WfJ/iNE/iS ,,IN'IJ,I/i, 25¢No. 383 .;~) X·523

Smash U.S. War Drive!

•Icara ua n er

12 July 1985

•Ie e

Gentile/Picture Barricada

Frontline defenders of Nicaragua: Soldiers alongside Soviet-built tank, digging in against Yankee invasion (left). Crack anti-contra battalion on paradein Managua (right).

On July 8 President Ronald Reaganescalated his war threats against Nicara­gua. Speaking before the Bar Associa­tion, Reagan arrogantly proclaimedNicaragua an "outlaw state" and part of"a new, international version of Mur­der Inc." 'Yhich the U.S. governmentclaims supports world "terrorism." Inthe mouth of the biggest state terroriston this planet, whose "free world"butchers terrorize the people fromSouth Africa to Latin America to Asia,Reagan's words are not just hypocrisyand lies. They are an open declaration ofthe U.S. government's intention toundertake military aggression; as wesaid last issue: watch out world! Whileludicrously charging Nicaragua (along

with Cuba, Libya, Iran and NorthKorea) with "outright acts of war"against the United States, Reaganremained coy about what kind ofbloody revenge, and when, the U.S. ispreparing against the Nicaraguans whodare to defy the diktats ofthe imperialistchief. Even in the face of this threat,thousands of U.S. citizens continue tovisit Nicaragua each month to see forthemselves the popular revolutionwhich Reagan vows to destroy, We pub­lish below a report of a recent trip toNicaragua.

MANAGUA, July 3-Last week theU.S. House of Representatives voted aresolution authorizing President Ron-

aid Reagan to invade Nicaragua shouldthe Sandinistas obtain MIG fighters ornuclear weapons; to respond to hijack­ings or "other acts of terrorism"; toprotect American citizens, or if there is a"clear and present danger" of attack onthe United States or its allies. In theUnited States this was billed as a curb onReagan: the New York Times (28 June)headlined, "House Restricts Sending ofG.I.'s into Nicaragua." Not here. Barri­cada, the officiai newspaper of theSandinista National Liberation Front(FSLN), titled its story on the Housevote, "Green Light for Invasion." Andtens of thousands of Nicaraguans havemobilized in the streets vowing to fightthe Yankee invaders.

After all, Reagan has a/ready decreeda "national emergency" claiming thatthe Nicaraguan government's policiesconstitute an "extraordinary threat tothe national security" of the U.S.!Following Congress' June 13 vote formillions to the CIA's "contra" merce­naries, Nicaraguan president DanielOrtega declared that Managua wasreasserting its right to obtain whatevermilitary equipment it needs for itsdefense, including advanced jet fighters.For years Washington has claimed thatNicaragua is engaged in "terrorism" and"indirect aggression" by supplying armsto Salvadoran leftist insurgents. Andthey can always invent the excuse of

continued on page 6

Bloodl Attacks on Soweto,- Black States

South Africa's Racist RampageSmash U.S./Pretoria Anti-Soviet Axis!Just after I a.m. on June 14elite kill­

er commandos from South Africa'sbloody apartheid regime slipped intoGaborone, the capital of the sparselypopulated black African state of Bot­swana which is but eight miles from theSouth African border. The commandossplit up, and staked out nine homes andthe office of the anti-apartheid Solidari­ty News Service. They then attackedthem simultaneously using machineguns, mortars and powerful explosivesto blow the homes and press offices tosmithereens. The toll was 16 dead andsix wounded. Others may have beenabducted back to South Africa. Blood­soaked beds were the evidence that insome cases the surprise had been total.

Pretoria's white supremacist' butcherswould claim afterward that the raid wasaimed at the "nerve center" of guerrillaoperations by the outlawed AfricanNational Congress (ANC), the oldestand most prominent black nationalistorganization of resistance to apartheid.But this was a terrorist murder missionwhich took the lives of a six-year-oldgirl, four Botswana citizens, a Sudaneserefugee and South African refugeesfrom apartheid repression unconnectedwith the ANC

This savage massacre, like earlierraids in Lesotho and Mozambique, wasPresident Botha's declaration thatSouth Africa intends to bludgeon the

continued on page 8

Armed mightof apartheid

state must besmashed by

workersrevolution.

co(/)

:co:;Ic

'"«

LettersBlack Soldiers in WWII:

U.S. Army's Racism in the Pacific

George Lavan Weissman~Remembered

22 June 1985"Dear Editor;

Workers Vanguard's two-part series,"Black Soldiers in the Jim CrowMilitary" (WVNo. 378,3 May 1985andWV No. 380,31 May 1985)concentrat­ed on the "war at home," the impact ofblacks in uniform on racist Americansociety. But reference should also bemade to the black GIs' experience ofracism and resistance in the Pacific

theater during World War II, whichforeshadowed the experience of blacktroops during the Korean and VietnamWars.

World War II was no war for"democracy" and in the Far East U.S.imperialism openly fought to turn thePacific into an American lake and itsislands into U.S. colonies. The colonial

as well as imperialist nature of the warthere exacerbated the racism endemic toAmerica's Jim Crow military. From thewhite racist bastion of Australia to thebrutalized Pacific island colonies, blackGis encountered fear, resentment andviolent hatred from the region's oldcolonial masters and privileged whitesand, most intensely, from their ownwhite "comrades-in-arms."

British officials were particularlyworried about the impact black

Black soldiers in theJim Crow U.S. Army,Solomon Islands.

troops-comparatively well-fed, well­paid and well-educated-would have ontheir colonial "subjects." When the WarDepartment proposed sending a blackcavalry regiment to New Caledoniawhere combat troops were urgentlyneeded, army commanders protested:"French contrbl of local natives wasdelicate enough not to aggravate it

further by the presence of additionalNegro troops" (quoted in Ronald H.Spector, Eagle Against The Sun- TheAmerican War With Japan [1985]).

With its official "white Australia"laws and immigration policies, thisformer convicts' colony at first protest­ed receiving black American troops.Given the manpower requirements ofimperialist war, the Australian govern­ment begrudgingly acquiesced to thepresence of black Gis. The then­Trotskyist U.S. Socialist Workers Partycalled attention to a cartoon which"cleverly summed up the situation";

..... showing a Negro soldier beinggreeted by an Australian official stand­ing in front of a sign which reads."Colored persons not allowed in Aus­tralia.' The official is saying to theNegro soldier: 'Jolly glad to see you, oldboy. Just l ignore these bloody signsaround here-for the duration.' Thefinal payoff is that the Negro troops arenot to be used for combat but only aswork gangs to do the "dirty work."

-Militant, II April 1942, quotedin Fighting Racism in WorldWar 11(1980)

In a society saturated with racism andbigotry, black troops stationed inAustralia were subjected to constantharassment and violence, especially

from white American soldiers. The mostexplosive issue was black socializingwith Australian women, which wasviolently resented even more by whitesoldiers from the "good ole US of A"than white chauvinist Aussies. InSydney most popular dance and musichalls were declared off limits to blackGIs. Women who dared to attend blacksocial functions were beaten up as theydeparted. In New South Wales, newlyarrived American white troops attackedan army truck full of black G Is, forcingthe blacks to dismount and provoking arace riot.

On Guam, repeated racial attacks bywhite Marines on black sailors from thelocal naval depot over socializing withnative women in the town of Aganacompelled the blacks to acquire armslike rifles and knives illegally. TheMarines, of course. had access toweapons. On Christmas Eve, 1942, awhite sailor shot a black sailor in Agana.The black sailors armed themselves,commandeered trucks and attempted todrive to Agana. They were stopped bymilitary police, provoking a full-scaleriot and shootout. Most of the blacksinvolved refused to testify before an all­white Navy Court of Inquiry and even avisit by NAACP executive secretaryWalter White to solicit cooperation didnot shake this black solidarity.

Comradely,Deborah Maguire andReuben Samuels

-"The Communist Party and Parliament,"adopted by Second Congress of the Communist International (August 1920)

!l!w!l!c!'l!or..~!f!~!!.!~EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Noah WilnerEDITOR: Jan Norden

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner

CIRCULATION MANAGER: Linda Jarreau

EDITORIAL BOARD: Jon Brule, George Foster, Liz Gordon, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels,Joseph Seymour, Marjorie Stamberg (Closing editor for No. 383: Liz Gordon)

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). 732-7861IBusiness). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New 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 nec,!-ssarily express the editorial viewpoint

Michel Pablo, head of the FourthInternational in Europe followingWorld War II; Marguerite Bonnet,Trotsky's literary representative inFrance; Ross Dowson, former leader ofthe Canadian United Secretariat sec­tion; Trotsky's bibliographer, LouisSinclair; French Lambertist scholarPierre Broue. From London, TamaraDeutscher, John Archer and MildredGordon all sent messages. Among theAmericans saluting Weissman fromdiverse points of the political compasswere Albert Glotzer, now with theSocial Democrats USA, who left theSWP in 1940 with the Max Shachtmansplit; Dave Dellinger, former editor ofLiberation magazine; and the SL's JimRobertson, who as you noted knewWeissman in the SWP.

Perhaps the most moving section ofthe FIT's account of the memorial dealswith comrade Weissman's personal andpolitical involvement with the Trotskyfamily. Weissman, as you know, was theU.S. literary representative of Trotsky'sestate. Naomi Allen's article notes thatWeissman "participated in the centen­ary of Trotsky's birth in Mexico City in1979. George and his first wife, Con­stance Fox Harding, entertained Natal­ia Sedova, Trotsky's widow, in theirhome during her visit to New York inthe fifties, and he maintained a closerelationship to Trotsky's grandson,Seva Volkov, and to his family as well.Volkov traveled to New York for thememorial meeting from Mexico anddelivered a speech to the meeting thatwas translated by his daughter Nora." Inhis remarks, Volkov called comradeWeissman

"the personification of the new man ofthe socialist society of the future, in aworld without borders and withoutoppression, without exploitation andviolence among people. Men likeGeorge Weissman make us proud of ourhuman condition and of the Trotskyistmovement-a living example of thehigh goals of humanity."

In solidarity,L.G.

WORKERS VANGUARD

5 July 1985

To the editor:

In light of WV's obituary for GeorgeWeissman [see "George Lavan Weiss­man, Veteran Trotskyist," WVNo. 382,28 June], I think your readers will beinterested in some additional details onthe May 25 memorial meeting organizedby Weissman's comrades of the FourthInternationalist Tendency (FIT).

Your article notes the 'broad range ofpeople who presented or sent greetingsto the meeting, an indication of therespect in which comrade W-eissmanwas held by those who knew him duringhis nearly 50 years in the Marxistmovement. A subsequent article on thememorial meeting appears in the newissue of the FIT's publication [Bulletinin Defense of Marxism (BIDOM),July]. .This article, written by Naomi­Allen, notes that the United Secretariat,the international grouping headed byErnest Mandel which the FIT supports,sent a speaker to deliver a messagesaluting Weissman as "an outstandingrepresentative of the founding genera­tion of the world Trotskyist movement,"and greetings were also received fromMandel, from the United Secretariat'sMexican section and from a group ofsupporters in Canada. A speaker wasalso sent to bring the greetings ofSocialist Action, a group of ex-SWPerswho were sometimes associated with theFIT before and after both groups werebureaucratically expelled, but is nolonger connected with the FIT. By wayof contrast the SWP, the organizationto which Weissman devoted his wholepolitical life, did not see fit to honor himor even to acknowledge the invitation.

In addition to the numerous ex­SWPers who spoke or sent messages,including George Breitman, MyraTanner Weiss, James Kutcher, AugustaTrainor and Gerry Foley, an impressivearray of figures associated with theTrotskyist movement overseas sentmessages. Mentioned in the BIDOMarticle were, among many others,

LENIN

12 July 1985

Communists and ParliamentThe revolutionists' utilization of par­

liamentary elections and bodies wasexplicated at the Second, Congress of theCommunist International (1920) in adocument drawing on the experience oftheBolsheviks and European revolutionarysocialists. The theses were drafted byBukharin with a historical introduction byTrotsky.

No. 383

TROTSKY

2

In the modern conditions of unbridled imperialism parliament has become aweapon of falsehood, deception and violence, a place of enervating chatter. In theface of the devastation, embezzlement, robbery and destruction committed byimperialism, parliamentary reforms which are wholly lacking in consistency,durability and order lose all practical significance for the working masses....

12. Parliamentary activity, which consists mainly of disseminating revolutionaryideas, unmasking class enemies from the parliamentary platform, and furthering theideological cohesion of tile masses, who, especially in the backward areas, still respectparliament and harbour democratic illusions-this activity must be absolutelysubordinate to the aims and tasks of the mass struggle outside parliament. ...

