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On 25 May 2009, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) successfully conducted its second underground nuclear test, thereby significantly boosting its self-reliant, self-defensive military deterrent power, aimed at securing the independence and sovereignty of the country and the socialist system chosen by the Korean people. Alongside this nuclear test, the revolutionary armed forces, the scientists and technicians of the DPRK have also conducted missile launches and taken other steps to defend the security of the country and the dignity of her people.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPBG-ML) resolutely and fully supports all the just steps taken by the Korean people, under the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) and Comrade Kim Jong Il, to boost the country’s defences, with a view to coping with the intensified aggressive challenge by the US and Japanese imperialists and their followers and to open the way to a great, prosperous and powerful socialist nation.
Whether or not to conduct nuclear tests or to develop missile technology is a matter pertaining to the sovereignty of the country. In a world where the leading imperialist powers possess massive nuclear arsenals, and where US imperialism has not only threatened but actually sanctioned their use, our party has always held the view that we unconditionally support the right of socialist countries, and other developing countries bullied and threatened by imperialism, to develop and possess nuclear weapons for their own defence.
In the case of the Korean peninsula, we note that the nuclear issue is one that is entirely of the making of the United States. The US imperialists planned and threatened to use nuclear weapons in their barbarous war against the Korean people, 1950-53. The only reason they were not used, as they were against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that the Soviet Union had by then succeeded in developing such weapons of its own.
Right from the 1950s, in defiance of the Armistice Agreement it signed, the United States has stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons in south Korea, posing a mortal threat to the entire Korean people as well as to the People’s Republic of China, the former Soviet Union/Russian Federation, and all the anti-imperialist forces of the Asia-Pacific region. The United States has threatened to use nuclear weapons against the DPRK on numerous occasions and to this day keeps the DPRK on its ‘nuclear first strike’ list.
Such being the case, the CPGB-ML has consistently held the view that the DPRK has not merely the right to develop its own nuclear weapons but is also faced with the necessity of so doing. As even Madeline Albright, former US Secretary of State, has pointed out, the blunt truth shown by a comparison of the Iraqi and Korean situations is that you are attacked if you do not possess such weapons and you are not attacked if you do.
The CPGB-ML, therefore, takes this opportunity to warmly congratulate Comrade Kim Jong Il, the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Korean People’s Army, the scientists, technicians, workers and service personnel, and the entire Korean people on the success of their second nuclear test.
It is the height of hypocrisy for Gordon Brown to describe the DPRK as a “danger to the world”, when British troops are marauding in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ireland, the Balkans and elsewhere, and when his government still insists on raiding its bankrupt treasury to spend billions on renewing the Trident nuclear missile programme.
The Obama administration, belying its own promises of change and dialogue, has refused to seize the opportunity to turn a fresh page in the United States’ relations with the Korean people, instead falling back on the old, tried and failed methods of provocation, threat and pressure. By so doing, it made the DPRK’s firm response inevitable.
The acts which the imperialist media denounce as showing DPRK aggression are in fact the only possible method that can be used in the present circumstances to deter imperialist aggression and promote peace on the Korean peninsula. Everybody who loves peace must applaud the DPRK’s courageous, intelligent and unflinching stand in the defence of peace. Despite the roars of frustrated rage emerging from all the world giants of imperialism who are bent on destroying socialism root and branch even in such a small country as the DPRK, the DPRK keeps alight the flame of socialism and peace that leads the working people of the world forward to a bright future.
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Via Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Late last week, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign started to receive information from members about adverts that they had seen on the London Underground. The adverts by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and ThinkIsrael included a map that included the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, together with Jews for Justice for Palestinians, immediately worked to bring these adverts down. We complained to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ourselves, and notified our members and supporters, many of whom also made complaints to the ASA, Transport for London and CBS Outdoor, which was the company that put up the adverts.
Sarah Colborne, Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Director of Campaigns and Operations, said:
‘The Palestine Solidarity Campaign welcomes the removal of these adverts, which had a map showing Israel as including the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights – which are all illegally occupied by Israel. These adverts wiped Palestine off the map. It was particularly grotesque to use this map in an advert for tourism, given that under the Israeli blockade of Gaza, even humanitarian aid staff are denied entry.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign had found the posters astonishing, given that the ASA had already upheld a previous complaint against ThinkIsrael.com for using a similarly misleading map in an advertisement placed in the Radio Times in 2007’.
