WfJIlIlEIlI"III1"'Il'

2 5 ~
No.520 ~ X ' 5 2 3 . 15 February 1991
Defeat U.S. Imperialism-Defend Iraq!
error

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FEBRUARY ll-Four weeks into the
U.S. air war against Iraq, the Pentagon
and George Bush keep repeating hypnoti-
cally that everything is "on course" and
"on schedule." The mass media lull the
public to sleep with round-the-clock lies
and images of an antiseptic war in which
not a drop of blood nor amangled body
ever appears on the TV screen. But the
only thing which is on schedule is the
mass slaughter being visited on the-Iraqi
people by the U.S. war criminals.
The A-bomb which leveled Hiroshima
carried 15,000 tons of explosive firepow-
er. That much and more is what is being
rained down on Iraq by the U.S. and its
allies every day. Homes and hospitals,
schools and factories are being turned
into rubble. City bridges in Baghdad are
destroyed. Not content to drop their
payloads of death from the air, U.S.
pilots even strafe civilians fleeing for
shelter and refugees fleeing west to Jor-
dan on the "highway of death."
In World War II, Hitler adopted a pol-
icy of Schrecklichkeit, deliberate terroriz-
ing of the "enemy" population. This was
expressed in the bombing of Coventry
and the London blitz. The Allies outdid
the Nazis in this department with the
firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, turn-
ing those cities into huge crematoria. In
Vietnam this was called "destroying the
country in order to save it." George Bush
has set out to terrorize and destroy the
Iraqi people to impose a Pax Americana
continued on page 12
u.s. Prepares Bloody Ground War
Dejong/AP
"Apocalypse Now" in the desert.
Troops Protest at Fort Hood
The Army admits it's the first mass
protest by American soldiers since
the Persian Gulf War began. Over
100 Louisiana National Guardsmen
at Fort Hood, Texas walked off at
midnight on February 5 to protest
conditions at the base, including
charges of racism. Forty of the
Guardsmen, members of the I st Bat-
talion, 156th Armor, 256th Infantry
Brigade, were declared AWOL. Offi-
cials said 90 others used a 24"hour
pass to head home to Shreveport.
Thefollowing night "another large
group" were stopped as they prepared
to go home on a number of chartered
buses! The entire 4,300-member
brigade was reportedly confined to
post. According to the Baton Rouge
Morning Advocate (8 February): "The
Army said the defections was the
first mass protest by U.S. troops
training for the Persian Gulf war."
According to WVUE TV, New Or-
leans, some of the Guardsmen were
arrested on "suspicion of mutiny and
conspiracy." Federal agents and MPs
arrested scores of soldiers as they re-
turned to Fort Hood. Army and
Guard brass are threatening swift
punishment including busting rank,
hard labor and years in the brig, and
possibly the death penalty for deser-
tion in wartime.
The protesting troops of the 256th
Infantry Brigade included both blacks
and whites. Press accounts mentioned
soldiers' complaints of inadequate
medical care and food, and that their
promised leave was cut in half. A
Louisiana reporter told WV that
charges of racism were not being
reported because they were "unsub-
stantiated," But this explosive issue
slipped past the media self-censors in
one AP dispatch, which said that
brigade commander Brig. Gen. Gary
Whipple "generally dismissed their
claims of mistreatment and racism."
Just two weeks before the protest,
members of another unit of the 1st
Battalion, the 141st Field Artillery
from New Orleans, went AWOL.
Others were arrested at the Killeen,
Texas airport. One soldier said he
didn't want to be "cannon fodder" in
Saudi Arabia (New Orleans Times-
Picayune, 26 January).
Soldiers who spoke to the press
told of being forced to train in
freezing rain without cold-weather
gear. Fifteen men suffered frostbite
or exposure. One artillery battery
refused orders to fire in early January
unless conditions improved. Another
Guardsman in the 256th, a student at
Southern University, declared he
would not fight-in the Middle East.
In the face of a wave of patriotic
hoopla designed to regiment the
American population in support of
this racist war, here is an integrated
group refusing to just "eat it." In
fascist David Duke's backyard there
continued on page 12
AP
Louisiana Guardsmen walk off Fort ~ o o d army
base to protest rotten conditions and racism.
EasternStrike'Was Betrayed
of the reformist Communist Party, to the
petty-bourgeois nationalism of the ANC,
which is unable to overcome the tribal/
ethnic divisions adroitly exploited by the
apartheid rulers.
This underlines our insistence that
"The central strategic task for a commu-
nist vanguard in South Africa is to set
the proletarian and plebeian base of the
ANC against the petty-bourgeois nation-
alist and collaborationist tops in the
struggle to create organs of dual power,
the basis for a black-centered workers
government." While the reformists with
their pipe dream of "power-sharing" are
today opposing struggles of the black
proletariat (such as the bitter Mercedes-
Benz strike in East London), we raise
the program of socialist revolution which
can unite blacks, coloureds and Indians
and the increasing number of whites who
do not wish to live in a racist garrison
state.
It is at the workplace, where the prole-
tariat is physically concentrated, that
serious struggles for class unity can be
made. Organized initially independent of
the ANC, the black trade unions have
grown explosively to become the central
focus for class struggle in South Africa.
But they have since co-opted by the
SACP/ANC. The critical task is to break
the working class from the nationalist/
reformist stranglehold and free its enor-
mous power in the fight to smash apart-
heid-for workers revolution.
misnamed Militant. Occupying a couple
of "strike coordinator" posts, supporters
of the SWP carried out a cynical, ref-
ormist game, endlessly proclaiming that
the strike never looked better, even after
the pilots and flight attendants crossed
the lAM lines and returned to work in
November 1989.
At the very beginning of the strike,
Wimpy and the AFL-CIO tops blustered
about shutting down East Coast com-
muter railroads with secondary strikes.
The Wall Street Journal called it "Labor's
'atom bomb'." We wrote: "Picket lines
must go up now at every airline, air
freight and airport service company. No
more PATCOs! Shut down the airports!"
But the SWP, after admitting that Eastern
strikers, and rail workers, were "looking
forward" to the secondary pickets, de-
fended the lAM bureaucrats when they
reined in the pickets:
"But the Eastern workers refused to be
provoked [!] into breaking the court
injunctions and held back from setting up
the pickets-a move that could have
jeopardized the broad public support for
the strike and the unity of the strike
itself."
-Militant, 5 May 1989
The "unity" the SWP talks about is
their unity with "Wimpy" and lAMDis-
trict 100 honcho Charles Bryan.
Now that the strike is over, these
water boys for. the bureaucracy pro-
claimed "Eastern Strike Scores Gains for
Labor" and editorialized about "Eastern
Strikers' Victories" (Militant, 8 Febru-
ary). With more "victories" like this,
there won't be much of a labor move-
ment left. To cover its ass, the SWP now
tsk-tsks "attempts by the union official-
dom to divert the fight into the courts,
halls of Congress, or buyout speculation"
(Militant, 8 February). But back in May
'89 when it counted, these reformists
were telling strikers that solidarity with
the strike "has been strengthened by
the official support the strike has won
from the AFL-CIO leadership." This
continued on page 13
Editorial Note
SWP's misnamed
Militant portrays
betrayal as
"victory."
South'Africa and Revolution
The concluding paragraph of the two-
part article, "South Africa and Permanent
Revolution" (WV Nos. 515 and 516, 30
November and 14 December 1990), notes
in the "uneven and combined develop-
ment of South Africa today striking simi-
larities to Russia in the early years of
this century." We pointed to the autocrat-
ic regime presiding over vast areas of
backwardness as well as a modem urban
economy, and also to its Achilles' heel,
a young and vibrant proletariat increas-
ingly conscious of its power. However,
there is a danger of drawing the Russian
analogy too closely: there is also an im-
portant difference, centered on the racial!
national question (the focus of Part I of
the article).
In the tsarist "prison house of peoples"
the Bolsheviks championed the fight for
liberation of oppressed nations and na-
tionalities, but the core of the revolution-
ary struggle was Russian workers rising
up against Russian rulers. In South Afri-
ca, in contrast, the black workers are
fighting a regime based on a privileged
white minority.. This makes the fight for
working-class power more difficult. With
the Afrikaner laager mentality-a kind
of frightened racialist nationalism-white
supremacy in its death throes will have
a broader social and military base than
the Russian autocracy had at the end.
And with the overwhelming weight of
national oppression, until now workers'
allegiances have been drawn, with the aid
the capitalist courts while the power of
the bosses' state was mobilized against
the strikers. The labor fakers' "strategy"
amounted to shopping around for a buyer
to whom they would offer as much in
givebacks as Lorenzo demanded, or
more. These same loser. policies are
burying' the New York Daily News strike,
now over 100 days old.
At the outset of the Eastern strike.
the road to winning was clear. We said
it: "Spread the Eastern Strike-Shut
Down the Airports! Rip Up the Injunc-
tions!" (WV No. 473, 17 March 1989).
But the pro-capitalist labor bureauc-
racy, especially the lAM leadership of
then-president William Winpisinger, a
member of the Democratic Socialists of
America, crawled to Congress and did
everything in their power to keep the
strike from spreading. We emphasized
that "the stranglehold of the AFL-CIO
tops must be broken" in order to use
hardball tactics, like hot-cargoing and
solidarity strikes, that could win.
As they isolated the Eastern strikers,
the labor tops had some help from a few
"socialist" water boys. But none more
craven than the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP) and their newspaper, the badly
LENIN
15 February 1991
strikers was squandered. A strike that
could have won big, and energized
unions.across the country, was knifed by
the traitors who are running the Amer-
ican labor movement into the ground.
PATCO air controllers, Morenci cop-
per miners, Hormel meatpackers, Grey-
hound bus drivers didn't lose in bat-
tle-they were betrayed. And the sellouts
who produced this string of defeats also
robbed Eastern strikers of the victory that
should have been theirs. The AFL-CIO
mouthed empty "solidarity," lAM tops
appealed to Reagan's Labor Board and
r
HE
Mll ITANT) -8 1991
Eastern strike scores for labor
'1 k and-file Machinists, airliuc folds
_____ ....,.. .... ..,
_ nIIl _.. ...
__________----- Iiiiiii ......".....f
-EDITORIALS- ............,.,.-
Eastern strikers' victories
or into" ,11\' plaJl(.'!'l mill
the nearly
twoye:tr "'101e. . I
Whell Lorcnl.11 we.. finally fon'('tl 111.11 of
goYcmllK'1l1 wlL'lcompelled lodin.'Clly inlcrv::,e mt e
in an 10 a
rrevenl U Ire s..1o .' 0 Ie' assaul1s the
American Racism and
Imperialist War
TROTSKY
No. 520

DIRECTOR OF PARTYPUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon
EDITOR: Jan Norden
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Jorge Ramirez
CIRCULATION MANAGER:. Karen Valdez
EDITORIAL BOARD: George Foster, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, Len Meyers, James Robertson,
Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg
The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (Fourth
Internationalist).
Wprkers Vanguard (USPS098-770) published biweekly, except 2nd issue Augustand with 3-week interval December,
by the Spartacist Publishing co., 41 Warren Street, New York. NY 10007. Telephone; (212) 732-7862 (Editorial),
(212) 7327861 (Business). Address all correspondence to: Bpx 1377, GPO. New York, NY 10116. Domestic
subscriptions; $7.00/24 issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER;Send address changes
to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.
Opinions expressed in signed arlicles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.
Young black men and women are used as
cannon fodder by the Pentagon war machine
while their families are condemned to starve
and freeze in America's inner-city ghettos.
Fully one-third of the ground troops in U.S.
imperialism's war for the Persian Gulf oil
fields are black and Hispanic. At the height
of the so-called "American century" in the
eariy 1950s, the veteran Trotskyist Richard
Fraser pointed to the link between the racist
underpinnings ofAmerican capitalism internally and its slaughter ofdark-skinned people
in the colonialized world.
Having become the imperialist leader of the capitalist world, the U.S. exports race
prejudice as naturally as it does death and destruction to the colonial world. Europe
was virtually free of color prejudice until the white American army began its indoctri-
nation of the "American Way"....
In the Korean War the wholesale destruction and massacre of civilians gave the
world a foretaste of the ruthless contempt that the American rulers hold for the darker
people of the colonial world. The introduction of "Luke the Gook's Castle" into official
military and journalistic geography attests to the persistence with which the U.S.
military spreads "the miasma of race prejudice," as Trotsky called it. ...
But capitalism, even in the southern United States, has created the conditions
necessary for its own destruction. It has disrupted the old agrarian pattern, undermined
the privileged white middle class, thus weakening the whole fabric of social repression.
It has created great industries,-proletarianizing white, urbanizing black. This process
has centralized the Negro community in positions of great strategic advantage in large
city communities, whereas before they were dispersed over the countryside. Capitalism
has likewise created the conditions for the overthrow of race prejudice by working
class solidarity. .
It falls upon the shoulders of the proletarian revolution, in which the American
workers will join together with the Negro people in the abolition of capitalism, to
uproot the Jim Crow system.
-Richard Fraser, "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution"
(November 1953), reprinted in Prometheus Research Series No.3,
"In Memoriam Richard S. Fraser" (1990)
The mechanics, cleaners and ramp
service workers were on the picket lines
against Eastern Airlines for 686 days,
one week longer than the bosses, who
folded the bankrupt, scab operation on
January 18 after bleedirig it dry of hun-
dreds of millions of dollars.
The Eastern Airlines strike attracted
instant solidarity from workers across
the country-i-here was a national, high-
profile strike against a boss, Frank Lo-
renzo, whose name was synonymous with
the greed and union-busting of the Rea-
gan/Bush years. When the International
Association of Machinists struck in
March 1989, their picket lines staffed by
militant black, white and Hispanic work-
ers were respected by the flight atten-
dants and pilots. This was the first time
in years that airlines industry unions
didn't scab on each other. Everyone
looked at Eastern and said, this is a
strike that can win.
Yet the Machinists were isolated; set
up and sold out, their jobs destroyed. The
strikers hung tough for almost two years,
and at incredible costs-strikers took
arrests and abuse at the hands of the cops
and scabs, families were destroyed, there
were even suicides among their ranks.
Their slogan was to stay out "one day
longer" than Lorenzo, and they did. They
brought down the bastard who screwed
them, but the courage of the Eastern
2
WORKERS
DRGANISER
SDeliUST
mouth by a police helmet.
He has since been charged with
"obstructing a police officer" and
"threatening behaviour."
If the organisers of the anti-war
demonstrations allow, without protest,
the cops to determine what slogans
can and cannot be shouted on the
peace marches, then a day may come
when the police will decide that slo-
gans like "Peace" and "Stop the bomb-
ingst'tare a breach of the peace too.
Freedom is indivisible.
The Partisan Defense Committee is
undertaking a publicity and fund-
raising campaign to mobilize support
for the Spartacist comrade, Alastair
Green. Because Green refused to be
gagged, he is being victimized express-
lyon the basis of"the SL's" political
positions on the Gulf War-for the de-
feat ofU.S.lBritish imperialism and for
the defense of Iraq. Contributions to
Alastair Green's defense can be sent,
earmarked and payable to: Partisan
Defense Committee, Box 99, Canal
Street Station, New York, NY 10013.
whose overriding loyalty is to the war-
mongering Labour Party of Neil Kinnock
-have done their bit to set the stage for
police repression against leftists partici-
pating in antiwar protests.