14. The election campaign itself must be conducted not as a drive for the maximumnumber of parliamentary seats, but as a mobilization of the masses around slogans ofproletarian revolution. The election struggle must involve rank-and-file Partymembers and not the Party leadership alone; it is essential that all mass actions(strikes, demonstrations, movements among the armed forces etc.) occurring at thetime are taken up in the campaign and that close contact is maintained with them.The mass proletarian organizations should also be drawn into active work aroundthe election.

The country is awash with Soviet spy mania. You can't open a paper or switch onthe TV without finding out about FBI agents seduced by KGB temptresses, reportsof a fourth, fifth and sixth man in the Norfolk spy ring. Never before have so manypeople been charged with espionage, the government reports, and who knows howmany more among the four million people with security clearances are ready to selIsecrets for dolIars? Oh for the good old days of Philby, Burgess and Maclean,remark the spy chasers plaintively, when spies were spies for the good ofthe cause."The ideologues are few in number," said one expert, "The people who want a littlemore cash are legion" (New York Times, 6 June). Meanwhile, the Reagan adminis­tration is trying to whip up a McCarthyite spy psychosis in order to reinstate a fed­eral death penalty for spies, hijackers and presidential assassins, among others.

The biggest case of late is that of the former Navy radioman John Walker, Jr.and his family. Supposedly he had been spying for the Soviet Union for 20 yearswithout' being detected, flying to ports around the world to take deliveries from

relatives aboard Navy ships. He was only caught because his ex-wife Barbaraturned him in. The case abounds with incongruities: no evidence of meetings withSoviet agents in the U.S., no proof of big money changing hands, and John Walkerwas Virginia state leader of the fascist Ku Klux Klan who used to "cuss thecommies" together with his buddy BilI Wilkinson, a national KKK leader andknown FBI informant. Even U.S. sources admit their "knowledge" of the purportedspy ring "is based, to a large extent, on well-informed speculation." At this pointthere's certainly reasonable doubt about the affair, such as ex-wife BarbaraWalker's remark: "'He always tried to make me believe that he was going away forespionage, but that was a lie: it was a cover,' she said of his affairs with women"(New York Times, 21 June).

During an earlier round of spy mania humorist Russell Baker analyzed theDmitri Rizzutovich Money Store phenomenon. We reprint below Baker's columnfrom the 22 December 1984 New York Times.

Copyright © 1984 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

OBSERVERRussell Baker

Cloak And DollarRemember those days of yester­

year when only a Commie rat"would betray America's se­

crets to Moscow? It isn't like thatany more, as I learned the firsttime I dropped in at the New Yorkoffice of the Soviet spymaster, Ovt­chovich.

A dozen Americans with bulgingbriefcases were waiting in a recep­tion room, hoping for a chance to seethe great spymaster so they might­as one of them put it - "pick up a nicepiece of change for the holiday sea-son."

They were out of luck, as it turnedout, for Ovichovich was in conferenceall afternoon with a fellow from thedefense industry who wasdemanding$150,000 for the blueprints of aweapon so new that its existenceis still unknown to the Americanpress.

"I finally got him to admit this newweapon - a laser-beam water pistol- is so new it does not exist; so new,in fact, that Cap Weinberger isn'teven asking for $30 billion to build it. "(This was Ovichovich talking at theend of the workday ovpr " dry Man­hattan.)

"The man is completely unprinci­pled - nothing but a cheap moochertrying to swindle the Soviet Union outof 150 thou."

Ovichovich is a fairly typical speci­men of the new style in Red spymas­ten being assigned to the UnitedStates. In his training for the job, heworked undercover at a small-loanshop in the Washington area, wherehe learned to spot a deadbeat at 40paces and elicit confessions of feloDi':ous intent from hardened bunco art­ists.

Such are the skills vital to successfor Red spymasters in the Americanterritory nowadays. There are now somany Americans with so many se­crets to peddle if the price is rightthat the average Red spymaster's of­fice resembles nothing quite so muchas a shady finance-company opera­tion.

As the business became increas­ingly commercialized it began to at­tract such a tacky class of people thatthe Soviet Union became embar­rassed about having them swarmingaround the Embassy. Its spymastersare now exiled to branch offices in thecountry's more raffish urban neigh-

borhoods."Ovichovich is not proud of his

calling, As a youth studying at theSoviet Institute of Spymasteringand Document Filching, he hadanticipated a glamorous career dls­covering brave and daring Marxistsburied in the great American fruit­cake.

These heroes, inspired by his per­suasive teachings, would see the wis­dom of bringing him America's se­crets free of charge, so that the wholeUnited States could some day be asmuch fun as Moscow.

It would be an honor to work withsuch spies, with spies who knew thatexposure could bring down upon themcries of "Commie ratI" and evenworse, spies who neverthelesswere willing to run those risksfor nothing but the love of Marx, orloyalty to the Revolution, or becausethey thought Stalin was a greathuman being.

By the time Ovichovich qualified towork the American territory the daysof the high-principled spies wereending. It was no longer devotionto Communism that brought Amer­icans in with the secrets; now it wasstrictly another rotten capitalistic en­terprise.

"By the time I got here," Ovicho­vich recalled, "we were being ap­proached by so many Americansdesperate for money to pay theirbills that I felt like a banker.When I'd go to a bar to relax, assoon as people heard my Russianaccent, I'd be surrounded by

Americans telling me about thetop-secret jobs they held audhow desperately they- needed$25,000."

As a student of people who are de­feated by 'the modem age, Ihave spent much time cultivatinl

The spybusinessisn't whatit usedto be

Ovichovich. Here is a man sodevoted to Marx that he is willin&to spend his life at the sort ofwork people do in .the CentralIntelligence Agency, and what ishis award? He ends up a broker inthe marketplace, a buyer, a shrewdjudge of values. In short, a capital­ist.

It will surely ruin his character.Recently we lunched together and Ipicked up the check. "Are you inter.ested in Gromyko's unlisted phonenumber?" he replied.

Though tempted, I declined his of­fer. "Gromyko is a Commie rat,"I said. Ovichovich smiled. Atthe thought of what the goodold days must have~ like, I sup­pose. 0

Fascists, or Just Plain Reactionary PigsII May 1985

Dear Comrades:

In the article "Hands Off Guillermo!"[YSp No. 126, April 1985] frequentNazi-Germanic references are made.For example, a reference to making "aNazi-style 'example" of Guillermo[Bermudez], a reference to "UC Reichs­chancellor Ira Heyman," a reference tothe "right-wing cabal running thecampus: it bears no small resemblanceto the fuhrer's bunker."

In WV 378 [3 May] the article "Rea­gan Salutes Nazis" you end by saying,"The American bourgeoisie wantedRonald Reagan, and it got the Nazis inthe bargain. From South Africa toGermany to Central America and theUnited States, the scourge of fascismwill only be wiped out throughinterna­tional socialist revolution." What onearth is going on?!? Reichschancellor­the University of California has becomethe German Empire? The Chancellor ishead of state? (Reichschancellor is amixed German-English word.)

Is it somehow the invention of theNazis to make brutal examples bycoming down hard on opponents? Ifanything they were Johnny-come­latelies to that business. Certainly thegood old democratic Americans were atit long before them; then of course therewas the Roman Empire, etc., etc. The"fuhrer's bunker," the Red Army isabout to take Berkeley? The GermanEmpire centered on presumably Cali­fornia with none other than dear oldBerkeley as its capital is in desperatestraits and about to be overrun? The

12 JULY 1985

WV quote says they "got" the Nazis. Thescourge of fascism exists "From SouthAfrica to Germany to Central Americaand the United Sta tes ...." You arearguing these are fascist states? No, Ireally don't think you are that dumb. Inthe Viet Nam era there was a lot of thistrite Nazi name calling, and I remember

. SL set itself apart by pointing out thatfascism (and its German manifestationin the '30's and '40's, Nazism) was ahistorically defined manifestation whichhad to be dealt with in definite ways, andimposed definite limitations. (If this issupposed to be a fascist, or Nazi, orNazi-like state why isn't SL and the restof the ostensibly Marxist left eitherunderground, in exile, in prison ordead?) (For that matter you might checkthe U.S. after its entry into WW I if youwant to see some repression, very muchwithin bourgeois democracy.)

All right, Nazi is a "buzz word" (I hatethat expression, but it fits), say it andyou arouse negative emotions (as youpointed out in the WV article)." Smearyour opponent with it and people willhate him. All this though is stupidly tritename calling! It is not scientific social­ism. Marxism even in agitation shouldstrive to be accurate. Furthermore byintentionally or otherwise equatingthings German with things Nazi you arecommitting a gross inaccuracy and aslander (not the least against theGerman communists who died oppos­ing the Nazis orforthat matter say otherGermans like Karl Marx). In the "RedAvenger" satire you used a lot of Naziand Germanic references, but satire issupposed to be absurd, it gets its effect

by gross overstatement. If the Guillermoarticle was supposed to be satire it didn'tcome off that way. "

In the WV article you seem to havegotten carried away with trying to tieReagan to the Nazis (whom he explicitlypublicly disassociates himself from) andwind up making an ambiguous state-

"Ich bin einBitburger"­

syndicatedcartoonist.Oliphant

thoughtso too.

ment. It needs clarification. Further­more Reagan never said "Ich bin einBitburger" (in fact the pseudoquote ispretty absurd) and I really don't thinkthat such things contribute anythingpositive to the article. Reagan is aconservative Republican, his politics arequite within the range of bourgeoisdemocracy, and he seems willing to staythere. That does not mean that theremay not be some repressive measuresagainst his opponents, and it does notmean that he will not go to war. In noway can he be described as a fascist. Thistrite Nazi and fascist name calling in factplays right into the hands of those whodefend capitalism claiming that fascism

is merely an aberration, and that really ifwe just get rid of them, and maybe voteout the conservative Republicans(maybe), everything will be all right(some would say put the conservativesin). This is not true, it won't.

The above is given as constructivecriticism, and I hope that it will be taken

that way. Generally I think" that thepolitics and the expression of it in the SLpress is good. I will add that apparentlysome other people here (Iowa City)think that the SLjSYL press is worthreading as they receive it positively oreven ask forit.

In solidarity,Loren

WV replies: Two days after the aboveletter was written. the police, bombed ablack neighborhood in West Philadel­phia. eleven members of the MOVEcommune were burned alive. includingtwo black babies. and 60 houses

continued on page 9

3

Verdict Im~licates Cop.!" KKK" Nazis-Whitewashes Cons~iracy

No More Greensboro Massacres!In Winston-Salem, North Carolina

on June 7,a jury brought back a verdictin the lJ-week. $48 million civil suit ofthe survivors of the Greensboro massa­cre. Five Nazis and Klansmen, twoGreensboro policemen and one policeinformer were found "liable for thewrongful death" of Dr. Michael Na­than, one of five Communist WorkersParty (CWP) supporters murdered incold blood by the fascists on 3 Novem­ber 1979. The jury awarded $355, 100 toNathan's widow Marty; $38,360 to PaulBerrnanzohn, who remains paralyzedfive and a half years after he was shot inthe head, and $1,500 to anotherwounded victim, Tom Clark. All'charges of conspiracy were dismissedagainst 45 people, including some 36Greensboro cops, two FBI informersand an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco andFirearms) agent named in the civil suit.

The fact that any of these criminalswas held accountable for the Greens­boro murders in a North Carolina court'is itself an achievement. Two previouswhitewash trials by federal and state"prosecutors" let their Klan and Nazico-conspirators off the hook, acquittedby lily-white juries. The New YorkTimes (14 June) snidely commented onthe verdict that although "most of thevictims were political agitators" and"considered Klan-baiting and Nazi­baiting as part of their mission," still,they supposed, "even radicals haverights." The Times has treated thispremeditated massacre as a "shootout"between two "extremist groups" allalong. For the victims, survivor MartyNathan commented:

"Finally we have a verdict that foundpeople at fault in this case. But I cannotsay full justice was done. Five wonder­ful people were killed, and their lives

WV PhotoSL-initiated rally stopped Klan from"celebrating" Greensboro massa­cre in Detroit, 10 November 1979.

were worth no less than M ichaclNathan's."

- Virginian- Pilot, g June

The shotgun blasts that cut down theanti-Klan demonstrators proclaimedopen season on blacks, union organizersand communists "at home" as theDemocrr tic Party administration ofJimmy Carter Whipped up its anti­Soviet "human rights" crusade abroad.The Greensboro massacre was a govern­ment conspiracy from start to finish,from the feds who instructed the fascistsin the manufacture of pipe bombs and­planned the attack route, to the "ex"

4

FBI informer riding at the head of thecaravan of death to the Greensboro copwho brought up the rear. And thedeadly conspiracy continues. Even asthe government terrorists of Greens­boro were in the dock, the black MOVEgroup and their babies were incineratedin Philadelphia, an operation workedout in detail with the FBI and lauded byReagan's sinister top cop Meese.Greensboro was the opening shot of theReagan years, and the bombing of blackPhiladelphia is the symbol of theReagan regime.

