The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 69/No. 20           May 23, 2005  
 
 

There Is No Peace: 60 Years Since End of World War II   

Strengthening anti-imperialist character
of Caracas world youth festival
Separating myth from reality about
the causes and outcome of World War II
(feature article)
 
The following is a letter from the Young Socialists in the United States to the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the Venezuela National Preparatory Committee for the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students, to be held August 7-15 in Caracas, Venezuela. The letter, signed by Argiris Malapanis, Olympia Newton, and Jacob Perasso, was written in response to the request by the leadership of WFDY and Venezuela NPC in mid-March for comments on the proposed program for the youth festival.

In consultation with the Young Socialists, the Socialist Workers Party leadership agreed to draft the reply. The letter explains why the YS and SWP opposed dropping the initial plan to dedicate the culminating day of political conferences and seminars to defense of Venezuela in face of escalating U.S. imperialist pressure, and to focus that day instead on the theme: “Anti-Fascist People’s Victory—60 Years after We Continue the Struggle against Imperialism and War.”

The letter was distributed to delegates at the Third International Preparatory Meeting for the world youth festival that took place in Lisbon, Portugal, April 22-24, and the political points raised in it became part of the discussion at the meeting. Delegates at that gathering decided to dedicate the last day of the festival, August 15, to Venezuela, adding an international solidarity conference with Venezuela to the program that day. The political theme of August 14 was set as “60 Years since Anti-Fascist People’s Victory in World War II: The Struggle against Imperialism, Fascism, and War Today.”

We publish the letter, and an accompanying article by Steve Clark, as part of this series, which appears regularly this year—the 60th anniversary since the end of World War II—to tell the truth about the second worldwide interimperialist slaughter.

Endnotes can be found at the end of the article.
 

*****

April 9, 2005
New York

TO THE WORLD FEDERATION
OF DEMOCRATIC YOUTH
AND THE VENEZUELA NATIONAL
PREPARATORY COMMITTEE

Dear Comrades,

This letter is in response to your request in mid-March, addressed to all the partners of the festival movement, for feedback on the guidelines of the program for the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students. We’ve already indicated our strong support for other aspects of the program, but we do want to say a few words about the new proposal contained in that letter, that is, the proposal to dedicate August 14—the culminating, and thus most prominent, day of political conferences and seminars—to the theme: “Anti-Fascist People’s Victory—60 years after we continue the struggle against imperialism and war.”

At the second International Preparatory Meeting in Hanoi in February, the Venezuela National Preparatory Committee, the host committee, proposed a schedule devoting that final day of festival conferences to Venezuela. Delegates from the Communist Youth of Portugal, backed by several other delegates from Europe, proposed altering that schedule by doubling up the Venezuela theme with closing events on the final day of the festival. Several delegates who spoke (from the Socialist Youth League of Japan, Young Socialists of New Zealand, and Union of Young Communists of Cuba) expressed concerns and indicated they thought the proposal by the Venezuela NPC was stronger. The proposal by the Portuguese comrades was not adopted but taken under advisement for future consideration.

We too are convinced that the aims of the Caracas festival—built around its slogan: “For Peace and Solidarity, We Struggle against Imperialism and War!”—are better served by maintaining Day 8 as an opportunity for the host country to give delegations a concrete feel for the deep-rooted anti-imperialist struggle there, whose defense in face of Washington’s accelerating threats grows more pressing by the day. Replacing the Venezuela theme along the lines proposed in the March letter weakens the worldwide effort to unite the broadest layers of students and youth around the very real struggles we confront today. Venezuela is a special target of U.S. imperialism’s confrontationist course, and this poses additional dangers for the people of Cuba and throughout the Americas. Focusing the concluding day of festival conferences on support to Venezuelan national sovereignty in face of these threats will represent a powerful political statement by all the delegations.

We hope that for these reasons the revised schedule will be reconsidered, and that we will return to the program dedicating Day 8 to Venezuela.
 

