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No. 737 .... XC3 2 June 2000

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
For the first time since the U.S. rein-
stated capital punishment in 1976, a state
legislature has voted for abolition of the
death penalty. The May 18 repeal vote in
New Hampshire came only months after
Republican Illinoiii governor George
Ryan declared a moratorium on execu-
tions in that state in January. Ryan's
announcement came after the widely pub-
licized releases of 13 death row inmates
who had proved their innocence. Fully
half of all Illinois death sentences that
have been appealed have been reversed in
favor of a new trial or sentencing hearing.
Throughout the U.S., 87 death row pris-
oners-one for every seven executed-
have been found innocent since 1977.
And those 87 are only the tip of the ice--
berg. Many of them, like of the 13 in
Illinois, were exonerated only on the
basis of recently developed DNA testing,
the expense of which alone puts it out of
the reach of most prisoners.
It is a measure of how capricious,
wanton and racist the application of the
death penalty is in the United States that
Ryan, a supporter of capital punishment,
now says he will not proceed with execu-
tions without a "100 percent guarantee"
against wrongful convictions. The IIli-
nois moratorium and the New Hampshire
vote, along with the dozens of resolu-
tions against the death penalty passed in
cities around the country, are a measure
as well of concerns among sections of
the ruling class that the "authority" of
the state's kiIIing machine is being
undermined by continuing exposures of
death row frame-ups.
The death penalty stands at the apex of
the apparatus of capitalist state repression
in the U.S., and that apparatus ofrepres-
sion has been heavily bolstered by the
Democratic and Republican parties in
recent years in order to contain the ex-
7 2S2741JJ 7 r
plosive contradictions generated by the
growing gap between the handful of
filthy rich and those at the bottom. The
rate of executions is now at its highest
level in 50 years. And the "alternative" of
life imprisonment proposed in the New
Hampshire bill amounts to a living death.
Over two million people now fill the jails
and prisons-largely a result of the racist
"war on drugs"-accounting for one-
fourth of the world's prison population.
Chicago,
November 1998:
POC-initiated
labor/black ..
mobilizatiofl.to free
Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Death penalty'
stands at apex
of capitalist
machinery of
repression.
We oppose the death penalty for the
gUilty as well as the innocent. We do not
accord the state the right to decide who
shall live and who shall die. We welcome
the Illinois moratorium, however brief it
may be, and any other measure curtail-
ing state-sanctioned murder, just as we
oppose all moves to expand and intensify
the repressive powers of the capitalist
state. Nothing short of a workers revolu-
tion will do away with the capitalist
......
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Robert F. Williams:
Fighter Against
Klan 'error ... 6
state, which is a machinery of organized
violence to defend the rule of the capital-
ist exploiters against those whom they
exploit and oppress.
The death penalty is a barbaric leg-
acy of medieval torture, a system of
legal murder that reinforces the brutal-
ization of society in all respects. And in
racist America, ruled by the imperial-
ists who have slaughtered countless mil-
lions around the world in defense of their
profits, the primary victims of this bru-
tality are black people.
It is no accident that the states of the
former Confederacy lead the way in legal
lynching. Texas alone accounts for over a
third of all executions carried out nation-
ally since 1977. Capital punishment in
the U.S. is rooted in the system of slavery,
when black slaves were considered chat-
tel, the private property of the slaveowner.
The Constitution counted a black per-
son as three-fifths of a human being. The
Slave Codes prescribed torture or death
for hitting a white man in self-defense or
for any other act deemed "insolent" or a
challenge to the slaveholders. In the 1857
Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court
decreed that the black man "had no rights
which the white man was bound to
respect." While the slave system was
smashed by the Civil War, the struggle for
continued on page 4
In an' ominous attempt to cripple
the defense of death row political pris-
oner Mamia Abu-Jamal, a federal court in
Philadelphia in late April imposed outra-
geous sentences against seven Mumia
supporters following their conviction on
sham charges issuing from a civil disobe-
dience action last summer. Among the 13
special restrictions handed down as part
of one-year supervised probation was a
ban on any contact with Jamal, thinly dis-
guised as forbidding association with
"felons."
In a May 24 protest letter to Attorney
General Janet Reno, the Partisan Defense
Committee declared:
"This prosecutorial vendetta is solely
intended to silence Mumia and his sup-
The State: Organ of Class Rule
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first
laid out, it is the historic task of the working
class to sweep the whole system of cap-
italist exploitation and oppression and usher
in a classless, egalitarian society. Key to
mobilizing the proletariat in its class inter-
ests is the Marxist understanding that the
state-consisting at its core of cops, courts
and prisons-does not represent society as a
TROTSKY whole, as liberals argue, but exists to defend LENIN
the rule of the dominant class. The capitalist
state must be smashed through a socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state
which expropriates the bourgeoisie and erects a planned, collectivized economy. The
victory of the proletariat on an international scale will lay the basis for the dissolution
of all classes and thus eliminate the need for any apparatus of repression.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the
great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under
penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces
on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already social-
ised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution.
The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into state
properly.
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and
class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, based upon class
antagonisms, had need of the state. That is, of an organisation of the particular class
which was pro tempore [for the time being] the exploiting class, an organisation for the
purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of pro-
duction, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited
classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of produc-
tion (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of soci-
ety as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this
only in so fm: as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being,
society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle
Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the
real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there
is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the indi-
vidual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the col-
lisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be
repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by
virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of soci-
ety-the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society-this is,
at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations
becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the gov-
ernment of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of
processes of production. The state is not "abolished." It dies out ....
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities
is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.
Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The strug-
gle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense,
is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere ani-
mal conditions of existence into really human ones.
2
- Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

EDITOR: Len Meyers
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The closing date for news in this issue is May 30.
No. 737 2 June 2000
porters to prepare the way for his legal
lynching. Such activists as Clark Kis-
singer, a prominent advocate for Mumia,
and Frances Goldin, Mumia's literary
agent, were slapped with draconian re-
pression to stop their efforts on behalf of
this innocent man and compelling voice
for black freedom. Mumia's supporters
have been forbidden to contact him, can-
not leave New York without permission
from a probation officer, must surrender
their passports, submit to house searches,
list all persons they associate with and
turn in financial records to the courts. All
of this for an infraction the legal equiva-
lent of a traffic ticket! ...
"The prosecution of his supporters with
such a vengeance is a testament to the
fact that the effort to execute Mumia
Abu-Jamal is supported by the highest
levels of the American ruling class and
its agents of repression. We demand
hands off all Mumia supporters. Drop all
the charges and all the restrictions!"
Mumia's powerful death row commen-
taries have been instrumental in galva-
nizing international support behind his
cause. It has been a longstanding aim
of the Fraternal Order of Police (EO.P.),
which has spearheaded the drive for
Mumia's execution, to muzzle him and
keep his writings from being pubIished-
and that is what is behind the ban on
prison visits by Frances Goldin. Jamal's
latest collection of writings, A.ll Things
Censored, includes the radio commen-
taries he had prepared for broadcast in
1994 on National Public Radio, which
caved in to pressure from the EO.P. and
refused to air Mumia.
The judicial persecution of Jamal's
supporters stems from a mass arrest of
96 protesters last July 3 at the Liberty
Bell in Philadelphia. One pretext used
by the cops for wading into the demon-
stration was a bogus bomb scare con-
cocted by the Philadelphia police. In
their drive to execute Jamal and intimi-
date the growing ranks of his supporters,
the EO.P. and its allies have long sought
to smear Mumia's defenders as "terror-
ists" or "crazies."
In a blatant violation of their rights
to free speech and assembly, protesters
were dragged off en masse by federal
Park Rangers. All those arrested were
issued summonses for "failing to obey
a lawful order," an infraction classified
as a petty offense. Those with the temer-
ity to demand a trial were convicted-
often on the basis of blatant lies by the
cops. The Park Rangers were unable even
to identify sdme of the defendants.
Goldin holds Mumia's power of attor-
ney and handles his finances; Kissinger is
a leading spokesman for Refuse & Resist!
(R&R) and speaks regularly at Mumia
defense rallies. Now they must supply
a detailed accounting of their financial
affairs every month to the court, giving
the state access to information related to
Mumia's defense. Even Kissinger's wife,
who was not a defendant, was confronted
by FBI agents at her workplace demand-
ing that she produce financial records
from the past ten years for a federal grand
jury!
A protest statement distributed on
May 17 by R&R to solicit support for
the convicted protesters denounces the
Feds' prying into the Kissingers' finan-
cial records as "a giant fishing expedi-
tion ... that further exposes the role of the
federal government in attempting to exe-
cute Mumia and silence the movement in
his defense."
But R&R's actions are counterposed to
that understanding. An 18 January R&R
Internet posting uncritically reported the
conclusion of a delegation that had met
with Justice Department officials: "to
broaden and deepen the international
campaign to save the life of Mumia Abu-
Jamal with a focus on President Bill Clin-
ton and Attorney General Janet Reno ....
We must say to them: the evidence is
in your hands." R&R also promotes the
call for a new trial for Mumia, which is
premised on the belief that the bourgeois
courts can be pressured to be "just."
Mumia is innocent and should be free.
The power to win his freedom is cen-
tered in the multiracial labor movement,
which in taking up this fight will strike a
blow against the entire capitalist sys-
tem which is predicated on the brutal
exploitation of labor and rooted in the
racist oppression of black people. Drop
all charges against Mumia's supporters!
Free Mumia now! Abolish the racist
death penalty!.
,/"
Memorial Meeting for
Mary Van De Water-Quirk
1954-2000
Saturday, 3 June 2000 at 3:00 p.m.
International House of Chicago, University of Chicago
1414 East 59th Street (Dorchester Avenue Entrance)
For more information, call (312) 454-4930
WORKERS VANGUARD
Sierra Leone:
All British/UN Troops Out Now!
The following statement was issued
by ou'r comrades of the Spartacist League!
Britain on May 16. While Revolution-
ary United Front leader Foday Sankoh
has since been arrested, the British/UN
imperialist presence in Sierra Leone has
deepened.
Over a week ago the Labour govern-
ment launched a military invasion of
Sierra Leone, dispatching 1,500 combat
troops including 700 paratroopers, Royal,
Marine commandos, Gurkhas and SAS
"special forces." The troops are supported
by a heavily armed armada offshore made
up of the aircraft carrier lllustrious,
a helicopter carrier tpe Ocean, Harrier
fighters and bombers, while other rein-
forcements are on their way. The invasion
of this small West African country was
supposedly to evacuate European civil-
ians, but upon arrival in Freetown British
troops immediately took over the airport
and paratroopers began patrolling the
streets.
Brigadier David Richards, commander
of the British military force, effectively
took command of the United Nations
troops there as well as of the Sierra Leone
national army which is to be merged with
Kamajor, a murderous pro-government
militia. Revolutionaries take no side in
the sordid civil war between the forces
loyal to the present government of Presi-
dent Kabbah and the "Revolutionary
United Front" (RUF). Both sides perpe-
trate heinous violence against the impov-
erished population.
The British military are now preparing
to "take the war to the rebels." Their
intention is that Sierra Leone forces will
do the frontline fighting while British and
UN troops will provide back-up. Labour
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has threat-
ened: "If our troops are attacked, they
will fight back, I don't want the rebels to
be under any misunderstanding about
that" (Guardian, 12 May). If ministers
seem a little vague about what role the
troops will play, it is' only because they
would rather have black African troops
bear the brunt of the casualties.
The 'same racist Labour government
whose cops kill blacks in police custody
with impunity and was forced to admit to
"institutionalised racism" in the forces of
capitalist "law and order" now dispatches
troops to shoot down blacks in Africa.
This capitalist government which rams
through privatisations and plant closures,
throwing thousands of workers in Britain
on the scrap heap, now rushes troops to a
former colony to secure control of the
diamond wealth for the capitalist class.
Working people and minorities in
Britain have no interest in this invasion
2 JUNE 2000
AFP
UN and British troops invade Sierra Leone. British imperialists seek to
assert control over diamond-producing former colony ..
which has nothing to do with "human
rights" and everything to do with capital-
ist greed and hypocrisy. The Spartacist
LeaguelBritain, section of the Interna-
tional Communist League, demands:
All British troops out of Sierra Leone
now! Down with Labour's neo-colonial
invasion!