The "Hands Off the Middle East
Committee" has voted unanimously to
endorse Alastair Green's united front
defence. Marxists have the right to
organise, and the duty to mobilise
working-class action against the slaughter
of the Arab peoples on behalf of Wash-
ington's oil plunder. We call on all those
in the workers movement and on the
left to join us in condemning the
state's attack on ourselves and others
who raise the call to defend Iraq. We
demand that all charges against comrade
Green and others arrested at the demon-
stration be immediately dropped! No
deportations, no internment of Iraqi and
Arab people! Defeat British/U.S. imperi-
alism! Defend Iraq!
Workers Hammer Photos
Alastair Green seized by pollee at February 2 demonstration.
Police Censor Anti-War Slogans
An alarming tum was taken on the
anti-war demonstration of :4 February
when the police stopped a section of
the march from chanting pro-Iraqi
slogans.
Alastair Green was one of a group
from the Spartacist League chant-
'liir"DefeatBritish/US imperialism!"
and "Defend Iraq!" Police told them
to stop or they would be arrested
under the Public Order Act. They
didn't, and Green was pulled into
a police van and bashed in the
The following article is reprinted
from the 8 February issue of Socialist
-, Organiser, representing a left-wing ten-
dency in the British Labour Party.
tions to police on the day.
It is often said that civil liberties, no
less than the truth, are among the first
casualties of war. Thus the present-day
star chamber "hearings" against Iraqi and
other Arab residents. This government
and Labour governments before it have
a despicable record on this score, war or
no: to name but a few, the judicial
frame-up of the Birmingham Six, Win-
chester Three and Guildford Four, the
"ban" on Sinn Fein and Irish Republican
spokesmen, the savage attack and round-
up of anti-poll-tax demonstrators last
March.
Now these methods, used against strik-
ing miners, print workers and their sup-
porters, are in operation against leftists
in the context of the criminal war against
Iraq. Again the government has relied
on its loyal opposition to exercise such
repression. On January 12, Spartacist
demonstrators in Glasgow were surround-
ed, sealed off and threatened with arrest
at the behest of the CND and Militant
tendency. On January 23 the Independent
quoted CND leader Marjorie Thompson
baiting those who call for iraq's victory
as "agents provocateurs," expressing the
wish that they be off the dernonstra-
tions. And now the arrests begin.rbased
on shadowy "complaints" against leftists.
The likes of Labour left MP Tony
Benn and the CND endorsed the sanc-
tions against Iraq, the prelude to
war. They promoted the United Nations
as a fig leaf for the vast buildup of
forces which have now been unleashed
in the filthy war against Iraq. Now
the CND leadership-those "pacifists"
Her Majesty's
music censors
set the drumbeat
for war. They
prefer the
me$sage
scrawled 'on
bomb by captain
from Kokomo.
supporters of the Revolutionary Com-
munist Party). Later on, after repeated
cop threats and harassment the police
threatened that the next person who
chanted "Victory to Iraq" would be
arrested, and they waded into the Spar-
tacist contingent and roughly seized
comrade Green.
The threats to protesters and the arrest
itself were a direct implementation of
the Crown Prosecution Service instruc-
president of the Republic were seized.
The song "Forge Ahead Saddam" and
others on the cassettes were by
the popular Algerian singer Mazouni.
In an outburst of chauvinism many
French radio stations have stopped
playing any popular songs about Arab
culture or peace.
What's next-nonstop military
music drumrolling across the air-
waves? This revolting chauvinism
isn't new, of course. During World
War I, German" composers were
banned from New York's Metro-
politan Opera, which also canned
Puccini's Madame Butterfly after
Pearl Harbor! Such are the depths
to which war hysteria quickly drags
the supposed "culture" of decaying
capitalism.
Meanwhile, after recent events at
No. 10 Downing St., we don't sup-
pose Her Majesty's music cops at
the BBC are going to be playing
"When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" any-
time soon either.
John Lennon Ruled Subversive
Defense of' Iraq' Banned in Britain
Spartacist Arrested at Hyde Park
BBC Bans "Give Peace aChance"
The BBC is doing its bit for the war
effort by coming up with a blacklist
of music deemed unsuitable for broad-
cast, including John Lennon's song
"Give Peace a Chance." Give us a
break, we thought, but when our com-
rades of Workers Hammer called up
the British Broadcasting Corporation's
press office they were told that such
a memo of "assistance and guidance"
was indeed sent out to the BBC's
stations.
Other moldy goldies reportedly on
the hit list of 67 songs deemed
too tasteless "for the duration" in-
clude Lennon's "Imagine," Queen's
"Another One Bites the Dust," Abba's
"Under Attack," Sonny & Cher's
"Bang Bang" and the Bee Gees'
"Staying Alive"-not what Her Ma-
jesty's cannon fodder is supposed to
concentrate on in the Gulf, obviously.
In France, meanwhile, Le Monde
(22 January) reported that 800 cas-
settes of a song purportedly glorifying
Saddam Hussein and insulting the
LONDON-On February 2, police arrest-
ed and attacked a Spartacistsupporter
at the demonstration organised by the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
protesting the Gulf War in London. The
Spartacist contingent marched behind a
banner which called for "Defeat U.S./
British Imperialism!" and "Defehd Iraq!"
Police threatened that anyone chanting
"Victory to Iraq" was liable to arrest
under the Public Order Act. Comrade
Alastair Green was seized by the cops
after demonstrators refused to stop chant-
ing their slogans.
While the march halted for 20 minutes
and outraged protesters demanded "Let
him go!" our comrade was dragged away
and eventually thrown into a police van.
Inside the van, one of the arresting
officers hit Green on the face with a
helmet; the comrade sustained a nasty.
injury to his mouth. He has been
charged with "obstructing a police offi-
cer" and "threatening behaviour."
At the beginning of the February 2
demonstration, a line of police moved
into the crowd to force leftists carrying
a banner of the Hands Off the Middle
East Committee calling for "Victory to
Iraq" to pull it down under threat of
arrest. CND stewards applauded vocifer-
ously when the banner came down. At
the end" of the march, the banner was
raised. again in Hyde Park; the police
intervened, cheered on by CNDers, and
again the banner went down.
The Spartacist League/Britain had
marched with its banner along with an
"anti-imperialist contingent" of other
left groups (including Workers Power,
the Workers International League and
1S FEBRUARY 1991 3
Young Sparlacus
Lessons of the
Vietnam Antiwar Movement
Gial Phong! (Liberation). Saigon, April 1975: victorious NLF tanks take presidential palace.
Heights Peace Committee, the "Chelsea
Housewives for Peace," and all these
sorts of things. Ditto for Workers World,
the Workers League (then the American
Committee for the Fourth International)
and others. They proposed rally speakers
by category: the official liberal, the offi-
cial disabled person, the official black,
the official poet, the official folk singer,
all that sort of thing.
In the next meeting we said, "No.
You're trying to restrict this. There is a
social revolution taking place in South
Vietnam. This is why the Americans
have intervened. Your single demand to
the exclusion of others of 'Stop the War
Now!' is a deliberate attempt to obscure
the class nature of the American inter-
vention in South Vietnam and the nature
of the social revolution taking place
there. We're not in favor of stopping the
war! There are just wars. There are just,
revolutionary wars. We're for the victory
of the NLF and the forces they represent
against the puppets of U.S. imperialism
and' against the U.S. forces in order to
achieve that social' revolution. Your
policies are intended specifically to ob-
scure that fact and to restrict the ability
of the American working class to per-
ceive the class nature of their own soci-
ety and to struggle against it."
We made these arguments and argued
against exclusion of signs, etc., and our
position carried. (Probably for the mo-
ment the other leftists felt guilt-tripped,
but it carried.) Then, out steps this
old fellow, a spokesman for SANE, the
. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy,
which represented the left wiag of the
continued on page 6
the faction fight and it was all about the
same basic revolutionary program and
principles. The firsttime out for the SWP
was in October 1965 with the Fifth
Avenue Peace Parade Committee. It was
the first of many SWP-organized coali-
tions we saw and marked the passage of
the SWP from centrist to reformist.
We hadn't heard of the first meeting;
we weren't invited.. We went to the sec-
ond meeting and it was very clear that
the policies discussed were classical
popular-frontist approaches. There were
no orgariizations there, except of course
everyone was a member of an organiza-
tion-I knew everybody in the room and
they knew me. The SWP was there in
force in the guise of the Washington
Early Days of the Vietna'm
Antiwar.Movement
I got my training in a faction fight that
was about the fundamentals of a revolu-
tionary perspective. We spent three years
in that fight in the early 1960s and other
comrades anticipated it even longer. That
was in the right-centrist SWP (Socialist
Workers Party). Then within a year of our
expulsion the bombings of North Vietnam
had taken place and the SWP made its
play. In a sense it was like Part Two of
WV Photo
"All Indochina Must Go Communist!" Spartacists called for revolutionary victory in Vietnam at antiwar protest in
Washington, D.C., January 1973.
not understand the ABCof Communism
andthat they themselves happento be in
the Communist Party only by accident."
That's not a bad introduction to this
whole discussion.
Young Spartacus is pleased to print a
presentation by Al Nelson ofthe Spartacist
League Central Committee to our Bay Area
district in January. Nelson's remarks have
been edited and abridgedfor publication.
I really strongly urge everybody to
read the material recommended for this
class and Trotsky's "War and the Fourth
International" in particular. It's like a
handbook.. What struck me was the
programmatic continuity from Trotsky's
writings anticipating World War II,
through our material in the 1960s and
'70s, to now. The rules of Class struggle
and the lines demarcated by the irrecon-
cilability of the working class and the
ruling class have not changed since the
beginning of capitalism. The roles of the
bourgeois liberals, the social democrats,
the reformists, the right centrists and the
left centrists, have not changed a bit
from the first imperialist war, the second
war, and all through the various partial
wars to the present. We've got a very
rich body of experience and basic Marx-
ist understanding that guided the com-
rades through the first imperialist war,
after there hadn't been a war in Europe
since the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
Trotsky starts off with a concise intro-
duction in "On the United Front" (The
First Five Years of the Communist Inter-
national, Volume 2):
"The task of the Communist Party is to
lead the proletarian revolution. In order
to summon the proletariat for the direct
conquest of power and to achieve it the
CommunistParty must base itself on the
overwhelming majority of the working
class.
"So longas it does not holdthis majority,
the party must fight to win it.
"The party can achieve this only by
remaining an absolutely independent
organization with a clear program and
strict internal discipline. That is the rea-
son why the party was bound to break
ideologically and organizationally with
the reformists and the centrists who do
not strive for the proletarian revolution;
who possess neither the capacitynor the'
desire to prepare the masses forrevolu-
tion, and who by their entire conduct
thwart this work.
"Any members of the Communist Party
who bemoan the split with the centrists
in the nameof 'unity of forces' or 'unity
of front' therebydemonstrate that theydo
4 WORKERS VANGUARD
Liberal Mask Is the Real Face
ISO in the Antiwar Movement
Spartacist League
Public Offices
- MARXIST LITERATURE-
Bay Area
Thurs.: 5:30,8:00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 pm.
1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)
Oakland, California Phone: (415) 839-0851
Chicago
Tues.. 5:00-9:00p.m., Sat. 11 :00 a.m-200 p.m
161 W. Harrison St., 10th Floor
Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715
New York City
. Tues.: .6:30-9:00 p.m., Sat.. 1:00-5:00 p.m.
41 Warren St. (one block below
Chambers St. near Church St.)
New York, NY Phone: (212)267-1025
of fooling the working class is pacifism
and the abstract propaganda of peace.
Under capitalism, especially in its imperi-
alist stage, wars are inevitable.' A peace
concluded by imperialists would only be
a breathing spell before a new war. Only
a revolutionary mass struggle against war
and against imperialism which breeds war
can secure a real peace. 'Without a num-
ber of revolutions the so-called democrat-
ic peace is a middle class utopia'."
- "Lenin and Imperialist War"
(December 1938)
Crime Doesn't Pay
The discrepancy between the ISO's
pretensions to Marxism and their "just us
liberals here" posture has some of their
own members feeling like they've been
shipped up the Gulf without a paddle. At
the October ISO conference in Chicago,
one member complained how he had
been besieged by his comrades: "I had 5,
6, 7 people coming up to me saying
'How are we supposed to explain this?
Are we supposed to bury the party pro-
gram or what?'" Judging from the Janu-
ary issue of Socialist Worker, the ISO
ironed out this wrinkle by moving further
to the right-even the thin camouflage
of left rhetoric (any reference to "capital-
ism" or "imperialism" for instance) has
all but vanished from its-pages.
continued on page J5
antiwar movement similarly dissipated
the anger and militancy of that genera-
tion by consciously suppressing revolu-
tionary politics to keep the protests
"safe" for the Democratic Party politi-
cians they pandered to. The failure of
that antiwar "strategy" is seen in the fact
that just 15 years since the U.S. was
defeated in Vietnam, humanity is again
victim to a genocidal war for the global
ambitions of the American ruling class.
As Leon Trotsky summarized Lenin's
views:
"It is impossible to fight against imperial-
ist war by sighing for peace after the
fashion of the pacifists. 'One of the ways
But the ISO thinks it has a better idea
and cynically peddles the notion to their
membership that censorship is really very
clever, that they can rope in more people
by pretending to be just liberals and then
drop the mask when they've determined
folks are "ready" for socialism. But for
the ISO the liberal mask is the face-and
sometimes it looks more reactionary than
even liberal.
While George Bush rails that Hus-
sein is "another Hitler," the ISO carried
a sign at the January 19 antiwar demo
saying "Saddam may be a Hitler but
Bush started this holocaust." Meanwhile,
what echoes Hitler is George Bush's
blitzkrieg for a "new world order"!
George Bush promises the American
people "no more Vietnams." Richard
Nixon titled his memoirs No More Viet-
nams. The ISO says ... "no more Viet-
nams." During the Vietnam War the
ISO's political forebears (the Interna-
tional Socialists) tailed the liberal wing
of the ruling class which only called for
"U.S. troops out" after it was clear they
were losing.
"Our" boys were the herdic Vietnam-
ese who defeated U.S. imperialism and
freed their country from neocolonial
bondage and capitalist exploitation. The
Vietnamese victory was a gain for work-
ers all over the world-Che Guevara
coined the slogan "Two, three, many
Yietnamsl" Stung by that defeat, the U.S.
imperialists were unable to directly
intervene on behalf of South Africa's
racist army in Angola or send the Ma-
rines in against Sandinista Nicaragua.
What then is the ISO's role in the
antiwar movement? They build liberal
coalitions that are an obstacle to the
development of socialist consciousness
because they foster the illusion that the
bourgeois government can be "pressured"
--ro act against its own class interests. The
U.S. war on Iraq is a war for imperialist
hegemony-to really fight against it you
have to oppose the economic and social
system that produced this war. Why do
the avowed socialists of the ISO pretend
otherwise? Because for them, "the move-
ment" is everything and their ostensible
political program is excess baggage to
chuck overboard whenever convenient.
How then do they hope to win youth
to Marxism? They promote the myth
that people will automatically be rad-
icalized in the course of a bourgeois
pacifist movement. If this were true, who
needs Leninists? The principal effect of
pacifist ideology is to obscure the class
nature of war and to prevent the cohering
of a politically independent working-
class struggle against the "Republicrat"
parties of war and racism.