*****

There is value, of course, in separating myth from reality about the causes and the outcome of World War II on the sixtieth anniversary of its end. Unless this is done, we are disarmed in face of the chauvinist campaign of the imperialist powers to advance their political and military aims today. Even more, unless we draw the lessons from this history, we will be condemned to repeat the errors that have cost the world’s toilers so dearly. There are a number of political points we are developing at public forums and other meetings that we believe are central to this discussion.  
 
1. Orgy of imperialist war propaganda
The sixtieth anniversaries of the so-called Victory in Europe Day (“V-E Day”) and Victory over Japan Day (“V-J Day”) are already being exploited by the rulers in the United States and other imperialist countries as an opportunity for an orgy of chauvinist propaganda. Similar to what they organized during and after the fiftieth anniversary activities a decade ago—using “patriotic” spectacles, TV documentaries, movies such as Saving Private Ryan, and books such as the modestly titled The Greatest Generation—the U.S. rulers this year are seeking to rationalize their assaults against Afghanistan and Iraq and prepare for future wars by waving the bloody shirt of “the victory of democracy over fascism” in 1945.

The U.S. government’s “World War II 60th Anniversary Committee,” announced last year by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, is organizing and cosponsoring activities across North America, Europe, and the Pacific to “acquaint or reacquaint all Americans with the significance of World War II to our nation and the world.” Calling the war “the pivotal event of the 20th Century,” the committee’s brochure asserts that “the enduring legacy of World War II is reflected in the faces of those who served, the alliances that were formed, the many technological advances [ask the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!], and the continued rise of democratic reform throughout the world.”

The committee recently announced that during President George W. Bush’s May 6-10 European trip, he will visit the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten in order to “honor the shared sacrifice of millions of Americans and Europeans to defeat tyranny, and mark the growth of democracy throughout the continent.” President Bush, they noted, will also travel to Moscow “to participate in another World War II commemoration ceremony and to meet President Putin. The President will conclude his trip with a visit to T’bilisi, Georgia, to underscore his support for democracy, historic reform, and peaceful conflict resolution.”

These imperialist-organized “commemorations” falsify history. They cover up the crimes against the greatest victims of World War II: the toilers of the Soviet Union, working people in the imperialist countries of both the Allied and Axis alliances, and peasants and workers throughout the colonial world.

The imperialist victors, above all Washington and London, downplay and at the same time attempt to justify their decision—for the first time in modern warfare—to carry out the systematic mass murder of civilian populations, both in Germany and Japan, as a “necessary” and “legitimate” method of war. The British air force firebombed Hamburg and other German cities in 1943. U.S. and British planes did the same to Dresden in 1945. In these raids Allied forces deliberately targeted working-class housing, suffocating or incinerating several hundred thousand German civilians. Washington’s firebombing of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and dozens of other cities in the opening months of 1945 killed more Japanese civilians than were massacred in the subsequent atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.1

(Washington has not yet repeated its barbaric and inhuman use of nuclear weapons, but it emulated what was done to the people of Dresden and Tokyo across broad swaths of Korea and Vietnam. And the U.S. rulers, in the bloody effort to hang on to their domination, are preparing a “transformed” armed forces today to repeat this as often and “effectively” as necessary.)

It is impossible to assess either the causes of World War II, or its consequences for the exploited and oppressed the world over, without recognizing that it was actually three wars in one.2

First, it was the second interimperialist slaughter in a quarter century waged over the redivision and plunder of the world. The victory in that war by Washington, London, and their allies over Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome did nothing to weaken, let alone eliminate, the worldwide system of imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation, which is the social root of the march toward depression, fascism, and war that have continued to confront humanity to this day. U.S. finance capital used the war to consolidate its position—economically and militarily—as the world’s mightiest (and, we should add, final) dominant imperialist power.

