"

W(JfiIlEfiS '1111"'11' 25¢No. 431 "$~)(-'23' 26 June 1987

Feds· Hands Off TeamstersIThe government is out to destroy the

Teamsters union. Word leaked earlierthis month that the Justice Depart­ment is preparing a lawsuit to removeTeamster president Jackie Presser andthe union's entire executive board,replacing them with a court-appointed"trusteeship." Under the cover of fight­ing "mob influence" in the labor move­ment, the gang of influence peddlers,contra war criminals and witchhunterswho make up the Reagan administra­tion intend, for the first time in his­tory, for the government to take over­an entire union. Cleaning up corrup-

tion has never been what's at issue inthe endless government assault on theTeamsters. Since Robert Kennedy'svendetta against Jimmy Hoffa 30 yearsago, both Democrats and Republi­cans have used the "mob connection"as an excuse to break the Teamsters'union power. One of the feds indicatedtheir real appetite: "Probably the onlyway to really solve the problem wouldbe to dissolve the entire union and startall over again" (Daily News, II June).

As one Teamster official com­mented on the attack, "obviously thiswas a calculated political ploy de-

signed to take the pressure of numer­ous problems off the Reagan Admin­istration" (New York Times, II June).It's a recurrent pattern: When they get240 Marines blown up in Lebanon theWhite House responds with the brutalrape of black Grenada. In trouble overIran/Contragate, they try to provoke ashootout in the Persian Gulf anddeclare war on the most powerfulunion in the United States. Thecharges against the Teamsters arebeing brought under the Racketeer In­fluenced and Corrupt OrganizationsAct (RICO). The name of this sinister

law is a description of the Reagan gov­ernment! A New York TV news pro­gram couldn't find one trucker whobought the feds' line that a takeoverwould "clean up" their union. If 2,000lawyers of the crooked "Justice" De­partment get mixed up with the Team­sters, who is corrupting whom? Is thisa fusion, a hostile takeover or what? IsEd Meese to be the new Teamstercapo?

The Reaganites are aiming theirguns at the heart of organized labor.It's no accident that this move comes at

continued on page 14

ass ro es sorea

Cops driven back by militant student protesters in Seoul, June 10.

JUNE 22-Mass demonstrations inSouth Korea over the past two weekshave tapped decades of pent-up popu­lar hatred of one of the more viciouslyrepressive regimes in the so-calleorFreeWorld." From the capital Seoul to theindustrial city of Pusan ill the South,hundreds of thousands have taken to thestreets since June 10. Despite the usu­ally efficient brutality of the riot police,protesters have been able to regroup fol­lowing pointblank barrages of peppergas. And the demonstrations continueto escalate. On June 18, the center ofSeoul became a battle zone as tens ofthousands of students seized control ofthe streets. from the' police. The nextnight, demonstrators. in Taejon rammeda commandeered bus into police lines;one cop was killed.

There is something of at tradition inSouth Korea of youth throwing them­selves. on well-armed' police shocktroops. However, as the New YorkTimes (17 June) observed', "The polit­ical crisis here has been built instead on

, the sustained outbreak of disturbancesin central Seoul and the growing par­ticipation of thousands of nonstudentsof all ages and backgrounds." While stu­dents have elicited. mass support fromwhite-collar workers, so far there hasbeen no mention of any participation bythe South Korean industrial proletar­iat, the motor force of South Korea's"economic miracle" and the only powerwhich can carry out it revolutionaryoverthrow of dictator Chun 000 Hwanand the. generals. .

Popular anger has boiled over inresponse to several events. One was thedeath by torture of 21-year-old studentPark Chong Choi after' his arrest foranti-government agitation on January14 by a special anti-Commumst policesquad. Police torture in South Korea is ~

routine, but this time the governmentwas forced to admit to it. In April, Chunabruptly terminated negotiations with

the barely tolerated bourgeois opposi­tion parties on revising the rigged con­stitution imposed in 1980. The presentwave of street battles erupted June 1.0following Chun's<, anointment of RohTae Woo, a long-time crony and fellowgeneral, as his successor when the presi­dent's term expires next February.

Hundreds of students occupied thegrounds of the Catholic MyongdongCathedral in Seoul, where they wereextended sanctuary by the Catholic

hierarchy and besieged, but notstormed, by the cops. An outpouring ofsupport for the Myongdong studentsfollowed. On June 13, several thou­sand workers from downtown shopsand offices gathered to taunt police.When students left the cathedral on the15th, after police lifted the siege in a dealwith church officials, thousands ofSeoul residents spontaneously ralliednearby, chanting slogans denouncingthe military dictatorship. On the 18th, as

protesters took over the city center, stu­.dents overpowered 80 cops who had runout of tear gas, stripped off their riotgea~ and burned it in the street.

Washington's ButchersWashington is backing its puppet

Chun. Despite some misgivings in theState Department, the Reagan WhiteHouse is determined to stand by thisbutcher. On June 17, Shultz declared

continued on page 6

I

**

No.II5olSIS

*

BRIEF FORTltESPARTAClSTUAGlEANDPART1SAN DEFENsE CONMJnEEAS

AMICusCUlUAEON 1JEHALF0FAPP£1UES

-v._nc; AGUILLAID, Loulll";"". IIo.\u OF £LDlDTAaY AND

:':::::. EDUCATION. 0.1.1.0\,,1 PAa.IN SCHOOL

""".tlH~

0.. AI'PE4I. noN THE UNITED STAtu CouaT-OF ArruuFDa THE FIlTH Qacun'

1l4cHa.....WClLUNInIN

~:-~::-1.SIMrt«iII lA....Hftt York.NewYart.llIOO7(211/W-11II6(eo......ufll._/vAUaII: C. WarSIaJI.;.:;::. r_lHf.....M , 'N<wY N<wY...1_(111/7S2-11271

NY Public Library

Joining the SL in the amicus briefwasan important advance of the PDe'swork. We also helped publicize and paylegal expenses for the SL lawsuit againstAlA (see article on page 16).The settle­ment and retraction won by the SL isan

Charles Darwin

important victory for all defenders ofdemocratic rights. But victories costmoney. It has cost nearly $10,000 inlegal expenses and publicity. The juniorJoe McCarthys of AlA have Big Broth­ers with deep pockets. Help defray thecosts of this case. Send your con­tributions to the PDe.

We also encourage WV readers tocontinue to support and build the PDe.Become a sustaining contributor. Senda donation of $5 or more and receive asubscription to Class-Struggle DefenseNotes. For a single copy send $.75 to:Partisan Defense Committee, P.O. Box99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY10013.•

and the Jim Crow death penalty. Welook not to the courts of this racistcapitalist state whose "justice" keepsGeronimo Pratt, Ramona Africa andnumerous other class-war prisonersbehind bars, but to the final court ofthe masses for a verdict over the super­stition, reaction. and bigotry whichcontinues to oppress and endangermankind.

Order Yours Nowl$4.00

Make payable/mall to: Spartaclst,Box 1377 GPO, New. York, NY 10116

The creationism case, particularly inits social context, invites comparison tothe infamous 1925 "monkey trial" inwhich John T. Scopes was convicted forteaching evolution. The 1920s,a decadeof rampant social reaction similar inmany ways to the Reagan years, alsosaw the formation of the Internation­al Labor Defense (ILD) as a massworking-class defense organization. It isupon the formative years of the ILD,then led by James P. Cannon, that thework of the PDC is modeled.

Defense of basic democratic rights,including those proclaimed in the bour­geois revolutions of the 17th and 18thcenturies, is a fundamental of the mod­ern communist movement. As Lenincounseled, in What Is To Be Done?,communists must strive to be:

"the tribune of the people, who is ableto react to every manifestation of tyr­anny and oppression, no 'matter where itappears, no matter what stratum or •class of the people it affects ...."

Today, as the American bourgeoisieseeks to regiment the population as partof its mobilization for war, we have beenin the forefront of defending basic dem­ocratic and personal rights. As stated inWV:

"The decay of capitalist society is dra­matically demonstrated when the menwho have their fingers on the button ofthe most advanced nuclear technologyand weaponry have minds filled withthe worst superstitions, ignorance andbigotry of the Dark Ages. They believeman's history is to be found in the literalinterpretation of the Book of Genesis,and mankind's future is spelled out inthe Armageddon of 'Revelations,' asthey are preparing to plunge the worldinto a fiery end in an apocalyptic battleagainst the 'Evil Empire' of 'godless'Russia. The only future for humanity inwhich man may realize his full potentialunfettered by dark obscurantism andsocial oppression must necessarily be asocialist one."

-WV No. 410, 29 August 1986

We welcome the Supreme Court'smajority decision in which Justice Wil­liam Brennan stated the obvious: that;the purpose of the law was to "restruc­ture the science curriculum to conformwith a particular religious viewpoint."But we place no faith in this Court whichrecently approved preventive detention

amicus brief noted:"The gains of the American bourgeoisdemocratic revolution of 1776 and theThirteenth, Fourteenth and FifteenthAmendments, codifying the defeat ofslavery during the Civil War, wereprogressive developments in the his­tory of mankind. They are part of theoutcome of a long and complicated, andin the case of the Civil War, bloodystruggle during which feudal fetters onpolitical freedom, economic freedom,religious freedom and scientific free­doms were broken or transcended."

The anti-science, anti-humanist bible­thumping crusade against "atheisticevolution" is a stalking horse for a polit­ical and social agenda shared with reac­tionaries from the White House to theresurgent Klan and racist murderersacross the country. Our amicus briefportrays the ideological connectionbetween attacks on Darwin's theses andnightriding racist terror.

" . " the study of scientific evolution isfundamental to man's quest for amaterialist understanding of our worldand human society, not the leastbecause.it provides material evidencethat we are all part of the same humanrace, definitively destroying the mythsof racial superiority."

Pil.rti§il.u Defeu§e£o......ittee

CLASS-STRUGGLE DEFENSE NOTES

Victory Against Louisiana~'Creationism" Law!

The Partisan Defense Committee isproud to have joined with the Sparta­cist League iri submitting an amicuscuriae brief to the U.S. Supreme Courtopposing the State of Louisiana's"Creationism Act" which mandated theteaching of biblical "creationism" in theschools whenever scientific evolutionwas taught. On June 19 the Court, in a7-to-2 decision, struck down this reac­tionary law. In our brief's opening state­ment we warned, "At issue is thepreservation of separation of _churchand state, the gains of the Enlighten­ment, and the education of future gen­erations." A UPI dispatch observed that"the creationism case drew a stack oflegal documents from groups rangingfrom the Marxist Spartacist League tothe National Association of Evangeli­cals." Our intervention in this case, as inothers reflecting a broad range of socialissues, represents an important compo­nent of functioning as a tribune of thepeople. '.

Taking its cue from the White House,the fundamentalist Christian right iswaging war on basic democratic rightswon in centuries of struggle. As the

For a Class-StruggleLeadership of Labor

The /934 Trotskyist-led Minneapolisgeneral strike laid the basis for thetransformation of the Teamsters into apowerful industrial union. It was one ofthree .general strikes led by avowedsocialists that opened the road to the riseofthe CIO. In a /942 lecture, AmericanTrotskyist leader James P. Cannon set

TROTSKY forth the principles of proletarian class LENINstruggle which imbued that strike.

All modern strikes require political direction. The strikes of that period broughtthe government, its agencies and its institutions into the very center of everysituation. A strike leader without some conception of a political line was very muchout of date already by 1934.The old fashioned trade union movement, which used todeal with the bosses without governmental interference, belongs in the museum. Themodern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by thegovernment at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were politicalpeople, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided ourcomrades; they couldn't be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders ofthat period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as theNational Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever inRoosevelt's Labor Board; they weren't fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal"friend of labor" president, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis win afew cents more an hour. They weren't deluded even by the fact that there was at thattime in Minnesota a Farmer-Labor Governor, presumed to be on 'the side of theworkers.

Our people didn't believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the classstruggle and the ability ofthe workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity.

-James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)'

!!9w!!!/!!!..~!f!!.~~! ~DIRECTOR OF PARTY PUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon

EDITOR: Jan Norden

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah WilnerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Jon Lawrence

EDITORIAL BOARD: Bonnie Brodie, Jon Brule, George Foster, Liz Gordon,Frank Hunter, Jan Norden, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour,Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg, Noah Wilner (Closing editor)

Workers Vanguard (USPS 098-770) published biweekly. except 2nd issue August and With 3-week interval December.by the Spartacist Publishing Co.• 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: 732-7862 (Editorial), 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, N'!w York, NY 10116. Domestic subscriptions: $5.00/24issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Workers Vanguard,Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not ne&essarily express the editorial viewpoint.

No. 431 26 June 1987

Spartacist.~Forum

Defend the Soviet Union Through World Revolution!

Gorbachev's Pipe Dream:Peace with Imperialism

Speaker: Joseph Seymour, SL Central Committee

-----Friday, June 26, 7:30 p.m.----­College Avenue Presbyterian Ohurch, 5951 College Ave.

For more information: OAKLAND For more information:(415) 839-0851 (415) 863-6963

2 WORKERS VANGUARD

acting as auxiliaries to the racist cops.Likewise, Sharpton's "anti-erack" vigi­lante sprees against Arab storeowners inHarlem fan the flames of poisonouschauvinism.

Meanwhile, the liberals joined Koch& Co. in pushing gun control. As wewrote in "New York on the Edge" (WVNo. 428, 15 May): "While the liberalsand fake-radicals close their eyes to it,lumpen crime is an ugly reality in NewYork, particularly for black people­which is why there was substantial blackSUPP9rt for Goetz." We insisted, Guncontrol kills blacks:

"We stand for the right of armed self­defense and actively defended blacksubway token clerk James Grimes whothe Brooklyn D.A. and the TA [TransitAuthority] tried to frame up for defend­ing himself against a-gang of muggers.To deny or ignore this fundamentalright is to leave blacks utterly defense­less in the face of criminal and racistattacks and to push whites into the armsof the racist mobs."

Meanwhile, the biggest, most mur­derous racist mob of all is loose on thestreets: the New York police. In Brook­lyn on June 9, eyewitnesses saw a whitecop shoot Eric Thomas in the head whilehe lay handcuffed on the ground. And inthe Bronx on June 20, the cops executeda 29,.year-old black man, TerrenceKeane, for the capital "crime" ofsideswiping a squad car. This wantonracist killing sparked outrage from hun­dreds of largely Caribbean black res­idents gathered along White PlainsRoad. As tires burned in the street, thecops threatened demonstrators: "A lotof you are going to die this summer!"This is no idle taunt coming from thearmed racist killers in blue who mur­dered black grandmother EleanorBumpurs, then repeatedly mobilized,thousands strong, to make sure thetriggerman, killer cop Sullivan, wouldwalk.

The black and Hispanic minoritypopulations of New York City are undersiege today. The Spartacist League callsfor mass labor/black -defense againstracist attacks. Following the lynch mobmurder. of black construction workerMichael Griffith in Howard Beach,Queens last December, the Committeefor a Fighting Transport WorkersUnion called for integrated uniondefense guards to make the streets ofNew York safe for all working peopleand minorities. To unleash the power oflabor requires a political break from theDemocratic Party of racist Americancapitalism and forging a multiracialworkers party that champions the causeof all the oppressed.•

vigilante" which has been widelyappliedto Goetz is really a misnomer. When oneis acting in self-defense,even excessive­ly, that is not vigilantism. Vigilantes areself-appointed police acting (supposed­ly) on behalf of others, like CharlesBronson in the movie Death Wish. TheGoetz case evokes deep passions be­cause the issue posed is fear for self, forone's life and human dignity, not forone's possessions. It's not the standardcontract where ethnically neutral crimi­nals show you their weapons, you.givethem your valuables and they go away.It's suffused with race-hatred. And it'sexplosive in the tinderbox of New York,whether it's a skinny white guy who's a"mark" for black lumpen muggers or ayoung black worker facing a lynch mobof white ethnic punks in Howard Beach:

For Labor/Black DefenseAgainst Racist Terror!

In racist America, the spectre of vigi­lantism is a deadly threat to black peo­ple. It's all the more obscene that the vig-

. ilante groups riding the New Yorksubways are largely made up of minor­ity youth. Curtis Sliwa's GuardianAngels have tried to.make Goetz a hero.Black demagogue AlSharpton is anti­Goetz, yet like Sliwa's bands his"Disciples for Justice" are goon squads

_ Suriani/PhotoreportersGoetz rushed out of court by cops, Guardian iAngeJs after verdict.

I would have shot them too. This isself­preservation, sweetheart."

A letter to the New York Times (21June) compared the Goetz trial toahighly publicized 1926 Detroit murdercase with ugly racial overtones and thespectre of vigilantism. Attorney Clar­ence Darrow defended Henry Sweetsaying, "Every man may act uponappearances as they seem to him. Everyman may protect his own life." Yet inthis-case, the defendant was a black mandefending his brother's home against alynch mob. The all-white jury acquittedSweet.

