Wisdom From Lenin: "Freedom, Democracy, and Capitalism"

No bourgeois republic, however democratic, ever was or could have been anything but a machine for the suppression of the working people by capital, an instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the political rule of capital.

The democratic bourgeois republic promised and proclaimed majority rule, but it could never put this into effect as long as private ownership of the land and other means of production existed.

“Freedom” in the bourgeois-democratic republic was actually freedom for the rich...

Soviet or proletarian, democracy has for the first time in the world created democracy for the masses, for the working people, for the factory workers and small peasants.

Never yet has the world seen political power wielded by the majority of the population, power actually wielded by this majority, as it is in the case of Soviet rule.

It suppresses the “freedom” of the exploiters and their accomplices; it deprives them of “freedom” to exploit, “freedom” to batten on starvation, “freedom” to fight for the restoration of the rule of capital, “freedom” to compact with the foreign bourgeoisie against the workers and peasants of their own country.

Let the Kautskys champion such freedom. Only a renegade from Marxism, a renegade from socialism can do so.


V.I. Lenin "The Third International and Its Place in History"

Billionaire Mayor Says "Living Wage" Is Red

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Oct 23, 2011 10:42 AM

The billionaire mayor of this city, Michael Bloomberg, is still refusing to sign a “living wage bill” currently before the New York City Council, despite revisions that watered it down somewhat. This bill would require some businesses that receive city funds to pay not just the minimum wage, but either a “living wage” of $10 per hour plus benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits.

The Census Bureau recently reported that one in every five city residents lives in poverty as a result of unemployment and low wages.

In stating his reason for opposing the bill, Bloomberg said: “The last time people tried to set rates, basically, was in the Soviet Union, and that didn’t work out very well. I don’t think we want to go in that direction.” (New York Times, Oct. 5)

Bloomberg needs to learn history.

In the Soviet Union, where workers took power in a popular revolution in October 1917, things did work out well for a long time.

After the USSR launched its first Five Year Plan in 1928, the world looked on in amazement.

While the capitalist countries were plunging into a deep depression, the USSR went from being a country with no steel industry and barely any railroads, indoor plumbing or electricity, to a world economic power. The largest hydroelectric power plant in the world at the time, the Dnieper Dam, was constructed during this mass move to build an industrialized socialist economy.

The impoverished, agrarian countryside that had prevailed in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia and the numerous other nations that made up the Soviet Union were soon filled with mighty industrial centers.

With the banks, factories and 91 percent of all economic institutions in the people’s hands, there was no need for anyone to be unemployed.

Thousands of jobless U.S. workers went to the Soviet Union in this period. Even though every citizen in the USSR was put to work at living wages, this wasn’t enough. Workers from all over the world were hired to go to the USSR and help out, in exchange for a living wage.

Illiteracy was abolished during this period of Soviet history and a national educational system constructed. Newly built universities allowed many former peasants to become engineers, artists, technicians and other kinds of skilled workers needed to build a socialist society. The country was on the road to realizing Lenin’s statement that “Socialism is Soviet power plus electrification.”

In 1941 German imperialism invaded the Soviet Union along an 1,800-mile front. They did terrible destruction to this struggling country, but at the heroic battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 1942 until February 1943, the people’s resistance defeated the Nazis and turned the tide of World War II. It was troops carrying the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union, not the red, white and blue, who liberated Berlin and the majority of Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

In the postwar period, the Soviet Union had to repeat its economic miracle, rebuilding what the Nazis had destroyed. It also aided other war-ravaged countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.

In 1946 the U.S. and Britain began the Cold War, which forced the USSR to devote much of its scientific and material resources to defense against the U.S. nuclear threat

Nevertheless, the USSR was the first country in the world to launch a space satellite, called Sputnik.

Until the 1980s, the USSR provided aid to countries and liberation movements threatened by U.S. imperialism with the kind of “regime change” forced on those who disobey Wall Street’s orders.

South Africans fighting the fascist apartheid regime and Angolans fighting Portuguese colonialism received Soviet weapons and training. Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida, faced a U.S. blockade after its socialist revolution, but was able to survive with Soviet economic assistance. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which lost millions of people in the war against invading U.S. troops from 1950 to 1953, got Soviet aid to help its socialist construction.

The Soviet Union built up a mass media apparatus to spread its message of socialism and anti-imperialism. This global megaphone publicized the horrors of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South to the peoples of the world, exposing the “democracy” the U.S. claimed to advocate.

China began its great revival with Soviet aid. Now one of the most powerful economies in the world, just 60 years ago it was dubbed “the sick man of Asia” because of its horrendous conditions of impoverishment.

Just where is this failure Bloomberg speaks of? Yes, the USSR collapsed, but only after Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his allies turned toward imperialism and actively began dismantling the Soviet economy. The USSR did not collapse until it was more polluted with “market reforms” than ever before.

In the modern world, the poorest countries of this earth, where people are suffering from mass unemployment, starvation and extreme poverty, all share governments that believe in Bloomberg’s “free market” nonsense and are backed up with Pentagon bombs.

Contrary to Bloomberg’s rhetoric, the construction of socialism in the U.S. will not be as simple as passing this “living wage bill” he loathes. The mass movement now emerging in the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon must lead to an uprising of revolutionary youth, workers and oppressed peoples against the capitalist system itself. It will take the formation of a mass, Marxist-Leninist party that can coordinate revolutionary activity to eventually liberate the banks and factories for the people themselves and create a new, working-class government to replace Wall Street’s cast of hired actors in Washington, D.C.

That’s when the successful economic model of socialism will be created in the U.S. At that point, we will in fact see what Bloomberg fears the most: a world without billionaires (like him), a world that instead provides a decent life for all.

1917: Women of the 'Death Batallion'

Women Soldiers in the Bolshevik Revolution

From: Six Red Months in Russia by Louise Bryant

NO other feature of the great war ever caught the public fancy like the Death Battalion, composed of Russian women. I heard so much about them before I left America that it was one of the first things I investigated when I got to Russia. In six months I saw them go through a curious development which divided them into two bitter hostile camps. Their leader, Leona Botchkarova, was severely beaten and had to be taken to a hospital. Hurt, uncomprehending, she declared: "I do not want to be associated with women! I do not trust them!" If she had been a thinker as well as a fighter she would have known that sex had little to do with the matter. Class struggle permeated everything and it hurled the women's regiments into the maelstrom with everything else.

Near Smolny Institute there was a recruiting station. It was here that I made my first friends among the women soldiers. A short dumpy little girl with cropped black hair stood awkwardly holding a big gun with a long bayonet. She regarded me belligerently.

"Stoi! What do you want?" she queried. I decided she must be the guard and explained my mission.

Inside were half a dozen girls sitting on stools in the hallway. They were arrayed in the strangest attire; one had on dancing slippers and a frivolous waist; another high-heeled French shoes, and still another wore brown buttoned shoes and green stockings--the only universal note was short hair and men's trousers.

They looked like the chorus of a comic opera in various stages of make-up. They all began to talk to me at once, as is the Russian custom. "Who are you?" "Are you English or American?" "Are you going to join the regiment?"

A very intelligent and lovely girl by the name of Vera, who was in charge that day, came out and invited me into her office. I often went back after that and had lunch with her. She was well read and spoke live languages. The only thing I didn't like about her was that she loved to salute so much that she kept doing it all the time, and as she was the superior officer, she couldn't very well salute any one else but me. This I found very droll after coming from France, where war correspondents are not treated like commanders-in-chief.

Vera explained about the variety of shoes. She said that they had ordered boots, but had never heard any further word. There was a very good reason, which I found out afterwards; there was no leather. The only women soldiers that ever did get boots or overcoats or anything else they needed were the first recruits to the Death Battalion. All the others were "just waiting" as every one does in Russia.