The reformist leaders of the' Vietnam
Marxism vs. PQcifism
In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels state: "The Com-
munists disdain to conceal their views
and aims." That is an elemental credo of
Marxism we Spartacists live by. Many
working people, students, and particu-
larly the black and Hispanic population
hate this war. What they need is leader-
ship. We seek to politically organize
the widespread anger in a revolution-
ary workers party to lead class-struggle
action against the capitalist state.
bloody oil grab and bid to be top cop of
a "new world order." That is why we
take a clear side in this war.
Saddam Hussein should be toppled by
the Iraqi working people, the oppressed
Kurds and other minorities-and their
cause will be furthered by defeating the
U.S. which supported Hussein for years
but now wants to replace him with
another dictator hand-picked by George
Bush. Our fight for labor political strikes
against the war stands in sharp contrast
to star-spangled peace crawls built by
fake-leftists who plead to murderous U.S.
rulers to "give peace a chance."
Spartacist Canada
Bloody U.S. rulers who were defeated on the battlefield by the Vietnamese say, "No More Vietnams." So does the ISO
and their Canadian cothinkers, shown here at Toronto rally on January 19.
organized antiwar conference on Janu-
ary 19. Facing a yawning abyss between
their nominal views and their real appe-
tite to tail liberal Democratic Party poli-
tics, the ISO resorts to exclusions and
threats of violence to suppress their own
contradictions. .
We in the Spartacus Youth. Clubs
say "Defeat U.S. imperialism-Defend
Iraq"... and that's exactly what we fight
for. In the politicaldebates on campuses
and in demonstrations around the country
we seek to win youth to an understanding
that defense of the working people and
exploited masses of the world requires a
struggle to defeat U.S. imperialism in its
Socialist
Worker
ISO cynically claims to defend Iraq,
but to say so out loud would be
a "tactical error" because it would
be unpopular. In publlc, ISO apes
Bush's war propaganda that Hussein
is "a Hitler."
As American B-52 bombers rain death
and terror upon the Iraqi people, a new
generation ofryouth are marching in
protest, attending teach-ins, snapping up
socialist literature and earnestly looking
for a way to stop the U.S. war machine.
Students just awakening to political con-
sciousness must beware however of
ostensibly socialist organizations who
seek to act as "Sominex" on the body
politic to keep youth from waking up to
the truth that to end imperialist war we
have to bury the capitalist system that
breeds war.
Two, three, many antiwar coalitions
have popped up. Workers World's "Coa-
lition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the
Middle East" vies with the "National
Campaign for Peace in the Middle East"
(which includes other reformists like the
Socialist Workers Party, Democratic
Socialists of America and the Young
Communist League) in organizational
squabbles over who will control "the
movement." Politically, they both com-
pete with each other-and the right
wing-on a populist "peace is patriotic"
basis while Iraq is carpetbombed under
the stars and stripes.
Students looking for a more radi-
cal alternative might be attracted to
the International Socialist Organization.
Here's a group that claims to defend
Iraq and calls for "broad-based unity,"
bemoaning the "disastrous split" in the
anti war movement. But let's take a closer
look at the ISO, the American offshoot
of the British Socialist Workers Party.
Before the bombing of Baghdad began,
the ISO wrote "in the case of the block-
ade and in the event of an actual war, we
are on the side of Iraq" (Socialist Worker,
October 1990). But to "campaign and
agitate under the slogan 'Victory to
Iraq' ... would also be a sectarian error
erecting a barrier between ourselves
and many of those who are genuinely
opposed to the war drive .... "
If the ISO's position looks equivocal
on paper, it was crystal clear in action.
Given a choice between two very right-
wing demonstrations, the "Victory to
Iraq" ISO endorsed the more right-wing
January 26 "Campaign for Peace" march
which condemned Iraq's annexation of
Kuwait and called for United Nations
sanctions as an "alternative" to war-i.e.,
to starve the Iraqi people with a blockade
backed up by aircraft carrier groups,
troops and missiles. Some "defense"!
The ISO not only buries their own
position of defense of Iraq but tries to
censor other leftists' views. Cops and the
ISO's own goon squad (wearing red,
white and blue armbands!) sealed off
members of the Chicago Spartacus Youth
Club and the centrist Revolutionary
Workers League (RWL) from an ISO-
15 FEBRUARY 1991 5
world', be it dictatorial, democratic, Third
World or most advanced, and concentrat-
ing it geographically and compressing it
in time.
War is so horrible because it's such a
concentration of mass killing by mass
means. A kind of horrible mass industrial
accident with metal removing sections of
bodies, heads and arms and limbs flying
in all directions. Preobrazhensky and
Bukharin their book (The ABC ofCom-
munism) tried to calculate how many tons
of human beings were killed in World
War I: "If we assume the average weight
of a soldier to be 150 lb., this means
that between 1 August 1914 and 1 Janu-
ary 1918 the capitalists had brought to
market twelve hundred million pounds of
putrid human flesh."
A pacifist can say these things too.
The point is, what is it about capital-
ism that leads inevitably to war? We
understand what the limitations of the
nation-state are. At the same time, the
nation-state is the basis for mobilizing
the working class in an interimperialist
war-social-patriotism. The capitalist
rulers always talk of some "high motive,"
but the bourgeoisie does not wage war
for political principles. It wages war for
raw materials, for spheres of influence,
for financial markets, for world hegem-
ony and its own wealth. That's the basis
for war.
You cannot end war without ending
capitalism. It's a question of breaking
down the false consciousness of the
workers, so that in time of war they
are not vulnerable to the appeals of the
social-patriots. The purpose of these
antiwar coalitions is to form a popular
front-an alliance with political agents
of the ruling class-to suppress revolu-
tionary politics. Against this we counter-
pose the Bolshevik tactic of the united
front where all groups participating in a
particular action have an equal opportu-
nity to express their views. The clash of
opinion and test in action of the various
forces claiming to be socialist is a crucial
element in raising the consciousness of
working people and youth.
Workers Have the Power
The SWP dominated the antiwar move-
ment from 1965 through 1973. By the
middle of 1971 or even earlier, their
classless liberal program had so dissipat-
ed the forces that were kind of radical,
not even leftist, that the campuses were
quiet. The spring of 1971 was the quiet-
est spring on the campuses in over ten
years, yet this followed the invasion of
Laos. The year before-when the United
States went into Cambodia, there were
big demonstrations on the campuses.
That's where the Kent State massacre
came from. The SWP's policy dissipated
all the militancy of all these kids who
hated the government.
At the same time, it was never clearer
than in 1971 how the popular-frontist
antiwar coalition was counterposed to
the revolutionary mobilization of the
workers. The National Guardsmen that
shot down those kids at Kent State had
just come from a strikebreaking mission
against the Teamsters who were at that
very same time engaged in a huge na-'
tional wildcat strike, which was opposed
minds what our political line is and what
it is based on.
Capitalist System Is
Root Cause of War
<
We're Marxists. Our starting point is
the irreconcilable class interests of the
ruling class and the working class: In
"War and the Fourth International,"
Trotsky talks about the creation of the
national state as the basis for the capital-
ist system. World War I posed the limita-
tions of the national state as the form for
the productive forces of society. Those
forces had outgrown the national state
and World War I was the first inter-
imperialist war for redivision of the
entire world in terms of spheres of influ-
ence. That's where Iraq and Kuwait came
from. The victors drew lines on a map.
The pacifists start from the false prem-
ise that it's possible to ensure peace
outside of the class struggle. Bourgeois
pacifism is what you can characterize
basically as a spontaneous ideology-but
it's not really-because it's what people
are taught. Most people who are reacting
to the possibility of war are reacting in
a purely pacifist sort of way, that "war
is bad." To the extent that the pacifists
of an organized sort and the ordinary
worker do not understand the social-
chauvinism that lies within both wings of
the bourgeoisie, whether they're liberal
and for sanctions. or they're the hard-
liners for war, to that extent they will be
gullible in terms of being prepared for a
larger war of an interimperialist sort, like
World War I or World War II.
It is our task to prepare the working
class for revolution. That means to utilize
every social struggle to make them aware
of the class basis of society and the class
nature of war. War exposes the nature of
capitalism in a way that nothing else
does. Every day all over the world there
are thousands of people that die from
starvation, lack of medical attention,
exposure, pure state repression, industrial
accidents. War is like taking all these
phenomena, these thousands of people
that die every day in a random sort of
way in every capitalist country in the
END THE WAR!
LET SANCTIONS WORK!

Communist Party (left) and DSA
social democrats want UN fig
leaf to cover U.S. war on Iraq.
Would you buy an "antiwar"
movement from people like this?
OPPORT...(JUR
;
iYS-8RING.
HOME
1'..10......,
, . Bulletin Young Socialist
At 1971 antiwar conference (left), SWPgoons assaulted members of Progressive Labor and Spartacists for opposing
presence of bourgeois politician-Democratic Senator V..nceHartke was keynote speaker. SWPantiwar honcho Fred
Halstead with social-patriotic sign (right).
Sparta;;]';
After Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee attempted to ban Spartacist call
for "Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution," SL defiantly marched together with
Walter Teague's Committee to Aid the NLF, New York City, October 1965.
o all us ground troops fro
gulf region. Whatever US naval or air
forces remain to enforce the sanctions must
direct UN command.
rialism with a humane face." How we
deal with that is a question of nuances of
propaganda. The "Vietnam syndrome" is
very operational-there's much more
widespread opposition to the war now
than there ever was at the beginning of
the Vietnam War. How we deal with
ordinary people who have illusions and
false consciousness and how we deal
with the centrists and the reformists and
the conscious bastards who know exactly
what they're doing is another question.
And we have to be very clear in our own
That's how the blockade is supposed to
work its way, and of course with the aid
of the CIA which must still have assets
there because they've been working with
Iraqi intelligence for ten years, feeding
them the names of Hussein's leftist oppo-
nents, and are now sitting there being
very quiet.
The difference the peace movement
has with the government is a tactical one.
Basically they're for sanctions. They
agree with the premises but want "impe-
went over big and a lot of people took
them, so we had a bloc. But we had to
shove SWP marshals away. -
Sanctions = Kill Iraqis
... Slowly
That's how it started. What we're
dealing with today is our own political
understanding, so that we don't get dis-
armed by the social-patriots waiting to
support a new imperialist war. If you
look at the antiwar movement writ large,
and all the peace forces, their program is
basically the same as the Democrats:
"Sanctions, not war." They- agree with
the premise that "Hussein is a real bad
guy," that it was "a real bad act of ag-
gression" that Iraq went into Kuwait and
"they should get out of there." But "we
don't want war, we don't want killing,
we had enough killing in Vietnam," so
"we should allow sanctions to work their
way."
What is a blockade? That means "let's
kill the Iraqis real slow" and starve first
the children, then the old people. That's
what happens first when you have lack
of nutrition. It's slow death, as opposed
to a big bombardment. Then when the
misery reaches a certain level, presum-
ably a wing of the Ba'athist military elite
will make a move and assassinate Sad-
dam Hussein in order to be the new
rulers in arrovertly U.S.-dominated Iraq.
(continued from page 4)
Democratic Party. He said, "If this policy
carries, we split." The SWP freaked out,
called a recess, worked over everybody
else, urging classless "unity," then recon-
vened, and our position which had been
voted up was reconsidered and voted
down. We walked out. The others stayed. '.
We therefore had fight our way into
the first peace demonstration in New
York City. We carried bundles of our
signs wrapped in paper. We spotted the
U.S. Committee to Aid the National
Liberation Front of South Vietnam. They
liked the Viet Cong flag and they would
get in trouble for raising it at demonstra-
tions. We defended their right to carry
that flag though we wouldn't carry it
ourselves since it would too closely iden-
tify us with the politics of the Stalinists.
So there was a de facto bloc there and
we defended their rights to carry the Viet
Cong flag against the wimpy SWP mar-
shals. Then we waited until the march
started to move, ripped off the paper
from our signs and rapidly handed them
out. They said: "Unconditional Immedi-
ate Withdrawal of All U.S" Forces from
Vietnam,'; "Victory to the Vietnamese
Revolution! No Negotiations!" and "Viet-
nam, Watts: Same Struggle, Same Fight."
Very controversial, right?-this was a
peace demonstration. But these signs
Antiwar
Movement...
6 WORKERS VANGUARD
no credit
National Guard troops who put down 1971 Teamster wildcat
strike also carried out Kent State massacre (right), leaving
four students dead.
not only by the governors of various
states, be they Republican or Democrat, -
but also by the Democratic Party mayors
where it affected them, by the presi-
dent of the Teamsters and by the vice
president of the Teamsters, who was
considered a liberal, and who was on
the steering committee of NPAC
(National Peace Action Coalition).
We published a special supplement to
Spartacist in July 1971 and said:
"It was from this strikebreaking detail
that four hundred Guardsmen weretaken
andsent to Kent State. Unlikethe Team-
sters, the students put up no resistance.
But it was.students, not Teamsters, who
weregunneddown. Why?Amassacre of
Teamsters, in the middleof a tense, mili-
tant nationwide wildcat by one of the
country's strongest unions, would have
precipitated a seriesof nationwide protest
andsympathy strikes-a far greatershow
of social power than all the student
strikes, peacecrawlsandpoliceconfron-
tations combined. In contrast, the mas-
sacre of students had little more long-
termsocial impact than startingsummer
vacation three weeks early on college
campuses.
"What made the protesting students so
vulnerable was preciselythe question of
brute social power: the Teamsters and
otherorganized workers haveit; students
do not."
The Teamsters were not the only union
engaging in strikes. There was a lot of
strike activity in the country at that time.
Yet the workers saw in the leadership of
this antiwar movement some of their
most sophisticated opponents. Guys who
were liberals on the question of the war
in Vietnam, but sponsored anti-labor
legislation in Congress. And then all the
parasites and labor lieutenants of capital,
all the guys they hate in their own union,
up there speaking as liberals against the
war. So there was a tremendous gulf
between the working class and the anti-
war groups because of the reformist
political character of the antiwar move-
ment. Furthermore, there were conscious
elements who sought to maintain that.
SWP Wages War on Reds for
Peace with Democrats
NPAC was the SWP's antiwar coali-
tion and on the steering committee was
Senator Vance Hartke. They had an
NPAC conference on July 4th weekend
in New York in 1971. We went in there
to intervene with our class-struggle pro-
gram and to distribute our Spartacist
supplement. The SWP had prepared
about 300 of their own members plus
union goons to put down so-called "dis-
ruption." The liberal wing of the bour-
geoisie broke over the 1968 Tet Offen-
sive and now opposed the war because
the U.S. was losing. Hartke represented
this defeatist wing of U.S. imperialism
and the SWP wanted to prove to the
bourgeois liberals that they could handle
the reds by drawing a line in blood to
prevent opposition to the war from taking
a revolutionary direction, especially since
there was class struggle going on in
society as well.
In addition to Senator Hartke, there
was Victor Reuther (the brother of Wai-
ter Reuther and the CIA's man in the
labor movement in Europe, who personi-
fied the linkup between the labor move-
ment, the Democratic Party, the CIA and
all its rotten operations all over the
world). Our forces were very disciplined
and, surprisingly, so were the PL/SDS
(Progressive Labor/Students for a Demo-
cratic Society) forces. I made a motion
that Senator Hartke not be permitted to
be in this meeting, that it was an obscen-
ity that a representative of the ruling
class be at an antiwar conference. That
motion was voted out of order. When
Hartke attempted to speak, we just shout-
ed him down-us and PL.