With an individual facing a mob or amugger, the right of self-defenseis posedirrespective of color. But this is a racist,violent society. A Russell Baker col­umn (New York Times, 20 June) caughtthe contradiction. Subway riders aresubjected to violent assault, robberies,rapes, murders-and so you get a Bern­hard Goetz. And "many black NewYorkers, in their first response to theGoetz verdict, said they feared it wouldencourage white vigilantes to go armedin the streets, making the normally dan­gerous life of young black men evenmore perilous."

Reactionary forces have tried to usethis case to whip up a climate ofvigilantism. Yet the term "subway

oe zWhen Bernhard Goetz shot four

black teenagers. who were shaking him. down on the IRT No.2 express train inDecember 1984, it echoed around thecountry. The skinny white electronicsnerd was hailed and reviled as the"subway vigilante." On June 16 a NewYork City jury found Goetz "not guilty"on four counts of attempted murder,four counts of assault, and one of reck­less endangerment. The jury did con­vict him on a gun rap, a felony whichcarries a maximum sentence of sevenyears.

In the course of the seven-week trial,what actually happened in subway carNo. 7657 was pretty clear. There's nodoubt Goetz was in the process of beingmugged: virtually every one of 'theyouths admitted it, saying Goetz looked"soft" and was "easy bait." At the sametime, Goetz reacted with qualitativelyexcessive force. After shooting the four,he walked.up to Darrell Cabey and shothim again, saying, "You seem to be allright, here's another." The bulletsevered Cabey's spine, leaving himbrain-damaged and paralyzed for life.

Racist mayor Koch, his black policechief Ward and the rest of the appara­tus of repression, concerned above all tokeep the monopoly of armed force in thehands of the capitalist state, warnedagainst taking the decision as a "prece­dent." But in fact the jury passed judg­ment not only on Goetz but also on lifein New York City. Six of the jurors­including two blacks and one His­panic-had been robbed or mugged inthe past, three of them in a subway. Thiswasn't a stacked court, just a cross sec­tion of New Yorkers..

Liberals and black Democrats de­nounced the verdict as a racist "openinvitation to vigilantism." But black res­idents of the South Bronx ClaremontVillage housing project where the fourteenagers lived had a different view.Eugene Mitchell, 34, said: "I think whatGoetz did was done in self-defense,Those young guys terrorized peoplearound here." Joyce Robinson, who'slived in the project for 18 years,commented:

"I don't see this as a racial thing. Rob­bery is a big problem up here .....If itwere me in the same situation as Goetz,

Harlem Hospital Workers Protest Racist AtrocityOn June 11, some 250 demonstrators, over­

whelmingly black, protested outside Harlem Hos­pital over a brutal police attack on a black doctorinside the hospital's X-ray lab! On June 1, Dr.James Gibson (holding megaphone) told white copDennis Carmody not to move or fingerprint a sus­pect who was being treated for a cerebral concus­sion. The cops did it anyway and when Gibson ob­jected, Carmody whipped out his gun and shovedthe doctor against a wall. In another case, policeinsisted on interrogating a stabbing victim beforedoctors and nurses had completed emergencytreatment. If Koch's cops don't kill you on thestreet, .now they come into the hospitals to finishthe job.

The demonstration was called by the Coalition toSave Harlem Hospital and included officials andmembers of AFSCME Local 420 who work there aswell as doctors and staff from Harlem Hospital, andothers. Supporters ofthe Spartacist League and theLabor Black League for Social Defense also par­ticipated carrying signs which read: "Stop Koch'sKiller Kops!" "For Labor/Black Mobilizations toStop Racist Terror!" and "Break with the Demo­crats, Party of Racist Terror-s-Build a WorkersParty!"

26 JUNE 1987 3

Pat Buchanan's Little Brothers

SWP Says: Let Nazi Butchers Live

Avenge the Victimsof SS Butcherof LIon!

-MARXist LlTERATURE­Bay AreaFri.: 5:00-8:00 p.rn., Sat.: 3:00-6:00 p.rn.1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)Oakland, Clllifornia Phone: (415) 839-0851

ChicagoTues.: 5:00-9:00 p.rn.. Sat.: 11.ooe.m-z.oo p.rn.161 W Harrison st., 10th FloorChicago. Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715

New York CityTues.: 6:00-9:00 p.m., Sat: 1:00-5:00 p.rn.41 Warren St (one block belowChambers St. near Church St.)New York. N.Y. Phone: (212) 267-1025

Spartacist LeaguePublic Offices

"what a state of society is that whichknows of no better instrument for itsown defense than the hangman, andwhich proclaims ... its own brutality aseternal law?" ("On Capital Punish­ment," February 1853). When the Bol­sheviks in 1917 led the first (and to dateonly) victorious proletarian revolutionin history, they banned the death pen­alty in Russia. But they were also deter­mined to defend the workers state, andin the face of a devastating civil war andintervention by 14 imperialist states, 'they used red terror against bloodycounterrevolution. The Cheka (Extra­ordinary Commission to Combat Coun­terrevolution and Sabotage) was set upand executions were reinstituted as tem­porary measures. The death penaltybecame permanent under the StalinistThermidor as a bureaucratic casteusurped power and gutted the Bolshe­viks' revolutionary program (see "Abol­ish the Death Penalty!" WV No. 117,9 July 1977).

On the eve of the Russian October, inAugust 1917, the soldiers of the SecondMachine Gun Regiment, part of thePetrograd garrison defending the cityagainst Kornilovite counterrevolution,expressed themselves forcefully againstthe death penalty and for ruthlessdefense of the revolution in danger;

"We insist on the immediate arrest andtrial of the counterrevolutionary com­manding staff and the abolition of cap­ital punishment, to become effectiveafter the execution of General Komi­lov and his supporters."

-quoted in AlexanderRabinowitch, The BolsheviksCome to Power (1976)

As for Nazi butchers like Linnas, Bar­bie, Artukovic, Demjanjuk and their ilk,hauled out of their holes after decades ofprotection by U.S. imperialism; we saygood riddance. These mass murderersshould have been shot more than fourdecades ago by the workers tribunalsof a victorious Europe-wide socialistrevolution.•

