The revolutionary forces of the world are firmly united under the banner of anti-imperialism and fighting for the final victory!
Stephen Cho, World Anti-Imperialist Platform
The Article is the Speech of the organizer of the World Anti-imperialist Platform, coordinator of the Corean International Forum, Stephen on June 10 in Athens, Greece.
The Balkans and the Korean Peninsula share an important historical commonality from the 20th century: they both fell victim to the Cold War and suffered from massacres and fascism. Fascism here does not refer to a variant of imperialism but to one of the two main methods used by imperialism to rule through neocolonial proxy regimes: either fascism or neoliberalism. Specifically, Greece is the only country in the Balkans that was thwarted in its march towards socialism and shrouded in the madness of fascism. This is exactly the same as South Korea on the Korean Peninsula which was prevented from moving to a new stage of social development after World War II and had to go through the ordeal of civil war and fascism. As a consequence, their social movements were dialectically strengthened, which explains why today, facing a new world war, these two countries have become the most important hotbeds of social revolution. We held the international conference of the World Anti-imperialist Platform last December in Belgrade, Serbia, which inherited the tradition of Yugoslavia and shares in the important history of the Balkans, and today we are holding an equally important conference in Athens, Greece. It is no coincidence that these events are taking place here.
South Korea is on the eve of war. While the war in Ukraine broke out in Eastern Europe in 2022, the war in South Korea and Taiwan is imminent in East Asia in 2023. At the root of this situation, where it would not be surprising if war started now, is the imperialist’s aggressive provocation. As we know, since the 20th century, imperialism has been solely responsible for wars, whether these were global or local wars. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnamese War, the Iraq War, and the Syrian War were all waged by imperialism.
The ongoing war in Ukraine is no different. The U.S. imperialist-orchestrated Maidan coup in 2014 and the NATO-backed eight-year massacre in Donbas from 2014 to 2022 were a combination of imperialist manipulation and fascist brutality and a thoroughly planned provocation to invade Russia. It is no longer a secret that U.S. imperialism, under Brezinsky’s infamous “Grand Chessboard Strategy,” has been supporting neo-Nazi forces, including the Azov Regiment, and manipulating “False Flag” operations and “fake news” while waiting for a decisive moment. Naturally, Russia had no choice but to make an urgent decision, faced with the possibility of being dissolved like Yugoslavia by imperialist aggression, so the “Special Military Operation” began, and now “real war” is just around the corner as declared on May 9th, Victory Day. Imperialist provocations, specifically NATO’s provocations using Ukraine, will continue to intensify, and Russia will take a defensive stance and make a decisive counterattack at some point. It is no longer a secret that that counterattack is linked to the war in East Asia.
North Korea and China respectively conducted the three-day operations in November 2022 and April 2023. North Korea even repeated the first day’s operation plan on the 4th day. Of course, both North Korea and China conducted these military exercises in self-defense, as a countermeasure against the aggressive imperialist war including all US imperialist and political provocations. Last year, in particular, North Korea responded to the nearly daily nuclear war drills which were part of the massive U.S.-Japan-South Korea joint air exercise called “Vigilant Ace” in November, combining an unprecedented 500 combat aircraft maneuvers, with test launches of various missiles. China responded to President Tsai Ing-wen’s visit to the United States in April. China responded to the U.S. House Speaker’s visit to Taiwan in August last year with missile tests and naval military exercises encircling Taiwan, and North Korea also test-fired two tactical nuclear cruise missiles toward Okinawa, a U.S. military base that could be used in a war in Taiwan. It is now common knowledge, even in conservative media, that if either one of the South Korean or Taiwan wars breaks out, the other will automatically follow. Recently, Yonhap, a representative South Korean news agency, reported that China’s gold buying and selling to the United States is at an all-time high, and in particular, pointed out that its arms exports in the past five years have decreased by 23 percent from the previous five years, drawing a parallel to the fact that the Ukraine war broke out when Russia’s exports decreased by 31 percent over an equivalent period. It also emphasized the fact that while the 30-year confrontation between North Korea and the United States from the early 1990s eventually led to a prevailing peace, the recent period has been completely different.