Nothing could be more cynical than
the pretence by British imperialism, who
plundered and enslaved Africa for cen-
resources, and the root of the conflict
is over who controls the vast profits.
What bothers the British imperialists, and
the UN who have 9,000 troops on site,
is not the "human rights" record of the
rebel RUF but the fact they control
the diamond-producing areas centred on
Konoand Koidu from which they earn
some $200 million a year. In fact it
was when UN troops attempted to move
into the RUF-controlled diamond-mining
areas that 500 troops were captured.
Some were killed, most are still miss-
ing. In the past the government forces
were supported by Nigerian troops while
Liberia, a neighbouring country, has sup-
ported the RUF. The threat of renewed
civil war in Congo could engulf several
African countries and fightiilghas broken
out again between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Colonialism artificially created borders in
Africa dividing up ethnic groupings. The
spilling over of ethnic conflicts to neigh-
bouring countries has been a fairly com-
mon feature in recent years.
Internationally, rivalries among impe-
rialist powers have heated up in the post-
Soviet world where the dominant powers
are no longer restricted by united opposi-
tion to the Soviet Union which was a
degenerated workers state. Its destruction
'by counterrevolution in 1991-92 had dis-
astrous impact, not least in Africa which
became even more impoverished as aid
from the Soviet Union dried up. Imperi-
alist rivalries lead to wars, the outlines of
Reuters
which can be seen in the "scramble for
Africa" now taking place over the conti-
nent's vast resources. U.S. imperialism is
sending Jesse Jackson as its black front-
man while Richard Holbrooke, the U.S.
representative to the UN, is touring Africa
to drum up support for more UN troops.
The British military presence in Sierra
Leone partly reflects fears that the UN
will lose credibility because its forces-
mainly African and Asian troops-sent to
enforce a BritishlU.S.-brokered "peace"
deal last year were no match for the RUF.
The UN is a den of imperialist thieves
and their victims which represents the
interests of the dominant world power,
the United States, and its allies. In Soma-
lia in 1993, racist UN "peacekeeping"
troops gunned down and massacred civil-
ians including women, children and the
elderly. The UN also presides over sanc-
tions against Iraq which have killed over
1.5 million people. UN troops are impe-
rialism's official mercenaries in blue hel-
mets, and whether the soldiers hail from
the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Bangladesh or
Nigeria their purpose is to guard the inter-
ests of the imperialists. We say: All UN
troops out of Sierra Leone!
The only way to end imperialist plun-
der of the Third World is through workers
revolution in the imperialist heartlands.
The Spartacist League is dedicated to
building a revolutionary workers party,
forged in the heat of class struggle, which
continued on page 9
turies, that their military occupations are
undertaken under the rubric of "human
rights imperialism," which was the pre-
tence for waging war to insert an imperi-
alist military presence in the Balkans.
Britain'srelationship with Sierra Leone
is called imperialism, which is not a pol-
icy but, as Lenin described it, the highest
stage of capitalism, in which competing
capitalist powers struggle to redivide the
world among themselves. This nec!,!ssar-
ily involves keeping poor countri,es in
poverty while a small number of 'giant
companies based in the richer countries
control the world market and make vast
profits.


.ff! ...... _ ... ____ ...............
... _: ,... .... "'" "'" ,.,lrilSj
for class struggle against
the Labour government!
The invasion of Sierra Leone is a con-
tinuation of Labour's position in 1998
when they used mercenary dogs of war
such as Sandline International to prop up
the Kabbah government. This country,
one of the world's poorest, has been dev-
astated by a nine-year-Iong civil war
which has killed upwards of 75,000 peo-
ple and mutilated countless others. But
Sierra Leone has tremendous diamond
Marxist newspaper of the
Spartacist League/Britain
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3
,
Death Penalty ..
(continued from page 1)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
rious Northern bourgeoisie. In the Jim
Crow system of rigid segregation which
issued out of the defeat of Reconstruction
in the South, official state murder was
supplemented by the extralegal terror of
the KKK.
More than two-thirds of the thousands
executed between 1930 and 1967 were
black. And with 98 people put to death
last year, the rate of execution is nearly
what it averaged in those years, when
Jim Crow reigned supreme in the South.
Ip the 1987 McCleskey v. Kemp case,
the U.S. Supreme Court examined and
acknowledged overwhelming evidence
of the racist application of the death pen-
alty, only to conclude that this was "irrel-
evant" and that such bias is an "inevitable
part of our criminal justice system"-
meaning that it was all too relevant to the
workings of this injustice system. Nearly
half of the more than 3,600 men and
women on death row today are black.
As ever more cases come to light of
innocent people put to death, popular
support for the death penalty is at its low-
est point in two decades. Noting that
Ryan's moratorium "once would have
represented a remarkable political risk,"
the Wall Street Journal (21 March)
the reformists of the International Social-
ist Organization (ISO). The call of its
Campaign to End the Death Penalty for
"Moratorium Now, Abolition Next," which
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ -
national Socialist Review (Spring 2000),
puts it to the right of the Repub1ican-
majority New Hampshire legislature,
which voted for "abolition now." A recent
Internet posting 25 May) by a disgrun-
tled ISO supporter makes clear what is
behind the ISO's refusal to call for aboli-
tion: "The ISO leadership instructed
members NOT to argue f(ir the abolition-
ist position in the interests of standing on
'common ground' with supporters of the
death penalty on the question of the 'mor-
atorium.' This took the form of a concrete
slogan raised by the ISO: 'Moratorium
Now, Abolition Next.' ... It is transform-
ing our meager forces into the ground
troops of Democratic Party hacks like
Jesse Jackson and others."
Racist Legal Lynching
Texas is emblematic of the rigged
scales of capitalist "justice." Court-
appointed lawyers for indigent defen-
dants are commonly known to sleep
through their trials, while the state
appeals court is notorious for almost
never overturning death penalty convic-
tions. James Beathard was executed in
Texas last December for the murder of a
family of three based solely on the testi-
Ruder/ISR
Spring 2000 issue of ISO journal. Reformist ISO stands to right of Republican-
majority New Hampshire legislature, which voted for "abolition now."
reported that two-thirds of residents "ex-
pressed approval of Mr. Ryan's action."
At the same time, there is widespread
anger over systematic frame-ups and
cop terror, from the LAPD Rampart
Division's routine frame-ups, torture and
murder to the NYPD killing of Amadou
Diallo and the exoneration of his exe-
cutioners. With the cops increasingly
viewed as "out of control," the U.S. Jus-
tice Department has launched. probes in
recent years to "clean up" the more fla-
grant "excesses" of police depart-,
ments from NYC to Buffalo, Pittsburgh
and Los Angeles. Through such cos-
metic measures, the capitalist rulers seek
to maintain the pretense of "democracy"
which masks their class dictatorship.
Aiding this effort in their own way are
..... -.- < ........... w".... ~
wE WILL
NOTFGlr.n
WV Photo
Racist cops act as executioners on
the streets. Signs outside Brooklyn
funeral of Patrick Dorismond in
March recall some of many victims
of NYPD terror.
4
mony of a friend who accused him of
being the sole killer. Three months later,
the same prosecutor dismissed that testi-
mony to win a death sentence against the
friend for having himself carried out the
killings, to which he confessed before
Beathard's execution, Even Texas prison
officials who are supporters of Bush
gasped when the governor claimed that
"every person that has been put to death
in Texas, under my watch, has been
guilty,"
That innocence is no bar to execution
was sanctified by the Supreme Court
itself in January 1993, when it rejected
an appeal by Texas death row prisoner
Leonel Herrera to hear evidence that
another man had confessed to the murder
for which Herrera had been convicted.
Four months later, Herrera was strapped
onto a table and injected with lethal
drugs, Now Shaka Sankofa (Gary Gra-
ham), a black man who was only 17
when he was sent to death row in 1981,
faces execution on June 22 despite pro-
viding massive evidence of his inno-
cence. Stop the execution!
In aNew York Times (21 May) article on
death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-
Jamal, Francis X. Clines writes: "Oddly,
for all the moratorium talk, capital pun-
ishment has not yet emerged as an issue
in this year's presidential arena," The pol-
itics of racism and death are at the core of
American bourgeois politics. Clinton/
Gore won the White House back for the
Democrats in 1992 in large part through
a campaign of outright racist displays
aimed at winning the Southern white
vote, This effort was symbolized by
Clinton's flying back to Arkansas in the
middle of his election campaign to per-
sonally oversee the execution of a brain-
damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector.
It was New Hampshire's Democratic
The politics of death:
preSidential candidates Bush
and Gore, supporters of
legal lynching.
governor, Jeanne Shaheen, who immedi-
ately vetoed the bill abolishing the death
penalty, Gore's formal nomination will
be presided over by Democratic Party
national chairman Ed Rendell, a former
Philadelphia mayor who as D.A. in 1982
railroaded Mumia to death row. And
Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, who
has twice ordered Mumia's execution, is
a leading prospect to be the running mate
for Republican Bush, who himself has
overseen 127 executions since 1995.
As we have said since first taking up
Jamal's cause 13 years ago, his case illu-
minates what the racist death penalty is
all about. Even the Times article acknowl-
edged in a p!J.oto caption: "Mumia Abu-
Jamal, the face of capital punishment in
America." Framed up and sentenced to
death on false charges of killing a Phila-
delphia policeman, Mumia has presented
mountains of evidence of his innocence.
This makes no difference to the capitalist
rulers who want Jamal dead because they
see in this eloquent journalist, MOVE
supporter and former Black Panther Party
spokesman the threat of black revolution,
a symbol of defiant opposition to racist
oppression. Free Mumia!
Workers Revolution Will
Smash State Killing Machine
With capital punishment so inter-
twined with black oppression-the bed-
rock of capitalism in this country-it is
highly unlikely that the death penalty
would be eliminated in the U.S" though
it is not inconceivable. In fact, there
was a hiatus in executions for almost a
decade until 1977, and in 1972 the
Supreme Court struck down existing
death penalty laws as "wanton and freak-
ish," ordering states to rewr:ite their stat-
utes. This move came in response to
massive popular unrest, beginning with
the civil rights movement of the 1950s
and '60s and then the mass protests
against the imperialist war in Vietnam.
At the same time, the racist rulers did not
need an official death penalty to unleash
the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO
campaign against the Black Panthers, 38
of whom were killed without benefit of
even a frame-up "trial," assassinated in
their beds or gunned down on the streets
by the cops.
Writing of the death penalty in Britain
nearly 150 years ago, Karl Marx con-
demned "any principle upon which the
justice or expediency of capital punish-
ment could be founded, in a society glo-
rying in its civilization .... What a state
of society is that, which knows of no bet-
ter instrument for its own defense than
the hangman" ("On Capital Punishment"
[1853]), Today, in the epoch of capitalist
decay, the barbarism of this system has
only deepened. As the instruments of
social control become increasingly more
savage, even juveniles and the mentally
impaired are being sentenced to death in
growing numbers, Crime and punish-
ment are defined in class terms: in the
eyes of the bourgeoisie, when hundreds
of workers die in a factory fire because
the employer sealed up the fire exits, that
is deemed an "accident," not murder!
As we wrote in "State Butchers Gil-
more" (WV No. 141,21 January 1977),
following the first execution in the U.S.
after the Supreme Court decision bring-
ing back capital punishment, the death
penalty "is one among many proofs of
the failure of capitalism in its death
agony to fulfill its promise of a decent
life .... The hangmen and firing squads
will not be eliminated through civilliber-
tarian reforms. Only the victorious prole-
AP
Stop the legal murder of Shaka
Sankofa (Gary Graham)! Despite
massive evidence of innocence, he
faces execution in Texas on June 22.
tarian revolution that overthrows the
bourgeois state will abolish the death
penalty for good and smash the prisons,
ill the course of rooting out the whole
vicious cycle of crime, punishment and
repression caused by capitalism.".
Black History and the Class Struggle No.2: 75 (32 pages), No.14: $1 (48 pages)
Make checks payable/mail to: Spartacist Pub. Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116
WORKERS VANGUARD
I
Capitalist Counterrevolution Tramples Women's Rights
The following article is translated
from the current issue of Platform a Spar-
takusowcow (No. 11, Spring-Summer
2000), published by the Spartakusowska
Grupa Polski, Polish section of the Inter-
national Communist League.