llQOl'l\ll\1'~~l/fj.',t";

~~~'\

C:<.1) .~ .;;.;.;;..t:::..;. --===:::.:.:::~Pat Oliphant

Ed Meese, Pat Buchanan defended Karl Linnas-SWP joins parade to belittle·Nazi killer's crimes, claiming Linnas was a "scapegoat"!,willy-nilly oppose the expulsion fromBolivia of Klaus.Barbie, who "advised"the U.S. in the murder ofChe Guevara!They would have left Barbie there tocontinue the grisly work of his Einsatz­kornmando, the "Fiances of Death."This puts the SWP sharply at oddswith, among others, Castro's Cuba,which cheered the expulsion of Barbie.Instead they prefer the company ofLinnas' lawyer, Ramsey Clark, LBJ's at­torney general who ordered COINTEL­PRO and who today acts as PR man forthe murderers of Grenadian leaderMaurice Bishop. The Barnesites seembent on giving new currencyto the oldStalinist term "social-fascist." So as theinsipid SWP is wont to say, where doesErnest "Pat Buchanan" Harsch gowrong on democratic rights for Hitler?

Harsch notes that the death penaltywas abolished by the Sandinistas uponcoming to power in Nicaragua in 1979,and .adds: "N 0 one, including the formerNational Guardsmen who murdered,tortured, and raped under the oldSomoza dictatorship, can be sentencedto death." It's one thing to abolish thedeath' penalty in a postrevolution legalcode. But at the height of the insurrec­tion 'that toppled theblood-drenchedSomoza tyranny, the petty-bourgeoisSandinistas opposed mass demands toexecute the sadistic butchers. The FSLNsought to prove their "generosity" to thebourgeois liberals by holding back therevolution. In addition to blocking rev­olutionary justice, they dissolved work­ers militias and kicked peasants off theestates of the "anti-Somoza bourgeoi­sie." So the Somozaist torturers high­tailed it across the borderand soon these

• "contras" were murdering, raping andpillaging as before.

The SWP's craven defense of Nazibutchers from the firing squad goes tothe heart of their quirky brand of social­democratic reformism. Barnes & Co.want to act as the salesmen for Castro/Sandinista-style Third World national­ist revolutions to the imperialist liber­als. In the mid' and late '60s, these"peaceful, legal" reformists policed anti­war marches, excluding the com­munists to keep the platform safe for theDemocratic Party "doves" while LBJwas dropping bombs over Vietnam.Harsch's civil libertarian AmnestyInternational rhetoric is part of a polit­ical appeal to the liberals. And they'renot just talking about a statute of lim­itations for genocide. Under the guise ofa "debate," the SWP actually provides aplatform for fascist KKK killers to inciteracist murder. The Spartacist League, incontrast, like the Trotskyist SWP of the1930s and '4Os, has mobilized masslllbor/black action to stop the lynchers.

Marxists have always opposed thedeath penalty. Marx himself asked,

Victims offascist genocideat Mauthausendeath camp. Nazimass murderersshould have facedproletarian justicedecades ago!

terror. Our comrades of the LigueTrotskyste de France wrote:

"As communists, we are opposed to thedeath penalty. But we know there aremany justified executions following abloody war. A court made up of theirsurviving victims 'should decide the fateof war criminals like Barbie. He shouldbe judged by the Jews of Buchenwaldand Auschwitz, those tortured in Lyon,those who escaped the French and Rus­sian villages he devastated, the Bolivi­ans that his thugs tortured."·

-I.e Bolchevik, May 1987

Or put another way: if nobody commit­ted mass murder in World War II, thendon't kill Linnas and Barbie.

The SWP says they want to be"consistent about opposition to all useof the death penalty," and opposeextraditing, deporting or expelling any­one to a country where they are under adeath sentence. Thus Jack Barnes & Co.

For Pat Buchanan, the now-departedGoebbels of the Reagan White House,such "accused war criminals" are just"innocent Americans" facing "irrepara­ble injury and death" due to "revenge­obsessed Nazi hunters" (New YorkTimes, 7 April). So those who wouldspearhead a fascist movement in theU.S. and civil libertarian social dem­ocrats "unite" in repulsive apologies forNazi terror. In sharp contrast, WorkersVanguard (No. 427, I May) wrote ofLinnas' deportation: "For our part, wewouldn't have been unhappy if a firingsquad were waiting for this mass mur­derer as he stepped off the plane inTallinn .... However the Soviets dis­.pose of this heinous criminal, it will be

, too good for him." .As for Klaus Barbie, we called to

"Avenge the Victims of SS Butcher ofLyon!"-the more than 10,000 Jews,Communists, Resistance fighters, theGypsies, the children' he tortured,ordered killed or deported to theirdeath. Our headline declared starkly:"Kill Nazi Barbie!" Not least in our rea­sons for calling for death to Barbie is todeprive the mounting French fascistmovement of a rallying point for racist

Kill Nazi Barbie!MAY l~~f.. r ,II< pH< ,......... k>,I\<.. "'I"f:u."S."t>ut<lI<,II:.U1o,Il••b;..... ,npt>t<lfr.""...... h.udOf'lI<G<..."" in l~on 110m .,.1'0 -1'MoI.hr'

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When ,he p,<><eedi.... h_gy IJOI.......t ...y M.y II.""" ",n.1y 'l'opo<1A<le.Tbe(i"'.y d""', 'c<l~' ·.<>!tIc<'nr It.\" kor.m ...,..wnok_b;" "'on·............. h'ooo ........ wilbl>\<>od.H.played Otl ,be nypo<ti.~ of 1110F"""";"'"",,,,1;" ....... i.. pen<Hllltl ......,,,""'.,, .. ~h !'lu; col .. l>otalor••nd

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reader refers to "this Nazi butcher" andMeese's attempts to bundle him off to aSouth American dictatorship, Harschaccuses the letter writer of "focusing onLinnas' record as a Nazi war criminal"!So instead he should have focused onLinnas' activities as a Boy Scout leader?Harsch claims that Washington andother capitalist governments are "sin­gling out individuals accused ofcommit­ting mass murder more than 40 yearsago to divert attention from the massa­cres and slaughters of today." Bunk.Washington and its allies helped theseNazi scum escape justice at the hands ofthe Red Army, used their "expertise"(from rockets to torture) in the anti­Soviet Cold War and have gone all outto protect these killers. -

For Ernest Harsch, Nazi butchers likeLinnas and Barbie are "scapegoats."

Back in April a last-ditch campaignled by America's top cop Ed Meesefailed to stop the deportation of Naziwar criminal and Estonian death campcommandant Karl Linnas to the SovietUnion. The unholy alliance to "save"this mass murderer from Soviet justicestretched from Meese and former WhiteHouse propaganda chief Pat Buchananto liberal Democrat Ramsey Clark andAmnesty International. Now there is anew member of this putrid anti-Sovietbloc-the Socialist Workers Party. TheSWP opposes' handing over Linnas tothe USSR because he might be execut­ed! Referring also to the SS "Butcher ofLyon," Klaus Barbie, an article in theSWP's Militant (12 June) by ErnestHarsch grotesquely declares, "Linnas,Barbie, and other war criminals likethem are scapegoats." What a despica­ble outrage against all victims of fascistmurder-these pseudo-rsocialists" areacting as lawyers for the bloody perpe­trators of the Nazi Holocaust!

Harsch was replying to a letter from areader objecting to an earlier (22 May)Militant article on the death penaltywhich opposed Linnas' extradition as a"dangerous precedent." Because the

4 WORKERS VANGUARD

Preventive Detention: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

APAnthony Salerno, held 14 monthswithout trial.

"terrorist conspiracy." Under the pro­visions of the Bail Reform Act, passed aweek before the raid, the "New YorkEight" were held without bail until ajudge determined they were not a"threat to the community." Aftermonths of intensive surveillance and

. dirty tricks, the government went to trialcontinued on page JJ

to convict. you of a crime to get you on"conspiracy." "Patterns of racketeeringactivities" or alleged participation in a"criminal enterprise" is all they need. 'RICO and the Bail Reform Act let thegovernment bankrupt the defendants(and thus cripple their legaldefense) byseizing their assets as "proceeds ofcrime." So far the Marshals Service haspoured about a half billion dollars inseized assetsinto government coffers.

Since the passage of the Bail ReformAct, some 4,800 people have beenordered held in preventive detention bythe federal government. Thousandsmore are languishing in jail due to lackof funds or competent legal representa­tion. Rehnquist claims that the period ofdetention is limited by the Speedy TrialAct to a maximum of 70 days. He lies~Salerno himself was held for 14monthswithout a trial. Rehnquist "explains"that the high court has "no view" as towhen "detention in a particular casemight become excessively prolonged,and therefore punitive." Now that theSupreme Court has spoken, the numberof detainees will grow rapidly in federaland state pens alike. Twenty-four statesalready have their own preventive de- .tention statute and that number, too,will now rapidly increase.

It all adds up to a sinister legal pack­age ofstate repression. They can put youon Big Brother's computer on mere sus­picion, pick you up without evidence fora crime that hasn't been committed, jailyou without bail and then ensure thatyou can't afford to hire a lawyer byseizing your assets. In 1984 the Courtallowed major exceptions to the "Mi­randa" law, justifying police interroga­tion of suspects without informing themof their legal rights. And it okayedevidence from warrantless searches ifthe cops claim they thought it was legal.Black people especially are in thegovernment's cross hairs. In Aprilthe Supreme Court approved state­sanctioned murder of black peoplewhen it upheld capital punishment de­spite' overwhelming evidence of racistbias. And last year the Court ruled thatopponents of the death penalty can beexcluded as jurors, ensuring a hangingjury.

A New York Times (28 May) editorialworried that with the new ruling,

, "tomorrow's prosecutor will find it eas­ier to 'regulate' other defendants, whoharbor unpopular ideas." Tomorrow'sprosecutors?The feds have already usedpreventive detention at least twiceagainst radicals. In October 1984, hun­dreds of agents of the FBI/NYPD"Joint Terrorist Task Force," armedwith shotguns, machine guns andbazookas, raided' the homes of radicalblack nationalists in Brooklyn, Queensand Manhattan, framing them for

cause they can't afford the price offreedom. The wealthy.ihowever, areroutinely released on' their ownrecognizance.

The RICO ConspiracyThe targeting of Anthony Salerno as

a test case was no accident. In fact, thiswas the Justice Department's third tryto have the draconian preventive deten­tion law upheld by the Court, after pre­vious attempts against a group of blackradicals in New York and Puerto Ricanindependence fighters backfired. Sowho better to use to establish the "prin­ciple" of presumption of guilt than analleged mobster? The feds want to usethe Salerno case in their vendettaagainst the biggest union in the U.S., theTeamsters. Earlier this month, federalprosecutors in the Salerno trial pre­sented the videotaped testimony offormer Teamster president Roy Wil­liams claiming that he had receivedmoney from Mafia leaders.

For our part, we believe that every­one is entitled to justice, including re­puted gangsters. But they're not the gov­ernment's real target (after all, some ofthe biggest drug traffickers and gun­runners in the U.S. are Reagan's contrabuddies). What the feds want is a bat­tery of repressive lawsfor use against theworking class, minorities and the left.Preventive detention goes hand in handwith the RICO (Racketeer Influencedand Corrupt Organizations Act) drag­net which lets the G-men pick up who­ever they want. The D.A. doesn't have

Blacks behindbars. Reaganl

Rehnqulst courtdecisions on

death penalty,preventivedetention:

part of plansfor racist

pollee state.

country for war and they're rubbing outthe remaining vestiges of civil libertieswhich stand in the way.

In his dissenting opinion, JusticeThurgood Marshall wrote:

"This case brings before the Court forthe first time a statute in whichCongress declares that a person inno­cent of any crime may be jailedindefinitely, pending the trial of allega­tions which are legally presumed to beuntrue.. .. Such statutes, consistentwith the usages of tyranny and theexcesses of what bitter experienceteaches us to call the police state, havelong been thought incompatible withthe fundamental human rights protect­ed by our Constitution .... [The] deci­sion disregards basic principles ofjustice established centuries ago andenshrined beyond the reach of govern­mental interference in the Bill ofRight~.."

But as columnist Russell Bakerquipped,"Talk in constitutional circles is thatJustice Department types are saying EdMeese should put Brennan and Mar­shall under preventive detention."

In Rehnquist's brave new world, pre­trial detention is merely "regulatory":"the mere fact that a person is detaineddoes not inexorably lead to the conclu­sion that the Government has imposedpunishment ...." And what about theConstitution's insistence that "excessivebail shall not be required"? The chiefjustice answers: "This Clause, of course,says nothing about whether bail shall be-available at all." The poor, the unem­ployed and minorities from whom ex­cessive bail is demanded have alreadyexperienced "preventive detention" be-

upreme ourtPo ice- tate Rulin

The police state yearned for by Attor- ,ney General Edwin Meese came a bigstep closer May 26 when the SupremeCourt ruled that a person who has onlybeen accused of a crime can be held in"preventive detention." All that's re­quired is for a government prosecutor toconvince a judge that the defendant rep­resents a "danger to the community,"and you're behind bars with no possi­bility of posting bail. Even as the patri­otic hoopla over the 200th anniversaryof the U.S'. Constitution was gettingunder way in Philadelphia, the Court's6-to-3 decision erased one of the funda­mental principles the Constitution sup­posedly protected-the presumption ofinnocence. And Meese already declaredthat suspects are ipso facto guilty: "If aperson is innocent of a crime, then he isnot a suspect." In Reagan's America,you can be jailed until proven innocent.

Two weeks after the Supreme Court'sruling, a federal advisory committeeapproved a major expansion of theNational Crime Information Center'scomputerized files Which would enablefederal, state and local cops to trackallthose "under investigation," includingpeople not charged with any crime.Various police agencies already send anaverage of 540,000 inquiries a day to thecenter's FBI-managed computers, get­ting a report in seconds. The advisorycommittee proposes a sweeping exten­sion of domestic surveillance, creatingan electronic "Big Brother" networkwith access to records of the Immigra­tion and Naturalization Service, thepassport office, IRS and more.Institu­tionalizing the frame-up principle, thefeds would be given blanket authority totarget entire organizations, includingpolitical groups. According to the NewYork Times (11 June), "The advisorycommittee said the national computerfile should include the names of groupsto which wanted persons wereknown tobelong." The National Crime Informa­tion Center even wants to include thegenetic characteristics of its subjects.The Nazis tattooed their victims; BigBrother in Washington wants yourDNA embossed on your ID!

Chief Justice William Rehnquist'smajority opinion upheld the OrwellianBail Reform Act, passed, appropri­ately, in 1984, which provides for thedenial of bail to certain defendantsdeemed to represent a threat to "thesafety of any other person and the com­munity." The decision reverses a U.S.

. Court of Appeals which struck down thelaw as unconstitutional in a case againstAnthony Salerno.reputedly head of theGenovese crime family. The SupremeCourt ruling has nothing to do withfighting crime. It's an American versionof a South Africa-style "emergencypowers" act designed for rounding upany and all opponents of the govern­ment. Rehnquist's ruling states:

"We have repeatedly held that the Gov­ernment's regulatory interest in com­munity safety can, in appropriate cir­cumstances, outweigh .an individual'sliberty interest. For example, in times ofwar or insurrection, when society'sinterest is at its peak, the Governmentmay detain individuals whom the Gov-,ernment believes to be dangerous."

The U.S. ruling class is regimenting this

26 JUNE 1987 5

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From Rice Bowl toIndustrial Dynamo

South Korea has been transformed ina historically short time from an over­whelmingly agrarian society to an

pressuring Moscow to attack Japan,Truman dr-opped A-bombs againstHiroshima and Nagasaki in large part asa warning to the Soviets.

In the South, mass demonstrationswere organized to greet the Americansas liberators of Korea from Japaneseimperialism. The V.S. colonial admin­istration under General Hodge usedJapanese troops and police to shootdown these demonstrators. That was ataste of what the Koreans could expectunder U.S. imperialism. SyngmanRhee, a nonentity who had been livingin exile in the V.S. for decades, wasbrought back and imposed as U.S.puppet.

While Stalin and the North Koreanregime basically accepted the artificialdivision at the 38th parallel, the V.S.never did and transformed the dividedpeninsula into a principal battlegroundof the anti-Soviet war drive in the FarEast. The victory of Mao's Red Army inthe Chinese civil war, smashing ChiangKai-shek and overturning landlord/capitalist rule, infuriated the impe­rialists. Particularly after the re­criminations over "who lost China,"Washington sought to "roll back Com­munism" to the borders of the SovietUnion. When the North Korean armyresponded to V.S. provocations bycrossing the border on 25June 1950,thepuppet South Korean army collapsedwith mass desertions.

Rhee's forces along with the V.S. con­tingent were driven back to Pusan onthe southern coast in weeks beforeAmerican troops massively intervened.Truman declared a "police action,"which meant he didn't ask Congress fora declaration of war. Under GeneralDouglas MacArthur (one of RonaldReagan's heros), V.S. forces (barely dis­guised under the VN flag) drove to andacross the Chinese border on the YaluRiver. However, the Chinese counter­attack drove the imperialists back to the38th parallel. While Truman nixedMacArthur's plans to nuke Manchuriaand sow a radioactive belt of cobaltacross the peninsula, the use of nuclearweapons was held back only becauseRussia by then had the bomb.

Today the 40,000-man V.S. contin­gent is formally described as a "tripwire" in case of North Korean attack; infact it is the forward position ofthe V.S.anti-Soviet war machine in the north­ern Pacific. According to the Sovietpublication New Times (15 June) theV.S. in South' Korea has "beaten allrecords for saturation with nuclearweapons, of which there are more than athousand units. There is one per lessthan 100 square kilometers of SouthKorean territory." The peninsula is atrip wire ... for World War III.

Protestershauled awayin police vansfor demandingfreedom forbourgeoisoppositionleader KimDae Jung.

UPI

Worker-student protesters captured army vehicles in 1980Kwangju-uprising.

WORKERS VANGUARD

cos. Kim remarked last year: "We needstrong government to effectively con­trol die military and to have a strong de-.fense posture against the North Koreathreat."

