Vol. 81/No. 47      December 18, 2017

 

25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

 

December 18, 1992

Under the “humanitarian” cover of a United Nations mission to feed starving people, the Bush administration is about to launch an invasion of Somalia.

The action, whose goal is to safeguard strategic U.S. interests in eastern Africa and set a precedent for future military intervention in other parts of the world, has received full bipartisan backing. President-elect Bill Clinton called it a “historic and welcome step.”

Pentagon officials, cynically dubbing the mission “Operation Restore Hope,” plan to pour at least 28,000 troops into Somalia. The U.S. force includes four warships, tanks, 155-millimeter howitzers, and Cobra attack helicopters. France is sending 2,000 men, along with 10 Mirage fighter planes and 20 helicopters. Britain, Belgium, Canada, Pakistan and Jordan have all vowed to contribute troops or supplies.

December 18, 1967

NEW YORK — Thousands of antiwar demonstrators, mostly youth, joined “Stop the Draft Week” here Dec. 4-8. They came out for four days in a row in spite of repeated attempts by Mayor Lindsay’s police to suppress the peaceful demonstrations in a massive assault on the right to dissent.

Contrary to the image the daily press sought to create, the demonstrators were peaceful. There were virtually no acts the police could have construed as provocations at any time during the demonstrations, even though police agents had infiltrated the crowd.

The protest was called by an ad-hoc Stop the Draft Committee, a coalition of various antiwar youth groups, including the Resistance, the Young Socialist Alliance, the Student Mobilization Committee, the DuBois Clubs, and pacifist organizations.

December 19, 1942

The Post Office, which has been withholding from the mails all recent issues of “The Militant,” has permitted the Nov. 28 and Dec. 5 issues to be dispatched and delivered.

Unquestionably this action is partially a result of the protests registered by numerous labor and liberal journalists and organizations in the six-week period since the Post Office began to interfere with the mailing privileges of “The Militant.”

Only a single group in the country has thus far expressed the slightest approval for the Post Office action, and that is the Communist Party, which not only wants “The Militant” suppressed altogether, but also wants a witch-hunt started against all labor organizations and papers critical of the administration and opposed to reactionary Stalinist policies.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home