Found "liable" in Dr. Nathan's deathwere Greensboro police informer Ed­ward Dawson, charged with helpingorganize and lead the KKK/Nazicaravan to the demonstration site;Klansmen David Wayne Matthews andJerry Paul Smith; Nazis Roland WayneWood, Mark Scherer and Jack Fowler;Greensboro police lieutenant P. W.Spoon and detective Jerry "Rooster"Cooper. It was revealed at the trial thatGreensboro cop Cooper called upDawson, their man in the Klan, toinform them of a last-minute change inthe starting point of the leftists' march.It was Spoon, the cop in charge that day,who kept the cops away to be sure theKKK/Nazi death squad had a clear fieldfor attack.

The verdict. may be the result of acompromise within the jury; early in themorning of June 7, the jury wasdeadlocked on all but one count ofassault. Jury foreman George E. Pope isblack, a significant contrast to thecomposition of the two previous kan­garoo courts. And the jury was clearlydissatisfied throughout the trial with thedefendants' open apologies for racistmurder. Lawyers for the GreensboroCivil Rights Fund presented 75 wit­nesses in eight weeks of testimony; whenthe government and fascists rested theircase after only four days, a ripple ofincredulity passed audibly through thecourt, one juror remarking, "Is thataliT'

Death Squad Assassination

When the civil suit opened, weheadlined "Greensboro CWP Victimson Trial Aga-in" (WV No. 376, 5 April).In court, the obscene equation of thevictims with the murderers was takenone step further, with lawyers for thegovernment joining the fascists inclaiming, according to the New YorkTimes (31 March), that the "anti-Klandemonstrators had provoked the shoot­ings" and the Klansmen and Nazis"acted in self-defense." District courtjudge Robert M. Merhige, Jr. initiallyagreed to hear a KKK "countersuit" atthe same time, later ruling after objec­tions that this would be taken uppending settlement of the GreensboroCivil Rights Fund suit. Now thatmotion stands in the wings as a threat,and could become part of a legalcounteroffensive by the KKK, Nazisand cops. At the least, an appeal of the ,verdict is likely.

Why did the jury rule "wrongfuldeath" liability only in the murder of Dr.Michael Nathan? Greensboro RightsFund attorney Flint Taylor said thejurymay have chosen Nathan because theywere told Nathan was not an officialmember of the CWP at the time.(Evidently North Carolina courts holdthat being a card-carrying communist isa justification for murder!) Chillingfirsthand testimony of the cops andfascists refuted the "shootout" lie,proving once again that this was adeath squad assassination in which the

human targets were picked out inadvance. Black Greensboro CWP lead­er Nelson Johnson was top on their hitlist-only by chance did he escape justwith wounds that day.

Maurice Cawn, a legal adviser to theGreensboro police department, testifiedthat at police meetings planning for theupcoming march, he sensed there was a"stigma or bad feelings" about march

Greensborocops maul

CWP leaderNelson Johnson

after KlanlNazislcopsl

FBI massacredhis comrades.

organizer Johnson, stemming "fromMr. Johnson's involvement in unrest atNorth Carolina A&T State Universityin the 1960's" and Johnson's criticism of"what he called undue police forceagainst Greensboro blacks" (New YorkTimes, 27 May). "Former" Nazi ChrisBenson testified to the meeting, one daybefore the murders, where he, ColmanPridmore, Virgil Griffin and Jerry PaulSmith looked at a rally poster withphotographs of the anti-K Ian demon­strators and picked out people they'd"like to get."

According to the Atlanta Southline(12 June), Hitler-lover "Roland WayneWood testified in a pinstripe suit withfive skulls on the vest pocket," which he"denied" represented the slain demon­strators. The Nazis' lawyer Roy Hallcould well have been Reagan's Bitburgspeechwriter when he told the jury at thefederal trial, "The Germans gambledeverything and lost all in opposition tocommunism. Aren't they a lot moreattractive now than they were 40 yearsago at the end of the war?.. Thesedefendants are patriotic citizens....That's why they went to Greensboro­to stop the communists."

Throughout the eight weeks oftestimony there emerged publicly in thecourtroom a significant pattern ofgovernment complicity for all but thewillfully blind to see. Forced to testifyfor the first time, ATF agent Butkovichswore to the events at the November IKlan/Nazi planning session where aKlansman told him he had "a pipe bombwhich would work well in a crowd ofniggers." As the plaintiff's attorneyFlint Taylor stated, "Agent Butkovichwith the express authorization of hissuperior encouraged Nazis to bring gunsto Greensboro." But Butkovich was notfound liable as an accomplice to the

racist murders.Meanwhile, police informer Dawson

testified how he had recruited Klansmento confront the marchers, how hedesigned and put up posters depictinglynchings, obtained the parade routefrom the cops, arranged a meeting pointfor the KKK/Nazis and was essentially"in charge" of the death squad caravan.The cops knew in advance that the

Klansmen were coming, that they had amachine gun and were going to "shootup the place." Yet Spoon, the cop incharge, never even showed up on thesite!

No More Greensboros!

Nelson Johnson told WV that thedecision was "a positive verdict in thatthe Nazis, Klan, the police commander,police informant and police detectiveswere all found liable," although therewere many others who should have beenfound guilty and did in fact conspire. Headded that the verdict was the product"not just [of) the efforts of those of uswho were plaintiffs, but of people allover the country who worked to make itpossible." As we have insisted, thesurvivors deserve every penny they canget, and it is important the cop/fascistconspiracy be exposed.

It will not be in the capitalist courtsthat real justice will be done. Reagan'sracist dogs of war can and must bestopped by mass labor/black action. Inthe aftermath of the 1979 KKK / Nazibloodbath, the cry of "No MoreGrcensboros-Fascists Off the Streets!"rang out from Detroit to Washington,D.C., as Spartacist League-initiatedmass mobilizations have successfullyinterdicted the fascist vermin in the bigurban cities thus far into the Reaganyears.

Like the Philadelphia inferno, themassacre at Greensboro was a heinouscrime of tile American ruling classburned into the memory of our party,and all class-conscious working peoplein this country. Only the abolition ofthis system of racist exploitation andmurder can avenge the five fallencomrades of Greensboro. Labor/blackaction to smash fascist terror! No moreGreensboros! Finish the Civil War!.

WORKERS VANGUARD

0$2/4 issues ofWomen and Revolution

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Air Disasters: Who Profits?

bragged about strikebreaking in 1981,are now talking about forming a newunion.

In order to make the skies safe for freeenterprise, Reagan has made themdeadly dangerous for airline workersand passengers. The government'sdestruction of PATCO combined with"deregulation" of the airlines was thegreen light for private carriers toattempt to destroy their unions. Now wehave a host' of fly-by-night outfitsmodeled on People Express, using scablabor, cut-rate maintenance and anunskilled staff, with every employeesupposed to be an "entrepreneur" sothat all they will worry about is thebottom line. After a few crashes they getbought out or go bankrupt. Meanwhilethe. big lines like TWA and Vnited aretaken over by professional union­busters. The dramatic nose dive of airsafety under Reagan underlines a keypoint: union rights and passenger safetygo hand in hand.

Over the years penny-pinching forprofit has cost thousands of lives. Theworld's worst civil aviation disaster­involving two Boeing 747s, a DutchKLM airliner which crashed into a PanAm jet on the ground in the CanaryIslands in March 1978, causing 585deaths-could have been prevented ifthe Tenerife airport had installedavailable ground radar and taxiingguidance systems. Similarly, the worstcivil aviation disaster in V.S. history­the crash of an American Airlines flightover Chicago in May 1979, in which 273people died-was the result of cuttingcorners: an engine literally fell off thejumbo DC-I 0 because the company wasusing a fork-lift truck to perform certaindelicate engine maintenance proce­dures, a practice which saved "200 manhours per aircraft and a considerableamount of money" but which crackedthe airframe (see William Norris, TheUnsafe Sky [1981]).

Safety innovations usually come fol­lowing the public outcry over a majordisaster. Thus only after TWA Flight514 plowed into the side of MountWeather, Virginia in December 1974didthe FAA decide to order the installationof inexpensive "ground proximity warn­ing systems," which tell the pilot to "pullup, pull up!" And the infamous DC-IOweak cargo door problem-which wasknown for years-was not fixed untilafter a Turkish Airlines DC-IO crashedin March 1974, killing 346, as a result ofthe cargo door blowing open. In the olddays coal miners used to take canariesdown into the mines to detect dangerousgas fumes-nowadays in the capitalistairline industry, we humans are thecanaries.

And in the anti-union Reagan yearsthings have sharply worsened. In 1983Air Line Pilots Association presidentHenry A. Duffy noted an increase in"pilot pushing," where pilots are underpressure to fly in marginal conditions,causing disasters like the 1982 crash ofa

continued on page 9

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higher than the pre-strike level," notedan article in the Nation (I June). Eventhe pro-business Wall Street Journal (20April 1984) felt compelled to warnabout skyrocketing "operational errors"due to "overtaxing a largely unseasonedwork force of controllers."

Last month the National Trans­portation Safety Board reported therewere 594 "near-collisions" in 1984, andthey're investigating a rash of 14 near­collisions on the ground in the past threemonths. Furthermore, there's muchmore they're not telling us. According tothe Nation, "Documents obtained inJanuary under the Freedom of Informa­tion Act by Ralph Nader's AviationConsumer Action Project indicate thatthe [FAA] failed to report at least 102near collisions in 1983 and 1984."Predictably, the Reaganite "solution"for the mounting numbers is to changetheir statistical methods: a 7 June APdispatch reports that the FAA isconsidering a "more limited" definitionof "near-collision" using a standard of500 feet which would, for instance, cutthe 1984 numbers by "about one-third."The situation has gotten so bad thatmany of the present controllers, who

wind in the name of "deregulation."Thefrontal attack on air safety was signaledby Reagan's 1981 firing of 11,400striking PATCO air traffic controllers,whose main concern was staff shortagesand job pressures creating safety haz­ards. Today the system is stretchedthinner than ever with 14,300 control­lers, 2,000 less than there were before thestrike, and only half the workforce israted fully "qualified." "The reducedforce of controllers must handle avolume of air traffic 8 to 10 percent

or calling for even a penny more for airsafety. Why not? Because skyjacking byforeign terrorists raises the hackles ofimperialist egotism-Reagan & Co.figure they should have a monopoly ontechnological terror. But the air disastercarnage is considered simply the "nor­mal" workings of business.

Most of the proposed "anti-terrorist"measures are either useless or danger­ous. Beefing up the "sky marshal" forcegives justifiable jitters to the airlinesassociation chief of security, who warns

of shootouts at 40,000 feet. And thepresident's call to boycott Athens.airport is sheer hypocrisy and a politicalvendetta against the Greek government.Greek minister of culture Melina Mer­couri shot back that "only two hijack­ings had originated in Athens in recentyears, while 36 had occurred in theVnited States in the same period oftime" (New York Times, 23 June).

Meanwhile New York's mayor EdKoch, friend of Israeli terroristjmurderer Ariel Sharon (who invadedLebanon in 1982, provoking the currentround of anti-Israeli terrorism), hassuggested such Zionist-type solutions asbombing Beirut airport and bombingKharg Island in Iran. Well, we have amodest counterproposal ourselves: Is­rael should be persuaded to go back intoLebanon, as soon as possible for as longas possible, to get chewed up in thecommunal warfare; and Koch should do

'a deep penetration intelligence missioninto the Shi'ite areas of Lebanondisguised as a mullah. They'd get a gooddose of their own medicine.

As for saving lives, a truly safe airtransport system would require suchthings as: hiring thousands more airtraffic controllers and cutting theirworkday to four hours, providingdecent wages, union-controlled workingconditions and massive training toground mechanics, installing state-of­the-art radar and other safety hardwareat airports and on planes, and so on.(And how about teaching stewardesseshow to fly in case of emergency-as theflight attendants' union has been de­manding for years.) They can. buildsafer, more rugged aircraft which cansurvive serious damage-like militaryjets designed to fly even after being shotup. But all this would cut into theprofit margins of the airline industry.And under capitalism, maximum profitis the name of the game.