Aligned' with the two Kims areRoman Catholic cardinal Kim SouHwan and other Christian religiousorganizations. Their base, particularlythe Catholics, is an upwardly mobileprofessional elite which chafes undermilitary rule. The shock troops of theopposition are the university students,numbering 1.2 million in a populationof 41 million. Largely children of themiddle classes, the students are thefuture administrators and technocratsof Korean capitalism. But while theKims and the cardinal court the V.S.State Department and CongressionalDemocrats, the students chant "YankeeGo Home!" along with "Down with theDictatorship!" To force the 40,000 V.S.troops out and bring down the militarydictatorship will require a workers rev­olution. And workers revolution in theSouth also poses a proletarian politi­cal revolution against the Stalinist­ruled North Korean bureaucraticallydeformed workers state.

The Two Koreas-Offspringof the Cold War

Froml9lOto the end of World WarllKorea suffered under the savagecolonial regime of Japanese imperial­ism, comparable to the Nazi occupa­tion of Eastern Europe. In 1945,in orderto get the Soviet V nion to enter the waragainst Japan, the V.S. imperialistsagreed at Potsdam and Yalta to let theRed Army occupy the northern half ofKorea down to the 38th parallel whilethe V.S. would get the south. On 8August 1945, the Red Army moved in,bringing along the Communist-led guer­rilla detachments who had been fight­ing the Japanese in Manchuria (andmany of whom had been integrated intothe Red Army during World War II).Among them was Kim II Sung, the Sta­linist ruler of North Korea. But after

July 1953:Cheering NorthKorean POWsreturn home.Korean WarfrustratedWashington'santi-Sovietdrive for worlddomination.

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a rigged election in 1970 against ParkChung Hee even under conditions ofvirtual military dictatorship. UnderChun, Kim was sentenced to death, thenreprieved as a favor to the V .S., and nowlives under chronic house arrest inSeoul. During. several years in exile inthe V.S., Kim Dae Jung hobnobbedwith the liberal Democrats who spon­sored exiled Philippine patrician Be­nigno Aquino before he returned toManila and was assassinated by Mar-

ious and middle-class, looks to Wash­ington for support. Its most prominentleaders are the "two Kims"-Kim DaeJung and Kim Young Sam-both main­line bourgeois politicians who recentlyfounded the Reunification DemocraticParty..Such is the hatred for the gener­als' rule that Kim Dae Jung almost won

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6

The Special Forces troops which car­ried out the massacre were released fromduty along the Demilitarized Zone withNorth Korea and replaced by V.S.troops. So it was quite appropriate thatthe butcher Chun was the first foreignhead of state to visit the Reagan WhiteHouse in January 1981. But the V.S.role in the Kwangju massacre has pow­erfully fueled anti-American feelingamong the Korean masses.

The liberal opposition, heavily relig-

(continued from page I)

"the best thing ...would be for thedemonstrations, with their potential forviolence, to stop and the dialog toresume"! The White House does notwant to "jeopardize a smooth transi­tion of power when [Chun] steps down,"reported the New York Times (16June).The military dictators who inhabitSeoul's presidential palace are V.S.creatures and have been since 1945. Forover four decades South Korea has beena front line in the anti-Soviet Cold War.Indeed, V.S. imperialism's first majorwar against the Sino-Soviet states,between 1950 and 1953, was fought onthis peninsula, a war which killed 3million Koreans out of a population of30 million.

Ever since, the V.S. troops stationedin South Korea have helped police thisbloody police state. Shortly after Chuncame to power.in a 1980 military coup,he consolidated his rule by massacringhundreds to crush an insurrection in thecity of Kwangju. In that battle, stu­dents and workers battled a full armydivision and seized military vehicles.

South Korea ...;

perspective in that half-country thatdoes not also look northward across theDMZ. Everybody in Korea seems to befor "reunification." The generals dreamof doing it through counterrevolutionin the North. The opposition pays lipservice to reunification as a nationalgoal standing "above ideology." Na­tionalist students see the ouster of theU.S. as the precondition for claimingthe heritage of a united nation. TheNorth Korean bureaucracy proposesutopian schemes for a federated unity,while it opposes workers revolution inthe South. Reunification will occur ononly one of two counterposed paths:counterrevolutionary war on a shortroad to worldwide nuclear oblivion, orrevolutionary reunification throughsocialist revolution in the South andproletarian political revolution in theNorth.

The nationalism of the courageousKorean student youth reflects the stronginfluence on events of Korea's positionbetween China and Japan, two majorpowers with a colonialist history. Japa­nese revolutionists have a special duty tooppose the Japanese bourgeoisie's rac­ist, imperialist contempt for and ex­ploitation of the Koreans-includingthe Korean minority within Japanitself-in order to forge revolutionaryunity of Korean and Japanese workers.Only through the Trotskyist programof proletarian internationalism will so­cialism triumph in Korea. U.S. outof Korea! For military defense of theUSSR, North Korea and the otherdeformed workers states! For revolu­tionary reunification "". of Korea! ForTrotskyist parties in Korea; Northand South! Reforge the Fourth In­ternational, world party of socialistrevolution! •

The American Question at theFourth Congress

of the Communist International----_PAGE 20 ' ,

Revolution andCounterreVolution in BoliVia

Repl, to 6. Lora. Parrot of Nationalism----_PAGE29 _

For International ClaSS-Struggle Defense!-----PAGE2 _

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a large and powerful industrial workingclass which can be held in check only bythe army. If the current upheavals stopshort of a workers revolution, there willbe nothing to replace the bloody mili­tary regime with. Washington's butch­ers will simply becomemere brutalandrepressive.

The monstrous police state that isSouth Korea is a product of the ColdWar, and there can be no revolutionary

counterrevolution worldwide. No doubtmany in the .bourgeoisopposition inSeoul dream of a Cory Aquino solu­tion: chants of "people power" are heardin the streets. We don't know muchabout South Korea. But one thing isclear: "people power" sure won't work,and Reagan is not about to put Chunon a plane for Hawaii. Unlike thePhilippines, there exists in South Korea

Reagan at theDMZ sets sights

on war withSoviet Union.U.S. dirty war

against Vietnamused South

Korean troops,here tormenting

capturedVietnamese'

woman In 1966.

dictatorship after another. SyngmanRhee was brought down by. mass stu­dent demonstrations in 1968and fled toHawaii. An elected government wasoverthrown nine months later by thearmy coup which brought Park ChungHee to power. The KCIA blew Parkaway as he wined and dined duringstreet demonstrations in October 1979.Chun came out on top in infightingamong the generals that followed(with the help of his buddy Roh, who .called in his Ninth Infantry at a criticalpoint).

The South Korean army was begun inthe 1940s with cadres trained by theJapanese officer corps, graduates of theJapanese-run military academies-s-i.e.,they were puppet troops, the collab­orators in a ruthless colonial repres­sion. During the Korean War there wasa vast anti-Communist expansion ofthearmy, and in the Vietnam War theyrented two divisions to the U.S. TheseSouth Korean troops had the highestkill rate of any units in the field in SouthVietnam. Chun and Roh served togeth­er in Vietnam. This regime is alsointimately tied in with an internationalnetwork of counterrevolutionary ter­ror. The sinister Unification Church ofSun Myung Moon is a creature of theKCIA. The Moonies organize not onlyglassy-eyed cultists but also. LatinAmerican death squads. And KoreanAir Lines-s-also closely tied to theKCIA-was used in Reagan's KAL 007provocation in which over 200 innocentpassengers were killed in a spy missionover vital Soviet military installations inthe Far East.

We would like very much to see thisregime shattered: it is a sinister force for

ness; universal medical care; a nationalsystem.of education and childcare.

Militarism and ReactionGiven the intensity of the social con­

tradictions, to maintain their rule theSouth Korean capitalists probably needbonapartism, and that means the army.It's no accident that the South Koreangovernment has been a sequence of one.

siaweek

South Korea's 'growing Industrial proletariat key to smashing military dictatorship, forging revolutionary unity withNorth Korean workers and peasants.

industrial, largely urban country­albeit a poor one, with one-eighth theper capita income of Japan or the U.S.In 1930,95 percent of the population insouthern Korea was rural. The Japa­nese built up industry in the north underconditions of virtual slave labor. In1940, factory and mine workers num­bered 300,000. Today there are 13million workers in the South, over 3million in industry, concentrated in,large modern auto, steel and shipbuild­ing factories. In 1986South Korea reg­istered its first-ever trade surplus of$4.5billion, mostly exports to the U.S.

South, Korea's "economic miracle"rests on state-sponsored private monop­olies, the chaebols-like Daewoo, own­er of the world's largest textile mills inPusan-which have made a handful ofKoreans filthy rich. Seventy percent ofthe national economy is in the hands of,just six companies. At the same time,South Korea is a major sphere ofexploitation by American and Japa­nese capital. In fact, South Korea maywellhave the highest rate of exploitationof any relatively industrialized country.Industrial workers average 54-hourweeks with no overtime and get paid, onaverage, 43 percent less than the costof subsistence living. The big plants arerun like military camps. Unions havebeen effectively banned except for a

government-run "labor" federation., Recently some illegal independentunions have arisen. Militant workersface the cops, gangs of company thugsknown as "soccer teams," and a compu­terized blacklist jointly run by theMinistry of Labor, the bosses and theKCIA secret police. Nevertheless, onoccasion the tinder explodes in defiantstruggle, and it has happened more fre­quently over the past few years. In April1985, thousands of auto workers seizedthe Daewoo Motors plant; two monthslater, thousands of women workers',picketed with students at the Kuro tex­tile factory in Seoul. Last May Daythousands of industrial workers inInchon, protesting working conditions,confronted riot police with clubs andiron bars.

Stalinist-ruled North Korea under theother "two Kims"-Kim II Sung and hisson and anointed heir, Kim Chong II­seems to be in a time capsule. With itsplanned economy, the North success­fully industrialized long before theSouth, which for instance did not sur­pass the North in steel production until1975, despite having twice the popula­tion, and despite the strain on the Northof maintaining a 700,OOO-man army toguard against the imperialist/puppetforces on the other side of the DMZ.North Korea produces all its own weap­ons-but the technology in the ,fac­tories is 25 years old or more. Kim IISung maintains a "cult of personality"that Stalin could envy, and pursues anisolationist policy of "self-reliance,"juche, the Kim II Sung version of"socialism" in half a country. Yet thesocial gains of the revolution areimpressive: no starvation or homeless-

26 JUNE 1987 7

"

From Petain to Le Pen

A,Keystone Canada Bundesarchiv Kob!enz

Leaders of Nazi-collaborationist Vichy dictatorship (above left), Marshal Petain and President Laval. Deportation of Jews (above right) from Marseille toNazi death camps. More than 75,000 French Jews were deported, only 2,500 survived. '

WORKERS VANGUARD

French Anti-Semitism in PowerIn the conclusion to their noteworthy

study Vichy France and the Jews, whichscrupulously documents the anti-Jewishpersecutions practiced under Petain,historians Michael Marrus and RobertPaxton write:

"It is striking with what alacrity theVichy regime, enjoying more popularsupport at the beginning than had mostpreceding French governments. delib­erately adopted an anti-Jewish policyafter the defeat of 1940. We hope thereis no longer any possible confusionabout the German role in launching thatpolicy. We can find no trace of German'attempts to extend their own anti­Jewish policy to the Unoccupied Zonein the summer of 1940; at the begin­ning. they envisaged France as adumping ground for their own ref­ugees. Vichy. anti-Jewish policy wasthus not only autonomous from Ger­man policy; it was a rival to it. Vichystruggled with the occupying authorityin an attempt to assert its own sover­eignty in anti-Jewish matters.. and tokeep the advantages of propertyconfiscations and refugee control foritself."

At the end of the 1930s, the Frenchbourgeoisie, haunted by the 1936strikes. wasdefeatist toward Nazi Ger­many, an attitude which was summedup well in the famous phrase "BetterHitler than the Popular Front." But theBlitzkrieg defeat and collapse of thearmy in May-June 1940conjured up forthe bourgeoisie the threatening spectreof the Paris Commune, the outcome oftheir last military defeat. Frightenedand traumatized, the bourgeoisie sur­rendered all power to the chiefs of staffin the person of Marshal Petain, the"victor of Verdun" and more especiallythe man who drowned in blood themutinies in the trenches in 1917.

The Nazis didn't object to lettingPetain have the means to "maintainorder." In fact, Hitler didn't have theslightest intention of Nazifying France.He only wanted to neutralize it mili­tarily and keep the economy trim inorder to finance his upcoming waragainst the USSR. The 1940 armisticewas therefore a deal (unequal, to besure) between two imperialist powers:French imperialism would be militarilydisarmed on the mainland and wouldplace its industry and state apparatus atthe service of the Nazi war machine, butat the same time it would be granted

continued on page 10

principal justifications for the PCF'spopular-front alliance with the bour­

.geois "Resistance" against Petain's"anti-national" regime. We are asked tobelieve that when it persecuted the Jews,Vichy was only giving in to Hitler'sdemands. Nothing could be more false.

atrocity of other crimes committed bycapitalism: the victorious proletariatwill avenge them all.

When Barbie was deported to Franceand arrived in Lyon in 1983, thedaugh­ter of a deportee (who herself had beensent to .the Draney camp at the age offive) was arrested in possession of aloaded rifle. It's really too bad thatshe didn't succeed (unlike ScholemSchwartzbard, a Jewish anarchist who,in 1926, executed the Ukrainian hetmanPetliura, who had been responsible forpogroms during the Russian civil war;Schwartzbard was acquitted during afamous trial). For there can be nodoubt: Barbie deserves to die.

As communists, we are opposed tothe death penalty. But we know thereare many justified executions followinga bloody war. A court made up of theirsurviving victims should decide the fateof war criminals like Barbie. He shouldbe judged by the Jews of Buchenwaldand Auschwitz, those tortured in Lyon,those who escaped the French and Rus­sian villages he devastated, the Bolivi­ans that his thugs tortured. But theFrench bourgeois state and its courts arequite incapable of this elementary act ofjustice. Since 1983 successive govern­ments have dragged out preparationsfor the Barbie trial for four years (he isnow 74). And now that it is finally begin­ning, the French bourgeoisie is visiblynervous.

For the Barbie trial could well bringto the surface the history of collabora­tion by the French bourgeoisie and itsstate with the Nazis, and its active par­ticipation in the extermination of theJews. This would seriously endanger theGaullist myth that all the crimes of theVichy regime were simply the result of

. its systematic capitulation to Germandiktats-i-e myth which is also an articleof faith in the French Communist Party(PCF), since it constitutes one of the

French Fascismand the

Holocaustthat country's oligarchy, and was madea colonel in the Bolivian secret service.

Verges' Sinister Role

Barbie's lawyer, Jacques Verges,plans to use all the unpunished crimescommitted by French imperialism, bothunder Vichy as well as during the dirtycolonial wars in Indochina and Algeria,to demand that the fascist butcher he isdefending be acquitted. In other words,Verges isdemanding amnesty for all tor­turers! In his book For the Fedayin,Verges had already characterized theJerusalem trial of Nazi war criminalEichmann as a "parody." Under coverof a pseudo "anti-imperialism" and afake "anti-Zionism" which smacks ofanti-Semitism, Verges tried to "relativ­ize" the horror of the Holocaust, themethodical, organized, cold-bloodedextermination of six million men,women and children. This genocide isthe ultimate horror of capitalist bar­barism-which does not diminish the

On May II the trial of the Nazi tor­turer Klaus Barbie opened in Lyon,where he was head of the Gestapo from1942 to 1944. Many of those who suc­ceeded in escaping with their lives fromthe clutches of the "Butcher of Lyon"have since died, but his surviving vic­tims are still waiting, more than 40 yearslater, for justice to be done.

They haven't forgotten the sadist whotortured resisters and hostages with bes­tial ferocity in the cellars of the Montlucprison and the Ecole de Sante Militaireon the Avenue Berthelot. They haven'tforgotten the SS Obersturmfiihrer whopersonally took charge of the slaughteror deportation of hundreds of defense­less civilians and the carnage of wholevillages in the countryside around Ainbetween February and April of 1944.They haven't forgotten the Jews whowere sent to a hideous death, such as the44 children rounded up in the village ofIzieu on 6 April 1944 by Barbie's menand their French accomplices of themilitia and shipped off to the ovens ofAuschwitz.

Barbie was a fanatical Nazi, a mem­ber of the Gestapo beginning in,1935,and has many other crimes on his head.In 1940, in Amsterdam, he took On thepersecution and deportation of the Jewswith a savage zeal. During the Germanoffensive against the USSR in 1941, hewas transferred to a Gestapo unit whichsowed terror in the wake of the Wehr­macht advance. And after the war, hav­ing fled to Bolivia with the help of theAmerican secret services for which heworked from 1947 to 1950, he con­tinued his fascist activities on behalf of

tbllotheque National. Pari!> Tallandier. Paris

French fascists take to the streets In the '3Os(left). Anti-Semitic propagandaposter of the 1940s.

8

Adapted from Le Bolchevik No. 73,-, May 1987, newspaper of the Ligue

Trotskyste de France.

•me

••

World PublishingGeneral Gehlen reviewing WW II Nazi pup­pet troops of "Russian Liberation Army."U.S. took over Gehlen group to use as WestGerman spy network.

-

TimeJames Jesus Angleton and Gen. "Wild Bill"Donovan in Rome 1945, architects of OSS

. "Rat Line" to funnel Nazi war criminals outof Europe.

Wide WorldReagan honors Nazi SS at Bitburg cemetery, May 1985, in preparation fornuclear Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

In its second month, the "trial" ofKlaus Barbie, the Nazi Gestapo chief inLyon, France during World War II,settled into a ritual. The state present­ed witness after witness of Barbie'sbestial crimes against humanity, hisroundup of 44 Jewish children fromtheir refuge in Izieu to send them to thegas chambers, the extermination ofResistance fighters in pre-dawn "nightand fog" operations, how the SSHauptsturmfiihrer personally torturedhundreds. The criminal himself isabsent: he doesn't feel like facing theanguished survivors of his reign of ter­ror, and the state is not eager to haveBarbie, the face of modern barbarism,smirking over the hall. They alreadydelayed the trial for more than fouryears, fearing his threats to put hisprosecutors on trial for the widespread