At 6:30 p.m. on January 25 in the small
city of Lubliniec near Czestochowa, cops
smashed their way into a gynecologist's
office just 'as doctors were completing
an abortion. The patient, a mother of four
about 40 years old, and her physician and
anesthesiologist were arrested by the
cops and the two doctors now face crim-
inal charges with penalties of up to three
years'imprisonment!
This vicious police attack, threatening
the life and health of a woman during a
surgical procedure in the privacy of her
doctor's office, underscores the profound
contempt for women which permeates
the Polish bourgeois state ten years after
clerical-nationalist Solidarnosc spear-
headed the restoration of capitalist rule.
Nor is it accidental that this first police
attack on a gynecologist's office was con-
ducted not in a major city but in a small
town in the economically devastated
Slask coal mining region, plagued with
poverty and mass unemployment amidst
waves of privatization, pit closures and
wholesale slashing of the social security
system. The Spartakusowska Grupa: Pol-
ski says: Drop all charges against the
Lubliniec doctors! Free abortion on
demand! For women's liberation through
socialist revolution!
As our comrades of the International
Communist League (then international
Spartacist tendency) warned throughout
the 1980s, banning abortion was a key
aim of clerical-nationalist Solidarnosc
from its inception, when it called for the
right of the Catholic church to broadcast
its poisonous anti-woman propaganda
over state radio and television systems in
August 1980. Solidarnosc. the yellow
union for the CIA, Vatican and bankers,
mobilized the forces of rampant clerical-
ism and nationalism in Poland, helping
pave the way for the capitalist counter-
revolution which triumphed in the for-
mer Soviet bloc irt 1990-92 and brought
untold devastation to working people
from Berlin to Vladivostok and beyond.
As we point out in the article "Polish
Feminists and Solidarnosc Counterrevo-
lution" (Platforma Spartakusowcow No.
10, Fall-Winter 1999, reprinted as "Po-
lish Solidarnosc: A Man's World," WV
No. 724, 26 November 1999):
"This world-historic defeat for the work-
ing class has led to a vast increase in
attacks on working women, from the
sweatshops of Southeast Asia to' anti-
abortion terror in North America and
beyond, and the unprecedented rise of
woman-hating religious bigotry and ene-
mies of basic human progress around the
world."
We communists of the ICUSGP stand
on the record of our consistent fight
against Solidarnosc-led capitalist restora-
tion. We fought for the unconditional mil-
itary defense of Poland and the other
deformed workers states against imperi-
2 JUNE 2000
Poland:
Free Abortion
on Demand!
alist attack and internal counterrevolu-
tion. As communist partisans of the cause
of workers, women and all the oppressed,
we sought to mobilize the proletariat
to defend these states-whose gains
included abortion rights, free health care,
education, full employment-which rep-
resented a tremendous conquest of the
proletariat deriving from the October
Revolution of 1917. At the same time, we
fought for workers political revolution to
oust the corrupt and discredited Stalin-
ist bureaucracies of the USSR and East
Europe, which were undermining these
gains and opening the road to capitalist
restoration. This program remains an
urgent necessity which the ICL fights for
today in the remaining deformed workers
states of China, Vietnam, Cuba and North
Korea.
In capitalist Poland, there is wide-
spread discontent over the misery
wrought by massive privatization, devas-
tation of state health care and education,
and unemployment and starvation wages.
In place of the jobs and social bene-
fits eliminated in the name of "interna-
tional competitiveness," workers, women
and youth are fed a steady diet of anti-
communism, religious obscurantism,
nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Many look to the ex-Stalinist Social
Democrats as a parliamentary "defense"
against the worst abuses of capitalist mis-
ery and clerical reaction. Yet when the
Social Democrats themselves stood at
Lech Walesa
(left), founder
of Polish
Solidarnosc, 1980.
Vatican-
sponsored
Solidarnosc
counterrevolution
drove women
out of jobs,
eliminated right
to abortion.
the helm of the capitalist government
in 1993-97, they loyally carried out the
same capitalist program as their Soli-
darnosc predecessors, including enforc-
ing the abortion ban which crowned the
Solidarnosc counterrevolution and esca-
lating the racist deportations of Roma
[Gypsy] refugees.
As Marx and Engels noted in the
Communist Manifesto over 150 years
()
:::T
(!)
I
""
~
2
3
Polish nurses
protest against
low wages
outside
parliament
building in
Warsaw last
year.
ago, "the executive of the modern State is
but a committee for managing the com-
mon affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."
The regimentation of the working class,
women and youth in the service of prof-
its through the promotion of reactionary
social norms is the common political pro-
gram of all wings of the bourgeoisie. As
communists we seek to show workers and
the oppressed that what is neec:ied is not a
"change of government" but a socialist
revolution-led by the working class at
the head of all the oppressed-to sweep
away the putrefying capitalist system
itself. Those who labor must rule!
Fight for a Leninist Party!
Among those calling themselves "rev-
olutionary socialists" in Poland nowa-
days are the Employee Democracy group,
followers of [the late] prominent British
reformist Tony Cliff, and the Revolution-
ary Left Current (NLR), co-thinkers of
the late Ernest Mandel's United Secretar-
iat. These self-styled "revolutionaries"
seek to recruit youth to their reformist
programs by (occasionally) claiming to
oppose the oppression of women and
defend abortion rights.
To conscious workers and radical
youth who may be checking out the cre-
dentials of such organizations for the first
time, we of the SGP say, "Buyer beware!"
When the most elementary defense of the
gains of working people, including abor-
tion rights, was posed pointblank, these
fakers stood on the opposite side of the
barricades together with the most vicious
enemies of women: from Pope Karol
Wojtyla to Afghan Islamic fundamental-
ists to Yeltsin's Orthodox priests. From
1980 onward, under the banner of anti-
communist "democracy." these "left"
groups hailed the very clerical-nationalist
forces who led the restoration of capital-
ism and have unleashed anti-abortion
state terror and capitalist immiseration.
To this day, these same groups hail
the reactionary woman-hating bigots
of Krzaklewski's Solidarnosc as genuine
"trade unionists in the government"
(Employee Democracy No. 18, January
2000)! -
For the Solidarnosc reactionaries of
the AWS/UW [Solidarnosc Election
ActionlFreedom Union] coalition govern-
ment, criminalizing abortion is only one
step in the crusade for "family values"
and "combatting the loss of morality
among youth." As we wrote after the im-
perialist occupation of Serbia (in which
Poland took an active part): "Together
with squeezing ever greater profits out
of the working class in the name of capi-
talist competition goes the need for
'moral' regimentation of the working
class" (Platforma Spartakusowcow No.9,
Spring-Summer 1999). While banning
abortion and promoting anti-immigrant
racism, clericalism and anti-Semitism,
the capitalists now seek to criminalize an
entire generation of working-class youth,
by targeting everything from pornogra-
phy to homosexuality to rock concerts
and the Internet.
As if in response to their masters' call,
the fake leftists of the Mandelite splinter
group NLR II have put together a loose
bloc with the Stalinist KMP and the
Morenoite GIPR in order to explicitly
oppose organizing workers in resistance
to these attacks of the bourgeoisie. As
they sneer in their "Bulletin of the Oppo-
sition" No. I (Fall 1999-Winter 2000):
"The basic field of activity must be the
living conditions of workers, activity in
the trade unions.
"There must be no concentration on sec-
ondary issues-to ascribe to national,
sexual and racial minorities. or students,
any ability to make changes in the
system is simply wrong and unserious."
Buying hook, line and sinker the bour-
geois lie that "communism is dead," these
phoney "revolutionaries" turn their backs
on Lenin's teaching in What Is To Be
Done? that the ideal for revolutionary
Marxists is not "the trade-union secretary,
but the tribune of the people, who is able
to react to every manifestation of tyr-
anny and oppression, no matter where it
appears, no matter what stratum or class
of the people it affects; who is able to
generalize all these manifestations and
produce a single picture of police vio-
lence and capitalist exploitation; who is
able to take advantage of every event,
however small, in order to set forth before
all his socialist convictions and his dem-
ocratic demands, in order to clarify for all
and everyone the world-historic signifi-
cance of the struggle for the emancipation
of the proletariat."
In contrast to the fake leftists who
give a "Marxist" veneer to the reaction-
ary poison of bourgeois ideology in the
working class, the ICLlSGP, following
Lenin and Trotsky'S Bolsheviks, proudly
inscribes on our banner the fight for the
liberation of women and all the oppressed
as part of the struggle for new October
Revolutions!
PlatformaSpartakusowcow
No. 11, Spring-Summer 2000
$1 (28 pages)
Order from/pay to:
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY ,10116
5
Robert F. Williams:
Fighter Against Klan Terror
In the mid-1950s, the eruption of mass
black struggle against the Jim Crow
system of legalized racial segregation in
the South opened up a new and convul-
sive period of modern American history.
For over a decade the black struggle for
equality and democratic rights domi-
nated political life in this country. From
the lunch counter sit-ins and "freedom
rides" in the South to the ghetto explo-
sions in the North, black anger shook
white racist America. These historic
struggles underscored yet again the cen-
trality of the fight against black oppres-
sion in the struggle to sweep away this
whole system of racist capitalism.
Today, a generation of black workers
and young activists have been taught to
look to the likes of Martin Luther King
Jr., Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP
of Roy Wilkins as the heroes of the mass
struggles for civil rights in the 1950s and
'60s. They are embraced by the capitalist
rulers and deified in school textbooks,
newspapers and movies precisely because
their strategy consisted of "moral sua
sion" and "nonviolent passive resistance"
to pressure the federal government-
through the Democratic Party-and con-
tain the explosive struggles for black
freedom. It is these liberals and preach-
ers that today's purported black spokes-
men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,
who work overtime to channel raging
,lllger over the epidemic of racist cop ter-
ror into Democratic Party electoral poli-
tics, describe as their role models.
Aiding the t;fforts of the bourgeoisie
and its black front men are yesterday's
hlack radicals-many of whom became
Democratic Party elected officials-and
the reformist left, who distort the mem-
ory of Malcolm X, purveying the myth
that this militant black nationalist was
moving toward agreement with Demo-
cratic Party liberal MLK. Malcolm X
was the voice of black militancy, intransi-
gently opposed to the "white man's pup-
pet Negro 'leaders' ," as he called King,
Bayard Rustin and other libetal civil
rights leaders. He reviled their calls for
"turn the other cheek" pacifism in the
face of murderous attacks by the KKK
Gordon Parks
Malcolm X, voice of black militancy,
opposed "turn the other cheek" paci-
fism of liberal civil rights leaders.
Jllurnal ,-.-- ,
VOL LVII No 41 NORfOlk, VIRGINIA. iATUIDAY, OCTO'" 12, lU7 1D 'AGES '11([ 15 CENTS
CITIZENS FIRE BACK AT KLAN
Ku Kluxers
tkeGunsAI
Monroe,Nt
SHh he"","
N..
Of HMC,H ....




John Herman Williams
As president of Monroe, North Carolina NAACP in late 1950s, Robert F.
Williams (center) organized armed self-defense that beat back Klan terror.
and other agents of Southern Dixiecrat
rule. He denounced their appeals to
Democratic president John F. Kennedy
and his brother Robert, the attorney gen-
eral who "came to the aid" of civil rights
activists by sending in the FBI and fed-
eral marshals to suppress militant black
protest.
While Malcolm X's memory is dis-
torted, the story of those Southern mili-
tants who also rejected King's pacifism
is largely untold. A recent biography,
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams
and the Roots of Black Power by Timo-
thy B. Tyson, tells the story of this coura-
geous fighter for black freedom and the
struggles of the black masses in the
South against the combined forces
arrayed against them-the KKK, cops,
Feds and courts abetted by the liberal
civil rights leaders.
Monroe, North Carolina was the
Southeast regional headquarters of the
KKK. There Williams and members of
the NAACP chapter found themselves in
the midst of some of the most ,heated
battles of the civil rights movement.
These were notable not for the racist
atrocities and wanton killings which
mark the era, but -for the fact that under
Williams' leadership black people fought
back, giving as good as they got (in fact,
better). By deed and by word, Williams
did much to inspire a layer of young civil
rights activists in breaking from their lib-
eral illusions in Amencan "democracy"
at home and U.S. imperialism abroad.
He became a target for repression by the
capitalist state because he personified the
black militancy that America's rulers
feared, especially when tied to organ-
ized, armed self-defense against racist
terror. The title of the book refers to the
radio broadcast Williams hosted from
Havana, which carried piercing commen-
taries on American racism and the liberal
civil rights tops, after he was framed up
by the FBI and driven into exile in Cuba.