PATCO: Union-Busting KillsAir Safety

In the Reagan years government air, safety controls have been thrown to the

You've got a lot more to fear from the airline Industry than from hiJackers. 150 died when Boeing 727 went down inflames after midair collision over San Diego, 1978.

computer checks, sniffer machines andelectrified barbed wire, to turn airportsinto high-tech prisons like somethingout of Escapefrom New York or /984.Cost is no object-the already-planned"security" beef-up at V .S. embassies andconsulates alone is projected to con­sume $3.5 billion dollars.

The Shi'ite hijacking is indefensible,but they had plenty of reason to do itafter the Israelis literally kidnapped1,100 Arab men and boys as they werepulling out of Lebanon this spring. It isthe massive, systematic terrorism ofimperialism that generates the desperateand suicidal despair of individualterrorists like the Shi'ite fanatics. In anycase, Reagan's hostage hysteria hasnothing to do with saving lives, Ameri­can or others. We don't diminish in anyway the cold-blooded murder of thatyoung Navy diver in Beirut, butthe factis if you're in a plane that's hijacked yourchances of coming out alive are prettygood, whereas if your plane is involvedin a midair collision you're a goner.

Every year hundreds die in prevent­able air disasters-tourists, house­wives, businessmen, the whole spec­trum of American society-yet youdon't see the president getting on TVtalking about "America under the gun"

APReagan jailed PATCO leaders, fired11,400 air controllers.

Now that the 39 former hostages ofTWA Flight 847 are back safely, RonaldReagan is looking for a way to "standtall" again, and that's when he's mostdangerous, as tiny Grenada found out in1983. "After seeing Rambo last night, Iknow what to do next time," Reaganmuttered into the mikes. In addition tohis shoot-tern-up fantasies, he's pushingproposals to beef up "security" at air­ports and other places. Newsweek (8July) described the "terror-proof air­port" of the future: x-ray machines, FBI

Ifjjack HIsteria" Air Safetl Nose Dive

Reagan's Deadly Skies

12 JULY 1985 5

Protest in Managua against Reagan's embargo, May 16. Banner reads:"I won't sell out. I won't give up. Let your mother cry uncle."

The Spartacus Youth League israising dollars for the urgenf de­fense of Nicaragua against Yankeeeconomic and military aggression.E-very penny' you give goes toNicaragua. Take a stand: makeyour "anti-contra"bution today.Make checks payable to the Stu­dent Committee to Defend Nicara­gua, and mail to: SYL, Box 3118Church S1. Station, New York, NY10008.

Nicaragua Needs $$$

of Matagalpa and Jinotega, the govern­ment announced on June 28 thedistribution of 600,000 acres of privateand state land scheduled for the week ofthe sixth anniversary of the revolution(July 19). A couple of days later it wasannounced that titles to another 27,000acres of land would be distributed tothousands of campesino families in thearea around Managua. And on July I,they announced the relocation ofdisplaced MiskitoIndians back to theirancestral larrds in Tasba Pri and RioCoco. According to Barricada, moreland has been distributed thus far in1985 than in the first four years of therevolution. However, until now almostall the land to which title had been

, granted was state lands occupied bysquatters or former holdings ofSomozaand his henchmen. The takeover ofBolanos represents a sharp departure:Wheelock pointedly declared that thepolitical considerations had been care­fully weighed in arriving at this decision.

For almost six years the ruling FSLNhas followed a policy guided by thetrinity of "mixed economy, politicalpluralism and nonalignment." Butunder the blows of Yankee imperialism,this policy of conciliating contradictoryclass interests has become increasinglyuntenable and downright suicidal, In arecent interview with Europeanjournal­ists, Daniel Ortega declared that:

"I at least have always had a rather clearidea of the historical stage whichNicaragua must accomplish in thiscentury. And this is valid for LatinAmerica as well. It is fundamentally thestage of national liberation. And wecannot unite national and social libera­tion at the same time, that would be verydifficult. First we must conquer inde­pendence, a degree of national libera­tion rich in deep popular content whichwill make it possible to lay the bases tosolve the great economic, social andpolitical problems which will drag onover centuries."

-s-L'Espresso. 23 June

No. Nicaragua does not have centuries,or decades or even years to resolve thefundamental question of which classshall rule. Reagan is seeing to that. Asthe 101 st and 82nd Airborne Divisionsrev up their engines, preparing to headfor Honduras and then on to Managua,the internal contras must be crushed.Today, the struggle to complete andextend the Nicaraguan Revolution is amatter of life and death for the CentralAmerican masses.

Speaking with the New York Times(7 June), Nicaraguan defense ministerHumberto Ortega said that in the face ofa U.S. invasion, "There will be tens ofthousands of people in different parts ofCentral America armed with rifles,antiaircraft guns and other weapons, inaddition to tens of thousands in ourcountry. The outcome will not bedetermined only by military power,"and protests will spread through theUnited States as well. As the U.S.Congress, Democrats and Republicansalike, gives the green light for invasion,American revolutionaries have a specialresponsibility to mobilize against Rea­gan's invasion plans. The SpartacusYouth League fund raising campaign fordollars to Nicaragua is an importantstep. It is also vitally necessary to fightfor labor strikes against U.S. interven­tion. Now more than ever, anti­imperialism abroad means class struggleat home. Defend Nicaragua-SmashU.S. war moves!-

Day/The Commercial Appeal

one-third the predicted turnout. Thesize of the crowd along the cardinal'sroute reflected strong religious senti­ment in this highly Catholic country­where the church is deeply divided andthere are three priests in the govern­ment. But, as the battie over PopeWojtyla's 1983 visit to Managuashowed, the church is also the trumpcard of the internal contras. Obandodeclared in his latest homily, "Don't letthem cut off your head, like communismcuts off your head with the sickle andbashes it with the hammer." And thenthe rightist La Prensa complains that hissermons are no longer broadcast live!

The airport demonstration forObando was noticeably middle-agedand well dressed. A very different crowdcame out for a Sandinista Youthdemonstration June 17-teenagers, pre­schoolers, militia men and women intheir early 20s, in uniform and fullyarmed. Guns were passed out to thecrowd, single shot and automaticweapons, and every time the speakerasked a rhetorical question shots wouldring out amid chants of "Aqui, alla, elyanqui morira" (Here, there, the Yan­kees will die) and "No se vende, no serinde" (We won't sell out, we won't giveup). Featured speaker Omar Cabezas, aguerrilla comandante and an EPSbrigade commander, asked: "Whatwould you prefer, plenty of toilet paperand nail polish, and in return we give upour gold and return the land confiscatedfrom the rich?" The crowd roared back,"Let the revolution continue!" Cabezasquipped, "If you run short of toiletpaper, you can always use La Prensa towipe your ass."

As the contradictions intensify inNicaragua, an accelerated pace of landdistribution has been announced. Twoweeks ago 3,000 peasants of the Agricul­tural Workers Association held a massrally in Masaya, an area of acute landshortage, demanding expropriations.MININRA (land reform) ministerJaime Wheelock responded by confis­cating the lands of COSEP leaderEnrique Bolanos, who refused thegovernment's offer of twice the acreageelsewhere. Then on July I the govern­ment announced another round ofexpropriations of Bolanos' property,this time his agricultural machinerybusiness, SAl MSA. Apparently thiswas simply confiscated, without com­pensation, and the Nicaraguan capital­ist leader is screaming bloody murder.

Meanwhile, in the war-torn provinces

and yellow Vatican flags, many chant­ing 'Viva Reagan-Death to Ortega!" Ittook six hours for Obando to make thenine-mile trip from the airport to hisresidence, edging along in his "cardinal­mobile" as up to 200,000 people linedthe route.

Was this a counterrevolutionarymobilization? It was plenty ominous.After the police had to use fire hoses tokeep the airport crowd under control,Interior Minister Tomas Borge vowed,"We are not going to allow this tohappen again." Obando's open air massthe next day drew only about 20,000,

submission, to get Managua to "crywolf" once too often.

Reagan wants to wear downNicaragua's defenses by psychologicalwarfare-"controlled management". oftheir hysteria-counting on the Sandi­nistas sooner ~r later to make a mistake.Now Congress is "neutralized," andwith the Lebanon hostage crisis, WhiteHouse spokesmen talk of a "specificplan of action, first in Central America"to "end the external support the Salva­doran terrorists [leftist rebels] receivefrom Nicaragua and the Communistbloc." They accuse the Sandinistas of"paranoia," but one of these times theU.S. will invade-otherwise its warthreats and war moves, which have onlypushed the country further down the"Cuban road," make no sense. AndNicaragua must be ready.

The beat of the Reaganite war drumshas been combined with internalprovocation. After being crownedcardinal by the Polish anti-Communistpope in Rome, Managua archbishopObando y Bravo came back by wayof Miami, where he said mass forthe Nicaraguan,counterrevolutionaries;prominent among the mercenary lumi­naries attending the "contra mass" wereAdolfo Calero of the Somozaist FDNand ex-Sandinista Eden Pastora,known here as El Traidor. WhenObando landed at Sandino AirportJune 14, a demonstration organized byCOSEP (the businessmen's association)pulled 5,000-plus people waving white

boycott May I-a clear act of war-thepopulation has been tensed for a U.S.strike. Many believe the invasion will

, come this month. Last week everyonewas talking about a Village Voice articlereprinted here laying out hypotheticalplans for "Operation Founding Fa­thers," targeted for July 4. Also reportedwas the New York Times series detailingextensive Pentagon preparations forinvasion in Central America. But as theVoice also pointed out, the Pentagonhas been engaged in a "perceptionmanagement program" in an attempt toscare the Nicaraguan population into

Nicaragua...(continued from page 1)

"saving American lives" (as the Grenadainvasion showed), even though thehundreds, possibly thousands of Ameri­cans here don't want to be "rescued."Even American liberals called theCongressional action "affirmative gosignals for the Administration."

On June 28, sixty thousand workers,students and soldiers rallied at Mana­gua's Roberto Huembe Plaza to givetheir response to the Yankee threats. Itwas the beginning of the annual marchto Masaya, 25 kilometers away, tocommemorate "La Repliegue" (theretreat). During the J une-J uly 1979insurrection, when Managua was cut offand subjected to murderous bombing bythe National Guard, the FSLN organ­ized a strategic withdrawal of 6,000combatants, returning victoriously tothe capital when the last of the Somozagang fled on July 19. In the main speechto the rally, President Ortega answeredthe U.S. threats, saying that Nicara­gua "already has nuclear weapons­the consciousness and heart of theNicaraguans."

This year the march was led by a showof military force, including seven T-55tanks, followed by several dozen armytrucks pulling 152 mm cannon and anti­aircraft artillery. Mingling with the,crowd were 4-5,000 troops of severalEPS (Sandinista People's Army) andM PS (militia) brigades, chanting anti­invasion slogans as their units werecalled out from the podium. Nicaraguais once again readying the trenches inpreparation for attack. The country ison alert, as it was last November duringthe "MIG crisis," manufactured byReagan, when American S R-71 "BlackBird" spy planes daily caused sonicbooms over Managua to sow panic inthe population; and also in October1983, following Reagan's Big Stickinvasion of the tiny black Caribbeanisland of Grenada. The tenor here can beseen from headlines in Barricada:• June 21: "[Nicaragua alerta!"• June23: "There Will Be No Grenada

Here"• June 25: "If the U.S. Attacks, They

Won't Take Us Unawares"• June 29: "On 'Your Knees Only to

Take Aim"All this week Managua has been

mobilizing on an unprecedented level. Adrive through the city will pass a dozenor more T-55s and armored personnelcarriers; antiaircraft artillery is in place.In the fields of the city, still strewn withrubble from the 1972 earthquake, tanksand APCs are being dug in andcamouflaged to defend strategiclocations-in some key spots a, tankevery 50 to 100 yards. The trooptransports that only a week ago drovethrough the city empty are now packedfull of armed troops-army, militia,interior ministry. And more movementsare taking place at night.

Ever since Reagan declared a trade

6 WORKERS VANGUARD

Strike Wave, Leftist Insurgency. in the Cap-ital

Class War in San Salvador

Reagan's man Shultz and Salvado­ran puppet Duarte..

• Some 22,000 members of theANDES teachers union undertook thefifth in a series of one- and two-daywork stoppages.

• Waterworks employees of the SE­T ANDA union held a nine-day strikedemanding wage increases and negotia­tions with the leftist insurgents. Theywon a pay hike and 49 workers who hadbeen fired were reinstated.

• At the same time ATRAME,representing employees of the educationministry, struck for a salary increase.

• STlSS, representing 4,500 em­ployees of the social security institute,struck for a month, occupying five

. hospitals and 20 clinics across thecountry.