There were sharply opposed views within the working-class movement toward that second interimperialist war and its outcome. The Communist Party and its youth group in the United States, for example, like its sister parties around the world, supported Washington’s war and welcomed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. For two days in a row, the Daily Worker featured editorial cartoons celebrating the knock-out punches being dealt the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the people of Japan. They hailed “the old one-two,” referring to the U.S. nuclear bombing and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan that same month. Those blood-drenched days of August, in the words of a Daily Worker headline, were “The Super-Duper Week.”

The Socialist Workers Party and young socialists, which opposed Washington’s imperialist war aims and efforts, had a different response to the atomic annihilation of the people of those two Japanese cities. The Militant denounced the crime against humanity and its issue of August 18, 1945, carried the banner headline, “There Is No Peace!”3 The accuracy of that historical fact has been amply confirmed in blood since the end of World War II by imperialist-organized wars, military interventions, or rightist coups in Greece, China, the Philippines, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Guatemala, Egypt, Cuba, Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Syria, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name just a few of the better-known cases.  
 
2. Defense of the Soviet Union
Within World War II was also a historic war to defend the Soviet Union, to preserve the state property, economic planning, and related social conquests that workers and peasants fought and died for in making the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of October 1917. That revolution, unlike the U.S. Defense Department’s false claim about their victory in World War II, truly was “the pivotal event of the 20th Century.” The Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad in early 1943 over the invading forces of German imperialism—at the cost of the lives of some one million Soviet soldiers and civilians—was a turning point not only in the struggle to defend the USSR but against imperialist oppression and domination worldwide.

In the years leading up to World War II, U.S. capitalism faced the decision of whether to seek to crush the Soviet workers state before or after establishing its dominance over its imperialist rivals in Europe and Asia. U.S. and British imperialism chose to take on Berlin and Tokyo first, hoping the Soviet Union would be so devastated by the German imperialist invasion that it could be brought down in the war’s aftermath. Once the Axis had been defeated, Washington, London, and other imperialist powers lost no time in launching a global crusade against “communism” at home and abroad. Among their central aims was to roll back the October Revolution and restore the dominance of capitalist social relations throughout the USSR. This was registered in the rapidity with which the U.S. rulers shifted between 1945 and 1947 from an alliance with the Soviet Union to the escalated buildup of a military machine equipped by the late 1950s with sufficient nuclear capacity to kill humanity many times over.4

The Soviet toilers’ successful defense of their conquests was achieved despite the reversal by the regime of Joseph Stalin of the Bolsheviks’ proletarian internationalism. Following Lenin’s incapacitating stroke in 1923, the bloody course of Stalin’s bureaucratic regime corroded the foundations of the Soviet workers state and demoralized the vanguard of the working class internationally (ultimately leading to the collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses across Eastern and Central Europe and in the USSR itself between 1989 and 1991). The Moscow-imposed ultraleft “Third Period” course of the German Communist Party at the opening of the 1930s—refusing to fight for working-class unity, for a united front with the Social Democratic Party to defeat the rise of Nazism—set up the workers for the disastrous ascendancy in 1933 of Hitler’s National Socialist movement. The Nazi regime established itself without the workers movement firing a shot.

Stalin’s subsequent lurch to imposing a Popular Front strategy on Communist parties across Europe and worldwide—subordinating the class interests and organization of labor and its allies to programmatic and even governmental alliances with imperialist parties deemed “antifascist” or friendly to Moscow’s conjunctural diplomatic needs—foreclosed revolutionary prospects in France and Spain, opened the way to fascist regimes there, and thus made the onset of a second, even more devastating interimperialist slaughter inevitable by the close of the 1930s.5

These obstacles to defense of the Soviet Union were compounded manyfold by the trials and executions of the top command of the Red Army during the Moscow frame-up trials of the late 1930s.6 The beheading of the Soviet Union’s armed forces, with tens of thousands of officers purged, was followed by the demoralizing and demobilizing political consequences of the Stalin-Hitler Pact signed in August 1939, including Stalin’s refusal to acknowledge Berlin’s preparations to invade the USSR until well after Wehrmacht Panzer divisions smashed their way across its borders in June 1941.