The book brings to life how Williams
led black workers and farmers in defend-
ing themselves against KKK nightriding
terror, only to be abandoned by the liber-
als. It demolishes the myth that black mil-
itants like Malcolm and Williams were
on a common course with the Demo-
cratic Party liberals, describing how Wil-
liams was vilified by Wilkins and King
and witchhunted out of the NAACP.
Where the liberals openly embraced the
American capitalist state as an ally of
black people, Williams defiantly opposed
the imperialist rulers. But this self-
described "revolutionary black national-
ist" did not grasp the understanding that
the power to smash racist capitalist rule
resides in the multiracial working class.
As we wrote in our obituary, "Robert F.
Williams 1925-1996: Courageous Fighter
Against Racist Terror" (WV No. 655, 8
November 1996): "The idea that in the
course of class struggle white workers
could overcome their racist prejudices
and recognize their common interests
with blacks was alien to Williams' out-
look. Yet within the limits of that outlook,
Robert F. Williams was a heroic and hon-
orable fighter against black oppression."
During the mass black struggles of the
1960s, the question of armed self-defense
became a central dividing line between
the liberals represented by King and the
radicals. What was involved here was not
simply or primarily the right of individu-
als to defend themselves and their fami-
lies against violent attack. What was
posed was the organized self-defense of a
mass movement, embracing entire black
communities across the South, confront-
ing the Klan, White Citizens Councils
and local white-supremacist govern-
ments. When King pledged "nonviolent
resistance," he was really pledging alle-
giance to the "white power structure," as
it was called at the time. He was saying
that the black movement would not go
beyond the passive, gradualist, electoral-
ist limits set for it by the liberal wing of
the American ruling class represented by
the Democratic Party under presidents
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
That's why Malcolm X called King a
"20th century Uncle Tom."
Black Militancy and
Revolutionary Leadership
In the introduction to Radio Free Dixie,
Tyson writes: "The life of Robert F. Wil-
liams illustrates that 'the civil rights
movement' and 'the Black Power
movement' emerged from the same soil,
confronted the same predicaments, and
reflected the same quest for African
American freedom." The civil rights acts
granted formal legal equality. But the
demands and aspirations of the "black
power" movement-which sought to
address the entrenched social and eco-
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Marzani & Munsell
FBI persecuted Williams for advo-
cating black self-defense.
nomic oppression of black people-
could not be met within the framework of
racist American capitalism. Black power
can become a reality in this country only
in the form of workers power: the over-
throw of the racist capitalist system
through a socialist revolution, in which
black workers-who are subjected to
both race and class oppression-will nec-
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
6 WORKERS VANGUARD
essarily play an exceptional role, led by a
multiracial proletarian vanguard party.
The activities of Williams and the
Monroe NAACP were symptomatic of
the large and growing militant left wing of
the Southern civil rights movement. This
tendency was centrally expressed in the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC), the main organization of
young black and also white radicals in
the South. By the early I 960s, SNCC
militants were derisively calling the mod-
erate Martin Luther King "De Lawd."
King's liberal-pacifism was -totally dis-
credited by the Northern ghetto rebellions
of the mid-'60s, especially by his support
to the police repression of the impover-
ished black youth who took to the streets
in an outpouring of rage against racist cop
terror and the hellish conditions of ghetto
life. At this juncture, a new SNCC lead-
ership under Stokely Carmichael raised
the slogan of "black power" which in-
t1amed, and was intended to int1ame,
bourgeois liberal opinion. While signify-
ing a rejection of liberal integrationism,
in the absence of a proletarian perspective
this slogan also pointed to growing
pseudo-nationalist despair over the possi-
bility of integrated social struggle.
Our own political tendency originated
in and was in part shaped by this tumul-
tuous period. The Spartacist League
began as the Revolutionary Tendency
(RT) in the once-Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party (SWP), which was then
moving rapidly to the right. We recog-
nized that here was a historic, but t1eet-
ing, opportunity to recruit the best of a
generation of young black militants to
revolutionary socialism (Trotskyism) in
the course of the mass struggles they
were leading. We wrote in an opposi-
tional document, "The Negro Struggle
and the Crisis of Leadership" (1963):
"The rising upsurge and militancy of the
black revolt and the contradictory and
confused, groping nature of what is now
the left wing in the movement provide
the revolutionary vanguard with fertile
soil and many opportunities to plant the
seeds of revolutionary socialism. Our
task is to create a Trotskyist tendency in
the broad left wing of the movement,
while building that left wing ....
"We work in these movements because
we want to fight racism in practice as
well as in theory, because we know that
it is only through the socialist revolution
that racism can ee wiped out. To build
the revolutionary vanguard is to partici-
pate in and build the revolutionary lead-
ership of the current struggles of the
working class-of the fight for Negro
liberation."
-reprinted in "What Strategy for
Black Liberation? Trotskyism
vs. Black Nationalism,"
Marxist Bulletin No.5 (Revised)
This is the perspective of revolutionary
integrationism. Our fight to mobilize the
multiracial proletariat in struggle against
every manifestation of racist oppression
is based on the understanding that genu-
ine equality can only be achieved through
the assimilation of black people into an
egalitarian socialist society. American
capitalism is rooted in the bedrock of
black oppression. There can be no social
revolution in this country without united
struggle of black and white workers led
by a multiracial vanguard party, and there
is nothing other than a workers revolution
which can at last realize the historic
struggle for black equality and freedom.
In the absence of revolutionary leader-
ship, the mass black struggles of the
1960s-first in the South and then the
North-led to no more than minimal and
token gains which have since largely
been reversed. "Moderate" civil rights
leaders, personified by Jesse Jackson,
became the black front men, centrally
through the Democratic Party, for the
white power structure. Black militants
like Robert F. Williams and later the
Black Panther Party leaders were sub-
jected to murderous state repression,
while many black radicals who did not
timl their way to a proletarian revolution-
ary perspective ultimately made their
peace with racist American capitalism. In
a founding document of the SL, "Black
and Red-Class Struggle Road to Negro
Freedom" (Spartacist No. 10, May-June
2 JUNE 2000
Muhammad Speaks AP
Muhammad Speaks cartoon lambasted M. L. King for supporting repression of 1965 L.A. Watts upheaval. King
(second from left) and other liberal civil rights leaders, here with Democratic president Kennedy in 1963, preached
reliance on federal government.
1967), written as the "black power"
movement was already moving in a hard
nationalist direction, we warned that "the
slogan 'black power' must be clearly
defined in class, not racial terms, for oth-
erwise the 'black power' movement may
become the black wing of the Demo-
cratic Party in the South." That is pre-
cisely what happened.
As a new layer of youth is drawn to
the militancy exemplified by Malcolm X
and others, the former black radicals and
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d.tory II
tlu. A
lina into a family with a tradition of ac-
tivism and self-defense. His grandfather,
Sikes Williams, was a radical activist in
the integrated Populist-Republican alli-
ance in the 1890s, publishing a small
newspaper, People's Voice. Branded a
"radical," targeted by white racists, Sikes
Williams kept o'a loaded rit1e close at
hand, a rit1e passed on to Robert F. Wil-
liams by his grandmother.
In 1941, while working on a New Deal
National Youth Administration job, 16-
I SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT
BLACK AND RED-
Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom

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Spartacist League fought to win 1960s black radicals to revolutionary
proletarian perspective. Top left: Leaflet distributed after 1967 cop riot in
Newark, New Jersey. Top right: 1966 founding document laid out program for
revolutionary integration ism.
year-old Williams organized a strike to
protest racist discrimination. This coura-
geous act won him an FBI file marked
"Security-C," meaning the Feds branded
him a Communist. Two years later he
moved to Detroit, finding work in the
Ford defense plant and becoming a mem-
ber of the militant United Auto Workers
(UAW) Local 600, where he came in con-
tact with members of the SWP and the
Communist Party. Williams was caught in
the middle of the 1943 racist riot in which
25 black people were killed by white
mobs abetted by the cops. The UAW
tops offered little more than pious wishes
to end racial discrimination and a self-
congratulatory pat on the back that the
bloodshed had not entered the plants. In
contrast, the then-Trotskyist SWP's Mili-
tant (3 July 1943) called for determined
union action in defense of the black
masses, noting that "the native fascists
would be cowering in their holes, demo-
ralized instead of triumphant, had the
union leaders called out the veteran t1ying
squadrons to defend the Negro people."
After serving in the army, Williams
used his benefits under the G.!. Bill to
attend a number of Southern colleges,
which were, of course, segregated at the
time. When the benefits ran out, he was
forced to quit college and look for work.
He found it difficult to make a decent
living in a country where black men were
proverbially "the last hired and the first
fired." At the same time, he was already
being hounded by the FBI because he
"had used communist words and slo-
gans like 'freedom' and 'democracy' and
'justice' ."
This is a statement of how the capital-
ist rulers see as a revolutionary chal-
lenge even an assertion by black people
of the very purported "principles" on
which the American republic was
founded. The fight for black freedom
does indeed require the shattering of this
system which is rooted in the forcible
segregation of the majority of the black
population at the bottom of this society,
to be used as a reserve army of labor
when the - capitalists need them and
increasingly deemed to be a "surplus
popUlation." At the same time, the racist
ideology which accompanies black
oppression is wielded by the exploiters
to weaken and divide the working class
as a whole.
When the Korean War broke out in the
early 1950s, Williams enlisted in the
Marines. His outspoken opposition to
racism in the Marine Corps antagonized
his white officers, and after a year he was
given a "dishonorable discharge." Like
many of the black soldiers who went
through World War II and the Korean
War, Williams left the service determined
continued on page 8
reformist leftists seek to corral them back
into the Democratic Party fold. That was
the purpose of the nationalist and reform-
ist organizers of the Black Radical Con-
gress conference in Chicago two years
ago, as they tried to convince the hun-
dreds of youth who turned 'out that Mal-
colm was at one with King. Similarly,
Socialist Action's Nat Weinstein (who
played a leading role in the SWP as it
went over to reformism in building class-
collaborationist "antiwar" coalitions with
Democratic Party politicians during the
Vietnam War) claimed: "King's campaign
for economic justice for poor people,
especially in the South, and Malcolm X's
angry Black nationalists coming from the
North, was a dangerous threat to capital-
ism. Both currents were on a course
toward each other and toward a freedom
movement with a powerful anti-capitalist
spin" (Socialist Action, August 1997).
Spartacus Youth Clyb Class Series
It is necessary for the present genera-
tion of young black workers and students
to learn not only the true story of the
heroic struggles waged by Williams and
other black radicals in the South in this
period but also about the limits and con-
tradictions of the "black power" mili-
tancy which they represented.
Organizing Black Self-Defense
in the South
The son of a boilermaker, Williams
was born in 1925 in Monroe, North Caro-
LOS ANGELES
Wednesday, June 21
Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through
Workers Revolution!
Location and readings: (213) 380-8239
VANCOUVER
Saturday, June 24, 3 p.m.
National Chauvinism Is Poison
to Class Struggle!
Independence for Quebec!
La Quena, 1111 Commercial (at Napier)
Information and readings: (604) 687-0353
Visit the ICL Web Sitet
www.ic.-fi.org
BAY AREA
Saturdays, 3 p.m.
1634 Telegraph Ave., Oakland
June 3 & 24: Basic Marxism
Information and readings: (510) 8390851
or (415) 395-9520
NEW YORK CITY
Saturdays, 2 p.m.
299 Broadway, Suite 318
(2 blocks north of Chambers St.)
June 10: Workers of the World Unite!
Marxism: The Fight for Socialist
Revolution
June 24: The Russian Revo/ution-
How the Working Class Took Power
Information and readings: (212) 267-'1025
7
Williams ...
(continued from page 7)
to break down Jim Crow barriers at home.
In his autobiographical account Negroes
With Guns (1962), Williams writes:
"When I got out of the Marine Corps, I
knew I wanted to go home and join the
NAACP."
The NAACP Williams found was not
the militant vehicle for fighting black
oppression he expected. Faced with an
upsurge of KKK terror aimed at crushing
the nascent civil rights' struggles, the black
middle-class professionals in _Monroe
abandoned the NAACP. By the time Wil-
liams joined, the branch was in the pro-
cess of dissolution, and it wasn't long
before the presidency fell to him by
default. Williams recalled, "They elected
me president and then they all left."