When Victor Reuther got up, we
chanted ten times, "Labor strikes against
the war!" and sat down. PL went on a
little longer, but eventually they were
quiet. After Reuther spoke, everything
was quiet. TheSWP was disappointed.
SWP honcho Fred Halstead (a big, flabby
sucker, but big) comes down' and grabs
some poor kid in a choke hold, rips him
over the back of the chair and drags him
out; the kid is choking. Seymour and I
look at each other, and Seymour says,
"We have to go. We have to go." We
jumped out, pulled Halstead off and then
300 guys came up that center aisle like ,
a hammer.
It was the most brutal experience of.
violence within the workers movement
I've ever been through. Beating went on
there for well over an hour. Someone got
thrown through a plate-glass door, I had
chunks of hair pulled out, somebody had
their nose broken. The PL students got
it worse than we did. Many were beaten
badly. The Wohlforthites (now the Work-
ers League) were on the goon squad. And
right up front were Nat Weinstein and
Dick Garza. Weinstein is now the leader
of Socialist Action, They were then the
liberal, trade-uniony face of the SWP, the
SWP's interface with the pro-capitalist
labor forces. This was the role that So-
cialist Action and their Workers World
Party competitors now seek to replicate.
By 1972, a severe polarization had
taken place and by the end we had a very
hard time selling papers at the peace
crawls organized by the official antiwar
movement. It was pure, pure, pure lib-
eral. All the speakers were respectable
Senators and labor bureaucrats and such.
Anti-Imperialism Abroad
Means Class.Struggle
At Home!
Right now this present antiwar move-
ment is stepping off politically at this
lowest point of the former anti war move-
ment. This is a very conscious policy
aimed at keeping the level of opposition
to the present war Within the framework
of capitalist ideology and capitalism
itself. The brokers of today's antiwar
coalitions perpetuate the illusion that war
can be stopped by means other than
socialist revolution which takes away the
power entirely from the bourgeoisie. In
so doing, they further illusions in the
liberal wing of the bourgeoisie. The lib-
eral wing is just as social-patriotic and
social-chauvinist as the most conserva-
tive Jesse Helms or Bush or anybody. In
creating these illusions in the liberal
wing of the bourgeoisie, they encourage
social-patriotic views among the working
Ruffner/Life
class, and prepare them to be cannon
fodder in the next imperialist war. That's
the significance of these coalitions in
search of imperialist doves we're looking
at and the little centrist groups who seek
to be their tails.
What we badly miss right now-and
we should understand that it's a handicap
for the time being, but it doesn't detract
one bit from our political tasks-r-are
fractions in the industrial working class.
Out: main role would be agitating
amongst the workers in the workplaces.
And this is what we will attempt to do
as this war unfolds and we work out a
series of tactics and see what we're
actually intersecting. Now the workers
are much more inclined toward strug-
gle than they were during the Vietnam
War. The standards of living have been
reduced 20, 30 percent.
The barbaric nature of imperialist war
is one of the purest expressions of the
indifference of the capitalists toward the
workers who produce their profits. They
don't give a shit about workers and will
kill 60,000 in one day-it happened in
World War I. World War I was a war of
attrition. The Allied generals put their
heads together and said, "Well, neither
side has the advantage but we have more
men. Eventually they'll run out of men
and we won't." Some huge percentage of
all the young men between certain ages
simply. were killed.
That horrible waste of human life
sparked revolutions all over Europe after
the war. Our task relative to this war
is to deepen the understanding of the
working class to facilitate class struggle
against the capitalist system as a whole,
and to recruit a new political generation
of workers, blacks and students to our
revolutionary perspective.
Bankrupt U.S. for War
Defeat U.S. Imperialism! Defend Iraq!
Racist War Machine in Gulf War Oil Grab
Black Soldiers in the Jim Crow Military
SAN FRANCISCO
Speaker: Diana Coleman
Thursday, Feb. 21, 7:30 p.m.
San Francisco State University
Student Union B 112
For more information: (415) 863-6963
CLEVELAND
Tuesday, Feb. 26, 7 p.m,
Cleveland State University
22nd and Euclid
University Center 361
For more information: (216) 781-7500
NEW YORK CITY February 16
Saturdays at 2 p.m. A Marxist Understanding of
41 Warren Street the State
(1 block south of Chambers February 23
between Church and West Broadway) War and Revolution
For more information: (212) 267-1025
CHICAGO
Guest Speaker: Bernard Branche,
member ATU Local 308
Saturday, Feb. 23, 7:30p.m.
Blackstone Hotel, Regency Room
636 South Michigan Avenue
For more information: (312) 663-0715
BERKELEY/OAKLAND
Saturday, Feb. 23, 7:30 p.m.
UC Berkeley, 126 Barrows
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Speaker: Paul Collins,
SL Central Committee
Saturday, Feb. 23, 2 p.m.
Howard University
Undergraduate Library Lecture Rm.
For more information: (202) 872-8240
Speakers: Hursey Bush
Don Alexander
For more information: (415) 839-0851
LOS ANGELES
Monday, Feb. 25, 7 p.m.
Los Angeles City College
Franklin Hall, Room 101
For more information: (213) 380-8239
,7
In Honor of Comrade
Garry Gianninoto
New York memorial meeting to honor Garry Gianninoto, 2 February 1991.
The meeting began with the playing of the Inter-
nationale in Russian as Garry had wanted, and ended
with the singing of the Internationale.
Garry deeply touched many people and many
honored him at the memorial in their speeches, letters
and other contributions. Here we are publishing edited
excerpts of some of these. We hope that they will
give our readers some measure of the man-our
comrade Garry Gianninoto.
* * *
Deborah Mackson
Garry was born on October 14, 1947. He died on
January 9, 1991. His 43 years were not long enough
for him to do what he wanted to do, which was to
help usher in a socialist America. The hope for a
future where there would be no more of what he saw
in Vietnam, and JlO more of what he saw in Harlem,
gave him the strength to fight, every day of his adult
life, to do his best for our party. If he believed noth-
ing else, he believed this party was America's last
best hope.
Garry was a casualty of the Vietnam War. I say
this not just because I believe his cancer was likely
caused by some toxic chemical to which he was
undoubtedly exposed while he was there, but also
because, like many other veterans, he suffered the
war every day of his life afterwards.
Garry joined the Navy as a Medical Corpsman in
November of 1966 at the age of 19. At that time, the
government began canceling deferments for a whole
class of medical problems. So Garry's deferment for
a bad knee was history. Like a lot of other young
men, he shopped around looking for safe service. He
was told that Navy Corpsman was probably his best
bet, that he would likely never be sent to Nam. So
what happened? Besides the fact that they always lie -
about. such things, Garry figured it was pure and
simple bad luck.
In February of 1968, he was shipped to Da Nang.
Four months later he reported to HQ to forthrightly
announce that this war was wrong and he quit. They
threw him in the brig. Conditions there, as you can
imagine, were savage. Garry participated in one of
the first prison rebellions there, which some of you
will remember spread in the summer of '68 and led
to the burning of what the troops bitterly referred to
as "the LBJ," the Long Binh jail. Later, still in the
brig, Garry helped lead sitdown strikes against the
inhuman working conditions that he and his primarily
black comrades were forced to endure.
Based on some study, it is my belief that those
sitdowns in the Da Nang brig were in fact the spark
which spread the sitdowns not only through the U.S.
prison system for its own men in Southeast Asia, but
later to active troops on the edge of the DMZ. Other
veterans in our organization, who went to war later,
tell me that by the time they arrived opposition
among the troops was much more organized and
individuals no longer had to face what Garry did.
Entire units were literally disarmed and moved to the
rear because they were "unreliable."
You can read about Garry's experiences, in his own
words, in his article, "Vietnam: Racism and Rebellion
Behind the Lines-A GI's View of America's Dirty
War," printed in Workers Vanguard on 2 November
1990. This article was a gift to our organization-it
came as the world was poised on the brink of another
war. Relating and bringing this truth to a new genera-
tion cost Garry dearly. I really don't believe any of
us can know how hard he had to fight-through so
many memories and so much pain-to give us that
history.
When he' finally got out of the Navy in July of
1969, Garry had two things burned into his soul: an
intense hatred of American imperialism and a deep,
to leave with his comrades-of his dedication to, and
understanding of, the necessity of building a revolu-
tionary combat party to fight for a socialist future.
It was a very emotional meeting which reflected
the tragic loss of a man so young and a man who
brought so much, both in our organization and in his
work outside, to furthering the cause ~ f decency,
humanity and a life free of degradation, exploitation
and oppression. The rich diversity of Garry's'contrl-
butions-memos on health care, meticulous statistics
and records he kept in the Circulation Department,
bulletins he had printed, articles from Workers Van-
guard he had contributed to, and many other exam-
ples of his work-were displayed at the memorial.
1947-1991
~
Mindy Gianninoto
Our comrade Garry Gianninoto died on January 9,
after more than a year of battling cancer. He was 43
years old.
Garry joined our organization in 1978 and served
in a leading capacity in both our Circulation Depart-
ment and on our Medical Commission. He was a
Vietnam veteran. For more than six years, in the
1980s, he worked as a physician's assistant at Harlem
Hospital.
On February 2, a memorial meeting was held in his
honor in New York City. His. comrades, friends and
coworkers from Harlem Hospital came out to pay
tribute. Members of both Garry's and his wife
Mindy's families were there. Garry's brother Tony
spoke at the meeting.
Messages of condolence, remembrance and respect
came in from comrades across the U.S. and from Sri
Lanka, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Canada.
Some had personal experience with the care, kindness
and attention that Garry brought to dealing with
medical problems of various comrades and others
internationally. A comrade from Britain wrote:
"I remember several occasions whenthere werecom-
rades in Britain with seemingly intractable medical
problems, with no apparent hope of decent treatment
fromtheNational Health Service.... Evenwhileunder-
standing the limitations of capitalist society, Garry
fought for what was available in a very concrete
way.... When a comrade was sick, he would manage
to keepin touchby day andby night. regardless of the
time difference and regardless of his shifts."
Even those comrades who had not personally
worked with or known Garry felt the impact of his
contributions. This was conveyed in a letter written
on behalf of the comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de
France: "Garry did not live to see the beginning of
this latest imperialist crime against humanity, the war
in the Gulf, but his work and especially his recent
article, 'Vietnam: Racism and Rebellion Behind the
Lines,' were key in arming the party-internationally
- for that critical moment of the war breaking out,
when the torrent of lies and chauvinist poison can
shake even a steeled revolutionary party." A comrade
wrote in from Chicago that this article also had a big
impact on transit workers there who were Vietnam
vets.
Garry was a hard communist. In his last months he
made a tape dedicated to his wife, and comrade,
Mindy. At the memorial meeting Mindy spoke for
him, conveying the testimony that Garry had wanted
8 WORKERS VANGUARD
* * *
Mindy Gianninoto
It is very hard to express what another human
being felt, but I feel I need to try.
There were only two things that mattered to Garry:
myself and the party.
Garry felt deeply committed to this party and what
we stand for. He did and would do whatever was
asked of him with no complaints. As he said, "I gave
it my best shot." He said he "would have died for this
party, but that should be a given."
He had no tolerance for people complaining that
any task was "shit work" or people not doing what
was necessary to carry out the work. He never lost
sight that we were here to change this world. He felt
that it was too bad that, in particular, our younger
members never went through military training. That
is where he learned what a combat organization is,
continued on page 10
I think, though, that his most valuable contribution
was his ability to move medical professionals to do
right by each and every comrade, or their family
members, who needed help. He would settle only for
the best. If he didn't know who the best was, he
would find out, somehow drag their asses out of bed
and get them on the case. He never.quit on this front,
and he continued to do it from his hospital bed when
he himself was dying. This is something I don't think
we will ever be able to replace and we are much,
much poorer for it. I will miss him horribly and ii
really hurts to think about it.
Garry always hated it when we got to the point
where we had to say about a particular medical prob-
lem, "there's nothing (or nothing more) we can do."
His wartime training and subsequent work at Harlem
Hospital instilled in him an urgency and great drive
to do everything possible to save lives and eliminate
pain. This is one of the reasons his battle with cancer
was so bitter for those of us who worked closely with
him in this area-there was nothing we could do to
make it better, and we hated that.
There are a few more things I'd like to say about
Garry. He was a news hound. To show you how
important that was, let me tell one story. We were
over at Jim's one night-September 30,1986 actually
-just "sitting around telling lies," as Dick Fraser
would have put it, and maybe playing a little bridge.
Just after midnight the phone rang. It was Garry, who
had been tracking the news. He called to say. that the
ILA had just walked out on the East Coast. Garry
knew this was important and he was right. Within
hours we were producing a special Workers Vanguard
supplement on the strike. Over the next several days
we distributed a half million copies to striking
longshoremen and others. In the two months follow-
ing that strike we produced many, many pieces of
literature which had to be circulated around the
country, to new places. Garry ran the entire eire
department for those months.
At the beginning of this talk, I mentioned to you
that Garry came out of Nam with a deep understand-
ing of the black question. This was another area
where I enjoyed working with him. I often talked to
him about public events we were having on this
question and he always gave me ideas and help. The
last time was five days before he died. We are going
to be having a public forum on blacks and the Jim
Crow military, and wanted to span the period from
the Civil War to the Persian Gulf. While we were
sitting in the radiology department waiting for yet
another test, we worked on a list of books to recom-
mend to the comrade preparing the talk.
So I've tried here to give you an outline of Garry's
history in, and multifaceted contribution to, our party.
Hopefully, a little sense, too, of who he was. He was
a troubled man, he had mostly sleepless nights and
every day he fought a battle to maintain an emotional
equilibrium which would allow him to go forward.
Theresults of that battle were uneven, some days he
won; some days he lost. But he kept fighting, and
kept giving what he could. That he could give so
much under such circumstances makes his contri-
bution all the more significant. It is a testament to
him, and something to which the rest of us can
aspire.
Garry was a good man, not so easy to be in this
world, and a fine communist, of which this world has
far too few. We loved him, we will miss him and as
a tribute to him we will go forward, the International
Communist League, for Garry"and for the rest of the
human race for whom he cared so deeply.
get him to change to an easier job. But for whatever
complicated reasons, he chose to stay in Harlem to
help those whom society had written off.
In January of 1983, we formed the party Medical
Commission with Garry as one of its members. This _
is the area in which I'worked most closelywith him,
and so it is the most painful for me to talk about.
Garry liked this work and his contribution was
unique. His substantial medical knowledge was
painstakingly applied to each and every individual
case with a kindness and a generosity of spirit not
often found in this world. He also enriched our press
by contributing to our articles on the AIDS epidemic,
for example, "AIDS Devastates Gays, Ghettos," in
October of 1988.
