ON 18 November, a shabby collection of anti-DPRK lies and political fantasy going under the name of the 'Resolution on Human Rights' was adopted at the third committee of the 69th UN General Assembly. This travesty, designed to help the US in its moves to make war on the Korean Peninsula, was instigated by the USA, but moved and seconded by the EU and Japan. ('Intensely debating targeted country reviews, Third Committee approves draft texts on Iran, Syria, Democratic People's Republic of Korea', un.org, 18 November 2014)
The 'resolution' was reportedly pushed through by means of threats from the US and Japan to halt economic aid to some of the countries voting. Even taking things at face value, any country moving a resolution that accuses another of human rights abuses but goes on to threaten still others with social catastrophe if they don't vote as instructed must surely be considered to be peddling a fraudulent proposition.
In the cases of the EU, US and Japan, however, the hypocrisy and double standards go far deeper than this obvious surface contradiction.
Under the slogan of 'protection of human rights', for example, the US jumped on the excuse of the assassination of Grenada's prime minister in 1983 to send aggressive troops to seize the island and install a puppet government there. It used the same excuse when it kidnapped the head of state of Panama after invading it.
Meanwhile, two wars have been waged by Anglo-American imperialism against Iraq on this highly questionable justification of 'protecting human rights'. These wars, the sanctions regime that separated them and the occupation that followed between them exacted a genocidal death toll of some 4 million violent and 'non-violent' unnecessary Iraqi deaths and created another 4 million refugees. (See 'Iraqi holocaust, Iraqi genocide' website by Gideon Polya).
'Protecting human rights' was the slogan under which the total destruction of anti-imperialist Libya and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were carried out. And once more, millions of avoidable deaths and the devastation of millions more lives was the result.
The Koreans themselves have first-hand experience of what it means to have such 'protection' from the US and other imperialists. Their own country was invaded and engulfed in a three-year bloody war during which the imperialist forces carried out numberless barbaric crimes and human rights abuses and left their country partitioned and the southern half under military occupation to this day.
The barefaced nerve of the US in promoting this resolution is staggering when looking at its own record of war, aggression and the denial of the basic right to life and liberty of so many millions around the world.
And all this is before we look at the record of the US government at home. For a country that is infamous for having the largest prison population on the planet (both proportionally and in absolute terms), as well as for the racism of its police and other state forces, to talk piously about human rights is the height of shamelessness. (Leaflet: "Land of the free" is a prison of nations', cpgb-ml.org, April 2008)
In the US, recent events bear witness to the fact that to be poor and black is to be branded a criminal from birth, and to suffer daily brutalisation at the hands of the police and prison system. Black teenage boys are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by the police. In the period 2010-12, 41 teenagers under the age of 14 were killed by US police. Twenty-seven of those were black. Statistics are incomplete because many police departments don’t even file reports for these murders. (See 'Deadly force in black and white', propublica.org, 14 October 2014)
The lists of crimes against humanity carried out by Japan, the EU and the individual countries within the European Union are also extremely long and also ongoing, yet all these murderers and sponsors of terrorism in such places as Syria and Palestine (to name just two of the long list of their victims), feel able to stand and point their blood-stained fingers at the DPRK, a country that has only ever fought in defence of its own liberty, and only within its own historical national boundaries. Korea, moreover, is a country where the most important of human rights are upheld by law as well as by common practice: all Koreans have the right to excellent education, health care, housing, jobs and culture in peace and with dignity.
The great crime committed by the DPRK in the eyes of the imperialists and their puppets is that they have created a society where the imperialist bloodsuckers have no place; where they cannot exploit the workers for the purpose of reaping maximum profits from their toil. Korean society is built in such a way as to enable its people to live in peace and happiness, but the Korean people have learned the hard way that they must be prepared to defend these gains to the bitter end if war is launched upon them by the imperialists and their puppets. ('Eye witness to socialism in Korea', Proletarian, December 2010)
The UN resolution itself rested upon a report that brings together the so-called 'testimonies' of traitors and criminals who hope to find celebrity and fortune by slandering the DPRK in the service of imperialism. Indeed, if these 'testimonies' were truthful, these 'escapees' would have sentenced all their friends and family still in the DPRK to death just by making the statements that they have.
Since the sordid fairytales they spin are not true, the friends and families of these scoundrels are not being tortured or shot by the DPRK authorities. In fact, the only danger that the former friends and families face is having to endure the shame of knowing or being related to the treacherous liars now in the pay of Uncle Sam.
An interesting point arising from this farce at the UN is the number of countries that wouldn't just nod yes when the US told them to. It should be no surprise that states such as China, Vietnam, Syria, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Russia backed the DPRK, but so did 13 others, including Egypt, while a massive 55 abstained.
It seems that these days the imperialists cannot threaten or bribe everyone to accept their drive to war. More and more people are seeing that the DPRK is not the devil that imperialism paints it as, and also that imperialism, especially the US variety, has no interest in human rights at home or abroad. The US ruling class’s only interest is in establishing a 'new world order' that will secure its own hegemony and save its failing political and economic system.
The DPR Korea, on the other hand, is, by its peaceful example and the rising prosperity of its people, shining a beacon across the oppressed world and showing the superexploited masses of the world that a bright future is in store for all those who are prepared to organise to overthrow the parasitic reign of the billionaires. KawanKorea
Human Rights: DPRK vs USA
