status of the USSR as the center and principal support of the anti-imperialist struggle against imperialist hegemony, against the world domination of U.S. imperialism.
How else can the ordinary worker and peasant, the ordinary person in any metropolitan imperialist country, interpret this except as an attempt to either curry favor with U.S. and Japanese imperialism or to directly conspire with them against a socialist ally and against the great popular resurgence of progressive anti-imperialist struggle in south Korea?
How inane, how innocuous sounds today's commentary by the Soviet news agency Tass on the Gorbachev-Roh meeting.
"As to prospects for the establishment of diplomatic relations [with south Korea]," writes Yuri Kornilov, "of which much is being written and said in the West nowadays, the Soviet stand is well known and remains unchanged."
Really? If it is that well known and unchanged, why wasn't there a prompt and unambiguous denial when Roh Tae Woo first arrived in San Francisco and announced the meeting? Instead, they let the imperialist press have three long days to build it up, and then, after all the speculation ended, Gorbachev did indeed meet with Roh Tae Woo and did say, "We will let the fruit grow ripe, and when the fruit grows ripe we will eat it."
What an astonishing way to talk about further diplomatic contact! Can anyone really mistake what this means?
But, Tass continues, "this issue [diplomatic relations] can be considered only in connection with further improvement of the situation in the Korean peninsula."
Where is there a scintilla of evidence of improvement in the Korean peninsula? Today there are more U.S. planes, more guns, another aircraft carrier, more annual exercises to intimidate the DPRK. Instead of the 40,000 U.S. troops last year, we now have 48,000. How could one stoop so low as to misrepresent patent facts that are so well known, even in the U.S.?
Then comes the real clincher in the Tass commentary, "the removal of ideological blinkers [sic] from our foreign policy." So that's it. An anti-imperialist, socialist international policy, that's ideological blinders!
This analyst ought to know from the free education he got in the USSR that these ideological blinders were what saved the Bolshevik Revolution when a 14-power coalition of imperialist powers invaded in 1918. It was assistance from the worldwide working class and oppressed masses, including massive resistance, that made impossible the further pursuit of imperialist intervention and continuing civil war.
Now removing these ideological blinders goes along with a "course towards broader economic contacts and political dialogue with other countries." This is an allusion to trade between the USSR and south Korea, which is said to have reached $600 million last year and is expected to rise to $1 billion this year. But this is a pittance (and probably exaggerated).
Is it for such sordid, narrow economic motives that one overthrows a fundamental socialist relationship with an ally? The truth of the matter is that the economic relationship with south Korea is of little if any economic significance when one considers the total weight of the Soviet economic system.
The real reason is that the Soviet bourgeois reformers aim to get in on the alliance between the U.S. and Japan, to participate with them as partners in a new Asia policy, which has all the earmarks of strengthening imperialism and weakening the anti-imperialist movement.
This in turn weakens the USSR.
It won't help the USSR in Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Kirghizia. Or in Asia, Africa or Latin America.
The crux of the policy is based on illusion, that the motive force of monopoly capitalism and its military machine has undergone a radical revolution of self-reform, from warmaker to peacemaker. Some such ideas were floated in 1963, following the signing of the ban on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, which was to bring about the dawn of a new age, not only in nuclear disarmament but in general.
We see now how those hopes were based upon illusions, that Star Wars continues to be the principal preoccupation of the Pentagon, that the U.S. now not only wants the old-fashioned NATO but seeks to bring within its fold a reunited, imperialist Germany while making the Pacific nothing less than an American lake.
Those are facts. The policy of the Gorbachev administration is based on quicksand, as events will surely show.
Last updated: 23 March 2018