Mindy Gianninolo
Garry and Mindy, St. Croix, summer 1986.
particular the Farsi language pamphlets were a night-
mare to produce. The script had to be done by hand
and the negatives were not very clean. Garry, who
didn't know the. language, nevertheless spent days
agonizing and poring over the negatives on the light
table to ensure that each dot and scratch, in this lan-
guage of dots and scratches, was supposed to be
there. He did a. similar job on our pamphlet "The
World Prospect for Socialism" which Helene told me
was his idea to produce and is on display in the back
of the-room with some of his other work.:
During this time, I believe it was June of 1983,
Garry went to work as a physician's assistant at
Harlem Hospital Center. Working at Harlem Hospital
was hard for Garry, it often exacerbated his post-
traumatic stress disorder. We tried several times to
thorough understanding of the black question. He
knew he was a communist and, after some unpleasant
trial and error, found the Spartacist League in 1978.
He applied for membership in October while working
on our New York City election campaign and was
accepted as a candidate member of the New York
local on November 19.
In January 1979, while still a candidate member,
he was made literature director of the New York
local. The local was in some disarray at the time,
which must have driven the careful, meticulous Garry
right up the wall. But he was also a very resourceful
guy. So he quickly acquainted himself with the Circu-
lation Department and started working through them
to keep things in order. As it turned out, Garry found
his niche there, bringing his organizational skills to
bear on the statistics and record-keeping so necessary
to keep on top of the stocking and circulation of all
our publications.
In May of 1979, he fell in love with Mindy, and
he never fell out. He chose well. Mindy's courage
through especially the last year is and will remain an
inspiration to all of her comrades. I think she knows
she has our love, our respect and our most profes-
sional military salute.
By 1981 Garry was trained to operate our press and
was printing our subscription blanks and the wrappers
for our newspapers. After a brief tour as a treasurer
in the New York local Garry returned to eire in 1983.
In early 1985, Garry came to the party leadership
with a big worry-many of our bulletins and pam-
phlets were out of print. Many of the bulletins, in
particular, had been mimeographed arid the stencils
were too old to use and we needed new copies. This
led to some intensive research on the printing of our
material and in February of 1985 we decided to
divide the eire department into "circulation" and
"non-periodical production." Garry was made chief
of the production operation.
The Spartacist League is quite proud of its history
and unlike other organizations, who sometimes have
a problem with their past positions, we are careful to
preserve and make our material available to our mem-
bers and others. Garry made this deeply felt principle
-the party as the collective memory of the working
class-a reality for us. This was really quite an
assignment, and Garry brought his perfectionism to
every aspect of the work.: He was the pressman, but
he also conceived the job and saw it through to the
end. He coordinated the tricky "priority" and "tech-
nical" decisions, the use of other party resources
-like the knowledge, skills and responsibilities of
other comrades-with all the other party department
heads. The comrades he worked the most closely with
during this period wanted me to say for them that he
was a pleasure to work with.
Darlene, who was our eire chief for a number of
years, remembers that Garry set new standards for the
production of our material. "No one took as much
time, pride and care on even the simplest jobs," she
said. But there were complicated ones as wellein
WVPholo
Garry at the front of SL-organized anti-Imperlali$t contingent marching for military victory to leftist
insurgents In EI Salvador, 3 May 1981.
15 FEBRUARY 1991 9
Dr. James Curtis
It's a real pleasure for me to be here. As director
of psychiatry for Harlem Hospital Center, it was a
great pleasure for me to hire Garry, I think it must
have been about six years ago now. "',
He worked on a project that was remarkably close
to so many of the other things that I've heard about
this afternoon. We were following a group of 150
patients who were being discharged from our psy-
chiatry in-patient service, and we needed to have
someone on that team of about a dozen people who
could take care of their physical health care needs.
That was the special assignment that Garry had, to
be in charge of the physical health care case manage-
people. Garry loved Tony but hadn't seen him for
probably 12 years. They opened up their lives to us.
We had more privacy in their home than they did. To
be able to sit out in the sun and watch nature was
very nice.
Then, all our trips to Montauk-to be able to get
away from New York meant being able to leave our
house, to get away from the hospital and just watch
birds, feed the birds, and listen to the ocean.
The comrades were always available day or night
for Garry and myself. That made a huge difference.
You guys never cried and we both thank you for that.
The only thing that came easy in Garry's life was
that he died in his sleep. ~
Garry had a tremendous sense of survival which
I believe came from the war. I don't know anyone
who would have gone through chemotherapy. But he
wanted to give it a shot.
Neither Garry or I ever thought life was fair. So,
it's never been a question of this wasn't fair. There
'is a real deep feeling of bitterness. But the man still
weighed 215 pounds and had his hair, as much as
they tried to destroy that.
Garry was a hard man. And he was a good man.
I think I had a pretty rare thing in life. He never
would have changed places with me-if there could
ever be such an option in life.
September 1983,
Garry at Spartaclst
protest against
U.S.-sponsored
seating of
Cambodian Pol
Pot regime In UN,'
part of continuing
Imperialist
vendetta against
the Vietnamese
Revolution.
* * *
Jim Robertson
To Garry's family, coworkers, his friends and his
comrades: I did not know Garry nearly well enough.
He was, as he described in his own words, a bit
asocial. I'm pretty shy, which is a terrible trait in a
politician, and there was a generation gap between us.
We began to work together on the Medical Com-
mission. Our party, having observed hospitals and the
medical profession, does not let medical doctors serve
on the Medical Commission. They serve as consult-
ants. If you're a physicist, a chemist, a pharma-
cologist, a nurse, or otherwise in some relationship
to the health field, you're a member of the commis-
sion. I believe our party doctors are very good
fellows indeed. But it's a kind of profession that
resembles too much the professional officer corps.
I found Garry uniquely suited for finding the right
doctor in the right field for a given patient. As things
unfolded over the years, I found that he had a fine
wry sense of humor, an enormous interest in nature---
his concern with photography and birds. I also had
the opportunity, at the last possible moment because
I did not think it would be very pleasant, to listen
to his tape, in his dying days, of goodbye to the
comrades.
I've been thinking since Garry died of what one
might say, and having listened to his goodbye tape,
1know that I have his full authority to make the kind
of remarks that I will make, because this is how he
felt.
Garry was shaped as an adult by his experiences
in the Vietnam War. Garry did not draw pacifistic
conclusions. He thought it was a wrong war, in which
American soldiers were fighting on the wrong side.
He did believe that there was a valuable quality to be
learned through military discipline and responsibility.
He was not a hippie.
ment for this group. We followed those people, not
just in and out of the hospital, but all over Harlem
and all over New York City, for five years. We
worked extremely closely with Garry, in conferences
that were held at least once a week.
So I came to know him quite well, and to know of
his ability. He was really dedicated and competent
and perfectionist. And the deep caring for people, you
could just see it. The patients loved him and admired
him and looked up to him. But the people with whom
he worked, including me, also had such a tremendous
feeling of warmth and respect and love for Garry.
I had no idea of the sources of some of his
strength, and I'm really pleased to be here this after-
noon to hear something of what inspired him and
gave him the particular kind of strength of will and
determination that he brought.
He also was someone who had the remarkable gift
of not being caught up in cliques and factions of
people who were wrangling with each other. And
you can't be on a team of six or eight people,
working with extremely difficult patients, without
having people fall info cliques and factions. But
remarkably, he never got caught up in either side and
kept his eye steadfastly on the mission of our work.
He was truly a remarkable man, and my life and all
of our lives were made so much the better for having
known him.
Garry's
meticulous
work as
party printer
enabled
Spartaclst
program to
appear In Farsi,
Japanese,
Turkish-language
publications.
* * *
In Honor of
Garry Gianninoto...
(continued from page 9)
from the chain of command to the discipline.
I believe that without the party and myself, Garry
could have very easily ended up like a lot of other
Vietnam vets .. Garry was a tortured soul. He could
-never live with or come to terms with that war. He
never thought he had a right to live past 20. But he
.never wanted to go this way.
Garry had post-traumatic stress disorder. This
government never gave a damn about any vet. All
they wanted and want is cannon fodder. But Garry
did courageous and honorable things in an "unhonor-
able" war. After four months of being a corpsman he
went to his CO and said, "I'm not doing. this any-
more." He led a sitdown strike in the brig along with
a brig uprising. All these things he expected to be
shot for.
Garry really cared about people. He thought, and
demanded, that everybody should get the best care.
I watched this man work, and he was good. If some-
body needed a neurologist, surgeon, or whatever-
whether it was immediately operational or for a
referral-he would get on the phone, call a contact
and say, "Who's the best?" Then he'd get them.
What the party and comrades did for Garry, in his
words, made it easier for him to die. He thanked
people for this. Garry was asocial and he thanked
comrades for the friendship that broke through this.
All through the years the party has always gone all
out to help Garry-from financially facilitating his
being able to see a psychiatrist for his post-traumatic
stress disorder, to making Garry a consultative mem-
ber so that he did nor have to quit the party. Although
he always hated not having a vote.
Garry took a medical leave of absence because of
major depression. He was having an extremely diffi-
cult time in life, but was in the middle of producing
the first Prometheus Research Library bulletin. He
waited until the bulletin was produced to take his
medical leave, not one day before and not one day
after. I believe that during this time Garry was
already sick.
The two things that they say about people who
have cancer is: one, they should never be in pain, and
two, they should never be alone. Garry took a lot of
morphine and was still in some pain. But it was
tolerable. The one thing about oncology, and probably
the only thing in my opinion, is that they have been
"won over" to no pain. And the party made sure that
Garry was never alone. From the day Garry was
diagnosed, I was never expected or asked to continue
with my job-even though it had to be a big strain
on the organization and comrades.
Being with Garry was important to him and impor-
tant to me. There are large parts of terror and fear
that another human being can never touch. But we
built our own little fragile world. It worked pretty
well until September, when life came crashing in.
What the party made possible was giving Garry a
real quality of life, for what time he had remaining.
One, he didn't have toworry about being evicted, and
two, all those wonderful trips Garry and I took.
Going to Florida was very important. They did a
thoracotomy on Garry which took him months to
recover from. Tony and Brenda were just wonderful
10 WORKEI\1SVANGUARI) .
fellow in the State Department said "history is dead."
Now we have a new war, the consequences of which
are incalculable. The world possesses 40,000 hydro-
gen bombs, and some of them are already in the
hands of really crazy people. It's not easy to appre-
ciate moving into a new period. Some of the elements
today-except that there's one power, the Americans,
who have this vast armament-are reminiscent of
pre-1914. You have these very large capitalist powers
jockeying for position.
The last good thing that I can recall that happened
on this planet was that a force of Angolans and
Cubans beat South Africa, threw them out of Angola
and assisted in getting rid of the white domination in
Namibia. That was back in the Brezhnev era, because
there was some residue in foreign policy on the part
of the Soviet Union that was not simply to give up
in the favor of imperialism. Then there was stalemate
in Afghanistan and collapse, and now the Russians
are butting out everywhere including inside their own
country. So it's not possible 10 know what is going
to happen.
But I know what Garry wanted, and I know what
this party is committed to, and that is to struggle for
the authentic socialist organization of society. And
that remains true even though we are moving into a
new period, many of the variables of which are not
now known to us. It is necessary to fight.
* * *
In Florida at his
brother's house,
February 1990.
Bruce
To those who don't know me, I'm a comrade of
Garry's. I too wanted to give an example of his mar-
velous compassion and ability to organize on a
moment's notice. When Laurie was pregnant, we
learned from the doctor that the baby's chromosomes
were scrambled. The doctors refused to issue an
opinion as to whether the baby would be born per-
fectly healthy or brain-dead. In 24 hours' time, Garry
had organized an appointment with the top cytogenet-
icist in the country, who Garry had learned was
working in New York. He got another leading doctor,
to speak to this scientist, so as to have the authority
to get an urgent appointment. It was through that
scientist's lab work and professional opinion-which
she was willing to give-that. we learned that the
baby would be perfectly normal. The worst ailment
that Sasha's ever had is the flu. That was Garry's
doing.
WVPhoto
Through articles in the pages of the Spartacist
press, Garry told the searing and painful truth
about what U.S. imperialism's dirty war in
Vietnam was like, and the hellish medical
conditions in America's ghettos.
a lot of time to trying to develop advice for people
on how to keep themselves healthy.
So I miss him very much as a trusted friend and
comrade.
Nonetheless there are risks of violence and attack, not
only from the fascists but particularly from the squad-
~ o n s of cops who have been mobilized to protect
them. If Garry was there, he was in charge of the
medical component. We needed to be ready for any
eventuality and we always have been.
One of Garry's last projects, which you can see in
the displays, was his work on preventive health care.
The most important thing is simply to stay healthy,
in order to stay out of this health care system. But
therein lies the contradiction, because in order to stay
out of it you have to use it. Garry actually devoted
* * *
Glenn
I had the privilege to know and work with Garry
for many years. In many tense and serious situations
Garry always stood tall and held his ground.
He paid heavily for being in the Vietnam War, and
for being against it. There's discussion on whether
Agent Orange is a facilitator of cancer. Of course it's
not in the government's interest to make that determi-
nation. But Garry was exposed to Agent Orange and
he died of lung cancer. He was also forced to live
with other scars from Vietnam. He was exposed to
and experienced the horrors that you see in war. As
a medic, he felt the strong intensity of those horrors
and the pain inflicted on soldiers. Post-traumatic
stress syndrome burns those horrors into your psyche.
Simple, everyday life events retrigger those emotions
with similar intensity. That's why it's so debilitating.
This made his life harder. It made suffering from his
disease harder, particularly since he knew and hated
the health system, he saw what was happening to
him, and that made it all the harder for him.
As a medical professional, I often worked with
Garry on medical problems that arose. We always
saw in him a clarity of thought, a demand for accu-
racy in information, firmness and determination to
push things,through. He also demonstrated the ability
to be lighthearted when that was appropriate, which
I think everyone has always appreciated.
I think the most important thing was the trust that
he earned from everydne. Comrades always knew
they had someone that was in their corner. Whether
it was an illness or an accident, Garry was always
interested in organizing all the facets because it's not
simply medical. There's the personal, financial and
political side.
Garry helped to develop the medical component of
the anti-Klan demonstrations that we've initiated and
organized. Our strategy is to organize the trade-union
movement and minority organizations who are target-
ed by the fascists. The strategy makes us strong.
WV Photo
"KKK, Hit the Road!" Leading chants at
5,000-strong rally that stopped the Klan in
Washington, D.C., 27 November 1982. Garry
also headed SL medical team to care for
'demonstrators in case of trouble.
That raises another question that's once again come
up. General Norman Schwarzkopf claims that Ameri-
can veterans returning from the Vietnam War, were
spit on by antiwar activists. Now I've known a lot of
militant antiwar activists. They never had any desire
to spit on returning American soldiers. I never heard
of such a thing. This is a version of the Hitler stab-in-
the-back myth that "German Jews sold out Germany
in the First World War, and that's why we lost, us
front-fighters." It was a lie. It's a lie today. What do
antiwar activists want to do to the reserves, that are
being called overseas? Give them one cold bottle of
beer before they get hauled into this hellhole-
because it's a bad war.
Men are terribly traumatized in good wars, but the
great bulk of them come out intact. Both sides
believed in the American Civil War, and so which-
ever side they fought on, you did not have very
much post-traumatic stress syndrome, even though
they went through bloody hell. When Erich Maria
Remarque, a German soldier, wrote All Quiet on the
Western Front, was he being anti-German by showing
that this was a terrible war, killing men on both sides
for no good purpose? So it's part of our job as
socialists to fight this infamy, where the antiwar
elements are supposed to be set up against the guys
who are being dragged into the slaughter. Let us look
instead at the Schwarzkopfs, their masters.
