Remember Korea and the ‘Forgotten War’

The U.S. bosses are contemplating another imperialist war on the Korean peninsula. Like all imperialists they don’t want the international working class knowing the real history of Korea. Like all imperialists they are terrified that if the workers in the U.S. and Korea knew about the “forgotten” Korean War, the workers would unite, turn the guns around, and shoot this imperialist system down.
Jeju. Koje. No Gun Ri. Daejeon. Sinchon. These are the names of some places in present-day North Korea that the international working class must never forget, alongside countless others where workers said “enough” to imperialist war and fought back.
Part of fighting to keep the memory and history of the working class of Korea alive is understanding how there came to be a “North” and “South” Korea in the first place.
Korea: From Feudalism to Fascism to Socialism
The Korean peninsula was a largely feudal kingdom until Japanese imperialists invaded in 1910. Korean workers and peasants were considered subhuman to the Japanese fascists. Japanese fascism meant Korean men grew food for the army in slave-like conditions, and Korean women were forced into sex slavery.
On August 15, 1945, the communist-led Soviet Red Army liberated the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. imperialists had just dropped atomic bombs on their Japanese imperialist rivals, and threatened the Red Army if they moved south.
What became “North” Korea literally changed overnight. On day one:

• “People’s Committees” led by women and youth, accountable to mass meetings in every village, were the new government.
• Landlords were arrested or driven out.
• Japanese fascist soldiers, police, Japanese-trained Korean police, government officials, and collaborators were thrown into their own prisons.
• All forms of sex slavery were abolished.
• Education, healthcare, childcare, housing, transportation, clothing, meaningful employment, leisure, access to culture, freedom of choice in relationships and marriage were guaranteed to all workers.
• Over the next several years, workers in the North built the foundations of socialism, modeled on the then-socialist Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, U.S. bosses kept the Japanese fascists in power in what became South Korea. They maintained every aspect of Japanese rule, including sex slavery, and opened segregated brothels for the U.S. military.
U.S. Imperialists Respond with Massacre
When workers in the South learned about the advances in the North through the Communist Party, they formed their own People’s Committees and rebelled. On Jeju island, an estimated 80 percent of the island’s 300,000 workers were communists, and in 1948 a rebellion erupted against the U.S. occupation. The U.S. burned the entire island in response.
Massacres like this occurred with greater frequency and desperation under U.S. imperialism. With a taste of workers’ power in the North, the working class refused to submit and dared to resist.
In 1950, the U.S. finally attempted outright invasion of the North. Demonstrations supporting the North erupted worldwide. The monstrous Korean war raged for three years and claimed millions of workers’ lives. The workers fought on—even under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the U.S. bosses—and showed the world the meaning of mass bravery.
Workers’ power was later reversed in North Korea, and PLP has analyzed the failures of socialism elsewhere.
The U.S. bosses call Korea “The Forgotten War” precisely because they hope it will be forgotten. But the working class of Korea will never be forgotten. PLP aspires to the legacy of the Korean workers’ commitment to revolution. Deserving that legacy means fighting onward to the final victory of communism. Our victory will be their vengeance.