It was the Death Battalion that book part in the last Russian offensive. There were two hundred and fifty in the battle; six were killed and thirty wounded. That was their last and only battle, except for the girls who were brought to the Winter Palace the day that it fell. And they surrendered before a single one was wounded.

I gathered these statistics very carefully and have compared them with the statistics gathered by reliable persons. I took great pains because I could not believe them when I first got them. I had been led to believe that the movement was much larger. In all Russia less than three thousand were gathered into the recruiting stations. It is interesting to note that many more have since taken part in the Red Guard Army.

Women in Russia have always fought in the army. In my opinion the principal reason for the failure of the woman's regiment was segregation. There will always be fighting women in Russia, but they will fight side by side with men and not as a sex. Botchkarova herself fought several gears before she organised the Death Battalion at the instigation of Kerensky and Rodzianko.

When the Soviet formally took over the government the women soldiers were given two months' leave. The majority were ordered home and told to put on female attire because they were considered enemies of the revolution. There was a good deal of misunderstanding on both sides.

I came across a peculiar case. I had heard a rumour that some of the girls had been mistreated the night the Winter Palace fell. I didn't believe it, but I wanted to assure myself. After a great deal of searching around I found that one girl really had been hurt and had been in a hospital. And another girl had committed suicide because she was "disappointed in her ideals." I got the address of the girl who had been sick and went round to see her.

She lived with another girl in one of the great barnlike unused buildings so common in Petrograd. Kira Volakettnova was her name. She was a dressmaker and had always been very poor. The building had a court with snow piled high in the centre. Garbage and filth of all sorts were thrown on top of the snow.

I knocked a long time at the front door; nobody answered. I found the back door wide open and went in. Hearing a noise in one of the rooms, I called out but received no reply. I opened the door and a lot of startled chickens ran in every direction. I searched all over that floor with no result, and finally went to the second floor. There in a tiny room I found Kira and her friend, Anna Shub. Anna was seventeen and came from Moghilev.

I asked Kira to explain how she was hurt.

"Well, that night when the Bolsheviki took the Winter Palace and told us to go home, a few of us were very angry and we got into an argument," she said.

"We were arguing with soldiers of the Pavlovsk regiment. A very big soldier and I had a terrible fight. We screamed at each other and finally he got so mad that he pushed me and I fell out of the window. Then he ran downstairs and all the other soldiers ran downstairs.... The big soldier cried like a baby because he had hurt me and he carried me all the way to the hospital and came to see me every day."

"And how do you live now?" I said. "How do you manage to get enough to eat?"

Anna Shub answered my question. "Why, the Red Guard," she said, blushing a little, "have been dividing their bread with us, and yesterday," she went on proudly, "they brought us six pieces of wood, and so we have been warm all day."

"Have you forgiven the Bolsheviki for disarming you?" I asked Kira.

Anna Shub broke in and asked excitedly: "Why should we forgive them? It is they who should forgive us. We are working girls and traitors have been trying to persuade us to fight our own people. We were fooled and we almost did it."

"How was that?" I asked.

Anna reached under her cot and took out a pasteboard box. The contents of that and what she had on her back was all that she had in the world besides a sick sparrow. The sick sparrow she had picked up on the street half frozen. Now it hopped about the room looking for crumbs and picking at spots on the floor. Anna opened the box and took out some folded papers. Two were small posters like those pasted daily on the buildings on the streets of Petrograd. "Read them," she said. They were written in the usual extravagant and colourful language of Russian bulletins. I give a free translation:

"Come with us in the name of your fallen heroes I Come with us and dry the tears and heal the wounds of Russia. Protect her with your lives.

"Wake up and see clear, you who are selling the heads of your children to the Germans. Soon, very soon, you will prefer to face ten German bayonets to one tigress. We pour out our maledictions upon you. Enough words! It is time to take up arms. Only with a storm of fire will we sweep the enemy off Russian soil. Only with bayonets will we attain a permanent peace. Forward against the enemy! We go to die with you."

After I finished reading Anna went on with her story.

"I left home," she said. "I left everything because I thought the poor soldiers of Russia were tired after fighting so many years, and I thought we ought to help them. When I arrived in Petrograd I began to see the truth; we were supposed to be shaming the soldiers."

Tears welled in her eyes. "I felt as if I myself could die of shame. I didn't know what to do. And then, just before the Winter Palace fell, one of the aristocrats of the Death Battalion came in and asked us to go down and join the Cossacks to fight the revolution."

"I am a Jew," said Anna, "and I come from within the Pale. Liberty is dearer than life to me. And I ... I was actually asked to do this thing!"

"I used to talk to the people in the bread-line," she went on, "about the Bolsheviki, and they said they were not bad people, and that they were our friends. When you go back to America," she said eagerly, as if every one would know about her unfortunate conduct, "tell them I am a woman soldier, and I fight only imperialistic invaders."

Anna and Kira had virtually no clothes at all. They had thin summer clothing, pieced out with all sorts of rag-tags they had managed to gather together, and they didn't know where to get their next meal. I offered them money and clothes. At first they both wept and refused and then they were quite happy in accepting.

A few nights before I left Petrograd I stopped at one of the huge military hospitals, where women soldiers were working. The Bolsheviki had secured them places so that they could get enough to eat.... That very day I hall seen two begging at one of the stations. I found that the girls had already gone home for the night. Following vague directions I walked up a dark street for about a quarter of a mile. The little house where they stayed stood in the middle of a deserted garden, snow-covered and desolate.

I went through an open door that sagged down on a broken hinge, and felt my way along the hall until I saw a shaft of light. I knocked and entered. Inside the little room was a peasant, his wife, their baby, the store, the bed and a highly pungent odour of cooking cabbage.

At the next door I had better success. This time it was a large room containing ten girls and ten beds, a long bench and a Russian stove. They were delighted to have company, especially from "so far away." We sat down on the bench and talked most of the night. Their stories were much the same as Anna's.

"We are girls from little towns," said one. "Some of us came with our parents' blessing, but most of us came with their curses. We were all moved by a high resolve to die for the revolution.

"How unhappy we have been! Everywhere we have been misunderstood. We expected to be honoured, to be treated as heroes, but always we were treated with scorn. On the streets we were insulted. At night men knocked at our barracks and cried out blasphemies. Most of us never got within miles of the front. The soldiers thought we were militarists and enemies of the revolution, and at last they disbanded us and took our arms away."

Another girl began to talk.

"That night," she said, "all of us thought of suicide; there was nothing left. We had no clothes and nowhere to go; life was unbearable. Some of us wanted to appeal to the Bolsheviki, to have a conference with them and explain our purpose. We wanted them to know that we would go to the front and fight for them or for any party. Our aim was to save Russia. But when we suggested that there were members of our battalion who objected and tried to get us to go down and join the Cossacks. We were horrified. We understood then how we had been misled. Of course we would not go...."

"Thirteen went," cried one of the girls.

"But they were aristocrats," answered the first speaker in great contempt.

They were violent in their denunciation of Botchkarova. "She calls us cowards," they said, "but it is she who runs away. It is she who abandons her country, who believes neither in Russian women nor Russian men. .. ."

It was just about the time that the negotiations were broken off at Brest-Litovsk and the possibility of the German advance was in everybody's mouth. I asked them if they would offer their services to the Soviet government in that case. They replied unanimously that they would.

"And how about you?" said one. "Will you fight with us?"

I said that I would. The idea pleased them very much. I was on my way home when the advance began and could not keep my word. But perhaps there will still be opportunity. Russia will be at war with Germany until the present German government is overthrown, and in that struggle for freedom of the Russian people I offer my services unreservedly.

