Vol. 72/No. 4      January 28, 2008

U.S. working people have no interest in sending a single cent, helicopter, or adviser to prop up the killers Washington is desperately trying to keep in power in El Salvador.

Arturo Rivera y Damas, Interim Archbishop of El Salvador, denounced Reagan’s intention to certify the regime, pointing to continued “illegal imprisonments, the discovery of mutilated corpses, and of people ‘disappeared.’”

The Salvadoran Human Rights Commission, meanwhile, reported that 5,840 people had been killed and 788 “disappeared” in the last year.  
 
January 27, 1958
The Ku Klux Klan was chased out of Robeson County, North Carolina, by Indians against whom it had been threatening racial violence. Of a population of 95,000 in Robeson County, some 40,000 are Lumbee Indians and 25,000 are Negroes.

Two fiery crosses had been burned on Indian property. Then the KKK announced a public rally and cross-burning.

Simeon Oxendine, son of the mayor of the nearby predominately Indian town of Pembroke, gave the New York Post the following account of the battle:

“We were pretty riled up and we started moving in. Some of the boys set off a few firecrackers. The Kluxers didn’t seem to get much calmer when they heard the bangs. They seemed to want to leave. In fact they ran off at every angle. They started loading up in their cars and—I don’t know—seemed like somehow most of the cars came up with flat tires.”  
 
January 28, 1933
On Sunday, January 2, tens of thousands of Fascists made a demonstration in Germany. In clashes with workers and Communists one worker was killed and a hundred were wounded.

In Berlin the Fascists invaded the heart of the proletarian districts to assemble in front of Communist party headquarters.

In the mind of every worker questions will arise: Why was the party not able to arouse the masses of workers to resist this hostile demonstration in its stronghold? Why could it not call on the social democratic workers to join with it against their common foe?

The reason is to be found in the false theories of the Thaelmann-Stalin leadership which harnessed the party to the yoke of social-Fascism and erected barriers across the line of march to the unity of the working class. That is why the party had to suffer the humiliating insult of a Fascist demonstration in front of its windows.  
 
 
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