The Militant - January 20, 2003 -- Letters

Vol. 67/No. 2 January 20, 2003

Letters

Protest in Koreatown
Chanting "Justice Now!" in Korean, several dozen demonstrators gathered in Los Angeles’ Koreatown on New Year’s Eve to "Protest U.S. Army Killing of Two Korean Schoolgirls!" The action was held in solidarity with actions in several other cities and a demonstration of 100,000 in Seoul (South Korea’s capital) a week earlier. The protest focused on the "insincere and indirect apology by President Bush" and the late November acquittal of the two GIs who had run over two teenage Korean schoolgirls, fatally crushing them with their armored vehicle. The incident occurred on June 13 as the U.S. military was participating in massive military exercises on civilian roads. Rally publicity materials demanded "immediate withdrawal of the 37,000 U.S. troops occupying the Korean Peninsula." Almost all speakers urged participation in protests against the U.S. war drive against Iraq scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on January 11 and in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., on January 18.

Barry Schier
Los Angeles, California

Useful article by Trotsky
Could you please print the name of the very useful article by Leon Trotsky that you ran in the December 30 Book of the Month columns? Anyone wanting to read the entire article would have quite a difficult time locating it in the book, which is a collection of scores of Trotsky’s letters, articles, and interviews from 1936-37.

Jim Altenberg
Oakland, California

[Editor’s note: The article, titled "On the Threshold of a New World War," appears on pages 438-457 of Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1936–37.]

On ‘patriotic dissent’
Thank you for the response by Maurice Williams to the letter by Chuck Cairns in the December 16, 2002, Militant. It reintroduces history to politics as a way of avoiding costly errors.

A concrete illustration of the point Williams makes comes in the form of a column by Nat Hentoff in the Nov. 29, 2002, Village Voice. In his column, headlined, "The New American Freedom Fighters: Organizing Against General Ashcroft," Hentoff lauds the development of the Northampton [Massachusetts] Bill of Rights Committee. The committee’s ACLU-inspired popular initiative to affirm the Bill of Rights, backed up by "law enforcement," including the police and the courts, has been picked up by at least 15 other town councils, and other such "affirmations" are pending in 40 municipalities in 24 states.

A photo accompanies the article. In it, a banner is displayed with the slogan "Dissent is Patriotic." Patriotic to what manner of class rule? That is a question Hentoff’s article deliberately sidesteps. Spokesmen for class collaboration such as Hentoff promote a dangerous lie. They suggest that the broadside attack on civil liberties (and what’s left out: workers’ rights) intended by the USA Patriot Act can be fought using the cops, courts, and agencies pledged to defend capitalist rule, wrapped in the bloodsoaked flag of U.S. imperialism. They would have us re-learn the lessons that should have been more than adequately drawn from events leading up to the formation of the Weimar Republic.

Toba Singer
San Francisco, California

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.

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