These struggles were reflected inrepeated mass mobilizations. On March8, 25,000 members of agriculturalcooperatives paraded in the capitalprotesting inflation and calling for"dialogue" with the FM LN and its alliesof the Revolutionary Democratic Front(FDR). On March 24, some 10,000protesters, organized by the Committeeof Mothers of Prisoners and theDisappeared, marched on the fifthanniversary of the assassination ofArchbishop Romero. And on May I, anestimated 25,000 workers, peasants andstudents took part in the largest MayDay celebration since 1979. Wearinghats with large visors and sunglasses todisguise themselves from governmentfinks, they courageously marched "un­der the eye of death," as one speaker putit, through the streets where hundreds ofmartyrs have been slaughtered by thesecurity forces.

The workers' mobilizations went onthroughout the month: on May 15,more than 5,000 ANDES teachersmarched to the education ministry; May20, several unions marched on the socialsecurity institute to support STISSstrikers; May 23, some 4,000 teachersand workers marched on the legislativeassembly demanding satisfaction oftheir demands; May 28. again more than4,000 workers marched on the assembly,this time together with the MothersCommittee.

These actions have taken place in theface of murderous repression. WhileU.S. officials proclaim the end ofdeath squad violence under "democrat"Duarte, since the beginning of the year22 Salvadoran trade unionists havebeen killed or kidnapped, among them

continued on page 10

In the capital social conditions areexplosive as a leftist-led union move­ment mobilizes discontent over cata­strophic living conditions. As a result ofa three-year wage freeze, the real wagesof Salvadoran workers lost an incredi­ble 65 percent of their buying powerduring 1981-85, while unemploymenthas risen to an estimated 40 percent(Guazapa, 25 April). For the last yearlabor struggle has been on the rise as thehistorically militant union movementreasserts itself. In spite of the state ofsiege in the capital, during March-JuneSan Salvador has seen a series of massdemonstrations and strikes on a scaleunequaled since the massive mobiliza­tions of 1979-80. The Boletin SemanalCentroamericana (10 June) publishedby the SALPRESS news agency reportsthe following major strikes during themonth of May alone:

supporters of the guerrillas. CalledProject 1,000, the plan is to create athousand "model villages" into whichpeasants in the northern tier of EISalvador would be herded: In Vietnamthey called them "strategic hamlets,"and as in Vietnam, here too they willdoubtless be destroyed from within.

The vastly increased U.S. aid hasmeant a setback to the leftist insurgency.Massed attacks have become rare,making it harder to destroy whole unitsof the government army. But theguerrillas have adapted to the govern­ment's new tactics, breaking down intosmaller squads and preparing for a "warof attrition." Without suffering a singlelost battle, they have been able to pulloff some spectacular raids, like theMarch 16 attack on the communica­tions installation atop El Picacho on theoutskirts of the capital. They have alsobegun targeting government and mili­tary officials, such as the execution ofarmed forces spokesman Lt. ColonelCienfuegos that same month. Lastweek, guerrilla commander JoaquinVillalobos told U.S. reporters, "Ourstrategy has to be based in defeating theresistance and the capacity of theReagan Administration to continuesupplying the Salvadoran Army." Asthe rebel leaders vowed to spread thewar to every part of the country, lastmonth FM LN units entered the westerncity of Santa Ana for the first time since1981.

Labor in the Streets ofSan Salvador

NotoriousSalvadorandeath squadleader, armyLt. ColonelCienfuegos gothis at the handsof the FMLN.

tunnel may be a long one. They arerelying heavily on saturation bombingby American-supplied A-37 strikeaircraft, UH-I H "Huey" helicopters andAC-47 gunships (equipped with three.50 caliber machine guns each capable offiring 1,500 rounds per minute) forstrafing; they use 500 and 750 poundiron bombs converted into anti­personnel fragmentation devices, andthe air strikes are pinpointed by U.S. AirForce reconnaissance planes flying outof Honduras (report by CongressmenLeach, Miller and Hatfield, AlertI,March 1985).

This has produced some "successes"for the government: according to RedCross figures, over 100,000 civilianswere driven from their homes betweenNovember 1983 and June 1984. Atleast 750,000 out of Salvador's fivemillion population have fled the coun­try, probably half to the United States,and there are another 500,000 "internalrefugees" living in camps inside thecountry. Now, following the brutalcounterinsurgency plan of neighboringGuatemala, the Salvadoran armedforces are applying a scorched earthpolicy attempting to remove peasant

Salvador, Another Vietnam AwaitsYou," would not be the last:

"Did Ronald Reagan think that hewould come to make war in EI Salvadorand that his soldiers were not going todie?"Let this be clear: as long as there ismore Yankee intervention, more U.S.Marines will die."

- Washington Post, 22-23 JuneLeading Salvadoran army officers

like hardliner Colonel Sigfredo Ochoaclaim, "We are winning the war." Andspokesmen for Washington have beensaying for the last year that there is"light at the end of the tunnel," to use thefamous Vietnam phrase, although the

Alert!

15,000 workers defy terror regime to march in San Salvador, May Day 1985.

clandestinity. The killing of U.S. sol­diers has grabbed the headlines, butthe press has not reported how tens ofthousands of Salvadoran workers andpeasants have repeatedly taken to thestreets in recent months in mass actions.

Coupled with its invasion plansagainst Sandinista Nicaragua, Wash­ington is sharply escalating its interven­tion in EI Salvador. White Housespokesman Larry Speakes declared:"... we are now drawing the line, we arelaying out a specific plan of action, firstin Central America, on deliveringmilitary weapons, providing additionalintelligence, providing technical lawenforcement assistance" (New YorkTimes, 21 June). None of this has beenauthorized by the U.S. Congress, butthey won't have any problems there:over the past year Democrats andRepublicans have voted $441 million innew aid to "democrat" Duarte. Already,Reagan has used emergency powers todeliver six new helicopters to theSalvadoran military. But the rebels'Radio Venceremos broadcast anFMLN communique on the San Sal­vador attack warning that their opera­tion, titled "Yankee Aggressor in EI

When an urban guerrilIa commandomade a lightning strike in the capital ofEl Salvador June 19, wiping out fourU.S. Marines in a single blow, RonaldReagan reacted with the arrogance of animperial dictator. As the flag-drapedcoffins were off-loaded from an Ameri­can military transport at Andrews AirForce Base, he vowed to smite the"jackals" who may have "disappearedinto the city streets" but could not"escape the judgment of God." TheAmerican president who thinks he cancalI dowri: heavenly wrath wilI havesome problems, though, for the streetsof San Salvador are no longer theexclusive hunting grounds of the rightistdeath squads and the mass murderingSalvadoran army. And as U.S. forces inCentral America mount, these fewMarine caskets will be followed bymany, many more.

The leftist rebels that Reagan calls"terrorists" carried out a military actionagainst legitimate targets in the midst ofa bloody civil war where they face armedforces trained, armed and paid for bythe United States. The San Salvadorattack, say leaders of the FarabundoMarti National Liberation Front(FM LN), represents a new stage in theirfight to "carry the war to the Yankeeaggressors wherever they are." NowU.S. "advisers" won't be able to super­vise bombing attacks on peasant ham­lets by day and sip margaritas in theZona Rosa at night. And as well asfacing the FMLN guerrillas, the U.S.and its puppet president Jose NapoleonDuarte have to contend with a combat­ive workers movement that is rising likea phoenix after almost five years of

12 JULY 1985 7

South Africa .•. externally and to "reform" the apartheidsystem within. Both the ReaganiteRepublican Senate and the DemocraticHouse are now passing measures foreconomic sanctions to pressure theAfrikaner nationalists in Pretoria to actin the best interests of the "free world."Writing for the New York Times (20June) op-ed page, liberal New YorkDemocratic Congressman Stephen So­larz endorsed both Reagan's boycott ofNicaragua and economic sanctionsagainst South Africa as part of "A newDemocratic foreign policy that ... wouldserve our country's interests by facili­tating a bipartisan consensus to resistSoviet expansionism and Communisttyranny."

From Soweto to Harlem:Workers to Power!

The U.S. rulers are worried that thearrogant white supremacists in Pretoriaare destabilizing not only southernAfrica but American society as well.Rev. Leon Sullivan, the Philadelphiablack clergyman who sits on the GeneralMotors board of directors and whodrew up the "Sullivan Code" forAmerican multinationals in SouthAfrica, warned the Senate BankingCommittee that if South Africa ex­plodes, "Riots would occur in Harlemand other cities all over this country"(Washington Post, 14 June).

Thus, the black front men for U.S.imperialism see a direct link betweenpacifying Soweto and pacifying Har­lem. In a keynote speech to a June 16rally in Harlem called in the name ofcommemorating the Soweto uprising,black Democratic hustler Jesse Jacksoncalled on Ronald Reagan to adopt a"new humane African policy" and for "anew African liberation policy comingfrom America." This is like calling onHitler in 1939 to adopt a "new humaneJewish policy" or for a "new Jewishliberation policy" to come from NaziGermany! The Harlem rally occurredonly three days after black scholarship

student Edmund Perry was shot dead,another victim of the wanton killingspree by Mayor Koch's racist cops.

Even though the attorney for thePerry family, Vernon Mason, who isrunning for district attorney in theDemocratic primaries, was one of thefeatured speakers, Perry and othervictims of racist cop killings wereseldom mentioned at this rally. Like­wise, the burning alive of eleven blackMOVE members in Philadelphia wasonly referred to most delicately, if at all.This is because the purpose of theHarlem rally was to elect more blackofficials like Philadelphia mayor WilsonGoode, who took "full responsibility"for that holocaust and vowed to do itagain. At this rally which disgraced thememory of the Soweto martyrs, only ablack leader of the Columbia anti­apartheid protest related apartheidslavery inSouth Africa to the hard racistreality of America's mean streets.

Apartheid is universally reviled be­cause it ruthlessly concentrates, institu­tionalizes and sharply delineates thebrutal exploitation, racist terror andcolonial degradation inherent in ewryform of capitalist imperialism, but

to play "honest broker" and woo theblack nationalist regimes away fromtheir Soviet allies with promises of peacetreaties with their imperialist neighborsto the south and of American aid. In re­turn these regimes become borderguards for apartheid slavery. Under theLusaka Agreement. Angolan troopspatrol their border, in tandem withSouth Africans to cut off the SWAPOguerrillas.' And under the NkomatiAccords, Mozambique expelled most ofthe ANC members in exile there.However, both UNITA and the phan­tom "MNR" have continued to receiveSouth African backing for their cam­paigns wreaking mass murder andeconomic devastation on these poorcountries.

The victory of the VietnameseRevolution gave impetus to the over­throw of Portuguese colonialism by theAngolan and Mozambique masses.That humiliating defeat of U.S. imperi­alism stayed its hand from rushing toreplace the Portuguese as it had re­placed the French in Indochina, and itsSouth African proxies were routed bySoviet-backed Cuban troops in Angola.

These events, in turn, inspired themassive youth-centered rebellion whichbegan in Soweto in 1976 and re-emergedthis past year, merging this time with theclass battles of the black proletariat.South Africa cannot tolerate independ­ent black states on its borders becausethey constitute a direct challenge toapartheid slavery, and so they behavelike arrogant bully boys in "their"backyard the way their Yankee imperi­alist allies have behaved in "their"Central American backyard for· acentury.

From Washington's standpoint, how­ever, Pretoria's unbridled militarismstands in the way ofestablishing a stableneocolonial relationship with the vari­ous black nationalist regimes in south­ern Africa and eradicating Sovietinfluence in the region. How can thenationalist regime in Angola, for exam­ple, be convinced to accept the with­drawal of Cuban troops if South Africatreats international borders as if theydon't exist? At the same time, apartheidterror internally threatens a bloodyconflagration within South Africa itself.

Hence U.S. imperialism would likeSouth Africa to "moderate" its behavior

APSoweto, June 1985: 5,000 blacks defied troops to commemorate victimsof Soweto uprising of 1976.

hi the black townships aroundPort Elizabeth, 27 anti-apartheidmilitants have been "disappeared"and eleven assassinated in a "deathsquad" campaign of terror by policeand white supremacists with ties tothe military. The apartheid regime'sdetermination to crush any resistancehas targeted the militant townshipsof the highly industrialized EastRand in the Transvaal and EasternCape. Here Pretoria has imposed amassive military occupation withsystematic terror and murder, pro­voking black protest in order tosuppress it with greater bloodshed.

