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Vol. 78/No. 16      April 28, 2014

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

April 28, 1989

The U.S.-imposed government of Grenada is continuing to enforce its undemocratic ban on the entry of books that it deems to contain “negative ideas.” On April 16 customs officials at Grenada’s Port Salines airport seized a package of 20 books from Dennis Thomas, international relations secretary of the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement (MBPM). Thomas was returning from a conference in Cyprus. Among the items seized were books he had picked up there, as well as a number published by the New York-based Pathfinder Press.

MBPM leader Terry Marryshow issued a condemnation of this escalation of the government’s attacks on the democratic rights of the Grenadian people.

Protests against the book seizure were featured in the April 7 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline, “Groups Condemn Confiscation of Books By Grenada.”

April 27, 1964

Since the great labor struggles in Chicago in 1886, May Day has been the holiday of revolutionary workers and the oppressed throughout the world. On this May Day we, in America, extend fraternal greeting to people everywhere who are fighting for freedom and a better life.

Our greetings go to the people of Cuba and Algeria, who in heroic struggle have won and are maintaining their independence from imperialist exploitation, thus blazing the path for other people still under the yoke of colonialism or neo-colonialism.

We send greetings to the oppressed and impoverished workers and peasants of South Vietnam, whose guerrilla soldiers are successfully fighting the armies of local despots supplied with an enormous arsenal of the most modern weapons and backed by the specialists and troop detachments of the mightiest military power on earth.

April 28, 1939

Conscription of the British working class for war was decided upon in London this week.

Simultaneously the British began sounding out the possibility of some kind of modified repetition of the Munich deal which will postpone the outbreak of war to enable them to complete their chain of European alliances.

In this and in this alone was there some chance of a postponement this week of the armed showdown that has been so agonizingly imminent for months.

This did not offer the peoples of the world much of a choice for if the war is postponed, it cannot be for long.

While superficially events seemed to hinge on Hitler’s speech this Friday, actually the key to the next act in the tragedy lay in the extremely complicated diplomatic moves made by the opposing camps in the mad scramble for allies.  
 
 
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