Turning first to the black vets,
Williams rebuilt the chapter with the
working-class blacks who were held in
contempt by the middle-class NAACP.
"One day I walked into a Negro pool-
room in our town, interrupted a game by
putting NAACP literature on the table
and made a pitch. I recruited half of
those present. ... We began a recruiting
drive among laborers, farmers, domestic
workers, the unemployed and any and all
Negro people in the area. We ended up
with a chapter that was unique in the
whole NAACP because of working class
composition and a leadership that was
not middle class" (Negroes With Guns).
Within two years the once defunct
branch numbered some 300 members,
with black women comprising the largest
group among the new recruits.
Following the summer 1957 drowning
death of a black child-blacks were
allowed to swim only in local creeks-the
Monroe NAACP began efforts to desegre-
gate the only public swimming pool in
town. Tyson recounts how the campaign
drove away their white liberal supporters;
the prospect of an integrated swimming
pool touched the very core of racist
pathology in the South-"race-mixing,"
particularly the fear that white women
might become sexually attracted to black
men. A local KKK leader that a
black person going to a white swimming
pool "is looking for a funeral." Klansmen
from throughout the state descended on
Monroe, burning crosses and driving
through the ghetto in armed caravans
escorted by the cops. On several occa-
sions, the racists fired into the house of
Monroe NAACP vice president Dr. Albert
Perry, who along with Williams and oth-
ers was deluged with death threats.
Williams and his NAACP comrades
organized to defend Perry's house--
wearing steel helmets and armed with
:\11-1 's, Mausers and German semi-
mtomatic rifles. On one occasion, when
" KKK motorcade opened fire on Perry's
horne Williams and his men greeted the
lightriders with a hail of gunfire from
hchind sandbag fortifications and earthen
,:ntrenchments. The fascist vermin turned
tail and ran. Williams put it, "the
Klan didn't have any more stomach for
this type of fight. They stopped raiding-
our community."
8
As KKK terror swept the South, two
white racists assaulted two black women
in separate attacks in Monroe. Their
acquittal outraged the city's black popu-
lation. Williams responded to the court
whitewash by telling reporters:
"We cannot rely on the law. We get no
justice under the present system. If we
feel that injustice is done, we must right
then and there on the spot be prepared to
inflict punishment on these people. I feel
this is the only way of survival. Since the
federal government will not bring a halt
to lynching in the South and since the
so-called courts lynch our people legally,
if it's necessary to stop lynching with
lynching, then we must be willing to
resort to that method."
-quoted in Tyson, Radio Free Dixie
For refusing to retract his statement,
Williams was suspended as Monroe chap-
ter president by the NAACP national
z

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3

Four young
girls murdered
in 1963
Birmingham
Klan bombing,
commemorated
in memorial at
16th Street
Baptist Church.
leadership. NAACP head Roy Wilkins
launched a redbaiting campaign which
culminated at the organization's 1959
convention that was to make a final deci-
sion on Williams' case. Recognizing that
Williams had substantial support at the
base of the NAACP, Wilkins trotted out
luminaries Jike Republican New York
governor Nelson Rockefeller, Jackie
Robinson and Martin Luther King to
denounce him. With Southern cops and
Klansmen beating and killing black
people with impunity, King argued that
"violence" by blacks"would be the great-
est tragedy that could befall us." Williams
refused to cave in, concluding the speech
before his suspension was upheld with a
defiant roar: "I am a man and I will walk
upright as a man should. I will not crawl!"
Tyson notes that the many black mili-
tants who supported Williams included
Malcolm X, who after their meeting in
1958 regularly invited Williams to speak
at his Harlem Mosque No.7. According
to Williams, Malcolm would tell the con-
gregation "that our brother is here from
North Carolina, and he is the only fight-
ing man that we got and we ha'!e to help
him so he can stay down
Williams Flees to Cuba
The NAACP actions didn't silence or
stop Williams' efforts. In the summer of
1961, Monroe became a major focus of
the Freedom Rides, a campaign across
the South to integrate restaurants and
other public facilities. That same sum-
mer, renewed protests to desegregate the
municipal swimming pool were met by a
brutal racist backlash. The young pro-
testers were savagely attacked by Klans-
men and other white-supremacists-
L
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3
rn
Williams and wife
Mabel in Havana,
1961, practicing
with pistol given
to him by Fidel
Castro.
many from out of state-but were con-
strained from defending themselves
because of the philosophy of "nonvio-
lence" promoted by King's Southern
Christian Leadership Council (SCLC)
and the NAACP tops.
As white mobs rioted in downtown
Monroe, a white couple drove into the
black neighborhood. Recognized as driv-
ing around town with a racist banner
the day before, they were stopped by
angry blacks. Suspecting a provocation,
Williams intervened and escorted the
couple into his house to protect them.
Almost immediately, white racists drove
by with 'guns blazing as black residents
defended themselves. At this point, the
local chief of police phoned Williams,
threatening that in 30 minutes he would
be hanging in the courthouse square.
Fearing for his life, Williams and his
family fled Monroe and made their way
north. The FBI charged him with kidnap-
ping the white couple whom he had res-
cued. After living underground for sev-
eral months, Williams and his family
managed to get to Cuba.
In the face of unremitting U.S. imperi-
alist hostility in the aftermath of the
overthrow of the corrupt Batista dictator-
ship by Castro's peasant-based guerrilla
forces, in 1960 the petty-bourgeois Cas-
tro government expropriated the domes-
tic and foreign capitalists, creating a
workers state, albeit one bureaucratically
deformed from its inception in which the
workers were denied political power.
Williams had previously visited Castro's
Cuba, where he was "made to feel that I
was a member of the human race for the
first time in my life." Though Williams
had never professed a belief in commu-
nism, he particularly hailed the gains
made by black people in the Cuban Rev-
olution. That this black militant could
find in Castro's Cuba not only a refuge
from U.S. government persecution but
also a platform to attack racist American
society helped dispel anti-Communist
prejudices among American radicals.
However, by the mid-1960s, the Cas-
tro bureaucracy, following the lead of the
Brezhnev regime in the USSR, its main
protector, was pushing for better rela-
tions with Washington in the name of
"detente." Williams' scathing attacks on
liberal Democrats and mainstream black
leaders like King thus became an embar-
rassment for the Cuban Stalinist regime.
Cuban officials began to obstruct his
activities and demanded that they be
allowed to censor his newsletter and
radio program. In 1966, Williams went
to China, where the Mao Zedong regime
was still posturing as a militant opponent
of American imperialism. In 1969, Wil-
liams returned with his family to Michi-
gan, where after years of court battles, he
finally got the Feds to give up their
efforts to imprison him.
The Black Revolt and Origins
of the Spartacist Tendency
Williams was not guided by a proletar-
ian class perspective. According to Tyson,
Williams' disillusionment with Castro's
Cuba took on an anti-Communist colora-
tion, allegedly telling one black radical
who was inspired by the Cuban Revolu-
tion that the answer to black oppression
lay with "more Nat Turner than whitey's
Marxism-Leninism." At the same time,
Tyson documents how during Williams'
years in Monroe he worked on several
occasions with the SWP, in the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee and earlier in the
infamous 1958 "Kissing Case," where
they joined with black radical attorney
Conrad Lynn in defending two black chil-
dren who had been charged with rape for
being kissed by a white girl. Among the
SWPers who were sent to work with
Williams in Monroe was Price Chatham,
who became a supporter of the RT.
Tyson makes clear his view that the
role of whit.e leftists was simply to sup-
port the struggles of black militants.
Tyson approvingly reports that at its 1957
convention the SWP "proclaimed the
need for an independent African Ameri-
can political leadership-preferably one
that also had ties to the NAACP-'to
determine the program' for themselves
and 'to make it theirs'." The SWP major-
ity resolution did indeed envision support
to separatist demands and also supported
the call for federal troops to protect black
people in the South (see "In Defense of
Revolutionary Integrationism," Spartacist
[English-language edition] No. 49-50,
Winter 1993-94).
By the late 1950s and early '60s, the
revolutionary fiber of the historic party of
American Trotskyism had been sapped by
a decade of political isolation during the
McCarthyite Cold War period. Reflecting
the pressures of liberal public opinion as
well as illusions among the black masses,
the SWP called for federal government
intervention to enforce court-ordered
school desegregation, first in Mississippi
in 1955 and two years later in Little Rock,
Arkansas. And U.S. president Dwight
Eisenhower did send troops into Little
Rock. Not surprisingly, this resulted in
the crushing of local black self-defense
efforts, which was indeed the chief aim of
the federal intervention. The SWP's sup-
port for federal intervention provoked
considerable internal opposition, and for
a time the party leadership backed off
from this reformist position.
The SWP's growing accommoda-
tionism was opposed from within the
party, though Tyson does not address
this. Richard Fraser, a veteran Trotskyist
who originally developed the perspective
of revolutionary integrationism, fought
for a counterposed "Resolution on the
Negro Question" and argued at the 1957
convention:
"The critical problem of the moment, the
crisis of leadership in the Negro move-
ment, revolves around the question of
reformism or revolution __ __
"The [majority] resolution does not dif-
ferentiate. It supports the basic line of
the religious pacifist leadership ____ The
differentiation will come as a result of
our being able to inject the revolutionary
proletarian program into that struggle."
Fraser opposed the SWP's initial support
to the deployment of federal troops in
Little Rock, arguing in a letter later that
year (reprinted in Prometheus Research
Series No.3, "In Memoriam Richard S.
Fraser" [August 1990]):
"The entire Negro community of Little
Rock, numbering 25,000, was poised and
ready for action. Their eagerness to par-
ticipate in the struggle at times over-
flowed in dramatic eruptions ....
"The demand for Federal Troops to the
South is revealed in action, not as an
adjunct to but as a substitute for the
organized action of the masses and is
counterposed directly to it."
As many civil rights militants were
moving to the left in the early '60s,
the SWP was moving rightward, in effect
denying the need for a revolutionary
Marxist program and a vanguard party to
implement it. Thus the SWP abstained on
principle from the Southern civil rights
struggle, refusing to vie for leadership
and instead seeking only to influence and
pressure the existing leadership. The
1963 resolution "Freedom Now" asserted
that "the logic of the Negro struggle inev-
itably leads it into socialist channels." In
practice, the- SWP became sideline cheer-
leaders for the mainstream civil rights
leaders like King, as well as radicals like
Robert F. Williams and black nationalist
critics like Malcolm X.
Standing on Fraser's program of revo-
lutionary integrationism, the Revolu-
tionary Tendency was born in opposition
to the SWP's centrist departure from
Trotskyism. We fought, as we do today,
WORKERS VANGUARD
Sierra Leone ...
(continued from page 3)
is necessary to lead the working class
and oppressed in the overthrow of British
imperialism. We seek to mobilise the
multi ethnic proletariat in the fight for
working-class rule. For this we must con-
vince the working class of the need for
irreconcilable opposition to Labour. Our
strategic task is to split Labour and to win
its working-class base to our revolution-
ary programme and party.
Labour has' a long tradition of colo-
nial butchery in the service of the Empire.
Blair's spokesmen are ostentatious in
showing just how aggressive they can be
when fighting for British imperialism.
Their arrogance stems from the belief that
their attacks on the working class and
minorities, as well as imperialist wars,
will generate less opposition than when
the same attacks are carried out by a Tory
government. In the Balkans War last sum-
mer, Blair howled loudest for blood as the
world's most powerful countries joined
forces to bomb Serbia. In Zimbabwe,
Robin Cook evidently believes he is over-
lord of colonial "Rhodesia" as he upholds
a condition imposed by Britain at the time
of independence which protected land
owned by white settlers from land reform.
Labour is also responsible for the fact
that British planes have terror-bombed
Iraq (together with U.S. planes) almost
daily. since December 1998. They sent
British troops to Northern Ireland in
1969 and, of course, under Blair's im-
perialist "peace" fraud they will stay
for unconditional military defense of
the Cuban Revolution, but we opposed
the SWP's political support to the Stalin-
ist Castro regime, which marked its
abandonment of a proletarian revolu-
tionary program. Instead, we fight for an
internationalist regime based on workers
democracy, requiring a proletarian polit-
ical revolution to overthrow the Stalinist
bureaucracy. Against the SWP's capitula-
tion to black nationalism and tailist
abstentionism, we fought for a Trotskyist
intervention as the eruption of black
struggle opened up new historic opportu-
nities for the recruitment of black cadre.