It was almost dawn when I bid the women soldiers farewell. One of them walked a little way with me into the night. It was painfully cold.

"Be sure to come back," she urged sweetly as we shook hands.

"I give you my word of honour," I said, feeling terribly solemn. I looked down and suddenly I realised that her feet were bare. ...

When I think back now she personifies Russia to me, Russia hungry and cold and barefoot--forgetting it all--planning new battles, new roads to freedom.

Socialism: What It Is

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Jun 23, 2011 9:29 PM

There has been much media talk about “socialism” since the 2008 financial near-meltdown.

From the left, Lawrence O’Donnell, the liberal MSNBC commentator who has replaced Keith Olbermann, calls himself a “socialist.” Film-maker Michael Moore’s film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” the ninth-top-grossing documentary in history, tears capitalism apart, but stops far short of describing real socialist change.

From the far right, Glenn Beck, due to be removed from his Fox News pulpit later this summer, has made a career of falsely accusing centrist President Barack Obama of being a “socialist,” “Marxist” and “Maoist,” without defining any of these terms.

But what is socialism in reality? In an earlier article, we wrote about what socialist isn’t. In this one we’ll briefly describe what it is.

In a socialist society, the “commanding heights of the economy” or the “major means of production” -- banks, factories, businesses, health care, education, natural resources -- are the collective property of the workers. The handful of people -- the small class of wealthy individuals -- who now own them privately are no longer allowed to control them nor appropriate the wealth that the workers produce. Rather, these things become the common property of the vast majority of the population. They are used to serve human needs instead of profits.

Socialist revolutions, yesterday and today

In 1917 there was a socialist revolution in Russia. The organizations that were the basis for the new society were called “soviets,” the Russian word for “councils.” Lenin, the leader of the party that directed this great revolution, defined the soviets as “Councils of Worker’s and Soldier’s Deputies.” These bodies directed the new state power that replaced the old czarist-capitalist state.

With the support of this new state, Russian workers seized control of their factories. The vast natural resources of the country, such as the mines and oil wells, became common property as well.

With the workers and peasants as the rulers, Russia and other Soviet republics of what had been a czarist empire became the Soviet Union, which was transformed over several decades into a newly industrialized country. Illiteracy was abolished by an educational system that served the people. Health care was available free to all in hospitals run not for profit but owned collectively.

When German imperialism invaded in 1941, the Soviet Union defeated it and liberated half of Europe from fascism. The Soviet Union launched the first spacecraft, Sputnik, into orbit in 1957 and achieved other great achievements in science. While on the path to constructing socialism, the Soviet Union provided enormous aid to the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America in their struggle against domination by Western imperialists.

This was all done due to the change in property relations. With no capitalist class to dictate government policy and promote social inequality and discrimination against women, gays and oppressed nationalities, the kind of solidarity, unity and joint effort needed to carry these things out could be achieved.

Cuba had a socialist revolution as well in 1959. The revolution began as a popular armed revolt against a U.S.-sponsored dictator, but after expelling him, it could not liberate itself from imperialist rule without taking the country’s sugar and fruit plantations, cigar factories and other means of production under public control. With aid from the Soviet Union, Cuba began to build toward a socialist society with the goal of full employment and managed to construct excellent education and healthcare systems at no cost to individuals.

The Cubans too had a new state, with an army rooted in the revolutionary guerrilla movement supplemented by Committees for Defense of the Revolution, community organizations where workers could enforce popular defense of the system against attacks from U.S. imperialism and any internal enemies.

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a popular armed revolt at the end of World War II and the Japanese occupation made the people the owners and operators of the economy. The DPRK has successfully resisted U.S. domination for over half a century and has provided universal literacy and housing for the population. By taking steps toward socialism, the DPRK has defended itself and made some gains despite existing in a constant state of siege, having gone through a horrendous imperialism war in 1950-53 and facing continuing threats from the heavily armed, U.S.-occupied capitalist south Korea.

Envisioning socialism in the U.S.

Socialism in the United States, as everywhere else, will mean that the private property that was grabbed up by Wall Street and the corporations in the form of banks, oil wells, businesses and service industries like health insurance companies will become the property of all the workers -- that's 90-plus percent of the people.

Undoubtedly any struggle for socialist changes will involve organizing to combat racism, sexism, anti-lesbian/gay/bi/trans/queer bigotry and other forms of oppression. Under socialist workers' state power, the economy and society will no longer be led by those who have a material interest in maintaining divisions in the working class or of paying certain sections of the working class even less than others.

Most socialist societies have started from a place of extreme underdevelopment. But in the modern United States there is already huge material abundance. But this abundance is controlled by a wealthy, elite few, and huge poverty persists amid great wealth.

A socialist society in the United States would utilize the huge wealth and productive capability that exists, not to benefit a few rich people, but to provide a decent life for all, with a better future for generations to come.

As capitalism shows signs of potential collapse, more voices express interest in the socialist alternative. Workers World Party has as its main task the establishment of a socialist U.S. WWP fights against imperialist wars, for full employment and an end to all forms of oppression, all with the goal of ending capitalism and replacing it with socialism.

Those who wish to engage in the hard, difficult, yet glorious revolutionary struggle to abolish capitalism and fight for a socialist future should get in touch with WWP. We call on all those who wish to engage in this historic effort to join us!
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

WW Editorial: Mladic, Libya and justice

Published Jun 2, 2011 8:55 PM

Politicians running the powerful imperialist countries in Europe and North America and their corporate media have unanimously hailed the arrest of Yugoslav/Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic as a triumph of democracy. Even if you knew nothing about the civil war in Bosnia, you would have to be suspicious of these declarations. Why? Because the first thing the imperialists tried to do is use the arrest to justify the current war against Libya.

Editorials in Britain and the U.S., for example, presented the following Big Lie: Mladic’s case proves that NATO’s so-called humanitarian military interventions are needed. Then they argued that the “West” has to go after the Moammar Gadhafi government in Libya. If not, they contend, some massacre would happen like in Srebenica, a town in Bosnia.

If NATO’s “humanitarian” bombings kill a dozen Afghan children, as one did May 28, the same editorial writers pass it off as “collateral damage,” a phrase a NATO’s spokesperson invented during the 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia in 1999. That war has many similarities to the current U.S.-NATO bombing of Libya.

There is not enough space here to review the 1990-2000 imperialist campaign that succeeded in destroying and tearing apart Yugoslavia or to review all the controversial statements about Srebenica. But there is no reason to accept the judgment from London, Paris, Berlin and Washington that Mladic and the Serbs were evil incarnate. Nor is there reason to consider the court in The Hague, Netherlands, fair.

There is good reason for thousands of Serbs to protest their government’s arrest of Mladic, as they did May 29. NATO set up this court to try Serb leaders and to put pressure on them. It was never fair. It brought few charges against other political elements or peoples in the former Yugoslavia. Like the International Criminal Court bringing charges now against Gadhafi and his government or against leaders in Sudan, the Yugoslavia court is a political weapon in the hands of the imperialists.

And this court never reviewed the serious war crimes that NATO leaders committed in the Balkans. From the beginning, German imperialism provoked the civil war in Bosnia when it recognized the split-off, right-wing Alija Izetbegovic government. U.S. imperialist diplomats prolonged the civil war for three years when they encouraged Izetbegovic to refuse a truce in 1992 quite similar to the one that ended the war in 1995. (For more information see the book “NATO in the Balkans” published by the International Action Center, 1998.)