and enthusiastic collaboration of theFrench bourgeoisie with the Nazi Holo­caust. Now they're staging a judicialproceeding which is a grotesque mock­ery of justice. Meanwhile, the fascistgangs of Le Pen are rampaging fromMarseille to Lyon and Paris.

America's rulers, too, are nervousabout the Barbie "trial." The New YorkTimes Magazine (10 May) wrote: "a keyelement in the Barbie case-though onethat will scarcely surface during thetrial-is the American involvement withBarbie at the close of the war, itself theprincipal reason it has taken almost 44years to bring the 'Butcher of Lyons' tojustice. For Barbie was recruited as anagent by the V nited States ArmyCounterintelligence Corps in 1947,and _worked for the c.l.c. until 1951, whenAmericans arranged his escape to

Bolivia." There the "American con­nection" ended, they claim, an "excess"of the Cold War as long.gone as theVichy regime in France. But, as ClaudeJulien noted in Le Monde Diploma­tique (May 1987), the Lyon trial is notjust a "history lesson": "The collapse ofthe Hitlerite regime didn't put an end tothe practices of the Gestapo. The brownplague simply contaminated other partsof the world .... it's impossible to judgethe crimes of yesterday while ignoringthe crimes of today."

Nazi monsters who kept one stepahead of the Red Army found safehaven in the American zone of occu­pied postwar Germany. Their tech­niques of genocide and commitment tosmash Communism were a marketableasset in the "Free World." As we notedin 1983when Barbie was at last expelled

from Bolivia and turned over to theFrench:

" ... Barbie along with thousands ofNazis were enlisted as 'freedom fight­ers' in the U.S. Cold War apparatus.Thus Klaus Barbieisonlyone-and noteven the worst one-of a largenumberof Nazi beneficiaries of the anti-Sovietcrusade which periodically- raises thebloodstained banner of 'human rights.'

• It is because Klaus Barbie is another'human rights' Nazi that it is such asticky mess for the imperialist bour­geoisies. It exposes againtheCIA'sNazinetwork, the widespread Nazi collab­oration by the French bourgeoisie, andthe barbarous purposes of imperialismfrom Bonn to La Paz."

-"Klaus Barbie: From Gestapoto CIA," WV No. 324,25 February 1983

Barbie was no rare exception but one ofthousands of Nazi war criminals res­cued by the V.S. government, manyof

them for 'service in imperialism's anti­Soviet spy agencies and anti-Soviet wardrive.

Anti-Communist Barbie:From SS to ass

And this policy continues to this dayas the CIA "networks" aging Nazis withmercenary contra scum from Nicara­gua to Angola. The fascist death squadsof Latin America who brutally torturedand murdered tens of thousands wereorganized and trained in Gestapo meth­ods under the direction of the CIA,sometimes with the direct. participationof SS bombers like Barbie. These deathsquads, especially the Argentine, wereused in turn by the CIA to train the con­tras. One of the spoils of Americanimperialism's victory in World War IIhas been the wholesale nazification ofSouth America's police and military aswell as the widespread formation anddeployment of fascist terror squads toaugment the repressive apparatus of thestate.

It was the Soviet Red Army thatdefeated Hitler's Reich, planting 'thehammer and sickle flag over the Reichs­tag on 1 May 1945. From the TrumanWhite House and Pentagon on down,American rulers were obsessed with the"threat" of a "Communi~n~keover" ofGermany. The V.S. Army's CounterIntelligence Corps hired Barbie as aninformer specializing in penetration ofthe German Communist Party (KPD)and intelligence operations in theFrench occupation zone, a hotbed ofKPD activity. Index' cards on Barbie,apparently drawn up by the Allied HighCommand before the war ended, de­scribed him as "very cruel," his "brutalcharacter hidden under a jovial exteri­or." He was listed by the War CrimesCommission as early as 1945and by theCentral Registry of War Criminals in1947 as wanted by the French for massmurder. Despite their denials, theAmericans knew exactly who KlausBarbie was. But now that he was "onboard" the description changed some­what: one of his CIChandlers, ErhardDabringhaus, described Barbie in 1947as "profoundly anti-Communist" and "aNazi idealist."

The orders came from the top. "De­nazification" was replaced by renazifi­cation. In his very belated "expose,"Dabringhaus tells how "we had receiveda directive from higher headquarters tothe effect that after June, 1948, we wereto turn our attention from former Nazisto the communists" (Klaus Barbie[1984]). General George Patton himselfproposed that rather than disarming theSS divisions in his zone of command,they should be included in his army sohe could "lead them against the Reds."When complaints from the Soviets

about footdragging in disarming theNazis were conveyed to Patton by a V.S.official, he snapped: "What do you carewhat those goddam Bolshies think?We're going to fight them sooner orlater. Why not now while our army isintact and we can kick the Red Armyback into Russia? We can do it with myGermans .... They hate those Red bas­tards" (New Times [Moscow], March1983). From defeated Japan, GeneralMacArthur was proposing the samething.

The Third Reich's "Russia experts"became the red squad for "Wild Bill"Donovan's OSS (Office of StrategicServices), forerunner of the CIA In1948, this policy was codified-in Nation­al Security Council Directive 10/2. An"Office of Policy Coordination'lwas setup to recruit secret armies among EastEuropean Nazi collaborators, to bedropped into the Soviet bloc for sabo­tage activities. The V .S. took overGeneral Reinhard Gehlen's infamous"Foreign Armies East" Wehrmachtcounterespionage group which was in­strumental in the deaths of over onemillion Jews on the Eastern Front.Renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst,Gehlen's gang became the official spyand counterspy service of the new WestGerman state, under close CIA super­vision. The OSS escape hatch for the SSwas the rule, not the exception. Over 30Nazis ended up as instructors at the V.S.Army's Intelligence School. Others, likeEinsatzgruppen Major Buchardt andSS General Franz Six, who headedHimmler's special staff to liquidate

continued on page J2

"'W4

Tom Bower

Klaus Barbie (right) with his U.S.Army Counter Intelligence control­ler Herbert Bechtold ilT Augsburg,West Germany after the war.

26 JUNE 1987 9

FrenchFascism...(continued from page 8)

broad latitude to apply its own reac­tionary policy, including in the zoneoccupied by the Wehrmacht in thenorth. Vichy no longer had an army, butit still had at its disposal the rest of thestate apparatus, in particular policeforces whose. strength soon numbered100,000.

On 3 November 1940 the Vichy gov­ernment promulgated a "Statut desJuijs" (anti-Jewish laws) which provid­ed the legal basis for transforming theJews into pariahs. These laws closed aseries of professions to Jews, in particu­lar civil service and teaching (a Jewbeing defined as "any person with threegrandparents of the Jewish race [sic] ortwo grandparents of said race, if thespouse is also Jewish," a definitionbroader than that used by the Nazis atthe time), and instituted a system ofquotas for the other professions. On No­vember 4 a law authorized prefects to"intern in special camps" "foreign cit­izens of the Jewish race."

The Statut des Juifs and"Aryanization" --

Bourgeois opinion applauded theseracist laws and "legal" specialists pro­duced sage commentaries on their ele­gance. The eminent expert on cohabita­tion, Maurice Duverger, then a risingyoung jurist and former member ofDoriot's fascist Parti Populaire Fran­cais (PPF), explained the link between

the "authoritarian" nature of the Petainregime and the anti-Jewish laws as fol­lows in the distinguished Revue duDroit Public: "This new regime is alsodeeply national: it is mounting a veryclear reaction against the cosmopolitan­ism inspired by the philosophy. of theeighteenth century. This national fhar­acter explains notably the measurestaken to exclude Jews' and naturalizedcitizens from public functions."

Vichy's anti-Jewish laws were imme­diately zealously applied. The purge ofthe officer corps, the police, the judici­ary, teachers and higher civil servants,was carried out in record time. The lib­eral professions enthusiastically appliedthe quotas which allowed good "Ary­ans" to take over the positions andclients of their Jewish colleagues. Andthe capitalists couldn't wait to get theirhands on Jewish-owned businesses.

This "Aryanization" of the economyprovoked considerable friction with theGermans over the question of whetherthe Germans or bourgeois Frenchmenwould get to rob the Jews in the Occu­pied Zone. The anti-Jewish policies ofthe Nazis and Vichy came into evenmore serious conflict over the questionof deportation of Jews to France. In1940and 1941, Hitler had not yet giventhe order for the massive exterminationof the Jews. He was trying to deport asmany as possible from the territorywhich was to form the Thousand YearReich, and the Unoccupied Zone of avanquished France seemed to him anideal place to ship them to. Paxton andMarrus relate a particularly tragic and

10

significant incident. On 22 October1940,6,504 German Jews weredeportedto Lyon in sealed trains. Vichy immedi­ately swamped the German authoritieswith a flood of protests against this"violation of the armistice."

"As for the wretched occupants of thetrains, they suffered as both French andGermans competed in inhumanity.After 'being shuttled back and forth intheir sealed wagons while French andGerman authorities' wrangled,' theseGerman Jews were finally deposited on25 October in the French internmentcamp at Gurs, in the Pyrenees. Whenthe cattle cars were unsealed at Pau,some of them contained dead bodies. AtGurs, more Jews died of cold, malnour­ishment, tuberculosis, and other dis­eases before the survivors were ulti­mately deported to the east in 1942and1943." .

Vichy and the Final SolutionVichy and Nazi anti-Semitism re­

turned to a parallel course in 1942,whenthe Nazis had decided on and organizedthe Holocaust. Vichy was enthusiasticover the fact that the Germans had nowdecided to definitively get rid of all Jews,and French imperialism didn't hesitateto place its state apparatus at the ser­vice of the SS killing machine. Evenmore abominable, the French govern­ment insisted that children under 16 bedeported, which the Nazis at first didn't

'want to do.In all, more than 75,000 Jews were'

deported from French territory (wheth­er under German occupation or not), ofwhich only 2,500 escaped death. Theoverwhelming majority of them hadbeen identified, put on lists and arrestedby the French administration andpolice, and then collected in the French

Le Pen and hisfascist NationalFront march ~

through Paris.Mitterrand'spopular frontpaved the wayfor current waveof fascist terroragainst Frenchand immigrantworkers.

concentration camp at Drancy (in thenorthern suburbs of Paris) before beingdumped into cattle cars by Frenchpolicemen and sent offto the Nazi deathfactories. Three thousand died of hun­ger and illness at Draney, which wasguarded by the French police. In De­cember 1941 an official French reportstated:

"Those who have not with their owneyes seen some of those released fromDraney can only have a faint idea ofthewretched state of internees in this campwhich is unique in history. It issaid thatthe notorious camp of Dachau is noth­ing in comparison with Draney."

French FascismWhy did anti-Semitism occupy such

an important place in Vichy's reaction­ary program?

In 1940, France was no longer-andhadn't been for some time!-the coun­try which liberated the Jews from feu­dal oppression and whose Napoleonicarmies had literally blown away thegates to the ghettos all over Europe.Under the double shock of the ParisCommune and its defeat by Bismarck,the nationalism of the French bour­geoisie and petty bourgeoisie had hard­ened into a xenophobic and revanchistnationalism. This transformation pre­saged the coming of the imperialistepoch-an epoch of "reaction across theboard," as Lenin said-in which decay­ing capitalism brutally reversed theprocess of Jewish assimilation.

The majority ofPetainist leaders were- members or sympathizers of Action

Franeaise, a powerful clerical and roy-

1936 Frenchgeneral strike:

Trotsky called fortransforming

workers. Committees of

Action (right) intorevolutionary

soviets. CPStalinists

sacrificed fightfor workers power

on altar ofpopular front.

alist movement founded by CharlesMaurras in'1898 and forged, at the timeof the Dreyfus affair, in the fight againstJews and the radical and anticlericalThird Republic. Anti-Semitismand anti­parliamentarism henceforth constitut­ed the two inseparable pillars of the ide­ology of the French far right. Of course,after 1917 diehard anti-eommunismwas added to it. A good idea of whatthis meant is encapsulated in thisformulation from an "Appeal to theWorkers," published by Action Fran­caise in 1924: "Twelve Jewish capital­ists founded L'Humanite, German goldmade possible the Russian Revolution,which was carried out by German Jews,Bronstein, called Trotsky, etc."

The world capitalist crisis of 1929hit France, bringing with it massiveunemployment and ruining whole lay­ers of the petty bourgeoisie. From thatpoint on, parliamentarism was doomed,as was the Third Republic and its main­stays such as the' bourgeois Radical­Socialist Party.

By 1934, the fascists had alreadygrown considerably and were organizedinto "leagues" which were mass organi­zations. The biggest of them, Colonelde la Rocque's Croix de Feu ("FieryCross"), had several hundred thousand'members. But there were many otherswhich were more virulent, though not asbig: the Camelots du Roi (themilitia ofAction Francaise), the Jeunesses Patri­otes, the "Franquists,' etc. On 6 Feb­ruary1934, they took the offensive:40,000 of them launched an assault onparliament, confronting the police in apitched battle which resulted in 16deadand 600 wounded. The next day, thepresident of the Council of Ministers,the Radical Daladier (the prime min­ister), resigned in favor of a reaction­ary, Doumergue. The big bourgeoisie,which had financed and armed the fas­cist gangs, used them to issue a warning

Peebles PressFrench captain Alfred Dreyfus, vic­tim of vicious anti-Semitic frame-upin 189Os.

to its Radical parliamentary servants atno cost to themselves and imposed abonapartist government more in linewith its wishes.

Popular Front Paved the Wayfor Reaction

The political crisis had entered anacute phase, opening up a prerevolu­tionary situation. The working class didnot remain inactive, and its strugglesmanifested its desire to take on the bour­geoisie and its fascist thugs. But to bevictorious, this battle could only .be afight for power: "Above all the tasks andpartial demands of our epoch therestands the QUESTION OF POWER.Since February 6, 1934, the question ofpower has been openly posed as aquestion of armed force" (Trotsky,"Once Again, Whither France?"). Or­ganizing the political general strike andworkers militias, crushing the fascistgangs-those were the immediate tasksof the hour.

The proletariat was not wanting inrevolutionary energy. It proved it re­soundingly with the May-June 1936general strike, which shook the founda­tion of bourgeois domination. What itlacked was a revolutionary leadership.The Stalinist' and social-democratic(SFIO) leaders of the French workingclass were only reformists who intendedto "fight fascism" by forming a politicalbloc with the Radical party-the Popu­lar Front. The bourgeoisie succeeded inturning back the working-class offen­sive in '36 by briefly entrusting powerto a class-collaborationist governmentwhich came out of this alliance, led bythe Socialist Leon Blum-with theactive support of the leaders of the PCF,who stayed out of the government inorder to avoid frightening the Radicals.Once the threat had passed, the bour­geoisie abruptly dismissed its "socialist"lackeys in 1938.

After the bloodletting of 1914-18,France was a country to emigrate to,and a number of Jews from EasternEurope had moved there, especially tothe Paris region. Trotsky viewed thisimmigration as a powerful factor for theregeneration of the French working­class organizations, which were basedon a limited working-class aristocracythat left the masses ofless privileged lay­ers to one side:

"Sixty thousand Jewish workers inParis is a great force .... Since the for­eign workers represent in their greatestmajority the lower layers of the coun­try's proletariat, they are thereby closeto, tied to, and share the same fate as thebottom layers of the native proletariat,which remains, however, most distantfrom the official organizations. The for­eign workers are of a different mind,just because they are foreign; of an emi­grant spirit, more mobile, more re­ceptive to revolutionary ideas. That iswhy in the foreign workers, cornmu-

WORKERS VANGUARD

Police-StateRuling ...(continued from page 5)

with a 66-eount indictment that allegednot one violent crime. Fortunately, thejury threw out the "conspiracy" chargesin August 1985.

The feds are still holding two PuertoRican independentistas without bail onframe-up charges after a series ofGestapo-like pre-dawn raids in SanJuan on 30 August 198§. Using a WellsFargo holdup in Hartford, Connecticutas the pretext, an army of FBI agentswith shotguns and automatic weaponsbroke into more than 30 homes. Sevendefendants were given outrageous bailsof up to $1 million, but the judge (citingthe Bail Reform Act) denied defensemotions for release of nine others whoremained in jail for over a year. In May1986 a federal appeals court ruled thatpreventive detention on grounds of"danger to the community" was uncon­stitutional, but the judge again deniedbail, citing new "evidence." After theappeals court ordered reasonable bailconditions set, four more were released.But Juan Segara and Filiberto Ojedahave been kept locked up for 20 monthswithout bail, the longest pre-trial deten­tion in the history of the federal courts.

Anti-Soviet War Drive andPolice-State Terror .

With prisons jammed to the point ofexplosion and beyond, the governmenthas even bigger plans to deal with oppo­nents-concentration camps. A civilsuit against leading Contragaters, filedlast year by the Christie Institute,revealed that Reagan and Meese haveplans to round up 400,000 Hispanic"illegal aliens" into concentrationcamps in the event of a U.S. invasion ofCentral America. Meanwhile, an Immi­gration and Naturalization Service"contingency plan" calls for rounding

.&::i<,c:o'0.!!!iii

u.s. concentrationcamps: 120,000

JapaneseAmericans were

imprisoned incamps like

Manzanar duringWorld War II. Newcamps are waiting

for Hispanics,Palestinians,

other targets ofU.S. war drive.

up thousands of Arab immigrants in theU.S. (The first arrests came in February,when seven Palestinians and a Kenyanwere seized in Los Angeles on trumped­up "terrorism" charges.) This is hardlynew. During World War II, 120,000Japanese Americans were locked up inbarbed-wire concentration camps andtheir property confiscated. At the sametime 18 Trotskyists and leaders of themilitant Minneapolis Teamsters werejailed for opposing the imperialist war.

Today the corollary of the anti-Sovietwar drive is escalating police-state ter­ror. That is the meaning of Reagan's waron labor starting with the destruction ofPATCO, and the bloody massacre ofthe MOVE commune in Philadelphiawhere eleven black people were deliber­ately burned alive by the cops and FBI.It is a bipartisan campaign. Preventivedetention was part of a broad, election­year "anti-crime" package stronglybacked by liberal Democrats like TedKennedy and passed 95 to 1 in the Sen­ate, 406 to 16 in the House. Foryears,liberal darling Ted Kennedy tried to