Many of the SNCC activists had expe-
rience working with leftist groups and
were open to a revolutionary perspective.
Black RTer Shirley Stoute received a
personal written invitation to work with
SNCC in Atlanta. The SWP majority had
to accede, but called her back to New
York within a month on a pretext and
refused to let her return. Thus as the
SWP leadership tailed popular black fig-
ures, they actually forced militant party
cadre out of this critical work. In a July
1963 document titled "For Black Trot-
skyism" (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin
No. 5 [Revised], "What Strategy for
Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black
Nationalism"), the RT asserted:
"Our leadership means the revolutionary
class struggle program carried out by
revolutionists in the mass movement,
fused into the revolutionary party. Just as
trade unionists will not join the revolu-
tionary party if they do not see it as
essential to winning the struggle, so
Negro fighters for liberation will not join
the party on any basis other than that the
only road to freedom for them is the rev-
olutionary socialist path of struggle
through the combat army."
The recruitment of a substantial layer
of black Trotskyist cadre would have had
an enormous impact on the course of
subsequent struggles, not least as a wave
of militant wildcats broke out in Detroit
and other cities beginning in the late
NOTICE
Workers Vanguard skips
alternate issues in June,
July and August.
Our next issue will
be dated June 30.
2 JUNE 2000
there-indeed the paratroop regiment
strutting through Freetown were the
killers of 14 unarmed demonstrators on
Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972. We
say: British troops out of Northern Ire-
land now! British and all imperialist
troops out of the Balkans! During the
Balkans War we called for defeat of
imperialism through workers revolution
and for military defence of Serbia, with-
out giving an iota of political sup-
port to the Milosevic regime. Above all,
we stressed the need to forge Leninist
vanguard parties to lead the proletariat
1960s. But the RT resolutions were voted
down and shortly thereafter we were
expelled from the SWP. Even though
small, the Spartacist tendency fought to
intersect the growing militant left wing
of the civil rights movement. Against
both the liberal pacifism of King and the
growing tendencies toward nationalist
separatism, we stood for revolutionary
integrationism, summarized as follows in
"Black and Red":
"The vast majority of Black people-
both North and South-are today work-
ers who, along with the rest of the Amer-
ican working class, must sell their labor
power in order to secure the necessities
of life to those who buy labor power in
order to make profit. The buyers of labor
power, the capitalists, are a small minor-
ity whose rule is maintained only by
keeping the majority who labor for them
divided and misled. The fundamental
division created deliberately along racial
lines has kept the Negro workers who
entered American capitalism at the bot-
tom, still at the bottom. Ultimately their
road to freedom lies only through strug-
gle with the rest of the working class to
abolish capitalism and establish in its
place an egalitarian, socialist society ....
"Because of their position as both the
most oppressed and also the most con-
scious and experienced section, revolu-
tionary black workers are slated to play
an exceptional role in the coming Ameri-
can revolution."
We advanced the call for a "Freedom
Labor Party" as the axis to link the
exploding black struggle to the power of
labor, North and South. With it we posed
a series of transitional demands to win
militants to this class-struggle perspec-
tive: for "A Southern Organizing Drive
Backed by Organized Labor," "For a
Workers United Front Against Fed-
eral Intervention" and for "Armed Self-
Defense." And we translated this into
practice by organizing aid-with the slo-
gan "Every Dime Buys a
the Deacons for Defense.and Justice. The
Deacons were black veterans who organ-
ized armed defense squads-beginning
in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, Louisiana-
to protect civil rights activists there.
Fundamentally, we sought to bring to
black militants the understanding that
the working class, which is racially inte-
grated at the point of production, is the
only class with the historic interest and
social power-derived from its role in
production-to sweep away the system of
exploitation and racist oppression. Black
workers form a strategic part of the
labor movement. Armed with a revolu-
lD
:J
e
3
S>l
o
Massive public
workers' protest
in Johannesburg,
South Africa
in October. South
African worke.rs
revolution is key to
emancipation of
sub-Saharan Africa
from imperialist
domination.
in overthrowing the imperialist rulers
through socialist revolution.
Acting like colonialist masters in
Africa is the corollary of Labour's racist
capitalist rule at home. Government
spokesmen orchestrated a racist frenzy
against refugees and immigrants-many
of whom come from the Balkans, Africa
and other areas ravaged by poverty and
war-which led to a dramatic increase in
racist violence. To workers facing job-
slashing such as in car manufacturing,
Labour and the trade-union bureaucracy
offer nothing but chauvinist demonstra-
tionary socialist program and organized
by a communist vanguard party, black
workers can lead backward, even racist,
white workers in battles against the rul-
ing class.
Standing as an obstacle to this per-
spective is the AFL-CIO bureaucracy,
which is committed to the capitalist sys-
tem and seeks to prevent the working
class from posing any challenge to capi-
talist class rule. The mass struggles for
black equality had the potential to pose
such a challenge. Thus both racist Cold
Warriors like then AFL-CIO chief
George Meany and social democrats like
the UAW's Walter Reuther-who paid
lip service to the cause of civil rights-
did all they could to oppose any mobil-
ization of labor power in the black free-
dom struggles of the 1960s and to help
crush black militancy. This treachery
served to turn a layer of black militants,
who identified the working class with its
racist, pro-capitalist misleaders, to the
dead end of nationalism, which ulti-
mately led them back into the Demo-
cratic Party.
Today, nearly four decades later, while
a small minority of black people have
tions waving the bloody Union Jack, the
emblem of racist exploitation. Social
chauvinism and nationalism are integral
to the programme of Labour and the
union bureaucracy whose role is to tie
the working class to the capitalist mas-
ters. We seek to mobilise workers in
struggle against the Labour government
and in particular to fight for full citizen-
ship rights for all immigrants!
The key to social and economic
progress and development in sub-Saharan
Africa is the Trotskyist programme of
permanent revolution. In some areas an
industrial proletariat exists only in mar-
ginal pockets; however, oil workers in
Nigeria, dock and rail workers in Kenya
and miners in Zambia represent a strate-
gic industrial workforce. It is the chal-
lenge of an international revolutionary
party to transform this sector into a
human link to the workers movements
of the Near East and especially the indus-
trial proletariat of South Africa who are
key to a revolutionary perspective on the
entire continent. Mobilised against their
capitalist exploiters, these vanguard lay-
ers can launch a struggle to emancipate
the cruelly oppressed men and women
throughout Africa through the seizure of
power by the proletariat and the extension
of socialist revolution to the imperialist
centres. This requires the construction of
Leninist vanguard parties, part of a re-
forged Fourth International. The purpose
of the ICL is to build such parties to
lead the struggle against imperialism and
its neo-colonial regimes. The Spartacist
League fights for proletarian revolution to
bring down British imperialism .
made their way into a precarious exis-
tence in the middle class as a result of
affirmative action programs and other
measures that were won in the civil rights
movement, conditions for the mass of the
black population are worse now than they
were in the 1960s.
In opposition to the liberal reformism
and support to the Democratic Party
pushed by the official black leaders, many
of whom first came to prominence in the
civil rights movement, we seek to build a
workers party to fight for a workers gov-
ernment which will expropriate the capi-
talist class and use the enormous produc-
tive resources of this society for the
benefit of those who labor to produce
them. Such a party can only be built
through breaking workers and minorities
from Democratic Party electoralism
across the board. A planned, collectivized
economy would rebuild the infrastructure
of American society, providing jobs,
quality, integrated housing, schools and
hospitals for all. Thus will the material
foundations be laid for black freedom,
through the full integration of black peo-
ple into society and the eradication of all
social inequalities .
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. ---.
Local Direct,ry and Public Offices
National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (212) 732-7860
Web site: www.icl-fi.org E-mail address:vanguard@tiac.net
Boston
Box 390840, Central Sta.
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 666-9453
Chicago
Box 6441, Main PO
Chicago, IL 60680
(312) 454-4930
Public Office:
Tues. 5-9 p.m.
and Sat. 12-3 p.m.
328 S. Jefferson St.
Suite 904
Los Angeles
Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(213) 380-8239
Public Office:
Sat. 2-5 p.m.
3806 Beverly Blvd., Room 215
New York
Box 3381, Church St. Sta.
New York, NY 10008
(212) 267-1025
Public Office:
Tues. 6:30-8:30 p.m.
and Sat. 1-5 p.m.
299 Broadway, Suite 318
Oakland
Box 29497
Oakland, CA 94604
(510) 839-0851
Public Office:
Sat. 1-5 p.m.
1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor
San Francisco
Box 77494
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415) 395-9520
Public Office:
Sat. 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
564 Market St., Suite 718
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA/L1GUE TROTSKYSTE DU CANADA
Toronto
Box 7198, Station A
Toronto, ON M5W 1X8
(416) 593-4138
Vancouver
Box 2717, Main P.O.
Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2
(604) 687-0353
9
Colombia ...
(continued from page 12)
new kind of criminal, "narco-guerrillas."
McCaffrey calls on the right-wing gov-
ernments of Peru, Ecuador, the Domini-
can Republic and elsewhere to form an
anti-guerrilla alliance, recalling the
notorious "Operation Condor" of the
1970s in which countless thousands of
leftists were killed in a coordinated
campaign of terror orchestrated by the
CIA and Chilean Pinochet.
Working-Class Struggle
Against IMF Austerity,
Death Squad Terror
. Even the U.S.-backed regime of
Andres Pastrana admits that the death
squads are intimately connected to-and
in many cases composed of-members of
the country's military and police estab-
lishment, who are armed, trained and
supervised by U.S. advisers. Union mem-
bers, human rights workers, lawyers and
popular journalists-anyone deemed a
"guerrilla sympathizer" or union organ-
izer-are on their hit list. In the first three
months of this year, even as the regime
was engaged in "peace" negotiations with
the FARC, over 400 peasants were slain
with unspeakable brutality in 85 massa-
cres by pqras and army units.
In February, some 300 paras attacked
the town ofEl Salado in Bolivar province,
first torturing villagers in the town's bas-
ketball court and then hacking 28
people's heads off with machetes. While
the FARC was meeting with Pastrana's
representatives in Spain in February, days
after the El Salado massacre, paras
attacked the northern jungle town of
Ovejas, beheading more than 20 villag-
ers. In April, in the oil-producing center
of TiM, northeast of the capital city of
Bogota, death squads massacred 21 peo-
ple and gravely wounded another five.
In Colombia, where nearly half the
population is officially below tbe poverty
level, there is a rising tide of working-
class struggle against a devastating eco
nomic downturn, austerity measures im-
posed by the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and a drive to privatize state-
owned industries. Last fall, a general
strike called by the three union federa-
tions brought out some 1.5 million work-
ers and basically shut down the country,
but was called off after two days of fero-
cious police attacks and arrests of strikers
and union leaders. The U.S.-backed re-
gime reacted especially violently to the
Combative
Colombian
working class
has mounted
massive
protests
against IMF-
dictated
austerity and
privatization.

unions' demand for the government to
stop making debt payments to the impe-
rialist bloodsuckers of Wall Street and the
IMF.
Last summer, Pastrana's government
militarized oil installations in the north-
east as part of an ongoing crackdown on
the USO petroleum workers union as
well as the ELN, which frequently sab-
otages oil pipelines. Under this state
repression and terror, union membership
has dropped from 20 percent to 7 percent
in the last ten years. However, unions
representing public sector, energy and oil
workers remain powerful.
More union leaders are assassinated in
Colombia each year than anywhere else
in the world-many of them by paras
whose known supporters include multi-
national oil corporations like Occidental
and Shell determined to prevent labor
unrest and protect their facilities and
pipelines. Over the past 15 years, around
3,000 unionists have been killed by
paras, with 93 slain just in the last six

-c
President of NY
Stock Exchange
embraces FARC
leader in Colombia
last summer. FARC
petty-bourgeois
nationalists seek
"power-shari ng"
under capitalist
rule.
months. Outraged protest against this
anti-union murder campaign should be a
rallying point for unions internationally,
and especially in the U.S. But the Ameri-
can labor bureaucracy is so tied to the
imperialist aims of the ruling class that
instead they're wrapped up in an anti-
Communist campaign against China.