On that occasion, the ASA ruled that ThinkIsrael.com had breached the ‘truthfulness’ clause, and also the ‘non-response’ clause, when it failed to reply to ASA’s correspondence.
PSC welcomes the deluge of complaints from members and supporters on this issue.
Media coverage of the posters being withdrawn:
Guardian : http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/22/israel-underground-ads-occupied-territories-map
BBC : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8063435.stm
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Via ft.com.
Few embodied the strength of Soviet communist ideals and practice like General Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov, who died on May 6, aged 85. He was Soviet power incarnate: even as it crumbled, he remained loyal. He hated the post-Soviet order but achieved rehabilitation under it, as the Stalin whom Varennikov revered was merged decorously into a pantheon of Great Russian heroes.
At a time – the fall of the Soviet Union – that seemed to call for opportunism and a swift sloughing of the old skin, he reaffirmed his commitment to the October Revolution, to international socialism and to the Soviet mission. He saw himself as a servant of these causes and had the character to remain true to them, coupled with the moral blindness necessary to regard them as being good for the world and Joseph Stalin as the greatest figure of the 20th century.
Varennikov was born poor, and a Cossack, near Krasnodar in southern Russia. Cossacks were rarely natural communists: that he took that path suggests an early hardening experience. Longing for military service from childhood, he entered cadet school in 1941 as war was looming, graduating the following year to be sent straight to the battle that more than any other defined total war: Stalingrad.
Stalingrad was, incredibly, a victory: with others later, it forced the retreat of the Wehrmacht and opened up the road to Berlin – a road Varennikov took with courage, sustaining three wounds, placing himself among those happy few who took the Reichstag and thereby earning the honour of casting captured Nazi banners at the foot of Lenin’s tomb during the postwar victory parade.
The Great Patriotic War, in which 30m lost their lives, has remained an emotional and patriotic touchstone for more than six decades: Varennikov was chief among those who kept its flame bright through the succeeding years. On his website there is a photograph of Soviet soldiers in Berlin, gathered round one of their number (who might be Varennikov) grinning below a luxuriant Cossack moustache and giving the thumbs-up. Beneath is written: “Dear Comrades, I warmly and heartily congratulate you … on the day of the Great Victory” – a message that must have been composed shortly before his death, to commemorate the end of the war in May 1945.
He remained in the army after the war and began to rise in rank: while at military college in 1953, he was seconded to guard duty outside the hall in which Stalin lay in state, a mark of distinction for the young officer. He remembered: “I was allowed inside the hall and I could see Stalin’s face clearly. I had the feeling that he had not died, that he only fell asleep and at any moment would get up again.”
As Varennikov rose, he was afforded an unusual degree of trust: much of his career was spent outside the USSR, in East Germany and then training fraternal allies’ armies in Syria, Angola and Ethiopia. Made a general in 1978, he was pulled into the increasingly hopeless Afghan campaign the following year. He became commander of Soviet forces in the country in 1984, a little before Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Under Gorbachev, a growing pressure for disengagement made itself felt; announced in 1987, withdrawal was completed early in 1989. Varennikov, however, had a good war: he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and deputy defence minister.
But he and Gorbachev were each other’s nemeses. The general secretary – endorsed by the KGB – first seemed like an orthodox communist reformer, then revealed himself as an admirer of democracy and the free market. Varennikov maintained a high post, as commander of land forces; but his world, material and more importantly spiritual, was being torn apart by nationalists, dissidents and liberals.
In the hot summer of 1991, he joined other military and party men in signing a letter to the orthodox Sovetskaya Rossiya daily, which proclaimed that “the great state entrusted to us by history … is being plunged into darkness and oblivion”. When a group led by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman, and interior minister Boris Pugo cooked up a conspiracy to depose Gorbachev and declare emergency rule, Varennikov joined. He, with three others, flew to the Crimea on August 18 to confront Gorbachev, then on holiday in his dacha. Having failed to persuade Gorbachev to pretend to be too ill to continue, Varennikov flew to Ukraine and briefed the Ukrainian leadership that a state of emergency would be declared.
