November 19, 2001
Below is an excerpt from Socialism and War, a pamphlet by V.I. Lenin and Gregory Zinoviev which summed up the position on World War I of the Bolshevik Party in Russia.
Socialists have always condemned wars between nations as barbarous and brutal. Our attitude towards war, however, is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and that of the anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within a country; we understand that wars cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and socialism is created; we also differ in that we regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by an oppressed class against the oppressor class, by slaves against slaveholders, by serfs against landowners, and by wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as fully legitimate, progressive and necessary.
November 19, 1976
HOUSTON — Speaking before a meeting of 100 Houston area steelworkers, Ed Sadlowski delivered a scathing rebuttal to the red-baiting and violence that have been directed against his campaign for president of the United Steelworkers of America.
“If you let red-baiting break you up, that’s the bosses’ game. If you let race hatred break you up, that’s the bosses’ game. There’s no place in the American labor movement for that kind of conduct. We have to restore full democracy in this union, and that’s not my concept of democracy. Booing, and shouting, and heckling, and bullets, and beating up — that’s the bosses’ game.”
He rejected the union bureaucracy’s line of protecting “our” industry against foreign competitors. “Hold the industrialists to blame for unemployment,” Sadlowski insisted. “Don’t blame the American worker or the Japanese worker.”
November 19, 1951
The capitalist press is deliberately underplaying the news about the real situation in the Near East. The millions of the Arab world whose living standards are abysmal, refuse any longer to live in this degradation.
The whole Arab world is now bitterly anti-British and anti-French and is turning more and more anti-American. As matters stand today, the French would have dim prospects of hanging on in North Africa, if not for the support of Washington.
Every single Arab nation — Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq — has filed a separate complaint in the U.N. against the French in Morocco. But this Moroccan issue, that is, the whole colonial issue in the Near East, was shunted aside by the U.N. This vote was the handiwork of the U.S. The most illiterate Arab peasant is aware of it today.