shove through an omnibus criminalcode, "S»l ," which was defeated amidoutcries Of protest by civil libertarians.Now the feds have incorporated theessence of Kennedy's bill, amended tothe Reagan "ethic" which equates polit­ical dissent with organized crime.

Reagan, Meese & Co. are installingan entire legal program of preventivecounterrevolution. In addition to thedeath penalty and preventive deten­tion, they have ABSCAM-style"stings"to snare troublesome Congressmen and­the all-purpose RICO conspiracy laws.For radicals they're dusting off the sedi­tion laws as in the case of the "OhioSeven"; for blacks and Hispanics in theghettos, the cops shoot first and askquestions later.

In Reagan's America you had betterknow what it means to be on the state'shit list. In the '60s and '70s, the FBI'sCOINTELPRO program gunned downscores of Black Panther Party militantsand jailed those who survived. Panthermilitant Geronimo Pratt has beenlocked up in San Quentinfor 17 years,

framed up by the California "justice"system then headed by Edwin Meese.Under Nixon, top cop John Mitchellannounced that the myriad "subver­sives" pickup lists had been consoli­dated into one "administrative index"(ADEX), targeted for "special atten­tion" by the FBI. Among the half dozenleft groups listed was the 'SpartacistLeague. In 1983wesued the FBI over itswitchhunting "Domestic Security/Ter­rorism Guidelines," forcing the FBltodrop its definition of the SL whichfalsely attributed to us a .conspiratorialcommitment to the violent overthrow ofthe U.S. government, and recognize usas the Marxist political organization wea~ .

This was an important legal victoryfor everyone on the government's ene­mies list. Such victories can 'buy sometime. But to stop the Meese police andtheir insane; nuclear war plans requiresnothing less than a victorious socialistrevolution to put this deadly danger­ous, racist, capitalist system out of itsagony.•

L"E1It-~~$"'ses~

Proces Barbie:Ie retour de renfer

Publication of the.Ligue Trotskyste de France

1 year(10 issues):40 francs, 60 francs airmail

Order from/pay to:Le Bolchevik, BP 135-10,

75463 Paris Cedex 10, France

We Marxists seek justice on behalf ofthe victims of the Massus, Papons,Barbies, on behalf of all victims of

. imperialist barbarism. Obviously thetrial of Barbie by French "justice" willbe nothing but a sinisterfarce (includ­ing Verges' scandalous defense of thisNazi). If the French state today were tosend Barbie to live out his days in theFrench equivalent of Spandau prison(where the Nazi Rudolf Hess is incarcer­ated), it would not even be a half meas­ure of justice. Justice wit! be had onlywhen the socialist revolution ends thepower of the bourgeoisie and finally,once and for all, sweeps fascist terrorfrom the face of the earth.

[In writing this article, we havemainly used two reference works:' KlausBarbie, Butcher of Lyons, by TomBower, and Vichy France and theJews, by' Michael Marrus and RobertPaxton.jjs

a mass revolutionary party would havebeen needed, and the French Trotsky­ists-victims of savage repression by theNazis, the Vichy police and .Stalinisthitmen-were much too weak to carryout this task, although they stressed 'itsurgency. As opposed-to such a policy,the reformist PCF had already subordi­nated itself to the "-Gaullist" faction ofthe bourgeoisie in order to salvage and'Consolidate the bourgeois stateappara­tus which had been serving Petain andHitler so loyally. ..

Vengeance for the Victims ofFrench Imperialism

Under these conditions, the "purges"ultimately spared the bourgeoisie and itsstate apparatus. Most of Vichy's cops,prefects, judges and ranking civilservants, who had merely zealously"served the state" by hunting downJews, communists and supporters of theResistance, got off free by taking shel­ter behind de Gaulle and the rare bour­geois who joined the Resistance fromthe beginning (among whom there werefewer anti-fascist democrats than dyed­in-the-wool anti-rKraur' reactionar-

. ies). Thus a Maurice Papon, secretary ofthe Gironde Prefecture from 1941 to1944, who was in charge of "Jewishquestions" and directly responsible fordeporting 1,700 Jews, was not only leftalone at the "Liberation," but in August1944was named director of the Cabinetof the new prefect. This "respectableservant of the state," who subsequentlybecame a Gaullist deputy and then aminister in the last Giscard govern­ment, served French imperialism as theorganizer of colonial repression inAlgeria from 1954 to 1956. Named pre­fect of police in Paris in 1958, heferociously carried out the anti-Fl.N:(Algerian National Liberation Front)repression and organized the policemassacre of hundreds of defenselessAlgerian demonstrators in the streets ofParis on 17 October 1961.

From Petain to De GaulleThere is no doubt whatsoever that the

bourgeois class was virtually unani­mous in standing behind Petain and hisclerical-reactionary program. It wasonly after 1942-43, when the Red Armybegan to repulse Hitler's forces and theNazis'defeat became: inevitable, that anon-negligible faction of the bourgeoi­sie suddenly discovered that it was"resisting" and rallied to de Gaulle,switching alliances at the last minute toenable France to be in the victors' campin 1944.

Since the bourgeoisie and its state wasup to its neck in Nazi atrocities, nothingshort of an overthrow of the bourgeoisstate by a workers revolution could haveinflicted on the auxiliaries of Nazi bar­barism the punishment they deserved.The collapse of the Vichy regime andthe insurrectional situation whichprevailed in' many places gave rise toa prerevolutionary crisis in which theworking class could certainly haveoverthrown a bourgeoisie whose powerwas hanging by a thread. But to do that

even more pronounced. The PCF wasbanned and its militants were subjectedto fierce repression. After the defeat inMay-June 1940, parliamentarism felllike an overripe fruit. In fact, it had beenso discredited that the bourgeoisie sawno use in continuing to camouflage thedictatorship of the chiefs of staffand thebureaucratic clique behind the papier­mache backdrop of the Third Republic.On 9 July 1940, by a huge majority of569 votes to 80 with 17 abstentions, thePopular Front chamber of deputies(elected in 1936, and from which thePCF deputies had been expelled in1939) turned full power, including con­stitutional power, over to MarshalPetain, The majority of Socialist dep­uties voted "yes." The Republic fellwithout lifting a finger, and Petain bap­tized the new regime simply the "FrenchState." .

nism has and can have the perspective ofa mighty instrument for penetrating thedeepest layers of the French workingclass."

-"Letter to Klorkeit and to theJewish Workers in France"(May 1930)

These foreign Jewish workers, oftencommunists or socialists, were perfectscapegoats for the fascists. In the early1930s,with the economic crisis and thearrival of a new wave of refugees fleeingdictatorships and persecution in East­ern Europe and in Nazi Germany, andwith the revolutionary danger, anti­Semitic xenophobia went far beyondits fascist audience and infested bour­geois opinion, which loudly demandedincreasingly noxious anti-immigrantmeasures. In 1934,the forcible deporta­tion of illegal aliens was authorized andmore than 3,000 were deported in thefirst four months of 1935. .

During the period of the Blum gov­ernment there was a brief respite in theescalating repression, due not so muchto the good will of the Socialist andRadical ministers of the Popular Front(who were careful not to repeal the hate­ful existing anti-immigrant legislation)as to the fact that the mobilization andcombativity of the working crass keptthe reactionaries at bay. But persecu­tion increased when Daladier succeed­ed Blum as prime minister. In May andNovember 1938 the Daladier govern­ment promulgated two anti-foreignerdecrees granting the Minister of theInterior the power to deport, intern orimprison Jewish refugees judged to beundesirable, and to withdraw Frenchcitizenship from immigrants who hadalread y been naturalized. Tens of thou­sands of refugees, including many Jews,were soon crammed into concentrationcamps. After the declaration of war,German Jews were interned in camps enmasse as ... citizens of an enemy power.

After the declaration of war 'against -_Germany in September 1939, the bona­partist character of the regime became

26 JUNE 1987 11

Fascist Torture: Made In the USA

We have documented vfuious ofBarbie's bizarre Bolivian escapades. Atone point he founded a "shipping" com­pany, the Transmaritima, as part ofagrandiose scam by the Barrientos dicta­torship (1971-78) to soak the popula­tion to buy a warship for landlockedBolivia (see "Who Protected NaziButcher in Bolivia," WV No. 330, 20May 1983). He also acted as "an agentfor sales of Israeli weapons to the Boliv­ian regimes," according to a letter byIsrael Shahak (see "Klaus Barbie: TheIsraeli Connection," WV No. 334, 15July 1983). In return, facing an interna­tional arms boycott after the 1967 war,Israel contracted a $50 million deal withBarbie whereby a shipment of Belgianand Swiss arms, ostensibly destined forBolivia, was diverted to Israel on thehigh seas. This operation was in con­junction with army chief of staffOvando Candia, the future Bolivianrepresentative of the WACL. But theactivities of the transplanted Nazis andfascist killers flourished in Latin Ameri­ca above all because of the patronage ofthe VSA: .

"They brought, too, the technologies ofrepression, from the old world to the

Scott and Jon Lee Anderson, reports:"Phase Three, according to a top-secret1979report ofthe Senate Foreign Rela­tions Committee... 'involves the for­mation of special teams from membercountries assigned to travel anywhere inthe world' to non-member countries tocarry out "sanctions"-including assas­sination-against Condor enemies'."

But Klaus Altmann-Barbie went intohigh gear around the Bolivian "cocainecoup" of 1980, so named because itsleaders, Colonels Garcia Meza and ArceGomez, were the godfathers of Bolivia'snarcotics traffickers. In the late '70s, heput together with other expatriate fas­cists and Bolivian cutthroats and mur­derers the "Fiances of Death," initially ahit squad for the drug kingpins. Barbiedrew up military plans for a putsch(code-named Amapole, for the poppyflower) in a 145-page document thatineluded economic plans for a NewOrder parceling out Bolivia's resourcesbetween the U.S. and Argentina. Fi­nancing was provided by Korean anti­Communist cult leader Sun MyungMoon and his CAVSA front group,which "offered 4 million dollars to the1980 putschists" iLe Monde Diploma­tique, February 1985). Barbie's Argen­tine "Condor". allies provided deathsquads trained 'in the "dirty war" whichassassinated and "disappeared" tens ofthousands after the 1976 Videla coup.And in one of the bloodiest coups inBolivian history, hundreds of leftistsand labor leaders were gunned down,blown up or dispatched to jungle con­centration camps.

UPIBarbie helped plan capture, torture and murder of heroic Che Guevara byCIA/NSA in Bolivia, 1967.

American intelligence-services, and thenopenly collaborating with the suc­cessive Bolivian dictatorships. Here hewas an adviser in torture and assassina­tion. In this regard, he had certainimportant political leaders executed,such as the Socialist leader MarceloQuiroga Santa Cruz" (quoted in EIPeriodista [Buenos Aires), 6 March).

Barbie's work for V.S. spy agencieswas far from over when he went downthe Rat Line in '51. He furnished theCIA with intelligence through the Boliv­ian Ministry of the Interior (once,according to CIA records, offering thenames of every KGB agent in theregion). Most dramatically, in 1967Barbie advised the CIA and its bigbrother the NSA (National SecurityAgency) in tracking down and extermi­nating the heroic leftist-guerrilla Ernesto(Che) Guevara. Magnust Linklater,Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson doc­ument this in their excellent book, TheNazi Legacy (1984): .

"The work for which Barbie was beingconsidered would have suited him ide­ally. His connections in Bolivia and hisanti-Communism would have equippedhim well for the. fight against CMGuevara's guerrillas. The US army wasclearly tempted to take him on; but itwas, interestingly ,the CIA, consciousof the potential for bad publicity whichAltmann's past offered, who were even­tually to dissuade them from employ­ing himdirect/y. On April 5, 1967 theCIA held a meeting in Washington witharmy intelligence to discuss the agency'sfindings and to seek an assessment ofthe merits and demerits of using him."

Gustavo Sanchez, in his recent bookBarbie: criminal hasta el fin, is cate­gorical, stating Barbie played a key ad­visory role in the V.S.-orchestratedcapture/torture/murder of Guevara(Toronto Globe and Mail, 13 May).

The Company's employment of Bar­bie's "talents" was not limited to his newAndean Fatherland. According to Link­later et al., "a CIA report shows that theagency approved a meeting, organisedby Barbie in 1977 in the tropical Yun­gas region of Bolivia, between repre­sentatives of the Chilean and Bolivianintelligence services... . the discussioncentered around coordination betweenthe two services, and the promotion ofCondor," a "mutual aid" pact betweenright-wing regimes in Latin America,"promoted by the US to unify their anti­subversion activities." Operation Con­dor was no mere "information ex­change." This international MurderInc., the brain child of Pinochet's DINA,organized the 1976 assassination of Or­lando Letelier, a former Allende cab­inet minister blown up on Embassy Rowin Washington, D.C., and the attemptedmurder of Christian Democratic leaderBernardo Leighton on a Rome streetin 1980. An in-depth study of the fa­scistic World Anti-Communist League(WACL), Inside the League (1986), by

springboard for the careers of futurecloak-and-dagger big shots like JamesJesus Angleton, then OSS chiefof oper­ations in Italy.

Barbie went down the Rat Line in1951, when the V.S. could no longerstonewall on repeated French requestsfor his arrest. Paris knew where Barbiewas all along-in fact they interrogated ..him four times while he was in CIC cus­tody! But the V .S.. would never allowBarbie's extradition to France, fearingan international scandal over how theyhad used him in spying in the Frenchzone of occupied Germany. Barbie"vanished" under the auspices of JohnMcCloy, the State Department's HighCommissioner for Germany, who pre­viously oversaw the detention of thou­sands of Japanese Americans in con­centration camps after Pearl Harborand commuted the sentences ofscores ofNazi war criminals convicted at Nurem­berg. In one ofthe more grotesque twistsof the American "cleanup" of Barbie,the OSS gave him the pseudonym"Altmann," after the chief rabbi fromBarbie's hometown, Trier. The real Alt­mann fled to Holland, where KlausBarbie was working with Eichmann's IVDepartment. Like so many other Am­sterdam Jews, Altmann was deportedand perished in Auschwitz.'

Nazi butcher Barbie was shipped toBolivia, where he became part of aSouth American "diaspora of tortur­ers." Paraguay got Mengele. Chile gotWalter Rauff, the man who invented the"Black Raven" mobile gas chambersused by the Einsatzkommandos toasphyxiate hundreds of thousands ofEast European Jews. These profession­al killers did not "retire" to putteraround their gardens, occasionallyattending secretive ODESSA meetingsof aging SS men barely able to raisetheir arms in a stiff-armed salute. Raufflater helped set up Pinochet's DINAsecret police. Barbie remained an unre­pentant Nazi war criminal, an ace inthe hole for the CIA and right-wingLatin American dictatorships and amortal danger to the international pro­letariat. So certain was Barbie's faith inhis American and Bolivian guardian

angels that he had his subscriptionto Newsweek addressed to: "KlausAltmann-Barbie, SS Hauptsturmfuh­rer" and delivered to a cafe in La Pazwhere he led chants of"Heil Hitler!" androunds of Nazi war songs. ,

Bolivia: The "Fiances of Death"The fleeing Nazis dreamed 'of estab­

lishing a new Reich in the SouthernCone. This corresponded neatly to theV.S.' desire to "stabilize" the region.Gustavo Sanchez Salazar, the formervice interior. minister who expelledBarbie from Bolivia in 1983, recentlycommented: "I would like for the trialopening in France to highlight some-

- thing essential: that Barbie continued toact as a Nazi the whole time after thewar. First under the protection of the

55-U.S.Rat Line...

APNazi German scientists Wernhervon Braun (above left) and ArthurRudolph, who launched U.S. rocketprogram, used slave labor fromHitler's death camps in WW II.

(continued from page 9)

Soviet leaders, became key advisers tothe V.S. during the Korean War.

In addition to espionage, the StateDepartment and Pentagon placed ahigh priority on smuggling Nazi warcriminal scientists into the V.S. to aug­ment the technical capabilities of theimperialist war machine. Code-named"Operation Paperclip," over 1,500 Nazis"disappeared" as nameless cargo onaircraft waybills and boarded planes .bound for the V.S. Among those "pa­perclipped" into the country were SSofficers like Wernher von Braun andArthur Rudolph, who used slave laborto produce Germany's V-I and V-2rockets and were swiftly employed byNASA and corporate military contrac­tors. A handwritten notation on Ru­dolph's original "qualification form" forPaperclip reads "100% NAZI, danger­ous type, security threat ... !! Suggest 'internment" (Nation, 7 June 1986).Instead, he helped design the Pershingmissile, then went to NASA, and in 1964was awarded the presidential "Distin­guished Service Medal." Two decadeslater, after his record as a Nazi slave­labor driver surfaced, Rudolph left forWest Germany to avoid denaturaliza­tion hearings.

If they could have gotten away with it,the CIA would doubtless have importedthe infamous Joseph Mengele as well.As one writer observed, "How couldNASA not be interested in Mengele'smeticulous notes on how long it takes anaked human being to freeze to death orburn to death, his research on organtransplants and skin grafts?" (L.A.Weekly, 15-21 February 1985).

The Rat Line: Shuttling Fascistsfrom Reich to Junta

Those Nazis whose profiles were toohigh for the V.S. to keep in anti-Sovietespionage in Europe were smuggled toLatin America on the infamous "Rat

Line," organized by the CIC in 1946 to"save" Allied agents who found them­selves behind the "Iron Curtain."Forged documents got them as far asSalzburg, Austria in the American zone;from there they went by train in thecompany of American escorts to Italy.There they were taken in hand by theCroatian priest Krunoslav Draganovic,a former "ecclesiastical adviser" to thequisling Vstashi regime, Nazi puppetswho murdered over two million Serbs,Gypsies and other ethnic minoritiesbefore Tito's Communist partisanssmashed these Balkan fascists. Draga­novic, who had the patronage of theVatican.' provided the "rats" with RedCross passports, which they used toboard Latin America-bound ships inNaples and Genova. The Rat Line was a

12 WORKERS VANGUARD

Army of Strikebreakers TargetsCanadian Postal Workers

Postal striker in Sydney, Nova Scotia mauled by cop.

TORONTO, June 20-"It was terror,sheer terror," said one Canadian postalworker describing-a bloody police riotagainst Toronto pickets of the LetterCarriers Union of Canada (LCUC). Inthe late hours of June 18, mounted copsbacked by a phalanx of riot-equippedpolice charged picket lines at the mainpostal installation. Clubbed and beaten,strikers were described as "running fortheir lives," chased at a full gallop by thebosses' strikebreaking cossacks.Mili­tants who tried to stop a scab truck fromgetting across the line were brutallyattacked, rounded up and thrown in jailovernight on charges of "obstructing" a"peace" officer. Twenty picketers werearrested, including several members ofthe' inside postal workers union, theCanadian Union of Postal Workers(CVPW).