International workers solidarity is anath-
ema to the AFL-CIO labor traitors-its
American Institute for Free Labor Devel-
opment (AIFLD) played a key role in
helping U.S. imperialism smash trade
unions in Latin America for more than
40 years and is hated by workers
throughout the region.
The power to overthrow the brutal rule
of the Colombian bourgeoisie and break
the grip of its U.S. imperialist overlords
Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League
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(includes English-language Spartacist and Black History and the Class Struggle)
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10
lies with the many-millioned Colombian
working class standing at the head of the
struggles of the oppressed peasant masses
and indigenous peoples for liberation. Yet
while the FARC seized a hydroelectric
plant in solidarity with last fall's general
strike, at best these petty-bourgeois guer-
rillas see the proletariat as simply an aux-
iliary to their aim of being granted a share
in the capitalist rule of Colombia. Far
from having any kind of "socialist" per-
spective-which the FARC still occasion-
ally proclaims-the interests of this peas-
ant-based movement are fundamentally
hostile to the working class. As we wrote
of the insurgencies in Central America
in the 1980s, which made far more claim
to being some kind of leftist challenge
to imperialism than do the present-day
Colombian guerrillas:
"As a mass of petty-bourgeois small com-
modity producers, the peasantry does not
have the collective strength and the inde-
pendent class interest of the proletariat.
There is no characteristic peasant mode
of production, much less a 'socialist peas-
antry' and therefore the peasantry cannot
lead a social revolution. But the vast
peasant masses are driven by a thirst for
land, and to get it they will even follow a
guerrilla band, or the revolutionary work-
ing class, if these forces can demonstrate
the ability to defeat the oligarchy and its
army. Once they have their plots that will
end the peasants' role as a revolutionary
factor. For instance, in Bolivia, where the
peasants became landowners in 1952 as
the result of an extensive land reform,
they became allies of the army against the
workers in the so-called 'military-peasant
pact.' Peasant militias were even sent into
the mines to massacre the combative tin
miners. Thus a peasant-based guerrilla
war, although directed initially against a
landlord-capitalist oligarchy, contains
within it the seeds of a restabilized capi-
talist regime. But even though numeri-
cally small, the. urban working class in
backward capitalist countries as in Central
America can become the revolutionary
vanguard, by placing- itself at the head of
a stormy agrarian revoir in the struggle
for a workers and peasants government,
for the dictatorship of the proletariat."
- "Workers Revolution vs. the
Guerrilla Road," WV No. 325,
11 March 1983
Drugs and Imperialist
Hypocrisy
Following several successful military
offensives against the government, the
FARC had become the de facto govern-
ment of a vast rural area in southern
Colombia, near the borders with Peru
and Ecuador. A year and a half ago,
unable to defeat FARC militarily, the
Pastrana government formally ceded
control of the area, which has become
known as "Farc1andia," to the guerrillas.
Last July, the FARC launched a nation-
wide offensive, attacking army units in
eleven provinces and advancing within
25 miles of Bogota, prompting the gov-
ernment to call for negotiations. In April,
the government handed over a second,
smaller zone in the north to the ELN.
Pastrana's negotiations with the FARC,
like previous government moves to nego-
tiate with the guerrillas, were opposed
by Colombia's U.S. imperialist masters,
who favor hardline military terror.
For the impoverished peasantry of
Colombia and throughout the region,
coca leaf farming has been one of the
only ways they can eke out a living.
Attempts to encourage them to plant
other crops have failed, both for eco-
nomic reasons and because of the con-
stant U.S.-sponsored spraying of toxic
chemical defoliants. Daily flights by a
fleet of over 65 airplanes and helicopters
flying out of three separate airbases-
reminiscent of the U.S. use of the carcin-
ogenic defoliant Agent Orange during
the Vietnam War-rain poisonous herbi-
cides over homes, schools and hospitals,
killing livestock and contaminating water
sources.
Meanwhile, the big money in drugs is
reaped by the Colombian bourgeoisie, its
army and the paras, who operate openly
as the "United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia" (AUC) under the leadership
of drug lord Carlos Castano (whose chief
bodyguard did two stints at the School of
the Americas).
And their U.S. masters are the biggest
hypocrites of all: U.S. government agen-
cies have long been the biggest drug-run-
ners in the world, going back to World
War II when the Office of Strategic Serv-
ices, predecessor of the CIA, made deals
with Corsican heroin traffickers and her-
oin-dealing U.S. gangster Lucky Luciano
to prevent Communists from gaining
political support in postwar France and
Italy. Against the 1949 Chinese Revolu-
tion, the CIA funded the anti-Communist
Guomindang in part with Burmese
opium. Similarly, during the U.S.' dirty,
losing Vietnam War, the CIA used Lao-
tian Hmong tribesmen to deliver opium,
shipping it out on the CIA's Air America.
During the 1980s, the CIA ran heroin to
fund the Islamic fundamentalist muja-
hedin fighting the Soviet-backed govern-
ment of Afghanistan. And after the San-
dinistas came to power in Nicaragua in
1979, the CIA traded drugs to arm the
counterrevolutionary contras.
Just recently, the head of U.S. military
anti-drug operations in Colombia, Colo-
nel J. C. Hiett, and his wife confessed to
running their own drug-smuggling opera-
tion, shipping cocaine home in diplo-
matic pouches! This is merely the analog
of what most every cop in the American
ghettos does after a bust: first confiscate
the drugs, then sell them. And of course
the Hietts' sentences were nowhere near
as severe as those meted out to the hun-
dreds of thousands of black and Hispanic
youth ensnared by the "war on drugs" in
the U.S.
FARC: Reformists with Guns
Clinton's military aid package is a five-
fold increase over last year's, which was
already a threefold increase over 1998,
adding up to a 3,500 percent increase in
aid since 1993-a military buildup which
has been compared to the early years of
the Vietnam War. We defend the FARe
and the ELN against the terror of tbe
imperialists and their local henchmen.
But the situation in Colombia today does
not remotely resemble that in Vietnam,
where the U.S. imperialists were faced
with a social revolution by the heroic
workers and peasants. Calling for military
victory to the forces of the North Viet-
namese deformed workers state and the
South Vietnamese National Liberation
Front, the Spartacist League demanded,
"All Indochina Must Go Communist!"
Today, even while the U.S. pours in
military aid to the Colombian regime,
the head of the New York Stock
Exchange on a recent visit to Farc1andia
invited FARC leaders to "visit the New
York Stock Exchange so that they can
get to know the market personally"! As
one journalist who spent some time with
the FARC's legendary leader, Manuel
"Tirofijo" ("Sureshot") Marulanda, put
it: "His agenda is not a social revolution
but only the sort of social justice that
globalization increasingly seems not to
take into account" (New York Times, 19
July 1999). And, after a recent visit with
Marulandil, America Online cofounder
and chairman emeritus James Kimsey
quoted the guerrilla leader as acknowl-
that "Communism is dead"
(Washington Post, 15 March).
This echo of the imperialist bour-
geoisie's "death of communism" lie by
the FARC leader does reflect that in the
absence of the existence of the Soviet
degenerated workers state as a curb
against the untrammeled ambitions of
WORKERS VANGUARD
McCaffrey ...
( continued from page 12)
Committee, McCaffrey crowed, "Once
we had them bottled up, up here at the
causeway, there was no way out."
As he closed in on the retreating
Iraqis-soldiers and civilians alike-
McCaffrey opened up on the defenseless
victims, claiming that he was under attack.
According to Hersh, the 24th Division's
operations officer described the battle
as "a giant hoax. The. Iraqis were
doing absolutely nothing." As he told
McCaffrey, "There was no incoming"
weapons fire. Another senior U.S. officer
told Hersh that "a colleague had over-
heard McCaffrey urge his commanders
on the command radio net 'to find a way
for him to go kill all of those bastards'."
The fact that the Iraqis were in full retreat
and posed no threat to the American
forces was confirmed by CIA and mili-
tary analysts in the command headquar-
ters who reviewed the events at Rumaila.
One Gulf War tank gun loader told Hersh
that he and his fellow soldiers were part
of "the biggest firing squad in history."
Before the main forces under McCaf-
frey's command began their all-out attack
on the retreating Iraqis, gut-wrenching
atrocities had been carried out by his
troops. In an example cited by Hersh, sev-
eral hundred surrendering Iraqis were
taken prisoner and seated in rows in the
desert surrounded by their captured vehi-
cles, which included a clearly marked
hospital bus. American commanding offi-
cers were informed of the location of
these prisoners, many of whom were
wounded. The unit that had captured the
Iraqi POWs was ordered out of the area,
and shortly afterward the prisoners were
machine-gunned by another unit of the
U.S. imperialism, the various guerrilla
organizations throughout Latin America
have largely abandoned even the pre-
tense of cloaking themselves in the man-
tle of "socialism." Instead, as in the case
of the Salvadoran FMLN which is now
fully party to the rule of the capitalist
oligarchy in that country, the bourgeois-
nationalist program behind the of
"pick up the gun" guerrillaism is blatant.
As we wrote irl our "Theses on Guer-
rilla Warfare" (Spartacist No. 11, Marchi
April 1968), at a time when guerrillaism
was being heralded as the road to power
for the working people and oppressed
masses of the so-called "Third World" by
a variety of leftists, from the Maoists to
Ernest Mandel's United Secretariat:
"The 'national liberation' armed-struggle
programs of the guerrilla movements are
not at all socialist. Certainly, they start
out as 'anti-imperialist' and even 'anti-
capitalist.' However, as a guerrilla move-
ment grows, the petty-bourgeois need to
attract 'influential' allies and to compro-
mise with the 'progressive' bourgeoisie
against the military apparatus defending
imperialist property will tone down the
guerrillas' 'anti-capitalism.' The nation-
alist reformism of the guerrilla move-
ment will be more blatantly portrayed in
its actions and program when it has gath-
ered enough strength to pose as the sole
protector of the 'fatherland.' Such a pro-
gram at best promises-barring the
destruction of the guerrilla movement-a
reordering of the national economy
through the state infrastructure, and by no
means the socialist reconstructi'on of
society."
In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution
was embraced as a brand new model of
revolution based on guerrilla struggle.
But the destruction of capitalist property
relations by Castro's petty-bourgeois
government in 1960-a tremendous vic-
tory against U.S. imperialism-could
only come about as the result of excep-
tional circumstances: the extreme weak-
ness of the Cuban ruling class, the
absence of a conscious proletariat fight-
ing for its own interests, and the existence
of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to
imperialism. With the destruction of the
Soviet Union and consequently no read-
ily available lifeline against imperialist
encirclement, the narrow historical open-
ing for petty-bourgeois forces to overturn
local capitalist rule has been closed.
2 JUNE 2000
Iraqi soldier killed in 1991 U.S. Persian
Gulf slaughter. Retired General Barry
McCaffrey, overseer of "drug war" terror
from U.S. ghettos to Latin American
countryside, ordered massacre of
retreating Iraqis following cease-fire.
24th. One soldier quoted by Hersh said,
"They knew there were prisoners there.
They knew they were unarmed. They
knew the hospita] bus was there."
Hersh provides graphic accounts of
other examples of wanton killing of flee-
ing Iraqis by the 24th Division. One
comes from a senior sergeant who stated
that "the day after the ceasefire, he saw
an American combat team open fire with
machine guns upon a group of Iraqis in
civilian clothes who were waving a white
At the same time, as exemplified by the
Cuban Revolution, even under very favor-
able historic circumstances the petty
bourgeoisie was at most capable of creat-
ing a bureaucratically deformed workers
state-an anti-working-class regime
whose nationalist adherence to the Stalin-
ist dogma of building "socialism in one
country" blocked the possibility of
extending social revolution into Latin and
North America and suppressed Cuba's
further development in the direction of
socialism.
We stand for the unconditional military
defense of the gains of the Cuban'Revo-
lution against imperialist attack and inter-
nal capitalist counterrevolution. At the
same time, we fight for a proletarian
political revolution against the Cuban
Stalinist bureauc:.racy in order to place the
working class in political power and to
open the road to socialist development,
which necessarily means fighting for pro-
letarian socialist revolution throughout
the Americas-particularly the overthrow
of the rule of U.S. imperialism.
Class Struggle in
South America
Colombia is only the most worrisome
of many Latin American nations on the
imperialists' horizon. Washington policy-
makers currently refer to the region
encompassing Colombia, Venezuela,
Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia as the "arc of
crisis." This winter, Bolivia experienced
its biggest political protests in more than
a decade against a multinational con-
sortium's attempt to impose exorbitant
rates for water on the poverty-stricken
population, and the country's rulers
briefly declared a state of emergency as
the British-based water pirates pulled out.
