Vol. 81/No. 2      January 9, 2017

 

25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

January 10, 1992

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Children of refugees are being detained here in increasing numbers, despite the fact that the law prohibits imprisonment of people under the age of 16.

New regulations were adopted in July 1990 on detaining refugees. According to Maj-Lis Lööv, the immigration minister in the previous Social Democratic government, the purpose of the new rules was to lessen the number of refugee children in prison. But the opposite has happened.

Before the new regulations, 181 refugee children were taken into custody in the first half of 1990. In the second half of that year 294 children were arrested and held, in the following 10 months, 587 children of asylum-seekers were locked up.

Up to December 1989, 80 percent of asylum-seekers were allowed to stay. The figure is now 40 percent.

January 9, 1967

One week after New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury exploded the Washington lies about the nature of bombing attacks on north Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson still refuses to face up to the truth. At a news conference in LBJ’s ranch in Johnson City, Texas, the president continued to insist that military targets alone are “authorized” for U.S. bombs.

However, Johnson admitted that civilians were getting killed as a result of U.S. attacks — and in the thousands:

“We do everything we can to minimize them, but they do occur in north Vietnam as they do in south Vietnam; there are thousands of civilians that have died this year in south Vietnam as the result of detonation of grenades and bombs, and every casualty is to be regretted.” Washington intended to escalate the bombing attacks on Hanoi without saying one single word about it.

January 10, 1942

The Communist Party is alarmed over passage by the House of Representatives of the Dies amendments which require the registration of all members of the Communist Party as agents of a “foreign principal” and places the Stalinists in the same category as members of the Nazi Bund. The C.P. claims that these amendments “represent the most serious success of friends and admirers of Nazi Germany.”

No, this can’t be palmed off as a Nazi plot. It’s the action of sober legislators who are just as concerned about winning the war as the Stalinists. They aren’t playing the Nazi game. They are playing their own game of fighting the labor movement by attacking the most vulnerable section of it, the Stalinists.

The way to defeat such legislation is by arousing the labor movement against all attacks on democratic rights and civil liberties.  
 
 
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