It was not until the 1959 victory of Cuban workers and peasants over the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship that a revolutionary internationalist leadership once again came to power, one that recognized that defense of the toilers’ gains depends not only on their political consciousness, military readiness, and armed mobilization, but is also indissolubly linked with advancing revolutionary struggles by the oppressed and exploited the world over. As the program of the Communist Party of Cuba adopted at its First Congress in 1975 explained, the defense of the revolutionary conquests of the Cuban people starts with “subordination … of the interests of Cuba to the general interests of the struggle for socialism and communism, of national liberation, of the defeat of imperialism and the elimination of colonialism, neocolonialism and all forms of exploitation and discrimination.” That is the policy Cuban revolutionists have followed from Vietnam to the Middle East and southern Africa, from Grenada and Nicaragua to Venezuela and elsewhere today.  
 
3. Anticolonial revolutions
A third inseparable conflict within what is generally called “World War II” was the exploding wars of national liberation by colonial peoples across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Foremost among these national liberation struggles was the nearly decade-long resistance by the people of China against occupation by imperial Japan. That was a struggle of such magnitude and blood that protests demanding of Tokyo a public apology, justice, and restitution continue to rage today.

Other colonial peoples, too, took advantage of the conflict among their respective imperialist overlords (both in the Axis and Allied blocs) to advance their battles for national sovereignty, independence, land redistribution, and labor rights. As the war headed toward its conclusion, these movements were strengthened and inspired by the victory of the Soviet Union, as well.

Especially where the imperialist slave masters were Allied powers (the reality in the big majority of cases), freedom fighters pressed forward their battle against colonial or neocolonial domination despite charges—inspired both by the imperialist colonizers imposed on them for decades, and by the Soviet government and its political followers—that they were “splitting” and “sabotaging” the struggle against fascism. Independence fighters in India continued their mobilizations against British colonial rule throughout the war. Puerto Rican Nationalists, Irish Republicans, and Quebecois independence supporters refused conscription to serve as cannon fodder in the armies of their oppressors.7

During the war neocolonial governments across the Americas divided. Most backed the Allied forces—including the regimes of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and Getulio Vargas in Brazil. Others, at least during the opening years of the war, remained “neutral” in sympathy with the Axis—including the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay.

In the wake of the war, following the defeat of the Japanese occupiers, national liberation forces in Vietnam and Indonesia continued the fight to expel the “victorious Allies,” the French and Dutch governments, which sought to reimpose colonial rule. The Chinese people, one-fifth of humanity, made a powerful revolution and overturned the rule of the landlords and capitalists. It is worth noting that massive “Bring Us Home!” demonstrations by U.S. GIs across Asia and Europe in late 1945 and early 1946 blocked the U.S. rulers from their postwar plans to use these troops to intervene against colonial peoples in China and elsewhere in Asia, against European workers, as well as at home against the strike wave sweeping the United States at the same time.8

In the early 1950s, the Korean people, having rid their land of Tokyo’s hated boot, fought Washington to a standoff and liberated half their country from imperialist domination. From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, one country after another on the African continent—from Tanzania to Algeria, from the Congo to Mozambique, and dozens of others—won political independence from London, Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon. During that same period, Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, Suriname, and other British and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean gained their independence as well.

In the very first days of 1959, in a great leap forward for popular humanity, Cuba became “the first free territory of the Americas.” The victory of the Rebel Army and a general strike and uprising across the island opened the door to socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere and gave an impulse to revolutionary struggles by workers and peasants across the Caribbean and Central and South America. And, in the aftermath of the 1988 defeat of apartheid’s invasion forces in Angola at Cuito Cuanavale, with decisive help from Cuban internationalist volunteers, Namibia won its freedom in 1990 and the system of white supremacy was toppled in South Africa itself by 1994.