In Peru, dictator Fujimori's attempt to
steal the elections a third time has pro-
voked widespread protests and strikes.
Last year, Ecuador experienced mas-
sive protests including a general strike
against the government, which declared
its inability to meet its debts to imperial-
ist bankers after faithfully trying to
jmpose IMF demands that it raise gas
prices by 100 percent, raise phone and
electricity prices by 66 percent, freeze
bank accounts and privatize state indus-
sheet of surrender."
The total number of Iraqis killed by
McCaffrey's forces at Rumaila will never
be known. Army reports claimed that
700 tanks, armored cars and trucks were
destroyed, but the dead were quickly
buried, and no accurate count of the vic-
tims, who included civilians and chil-
dren, could be made. With bloodcurdling
pride, McCaffrey described his. work as
"one of the most astounding scenes of
destruction I have ever participated in."
tries. In Brazil, workers have launched
strikes against Ford and staged the largest
ever anti-government demonstration in
Brasilia last fall. From Buenos Aires to
Mexico City, unions have organized huge
protests against privatizations and IMF-
dictated austerity. Washington is also ner-
vous that the populist and nationalist
regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela-
the number one supplier of crude oil to
the U.S.-could provoke social unrest
that could spin out of control.
What's needed to end the Colombian
bloodbath, and to throw off imperialist
domination throughout Latin America, is
the forging of revolutionary workers par-
ties armed with the Trotskyist perspective
of permanent revolution: the proletariat-
standing at the head of the peasantry,
the indigenous peoples and all the
oppressed-must seize state power from
the weak and venal bourgeoisies, neces-
sarily seeking to extend socialist revolu-
tion to the imperialist heartland. Only in
this way can the burning tasks of agrarian
revolution, equal rights for blacks and
indigenous peoples, education, health
care, housing and full employment be
achieved. To carry this out requires a
struggle to win the working class away
from the nationalism-purveyed by the
fake left and the trade-union bureauc-
racy-that ties it to its bourgeois class
enemy in the name of "anti-imperialism."
McCaffrey even sent out "scout" troops
after the killing spree to recover Iraqi
and Soviet flags as "war trophies."
This barbarism was not simply the
result, however, of the personal character
of a butcher like McCaffrey, a career
military officer and gung-ho Vietnam
War veteran. McCaffrey told his troops
after the bloodletting that their actions
were "probably the single most unify-
ing event that has happened in America
since World War II .... The upshot will be
that, just like Vietnam had the tragic
effect on our country for years, this one
has brought back a new way of looking
at ourselves." This is exactly what the
American rulers wanted when they spent
months planning and assembling their
massive military juggernaut against Iraq.
Republican George Bush was presi-
dent and commander in chief of the U.S.
armed forces during Operation Desert
Storm, but it was Democratic presiden-
tial candidate Bill Clinton who cam-
paigned against Bush in the 1992 elec-
tions on the grounds that he had ended
the Persian Gulf War too soon. At the
time, we reported on the war crimes of
imperialism in Operation Desert Storm,
from the 20 January 1991 bombing of
the baby formula factory on the outskirts
of Baghdad to the 13 February 1991
incineration of hundreds of women and
children civilians crowded in Baghdad's
Amiriya bomb shelter.
The mass murder of Iraqis and the
destruction of the country's infrastructure
continues today under the decade-long
United Nations starvation blockade that
has claimed the lives of more than 1.5
million people. Eight years of the Clin-
ton and Gore administration's continued
bombings and the blockade of Iraq make
them no less gUilty of mass murder and
destruction than McCaffrey .
The Russian October Revolution of
1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of V. I.
Lenin and Leon Trotsky, embodied the
revolutionary internationalist program we
fight for. The Bolsheviks understood that
the fate of the first workers state on earth
depended on spreading socialist revolu-
tion to the advanced capitalist countries,
making possible the elimination of want
and scarcity and opening the road to a
classless society. Writing in 1939, a year
before his assassination by an agent of
Stalin in Mexico, Trotsky wrote in "What
Is the Permanent Revolution? Three Con-
cepts of the Russian Revolution":
"The perspective of permanent revolution
may be summarized in the following
way: the complete victory of the demo-
cratic revolution in Russia is conceivable
only in the form of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The
dictatorship of the proletariat, which
would inevitably place on the order of the
day not only democratic but socialistic
tasks as well, would at the same time give
a powerful impetus to the international
socialist revolution. Only the victory of
the proletariat in the West could protect
Russia from bourgeois restoration and
assure it the possibility of rounding out
the establishment of socialism."
We fight to build Leninist-Trotskyist
vanguard parties based on the program
of permanent revolution in Colombia
and throughout Latin America, as part of
the struggle to reforge Trotsky'S Fourth
International.
Trotskyist League/SYC Forums -----,
. . . . ..
$tbAIl .. .. fthe.Def.-at of U.S. Imperialism
.... , .aeI'IiC.Vi.-t .. _mese.Worker$ .. i,lnd
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.Ar.Yictory Aga.i.l1st..Imperialism
Defe(jtU .. $J":anadiaIIIQlP"rii,llism! 'ForWofkers Revolution!
Friday, June 9, 7:30 p.m.
International Student Centre, U of T
33 St. George St. (North of College St.)
(Subway: Queen's Park or St. George)
For more information: (416) 593-4138
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R.aiii
i
u.s. Hands Off Colombia!
Having wreaked death and destruction
around the globe-from the 1998 bomb-
ings of Afghanistan and Sudan, to the ter-
ror bombing of Serbia and the occupation
of Kosovo, to the ongoing bombardment
and starvation ofIraq-Clinton's "human
rights" imperialism is increasingly focus-
ing its deadly attentions on its "back-
yard," Latin America. Seeking to aug-
ment the already massive U.S. military
involvement in the Colombian govern-
ment's nearly 40-year-long "dirty war" to
wipe out that country's various guerrilla
groups, the CI inton administration is
pushing Congress to adopt a gargantuan
$1.7 billion military aid package billed as
key (0 the global "war on drugs."
This huge escalation in military aid
to Colombia-already the third-largest
recipient of U.S. aid, after only Israel
and Egypt-has little to do with drugs
and everything to do with asserting U.S.
imperialist domination over Latin Amer-
ica. In Colombia, a peasant-guerrilla
insurgency rages in over half of this oil-
and mineral-rich, strategically located
country. In the last decade, over 35,000
people have been killed in the Colom-
bian "dirty war," and more than 1.5 mil-
lion people, mostly peasants, have been
forced to flee their homes. The imperial-
ists fear that social turmoil and civil war
in Colombia.could further "destabilize" a
region already simmering with social
struggle.
While in the U.S. the "war on drugs"
has meant an escalation of racist police
terror in the ghettos and barrios, in Latin
America it has become Yankee imper-
ialism's latest fig leaf for beefing up the
forces of repression against peasant and
working-class unrest. Just as in Mexico,
where massive U.S. "anti-drug" aid is
aimed in large measure at wiping out the
Zapatista rebels in Chiapas; Clinton's
military buildup il) Colombia directly
targets workers, leftists and peasants'
for even more terror at the hands of
AP photos
Bodies of peasant guerrillas murdered in U.S.-backed war of terror by Colombian military. Right: Head of U.S.
Southern Command with Colombian army chief.
the bloodthirsty army and its auxiliary
right-wing paramilitary death squads,
known as paras. The International Com-
munist League demands: U.S. hands off
Colombia!
Clinton's "Plan Colombia" aid pack-
age, which includes Black Hawk heli-
copters, P-3 radar aircraft, heat-seeking
weaponry and speedboats, would create
three new "anti-drug" army battalions to
be deployed in an operation called "Push
into Southern Colombia"-the provinces
of Putumayo and Caqueta which are con-
trolled by the largest guerrilla group, the
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia). The U.S. Special Forces
would provide training and personnel,
while US. intelligence agents would
track down "suspected guerrillas." The
Washington Post (8 February) acknowl-
edged that "this is a counterinsurgency
strategy packaged as a counternarcotics
program." Since the Monroe
Doctrine in the early 19th century, the
U.S. has considered Latin America to be
under its exclusive control. These U.S.
war moves mark yet another chapter in
the more than a century-long history of
Yankee imperialist terror against the peo-
ple of the Caribbean, Central and Latin
America: stealing Panama from Colom-
bia in 1903; invading Haiti in 1915 and
again in 1994; the CIA overthrow of the
Guatemalan government in 1954; the
invasions of the Dominican Republic in
1964, Grenada in i 983 and Panama in
1991-to name only a few.
For the past several years, as the
FARC and the smaller National Libera-
tion Army (ELN) have gained strength,
and with imperialist oil interests in the
country like L.A.-based Occidental
Petroleum feeling increasingly threat-
ened, the U.S. has been funneling ever
more arms and "advisers" to the Colom-
bian regime. Long one of Washington's
showcase Latin American "democra-
cies," Colombia is an archetype of
"Third World" countries in which the
weak ruling class, beholden to U.S.
imperialism, relies on monstrous state
repression from the U.S.-trained army
and the paras to protect its privileges
from the impoverished and increasingly
combative workers and peasants. The
Colombian army boasts of having more
graduates than any other Latin American
country from the U.S. Army's notorious
"School of the Americas" (known world-
wide as the "School of the Assassins"),
now located in Fort Benning, Georgia.
Clinton's point man for increased
involvement in Colombia is "drug czar"
and Gulf War criminal Barry McCaffrey
(see "Drug Czar McCaffrey, Imperial-
ist War Criminal," below), former head
of the U.S. Army's Southern Military
Command (SouthCom), who's created a
continued on page 11
"Drug Czar" McCaffrey,
Imperialist War Criminal
by the Democrats and Republicans along
with an obliging bourgeois press. During
"Operation Desert Storm" against Iraq,
the Spartacist League/U.S. fought on a
revolutionary program calling to "Defeat
U.S. Imperialism!" and "Defend Iraq!"
We seek to mobilize the proletariat to
smash American imperialism from within
through workers revolution.
Retired 4-star general Barry R.
McCaffrey is Bill Clinton's "drug czar"
and a key administration architect of the
U.S. "counter-insurgency" plan to milita-
rily crush the peasant-based Colombian
rebels. Now well-known liberal journal-
ist Seymour Hersh has written an expose
for the New Yorker (22 May) show-
ing why McCaffrey is an ideal candidate
for orchestrating death squad terror in
Colombia. Hersh documents the hideous
war crimes that McCaffrey reportedly
committed during the war on Iraq nearly
a decade ago. -
Hersh's piece is detailed with the
12
accounts of soldiers from the 20,000-
strong 24th Infantry com-
manded by McCaffrey who participated
in a slaughter of retreating Iraqis trapped
in southern Iraq on 2 March 1991 in the
so-called "Battle of Rumaila." Hersh also
makes clear that the Pentagon was fully
aware of McCaffrey's actions and carried
out a series of whitewashing investiga-
tions that they sat on for a decade. The
pre-planned massacre at Rumaila was of
a piece with the whole purpose of the
Gulf War, which was to demonstrate
U.S. imperialism's willingness to carry
out mass killing to assert its position as
the top cop of the world.
On 23 February 1991, a ground war
was launched against Iraq. The U.S.
refused Saddam Hussein's offer of sur-
render on February 26. That night Amer-
ican surveillance detected a massive
stream of Iraqi vehicles out of Kuwait
headed back toward Iraq. In a deliberate
display of modern barbarism, for 18
hours U.S. planes rained incendiary
explosives on what the media called the
"Mile of Death," killing thousands who
were fleeing for their lives.
The U.S.-led war on Iraq was one big
series of war crimes effusively supported
Until Seymour Hersh's expose, the acts
of the 24th Division during the second
day of the declared cease-fire between the
Iraqis and the U.S.-led coalition of impe-
rialist mass murderers had been largely
unreported. As Hersh describes it, a route
for the retreating Iraqi army to fol-
low during the "cease-fire" that began on
February 28-along the Lake Hammar
causeway- had been carefully chosen by
American military commanders. Fully
aware of this, McCaffrey moved his
troops to within striking distance of the
causeway. In his own account two months
later to the Senate Armed Services
continued on page 11
2 JUNE 2000