The truth of Bosnia, Mladic and the town of Srebenica will never come out of a NATO court, where NATO’s own war crimes are being covered up. Even Phillip Corwin, the highest ranking United Nations official in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, says that the international media “exaggerates” — diplomatic jargon for “lies” — when claiming there was a massacre of 8,000 civilians in Srebrenica. Srebrenica was a battle site, and, he says, there were civilians killed, as civilians are killed in all war zones. He says that about 800 died in the battle, most of them combatants. (“The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics”) It was NATO, under the same political leaders and generals who are now charging Mladic, that has committed serious war crimes in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and now in Libya.

No bomb, no “international court,” no news media in the hands of the imperialists can be trusted. Put the NATO leaders on trial. Hands off Serbia and Libya!
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

May Day in Moscow Includes Countless Competing Rallies

Not just unions and communists in Moscow this year for May 1st. The Russian LGBT movement marched, as did the Russian Fascists.

Recalling "Romantic Notions" Without Profits: RT on Soviet Railroad Construction

Grover Furr on Stalin

Class Struggle v. Class Collaboration: British Communists Debate The Road to Socialism

Nazi/Communist Alliance in the Weimar Republic? FALSE!

Glenn Beck has told a disgusting lie on national television. This is blatant and disgusting. Beck, in the above clip, maintains that the Nazi Party and The Communist Party were allies during the Weimar Republic.

This is just false.

The Communists formed the Red Front Fighters League to combat the Nazis.

Hitler's book Mein Kampf proclaims "Marxism seeks to deliver the world directly into the hands of the Jews."

The Communists had numerous Jewish people among their ranks.

The Nazi party was always militant in its Jew Hatred.

Hitler participated in the crushing of the 1918 Spartacus Revolution in Bavaria.

The Nazi party acted as an anti-communist and anti-labor goon squad.

Entire sections of Mein Kampf are devoted to demonizing "Marxism", "Bolshevism", and "Social Democracy."

Hitler referred to his movement as a "party of the right" that sought to save Germany from the "Red Flag of Destruction." Read Hitler's own speeches, posted various places on the internet for proof of this.

The phrase "First Brown, Then Red", and "After Hitler, Us" reffered to the Communist Party of Germany's (KPD) belief that Hitler would come into office and make capitalism look so disgusting with his open racism and cruelty, that workers would let the Communists walk into power as a result.

This didn't happen, because when fascism triumphed, Hitler then used the Reichstag Fire to block all further elections, and have the Communists put into death camps.

The phrase "first brown, then red" was based in the "social fascism" theory of the COMINTERN (Communist International), that argued that reformist and moderate socialists were more dangerous, as they tried to make capitalism softer with reforms, and pulled militant workers away from Communism.

The theory was repudiated by the COMINTERN in 1935. The fact that the Communist Party never differentiated the Social-Democrats and Liberals with the Fascists, was a huge historical error.

But, at no point in history were the Nazi Party of Germany and the Communist Party of Germany ever in an alliance.

This disgusting lie, which Glenn Beck has screamed into his million dollar microphone is beyond belief.

Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Thallmann, Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebkecht, and the numerous other Communists fought Hitler in the streets with guns, many eventually perishing as he came to power.

The fact that even networks like MSNBC who denounce Beck regularly are not filling the airwaves with historians refuting these falsehoods is shocking. The fact that the liberal sections of the media will let this falsehood go un-denounced shows that the "left" in the U.S. is just another wing of capitalism.

Does one have to be a Communist to realize that the Nazis and Communists hated each other throughout all of German history?

"Who controls the present, controls the past."

Roger Keeran on Mccarthyism

The Anniversary of the Red Army Liberating Auschwitz Nazi Death Camp

From: Marxist-Leninist Daily online journal of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)





66th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of Those Murdered by the Nazis

On January 27, 1945, near the end of the Second World War, the advancing Soviet Red Army entered the Nazis' Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp, liberating more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, most of whom were ill or dying. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of those murdered by the Nazis.

Today, as we commemorate the victims of the Nazis, we are duty-bound to note the prominence of the same Nazi banking and industrial interests today and what they and their political representatives are up to, not only in Germany but in the U.S., Canada and other countries. We are not only concerned with the fact that these scions of industry and banking established Auschwitz and benefitted from its slave labour and extermination programs. We are mainly concerned with what they are up to today to make sure it never happens again.

TML calls on Canadian workers and youth to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army by taking clear stock of attempts by current governments, including that of Stephen Harper, to resurrect Nazi war criminals by claiming that they were just ordinary men and women who fell victim to the crimes of so-called totalitarian communism. Why are they doing this? What aim does it serve today and why is it of concern to not only the Canadian working class and youth but to Canadians from all backgrounds, including all those who sacrificed in World War II to rid the world of the Nazi menace. Let us today imbue with new life the call of those who suffered in the first Great War: Never Again!

Lest we forget, on this occasion TML is publishing below an article "About Auschwitz" by Dougal MacDonald.

About Auschwitz

- Dougal MacDonald -

Auschwitz was a complex of labour and extermination camps built by the Nazis from 1940-42 in annexed Polish areas around the city of Oswiecim, about 50 km west of Krakow. The biggest Nazi concentration camp, it consisted of three large camps: the main camp Auschwitz I, the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp where 90 per cent of prisoners died, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz which supplied slave labour for chemical monopoly I.G. Farben. There were also more than 40 smaller sub-camps that exploited prisoners as slave labour in various industrial plants, armaments factories, coal mines, construction sites and farms. At first only Poles were imprisoned but later on Soviet prisoners of war, Romanies ("gypsies") and people of other nationalities were also incarcerated.

A Soviet document of May 6, 1945, officially acknowledged by the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, established that the Nazis exterminated four million people at Auschwitz (through execution, torture, starvation, illness, exhaustion and murderous medical experiments), and from 1948-89 a commemorative monument at the camp site honored the four million victims. Trying to diminish the enormity of Nazi crimes, the imperialists later reduced the deaths to 1.5 million, the "official" number inscribed on the new Auschwitz memorial in January 1995. The change created a propaganda windfall for the neo-Nazis whose big lie is that the Nazis and their collaborators did not murder anybody.


Auschwitz was a joint project of German and U.S. monopoly capitalism, which financed, built, and operated the camp, savagely exploited prisoner slave labour for profit and organized the extermination of the inmates. A few examples can be given of the many German monopolies involved. The archives of the Deutsche Bank "discovered" in 1999, contain detailed records of loans to companies that constructed camp facilities and that built the adjacent I.G. Farben chemical plant which used prisoners as slave labour, 25,000 of whom died. The I.G. Farben monopoly produced the Zyklon B gas used to exterminate prisoners, as well as many other products for the Nazi war machine. Insurance monopoly Allianz insured the property and personnel of Auschwitz. Ferdinand Porsche contacted SS leader Heinrich Himmler directly to request slaves from Auschwitz for his Volkswagen factory.

Red Army soldiers bear witness to Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz.

There are also many examples of collaboration between German and U.S. corporations which are still collaborating today. German monopoly AEG produced Auschwitz's electrical equipment, using camp slave labour, while German monopoly Siemens exploited almost 100,000 slave labourers in a factory inside Auschwitz that supplied the camp with electricity. The U.S. monopoly General Electric owned 30 per cent of AEG and had significant investments in Siemens. The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, two-thirds owned by Frederick Flick (convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg) and one-third owned by U.S. financier Averell Harriman and his partner Prescott Bush, also exploited Auschwitz slave labour. Prescott Bush's bloodstained profits launched his son George H. W. Bush into the oil business in 1953 as a partner in Zapata Corporation and eventually both his son and grandson into the U.S. presidency.