51.00

War Against Black TownshipsOn July 5, police wearing knitted

caps as hoods went on a house-to­house rampage shotgunning blacksin Duduza, a black township east ofJohannesburg. After three days ofstonewalling, Pretoria finally admit­ted to killing at least three blacks andthat a black woman was run over byan armored vehicle. On July 9 afuneral vigil was held for the four in amovie theater in a nearby township,KwaThema. Policemen and soldierslobbed tear-gas canisters into thevigil. As the mourners poured out,these apartheid butchers opened fire,killing six immediately.

crimes both material and moral sup­port. For example, when South Africanpolice killed 20 and wounded another 27unarmed funeral goers in Uitenhage lastMarch, Reagan justified the murderclaiming: "There was rioting going onon behalf of others ... who want aviolent settlement." This lie was repudi­ated even by the apartheid regime's owncommission of inquiry which found thatmost of the blacks were shot in the back.

But the Botswana raid, coming on theheels of another South African com­mando raid into Angola's northernprovince of Cabinda to blow up oilinstallations jointly owned by theAngolan government and the U.S.multinational Gulf Oil, compelled theState Department to issue a diplomaticrebuff by recalling the American am­bassador to Pretoria. Certainly it wasnot concern for innocent black lives thatmotivated the White House defenders ofthe Uitenhage.massacre and the organ­izers of the bombing of a black Philadel­phia neighborhood. The State Depart­ment claimed it was acting out of"respect for the national sovereignty ofall states and inviolability of interna­tional borders." Coming from theinvaders of Grenada, the state terroristswho mine Nicaraguan ports, the carbombers of Beirut, the State Depart­ment's claim exemplified what Shake­speare said in his Merchant of Venice:"The devil can cite Scripture for hispurpose."

But Washington is indeed temporari­ly miffed with its racist, anti-Sovietallies in Pretoria. Under "constructiveengagement" Reagan has tried to brokera "Pax Afrikaner" in southern Africa inwhich Pretoria, as a junior partner ofWashington, economically dominatesand militarily polices nominally inde­pendent black states. This is to includeNamibia, whose "independence" islinked to the withdrawal from Angola of25,000 Soviet-backed Cuban troops,who are the only guarantors that thisformer Portuguese colony will not beturned into another bantustan. As withits Israeli client state in the Near East,Washington has developed a soft coplhard cop duet with South Africa.

The latter does the dirty work ofmilitarily terrorizing neighboring blackstates or organizing local "contras."such as Jonas Savimbi's UNITA inAngola and the Mozambique NationalResistance (M NR). This allows the U.S.

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Troubles for theWashington/Pretoria Axis

The Gaborone massacre was a typicalnight's work for apartheid's bloodyrulers. And up to now they have beenable to look to Washington underReagan's policy of "constructive en­gagement" to give apartheid's racist

desperately poor and economicallydependent black African states on itsborders into expelling the ANC andother opponents of apartheid. This inturn is part of its war to drown in bloodthe growing resistance to apartheid bySouth Africa's black masses, especiallythe six-million-strong black proletariat.The Gaborone raid came as the apart­heid regime was attempting to beheadthe largest anti-apartheid grouping, theUnited Democratic Front (UDF), 40 ofwhose leaders are on trial for treason.They face hanging if convicted.

Coming but two days before theannual commemoration by black SouthAfrica (and black people throughout theworld) of the massive youth-centeredrevolt which began in the black town­ship of Soweto on 16 June 1976, theGaborone massacre was both a provo­cation and a dire warning. The Sowetouprising swept across the black town­ships of South Africa; more than 500youth were killed by the police before it.was quelled in 1977, with thousandsmore forced into exile, particularly intoBotswana. And in Soweto on this June16 as 5,000 blacks poured out of acommemoration meeting at the town­ship's Regina Mundi cathedral, cops inarmored cars waiting outside fired teargas and rubber bullets, pursuing the"crowd as they fled.

This scene was repeated the followingday as cops with batons and tear gascharged a demonstration of 500 blacksin a township near Windhoek, thecapital of the South African colony ofNamibia, formerly called South WestAfrica. The blacks were protesting theimposition by Pretoria of a puppet"transitional" government excludingthe black majority, who overwhelm­ingly support the nationalist SouthWest Africa People's Organization(SWAPO). And as if to remind every­one who still rules this mineral-richland, on June 29 South African forcesbased in Namibia pursued SWAPOguerrillas into southern Angola and in atwo-day rampage killed 61 people.

Meanwhile, a showdown is loomingbetween South Africa's mine ownersand the superexploited black minerswho come overwhelmingly from thebantustans and bordering states likeBotswana, Mozambique and Lesotho.The black National Union of Mine­workers (NUM) which represents morethan 160,000 of South Africa's half­million black miners, held strike ballotsat 18 gold mines and eleven collieries intheir fight for increased wages. Alreadyin late June 20,000 black gold miners inthree mines near Johannesburg wildcat­ted for two days, forced back to workonly by the threat of dismissal and theforce of police bullets which killed oneminer.

8 WORKERS VANGUARD

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potential safety of air travel hold out thepromise of transforming the disparatenations of the world into a genuineinternational community. But the devel­opment of air transportation requiresthe highest level of human skill, technol­ogy and coordination, while cutthroatcompetition produces fiery disaster. In aconcentrated form, the life-and-deathquestion of air safety demonstrates theneed for international planning in asocialist society .•

contrary, it only emphasizes-the urgencyof workers revolution. Brother Schuttunfortunately shares with the reformistsan unwarranted faith in the stability ofbourgeois democracy in this period ofthe death agony of capitalism. But thereis no "Chinese wall" between the"democratic" and fascist variants ofcapitalist rule. Back in the 1930s, JamesBurnham, when he was a leader of thethen-Trotskyist Socialist WorkersParty, wrote:

'The Peoples' Front justifies its policyby stating that the fundamental issue atthe present time is 'Bourgeois democra­cy vs. Fascism: We have seen that thereis no such issue. that the only issue is'Socialism vs. Capitalism: .. , Bour­geois democracy prepares the groundfor fascism: fascism takes root. growsand matures. within the ground ofbourgeois democracy. No basic transferof power is involved in the transitionfrom democracy to. fascism: the sameclass continues to rule bv othermeans.... It is of the utmost significanceto remember that Hitler came to powerin Germany within the framework orthe Weimar Constitution-s-uv: Consti­tution described by Social Democracyas 'the most democratic in the world'."

- The Peoples' Front: The NewBetrayal (1937)

The mass murderers who destroyedvillages in Vietnam in order to "save"them from the Viet Cong now bomb ablack neighborhood in Philadelphia inorder to "save" it. In EI Salvador theypromote "death squad democracy," andthey proclaim the apartheid police statean integral part of the "free world." Aninsane social order which proposes todestroy the world in order to "save" itfrom communism will not long preservethe trappings of democracy at home.That is why we say, "From South Africato Germany to Central America and theUnited States, the scourge of fascismwill be wiped out through internationalsocialist revolution.".

articles in A viation Week & SpaceTechnology, 24 June and I July). A Wreported with a hint of envy that theSoviets are readying an ultra-moderncollision-avoidance system using high­speed phased-array antennas, which cantrack many planes at once. The FAAhad once envisioned building such aphased-array system but abandoned theidea-it was "more costly."

As for terrorism in the air, the U.S.imperialists have a lot of gall pointingfingers at anybody. It was Reagan & Co.who criminally sent KAL Flight 007 onan intelligence mission over sensitiveSoviet military installations in 1983,sacrificing the lives of over 200 passen- .gers. Nor was that the first time U:S. spyagencies used civilian airline passengersas a screen for their "dirty tricks" (see"KAL 007 Was U.S. Spy Plane," WVNo. 379, 17 May). And what about the73 passengers of a Cubana airlines planeblown up in the air by CIA-trainedgusanos in I976? The big-time terroristsare in the White House and thePentagon. They and their union-bustingpals in the airline company boardroomsare the ones guilty of mass murder in theskies. .

"Travel broadens," Malcolm X right­ly said, and the speed, convenience and

ranmaKu Klux Klan endorsed Reagan. The present gang In the White House is abunch of dangerous, war-crazed, fasclst-ml.,ded nuts.

war Reagan openly expresses his bona­partist contempt for Congress: hepounds the table declaring, "We've gotto get where we can run a foreign policywithout a committee of 535 telling uswhat to do." To outlaw and suppressopposition to this war drive the adminis­tration has issued FBI "guidelines"equating political opposition with "ter­

.rorism" and calls for "anti-terrorist"preventive strikes while the SupremeCourt guts the Bill of Rights.

The present Cold War II, combinedwith Reagan's insistence on makingAmerica a "Christian nation" under theiron heel of far-right Moral Majoritybigots, has emboldened native fasciststo new outbursts of racist terror. Theopening shots of the anti-Soviet wardrive were fired here at home, underDemocrats Carter and Mondale, inGreensboro, North Carolina on 3November 1979. And as was justdemonstrated in court, the governmentand KKK/Nazi killers at Greensborowere in a murderous conspiracy to gundown communists, union organizersand civil rights activists. On 27 Novem­ber 1982 Reagan, who was endorsed bythe Ku Klux Klan, gave the lynchers thegreen light to take the streets of thenation's capital for the first time since.1925. But they were stopped and run outof town by the mass mobilization oflabor, especially black workers andyouth, initiated and politically led by theSpartacist League.

Loren Schutt is right when heindicates that promiscuous "Nazi­baiting," a Stalinist specialty, leads topolitical disorientation. But to say thatthe present rulers of America are abunch of dangerous, war-crazed,fascist-minded nuts in no way impliespolitical support for the Democrats orany other bourgeois party. On the

Pan Am jet at New Orleans airportwhich killed 145. when the plane wascaught in a dangerous "wind shear" ontakeoff in a heavy rainstorm. Somecarriers like American Airlines haveabolished .the final walk-around checkof the aircraft by a mechanic beforetakeoff to save a few more pennies, andall carriers are planning to eliminate thethird member of the cockpit crewthrough autornation.. How many morewill die for this "frugality"?

While the time bomb in air safetyticks away, Reagan tries to blame all theworld's troubles on the Soviet Union.But in the matter of air safety, theSoviets, who are not hobbled by theprofit motive, are becoming pioneers.When a team of Western avionicsexperts recently toured the test sites of aSoviet electronics research institute,they were astonished to discover that theUSSR is now emerging as "a potentialexporter of next-generation hardware"for air traffic control systems (see

Fascists,Or Pigs...(continued from page 3)destroyed in the fiery holocaust. Thisterrorist crime was authored by aconspiracy extending from Philly cityhall, with its black Democrat mayor, tothe 'racist Republican in the WhiteHouse. Why? The back-to-natureMOVE group's alleged "crimes" wereviolation of the city sanitation code,failure to pay the gas bill and using aloudspeaker. The Philadelphia infernoisn't exactly what we would call "withinthe range of bourgeois democracy"; onthe other hand, it bore the unmistakablesignature of the Reagan regime. Inresponse to this deliberate act of racistmass murder we ran the headline:"Bitburg Hits Philly."

Ronald Reagan wasn't trying to'.'explicitly publicly disassociate" him­self from the Nazis at Bitburg. On thecontrary, he consciously tied himself toGerman Nazism by honoring the Waf­fen SS graves. This outrage was onlyadded to by his obscene, hastily addedvisit to Bergen-Belsen, where his SecretService ordered West German police toround up and cart off protesting JewishHolocaust survivors. The Bitburg visitdisgusted broad layers of Americansociety, including even the Navy Times,hardly an organ of crazed leftist Nazi­baiters, which printed a cartoon show­ing a swastika-bearing skeletal armgiving Reagan the Hitler salute. As forour evocative subtitle, "Ich bin einBitburger," it seems the same ideaoccurred to nationally synd icated car-toonist Oliphant. .

Was all this outrage mere "trite name­calling"? We don't think so. Reaganpositively wants to make the Naziconnection in order to cement hisalliance with modern-day Germanimperialism for war on Russia. The"Fourth Reich," bristling with Pershingnuclear missiles only eight minutes fromMoscow, is in the front line of Washing­ton's anti-Soviet war drive. And themad bombers in the White Housebasement are, if anything, even crazierthan the entourage in Hitler's bunker.The Hitlerites only wanted to conquerthe world by fighting a war on twofronts; the Reaganites believe they cannuke the "Evil Empire" without a singlewhite, upper-class American beingtouched by so much as an ash offallout.

There are probably a few capitalistpoliticians around who. believe inbourgeois democracy. Ronald Reaganjust doesn't happen to be one of them.He came to power through elections, allright (so did Hitler), but in his drive for

Reagan'sDeadly Skies...(continuedfrom page 5)

which elsewhere is masked by "imper­sonal" market forces, social conventionand formal bourgeois legal equality. In

, America the children of welfare motherssupposedly have as much "right" as aRockefeller to own a bank. In SouthAfrica in the white "homeland," wherethe cities, industries, mines and arableland are concentrated, blacks bylaw canown nothing.