In fact, recently, the imperialist powers held a G7 meeting in Hiroshima from May 19 and 21 to prompt the finalisation of the formation of an Asian version of NATO. Even Zelensky participated in the meeting, during which the aggressive intentions to expand the Ukrainian war in Eastern Europe to the South Korean and Taiwan wars in East Asia, and more blatantly, their “proxy war” and “hybrid war” methods based on the “New Cold War” strategy, were exposed. In response, China has sought to develop relations with the five Central Asian countries, and Russia has sent a delegation headed by its Prime Minister to strengthen strategic ties between the two countries. This is in line with President Xi Jinping’s diplomatic campaign, which included visits to Saudi Arabia at the end of last year and Russia this year, as well as inviting French President Macron and Brazilian President Lula to China this year. The strategic development of relations among the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, centered on the relationship between China and Russia, is particularly marked by the unity of the Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, and the agitation of Western Europe, including France. In short, the weakening imperialist powers are trying to turn the situation into a new war, while the anti-imperialist line between the socialist North Korea, China and the capitalist countries, including Russia, is strengthening at various levels.
In particular, North Korea changed its stance from “power for power and goodwill for goodwill” to “power for power” in response to the U.S. dual-track policy. Specifically, since the 8th Party Congress in 2021, North Korea has proposed and implemented a “new path,” that is, “non-peaceful independence and peaceful reunification,” which is to solve the problem of independence non-peacefully and then solve the problem of reunification peacefully. This means that if the U.S. and South Korea continue to conduct war manoeuvres against North Korea, the North will eventually eliminate the South’s government and military warmongers through the non-peaceful use of self-defensive armed force, declaw the U.S. military, prevent Japanese military intervention, liquidate the pro-American and pro-Japanese forces in the South, and establish a democratic government in the South to achieve peaceful federal reunification with the socialist government in the North. If this happens, from the viewpoint of the North, the war in South Korea will be a war against the U.S. military, which entered the South as an occupation army and retains control of the South’s operational authority; a war of national liberation and national reunification; and a just war in which Korea, which has been a single nation for half a millennium, will be united again. By contrast, it will be an imperialist and unjust war from the U.S. side.
Despite this truth, some communist forces, such as the Communist Party of Greece, characterize South Korea as imperialist and the war in South Korea as an inter-imperialist war. This is because they also view the socialist North as imperialist.
This absurd view is not a theory, but a pseudo-theory, a bizarre and crude concept that is being spread by the Communist Party of Greece under the name of the “theory of imperialist pyramid.” First of all, this revisionist theory, which denies the core content of Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, views all capitalism as imperialism. As a result, it denies the significance of the anti-imperialist national liberation revolutions in the Third World and the tactics of anti-fascist front during World War II, and insists only on class liberation and socialist revolution. In the end, the line of the Communist Party of Greece, which advocates this petit-bourgeois theory rooted in Kautskyism, Trotskyism, and postmodernism, is revisionism and opportunism, and the current Communist Party of Greece is driving international sectarianism that is dividing other parties with its false theories. With the rise of Khrushchev’s modern revisionism and the removal of Nikos Zachariadis and other revolutionaries from the party, it seems that revisionism and opportunism began to crystallize in the Communist Party of Greece. Of course, we must distinguish between revisionism within the Communist Party of Greece and the Communist Party of Greece itself. It is not the Communist Party of Greece itself that we oppose, but the revisionism and opportunism within the Communist Party of Greece.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, the Communist Party of Greece has become more convinced of the “theory of imperialist pyramid”, imposing this false line on the international communist movement and deepening divisions. Amidst this urgent situation and conscious of the gravity of the problems, the World Anti-Imperialist Platform was launched in October 2022 with an international conference in Paris, France, with three goals: anti-imperialist mass struggle, ideological warfare, and strengthening the international communist movement. With organising international conferences and the world anti-imperialist struggle as its basic methods, the World Anti-Imperialist Platform is stridently achieving its fundamental goals by holding events in Belgrade, Serbia in December 2022, in Caracas, Venezuela in March 2023, and in Gwangju and Seoul, South Korea in May.
We are convinced that the harder a flint is struck, the brighter it shines, and that the militant practical struggle and sharp ideological struggle of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform will continue to shine brighter and brighter, contributing to the correction of errors within the world anti-imperialist movement and the international communist movement and strengthening the new tide of unity. Taking the scientific ideas of the working class, proven by history and practice, as our revolutionary conviction, and chanting the slogans “Workers of the world, unite” and “People united will never be defeated,” we will continue to struggle unflinchingly in the face of all trials and difficulties, in firm solidarity with the revolutionary forces in the world, including the comrades of the Greek revolution, and advance and realize the day of final victory.