Other Nazi concentration camps besides Auschwitz supplied slave labour for the U.S. and German monopolies. One example is Ford-Werke, the U.S. Ford Motor Company subsidiary in Cologne, Germany, which used slave labourers from Buchenwald concentration camp in east-central Germany to make armored cars and trucks for the Wehrmacht.[1] Henry Ford was a long-time admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler, who praised Ford in Mein Kampf and awarded him Nazi Germany's highest medal for a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

One U.S. monopoly that profited handsomely from Auschwitz was IBM.[2] Shortly after Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland, IBM set up a special wartime subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, to help the Nazis organize the systematic looting and subjugation of Poland. The massive IBM statistical centre in Krakow, staffed by over 500 employees, sent data to the Reich's Central Office for Foreign Statistics and Foreign Country Research in Berlin. The Nazis used the information to systematically round up prisoners, target them on the basis of religion, nationality and political affiliation, transport them to Auschwitz, employ them as slave labour, starve and execute them. The infamous Auschwitz tattoo on inmates' forearms began as a five-digit IBM number, part of the customized punch-card system devised by IBM to track prisoners. The Polish IBM subsidiary operated even after the U.S. entered the war in December 1941.

Auschwitz was not the first time that IBM profited from the Nazi regime.

After Hitler assumed power, Nazi Germany quickly became IBM's most valuable client outside the U.S. In April 1933, the Nazis commissioned IBM subsidiary Dehomag to collect census data in Prussia. In 1937, the Nazis gave IBM a $14 million (today's equivalent) contract to conduct a new nationwide census, which, in accordance with the 1935 Nuremberg race laws (strikingly similar to the State of Virginia's race laws), included tracing Jewish ancestry. IBM's Viennese subsidiary, supervised by Adolf Eichmann, collected so-called demographic information about the Austrian population before the Nazi annexation in 1938. In nearly every occupied country, an already-existing IBM subsidiary collected information that informed the murderous plans of the Nazi aggressors, as well as helped to organize the efficient allocation of Nazi military equipment and personnel.[3]

The Allies, well aware of what was taking place at Auschwitz, made no effort to strategically bomb the camp, drop weapons to the prisoners, provide air cover for an escape, organize an assault to free the prisoners or even bomb the railway lines that took prisoners to the camp. The main person who blocked any U.S. attacks was banker and Rockefeller underling John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War. In late 1944, McCloy claimed a mission to Auschwitz would be too dangerous, even though a few months earlier, Allied forces had bombed nearby industrial centers, also causing damage to buildings in Auschwitz, while sustaining very low losses.

Perhaps McCloy's real reason was that the liberation of concentration camp prisoners would have undermined the profits of the monopolies that used camp slave labour. McCloy, who shared a box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics with Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering, was legal counsel for I.G. Farben from 1936-40, and close to Germany's Warburg banking family, which helped finance I.G. Farben. In the 1950s, McCloy pardoned and released all the Nazi war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg Trials, including industrialists Gustav Krupp, Frederick Flick, and the I.G. Farben directors. McCloy was close friends with pro-Nazi Henry Ford, who made him chairman of the Ford Foundation from 1958-65, overlapping with McCloy's 1953-60 chairmanship of the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank, which, as the Chase National Bank, had helped the Nazi regime exchange marks for dollars. McCloy was also a lobbyist for the Rockefellers' Standard Oil, I.G. Farben's U.S. partner, as well as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, which donated funds to found the German eugenics program.[4]

After the war, IBM retrieved its German assets and profits without incident. Never did the Allies suggest that IBM be prosecuted for war crimes at Auschwitz or for any other war crimes, even though Thomas Watson, IBM's chairman from 1924-1956, not only collaborated with the Nazi regime but also became a political spokesperson for the German Reich. In 1937, Hitler awarded Watson the Merit Cross of Eagle with Star. The major shareholders of IBM, who were the Watson family, Sherman Fairchild, and other descendants of the founders, kept and continued to amass their personal fortunes. Thomas Watson and his brother Arthur were later made U.S. foreign ambassadors, while Sherman Fairchild died peacefully in 1971 with an estimated wealth of more than $200 million.
Notes

1. See, Billstein, Reinhold, Fings, Karola, Kugler, Anita, & Levis, Nicholas, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labour in Germany During the Second World War. Berghahn Books. 2000.
2. See, Black, Edwin, IBM and the Holocaust. Crown Publishers, 2001.
3. In 2004, a group of Romanies ("gypsies") launched a lawsuit against IBM, which is slowly working its way through the Swiss courts. The suit alleges that IBM's punch-card machines helped the Nazis commit mass murder more efficiently. The lawsuit was filed in Geneva, Switzerland, the location of IBM's wartime European headquarters.
4. In 1945, McCloy was instrumental in delaying the peace talks with Japan to set the stage for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Innumerable other examples can be given which illustrate the consequence of his decades of loyal service to the U.S. financial oligarchy.

Ayn Rand & Jared Lee Loughner: A Match Made in Hell

by Caleb T. Maupin

The media has focused a great deal of time on examining the motives of Jared Lee Loughner, the 22 year old who opened fire on a political rally in Tucson, Arizona. Much emphasis has been put on his listing of Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” among other books, among his favorites.

A Sinister Philosophy

However, another book stands out on the racist killers reading list. That book is “We the Living” by Ayn Rand. The fact that this book was listed says a great deal about the personality of this racist murderer, and how he views other human beings, himself, and politics.

Ayn Rand was a right-wing intellectual of the Post-WWII era. Her books all serve to preach an ideology called “objectivism.” Rand bragged that this new “philosophy” she had invented could rationalize pure free market capitalism, while no other moral code could. She may be correct.

Regardless, Rand became a household name during the time when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), along with Ronald Reagan, purged Hollywood of leftist screenwriters and actors.

Rand testified against her co-workers in the film industry, and was rewarded with book contracts and publicity.

Rand’s novels reek with capitalist worshiping sociopathy. Her novel “The Fountainhead” has a scene portraying rape as a moral act. Her most highly praised work “Atlas Shrugged” tells of the capitalists of the world going on strike in protest of “the mob” i.e. the working class, somehow persecuting them with government regulation and wealth redistribution.

Rand’s non-fiction is even more twisted in content. One of her many texts is titled “On the Virtue of Selfishness” and preaches that compassion for other human beings is a form of weakness. Another book, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” claims that the bankers and capitalists are “the most persecuted minority”, a laughable concept at best!

Rand’s writings have received a great deal of promotion in the present times, as the wealthy use them to propagate the ideas of the “Tea Party” and other ultra-rightist movements. FOX news, Ron Paul, Campaign for Liberty, the John Birch Society, and countless other ideological ultra-rightist organizations view Rand as prophet, proclaiming to humanity the merits of ruthlessness, and the need to hand complete power over to the “great men” who drive the capitalist economic system.

"We The Living" vs. Real Soviet History

The particular novel that was so adored by the ruthless Arizona murderer is particularly interesting. “We The Living” is Rand’s first novel, published before she became famous. It is an ugly, deceptive attack on the heroic Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Rand wrote the novel after moving to the United States, leaving the USSR. Her hatred of the USSR was largely based on the fact that her wealthy father was forced to share his mansion with working class people by the Bolsheviks. The injustice and persecution Rand felt at seeing workers get a share of the wealth they produce never left her.

The novel portrays the Soviet Union as a hellhole of starvation and corruption, and slanders the leaders of the Bolshevik Party as corrupt and incompetent.

At the time this novel was published in 1936, the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse. The Communist Party’s five years plans had brought with them full employment, free education for all, and quality medical care. Soviet life expectancy triple during this period.

