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Vol. 81/No. 17 May 1, 2017
(feature article)
SWP in 1950: ‘Stop US Korea War!
US troops out now!’
Below are excerpts from three letters protesting the Korean War by
James P. Cannon, then national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party,
that were featured in the Militant in 1950-51. The letters, written to
President Harry Truman and Congress, are from Cannon’s Notebook of an
Agitator. The 1950-1953 U.S.-organized, imperialist war against the
Korean people took the lives of over 4 million people including 2
million civilians. Copyright © 1958 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by
permission.
BY JAMES P. CANNON
THE MILITANT, July 31, 1950
To the President and Members of the Congress:
Gentlemen:
I disagree with your actions in Korea, and in my capacity as a private
citizen I petition you to change your policy fundamentally, as follows:
Withdraw the American troops and let the Korean people alone.
I am setting forth the reasons for this demand in detail in the
following paragraphs. But before opening the argument, I beg your
permission, gentlemen, to tell you what I think of you. You are a pack
of scoundrels. You are traitors to the human race. I hate your rudeness
and your brutality. You make me ashamed of my country, which I have
always loved, and ashamed of my race, which I used to think was as good
as any.
The American intervention in Korea is a brutal imperialist invasion, no
different from the French war on Indo-China or the Dutch assault on
Indonesia. American boys are being sent 10,000 miles away to kill and be
killed, not in order to liberate the Korean people, but to conquer and
subjugate them. It is outrageous. It is monstrous.
The whole of the Korean people — save for the few bought-and-paid-for
agents of the Rhee puppet regime — are fighting the imperialist
invaders. That is why the press dispatches from Korea complain more and
more about “infiltration” tactics, increasing activities of
“guerrillas,” the “fluid” fighting front, the “sullenness” and
“unreliability” of the “natives.”
The Korean people have a mortal hatred of the Wall Street “liberator.”
They despise unto death the bestial, corrupt, U.S.-sponsored Syngman
Rhee dictatorship that made South Korea a prison camp of misery, torture
and exploitation.
The high morale and fearlessness of the North Koreans and the hostility
of the South Koreans toward their U.S. “liberators” alike testify to the
unity of the entire Korean people in this unflinching opposition to
imperialistic domination.
The explosion in Korea on June 25, as events have proved, expressed the
profound desire of the Koreans themselves to unify their country, to rid
themselves of foreign domination and to win their complete national
independence. It is true that the Kremlin seeks to take advantage of
this struggle for its own reactionary ends and would sell it tomorrow if
it could get another deal with Washington. But the struggle itself has
the overwhelming and wholehearted support of the Korean people. It is
part of the mighty uprising of the hundreds of millions of colonial
people throughout Asia against western imperialism. This is the real
truth, the real issue. The colonial slaves don’t want to be slaves any
longer.
This is more than a fight for unification and national liberation. It is
a civil war. On the one side are the Korean workers, peasants and
student youth. On the other are the Korean landlords, usurers,
capitalists and their police and political agents. The impoverished and
exploited working masses have risen up to drive out the native parasites
as well as their foreign protectors.
Whatever the wishes of the Kremlin, a class war has been unfolding in
Korea. The North Korean regime, desiring to mobilize popular support,
has decreed land reforms and taken nationalization measures in the
territories it has won. The establishment of people’s committees has
been reported. These reforms, these promises of a better economic and
social order have attracted the peasants and workers. This prospect of a
new life is what has imbued a starving subject people with the will to
fight to the death. This is the “secret weapon” that has wrested
two-thirds of South Korea from U.S. imperialism and its native agents
and withstood the troops and bombing fleets of mighty Wall Street.
American imperialism was quite willing to turn northern Korea over to
Stalin in return for control over South Korea, which it ruled through
the bloody dictatorship of Syngman Rhee. Now Washington is seeking,
against the resistance of the Korean people, to reimpose its imperialist
puppet rule, to enforce the division of Korea and to maintain it as a
colony and military base for future war on the Soviet Union.
There is not an iota of concern for the wishes and rights of the Korean
people in this brutal invasion. The attempt to prop up the Syngman Rhee
regime by armed force is part of Wall Street’s planned program to
dominate and exploit the whole world. Your undeclared war on Korea, Mr.
President, is a war of enslavement. That is how the Korean people
themselves view it — and no one knows the facts better than they do.
They’ve suffered imperialist domination and degradation for half a
century and they can recognize its face even when masked with a UN flag. …
THE MILITANT, December 4, 1950
Once more, as at the start of your Korean intervention, I take this
means to tell you what I believe is the heartfelt sentiment of the
overwhelming majority of humanity, including the American people, today:
Stop your criminal aggression against the Asian people.
Your reckless military adventure in Korea has brought this country into
a clash with the 500 millions of China and threatens an “entirely new
war” that will engulf millions more of our youth and drain our last
resources.
You have permitted MacArthur, with his mad ambition to be the conqueror
of all Asia, to deliberately provoke a situation that could mean war on
a titanic scale. Now he has turned for a “solution” to the “United
Nations and chancelleries of the world.”
But that is precisely where this grave crisis of humankind has been
forged — in the UN and the chancelleries. Can we then entrust the
further fate of the world to pin-striped diplomats?
Your proposed solution, Mr. President, is a threat to repeat the
atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by using the atom bomb in Korea.
Take heed, Mr. President, before it is too late! Hear the voice of the
people of America and the whole world. They are thundering: Stop the war
NOW! Recall your madly ambitious MacArthur! Withdraw the troops from
Korea! Let the peoples of Asia alone to settle their own fate!
Who wants this war?
Not the Koreans, whose cities, towns and villages have been reduced by
your bombs to charred rubble, and who mourn hundreds of thousands of the
slain.
Not the Chinese people, whose dead in the struggle against imperialism
and Chiang Kai-shek’s despotism number tens of millions. Not the peoples
of Europe, whose fears are reflected today in the warnings to you by
their governments. …
THE MILITANT, May 7, 1951
My purpose in addressing you for the third time since the Korean war
began is to present three concrete proposals on foreign policy as an
alternative to the policies of the Truman administration on the one hand
and MacArthur-Taft on the other.
Your differences are merely tactical. My differences with both sides in
your so-called “Great Debate” are fundamental. You are preoccupied with
the problem of how to conduct a war the American people do not want and
never approved. I propose to end the war at once and let the American
people themselves decide the life and death questions of foreign policy.
I submit the following three proposals: (1) Withdraw all American troops
from Korea. (2) Recognize the Peking government. (3) Let the people vote
by referendum on the issue of war and peace.
I have opposed your Korean war from the start. Twice before in open
letters I urged you to heed the peoples’ will to stop the war and bring
the American soldiers home. American troops have no business in Korea.
They are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands for no good purpose.
Every day they remain swells the casualties list and inflicts more grief
upon parents, wives and children. Every day they remain intensifies the
hatred of the Asian people for all things American. Again I urge you:
Withdraw the U.S. troops from Korea.
The way to peace in Asia is neither to wage a “limited war,” as you are
now doing, nor to expand it by bombing Chinese cities and killing the
civilian population. The way to peace in Asia is to get out of Asia and
let the peoples of Asia run their own affairs.
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party: ‘US hands off Korea!’
All US troops, warships, fighter bombers out now!
US armada heads to Korea, Washington threatens to act
US THAAD anti-missile battery out of Korea!
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