Vol. 73/No. 49      December 21, 2009

One Indian official from the Bhopal area charged Union Carbide and other corporations with “declaring war on the Third World.”

The gas leak in Bhopal was the worst industrial disaster in history. Incomplete estimates of the toll range as high as 2,250 dead and 200,000 injured. Many of the injured will also die. Others, doctors say, will suffer blindness, sterility, mental retardation, and kidney and liver damage.

When the gas erupted, a church worker said, “The whole city became a big gas chamber.”

The city became a human river of blinded and suffocating people trying to escape the deadly fumes.

December 21, 1959
MINNEAPOLIS—Striking packinghouse workers, a thousand strong, have offered a magnificent demonstration of militant resistance to a scab-herding operation at the Albert Lea plant of Wilson & Co., about 100 miles south of here. After two days of company-inspired violence, Gov. Freeman declared martial law in the area and the National Guard shut down the plant.

A major battle broke out at the struck plant last Wednesday when a mob of scabs, armed with guns, knives and blackjacks, tried to leave the plant by crashing though a mass picket line of the 1,100 striking members of the United Packinghouse Workers Union, Local 6, AFL-CIO.

Several strikers were almost run down and a scab car struck one of the pickets. The strikers returned the attack with a barrage of bricks and rocks. A number of the strikebreakers’ cars were overturned.

December 22, 1934
Recent events in the Soviet Union, commencing with the assassinations of Kirov and followed by secret executions totaling 103 at the present writing, cause the deepest alarm to the thinking revolutionary workers of the entire world for whom the Soviet Union is and has been since 1917 the star of hope and inspiration.

For days after Kirov’s assassination there was complete lack of any explanation as to the identity of the assassin or the reason for his act. Then the Soviet authorities placed the blame upon White Guards, counterrevolutionaries left from the old Czarist regime. Later it was hinted that representatives of some foreign capitalist power were engaged in dastardly counterrevolutionary activities.

If the Soviet Union is in danger the advanced workers throughout the world will rally to its defense as they have always done and they will not object to drastic measures against conspirators.  
 
 
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