At the same time, the rest of the world was in the grips of the “great depression.” While thousands of workers in the U.S. were unemployed and starving, the Soviet Union had a labor shortage, and hired thousands of workers from the U.S. and elsewhere to help them in a boom of socialist construction.

Mighty collective farms drove starvation into the pages of history. The first steel mills in the region pumped out tons of sturdy metal. The world’s largest hydro-electric power station, the Dniper Dam lit up the countryside. Railroads connected the far off Siberian territories, and the isolated villages of Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus to the world.

The Bolshevik regime was the first country to legalize homosexuality in modern Europe. Abortion was likewise made legal, and birth control was given on demand, without apology.

Illiteracy was abolished as members of the Young Communist League and the Young Pioneers poured into the countryside.

While capitalist countries like Germany, Spain, and Italy embraced fascism to save capitalism, and lynch mobs waged a reign of terror in the Jim Crow U.S. South, the USSR stood tall as a shining light of social equality. Women managed factories and held seats in the Soviet Government. Paul Robeson visited the USSR and proclaimed “I am at home” as the racial discrimination so common in the U.S. was non-existent.

The portrait portrayed in the piece of fiction so beloved by ruthless, racist killer Jared Lee Loughner is not consistent with reality.

The Danger of "Revolutionary" Rightism" & Fascism

The lie that the USSR and other Socialist Countries were horrid and impoverished has long been used by the ultra-right. Glenn Beck and his ilk have even tried to convince workers that the misery of unemployment, home foreclosures, and economic suffering they endure is because the U.S. is “socialist.”

Just as Hitler referred to the Weimar Republic as “Marxist” in order to discredit revolutionaries in 1930s Germany and win angry working people to a right-wing position, now the ultra-right does the same in painting Obama as a “Socialist” and a “Marxist” as he presides over bank bail-outs and massive tax cuts for the super rich.

The lies that are peddled by the ultra-right, including hitmen like young Loughner are deceptive fascist poison. The cause of the massive suffering so many feel in the present time is not immigrant workers, oppressed people, “socialism”, or the President of the United States.

The cause is the ruthless capitalist class, who lives by exploiting human labor and foments war and destruction around the world.

The only hope for working people in the U.S. is to cast off rightist lies like those peddled by the Loughners and Becks of the world, and build a revolutionary movement to bring this ugly system down, and win real justice.

Loughner and his ideological co-horts are a tragic symptom of the decline of capitalism, and the lack of true revolutionary organizations to defend workers interests.

To many young working people are unaware of Marxism-Leninism and its path to a brighter future of working class power and equality. Instead, the poison of Fox News, Ron Paul, Ayn Rand, or the Tea Party fills the void. These fascistic, ultra-rightist “movements” connect with young worker’s rage at their material conditions, but also manipulate this rage into disgusting racism, bigotry, and eventually confused depression and insanity.

What young worker’s need more than ever is a strong revolutionary movement confronting the capitalist system, and demanding jobs, education, and healthcare for all. Furthermore, they need to join with the battle to abolish capitalism, and fight for World Socialism as the capitalism dies a fiery, explosive, and destructive death.

1935: "I Am At Home" Paul Robeson in the USSR

From: M-L Translations
"I Am at Home"
Says Robeson at Reception in Soviet Union

Interview by Vern Smith, Daily Worker, January 15, 1935

Moscow, U.S.S.R.-"This is Paul Robeson, the greatest American singer!" declared the famous film director, Eisenstein, introducing Robeson to a reception in his honor, attended by nearly all the celebrities in Moscow's theatre and art world. The reception was given in the "House of the Kino," palatial club house of the workers of the movie industry.

I repeat the words of Eisenstein, master of ceremonies at the reception, not by way of informing the public as to who Robeson is, for that is well enough known, but to show the tone of the feeling of the workers and the artists of the Soviet Union towards this visiting Negro singer, son of a slave in the United States-to show the wholehearted appreciation of these Russian sons of serfs who now are freed by their own efforts.

The reception was long and brilliant and lasted until about 2 a.m. But somehow in the course of it, Robeson found time to answer a few questions from the Daily Worker correspondent.

I began with the obvious: "Have you noticed a race question in the Soviet Union?"

An undercurrent of laughter rumbled under Robeson's big mellow voice as he answered: "Only that it seems to work to my advantage!"

And then he explained. He has been studying the Soviet Union for two years, studying the Russian language also for that length of time, has been a regular reader of the Pravda and Isvestia for months, and knows something about the solution of the race question here. He knows that the Soviet theory is that all races are equal-really equal, socially equal, too, as well as economically and politically. He expressed delight but no surprise when I informed him of the election to the Moscow Soviet of the American Negro, Robinson, working in the First State Ball Bearing Plant here.

But what he admitted he had not been expecting was the simple, wholehearted, affectionate welcome that lay in store for him. Robeson declares himself that he knows he has made a sufficient place for himself by his singing and acting, that even in the capitalist world some of the bitterest aspects of Jim-Crowism and white chauvinism are not applied to him. But it is just this feeling that a condescending exception has been made of him that is missing here. Here there is just the enthusiastic joy of Russian workers and artists, they or their fathers also once slaves of capitalist and landlord, who now welcome in addition a man they feel is a brother artist from abroad, coming with a real desire to honestly know and understand the new life they have made for themselves.

"I was not prepared for the happiness I see on every face in Moscow," said Robeson. "I was aware that there was no starvation here, but I was not prepared for the bounding life; the feeling of safety and abundance and freedom that I find here, wherever I turn. I was not prepared for the endless friendliness, which surrounded me from the moment I crossed the border. I had a technically irregular passport, but all this was brushed aside by the eager helpfulness of the border authorities. And this joy and happiness and friendliness, this utter absence of any embarrassment over a 'race question' is all the more keenly felt by me because of the day I spent in Berlin on the way here, and that was a day of horror-in an atmosphere of hatred, fear and suspicion."

Commenting on the recent execution after court-martial of a number of counter-revolutionary terrorists, Robeson declared roundly: "From what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!

"It is the government's duty to put down any opposition to this really free society with a firm hand," he continued, "and I hope they will always do it, for I already regard myself at home here. This is home to me. I feel more kinship to the Russian people under their new society than I ever felt anywhere else. It is obvious that there is no terror here, that all the masses of every race are contented and support their government."

Robeson commented on the absence of slums, on the huge building of workers' apartments in the factory districts, such districts as are invariably slums in capitalist cities. He declared that he will make an extensive study of the club life of the Soviet worker, especially as the clubs are centers of instrumental and vocal musical training, and of dramatic art.

[Robeson has developed a theory, based on his knowledge of Central Asian folk music and drama, and on his recent three months experience in Africa in connection with the filming of a motion picture scenario based on African life, that a new vehicle of expression, not drama, and not opera, can be evolved from these arts of primitive peoples. He sees certain underlying consistent bases in all this art of primitive civilizations. He hopes to supplement his observations by a study of Chinese folk music and drama.

He has selected the Soviet Union as a most proper center from which to conduct his researches, and as the only country giving him unstintedly the social and other environment in which he can systematically complete his research and work towards this new form of artistic expression. He says that he intends to remain in the Soviet Union until about the middle of January, then will have to return to England for the final completion of the film of African life and to wind up his other affairs there. Then sometime during 1935 he will come with his whole family to the Soviet Union for a prolonged stay, working on his researches and on the first steps of the new form of drama and opera, meanwhile singing and acting in the Soviet theatres and moving pictures.]

At the reception given in his honor here, Robeson sang, besides several Negro workers' songs and spirituals, four selections in the Russian language: two from the opera "Boris Godunov," one old folk song and a Cossack lullaby. Hearty applause and the voiced opinion of those present testified to his progress in the rather difficult Russian language.