These national liberation struggles against both Axis and Allied imperialist powers, which began accelerating in the midst of the Second World War and exploded in its wake, have been the most powerful single motor force of the world revolutionary movement since the latter half of the twentieth century—a confirmation of the anti-imperialist focus around which the forces building the Caracas festival are united.  
 
4. An injury to one is an injury to all!
The class struggle in the United States during World War II is among the chapters richest in lessons for working people and the oppressed. As the U.S. rulers cranked up the war effort, they targeted the constitutional rights and space for political action of the labor movement, communists, Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, Puerto Rican independence fighters, Japanese-Americans, and others. As sections of the exploited and oppressed continued to press their demands during the war, their efforts to do so were publicly and aggressively opposed by the Communist Party in the United States and those influenced by its Popular Front line of subordinating the struggles of working people to support for the U.S. imperialist government in the war. Those who refused to simply bend their knee were branded as “splitters,” “appeasers,” “disrupters,” and often outright “agents of Hitler and the Mikado.”

o On December 8, 1941, eighteen leaders of Minneapolis Local 544-CIO and of the Socialist Workers Party were convicted in federal court, and given sentences ranging from twelve to eighteen months in prison, on frame-up charges of “conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.” These were the first convictions under the notorious Smith “Gag” Act, newly signed into law by President Roosevelt. The indictments and prosecution were aimed at breaking the class-struggle vanguard of the labor movement that was leading opposition to Washington’s preparations to drag workers and farmers into the imperialist slaughter of World War II.

Despite the fact that the Smith Act was aimed at the entire labor movement, especially its radical components, the Communist Party used its press and podiums to urge everyone it could influence to support the government frame-up, charging that the Local 544 and SWP leaders, through “their fifth column service to Hitlerism,” were “spreading disunity in labor’s ranks.” The CP went so far as to prepare evidence for the federal prosecutors, sending a dossier to the Justice Department entitled “The Fifth Column Role of the Trotskyites in the United States.” Eight years later, eleven leaders of the Communist Party itself were convicted under the very same Smith Act, most of them railroaded to federal prison for five years. The Socialist Workers Party actively campaigned in their defense, covering the trial regularly in the pages of the Militant.9

• In an effort to weaken the rising industrial union movement, Washington imposed a wartime wage freeze and won a no-strike pledge from class-collaborationist labor officials, who threw themselves into the imperialist war effort of the employing class. In 1943, in defiance of these antilabor measures, members of the United Mine Workers union, whose president was John L. Lewis, went on strike over the coal operators’ efforts to increase hours and freeze pay.

When the Roosevelt administration threatened to send in troops to break the strike, the miners responded: “You can’t mine coal with bayonets!” The Communist Party, through the Daily Worker, not only opposed the UMWA strike but called for the “Lewis line” of defying the no-strike pledge to be “utterly defeated.”10 Nonetheless, the miners won, opening the road to the strike wave that exploded in 1945 and 1946.

• The federal government resisted and sought to undermine the March on Washington Movement, which organized throughout the war years against Jim Crow segregation in the armed forces, against racist discrimination in munitions industries and society as a whole, and against the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to introduce antilynching legislation. The Communist Party opposed the March on Washington Movement. CP leader Benjamin Davis insisted in 1942 that “the winning of this war is the primary issue before the Negro people.” Davis charged that leaders of the movement were working “to exploit the just demands of the Negro people against the war and against the best interests of the Negroes.”11

In November 1942 U.S. postal authorities began withholding delivery of issues of the Militant newspaper from the mails. In March 1943 the Postmaster General revoked the Militant’s second-class mailing rights on the grounds, among others, that its articles included “stimulation of race issues” in wartime. The Communist Party supported the revocation of these mailing rights.12

• Several years before the war, the U.S. government incarcerated Pedro Albizu Campos and other Puerto Rican Nationalist leaders on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow the government and “inciting rebellion” against the United States. Scores of Puerto Ricans were also jailed for resisting the wartime draft. Albizu Campos and the other Nationalist leaders rejected the government’s degrading “offer” to free them if they would suspend proindependence activity during the war.

