ABSTRACT
But more than the litany of crimes committed against South Koreans or the kidnapping of Japanese citizens or the axe-murder of UN guards in the Demilitarized Zone, more than the macabre nature of the North Korean regime which allows its citizens to starve to death by the hundreds of thousands while pouring in one-third of its GDP into the military, more than the habitual violations of international agreements and the predictable pattern of blackmail and willful deceit that has always underlain North Korean diplomacy, there is a basic irrefutable fact that shows that North Korea always has been and remains to this day a grave threat to South Korea’s national security and to peace in the region. It is North Korea’s explicitly stated national goal as enshrined in the preamble of its Korean Workers’ Party Rules and in its Constitution and repeated over and over again by the various channels of state propaganda machinery: “Liberate the South and bring about the complete victory of socialism on the fatherland.” 1