In South Africa blacks are forced bylaw to live in "group areas." There is no"group areas" act in the U.S. butEdmund Perry was still shot dead by a

- cop for being out of his "area" afterdark. Every American black and theoppressed and exploited of the worldsolidarize with the struggle againstapartheid because they see in it themirror of their own oppression.

As with the birth of the civil rightsmovement in the late 1950s, the anti­apartheid protests which swept thecampuses this past spring raised ques­tions which directly challenge theracist imperialist system, both in theU.S. and in South Africa. At the sametime, they sought solutions within theframework of the system: Take the"divestment" strategy whereby studentprotest is supposed to pressure collegetrustees to sell stocks from their endow­ment portfolios of multinationals whichinvest in South Africa, thereby pressur­ing these companies to pull out andthereby pressuring the apartheid regimeto reform itself. But there are twofundamental laws of capitalism in­volved here: investment seeks thehighest rate of return and every sale hasa buyer. Indeed, due to the superexploi­tation of black labor, which from aneconomic standpoint is what-apartheidis all about, the rate of return in SouthAfrica is very good. Every "divestment"will therefore find another investor.Wall Street and its government inWashington are n~t going to fundamen­tally alter the capitalist system.

While the "divestment" strategy is aform of liberal utopianism, many of theanti-apartheid protesters are raisingbasic questions about racism and war ina period when Reagan wants to regi­ment the American people for his insanedrive for nuclear Armageddon with theSoviet Union. Young anti-apartheidmilitants are being given an education inthe class nature of the state. One needonly contrast the kid-glove treatmentthe limousine liberals got at the SouthAfrican embassy in Washington to thehundreds of protesters beaten andarrested at elite campuses like Cornelland Berkeley.

Berkeley students also witnessed andappreciated a small demonstration ofthe power of the working class. For tendays last winter longshoremen in theBay Area refused" to unload SouthAfrican cargo despite victimization bythe bosses and criminal sabotage byunion misleaders and their reformisthangers-on. The key to black liberationin both the U.S. and South Africa lies inclass struggle.

South Africa is drifting toward abloody civil war. The black majority hasmade it clear that they are not going totake this oppressive situation anymore,and the white minority is armed to theteeth and determined to defend what ithas got. Insofar as a conflagrationoccurs purely along national, white-vs.­black lines, the whites will win handsdown. But the Achilles' heel of theapartheid system is the six-million­strong black proletariat. From the goldmines of Witwatersrand to the autoplants of Port Elizabeth, for the pastdecade this proletariat has entered into

. struggle and gained an increasing senseof its own power. In South Africa theclass principle can prevail.

A workers revolution in South Africawould be the powerhouse for emancipa­tion of all desperately impoverished andfamine-stricken black Africa. And itwould be a clarion call, given thestrategic position of black workers in

. the U.S., for the American proletariat toenter the battle to wrest power from thisinsane racist ruling class.•

12 JULY 1985 9

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establish alliances with us."Today Villalobos says, "We believe

that, except for the escalated process of[U.S.] intervention, we would have wonthe war." Yet it was known from thebeginning that Washington wouldintervene to prop up its allies in EISalvador. The FDR/FMLN tops "lost"the moment once again centrally be­cause they could not fight politicallyagainst the "democratic" demagogy ofReagan and Duarte. For fear of antag­onizing liberal Democrats in the U.S.,and because they need Duarte for their"political solution" fantasies, the guer­rillas failed to challenge the repeated"election" frauds mounted and paid forby the CIA. So the U.S.-backed regimehas gained political strength and moun­tains of arms, because the leftists failedto wage a classstruggle. But at least theycontinued to fight guns in hand, whereasin the U.S. the "solidarity" milieucriminally disarmed opposition to theSalvador war by channeling it intopressure tactics on the Democrats, whonow vote hundreds of millions forDuarte.

Now once more the possibility ofpowerful workers struggles in El Sal­vador has arisen. As we wrote more thanhalf a decade ago, "The only roadforward to victory for the workers andpeasants of Central America lies in anuncompromising struggle against all theexploiters, their military, political and'spiritual' representatives, not just theoligarchy and the imperialists but thecapitalist class. This road, the road ofpermanent revolution, requires theconstruction of a revolutionary Trot­skyist vanguard to lead the struggle forworkers and peasants governmentsthroughout the isthmus and a UnitedSocialist States of Latin America.".

struck repeatedly in 1979, occupyingplants and leading to the downfall of theRomero dictatorship. Even in the faceof the "reform" demagogy of the"revolutionary junta," labor unrestcontinued. In 1980 twice there werehuge mobilizations of more than100,000people and three general strikes.The powerful working-class upsurgewas ultimately defeated by massivegovernment repression, bloody deathsquad terror ... and the misleadership ofa guerrillaist left which criminallyignored the crucial moment for prole­tarian insurrection, because workersrevolution is not their goal.

In an interview with Chilean StalinistMarta Harnecker, FM LN comandanteVillalobos remarked of the 1979-80upsurge, "The development of the massmovement ... obviously generated ex­pectations about the insurrectionalpossibilities.... What happened is thatwe lost the appropriate moment"(Punta Final Internacional, November­December 1982). But why did they"lose" this moment? We wrote in ourarticle, "El Salvador on Edge of CivilWar" (WVNo. 252,21 March 1980): "Inthe midst of a pre-revolutionary crisis,in which the impossibility of liberalcompromise has been clearly demon­strated, the popular-frontist guerrillascontinue to call for a grand alliance ofthe exploited and oppressed masses withthe 'democratic' class enemies andmilitary butchers." Villalobos admits it:they were looking, he says, to "sectors ofthe bourgeoisie [who] were willing to

based on the present army and theFMLN."

The army is at the heart of theSalvadoran ruling class. For half acentury it provided the presidents. Itpoliced the peasants for the landowners;it spawned the death squads whichassassinated hundreds of laborleaders.Its officer corps will defend capitalistexploitation to the death and is shotthrough with fascistic elements. Any"political solution" that leaves thearmed forces intact means abandoningthe struggle for social revolution andabandoning the masses to the deathsquads.

In addition to the tragic experiencesof Spain under the Popular Front of the1930s and Chile's Unidad Popularduring 1970-73, El Salvador has alreadyhad its own experience with such a"broad" coalition: the "revolutionaryjunta" established on 15 October 1979,which included FDR chief Ungo and"democratic" colonel Majano, andcounted several future FDR leaders(such as Ruben Zamora) among thecabinet members. Because of the pres­ence of their would-be bourgeois alliesin this "human rights junta" installed byJimmy Carter's State Department, theleftist "politico-military organizations"which are today grouped in the FMLNhesitated to attack the new regime. Butdespite the promises of reform, within48 hours the army was mowing downslum dwellers in the barrios of Mejica­nos, evicting strikers from occupiedfactories and "disappearing" leftists.

For Workers Revolution!

Five years ago San Salvador wasshaken by powerful union struggles:electrical and manufacturing workers

FDR/FLMN leaders Clenfuegos, Ungo and Zamora at La Palma talks. Wesay: No popular-front selloutsI Leftist rebels must win the war-Workerstake San Salvador!

1984 call for a "government of broadparticipation." Such a government, saidthe FDR/FMLN, would include notonly workers and peasants, but also "theprivate sector" (i.e., business interests)and "an already-restructured nationalarmy."

In his recent interview guerrilla leaderJoaquin Villalobos shocked Americancorrespondents by declaring, "We haveno condition for laying down our armsbecause we are not prepared to give upour guns ever" (New York Times, 7July). But in his September 1983document, i Por que lucha el FM LN?(What Is the FMLN Fighting For?),Villalobos declared:

"The FM LN does not pose thedestruction of the army but rather theorganization of a new military power

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leader of the Salvadoran CommunistParty, replied: "We don't have anabsolute identity, either in our form offighting or in our political positions"(Washington Post, 7 July).

There have been similar differences inthe past between the ostensibly"Marxist-Leninist" groups of theFMLN and the tiny middle-class "dem­ocratic" formations in the FDR. Theycenter on the price of the so-called"political solution" to the war which allwings of the FDR/FMLN call for. The"moderates" want at all costs to avoidangering Reagan or Duarte-eventhough they're in the middle of a war!­while the "militants" push armedstruggle, in order to bargain for a betterdeal. Last fall, Zamora and an FDRofficial in Costa Rica raised the possibil­ity of participating in the legislativeelections organized by the Duarteregime ("Rebels Weigh Election Role,"Washington Post, 16 November 1984).In response to this apparent split in therebel ranks, U.S. Undersecretary ofDefense Fred Ikle remarked:

"You can u~e negotiations to bring overthose associated with the insurgencywho are willing to participate in thedemocratic process.... The hard coremay go away-they may leave forPrague or Cuba."

-Los Angeles Times,17 November 1984

Duarte, who ultimately depends on themilitary and Washington, could notprovide the necessary guarantees for hisformer allies Zamora and Ungo, so hemissed the opportunity to split theopposition.

From the beginning of the guerrillastruggle in early 1981, the Salvadoranleftist rebels have been calling fornegotiations to end the war. Duarte·finally took them up on their offer bycalling for a "dialogue" which tookplace last October 15 at La Palma.Caught unprepared, the FDR/FMLNdelegates presented only proceduralproposals. At the next session, heldNovember 30 at a Catholic retreat in thetown of Ayagualo, they presented athree-stage proposal for a "governmentof national consensus." This was essen­tially a restatement of their January

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Military Victory to LeftistInsurgents!

The June 19 San Salvador raid wascarried out by the Mardoqueo Cruz unitof the Central American Workers Party(PRTC), the smallest of the five compo­nents of the guerrilla front. While theFMLN took credit for the operation,not all sectors of the opposition coali­tion took the same tack. Ruben Zamo­ra's Popular Social Christian Move­ment (MPSC), a dissident ChristianDemocratic grouping that is part of theFDR, took out a half-page advertise­ment in a local newspaper to declarethat the attack on the Marines "lacksany justification" and "does not contri­bute in any way to the attainment of ajust peace in the country." Asked aboutsuch criticisms by their allies, FM LNcommander Jorge Shafik Handal,

San Salvador•• ~(continued trom page 7)several prominent leaders. Two daysafter the May Day demonstration, twoSETANDA members were assassinatedby the National Guard. And thisterrorism has received official sanctionright from the top. In his June I "state ofthe nation" speech, Duarte blasted theunion movement: "When the unions areinfiltrated and manipulated for war anddestabilization, they lose their socialfunction and the credibility of thepeople" (Boletin Semanal Centroameri­cano, 20 May-9 June).

The very next day, at 3 a.m., in acoordinated action hundreds of militarypolice and National Guardsmen burstinto the hospitals and clinics occupiedby the STISS strikers in an attempt tosmash the strike. At San SalvadorGeneral Hospital the operation was ledby a special SWAT team made up ofagents of the notorious Treasury Policetrained (in violation of a Congressionalban) in Puerto Rico by the FBI. Besidesterrorizing staff and patients (onewoman died of a heart attack), thepolice commandos managed to shootdead four undercover cops who hadentered the hospital earlier. Two STISSofficials were arrested, but later releasedafter 5,000 workers marched June 5 intheir defense.

The government repression contin­ues. On June 10, security forces raided,the SETANDA offices. Two days laterthe headquarters of the Human RightsCommission and the Committee ofMothers of the Disappeared werebroken into and sacked. But theworkers' mobilization has continued aswell. According to the weekly summaryof the FMLN's Radio Farabundo Marti(WKCR, 3 July), on June 29 approxi­mately 15,000 urban and rural workersmarched in San Salvador demandingacross-the-board wage increases, while60 unions announced they were prepar­ing a general strike in defense of thestriking water workers.

·10 WORKERS VANGUARD

Union Tops Throttle Militant NYC Hotel Strikers

Militant pickets at NYC's Roosevelt Hotel, June 13.

Cockroach Capitalists'Welfare Hotel Rip-Off

On June 27, striking New York Cityhotel workers voted overwhelmingly toaccept a tentative agreement with theHotel Association of New Yark, endinga 26-day walkout. The gutsy militancyand determination of the strikers wonthem the respect of the city's workingpeople. The bosses' attempt to breakthis union was beaten back; the strikersare back on the job, the scabs fired. Butstrikes are won and lost on the picketline. The disastrous no fight, no winpolicies of the union officials, centeredon the bullshit lie that racist DemocratKoch and his mounted cops were on theunion's side, paved the way for massivescabherding and a giveback contract.