As this resistance was being organized both on the island and in the United States, the Communist Party publicly urged Puerto Rican fighters to suspend the struggle for independence during the war, comply with the draft to advance Washington’s military efforts, and—in the words of CP leader Earl Browder—put an end to their “intransigent and unreasoning hostility toward the United States.”13 (The CP and its sister parties in the United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere adopted the same stance toward resistance by Irish and Quebecois independence fighters during the war.)

• The U.S. government in 1942 rounded up 112,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast and held them in barbed-wire-ringed concentration camps for much of the duration of the war. When they were released, thousands found that their farmland, tools, and often even homes had been confiscated and sold to new, non-Japanese-American owners.

Already, in the aftermath of Tokyo’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Communist Party had deregistered its Japanese-American members, saying that “the Party was the best place for any Japanese fifth columnist to hide and we don’t want to take any chances.” When Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was issued establishing the concentration camps, the CP hailed it as “a sensible program” and instructed its former members to go into the camps peacefully—and to lead others to do so—as their contribution to the war effort.

The Socialist Workers Party condemned the camps from the outset as a violation of the rights of Japanese-Americans, “driving them from their homes” and “terrorizing them.” The federal executive order, the SWP said, was “an indiscriminate and brutal witch-hunt…having the character of a racial pogrom.”14

As these examples show—and there are others too numerous to recount—never before or since has there been a more pressing need than during World War II to champion and act on the longtime slogan of the working-class movement: “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
 

*****

Among the many forces worldwide who are united around the anti-imperialist aims of the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students in Caracas, there is undoubtedly a broad range of views about what there is, and what there is not, to commemorate, much less celebrate, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. We do not expect that our opinions will be embraced by everyone building the festival. We are convinced, however, that any effort to impose a particular assessment of these historical questions on the movement as a whole will cause division and disunity in building the festival.

In line with the slogan of the Caracas festival, we continue to strongly believe it would be better to conclude the discussions there on Day 8 by uniting participants around activities in defense of Venezuela’s national sovereignty in face of U.S. imperialism’s mounting threats.

We urge our meeting in Portugal to return to the original program proposed at the Hanoi meeting.

Fraternally,

s/Argiris Malapanis
Argiris Malapanis

s/Olympia Newton
Olympia Newton

s/Jacob Perasso
Jacob Perasso

Young Socialists

cc: Union of Young Communists of Cuba


NOTES

1. See “U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 killed 100,000” in March 28, 2005, issue of the Militant.

2. See “World War II: Three Wars in One” by Dan Roberts, major excerpts of which were reprinted in the April 25, 2005, issue of the Militant. Also see The Changing Face of U.S. Politics (pp. 109-111) and Capitalism’s World Disorder (pp. 423-31) by Jack Barnes; Socialism on Trial (pp. 59-85) and The Socialist Workers Party in World War II (pp. 245-65) by James P. Cannon; and In Defense of Marxism (pp. 41-64) and Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (pp. 221-65), by Leon Trotsky. All the above books are published by Pathfinder Press.

3. “There Is No Peace!” the August 1945 statement of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, was reprinted in the April 11, 2005, Militant. The front page of the Aug. 18, 1945, Militant is reproduced on page 7, along with several cartoons and headlines that same month from the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. The Daily Worker’s response to the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo was much the same. “309 B-29s in Record Raid on Tokyo” was the headline on a United Press dispatch in its March 10, 1945, issue. And in July 1943, with no comment, the paper ran another UP dispatch reporting that “Britain’s giant night bombers loosed a record bomb load of more than 2,300 tons on Hamburg [Germany] in the sixth raid on that seared and flaming city within 72 hours.”