For months the Canada Post Corpo­ration, -and behind it the Canadiangovernment, has been preparing for all­out war to bust the postal unions. Anarmy of scabs was trained, thousands ofsecurity cops hired and a sinister outfitof ex-RCMP(Royal Canadian Mount­ed Police) agents recruited for "covert"operations against "union troublemak­ers." This is part of a nationwide union­busting offensive. In British Columbia,following a one-day "stayaway" strikeon June I the bourgeois press ranheadlines screaming "Sedition!" and"Conspiracy!" In going after the postalunions Reagan's junior partners inOttawa are trying for their PATCO.And they thought they would have aneasy win over the LCUC, traditionallyconsidered the "moderate" postal unionthanks to a leadership that has spentyears conciliating the bosses.

But the postal management got morethan they bargained for. On June 16,theLCVC started a series of "rotating"strikes aCl'OSS the country. Despite theunion leaders' attempts to head off anymilitancy through limited strike action,when and where they went out the ranks'built and defended pickets that drove'potential strikebreakers away in fear. In

new: Barbie introduced the fully­developed concentration camp to Boliv­ia, and lectured on the use of electrodesapplied to the human body to extractconfessions, a technique first devel­oped by Gestapo investigators inFrance. Together with the Italian ier­rorist, Stefano delle Chiaie, he organ­ised the squads of mercenary thugswhich held down Bolivia by murder andintimidation, and which are seen per­forming the same task in EI Salvadortoday."Not only the Bolivian dictatorship butGeneral Pinochet in Chile, the officerswho directed the 'dirty war' in Argen­tina in the 1970s, and today's expo­nents of counter-terror in CentralAmerica have drawn deeply on the skillsand services of this very special immi­gration from Europe."

- The Nazi LegacyThis was not some Reaganite plot,

but long predates the IranfContragateconspiracy. In fact, the "Black Interna­tional" terrorists were continuing thework of liberal Democrat John F.Kennedy, whose"Alliance for Progress"sent "advisers" from its Office of PublicSafety (OPS) around Latin America aswell as to other U.S. allies to train localpolice forces. Greek director Costa­Gavras dramatized this export of tor­ture in his film State ofSiege, the tale ofhow Dan Mitrione, former police chiefof Richmond, Indiana, went to Monte­video to train the Uruguayanpolice fora dirty War against the Tupamaro ur­ban guerrillas-and was then executed.The story of the OPS is told in A.J.

26 JUNE 1987

Toronto 1,200 LCUC members sur­rounded the main postal installationchanting, "No scabs tonight or ever!" InMontreal flying picketsquads removedscabs and their security cop "protectors"from postal stations. CUPW membersjoined the lines despite a despicablescabbing deal made by the LCUCjCUPW national leaderships agreeing totake down the picket lines to allowinside workers to go to work.

Vnionists across Canada see in thepostal workers' battle a chance to wage areal nationwide offensive against thegivebacks, strikebreaking and union-

ygma

-. In Bolivia Klaus Barbie organizeddeath squads led by fascist emigrehenchmen.

Langguth's Hidden Terrors (1978),which documents how terror tech­niques were disseminated by the U.S.Hundreds of Latin American cops weresent to the International Police Acade­my in Washington, from which a selectnumber would go on to the BorderPatrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texasfor a special "Technical Investigations

Canadian Press

busting. In British Columbia, whereorganized labor is locked in a life-and­death battle for its very existence withthe far-right Social Credit government,woodworkers joined the picket lines. InToronto, bus drivers from the Amalga­mated Transit Workers Union refusedto drive scabs across the lines. Whenthese workers were suspended, theunion called a meeting to take strikeaction in their defense, forcing the'transit bosses to. back off.

Not only the government and itscapitalist masters were scared that thisstrike could spark a nationwide labor

Course" to study plastique bombs andassassination weapons.

The instruments of torture were sup--plied by the CIA's Technical ServicesDivision and transported throughoutLatin America via the U.S. embassy'sdiplomatic pouch. Soon the terror tech­niques took on a chilling sameness fromthe Santiago stadium to the naval engi­neering school in Buenos Aires to thebody dumps in San Salvador. No won­der-they came from the same source.The Salvadoran death squads were theoutgrowth of the ORDEN paramilitarysquads. set up by intelligence' chiefColonel Medrano with the aid of theCIA under the cover of AID's. PublicSafety Program (Michael McClintock,The American Connection, Vol. I:"State Terror and Popular Resistance inEI Salvador" [1985]). Death squadchief Roberto D'Aubuisson, a cashieredsecurity agency officer, had worked withItalian terrorist Delle Chiaie in EI Sal­vador, and joined him at the 1980WACL congress in Buenos Aires. Bar­bie, with benefit of a Bolivian diplo­matic passport, entered the U.S. severaltimes and visited the huge U.S. para­military and counterinsurgency train­ing center in Fort Meade, Indiana.

The fascist networks, death squadsand international right-wing and ter­rorist organizations are all part oftoday's "contra international," sup­ported and financed by U.S. imperial-

explosion. Their labor lieutenants Werequaking, desperately looking for a wayto head it off. Canadian Labour Con­gress president Shirley Carr appealedto Conservative prime minister BrianMulroney to "resolve" the strike. As wego to press 'LCVC national presidentRobert McGarry is welcoming CanadaPost's offer of a government-appointed"mediator." McGarry, who sat as adirector ~on the Canada Post board ofdirectors until early this year, is openlyknown as a company cop. But CUPWnational president Jean-Claude Parrot,the supposed "militant" union leader, isordering his members to scab.

The only "illegal" strike is one thatloses. In 1965 it was an "illegal" lettercarriers strike that won the right tostrike for all government workers.Today the labor fakers are abetting thedrive to hack up the unions by theircowardly legalism and racism. Withtheir protectionist poison the labormisleaders have fed anti-immigranthysteria and escalating racist terroragainst minorities. Postal managementcapitalized on this by recruiting desper­ate Tamil and Haitian refugees asstrikebreakers in Montreal. ReportedlyMontreal picketers carried racist plac­ards and taunted scabs with racial slurs.This kind of disgusting crap has no placeon a picket line! A fight by the unionmovement to defend the rights ofand organize their foreign-born classbrothers and sisters would strike apowerful blow against the bosses' racistunion-busting.

The LCUC strike shows the potentialfor igniting some hard class struggle,from the militant Quebecois workers tothe combative B.C. proletariat. Butlabor is being handcuffed by the traitorsin the leadership of the union move­ment. And the response to the strikefrom the right-wing social democrats ofthe New Democratic Party, Canadianlabor's supposed "political arm," is tosay that they wouldn't rule out votingfor -back-to-work legislation! In 1978the government trashed the militantCVPW strike with strikebreaking legis­lation, RCMP raids on union officesand the arrest of union leaders. Postalworkers must understand: any majorlabor struggle will become a politicalbattle immediately posing the need for aclass-struggle leadership and a revolu­tionary workers party that can uniteall of labor and the oppressed instruggle against the bosses and theirstate.•

ism in its bloody campaign to roll backthe gains of social revolution fromHanoi to Cuba to Moscow. Contragateluminary General John Singlaub unitesthese terrorists in his World Anti­Communist League, praised as "free­dom fighters" by President Reagan.And the OSS Rat Line provided a liv­ing link for V.S. imperialism to the Naziscum of the earth. In fact, the Nicara­guan contras have borrowed the tacticsof the Croatian fascist Pavelic who oncesaid, "A good Ustase is one who can usehis knife to cut a child from the womb ofits mother" (The Nazi Legacy). The hor­rifying crimes of Reagan's contras arean integral part of the same anti-Sovietwar drive to which V.S. imperialismrecruited Klaus Barbie and hundreds ofhis ilk.

The bombing of Philly MOVE, com­ing just daysafter Reagan's "Sieg Heil"to the Waffen SS at Bitburg in May1985, bore a chilling resemblance tosome of the crimes of Barbie. It was andis a searing reminder that the mainenemy' is at home. As we have notedbefore e'V.S. Imports Nazi War Crimi­nals," WVNo. 318,26 November 1982):"Only victorious workers revolutionwill sweep the fascist murderers fromthe face of the earth and prevent a futureholocaust which is even now beingprepared using the services of the tech­nicians and executioners of the lastone.".

13

WORKERS VANGUARD

International TeamsterPresser invited Bush (left) to '84 Ohio Teamster convention, endorsedReagan re-election.

Presser-were groomed in the Hoffamachine. For the most part they had allof Hoffa's vices, with few if any of hisvirtues. In addition, the erosion of U.S.capitalism has rendered Teamster-stylebusiness unionism increasingly impo­tent. The union has lost 400,000 jobs inrecent years, as major trucking com­panies have used deregulation of theindustry to extract givebacks from theTeamster bureaucracy. The nationalMaster Freight Agreement has beeneroded by substandard "two-tier" con­tracts and the use of casuals.. \,

Jackie Presser was placed atop Local507 in. Cleveland 20 years ago by hisfather, William Presser. "Bill" Presserserved six months in Federal prison onmob-connected charges and "distin­guished" himself in the 1970 OhioTeamster wildcat by asking then-_governor Rhodes to send in the Nation­al Guard against his own members.

ing labor. We're going to get the bestprice we can" (John Bartlow Martin,Jimmy Hoffa's Hot [1959]).

But Hoffa delivered. From the powerbase of the Central States Drivers Coun­cil, he conducted a successful postwarorganizing drive in the South and usedthe tactics of "hot-cargoing" and strik­ing over grievances to circumvent theslave-labor Taft-Hartley law and itsprohibitions on secondary boycotts.Hoffa had learned these tactics fromFarrell Dobbs, a Trotskyist leader ef theMinneapolis Teamsters whose power­ful 1934 strike laid the basis for build­ing the Teamsters into an industrialunion.

The McClellan committee, followingin the footsteps of the governmentwitchhunt against the ILA in the early1950s, was out to gut the Teamsters'power.' In particular, the "Get Hoffa"campaign was aimed at his efforts to winthe first national trucking industry con­tract. Hoffa was indicted on briberycharges, set up by one John CyeCheatsy, a Kennedy fink who Hoffa hadhired as an attorney. He was acquittedin July 1957 by a jury including eightblacks, as Hoffa's friend boxer JoeLouis visited the courtroom in solidar­ity with the Teamster president. A fewmonths later, despite the vicious cam­paign waged in the courts and the pressby Kennedy's more than 250 full-timeinvestigators, Hoffa became IBT presi­dent. And culminating with the MasterFreight Agreement in 1964, Hoffa con­solidated bargaining for 450,000 over­the-road and local freight drivers.

The McClellan hearing produced the1959 anti-labor Landrum-Griffin Act(originally co-sponsored by John Ken­nedy), which specifically outlawed theuse of "hot-cargoing" in the truckingindustry. And after five separate trialsover seven years, Kennedy finally

. entrapped Hoffa on jury tamperingcharges in 1964.Hoffa wasjailed in 1966for almost five years. After his release,he disappeared on 30 July 1975 duringhis attempt to regain the Teamsterpresidency.

The succession of Teamster leaderswho followed Hoffa-Frank Fitzsim­mons, Roy Williams and now Jackie

attorneySidneyKorshak,whohasbeendescribed byfederal investigators astheprincipal link between the legitimatebusiness world and organized crime."

Reagan helped mobsters to break thestrike of the left-wing Conference ofStudio Unions in March 1945, hiring anarmed bodyguard and carrying a pistolas he crossed the picket lines. And asFBI confidential informant "T-IO,"Reagan used his status as witchhunterand SAG president to "clear" actressNancy Davis (later Reagan) of allegedCommunist ties.

From Kennedy to Meese:Targeting the Teamsters

Thirty years ago another investigatorand attorney general used illegal wire­taps, informants, call girls and entrap­ment in an effort to break the Team­sters. Then it was liberal DemocratRobert Kennedy. He had been one ofJoseph McCarthy's anti-communistwitchhunters. From there Kennedy

.moved to chief counsel of the McClellanSenate Select Committee on Improp­er Activities in the Labor or Manage­ment Field. Kennedy's vendetta againstJimmy Hoffa enlisted the IRS, FBI,Immigration and Naturalization Serv­ice, Federal Bureau of Narcotics,and the Justice, Labor and TreasuryDepartments.

To be sure, as one of Hoffa's follow­ers once said, "Jimmy is no angel." No­torious for his underworld connectionsand shady pension fund deals, Hoffawas a convenient target. He was the epit­ome of the business unionist, even loan­ing Teamster pension funds to com­panies being struck by his own union. InHoffa's words: "I don't think the driv­ers expect me to be holding social gath­erings for them or to go on the air andtell what's wrong in Germany or Italy.Running a union is just like running abusiness. We're in the business of sell-

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TEAIVISTl!RS.·~~ •.'..·....•·.•.....•.Z.•.~.·..·.•.•DON'T f/tII.tjiZ· ..

4I1C#I "I.SCA..·····.·

UPIUnion power in action: Teamsters blocked Philly streets, stopped scabs in1983 Greyhound strike.

traveled to El Salvador to turn this"intelligence" over to the death squads.

Meese is in a class by himself. He issuch a crook that his nomination forattorney general was held up almost ayear by Congress investigating hisfinancial chicanery. The attorney gen­eral has attempted to protect the"imperial presidency" by declaring thatspecial prosecutors are unconstitution­al. At the same time he keeps appoint­ing special prosecutors because nobodytrusts the crooked Justice Departmentto investigate its own. The latest case isthe Wedtech Corporation (described bya grand jury as a "criminal racketeeringenterprise"), where Meese is under in­vestigation for peddling his influence towin government contracts for the SouthBronx military contractor. Wedtechpaid Meese crony Robert Wallach morethan $1 million (including $100,000which reportedly went for Wallach'sexpenses in defending Meese during hisconfirmation hearings as attorneygeneral).

In setting the stage for the JusticeDepartment's attempt to take over theTeamsters, Meese's Organized CrimeCommission argued: "The systematicuse of trusteeships by the courts may benecessary to prevent organized crimefrom continuing to do business as usual"(New York Times, II June)! Usuallywhen the government imposes a trus­teeship there isat least the pretense ofsomething minimally reputable aboutthe "trustees." But the kind of'vtrustee''you would get from the Justice Depart­ment might be government informerMichael Raymond. Scheduled to standtrial in Florida for the murder of a 67­year-old widow who he swindled out ofthousands of dollars, Raymond was theG-man who blew the lid off the NewYork City corruption scandal. Accord­ing to. the New York Times Magazine(21 June):

"Ali the while, this street-smart, steel­nerved confidence man has pursued hisown spectacular life of crime.. 0 trav­eled widely under a dozen aliases, car­rying out swindles, embezzlements,thefts... 0"

As Fort Lauderdale chief of detectivesAl Ortenzo commented: "maybe theyought to take the word Justice out ofJustice Department." .

But the mob connections with thegang now running the country go rightto the top. A recent book by Dan

. Moldea, entitled Dark Victory: RonaldReagan, MeA, and the Mob (1986)looks back at Reagan's activities as pres­ident of the Screen Actors Guild in thelate '40s:

".0. thereremainnumerous unansweredquestions .and allegations about therelationship between Reagan andMeA. These doubts raisedelicate issuesthat involve possible personal and polit­ical payoffs-as well as links to majorMafiafigures, particularly Beverly Hills

(continued from page 1) .the same time the International Broth­erhood of Teamsters (IBT) is going intonational negotiations with United Par­cel Service and on the Master FreightAgreement, which enables the union toshut down trucking coast to coast. Afterthe Teamsters, Reagan's mob has itseyes on the International Longshore­men's Association, the Laborers Unionand the Hotel and Restaurant Employ­ees and Bartenders union. They want toreturn to the days when all unions weretreated as "criminal conspiracies." Rea­gan wants to "finish the job" on labor hebegan with the mass firing of 14,000 aircontrollers. But the destruction of thePATCO union was made possible by thetreacherous stab in the back from therest of labor officialdom who refused toshut down the airports. Now more thanever, organized labor must mobilize itspower against this attack on the Team­sters by the capitalist state. Govern­ment's dirty hands off the unions!

"Take the Word Justice Out ofJustice Department"

The Meese mob is ripe for RICO. AsTeamster attorney John Climaco saidon ABC's Nightline (10 June), "TheJustice Department should be con­cerned about cleaning its own skirts."According to the Los Angeles Times(10 June), "the lawsuit would include'misfeasance' charges against Teamsterleaders for their alleged failure to rootout internal corruption." Look who'stalking! The "sleaze factor" extendsthroughout the. Reagan administra­tion, where just about everyone is milk­ing the government under the guise ofprivatization. Over 100 of the pres­ident's men have been charged withlying, cheating, stealing and otherchicanery. Meanwhile, the governmentsystematically breaks its own laws: theEnvironmental Protection Agency sus­pends hazardous-waste regulations,Health and Human Services dropsthousands from the Social Security dis­ability rolls, and "Justice" rips up civilrights legislation.

The feds' idea of law and order comesstraight from Al Capone. The JusticeDepartment used a "sting" operation toentrap auto executive John DeLoreanand destroy his family. After a Detroitjury rejected RICO charges against himin December, DeLorean is filing suitcharging that government agents com­mitted 41 separate felonies in theirrepeated attempts to frame him: "Theyobstructed justice by fabricating falseevidence. They tried to plant narcoticsin my attorney's car .... They backdateddocuments. They threatened witnesses.They even threatened my attorney incourt during the trial" (New York Post,4 April).

Then there's the money launderers,drug traffickers and gunrunners work­ing out of the White House basement.As word leaked out about OliverNorth's operations, the Justice Depart­ment repeatedly squelched investiga­tions. In May 1986 they stopped anattempt to impanel a grand jury to.lookinto illegal contra arms shipments fromFort Lauderdale, Florida. In October,after U.S. mercenary Hasenfus was shotdown in Nicaragua, they called off aninvestigation of Southern Air (a "for­mer" CIA proprietary). And when theIranjContragate scandal was breakingin November, the Criminal Division waskept out of the "investigation," allow­ing North & Co. to shred incriminatingfiles (Vii/age Voice, 21 April).

