From Week to Week

Grey River Argus, 25 February 1942, Page 7

From Week to Week

(By

H. Winston Rhodes)

Japan in Korea: The story of the Korean revolutionaries is one of terrible persecution and heroic determination. The minds of the Korean people are not confused by a rivalry of hates towards different foreign imperialisms. Because of their recent history no country competes with Japan as the object of their detestation. It would be better for Britain and America if the native races of other Pacific and Asiatic countries were able to be as single-minded in their struggle.

Japanese policy towards Korea has been one of ruthless exploitation. It has been a policy deliberately designed to create a nation of Japanese slaves. Not only have the Korean people been dispossessed of land, and investments in Korean industry monopolised by the Japanese, but also special attempts have been made to stamp out all signs of Korean nationality and independence

Thirty years of suffering, thirty years of persecution have not quenched the flame of revolutionary struggle among the Korean people. The co-prosperity sphere of the Japanese propagandist is exposed as the sinister thing that it is when we examine the results of thirty years of Korean “prosperity.”

Recently Nym Wales, the Wife of Edgar Snow, wrote a book, the contents of which is the life story of a Korean revolutionary whom she calls Kim San. She met him in Yenan, the northern capital of China, and the centre of the Chinese Red armies. It was Kim San who said: “For a revolutionary to be a man with four countries is worse than to be a man without a country. All are but a passport to death.” Until very recently wherever a Korean revolutionary was to be found, whether in his native land, in Manchuria, an China or in Japan, the result was the same. With monotonous and dreadful regularity every year since 1905 hundreds of these valient patriots have been put to death or imprisoned. But the fight goes on. Korean Revolt:

Nym Wales relates that outside Seoul, where in 1940 the Governor-Gener-al declared: “It is the mission of the peninsula to fulfil its role of a military base of the Empire in its march forward on the continent,” there is the tragic hill of Ariran which symbolises so much for the Korean people. Upon this hill have been hanged tens of thousands of Koreap prisoners, and the song that one of them sang as he climbed to his death has become the traditional song of all condemned Korean revolutionaries. »

As in China so in Korea those who struggle against foreign imperialism have become united and a little over three years ago the Korean Volunteer Battalion took its place side by side with the Chinese armies fighting against Japanese aggression. Its aim is to build a Revolutionary Army for the liberation of Korea and to rouse all the millions of Koreans who detest their colonial slavery.

All over China both in the occupied and unoccupied areas are groups of Korean revolutionaries, organisations of different sorts all working for the same result—the overthrow of Japanese imperialism. Inside Korea- itself there are continual revolts. Peasants and workers both have a glorious record of activity, and this activity has led to risings in which thousands have participated. In one town the peasants burn down all Japanese buildings; in one port the workers destroy the Japanese fortifications; in another place they fight against the Japanese forces for three days and nights.

North-east from Korea, in Manchukuo, are to be found no fewei than a million and a half Korean exiles, many of whom are revolutionaries with a long and bitter experience of Japanese methods. Some years ago the army they had organised was over twenty thousand strong and had again and again attacked the Japanese armies in Korea. The Road to India:

Nowhere in the world are there to be found people more capable of life-long devotion to a cause, more capable of acts of heroism, more willing to endure hardship, persecution and death than among the Korean revolutionaries. These men for over thirty years, under terrible conditions, have been struggling against forces far stronger in material equipment to their own, but they have never flinched, they have never wavered.

To-day in East Asia, in the whole Pacific area, are countless millions who would struggle in like fashion, and all they ask is to struggle for the welfare of their own people. Through Burma the threat to India grows. The strategy of the Japanese imperialists may involve the cutting of all sea routes to India and the attempt to join forces with their German allies by way of the Persian Gulf.

For decades British policy in India has been such that Indian nationalists can see little in the present wai but the struggle between rival imperialisms. To-day it is the task of British policy, even at this late hour, to prove that the bad old days of British imperialism are gone for ever. The visit of Chiang Kai-shek is no guarantee of this. Pleas for cooperation are no guarantee of this. As I have never been tired 1 of stressing, and present events are heavily underlining the fact, military strategy and political activity are indivis-

ible. This i$ a lesson which has been mastered, the world knows with what success, in the Soviet Union. It I is yet to be mastered in Britain and America.