4. See Capitalism’s World Disorder (pp. 111-20) and “Washington’s Third Militarization Drive” by Mary-Alice Waters in New International no. 7 (pp. 251-290).

5. For further reading on the historic defeats of the working class resulting from the Stalin-led Comintern’s ultraleftism and subsequent swing to Popular Frontism, see Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It by Leon Trotsky, as well as “Once Again on the Causes of the Defeat in Spain,” in The Spanish Revolution (1931-39). Both are published by Pathfinder.

6. Throughout the 1930s the Stalinist regime in Moscow organized the systematic murder of revolutionists not only in the Soviet Union but in Spain and elsewhere across Europe, culminating in the assassination of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. In doing so, they stilled the voices of those who were presenting a communist course on the questions discussed in the letter reprinted here at a time when something could still be done by the workers movement to reverse the disastrous policies that resulted in defeat after defeat, made the onset of World War II inevitable, and blocked the implementation of a revolutionary line of march during the war itself.

7. See “Washington’s Fifty-Year Domestic Contra Operation” by Larry Seigle in New International no. 6 (pp. 245-48). See also “The Struggle in India” in Fighting Racism in World War II (pp. 246-51); The Changing Face of U.S. Politics (pp. 427-28); The Socialist Workers Party in World War II (pp. 261-65); and Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (pp. 242-47, 252-54).

8. See “1945: When U.S. Troops Said ‘No!’” by Mary-Alice Waters in New International no. 7 (pp. 301-324).

9. See “Anatomy of a Frame-up” in Teamster Bureaucracy by Farrell Dobbs (pp. 230-44, 306-29). See also “Washington’s Fifty-Year Domestic Contra Operation” in New International no. 6 (pp. 215-24, 237-45). An accompanying article in this week’s Militant quotes from accounts of the Communist Party’s course during the 1941 Smith Act trials by two longtime CPUSA members or supporters.

10. See “Washington’s Fifty-Year Domestic Contra Operation” in New International no. 6, especially pp. 235-36, 241. When the UMWA miners threatened to go back out at the opening of the great strike wave of 1945, the Daily Worker wrote in its March 12 issue: “The coal miners will have to learn this bitter lesson, that so long as they permit John L. Lewis in their name to sabotage the war effort, to lead them into strikes at the height of the war, to carry on civil warfare against the President, and to conspire to defeat America’s foreign policy, just that long also will the miners suffer substandard conditions of wages and labor.”

11. See Fighting Racism in World War II (pp. 196-97, 213-21, 252-61).

12..See “Washington’s Fifty-Year Domestic Contra Operation” in New International no. 6 (pp. 228-31), Fighting Racism in World War II (pp. 273-81), and Teamster Bureaucracy (pp. 309-12).

13. Earl Browder, Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace (New York: International Publishers, 1944), pp. 57-58. See also “Washington’s Fifty-Year Domestic Contra Operation” in New International no. 6, pp. 232-33; Oscar Collazo, Memorias de un patriota encarcelado (Memoirs of an imprisoned patriot) (Fundación Francisco Manrique Cabrera: San Juan, 2000), pp. 233, 246; A.G. Quintero Rivera, La lucha obrera en Puerto Rico (CEREP: San Juan, 1972); Carlos Rodríguez-Fraticelli, “Pedro Albizu Campos: Strategies of Struggle and Strategic Struggles” in Puerto Rican History and Politics, Winter 1991-92, pp. 29-30; and the Marisa Rosado biography of Pedro Albizu Campos, Las llamas de la aurora (The Flames of Dawn) (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998).

14. See “American Concentration Camps: Racism and Japanese-Americans during World War II” by Patti Iiyama in the April 18, 2005, issue of the Militant. See also the comments by the Communist Party’s longtime general counsel, John Abt, in the accompanying article below.
 
 
Related articles:
How CP USA backed Smith Act convictions of SWP, Teamster leaders
 
 
Previous article in the series:
World War II: Three wars in one  
 
 
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