Beginning with the help of Stalin and now com-
pleting with the restoration of .capitalism in East
Europe, there are again to be two classes: the people
in shirts and ties, and the people who clean the
toilets. Garry despised that. He believed that all
people are equal. And he meantit in the most literal,"
practical way. In our party, I hope that we've carried
that out. Anytime you find somebody who finds that
there's some task that's too menial, trivial or degrad-
ing, you have somebody who's profoundly an elitist
and who believes that they ought to be part of a
master class. And Garry felt that too very strongly.
Our organization went for a long time being very,
very lucky and we didn't know it. It's been in exis-
tence for about 25 years. For the first ten years,
nobody died or got really hurt. Then we started get-
ting it. Toni Randell, at the age of 39, cancer; Kim
Kilmer in an accident; Alden Cavanaugh, suicide;
Noah Wolkenstein, suicide; Clay Dickinson, AIDS;
Garry Gianninoto, cancer. We've had other serious
problems. These are young people. I can list some old
people, who were either old party comrades or who
were, if not in close agreement, at least collaborated
with us on matters of common interest. But when you
get a heart attack at the age of 82 after profound
medical complications, that's the way we hope we all
leave this world. But in the last years, we have been
getting the wrong side of the equation: early and
miserable death. And Garry is the latest.
Well, the world is certainly changing. We are
witnessing the death agony of the Stalinist takeover
of the Russian Revolution. Immediately there's the
bourgeoisie saying "Communism is dead." Some
15 FEBRUARY 1991 11
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF;CANADA
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY
Vancouver
Box 2717, Main. P.O.
Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2
(604) 687-0353
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Box 1972, Main PO
Norfolk, VA 23501
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Box 5712
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Washl,ngton, D.C.
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Montreal, QC H2L 4V5
not dropbombs) is that the U.S. is'drop-
ping at least 16,000 tons a day, a total of
a half million tons in the first month of
war.
This is mass bombing on an unprece-
dented scale. In four weeks the U.S. has
hit Iraq with a quarter of all the bomb-
ing tonnage dropped on Germany and
German-occupied Europe in all of World
War II (2.2 million tons), and in ten
days it exceeded the firepower unleashed
against Japan (153,000 tons). As Bagh-
dad rightly charged, the U.S. is out
to "expel Iraq from the 20th ,century"
(Washington Post, 7 February), just as
the Americans tried to bomb Vietnam
"back to the Stone Age."
A Vietnamese civil engineer in Basra,
who lived through the carpetbombing of
Haiphong, said: "I thought I was back
in Vietnam." The Pentagon has declared
the whole city of Basra a "military tar-
get," recalling the "free fire" zones of
Vietnam. Los Angeles Times reporter
Mark Fineman described videotapes of
the destruction in Basra showing "limbs
protruding from piles of residential rub-
ble, dolls strewn atop twisted furni-
ture in what clearly were once homes;
bloodied civilians with shrapnel wounds
being rushed into hospital emergency
rooms; blanket-covered corpses on side-
walks; crumpled swing sets in battered
playgrounds. "
When CNN's Peter Arnett revealed
that the supposed "biological weapons
plant" bombed by the Americans made
powdered milk and infant formula, he
was denounced as a virtual Iraqi agent by
Washington. Now an Australian clergy-
man who visited the devastated factory
says: "I walked through the rubble of
that plant and I was contaminated with
milk powder." Nestle's said they knew
all about the state-owned factory, since
they keep tabs on their competition. And
the Washington Post (8 February) quotes
the director of the French company
which built the plant: "It would have
been impossible to transform this . .vinto
the making of chemical products."
u.S. Threatens Nuclear
Holocaust
The devastating bombardment of Iraq
is justified with the line that it will "save
American lives" in the coming ground
attack, echoing Truman's justification for
the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The arrogant U.S. imperialists
claim the right to bomb any country off
the face of the planet if they think it
will "save American lives" in a criminal
invasion.
For the ground offensive, the Pentagon
has delivered "fuel-air explosives," which
dropped in clusters create a giant fireball
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the American population through the
tame media which is "free to report what
they're told." New York Times correspon-
dent Chris Hedges complained on ABC
News (11 February): "You never see any
problems, you're never allowed to report,
nothing's ever wrong. This entire war has
become videotapes of planes always
hitting their targets like giant Nintendo
games and soldiers up front eating turkey
and waving flags. And it's a lie." This
lie will be exploded as the body bags
start coming home by the hundreds and
thousands.
Smart Bombs, Dumb Bombs,
War Crimes
"U.S. officials have repeatedly de-
clinedto disclose the cumulative tonnage
of explosives dropped," notes the Wash-
ington Post (3 February). Why? Because
the astronomical numbers would belie the
Pentagon's sanitized picture of the air
war as clean, "precision" bombing of
strictly "military targets." While media
attention has focused on high-tech weap-
ons, Baghdad and especially Basra are
being hit by Vietnam-era B-52s. "With
B-52s, the emphasis changes from drop-
ping smart bombs worth $1,000 a pound
to $1-a-pound dumb bombs" reported the
U.S. News &World Report (11 February),
a bottom line which the rising stock
market seems to love.
One report quotes a British defense
consultant in Saudi Arabia that "the
tonnage of high explosive bombs already
released has exceeded the combined
allied air offensive of World War II"
(London Times, 5 February). This may be
an overestimate, but not by a hell of a
lot. Our own estimate (based on the
Pentagon's conservativefigure of 2,000
sorties a day and taking 'into account
estimated percentages of those which did
In June 1966 the Fort Hood Three were
the first soldiers to publicly refuse orders
sending them to Vietnam. In 1968, some
150 black GIs refused to leave base for
"riot control" duty against antiwar
demonstrators outside the Democratic
convention in Chicago. And in 1971,
over 500 active-duty troops marched
down the streets of Killeen behind a
giant banner demanding, "We Want Out
Now." Fort Hood was also where the
racist Army brass unsuccessfully tried to
court-martial baseball star Jackie Robin-
son in 1944 for refusing to sit in the back
of a bus.
Coordinated mass social protest in the
army poses a threat to the war in a way
that individual refusals to fight do not.
When the generals launch their bloodbath
on the ground and the body bags start
coming into Dover AFB, such protests
will spread among the black, Hispanic
and poor white troops who are the
"cannon fodder" for Bush's New World
Order. Drop the charges against the Fort
Hood protestersl js
soldiers winno doubt exact revenge on
the ground for the murderous bombing
inflicted on their families over the last
month.
With Iraqi positions well entrenched
behind layer after layer of defensive
fortifications, ground fighting in Kuwait
will be more like-the trench carnage of
World War I than any war the U.S. has
fought since. In his antiwar classic, All
Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Erich
Maria Remarque described the horrors of
that war:
"We see men living with their skulls
blown open; we see soldiers run with
their two, feet cut off, they stagger on
their splintered stumps into the next
shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawlsa mile
and a half on his hands dragging his
smashed knee after him; anothergoes to
the dressing stationand over his clasped
hands bulge his intestines; we see men
without mouths, without jaws, without
faces; we find one manwhohas held the
artery of his arm in his teeth for two
hours in order not to bleed to death."
This is what the flag-waving yahoos-
financed and organized by Contragate
terrorist John Singlaub and right-wing
wheeler-dealer Richard Viguerie-are
cheering.
. Meanwhile, the war is being sold to
Rumens/Reuters
Remains of baby formula' factory In Baghdad destroyed by U.S. bombs.
Fort Hood was hotbed of GI protests against VietnamWar. Five hundred Gis
march in Killeen, Texas, 25 October 1971.
(continued from page 1)
are some cracks in the capitalist war
machine. Fort Hood alone has supplied
23,000 Army troops and trained 10,000
Guardsmen for the. Gulf War. The head
of the Louisiana' National Guard is
quoted as saying the incident had "a
platoon of four-star generals concerned."
Press accounts also talk of "low
morale" in Mississippi and Georgia
Guard units. Around the U.S., the Mili-
tary Family Support Network says local
groups to aid soldiers who desire to
become conscientious objectors are
mushrooming. And in Germany, about
100 U.S. soldiers have reportedly left
their units, many seeking CO status. A
network of German pacifists is sheltering
those who refuse to fight Iraq.
Imperialist war sharpens social con-
tradictions at home. Fort Hood, which
draws soldiers from across the Deep'
South, has been a particular focal point.
Fort Hood...
Terror
Bombing...
(continued from page 1)
on the Near East and the world.
"Our plan is mathematical and it has
its schedule," a particularly dimwitted
White House official announced last
week. But as Count Helmuth von Moltke
the Elder, chief of staff of the Pruss ian
army, observed, "no plan survives con-
tact withthe enemy." And on January 29,
U.S.-led forces got their first contact
with Iraqi troops. An armored column of
some 2,000 Iraqi troops swept straight
into the high-tech teeth of the American
war machine, took the town of Khafji six
miles inside Saudi territory, held it for
two days and then withdrew with the
bulk of its forces intact.
While the brass played up the number
of Iraqi tanks destroyed and played down
the significance of the battle (like they
did after the Vietnamese Tet Offensive
in 1968), for the American troops on the
ground, it was a sobering shock after
weeks of glib, racist propaganda about
how the Iraqis would simply collapse in
the face of superior U.S. firepower. One
Marine helicopter pilot who participated
in the recapture of -Khafji said after-
ward: "Nobody who is going to go face-
to-face with the Iraqis-cold steel to
cold steel-believes it will be a cake
walk." Another added, "I wouldn't say
this war will be quick. Many people will
die."
Many people have already died. But
once the ground war starts in earnest, it
will no longer be just Iraqi' civilians-
many Americans will also die. Despite
the cutesy codenames like "Razzle-
Dazzle" and "Bulldozer" the Pentagon
has assigned to its various scenarios for
a ground assault, Khafji will seem like
a cakewalk compared to what the U.S.
is in for with the bloody ground offen-
sive they're preparing. With a battle-
hardened and well-armored army, Iraqi
12 WORKERS VANGUARD
WVPhoto
Spartacists march in SF demonstra-
tion, January 26.
o $3/3 issues of
Women and Revolution
o $2/10 introductory issues
of Workers Vanguard
(includes English-language
Spartacist)
Class-Struggle Road to Peace
The left-liberal organizers of the anti-
war protests seek to outbid the war crim-
inals in patriotic sloganeering with calls
to "support our troops" and displays of
yellow ribbons and flag-waving. Ironi-
cally, Vietnam vets have taken to wear-
ing orange ribbons, a reminder of the
cancer-inducing Agent Orange defoliant
thatwas dumped on the Vietnamese peo-
ple as well as U.S. troops during the
imperialist devastation of Vietnam. Now
that the U.S. is sending another gener-
ation of youth to be slaughtered, Bush
has finally signed legislation acknowl-
edging that Vietnam vets were afflicted
by Agent Orange.
As the German-Polish Jewish revolu-
tionary Rosa Luxemburg put it during
the carnage of World War I, the alterna-
tives are socialism or barbarism. This
could not be clearer than it is today. The
imperialist system has spawned two
world wars and more than 150 "lesser"
wars so far in this century. More than
three million people have died in wars
since 1979, a million of them in the hid-
eous eight-year-long Iran-Iraq border war
in which the U.S. alternately (and some-
times simultaneously) supported both
sides. While Bush talks of a "new world
order," the reality underlines V.I. Lenin's
statement that the imperialist epoch is
one of wars and revolutions.
The barbarism of this imperialist sys-
tem in its death agony must be swept
away through revolutionary working-
class struggle if humanity is to be spared
ever grislier holocausts. A resounding
battlefield defeat for the war criminals of
Washington and Wall Street, linked to
class struggle by workers and minorities
at home, can pave the way for ending the
horrors of imperialist war once and for
all. The working people of this country
have the power to bring down this most
dangerous enemy of all humanity, the
U.S. ruling class. The key to unchaining
this power lies in the forging of an inter-
nationalist vanguard party committed to
the program of socialist revolution.
For labor strikes against the war! Sink
U.S. imperialism in the Persian Gulf!
Defend Iraq!
class have their way, there will be
many more 'Ismael "Cottos before this
bloody war is over, including hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi civilians. This
ruling class cares very much whether it's
the "best," biggest andbloodiest in the
world-that's what its survival depends
on.
The dollar declines in value against the
D-mark and yen, the U.S. economy is
wracked by recession-a "temporary
interruption of economic growth" as
Bush terms it-while the stock market
soars. American capitalism can't produce
a decent car, not to mention VCRs, it
can't provide education and housing for
its population. But it can throw around
its military muscle in an attempt to stay
top dog of the imperialist pack. "When
we win," rants Bush, the world will
know "that what we say goes." When
"we" win, vows the would-be Fuhrer of
the "new world order," Japan and Ger-
many "have got to give us access to
markets."
0$7/24 issues of Workers Vanguard
(includes English-language Spartacist)
o New 0 Renewal
International rates:
$25/24 issues-Airmail $7/24 issues-Seamail
Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League
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Name _
Address _
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City
were spending billions on this. I saw
themonWall Streetandtheywerecheer-
ing!It wassick. Theywerecheering, like
it was a game. Don't theyknowit means
that peoplewill die? Not them. Not their
families. Not their kids, People like my
brother. What do they want?':
-New York Post, 2 February
Describing the home that Ismael man-
agedto buy for his young wife and three-
year-old daughter in California.his broth-
er Carlos said: "He achieved the things
he dreamed of, the American dream."
All too cruelly, Ismael Cotto Jr. found
out in the end what the American dream
really means for blacks and Hispanics
and all the dispossessed in this disgust-
ingly racist, capitalist society. "What do
they want?" asks Maria Cotto, "To be the
best in the world? Well, I don't care if
we're the best. I want my brother back.
They took him away." If Bush and his
to drive out the erstwhile imperialist ally
Saddam Hussein and the capitalist Class
rule he represents. Only workers revolu-
tion can ensure the national rights of all
the peoples in the region-Palestinians,
Kurds and Hebrews alike. For a socialist
federation of the Near East!
Whose War?
In the wake of the battle of Khafji, the
Manchester Guardian Weekly (10 Febru-
ary) front-page headline read: "The body
bags begin to flow." This time, the Pen-
tagon has 'ordered, there will be no TV
cameras waiting when they return, no
ceremonies, no flags draped over them.
But the families will know, they will still
get the. dreaded phone call in the middle
of the night, as did one family in the
South Bronx last week.
Inside one of those body bags was
27-year-old Ismael Cotto Jr., a Puerto
Rican who managed to escape the hellish
conditions of his South Bronx barrio by
enlisting in the Marines. "I think he
died unnecessarily," said his distraught
23-year-old sister Maria as she lashed
out at the government that sent him to
his death:
"Why are they spending all this money
on this stupid war? Why aren't they
spending it here?Whyaren't theyspend-
ing it on the children, on the schools, on
housing, on-factories? ..
"I saw them on television saying they
ments. Egypt and Turkey have substantial
working classes. The memory of previous
colonialist and imperialist atrocities is
deeply seared into the consciousness of
the masses of the Near East, not least
Winston Churchill's use of poison gas to
quell an anti-colonial uprising in Iraq
in 1921, which he said would "spread a
lively terror" among the "uncivilised
tribes."