He has deliberately and for a long time been laying plans and preparing to move to the U.S.S.R. as the most suitable center for the important work of artistic innovation which he has in mind, and because he had decided on the basis of much evidence that it is a place where a man may do such work with greatest freedom and facility. He said in his interview that he is more than satisfied that the Soviet Union is just such a place.

My Speech at the WWP 2010 Conference

CPC(ML): Smash The Falsifications!

Anniversary of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact,
August 23, 1939
Smash the Falsifications on
the Origins of the Second World War!

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union signed what is now known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact with Germany which stipulated that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union would not attack Germany. Future events proved the farsightedness of Stalin in signing the pact. It was the best of all available alternatives. It provided the Soviet Union with 22 months of peace so as to prepare herself to withstand the inevitable German invasion and it put an end to the Anglo-American and French policy of egging Hitler toward the East in what would have resulted in a completely isolated Soviet Union facing massive German forces.

The Nazis did eventually invade the Soviet Union as expected but not until June 22, 1941 in the largest German military operation of the war. The heroic and protracted Soviet resistance against the Nazis culminated in the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, that concluded with the encirclement and surrender of a German army of 300,000 troops. This was followed by another decisive Soviet victory at Kursk. These triumphs began a powerful counteroffensive that drove the German Hitlerites steadily backward until the final demise of the Third Reich in Berlin. On May 9, 1945 the anti-fascist forces of the world with the Soviet Union and communists of all lands at the head of the Resistance Movement declared victory over the Hitlerite Nazis. Fascist Germany acknowledged defeat and declared unconditional surrender.

Completely ignoring these undisputed facts, the reactionaries of today are using the anniversary of the non-aggression pact not to once again acclaim the great victory of the world's people over Nazi Germany but to follow their mentor Goebbels by making such fascist claims as, "On August 25, 1939 the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which led to the second world war, the killing of millions of people and the Holocaust."[1]

Such big lies should not be treated with indifference because they are not harmless and need to be opposed. The aim can only be to create a climate which will assist the same kind of Hitlerite and fascist forces to rise once again. In fact, those carrying out this propaganda today are the descendants of the very same fascist forces.

To suggest that Stalin's signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany was the cause of World War II is the basest infamy. First, it should be noted that Britain and France had already issued a joint declaration of non-aggression with the Germans in 1938. Of all the non-aggressive Great Powers in Europe, the Soviet Union was the last to agree to a pact with the Germans. Second, "The history of events in 1937, both before and after Hitler's occupation of Austria in March show that the Soviet Union, as it had done in earlier years, made many efforts to persuade Britain and France to maintain collective mutual assistance and in particular to carry our their undertaking to defend Czechoslovakia against aggression .The Soviet Union was not only willing to join forces with France to defend Czechoslovakia, if France would keep her word, but was prepared to defend Czechoslovakia on her own, even if France refused" [2]

All these efforts failed and the British and French refused to sign the collective mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union. Instead, they signed the September 29, 1938, Munich Pact with Germany which permitted Germany to incorporate the Sudeten, ordered the Czechs not to resist Nazi aggression and gave the Nazis the green light to launch their attacks across Europe.

Of course the reactionaries never want to discuss the Munich Pact because it was such a blatant betrayal of the world's people that even Winston Churchill accused Prime Minister Chamberlain in the British Parliament: "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war."

It is indisputable that faced with the British and French betrayal, the Soviet Union had no choice but to take whatever measures it could to defend itself and the cause of peace.

All these facts can be verified. They are all available in reports, speeches, accounts and documents of that time. Just to give one example, Memo #8604, which was sent to Moscow by Russian intelligence from Prague several days before the signing of the Munich Agreement reads: "On September 19, British Ambassador Newton and French Ambassador De Lacroix conveyed to Milan Hodza (Czechoslovak prime minister in 1935-1938) the following on behalf of Chamberlain and Daladier, respectfully: 'Guided by the lofty principles of preserving peace in Europe, they consider it necessary for Germany to incorporate the Sudeten region. A system of mutual aid pacts with other countries should be cancelled.'"[3]

The nefarious actions of the Anglo-Americans and the French, behind the back of the Soviet Union, which had mutual aid agreements with Czechoslovakia and France, destroyed the existing elements of the collective resistance system against Nazi Germany. It was the Munich Pact which was the final cowardly act that led to the second world war, the killing of millions of people, and the Holocaust. The judgment of history points to the truth about the Anglo-American and French betrayal of the world's people and to the truth about the heroic role of the Soviet Union and J. V. Stalin in defeating the Nazis. "In the end, the resistance of the Soviet peoples led by Stalin and the Communist Party broke the back of the Nazi aggressors. Some 50 million people died and another 35 million were seriously wounded during the Anti-Fascist War with the peoples of the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the casualties"[4]



Footnotes

1. Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact': Stalin was 'prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War', Nick Holdsworth, Telegraph UK, October 18, 2008
2. Bains, Hardial. Causes and Lessons of the Second World War. Toronto: MELS, 1990, p. 54.
3. Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Declassifies Munich Agreement Papers, Valery Harmolenko, RIA Novosti, September 29, 2008.
4. "The overthrow of the imperialist system is the only guarantee for peace." The Marxist-Leninist Daily, May 11, 2010.

1972: German Democratic Republic Welcomes Angela Davis

In 1972, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) welcomed Communist leader Angela Yvonne Davis. The visit came just after she was acquitted of murder and kidnapping, defeating an FBI frame-up in court.

The well known Communist Party USA member, and famous Professor of Feminist Philosophy was given an honorary degree from Karl Marx University. Earlier, a "World Conference on the Example of Angela Davis" had been held in West Germany, despite repression from the government.

In the U.S. she had been fired from her position as a professor at the University of California - Los Angeles. At the time, California law banned members of the Communist Party from holding teaching positions at public schools or Universities.

Ronald Reagen, then governor of California, had said he supported the death penalty for Davis if she was convicted. However, the charges were defeated, and two months later, Davis was welcomed in the Socialist Bloc as a hero, dubbed "America's Minister of Education" by a popular East German song.











The businessmen of death

want to kill you, Comrade Angela.

But you will be free and will

become America's minister of education.

- Pop Song from the German Democratic Republic

U.S. Talks Peace, Prepares New Bombs

By Kathy Durkin
Published Aug 15, 2010 10:32 PM

Sixty-five years ago the entire world watched in horror as the United States dropped atomic bombs over Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a four-ton uranium bomb on Hiroshima, only to follow that horrific attack by unleashing a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki three days later. The cities became infernos.

By the end of 1945, more than 250,000 people — men, women, children, mainly civilians — were dead. Many were incinerated instantly. People within a one-mile radius of Hiroshima were vaporized. Thousands died agonizing deaths soon after from burns, injuries and radiation poisoning. In subsequent years, more deaths occurred from cancers and other radiation-related diseases.

Sixty percent of Hiroshima was destroyed. The bomb was aimed at the city center; residential areas bore the brunt of the impact. Only four of the 30 targets were military, in line with U.S. war policy of bombing Japanese civilian populations. Nagasaki, an industrial city and port, was flattened.

Among those who died were 20,000 Koreans in Hiroshima and 2,000 in Nagasaki, whom Japan had drafted as forced laborers during World War II. Conscripted Chinese workers were killed, too.

The U.S. is the first and only country ever to use nuclear weapons. Washington has never shown regret for the bombings nor apologized for causing such monumental destruction and devastation of human life.

As the war was ending, the U.S. dropped the A-bombs to assert military hegemony in Asia and as a warning to the socialist Soviet Union. Washington showed the world that it had developed and would use nuclear weapons against civilian populations.