Vito Pitta, head of the strikers' nine­union coalition. falsely hailed thesettlement as a "victory." In Reagan'sAmerica and Koch's New York, it istestimony to the bankruptcy of Ameri­can trade-union leaders that if a strikeisn't smashed, the tops claim they won,The bosses won significant concessionshere, including the right to combinejobs, a two-tier wage scale under whichnew employees will receive 75 percent ofscale for their first year, and no griev­ance procedure for up to six months.The strikers got a 23.5 percent pay hikespread ovetflve years, which means thatinflation will wipe out any improve­ments in the slave wages most hotelworkers get.

The strike started out with a bang.The militant marches of the hotelworkers attracted nationwide presscoverage, particularly in towns likeMiami with a large hotel industry.Initially, 45 hotels were struck and therewas talk of pulling out another 40 but itremained just that-talk. Twelve thou­sand scabs streamed across leaky picket

SpartacistCampaign...(continued from page 12)

attack. Ir~ time to finish the CivilWar-Black liberation through social­ist revolution!"

The Stamberg/ Kartsen campaign is aplatform for all who want to take astand against the Moral Majority bigotsand reactionaries who are trying to runour lives. The Spartacists say: Govern­ment out of the bedrooms! Peopleshould be able to watch, read or doanything consensual they want! Mil­lions for AIDS research! Full democrat­ic rights for homosexuals! Free abortionon demand! Full citizenship rights I'OF

foreign-born workers! Triple welfare!For the socialist reindustrialization ofAmerica!

Marjorie Stamberg was the Sparta­cist Party candidate for state assemblyin Manhattan's 64th A.D. in 1978. Aveteran of the civil rights, antiwar andwomen's movements of the I960s, she isa member of the editorial board of theSpartacist League newspaper, Workers

Spartacist~ Forum

Philly Inferno:Racist Murder!

MOVE Massacred byReagan, Cops, Black Mayor­

They're the Terrorists!Speaker: Ed Karlsen

Spartacist League Central CommitteeGuest Speaker: laVerne Sims

Former MOVE memberGuest Speaker: Gene Herson

Militant-Solidarity Caucus in the NMU

Thursday, JUly 11, 7:00 p.m.Borough of ManhattanCommunity College, Room N402(Greenwich at Chambers)For more information: (212) 267-1025

NEW YORK CITY

12 JULY 1985

lines into the struck hotels every day. Atthe ratification meeting Pitta wasroundly booed when he tried to thankthe New York cops-strikers knew fullwell whose side these racist, strikebreak­ing thugs were on. The Teamstershonored the strike but this was theexception. Most damaging was thescabbing of the unionized city sanitationmen who picked up the hotels' garbagefrom day one-and Pitta & Co. alibiedthem by claiming that the Taylor Lawgave them the right to scab. AFSCM E'sconsummate sellout Victor Gotbaumwent so far as to cross the hotel workers'picket line at the Mayfair Regent. Thedaily midtown 'Parches became noisy

Vanguard.Edward Kartsen, a signal maintainer

in the New York subways until recently,was the oppositional candidate forTransport Workers Union Local 100president in 1983. Kartsen chaired theLabor/Black Mobilization to Stop theKlan in Washington on 27 November1982, when the Spartacist League andblack unionists led thousands whostopped the KKK race-terrorists in thenation's capital. •

Koch's Raid ...(continuedfrom page 12)

people in the space of a month, it wasanother exercise in police intimidationof the population.

Many Brownsville residents wereoutraged. One mother, whose daughterwas released after paying a fine, said, "Itwas really disgusting. Where were theyyesterday when a 60-year-old womangot raped right over there?" Anotherresident remarked, "You know this stuffwouldn't have been happening if itwasn't an election year" (New YorkTimes, 3 July).

This massive South Africa-style ter­ror raid against the black community isexactly Koch's style. While calling forthe bombing of Beirut airport, Lebanesecities and Iran, Koch plays out hisbloody fantasies on New York's op­pressed minorities. "You know SaudiArabian law as it relates to graffiti,"would-be ayatollah Koch said recently,referring to the barbaric practice ofcutting off thieves' hands: "In mydreams ... I'd make a Saudi Arabian thepolice chief for just a week" (DailyNews, 27 June). Why bother? Koch'scops already beat to death alleged"graffitist" Michael Stewart, while hisghoulish coroner Dr. Gross gouged outStewart's eyeballs so evidence of stran­gulation wouldn't turn up.

From the hit-and-run killing ofadoctor on Park Avenue and the shotgunmurder of Bronx black grandmother

diversions from the critical task ofstopping the scabherding and deliveriesof food and supplies that kept the hotelsopen.

The ranks were plainly getting tired ofthese no win policies. On June 24, amidtown candlelight march was sched­uled for 9 p.m., an hour which ensuredthat not even traffic would bedisrupted.Union officials stated that strikerswould be wearing yellow armbands as agesture of solidarity with the Americanhostages held in Beirut. Instead, morethan 1,000 union members and support­ers, far more than the bureaucratsexpected, massed in front of the Plaza.Almost no one was falling for the

While big-time real estate robberbarons like Condo King DonaldTrump make multi-millions soakingthe rich, NYC's' cockroach capitalistsare getting fat, too, packing thehomeless into squalidwelfare hotelsand billing the city millions. Ascolumnist Sydney Schanberg point­ed out (New York Times, 15 June),there are now an estimated 2,900homeless families crammed intothese "single room occupancy" dives.Here they are preyed upon bydesperate criminals, whole familieshuddled into SRO cubbyholes, de­nied cooking facilities, sufferingwith the most marginal sanitationfacilities. According to Schanberg'sexpose, "The city pays the hotels anaverage of about $1,900 a month foreach room, which is roughly $23,000for rent per year for one family. Thebill to the city is about $70 million ayear."

So why don't they just give thefamilies $23,000 a year to go out andrent apartments? But, of course, thatwouldn't do-the homeless have tobe punishedfor their "crime"ofbeingpoor! Then there's the welfare hotelowners' latest scam. Fewer than halfthe 2,900 rooms have refrigeratorsand almost none have stoves, al­though many of the homeless fami-

Eleanor Bumpurs to the killing ofscholarship student Edmund Perry, noone is safe from Koch's killer cops.That's what the Brownsville raid,Koch's vicious "solution" for the blackcommunity, was intended to underline.Marjorie Stamberg and Ed Kartsen,

patriotism diversion-there was hardlya yellow armband in sight. Chantingand clapping, the marchers paid aspirited visit to a do/en or so of thestruck hotels. When they got back to thePlaza they' ignored instructions todisband and. surging past both thefrantic bureaucrats and the nervouscops, took oil down Fifth Avenue formore picketing.

But as WV pointed out when thestrike began. "spontaneous militancy isnot enough." The measures needed for asolid victory-mass picket lines thatnobody would dare cross and solidaritylabor action-meant a confrontationwith Koch and the Democrats. Strikerswere more than ready for some old­fashioned class struggle. Our "Labor'sGotta Play Hardball" supplement waswell received; over 1,000 WV's andSpanish-language Spartacists were soldon the picket lines. along with a do/ensubscriptions. But what was absent wasa militant leadership that could counter­pose fighting policies to the pro­Democratic Party line of Pitta and thecity's Central Labor Council.

New York City, a once proud uniontown, is long overdue for some hardclass struggle. The powerful NYC labormovement, although weakened by itsdefeatist leadership, can and must bemobilized to fight the bosses' racist,anti-union offensive. That means dump­ing the· labor . fakers who counselreliance on the capitalist state and itsanti-labor laws and injunctions, Realvictories require' a leadership armedwith a fighting program of class struggleand the determination to politicallybreak the workers movement from itssubordination to the capitalist Demo­cratic and Republican parties.•

lies include pregnant women orinfant children, which means facili­ties for storing and preparing foodare essential. But when the city finallydecided to install small refrigerators(about $160 each), the owners re­fused to have them unless they got arent increase and a further rake-offfor "maintenance" costs. One incred­ible argument: refrigerators generateheat, and heat attracts vermin (as ifleaving food and beverages on thewindow sill didn'tl)

But they certainly attract humanvermin-after the city agreed to paythe owners' blackmail fee of an extra$350 in "maintenance" costs, theowners finally let the city put in thesmall refrigerators. Truly, there'snothing Koch and his loyal slumlordswon't do! Today, an estimated armyof 60,000 homeless survive somehowin the streets, the subways andcrevices of New York City. Thou­sands more are plunged into thesedepths each year, as the city's housingsqueeze tightens, and even the paltryfederal housing aid is cut off underReagan. We say: restore and extendrent control! Homeless should seizeTrump City-the several squaremiles of empty acreage on NewYork's far West Side! Expropriatethe real estate barons!

Spartacist candidates for mayor andManhattan borough president, de­mand: Kick out Koch! Mobilize laborand minorities to stop racist attacks!For integrated armed workers defenseguards, drawn from responsible unionmen and women!.

11

WfJRNERS ,/IN'O/lR'

New York Cit,:For the Working Peoplel

Marjorie Stamberg for Mayor.Stamberg with striking hotel workers. SpartacistLeague distributed WV supplement, "Labor'sGotta Play Hardball to Win."

The Spartacist Party Campaign Committee an­nounces it is running candidates in the upcoming NYCelections, campaigning around the call, "New YorkCity: For the Working People!" Demanding "Kick OutKoch! Dump Trump! Stop Racist Cop Terror!", theSpartacist election platform denounces the Demo-­crats and Republicans as "par\n~r parties" of Ameri­can capitalism and calls for a lighting workers party.The Spartacist candidates are Marjorie.Stamberg forMayor and Edward Kartsen for Manhattan BoroughPresident.

The Spartacists say: Avenge victims of the racistcops-Edmund Perry, Michael Stewart, EleanorBumpurs! Koch's cossacks are wantonly shooting

down black youth and terrorizmg Brooklyn blackneighborhoods in South Africa-style racist roundups.It's a system: the cops kill, then D.A. Morgenthau andcoroner Dr. Gross the ghoul cover up the crime. TheSpartacist campaign calls to "Mobilize labor andminorities to stop racist attacks! For integrated armedworkers defense guards, drawn from responsible unionmen and women!"

"The U.S. is gearing up for invasion of Nicaragua '!Spart of the insane anti-Soviet war drive," said mayoralcandidate Stamberg. "Meanwhile they bomb a blackneighborhood in Philadelphia and wage war on theunions at home. Ed Koch is Reagan's hatchet man forNew York City, and they're .going after all of us­blacks, unionists, gays, immigrants, women, thehomeless, students, ghetto youth, you name it." "TheSpartacist campaign," she said, "seeks to rallythesocial power of the working class and oppressed for arevolutionary struggle against the war drive." Thecandidates' program states, "A vote for Spartacist is avote for the program of workers power-from South

IIEd Kartsen for Manhattan Borough President

Kartsen urged massive union action after transitworker's brutal murder by racist punks in 1982.Above: Ed speaks at militants' rally, July 1983.

Africa to the U.S.""They're killing our youth," says Manhattan

borough president candidate Kartsen. "A wholegeneration is being tossed on the scrap heap. We needschools and jobs, but Koch builds prisons. And they'retrying to destroy our unions." The campaign calls fordefense of city unions against labor-hater Koch whodeclared war on transit workers in 1980, and hisYuppie opponent Carol Bellamy who led the joggersover the Brooklyn Bridge during that strike. "Thebottom line is the picket line," said Kartsen. "We needto build a class-struggle workers party to beat back theunion-busters, to mobilize mass defense against racist

continued on page II

Koch's Gestapo Raid in BrooklynKoch's cossacks have struck again.

On July 2, two hundred cops sweptthrough housing projects in Brooklyn'sBrownsville neighborhood in a pre­dawn Gestapo-style raid, draggingfamilies out of bed. They rounded upand arrested 160 terrified black resi­dents of the projects. Many were herdedoutside without being allowed to dress,chained together, photographed by thepress and loaded into vans. The copsbragged they'd planned their racistterror raid for three weeks, usingcomputers to locate so-called "fugi­tives." Meanwhile Brooklyn DA law-­and-order "liberal" Elizabeth Holtz­man's office had three assistant district

12

attorneys waiting at the Criminal Courtto "process" the victims. That means upto two days in jail, which for manymeans possibly losing their jobs.

They claim this raid is part of aprogram to combat robberies inBrownsville. But the "fugitives" theyseized were simply a miscellaneous

, collection of people who'd missed courtappearances for minor, petty chargeslike smoking dope on the street, tres­passing or turnstile-jumping. It wassheer race-terror. Like the huge Opera­tion Pressure Point "drug bust" dragne'on the Lower East Side last winter,where Koch's cops grabbed over 2,000

continued on page II

NYPDnightridersdrag black"suspects"

in chainsfrom their

homes.

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12 JULY 1985