The coup foundered; Gorbachev returned; Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, emerged as the hero of the hour; the Soviet Union completed its disintegration by the end of the year. Varennikov, with the others, was imprisoned: alone among them, he refused the amnesty offered by the Duma (parliament), demanded a trial – and was acquitted. Eagerly embraced by nationalists and communists, he used the trial as a forum for his beliefs: he had “no regrets” except for “a bitter feeling that we failed to save the country”.
That bitterness was nursed with others through the Yeltsin years, as he sat for the Communist party in the Duma, defended army veterans who were living in poverty and inveighed against the degradation of the country. His sentiments, however, found an echo in Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, who also saw the break-up of the USSR as the geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. Putin received him and gave him an honorary post as inspector general of the defence ministry. On his death, Putin’s successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, hailed him as a “distinguished commander” and “a true patriot”. True he was: but to a fatherland which, as he said, he had failed to save.
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Yesterday, I had a lengthy talk with Miguel d’Escoto, president pro tempore of the United Nations General Assembly. I had listened to his remarks at the ALBA meeting in Cumana on April 17.
I admired his significant statement. I had first met him after the victory of the Revolution in Nicaragua when Daniel Ortega appointed him minister of Foreign Affairs, a position he held until Reagan’s dirty war, which caused the death of thousands of Sandinista youths and great economic damage, ended up with the victory of counterrevolution in Nicaragua.
The backwardness that situation brought throughout seventeen years, and the economic and social disaster imposed by the U.S. “democracy” on the noble Nicaraguan people, led to the return of the Sandinista government to the country; this time with constitutional limitations and a marked dependency from the United States. Daniel denounced it on April 17, at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain where with great dignity he condemned the blockade on Cuba. On the other hand, Miguel d’Escoto, who as a minister of Foreign Affairs of Nicaragua had earned great prestige with his talents and ideas, was elected in 2007 president of the UN General Assembly for a two-year period.
It was in this capacity that he attended the Non Aligned Movement’s ministerial meeting held in Havana this past April 28, 29 and 30. Today, he was at the Revolution Square with Raul watching the impressive parade for the International Worker’s Day carried live by our television while in Santiago, the cradle of the Revolution, and in the other provinces of the country enthusiastic parades took place which constituted an irrefutable expression of the fortitude of our Revolution.
The words of the announcers were heard from the rostrum vibrant with emotion as Miguel d’Escoto and many foreign relation ministers and representatives of NAM as well as two thousand visitors from countries of every continent shared the joy of this workers’ celebration.
The poem dedicated by Fayad Jamis to Manuel Navarro Luna, a revolutionary and communist poet who lived in Granma province since he was a six year old child –the same province where our last war of liberation started– was quoted more than once.
From his early childhood, Navarro Luna was forced to give up school and start working in various trades. He worked as a janitor, a shoe shiner, and a diver, a night watchman and a clerk. He studied by himself to acquire some knowledge.
In 1915 he published his first poems and in 1919 his first book. In 1930 he joined the Communist Party.
He worked at the first Communist Mayor’s office in Cuba after the fall of Machado’s government in 1933. After the revolutionary victory in 1959, and challenging the passing of time, he became a member of the National Militias and took part in the fight against the counterrevolutionary bandits at Escambray and in the victory of Playa Giron.
…For this freedom of song beneath the rain
We will have to give our all
For this freedom of being closely bound
To the heart of the people sweet, firm we will have to give our all
For this freedom of a sunflower opened in the dawn of factory furnaces
And illuminated schools
And of crackling earth and waking child
We will have to give our all
There is not alternative but freedom
There is not other path but freedom
There is not homeland but freedom
There will be no poetry without the violent music of freedom
For this freedom which is the terror
Of those who always violated it
In the name of lavish misery
For this freedom which is the night of the oppressors
And the definitive dawn of the whold invincible people
For this freedom which lights up sunken eyes
Bare feet
Leaking roofs
And the eyes of children who wander in dust
For this freedom which is youths empire
For this freedom
Beautiful like life
We will have to give our all
If necessary
Even our shadows
And it will never be enough.
The white, red and blue colors of our flag, sustained by the industrious hands of thousands of students from the University of Informatics Sciences closed the parade, preceded by the youths of the university and middle level education students’ federations from the capital; the disciplined and active youths of humble origins being trained as Social Workers; the children from La Colmenita art troupe and other creations of the Revolution; they are all aware that they carry a flame that nobody will ever be able to extinguish.
