25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

March 20, 2023

March 23, 1998

Class-conscious fighters must lead opposition to military intervention in Kosovo by Washington and other imperialist powers, whether in the guise of United Nations “peacekeeping” troops, NATO soldiers, the Western European Union, or anything else.

Washington and its rivals in Europe are attempting to use the atrocities carried out by Serbian government forces in Kosovo as a pretext to intervene. Their actions have nothing to do with “humanitarian” missions.

Forging a working-class leadership with a clear political perspective is the way forward for workers and peasants in Kosovo and the other republics in Yugoslavia. Calls for imperialist intervention weaken working-class solidarity.

No to military intervention in Kosovo! Lift the sanctions against Serbia!

All imperialist troops out of Yugoslavia now!

March 23, 1973

PINE RIDGE RESERVATION, S.D. — M-16-toting FBI agents again block the roads to Wounded Knee. Fuel, electricity, and telephone service have been cut off in the latest government attempt to starve out the occupants of this blizzard-besieged village.

The chairmen representing six of the reservation’s eight districts met March 11. They announced: (1) withdrawal from “a government-controlled body — the tribal government system”; (2) withdrawal of the Oglala Sioux from the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act; and (3) declaration of national sovereignty for the Oglala Sioux nation.

Indian leaders say they will refuse to lay down their arms. “We remember what happened to Big Foot in 1890,” Russell Means said. Federal troops massacred Big Foot and 200 men, women, and children in Wounded Knee in 1890 after they laid down their arms.

March 22, 1948

The anti-communist witch hunt, which has been systematically organized by Wall Street and the government in Washington, scored two sinister successes in Detroit and Akron last week. Three workers in the Briggs plant were driven out of their jobs by a self-constituted goon squad, which accused them of being “communists.” Langston Hughes, the well-known Negro poet, was denied a hall for a lecture and a reading of his poetry, on the grounds that he was a “red.”

The local labor movement failed to take a stand against the anti-red hysteria. Nothing can be more fatal than the idea, held by some unionists, that they can use the government-inspired red-baiting campaign as a weapon against the Stalinist misleaders. Unless the labor movement takes a firm stand against the spread of the witch hunt, it is contributing to the unfolding attack against itself.