Meanwhile, the FBI is up to its oldCOINTELPRO tricks, running a Sal­vadoran informer, Frank Varelli, inDallas who infiltrated the Committee inSolidarity with the People of El Salva­dor, aided FBI break-ins .to CISPES'Dallas offices, helped compile "terroristfiles" on almost 700 people (includingtwo U.S. Senators, a House memberand a former ambassador), and then

14

(Teamsters...

.L"' ..........Wllitr lIoN. ait!rUnder investiption bya special prosecutor forhis:role in helpinSWedtech Corp.

--Ikod cf VrlualuAdlHiHi.ftmtiot,Resiped before a reportcritici~ him for improperuscof Government services

ss_w...........Nlilllt EPA ""mini.flrulorResi&I¥d aner his stafTdis-­closed th•• he allowed flowChemical t.oreviewa reportnamiq i. a dioxin polluter

-­lJrpllty Assislllni ,olht'PrnidmlResi,ned aner beiDaec­cused of helping mov'C cashIOtM roetras

-­!Jtpllty Whitt' 1I0u.fl'<h;<,/<fsr'lffIndieted for perjury aflerinvestigation for violationof ethics statutes

-e-Dir«tor. CrntralInte-lIi1(nu ANn,C')"Suspected oflyin& to Con­BreIS about CIA involvementin lran-("(Wftraaffair

I.L__

Oi<'/';'MF«ifflJ'04.,_ Admtnisl,."t_

Res;,ned "'hen srandjuriesprobed his earlier businessdeallnp

...........u.s. AllorHry GftnvlUnder in......ion by• special prosecutor forhis rotein helpin.Wedteeh Corp.

e.tosc:..wlAniSIUNIS«rrta,.,·.Commn-u 1Jrp(IrtmrntRelinquished hisjobaflercharacs of awarding dum­OUSaranlS to friends' firms

.-...,.FtIOIJ .nd DnIK AJmilfinro­tkJlf~",iDitJlwrRcoiInod wIIile under in­WIt••ion ror OYef1appin.reimbursements for .ravel

"-1urfanIEPA mJ'''''''i'',.",orResigned af'terdisclosuresthat she bent environmentalrcaolalions for certainindustrial pol1U1Cts

.....CnyClulirm"n. FftlnwillomrLotI"••/i IlotlrdRepaid 'lOme 526.000 intravel costs for himself andhis wife

--­Na,iontl' $«urityAd'';Sf'rUnder investiption (or his:participation in the lran­C'OIflru.fT.ir

~......DIIWItW. F«ifflJ' &wr­~)'Nfl,..""""" ARa~J'Resianed amid allcJationsof misuleofGoYernmenl

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..........EPA tlut""., od,,,i,,islrulOr/tJI'lOXic.....rConvicted 01perjury c:on­cernina preferential treal­ment for a ronne, employer

IllcIIonIAIon , ~.....NIlI/OIIal $«urily Adl'iJrr ' Chit!tUlmin;s/rtllm"Resiancd amid controveny q NASAewera S 1.000 "honorarium" Indicted fQf' defraudinaafter arranaing an interview Govemment ...-hile an exec­with Nancy Reapn Oliveat General Dynamics

_.­Deputy S«"'ory.;u.m",......RcoiInod .tler.'....'ions .0(canniet of interea incontract M,otiadons

-......CiA ~"if!/"€Oltrrlopn'fIlionsRcsianedafter pressaUcpttonsoffraudulentfinancial dealinp

25 May 1987

MoralityAmong theSupply­Siders .More than 1()() ReaganAdministration officialshave/aced allegations 0/questionable activities.While some are still inoffice. others have resignedunder a cloud. Many o/theallegations were relativelyminor, but the accumula­tion 0/cases produces aportrait 0/impropriety ona grand scale

TIME

Who's calling who corrupt? Above, partial lineup. from Time magazine of Reagan adm(nistration rogues' gallery: Is this new Teamster executive board?

Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartaclst League

0$2/4 issues ofWomen and Revolution

0$2/10 introductory issues ofWorkers Vanguard(includes Spartacist)

Stalinists all enforced the wartime no­strike pledge, speedup, etc., the Trot­skyists stood their ground. Rooseveltprosecuted them under the Smith Act,and Tobin moved in with his thugs to"reorganize" the Minneapolis Team­sters. (Hoffa was one of Tobin's chiefgoons, and used the cops and courts tostrip Local 544of their office,funds, andthe union's paper, the Northwest Organ­izer.) Following the war, the Meanysand Reuthers-in cahoots with the gov­ernment-extended the anti-communistwitchhunt throughout the AFL andCIO, consolidating the anti-Soviet,viciously class-collaborationist unionbureaucracy that today lords it over theranks.'

You can't fight the union bureauc­racy with the capitalist government asan ally. Both corrupt business unionism,whether embodied in Hoffa or hismore degenerate successors, and pro­Democratic Party liberalism are equallydead ends. What's necessary is a class­struggle leadership that refuses to sub­ordinate itself to the bourgeois state andfights for genuine political independ­ence: a workers party to struggle for aworkers government. As Trotsky statedin his final message to the world's work­ers ("Trade. Unions in the Epoch ofImperialist Decay" [1940]):

"The trade unions of our time can eitherserve as secondary instruments ofimperialist capitalism for the subordi­nation and disciplining of workers andfor obstructing the revolution, or, onthe contrary, the trade unions can be­come the instruments of the revolu­tionary movement of the proletariat." ... the independence of the tradeunions in the class sense, in their rela­tions to the bourgeois state, can, in thepresent conditions, be assured only by acompletely revolutionary leadership,that is, the leadership of the FourthInternational." •

431M8ke checkI PlIy8ble/m8•• to: SPllrtllc:lst Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, N_ York. NY 10116

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o $5124 issues of Workers Vanguard(includes Spartacist) International rates:o New 0 Renewal $20/24 issues-Airmail

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Address _

Commission on Organized Crime andsome 15present and former experts inthe Labor Department."The RICO statute provides for 're­organization' of any enterprise foundracketeer-controlled. Two monthsago TDU sent the Justice Depart­ment a detailed plan for such areorganization ...."

-Washington Post, 21 June

In December TD U supporters filed theirown RICO and Landrum-Griffincharges to remove Presser from allunion positions (Convoy Dispatch, Jan­uary 1987)! And their keynote speakerat the last TDU convention was noneother than Victor Reuther. If the Team­sters are taken over by Meese and com­pany, the TD U can claim its share of the"credit."

For Class-Struggle Unionism!It was the Trotskyists who laid the

foundations of Teamster power in theMinneapolis general strike of 1934.They fought the strike politically, tak­ing on not only the bosses but also theNational Guard called out by "friend ofthe unions" Farmer-Labor Party gov­ernor Floyd Olson.. Their victory laidthe basis for breaking down traditionalAFL craft unionism, laying the basisfor organizing over-the-road driversthroughout the Midwest. The commu­nist leadership also organized the unem­ployed into an affiliate section of theunion, defended the struggles of federalpublic works employees, and success­fully mobilized labor against the fascistSilver Shirts.

The leaders ofthe Minneapolis Team­sters and the SWP were targeted byRoosevelt and Teamster Internationalpresident Daniel Tobin. Their "crime"was opposing the imperialist WorldWar II. While the Rooseveltian liberalunionists, business unionists and the

leadership that will not kowtow to thecapitalist cops and courts, and is willingto risk a jail sentence to win a strike.

The difference between the Teamsterbureaucrats and their counterparts inthe UAW, lAM or CWA is one of style,not substance. Hoffa supported bothRepublicans and Democrats, depend­ing on where he thought he could get a"better deal." The social democrats aremore closely tied to the DemocraticParty, the main agency for subordinat­ing the unions to the American capital­ist order, and pride themselves on being"labor statesmen" for U.S. imperial­ism. Victor Reutherofthe UAW was thearchetypical Cold War labor bureau­crat, breaking Communist Party unionsin postwar Europe. In the early 1960s,asKennedy was persecuting Hoffa, Reu­ther was advising the CIA:

" ... a breakfast meeting was arrangedwith Attorney General Robert Kennedyat his home in McLean, Virginia.Walter [Reuther] and I reviewedthe sit­uation in Italy, as we understood it, andcautioned Kennedy and Schlesingerthat new directives would have to begiven to the CIA and its operators inItaly. Kennedy suggested this questionbe raised directly with the NationalSecurity Council and asked us'to attenda meeting and present our view."

-Victor Reuther, The BrothersReuther (1976)

These are the "clean" union leaders whodrummed the Teamsters out of theAFL-CIO!

Forging class-struggle unions re­quires independence from the capitaliststate and its political parties. The Spar­tacist League has consistently fought thefake-leftists and union "oppositions"which have made a career backingLaborDepartment campaigns to "cleanup the unions." The classicexample wasthe United Mine Workers' ArnoldMiller, a West Virginia coal miner andDemocratic Party politico whose Min­ers for Democracy was swept into officewith the aid of the government. Millerspent the next several years collaborat­ing with the courts and Carter govern­ment to break wildcats and to derail themilitant national coal strike of 1977-78.

In the IBT, the Teamsters for a Dem­ocratic Union (TDU), originally brain­trusted by the anti-Soviet InternationalSocialists (now mostly defunct), haspursued the same program of endlesscourt suits against the union bureauc­racy. The TDU works hand in glovewith the Reagan "Justice" Departmentto smash the Teamsters. In a recentarticle, Ken Paff argues that a JusticeDepartment takeover is unnecessarybecause TDU would do the job forReagan/ Meese:

"TDU contends that this system [ofelections] violates the Landrum-GriffinAct, a view backed by the President's

Presser stated at the time, "It's a hell of aday When we have troops riding shotgunon a truck but somehow we must stopthis violence through the law." After thisstrikebreaking duty, the Guardsmenregrouped against a less.formidable tar­get-antiwar protesters at Kent StateUniversity-where they opened fire,killing four.

Jackie Presser was elevated to thepresidency in 1983, after Roy Williamswas jailed under RICO. Presser hasbeen charged with embezzlement, rack­eteering and padding the payroll of hishome Local 507 in Cleveland with"ghost" employees. An earlier LaborDepartment investigation of Presserwas quashed, apparently at the instiga­tion of the FBI. (If Presser, who hasadmitted to a "relationship" with theFBI, was finking on other Teamsterofficials and the mob, the federal indict­ment may be the least ofhis worries!)

As in the case of Hoffa, the real tar­get of the army of federal prosecutorsand the organized crime "strike forces"is not the corrupt and venal Presser, butthe Teamsters union itself. Ironically, asa union vice president in the late 1970s,Presser embarked on a campaign toimprove the Teamsters' "image." Heserved Reagan as a "senior economicadviser" and delivered to the Republi­cans the Teamster endorsement in 1980and 1984. With Reagan a crippled lameduck and a Baker regency in the WhiteHouse, George Bush is left holding thebag as the "friend of the Teamsters."

The "Clean" Labor Traitors

Pointing a finger at the Teamsters,ILA and other unions with alleged mobconnections has always been a conven­ient way for the AFL-CIO labor fakersto channel membership heat away fromthe rotten fruits of their own class col­laboration. At last year's United AutoWorkers convention, UAW .presidentOwen Bieber began with the proclama­tion that "his 50-year-old union was notinvolved in criminal activities" (Phila­delphia Inquirer, "2 June 1986). Maybethe UAW tops don't take mob money­they "merely" traded the jobs of hun­dreds of thousands of auto workers for aseat on Chrysler's board of directors!All clean, aboveboard and "legal"-anda disaster for the working class.

"Obeying the law" has lost more thana few key strikes. Take Reagan's bust­ing of the air traffic controllers union.

, Presser grotesquely praised Reagan­but what did the other trade-unionbureaucrats do? International Associa­tion of Machinists chief William Win­pisinger kept his members working­thereby ensuring the PATCO strike'sdefeat. The unions need a class-struggle

26 JUNE 1987 15,.

W'IiIlEIiS "N'II,I/,

AlA Witchhunters Retract

SL won settlement requiring AlA to print above retraction In "its journalCamp-us Rep-ort.

Campus Contras Cry Uncle

Irvine and Laszlo Csorba have alsowritten for the Washington Times,Wolkenstein noted.

She added, "It is utterly incongruousthat .our organization, which attemptsto influence important social issues andcauses in the courts, could be terrorist.The SL has intervened in the courts notonly in defense of itself, but also hasfiled amicus curiae briefs in the U.S.Supreme Court. We filed an amicusbrief in support of separation of churchand state and for freedom of associationin the Sun Myung Moon 'tax .fraud'case. And our brief in defense of scienceand the gains of the Enlightenment inthe Louisiana 'creationism' case wasnoted by the San Franeisco Chronicle(June 20), which commented that thecase 'drew a stack of legal documents"from groups ranging from the MarxistSpartacist League to the NationalAssociation of Evangelicals'."

"We have stood up in this decade ofsocial and political reaction not only forour own rights, but for those of so manyothers who appear weak and alone,"said SL spokesman Marjorie Stamberg."Many groups have bee III smearedwithout redress, since they were withoutfunds and resources to fight. Our victoryagainst Reed Irvine and AlA is a viCtOFYfor every trade unionist, every studentand academic protester, every minority,everyone in opposition to this reaction­ary government, Leftists must not beattacked with impunity! We wiUcontin­ue to fight with every legal ancspoliticalmeans at our disposal to ensure that."

AlA has especially. targeted universityprofessors, including Howard Zinn ofBoston University, who gave the follow­ing statement to the SL: "0 understandthat Accuraey in Academia has claimedthat the Spartacus Youth Leagueadvocates the killing of policemen.Whatever my own political disagree­ments with the Spartacus. YouthLeague, I have seen no evidence of theirbelief in" such tactics, and to falselyaccuse an organization of that is to setthem up for violence directed againstthem. My own experience with Accura­cy in Academia is that they are dishon­est, especially in claiming to be objec-

"tively interested in accuracy, when it isclear that they are interested in purgingleft-wing and even liberal faculty fromuniversities. In short, they do not believein academic freedom, are contemptuousof the ability of students to think forthemselves about the important issuesof politics, and have no. faith in thedemocratic value of pluralist opinions."

The SL suit won endorsements frommany teachers and civil libertarians,including individuals such as HarvardLaw School professor Derrick Bell, InThese Times editor James Weinstein,CUNY professor Bogdan Denitch,Michael Meeropol, Nathan Hare, ChipBerlet of the National Lawyers GuildCivil Liberties Committee, and manyothers, including trade unionists.•

87 eIV. 2242(RJW)

<;"'"(1 p V '-!Frf0,.)

ci..AGREEMENT OF

SETTLEMENT

we served with the legal papers, as hewas going into ABC studios at 6:3Qa.m.to complain that his brain child, theanti-Soviet soap opera Amerika, wasn'tanti-Communist enougb] Today, th\sself-admitted and public exposure ofIrvine & Co.'s 'Big Lie' technique is avictosy for all the potential victims oftheir smear jobs in-the service of Reaganreaction. Their admission of falsifica­tion shoulddemoralize their supporters,and discourage those who would other­wise attempt to so libel us."

The Spartacist League has success­fully' beaten back other attempts tosmear leftists and Marxists as terror­ists. In settlement of the SL's lawsuitagainst the 1983 FBI "terrorism" guide­lines, the FBI and Attorney Generalagreed to change the FBI's formersinister definition of the SL to exactlywhat the SL says it is-a Marxistpolitical organization. In 1983, an SLlawsuit forced the Moonie WashingtonTimes to retract their deadly libel thatthe militant union-backed. SL-initiateddemonstration that stopped the KuKlux Klan from marching in Washing­ton, D.C. on 27 November 1982 hadprovoked violence against cops. Reed

d.....THIS SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT is made

Defendants.

Plaintiff,

-against-

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTSOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NE~' VORK

t

ACCURACV IN ACADEMIA, I~C., REEDIRVINE AND LASZLO CSORBA,

----------------------------------------xJAMES M. ROBERTSON, as NationalChairman of the SPARTACIST LEAGUE,an Unincorporated Association,

----------------------------------------x

Dea lyLi,el

AlA and Laszlo Csorba now admit the falsityof ~ statement contained i~ a pamphlet pub­lishedand distributed by them that theSpartacist League in its "publications ,Work­ers vanguard, Young Spartacus, an~ TheSpattacus [sic]urge ••• the killing afpolice officers." This statement about theSpartacist League is faJse.

AIM are part of the Reaganauts'domestic war to regiment the Americanpopulation into acquiescence to thebipartisan anti-Soviet war drive....Irvine andCsorba are more than justideological witchhunters. They're sinis­ter Oliver Norths on the home front,reflecting the 'privatization' of the drivefor counterrevolution from Nicaraguato Afghanistan. It's privatized McCar­thyism." Young Spartacus has notedalso that AlA stands squarely behindthe racist marauders who've attackedblack students' and anti-racist militantson the campuses. When the" staff ofthe conservative Dartmouth ~ Reviewwielded sledgehammers to level ashantytown occupied by students op­posing apartheid, AtA's Campus Re­port ran a prominent fund appeal for theracists' legal defense.

"Reed Irvine's pretensions to 'accu­racy' in media or anywhere else havebeen exploded by his admission in courtto a falsehood," said SL general counselRachel Wolkenstein. Furthermore, shepointed out, "Inveterate disinforrnerIrvine hopes to shift the responsibilityfor this libel to Csorba in their publicretraction. It was Irvine himself whom

laine Osowski

Reagan's wltchhunter Reed Irvine.

We print below a press release issuedby the Spartaeist Leaguetv.s. onJune 22.

The Spartacist League, a Marxistpolitical organization, has won animportant victory for democratic rightsagainst the McCarthyite witchhuntersof "Accuracy in Academia," SL spokes­men announced today. Last Februarythe SL launched a libel lawsuit againstAlA, its executive director Laszlo Csor­ba and Reed Irvine, AlA founder and,"chairman of the board (anti head of"Accuracy in Media"). Attorneys for thesuccessful SL action were SpartacistLeague general counsel Rachel Wolken­stein and noted libel attorney JonathanW. Lubell. On June 19, a settlement ofthe suit was filed in the U.S. DistrictCourt for the Southern District of NewYork, stating:

"Defendants AlA, Reed Irvine andLaszlo Csorba admit that the statementcontained in the pamphlet, 'Appeasingthe Censors, A Special Report onCampus Free Speech Abuses,' thatSpartacist 'publications (Workers Van­guard, Young Spartacus, and TheSpartacus [sic]) urge ... the killing ofpolice officers' is false and herebyretract said statement."

Further conditions of the settlementare that AlA must cease further publica­tion and distribution of the pamphletuntil and unless accompanied by aretraction. This retraction must also- beprominently displayed in their publica­tion Campus Report (withia circulationof 20-25,OOO}. The retraction states:

"AlA and Laszlo Csorba now admit.thefalsity of a statement contained in apamphlet pnblished and distributed bythem that the Spartacist League inits 'publications tWorkers Vanguard,Young SfXlltQ€US, and The Spartacus[s«:)J. urge ... theakilling of police offi­cers,' 'This statement about the Sparta­cist league is'faise."

Workers" J{anguard (No. 423, 6::March) has pOinted. out that: "~I'A,/j

16 26 JUNE 1987