I was very pleased to know that Miguel d’Escoto was there watching the parade. Three days before, in his remarks to the foreign ministers and representatives of the Non Aligned Movement he had said:
“…The world order exists based on the capitalist culture in which having more means being better; the same that promotes selfishness, greed, usury and social irresponsibility. These anti-values of the capitalist culture have led the world to a number of converging crises that should be effectively taken care of; otherwise they might endanger the life of the human species and the capacity to sustain life on Earth.
“At the root of all of the different crises we are facing lie an enormous moral crisis, a deep crisis of ethical values and principles. We have all betrayed the values derived from our respective religious and ethical-philosophic traditions. By succumbing to the capitalist temptations we have betrayed ourselves, and by assuming its anti-life values of hatred and selfishness, we have become the worst predators, enemies of our Mother Earth, we have dehumanized ourselves…
“…Cuba has always been a place for spiritual refreshment. Here we can all see that love is stronger and more powerful than selfishness. Here more than anywhere else we can learn what solidarity is: the most important antidote for humanity to survive the insane selfishness that seems destined to bring about its annihilation.
“…In this 21st century, a century of reconciliation and peace through the rule of law, social justice and democratic inclusiveness, we respect every minority and we want to hear them all. It is at the G-192, the General Assembly, where we shall decide on the path to take in order to avoid the trap of the insane and suicidal selfishness that capitalism has led the world to. It will not be with any kind of revanchism but with the spirit to build a better world for all, without exceptions or exclusions…
He did not run for the position of president of the UN General Assembly he now occupies. He learned of his candidacy through the Nicaraguan Ambassador to the UN. It was Latin America’s turn, and Daniel Ortega, being aware of his qualities had made the proposal unhesitatingly. He did not even have time to explain his health problems to take on such a high responsibility. The countries of Latin America, Africa and the Third World quickly offered their support. Miguel was not perturbed by the difficulties and accepted the position.
He handed me a document he signed as president of the UN General Assembly designating Cuba a paradigm of international solidarity and showed me the gold medal that comes with the decree and that he designed himself.
He said in his remarks many other interesting things that I am not quoting here to avoid being to extensive.
His words and deeds have honored our Revolution.
…. We will have to give our all
If necessary
Even our shadows
And it will never be enough.
These were the final words of this poem by Fayad Jamis.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 1, 2009
a7:23 p.m.
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A debt of gratitude is owed by the anti-revisionist communist movement to Stewart Parker for the timely release of his second book ‘Marxism and the Jewish Question – In Theory And Practice 1843 – 1953’, which is a study/refutation of the many and varied allegations, by bourgeois and opportunist historians alike, of anti-Semitism within Marxism-Leninism as an ideology and within the Soviet Union in general with particular emphasis on the views and deeds of JV Stalin.
Parker’s first book, ‘The Last Soviet Republic’ was concerned with present day Belarus and its history and policies. It is a book full of useful facts and information but is somewhat timid when dealing with the wider political questions it inevitably comes up against. This timidity, or more correctly over-cautiousness regarding perceived impartiality, completely disappears in this second book. The author has settled down to deal with his subject without worrying if this work will be received as biased towards communism. It is un-ashamedly pro-communist but backs up every statement in defence of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin with solid facts and logic, likewise, it utterly destroys the claims of the accusers using these solid facts and logic against their flimsy but very well circulated and oft repeated ‘evidence’ which is shown up to be nothing but lies and carefully built up prejudices.
Among the supporters of the Soviet Union and comrade Stalin there will inevitably be some comrades who will find small parts or some conclusions not to their liking (being anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists and pro Stalin does not make us all believe the same thing on all questions) but overall this should not detract from the value of the book which is of great use to all who consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninists. It is well researched, and well written, exposing the lies so often repeated concerning the Jewish Autonomous Region, the trial of some members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and the ‘doctors plot’. This is an easy and enjoyable book to read and is as important in its field as Mario Sousa’s ‘Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union’ is in countering the claims that Stalin murdered millions in death camps etc. It should be on the bookshelf (or rather in the hands) of all anti-revisionist communists and any other genuine truth-seeker on this question.