In the struggle to crush the imperialist
invaders, a revolutionary leadership could
channel the anti-imperialist sentiments of
the "masses toward proletarian-led upris-
ings to sweep away all the bloody des-
pots in the region-from Teheran to
Baghdad to Tel Aviv and beyond. It is
the task of the Iraqi working people-
Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shi'ites-
play by the bosses' rules. The strikers'
determination, the solidarity of workers
across the country, a truly evil boss-it
was all there, except the fighting leader-
ship the strikers deserved.
Real militants who don't buy the
SWP's cynical, self-serving reformism
must draw the lessons of this betrayal.
As we insisted early in the strike (Wv
No. 475, 14 April 1989): "The Eastetn
strike has posed pointblank the need for
class-struggle leadership. Any serious
class battle must be waged politically,
taking on the capitalist labor boards,
no-strike laws and strikebreaking in-
junctions. This means a fight to take
workers' struggles out of the. hands of
the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, oust-
ing these class traitors and forging a
workers party to fight for a workers gov-
ernment which will undertake the social-
ist reindustrialization of America.".
Reuters
Workers at demonstration of 400,000 in Algiers last month for Iraqi victory.
Arab World in Turmoil
Massive protests are sweeping through
all of North Africa and the Near East.
After initially threatening to arrest any-
one who tried to organize pro-Iraq
demonstrations, Morocco's King Has-
san-who has 1,200 troopsin the U.S.-
led coalition-s-not only permitted but
endorsed a massive one-day general
strike. Five hundred thousand people
surged onto the streets of Rabat with
Iraqi and Palestinian flags and banners
reading "We are all Iraqis." In Algeria,
Tunisia and Egypt high schools and uni-
versities have been shut down to prevent
student demonstrations. And Iran remains
a wild card.
To a large extent, the outpouring of
opposition to U.S. imperialism in the
region is influenced, if not dominated, by
Islamic fundamentalists. But many of
these countries, especially in North Af-
rica, have sizable secular leftist move-
the U.S. gears up for a bloody ground
war, the Zionists gear up for their bloody
"Final Solution." Shamir has taken the
Moledet party, whose sole program is the
mass expulsion of all Palestinians from
" the Occupied Territories, into the cabinet.
J'his flagrant statement of the Zionist
butchers' genocidal intentions angered
many even in Shamir's own rightist
Likud party.

Eastern
with the force and fire of a tactical
nuclear explosion. In addition, the U.S.
has thousands of actual nuclear weapons
in the Gulf. The Tomahawk cruise mis-
siles being launched from carriers in the
Gulf were in fact armed with nuclear
warheads which were replaced with con-
ventional ones. The nuclear tips can
easily be placed back on, and each has
a yield of up to 150 kilotons. Naval
aircraft can carry "tactical" nuclear
bombs of up to a I,OOO-kiloton yield.
And American spokesmen have al-
ready made clear they would have no
qualms about unleashing a nuclear holo-
caust over Iraq. When Cheney was asked
on CNN's Evans & Novak Report (2 Feb-
ruary), "That means we might use tacti-
cal weapons, then?" he coyly replied,
"It means that we've got a wide spec-
trum of capabilities." Cheney also gave
the Israelis a green light to use their
nukes against Baghdad, warning that if
Iraq launched chemical weapons against
Israel, "the possibility would then exist,
certainly with respect to the Israelis, for
example, that they might retaliate with
unconventional weapons."
To that purpose, the Zionist madmen
could certainly manufacture an "Iraqi"
C-weapons attack, no doubt one that
would land on the occupied West Bank,
where 90 percent of the Palestinian popu-
lation still has not been given gas masks.
For all the outcry over Scud attacks,
when one missile appeared headed for
an Arab village in the West Bank, the
Israelis told the American Patriot crew:
"Let it go" (New York Post, 31 Janu-
ary). With the Washington/Tel Aviv axis
aiming at Iraq, the Near East stands
a good chance of suffering a regional
Armageddon. -.
In the meantime the Zionist rulers,
itching for some Arab "blood, have
opened a "second front" against Palestin-
ian refugee camps in Lebanon. At least
eleven Arabs, including prominent Pales-
tinian journalist Sari Nusseibeh, have
been rounded up as "Iraqi spies." And as
(continued from page 2)
came after Kirkland, Winpisinger and the
Teamsters bureaucrats kept airline and
airport workers on the job.
You see, according to the SWP, work-
ers can't win strikes in this period:
"Taking place outside of conditions of
generalized resistance or an offensive by
the labor movement, the strike accom-
plished what the relationship of forces
between the employers and the working
class wouldtodayallow. this is its great
victory."
The truth is the SWP, following the lAM
and AFL-CIO, won't go beyond what the
capitalist class, their courts, cops and
labor boards will "allow." The Machin-
ists strike could have been the battle that
sparked a long-overdue offensive by the
working class-as long as they didn't
15 FEBRUARY 1991 13
cally, it is possible-although admittedly
unlikely-for the Soviet Union to be
transformed into a capitalist state while
preserving its present boundaries. Insofar
as Gorbachev has a coherent program,
this is the direction in which he is
moving. Thus his new economic policy,
announced in mid-October, calls for both
"speedy progress on the road to the mar-
ket economy" and "a renewed federative
and strong Union." Translating this
program from paper to the real world is
altogether another matter.
Gorbachev's current tum is not simply
a reaction to the provocations of the Bal-
tic secessionists. It is also a response to
the campaign against him by the "demo-
cratic" opposition now led by Boris
Yeltsin from his power base as president
of the Russian republic. At the end of
August, Yeltsin spokesmen announced
agreement on a "radical" new program
worked out by Gorbachev's economic
advisers, notably Stanislav Shatalin, for
transforming the USSR into a full-
fledged market economy. Housing would
be privatized, agricultural land sold to
peasant smallholders and at least 70 per-
cent of industrial enterprises dena-
tionalized-all in 500 days. Real power
of economic decision-making would be
transferred from the central government
to the various republics (see "Smash
Yeltsin/Gorbachev SOO-Day Plan!" WV
No. 510, 21 September 1990).
The prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov
opposed this, while Gorbachev himself
waffled for weeks. Finally, he backed
away from the Shatalin plan for fear of
triggering a mass explosion. In mid-
October Gorbachev offered a new eco-
nomic programwhich had the same goals
as the Shatalin plan but without the
forced-march timetable. It called for
"denationalization and privatization"
through the auctioning of state property,
"including the incomplete construction
projects, uninstalled equipment, construc-
tion materials, means of transportation,
enterprises and shops, food and service
outlets." It also specified that "Foreign
firms can operate on the domestic market
on an equal basis."
Had Mr. Perestroika come out with
this economic platform a year earlier, it
would have been hailed by Wall Street,
the City of London and Frankfurt as a
bold step toward "free markets," private
property and the decentralization of the
Soviet state. But now the "500-day" plan
was viewed by the imperialist bourgeoi-
sie and its Russian agents as a litmus test
of the Soviet president's commitment to
capitalist restoration. When Gorbachev
rejected this, he came under heavy fire
from the pro-Western "democrats" en-
couraged by their foreign godfathers.
Yeltsin threatened that, the Russian
republic would issue its own currency
and establish its own armed forces, while
pushing ahead with its own "free market"
economic program. At the same time,
Yeltsin demanded that Gorbachev dis-
band the central Soviet government and
replace it with a "government of national
unity" including himself and other lead-
ing anti-Communists. This campaign was
.taken up by prominent intellectuals like
Oleg Bogomolov and Tatyana Zaslav-
skaya who had been among the main
ideologues of perestroika.
one not heard from Mr. Gorbachev for
many a long year-though it has been
frequently used by his most conservative
critics to denounce his attempt to intro-
duce a market economy in the rest of
the Soviet Union."
The Western bourgeois' media is acting
as if Gorbachev has betrayed his promis-
es and even his own principles: But is
that in fact so? Imperialist ideologues
and their "democratic" Soviet proteges
invariably link capitalist restoration to
the breakup of the USSR along national
lines. However, there is nothing inherent
or necessary in such a linkage. Histori-
and the prime minister Kazimiera Prun-
skiene was forced to resign. She was
then replaced by a more extreme nation-
alist and "free marketeer." These protests
point to the possibility of uniting the
multinational working class against the
forces of bloody counterrevolution from
Vilnius to Moscow.
Behind Gorbachev's
"Conservative" Turn
<
When Gorbachev denounced the
Landsbergis regime for seeking to restore
"the' bourgeois system," the London
Guardian (11 January) commented acid-
ly: "This old Marxist-Leninist term is
of NATO's mobile strike force, a dag-
ger directed against the Soviet Union.
The Kohl government has declared that
defense of Turkey is required for rea-
sons of alliance, raising the possibility
of direct intervention of the' Bundes-
wehr together with the rest of NATO.
"With the defense of Iraq against
murderous imperialism directly posed,
the Soviet Union backed first the U.S.-
ordered UN blockade to starve Iraq, and
then the U.S./NATO mass slaughter.
This imperialist adventure to make the
Pentagon cops of the world and to
plunder and redivide the region's re-
sources endangers the Soviet Union
itself and brings the world closer to
world war. U:S. war minister Cheney
declared the land of October remains
Enemy Number One. We say: 'Defeat
U.S./NATO imperialism in the Gulf!
.Defend Iraq!' Your courageous action
is a concrete measure in defense both
of the Soviet Union and Iraq against :
imperialism, and isan inspiration to the
international working class."
Gorbachev
with Bush In
Malta, December
1989: "New
thinking" means
appeasement of
Imperialism, from
abandonment of
Afghanistan to
support of U.S.
war against Iraq.
unhappy over the U.S. military opera-
tions, and the next day the Soviet news
agency TASS officially stated that So-
viet planes would henceforth not be al-
lowed to carry weapons to crisis areas.
During the standoff, our comrades of
the Spartakist Workers Party of Germa-
ny (SpAD) issued a statement (translat-
ed below) solidarizing with the action
of the Soviet pilots:
"The SpAD hails the refusal of Sovi-
et pilots to carry Roland rockets to the
Bundeswehr at Dyabarkir, in Turkish
Kurdistan. The NATO-backed and
widely hated Ozal dictatorship has
leaped into the U.S./NATO war of mass
murder against the Iraqi people with
designs on the oil fields of Kirkuk and
Mosul. The Luftwaffe unit there is part
Nogues/Sygma AvakianlWoodfin Camp
Demagogue Boris Yeltsin, longtime Stalinist hack, former Gorbachev lieutenant, Is now hero of forces which openly
seek to restore capitalism and dismember the Soviet Union.
Mkhitaryan, a Byelorussian assembly-line
worker at a Vilnius appliance factory,
who describes the Landsbergis regime as
"a totalitarian system." Last April Mrs.
Mkhitaryan and her fellow worker mili-
tants formed the Civilian Committee,
which became part of the National Salva-
tion Committee in Lithuania.
A week before the crackdown in Vil-
nius in mid-January, there were large-
scale demonstrations by Russians, Poles
and also ethnic Lithuanians against the
Sajudis regime's plans to raise prices
between 200 and 800 percent! The price
increases were immediately rescinded
or stooges manipulated by Moscow. Yet
20 percent of Lithuania, 40 percent of
Latvia and almost half of Estonia con-
sist of Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorus-
sians and other nationalities. Heavily
concentrated in the working class, these
people will be the main immediate vic-
tims of the drive toward capitalist exploi-
tation. If the Baltic nationalists secede
and establish independent states, they
will drive out those whom they sneer-
ingly call "Soviet peoples."
That is why Moscow has a substantial
base of support in the Baltic republics.
This is seen even by the Wall Street
Journal (17 January), which cites Galina
Soviet Pilots Refuse to
Transport German Rockets
On February 8 a chartered Soviet air
freighter arrived at the Bonn- Knln
airport to pick up a German "Roland"
antiaircraft defense system and its
Bundeswehr crew. But when the Soviet
pilots found out that the cargo was to
be delivered to southeastern Turkey, for
use against Iraq in the present war, they
refused to take .off. The captain also
refused to speak with the Soviet ambas-
sador. Over the weekend there were
hourly radio reports as the plane sat on
the runway. The Kohl government
insisted it had paid good D-marks to
lease the giant Antonov freighter, one
of the few planes large enough to hold
the "Roland." (U.S. Galaxys are booked
up for the Gulf War.) But on Saturday,
Gorbachev declared that Moscow was
Soviet Union..
(continued from page 16)
Soviet peoples living in these republics.
For example, the parliaments which
declared "independence" were elected on
voters' rolls which exclude large numbers
of Soviet citizens who live in Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia.
The Sajudis regime of Vytautas Lands-
bergis has demonstrated in the most
flagrant way its intent to restore capi-
talism amid the immiserization of the
working class. A Sajudis supporter, Leo-
nid Mlechin, sumrped up its economic
program in the Moscow journal New
Times (23 October 1990):
"Lithuania honours the right to private
property and is prepared to give land to
people, privatization schemes are being
elaborated together with programmes to
attract foreign capital.. ..
"Former state enterprises will become
either private or joint-stock enterprises.
It is forbidden to make factories collec-
tive property of their work collectives,
this practice is viewed in Lithuania as 'a
manifestation. of socialist, in particular
Soviet ideology, which is incompatible
with the Lithuanian model of economic
reforms.'
"Prices will be determined on a free mar-
ket. Losses will never be covered by state
subsidies. Goods, currency and securities
will be freely exchanged and unemploy-
ment offices will appear."
This program could have been, and per-
haps was,' dictated by the Wall Street
Journal or London Economist.
Just as the Lithuanian nationalists are
in the forefront of capitalist counter-
revolution, so they are spearheading
the imperialist drive to dismember the
USSR. In an interview with the Wall
Street Journal (11 September 1990),
Landsbergis called on the NATO powers
to launch a new Cold War offensive: "we
think that the West is too careful; too
careful, not to risk any complications
with the Soviets. They could push the
Soviets back more strongly, because the
Soviets are collapsing and are pulling
back from all conquests and this pull-
back could include the Baltics."
The Sajudis nationalists have delib-
erately provoked Soviet soldiers and
officers stationed in Lithuania. They are
taunted in the streets, their children beat-
en up in the schools, Red Army monu-
ments commemorating the victory over
Nazi Germany are destroyed and defaced.
The Landsbergis regime has deprived
Soviet soldiers of housing and their chil-
dren of schools. The commander of a
paratroop regiment stationed in Kaunas
contrasted the Soviet military interven-
tion in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslo-
vakia in 1968, which he condemned, with
the current situation in Lithuania: "There
they were putting down democracy. Here
there is 0'0 democracy. It is a real fascist
dictatorship."
The Western bourgeois media depicts
the internal opponents of Baltic seces-
sion, now organized around "National'
Salvation Committees," as simply agents
14 WORKERS VANGUARD
ISO...:
(continued from page 5)
The ISO has eagerly built an aptly
named front group, "Chicago Campuses
Against War" or "CCAW" (read: see-
saw). Now it looks like they may have
created their own Frankenstein and
spawned a group that's even too right-
wing for them. At a February 3 CCAW
meeting, the ISO scrambled to squash a
proposal by the liberals they attracted to
decorate Chicago campuses with blue and
yellow ribbons (blue for "peace," yellow
for "support.our troops") and launch a
blood drive for' u.s. troops! The same
meeting was crashed by anti-communist
anarchists who were hilarious in spoofing
the ISO's bureaucratic opportunism. One
sported a circus ringmaster's costume
and raised a sign reading "Welcome to
the Zoo" while others passed out animal
crackers and a satirical leaflet:
"CSAW members come from a broad
variety of political perspectives and
points of view, but we are united in our
membership in the ISO. We agree to
work together around four points of uni-
ty: Dissidents out of CSAW-No inter-
vention in the CSAW hierarchy-No
Democracy-Recruit at home and
abroad.... Jump on the C-SAW!"
