The U.S. Communist Party, true to its Stalinist tradition, is attempting to rewrite history to cover up its role in championing the murderous atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. imperialist rulers 80 years ago.
Marking this anniversary of Washington dropping the bombs in 1945, the People’s World last month presented what it claimed are selected excerpts from articles in the Daily Worker, the CP’s paper at the time, that pitches the party as being opposed to the slaughter. The collection of articles is summarized with the headline, “Daily Worker 1945: Atomic terror unleashed on Hiroshima.”
But a closer look at what this Stalinist paper was saying then puts the lie to this story.
The U.S. CP, like its sister parties around the world, dutifully followed all the political twists and turns of the counterrevolutionary bureaucratic regime in Moscow. And, like Moscow, the CP here hailed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For two days in a row, Aug. 10 and 11, the Daily Worker featured editorial cartoons celebrating the mass death and destruction rained down on working people there.
The CP hailed what they called “the old one-two,” referring to the U.S. nuclear bombing and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan that same month. The annihilation of more than 200,000 men, women and children in these two cities was described in a Daily Worker headline as, “The Super-Duper Week.” Tens of thousands more died afterwards from radiation poisoning and cancer.
In sharp contrast, the Socialist Workers Party told the truth. “There Is No Peace!” was the banner headline in the Aug. 18, 1945, issue of the Militant, featuring a manifesto issued by the National Committee of the SWP. It denounced Washington’s ongoing imperialist war aims and its crime against humanity in unleashing the atomic bomb on working people in Japan.
“Capitalism in its death agony, writhing in the toils of mortal crisis, has perfected an instrument of all-embracing annihilation,” the Militant said. “This deadly destructive force, held in the grip of the criminal capitalist rulers, will be used to decimate mankind unless it is snatched in time from their murderous grasp.”
“Let the cataclysmic horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki serve as a clarion call to the working class! The workers must wrench the power from the hands of the blood-drenched capitalist criminals and take their destiny in their own hands,” it said. “Today the fight for socialism is a fight to prevent the annihilation of the human race. Mankind must now exterminate the capitalist system — or be exterminated!”
Communist Party leader William Z. Foster, in a piece excerpted in the Daily Worker feature, argued that future use of atomic bomb destruction would be better decided if “vested in the Security Council of the United Nations.”
But the U.N. quickly showed its true colors by sponsoring the U.S. rulers’ war on the people of Korea, where carpet bombing and napalm was used to level cities across the peninsula.
Washington’s slaughter in Korea, and in Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else the U.S. rulers thought their ability to plunder and profit was in danger, has marked our epoch.
Unlike the CP, which today says a Popular Front, running the spectrum from their party to the good capitalists, is necessary to defeat the fascist Donald Trump, the Socialist Workers Party advances a revolutionary working-class road forward. The SWP says the working class needs to break with the capitalist parties and their hangers-on and build a leadership capable of organizing us in our tens of millions to take political power into our own hands and join with fellow toilers worldwide.