This year’s commemoration ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace memorial was attended for the first time by representatives of nuclear powers Britain, France and the U.S. The U.S. Embassy claimed that Ambassador John Roos attended to support the administration’s goal of a “world without nuclear weapons.”

Japanese anti-war activists stood firm and rightfully criticized the U.S. at an “alternative memorial” nearby. They called for the U.S. to apologize for the bombings and to remove all military bases from their country.

There has been a long and massive struggle to get U.S. bases out of Okinawa, where 70 percent of U.S. bases in Japan are situated. Especially key to activists is the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, one of the largest U.S. bases in East Asia. The U.S. refuses to relocate or close this facility, as it is key to its military strategy there.

Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe warned in the New York Times of “the possibility that we [Japan] will allow [U.S.] nuclear weapons to pass through Japan.” Oe explains that this violates Japan’s post-war nonnuclear principles, which forbid nuclear weapons from being brought into the country. (Aug. 5)

Can the U.S. government be believed when it claims to be for a nuclear-weapons-free world? Actions speak louder than proclamations.

Since 1946, the U.S. has threatened to use nuclear weapons at least 30 times, including against the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran and Iraq.

In April, prior to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, Washington asserted the right of nuclear first-strike against Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea if the U.S. decided they were violating nonproliferation rules.

No agency is downsizing the U.S. arsenal’s 5,113 nuclear warheads, 12 nuclear-powered submarines and 1,152 nuclear warheads in the world’s oceans. The U.S. isn’t cutting back on its international stores of thermonuclear bombs and cruise missiles.

Instead, in May, the Obama administration proposed increasing nuclear weapons-related funding to a record $180 billion over the next decade — $80 billion for modernizing the nuclear weapons complex and $100 billion for strategic nuclear delivery systems, including bombers and submarine-based missiles.

This multi-billion-dollar, profit-driven weapons production is inherent to capitalism. So is the war drive. The imperialist U.S. is compelled to strive for global economic, political, military and strategic domination.

Any discussion of nuclear nonproliferation must begin with the U.S. If the Obama administration claims to support this, then it should stop research and development of new weapons and begin to disarm immediately.

Fidel Castro appeals to Obama

On the anniversary of Hiroshima’s devastation, Cuban leader Fidel Castro made an urgent personal appeal to U.S. President Barack Obama through a special address to the Cuban National Assembly, calling on Washington to refrain from unleashing a nuclear attack on Iran.

Nuclear war is a great danger to the world’s people. The global stockpile is equivalent to 150,000 times the potency of the bombs dropped on Japan.

The world’s anti-war forces must keep up the struggle for nuclear disarmament. U.S. activists have the primary responsibility of demanding unilateral nuclear disarmament of U.S. imperialism, even as the world’s people demand elimination of all these weapons.

The enormous sums spent by the U.S. on nuclear weapons’ funding could instead be used to create a real jobs program for millions of unemployed and underemployed workers, to build hospitals and schools, and to provide health care, housing, education and nutritious food for all.

Progressive forces must organize to stay the hand of U.S. imperialism so that there is never another nuclear attack.

Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Even CIA Statistics Show 'Free Market' Brings Disaster to Eastern Europe

PART 2

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Aug 15, 2010 10:26 PM

The Central Intelligence Agency, a ruthless enforcer of Wall Street’s drive for profits, publishes “The World Factbook.” It gives updated statistics for every country, some of which measure quality of life and societal health, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, unemployment and industrial production. In this series, Workers World examines some surprising conclusions, all using the CIA’s own statistics. Even though these statistics often understate gains compared to United Nations figures, they can’t help but show that countries benefit by breaking with imperialism.

When the Soviet Union dissolved and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe experienced counterrevolutions, the press proclaimed that the “free market” would bring prosperity to the people there. The media claimed that the collapse of the USSR was due not to 72 years of hot and cold war against the socialist regime, but to an inherent flaw in socialism.

They claimed that now that capitalism had returned to the USSR and Eastern Europe, prosperity and increased quality of life would ensue.

Statistics show that the actual results of the massive counterrevolutions were otherwise.

Belarus is the only country in the former USSR still attempting to maintain a socialist economic model. The rest of the former USSR and Eastern Europe have largely succumbed to the economics of the “free market.”

National infant mortality rates are universally recognized as basic quality of life barometers. The socialist economy of Belarus has achieved a relatively low infant mortality rate of 6.34 deaths per 1,000 births in the first year. Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania and Poland all have higher infant mortality than socialistic Belarus. The infant mortality rate in capitalist Ukraine is 8.73.

Capitalist Georgia, whose pro-Western regime attacked Russia in 2008, has a very high infant mortality rate of 15.67, while Bulgaria’s infant mortality is 17.26.

The highest infant mortality in Eastern Europe is suffered by Romania. Romania was the victim of a brutal capitalist counterrevolution in 1989 and its president was executed. Under the free market, the infant mortality rate has climbed to 22.09.

It seems that the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe has hardly been an “economic miracle.” Almost 20 years after the collapse, Eastern Europe has entered the “free world” of high infant mortality and shorter life expectancies.

It seems that Belarus, dubbed “the last Soviet Republic” by Western media, and demonized for its refusal to adopt capitalist economics, has a much better quality of life than the regimes that “reformed” themselves into the system of free-market chaos and impoverishment.

More to come
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Memorial of Stalin Dedicated in the Ukraine

No Ukrainian-American Can Ever Say "I Know the Truth About The Evils Of Communism." The ones back in Ukraine, who didn't run away to Parma, OH have built a Monument to Stalin. What further information is needed to discredit the anti-Communist "holomodor" industry, and cult of Czarist Solyzenitzn and lying fools like Robert Conquest.




ZAPORIZHIA, Ukraine — Ukrainian communists on Wednesday unveiled a controversial monument to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, despite angry criticism from nationalists.

About 1,000 supporters of the Communist Party, including many elderly World War II veterans bedecked with medals, cheered as the monument was dedicated in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhia.

"Long live Stalin!" said one of the speakers at the festive, Soviet-style event, as the audience responded: "Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!"

The metal statue was placed outside the local headquarters of the Communist Party in Zaporozhia, a Russian-speaking city about 500 kilometres (300 miles) southeast of Kiev.

Standing more than two metres (seven feet) tall and depicting Stalin holding a pipe, it was commissioned by local communists and dedicated ahead of this weekend's 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Stalin is a deeply controversial figure who is accused of causing the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens in his brutal Gulag prison camps and through the forced collectivization of agriculture.

Nationalists in Ukraine -- which won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 -- revile Stalin as the instigator of a 1930s famine which killed millions of Ukrainians.

But Stalin's supporters praise his role in the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.

"It was the USSR under Stalin's leadership that liberated Europe," Olexander Zubchevsky, the second secretary of the Zaporozhia regional branch of the Communist Party, told AFP ahead of the dedication ceremony.

The Gazeta po-Kievsky newspaper reported that the Stalin statue had been sculpted in secret and that communists would keep a round-the-clock guard around the monument to prevent it from being defaced.

Svoboda (Freedom), a Ukrainian nationalist group, had sought to hold a protest against the dedication of the monument, calling Stalin "the executioner of the Ukrainian people."

But Svoboda was denied permission by Zaporozhia authorities to hold its protest, the Interfax news agency reported.

The dedication comes three months after the election of Ukraine's new pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Yaunkovych has downplayed the importance of the Stalin statue, saying it was a communist initiative not backed by the government.

"Since this territory belongs to the communists, the consent of the city council was not needed," Yanukovych said last week in comments carried by the presidential press service.

Yanukovych said residents of Zaporozhia should vote in a referendum on whether their city should be home to the statue.

From AFP News Service/Google