In their efforts to ride whatever wave
may be popular at the moment, the ISO
has hailed "movements" thatwould make
even a reactionary blush. In 1979 the
ISO supported the ayatollah Khomeini' s
"Islamic revolution" in Iran-a revo-
lution that put woinen in veils, leftists
in jails and killed countless thousands
of Kurds and Communists. They swung
back and forth over the squalid Iran/Iraq
border war, first hypocritically denounc-
ing the Iranian left's "fatal support for
the mullahs at the outbreak of the war"
(SW, October 1987) and then insisting
that there was "no choice but to support
the Khomeini regime against the U.S.
DPA
I

and its allies" (SW, February 1988).

The ISO wouldn't recognize the class
line if they tripped Over it-which they
do, regularly. In the winter of 1984-85
Britain was convulsed by the militant
coal miners strike. All sectors of So-
ciety-leftist students, steel workers,
blacks and Asian immigrants, gays and
women-united in active solidarity with
the miners because they saw the strike as
the spearhead of a fight to bring down
the vicious Thatcher government. But the
British SWP incredibly declared: "The
miners' strike is an extreme example of
what we in the Socialist Workers Party
have called the 'downturn' in the move-
ment" (Socialist Review, April 1984).
The sellout Labour Party tops worked
overtime against solidarity in action by
other unionists who were eager to be
called out on strike with the miners. As
miners battled cops and scabs in the pits
and villages throughout Britain, Tony
Cliff, the ISO's British mentor, boasted
at an SWP public meeting in London on
23 August 1984: "We have steelworkers
in Redcar who cross picket lines. We
have three steelworkers in Scunthorpe,
they cross picket lines. We have a
'steelworker in Ravenscraig who crosses
picket lines. We have a steelworker in
Llanwern who crosses picket lines."
State Department "Socialists"
The problem for the ISO is that
they have a wildly twisting weathervane
where communists need a. good back-
bone. Crisscrossing the class line is the
defining political characteristic andori-
gins of their organization. They crossed
it decisively at the height of the Cold
War when defending the Soviet Union
became unpopular. The Cliffites aban-
doned defense of the Soviet Union-s-
putting forward the ridiculous theory
that the. USSR is "state-capitalist"-and
haven't known which way is up since.
Ironically, the "we hate Russia" ISO
SociaIist-
Worker
........................ '-
01 I May 1988 ,.
Just as socialists welcomed the
defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam, we
welcome the defeat of the Russians
in Afghanistan. It will give heart to
all those inside the USSR and in
Eastern Europe who want to break
the rule of Stalin's heirs.
p. Or rl".... ....."..
ISO supported CIA-aided
mujahedin cutthroats
In Afghanistan. When
Gorbachev criminally
ordered Soviet
withdrawal, ISO cheered.
February 1979
stteet::>,
wished.
Iranian women are on the
threshold of a freedom denied
them for years.
Thousands have been in-
ISO hailed Khomelnl's rise to
power In Iran which put
women In veils, leftists In
jails, and thousands In the
grave. "Socialist-feminist"
ISO claimed the oppressive
veil was a symbol of
resistance to ImperialismI
employs every despicable practice that
Stalinism brought into the workers move-
ment-from physical violence against
Trotskyists to building illusions in "dem-
ocratic" capitalism and building popular
fronts while duplicitously "boring from
within."
Since 1917, when the Russian workers
andpeasants under the leadership of the
Bolsheviks smashed the power of the
capitalist class and instituted a workers
state for the first time in history, the
"Russian question" has been the litmus
test for any organization that lays claim
to Marxism. Although the gains of the
revolution have been corroded by dec-
ades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, the
imperialists have not given up on their
drive' to reconquer that lost market for
capitalist exploitation. We Trotskyists
fight to defend the Soviet Union against
imperialist attack and internalcounterrev-
olution while struggling to oust thebu-
reaucrats and restore workers democracy.
As Trotsky wrote:
"The workers' state must be taken as it
has emerged from the merciless labora-
tory of history and not as it is imagined
by a 'socialist' professor, reflectively
exploring his nose with his finger. It is
the duty of revolutionists to defend every
conquest of the working class even
though it may be distorted by the pres-
sure of hostile forces. Those who cannot
defend old positions will never conquer
new ones."
-In Defense of Marxism
"Old positions" were junked rather
than defended by Tony Cliff when the
Cold War burned red hot over Korea. As
in the Persian Gulf today, the u.s. fought
the Korean War under the cover of the
United Nations flag. Three ml'llioa Ko-
reans were slaughtered and the country-
side was reduced to a moonscape, Cliff
refused to take an elementary stand in
defense of the North Korean deformed
workers state-instead he split from the
Trotskyist movement. The ISO traces its
origins to this, and in every conflict
since, where the imperialists have sought
to "roll back Communism"-from Po-
land to Afghanistan to Eastern Europe
and the Baltics today-the ISO has stood
in the camp of U.S. imperialism.
Only the fact of Soviet nuclear capa-
bility deterred the U.S. from using nu-
clear weapons in Vietnam. Today it is
precisely the collapse of Stalinist rule in
East Europe and the deepening crisis in
the Soviet Union, as Gorbachev goes all
out to appease imperialism-from the
withdrawal from Afghanistan to the
handing over of East Germany to capital-
ism and the "Fourth Reich"-that has
emboldened the U.S. to launch its bloody
adventure in the Near East.
The destruction being wrought by U.S.
imperialism in the Persian Gulf is open-
ing many young people's eyes to the
horrors and injustices inherent in this
so-called "democracy." Nothing short of
a fundamental change in the class rule
of this society will eliminate this system .
of war, racism and exploitation. To pre-
tend otherwise is simply a lie. It is the
working class which has the power to
bring this rotten system down. Anti-
imperialism'abroad means class struggle
at home! As Trotsky's biographer Isaac
Deutscher once told an audience of
Vietnam antiwar activists, he'd trade all
the peace marches for just one good dock
strike against the war.
We take as our watchword Trotsky's
injunction to "speak the truth to the
masses." Antiwar militants should join
the revolutionary youth organization
whose program provides a basis for link-
ing this struggle with the social power
of the working class against the capi-
talist system. Join the Spartacus Youth
Clubs!
In mid-December a special economic
commission appointed by the world
bankers cartel (International Monetary
Fund, World Bank, et al.) "recommend-
ed" that the Soviet Union carry out a
Polish-style "shock treatment"-afreeze
on wages, an end to price controls
and subsidies, the closure of unprof-
itable enterprises and privatization of
state-owned property. Shortly thereafter,
Yeltsin attempted his own economic
"shock treatment" by threatening to cut
back by 90 percent the Russian repub-
lic's contribution to the central Soviet
budget!
Faced with the political offensive and
provocations of the Yeltsin-led "demo-
crats," amid mounting nationalist unrest
and economic chaos, Gorbachev turned
for support to the old-time Stalinist appa-
ratchiks whom he previously downgraded
and even abused. He replaced the "liber-
al" minister of the interior with a hard-
liner, Boris Pugo. Appointed as Pugo's
deputy was Colonel General Boris Gro-
mov, the last Soviet commander in
Afghanistan, who as such is especial-
ly hated and feared by pro-imperialist
forces. Gorbachev pushed through as his
new vice president an undistinguished
15FEBRUARY 1991
party hack. Likewise, his new prime is at least equal to the annual wage bill.
minister. The Gorbachev regime has now confis-
However, Gorbachev's "conservative" cated part of these forced savings by
tum is of a quite limited character. The abolishing large 50- and 100-ruble bills
dismantling of the socialized economy is while restricting withdrawals from sav-
continuing 'at an accelerated pace. In ings accounts. The government claims
October a presidential decree allowed that in doing so it is only going after
foreign multinationals to own 100 per- the illegal earnings of black marketeers
cent of Soviet enterprises and repatriate and speculators. But big-time private
their profits in hard currency. In January operators and, of course, well-placed
another presidential decree set aside government functionaries have already
16,000 square miles of agricultural land transformed their surplus rubles into
to be leased to private farmers. No foreign currency or real goods. Everyone
tumultuous debates on these issues were in the world knows the Soviet Union is
allowed in the Congress of People's about to experience unsuppressed infla-
Deputies. tion. Official consumer prices are sched-
Gorbachev's latest economic "reform" uled to rise 50 to 70 percent this year.
is to make the working people, including The main victims of the currency "re-
the poorest sections, pay for years of form" are working people, especially
gross bureaucratic mismanagement. Ever old-age pensioners, many of whom do
.since the late Brezhnev period, succes- not trust putting their money in savings
sive Kremlin regimes have pumped bil- banks. Perhaps they remember how Sta-
lions of rubles into the economy while lin confiscated their savings after World
seeking to freeze the prices of consumer War II.
goods sold in state shops. The result is Gorbachev's continuing attacks on
an extreme case of suppressed hyperin- Soviet working people internally are
flation with empty state shops and extor- coupled with his continuing appeasement
tionate prices in private markets. The of Western imperialism globally. After
mass of unspendable rubles hoarded in Shevardnadze's dramatic resignation,
savings banks, cupboards and mattresses Moscow went out of its way to assure
Washington there would be no change in
the "new thinking" in foreign policy,
especially support for the U.S. war
against Iraq. A few weeks ago, Shevard-
nadze's protege and successor as foreign
minister, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, issued
a joint statement with U.S. secretary of
state James Baker maintaining that: "The
military actions authorized by the United
Nations have been provoked by the refus-
al of the Iraqi leadership to comply with
the clear and lawful demands of the
international community for withdrawal
from Kuwait."
Restoring the independence of the
filthy rich sheikdom of Kuwait is but a
pretext for American imperialism to seize
the Persian Gulf oil fields and reassert its
role as cops of the world. If the U.S.
defeats and occupies Iraq after a big,
. bloody war, Washington will be greatly
emboldened in its aim of dismembering
the Soviet Union in the name of Bush's
"new world order." The Soviet working
people must link the defense and regen-
eration of the collectivized economy, the
restoration of workers democracy, to the
struggle against imperialist militarism on
a world scale.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
15
e
WfJlililliS ".'1/11"
Where Is the Soviet Union Going?
Spartacist
DerSpiegel
Gorbachev's' perestroika has produced
economic chaos. Left: Empty shelves In
Moscow bread store. Right: Homeless
erect tents behind Red Square.
Lithuanian Sajudis in the
Vanguard of Counterrevolution
As Leninists and internationalists, we
stand for the democratic reorganization
of the Soviet Union and for the right of
any nationality with a leadership that
opposes counterrevolution to withdraw to
any extent it sees fit. However, the Baltic
separatists mean to carry out a bloody
capitalist counterrevolution. Behind their
appeals to "democratic" rights, they have
pursued viciously anti-democratic, indeed
racist, policies toward the non-Baltic
continued on page 14
What is missing in the present ideolog-
ical division is the Soviet working class.
While the October Revolution has been
eclipsed in the political consciousness of
the masses, working people take for
granted the tangible gains of October: the
right to a job, cheap food, subsidized
-housing, free medical care and schools
for their children. And these gains are
under attack by all wings of the
bureaucracy.
Everyone is expecting strikes and mass
protests against the impending sharp
price increases planned by the Gorbachev
regime. Working-class struggles in de-
fense of social equality and the emer-
gence of an authentic Leninist pole of
attraction would shatter the present align-
ments within the bureaucracy and.intelli-
gentsia, Some intellectuals who now sup-
port the "democratic" opposition and also
many Soviet-patriotic military men would
come over to the side of the embattled
masses. At the same time, some "free
marketeers" would bloc with hardline
Stalinists in seeking to suppress workers'
resistance.
The Soviet working people must cut
through the false polarization between
the "democrats" and the "patriots," each
in their own way heirs of the parasitic
and reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy.
The forces driving for the restoration of
capitalism can and must be defeated,
socialized property must be maintained
and revitalized by the working class
taking political power on the basis of
soviet democracy as was established by
the 1917 October Revolution.
Today many Soviet working people
rightly fear that the breakup of the USSR
will ignite bloody nationalist strife (as
now in the Caucasus), while the remnants
will become semi-colonies of Western
imperialism. The multinational Soviet
state can be preserved and regenerated OR
a socialist basis only through genuine
equality and justice for all its peoples.
This requires returning to the proletarian
internationalism of the Bolsheviks, who
resolutely combatted all forms of nation-
alism, including and especially Great
Russian chauvinism.
oil fields-built by the sweat and blood
of the workers-to Wall Street and the
Frankfurt banks, and pocket the proceeds.
They call themselves "democrats."
On the other side are conservative
Stalinist apparatchiks, military men and
KGB operatives who want to return to
the days when they gave the orders and
everyone kowtowed, when no one ques-
tioned their right to a dacha, ZIL lim-
ousine and the other privileges of the
ruling caste (the nomenklatura). They
now appeal to GreatRussian nationalism
and even vile anti-Semitic ,demagogy.
They call themselves "patriots." '
to restore strict Stalinist order? Is this
even possible in any event?What are the
prospects for a military coup, for a civil
war? In short, where is the Soviet Union
going?
The crackdown against Baltic separa-
tists and the law-and-order tum is bot an
episode in the terminal crisis of Stalinist
rule in the USSR; The Kremlin bureau-
cratic elite is disintegrating and tending
to polarize. On one side are the pam-
pered children of Stalin's apparatchiks
who want to live like American or Ger-
man yuppies. These "free marketeers"
want to sell off the factories, mines and
Gamma
SHOWDOWN IN VILNIUS: Soviet troops 9utsJde Lithuanian parliament.
Crisis of Stalinism paves the way for capitalist restoratlonists, reactionary
secessionists.
secessionists who want to join the cape
italist "free world" right now. -As the
New York Times complained: "This is
where Mikhail S. Gorbachev has drawn
the line."
Moscow's actions against the Baltic
separatists, which so distress the Western
imperialists, come in the context of a
tum by the Gorbachev regime to shore
up the disintegrating existing system. Mr.
Perestroika now increasingly calls for
law, order and discipline. The KGB has
been instructed to crack down on illegal
profiteering and "economic sabotage."
Army troops have joined the police in
patrolling major Soviet cities. Mean-
while, Gorbachev's once closest cothink-
ers and fellow "new thinkers't.have gone
by the wayside and been replaced by old-
line Stalinist apparatchiks. In December
foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze,
described as NATO's best ally in the
Kremlin, resigned, darkly prophesying,
"A dictatorship is approaching."
Clearly, a tum of some sort has oc-
curred. But how decisive and permanent
is it? Has Gorbachev abandoned his
"reform" program and is he now seeking
PART ONE OF TWO
"The West's Gorbachev honeymoon
ends," proclaims the London Guardian.
The London Economist writes of "The
Rise and Fall of Perestroika." "No Aid
for a Repressive Moscow," lectures the
New York Times. The West European
Common Market suspended $1 billion in
aid and the Bush White House can-
celed a scheduled summit in Moscow
to show their displeasure at Gorba-
chev's crackdown against the Lithuanian
16 15 FEBRUARY 1991