Korea, the Scientific Slaughterhouse

American Fraction of the Left Communist International

1950

Initially published in the Autumn-Winter 1950 issue of The Internationalist, a publication of the Italian communist left in the U.S. This article was reprinted in the May 1975 issue of the Revolutionary Workers Group publication Workers’ Truth. From a scanned PDF at https://archive.org/details/rwg_workers_truth_1975-05.

Korea, the Scientific Slaughterhouse

The war in Korea is a real war of extermination; brutal and inhuman without any reservations. Both sides vie with one another in the committing of crimes from which the native population suffers the consequences.

As long as American Imperialism uses its air force to bomb indiscriminately the villages of straw in Korea, which are consumed completely in flames, the North Koreans proceed to round-up and execute en-masse all suspected collaborators of MacArthur and Syngman Rhee, besides executing captured soldiers.

The North Korean leaders gave proof of absolute indifference to the lives of their own soldiers, who were thrown en-masse into the massacre for limited local gains.

American Imperialism, for its part, has conducted itself worse than German Imperialism in Europe. It is slaughtering en-masse all suspected collaborators of the North Korean regime and established forced labor, a la Hitler and Stalin. Forced migration is the order of the day. The population is continually compelled to be on the move as military operations are extended and opened up under twenty-two to twenty-four hour notice.

The condition of the Korean population can easily be imagined; the starvation and the catastrophe of shooting war opening up on them. As if this is not enough, voices in the American camp babble about threatening to use the atom bomb.

North Korea, in spite of initial success, never had the possibility of winning nor of out-doing their earlier military offensive. Inevitably, the powerful weight of U.S. imperialism, which also is capable of mobilizing many other states for its aims, crushed the northerners, whose armaments were too inferior to that of the Americans.

This means that the Korean population is tied again to a new rule of force, for another war, War III, and other nameless horrors. But the men of the Kremlin are indifferent to this prospect. The desperate situation of their Korean allies and the misery of the population is of no importance to them. Now they push China into the war as American Imperialism threatens the water supply and electric power of Manchuria. Thus under one pretext or another both Western and Eastern Imperialism, in spite of their hypocritic cries for peace, are drawing the whole world into a new conflict. The strategy of the Kremlin is to create a weariness and contempt for rival American Imperialism and bring about an elimination of American prestige in Asia. The price required is the destruction of whole countries, innumerable dead, and an unheard of misery well on its way. Thus, the Russians have pushed the North Koreans to the initial attack, left them without sufficient armaments to bring the war to a victorious conclusion. A victorious North Korea would have been as detrimental to Russia as to America. Neither Imperialism can tolerate, if it can help it, the independent victories of its “allies”. Such “independence” leads to Titoism in the case of Stalinist imperialism, which is the contradiction between poor states and rich states, as in the American Imperialist camp.

Like the North Koreans, the Americans in Korea commit atrocities of their own, which is also characteristic of all war. The Cominform uses these atrocities to good advantage in its world propaganda.

Thus the life of humanity, of entire peoples, has no other value, but that of supplying sustenance and new excuses for the inhuman battle that the Imperialisms instigate on the international scene.