London
In response to the appeal of the National Peace Action Coalition for international action in solidarity with its October 31 demonstrations in the United States, the Vietnam Solidarity Committee [VS] has taken steps to ensure an action in London on the same day.
The idea was "floated" at a meeting organized by the VSC to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 12.
At this meeting both Linh Qui, representative of the DRV in London, and Tariq Ali, well-known member of the International Marxist Group [IMG - British section of the Fourth International], spoke in favour of continuing the demonstrations against the U.S. war of aggression in Southeast Asia and in support of the liberation struggles in that area.
The VSC had invited representatives of various organizations to the meeting and after hearing the speeches of Linh Qui and Tariq Ali those present held a general discussion on further actions. The outcome was a decision to establish a coordinating committee which would olan such action.
which would plan such action.
The first meeting of the coordinating committee was attended by representatives of the Action Committee Against NATO, Anti-Imperialist Movement, Australians and New Zealanders Against the War in Vietnam, British Council for Peace in Vietnam, British Peace Committee, Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, Group 68 (a group of antiwar Americans living in London), ICDP, IMG, New Socialists, Spartacus League, Tricontinental Committee and VSC.
Although not represented at the meeting, both the Friends of Korea Committee and International Socialism 844
have indicated their support, as have members of women's liberation groups, who hope to be officially represented in the future. The Young Communist League is to discuss the project - its representatives have indicated general support. Over sixty other organizations have been invited to the coordinating committee meetings which will take place weekly until the demonstration.
Final arrangements and slogans will be adopted at the next meeting on September 29, but so far the timing (late afternoon on Saturday, October 31), the main thrust (solidarity with the liberation struggles of Southeast Asia and with the U.S. antiwar movement), and aim (as large as possible a demonstration on a militant programme) are agreed, as are the speakers at the political rally: a representative of the Vietnamese, an antiwar GI and a British trade unionist who will have recently returned from Vietnam.
The Anti-Imperialist Movement (an organization consisting mainly of ex- LSE [London School of Economics] students who came together in the struggle against that college's links with South Africa and Rhodesia) is anxious that the general international nature of imperialism be stressed and that the role of British imperialism on a world scale be explained. It has been agreed that this point be covered by messages of support from various organizations being read at the political rally (e.g., from the Irish Solidarity Campaign, Black Panthers, Arab groups, etc.).
The coordinating committee, which tries to work by a "consensus" approach, is confident that a really broad but militant programme and demonstration can be arrived at.
An Appeal for Help
100 Trotskyists in Greek Prisons
The weekly Rouge, published by the Ligue Communiste (Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International, appealed in its September 28 issue for aid to the more than 100 imprisoned Greek Trotskyists and their families.
Rouge cited the case of Theologos Psaradelles as an example of the plight of the Greek Trotskyists.
Psaradelles escaped from the Mytilene prison and crossed to Turkey in a rowboat. From there he tried to gain asylum in Bulgaria. The Stalinist authorities turned him over to the Greek political police.
At his trial, Psaradelles defied the military court: "I confess in the name of all workers. I struggle together with all of the oppressed people of the earth. I am a militant of the Fourth International."
According to Rouge, he was sentenced to thirteen years and three months. 1
Despite the dramatic circumstances of the case, the communications media passed it by as not newsworthy.
"The silence of the leading papers on Psaradelles indicates how isolated our comrades are," declared Rouge. "There is no lack of aid for 'democrats' and to a lesser degree for Stalinists, but we alone can aid our revolutionary comrades and their families. The arrest of a comrade often means that his relatives will lose their jobs or be evicted. Help us to help our imprisoned Greek comrades!"?
Because of the depth of the reactionary terror in Greece, the names of less than half the Trotskyists in the colonels' jails are known. Rouge gave the following partial list of the prisoners and their sentences:
Theologos Psaradelles, 13 years, 3 months.
Antonis Liakos, life in prison; Triphon Mitaphidis, life in prison; A. Darveris, life in prison; Th. Thomadakis, life in prison; Pan. Doukas, life in prison.
Helen Douka, 18 years; D. Katsaros, 15 years; G. Nikas, 18 years; D. Dariotis, 16 years; K. Anastasiadis, 16 years; L. Reklitis, 15 years; us, to years, t. netuls, to years, I. Petropoulos, 15 years; M. Kalergi, 15 years; I. Theophylaktopoulou, 15 years; M. Pitakas, 10 years; K. Manthaios. 8 vears: N. Armaos 8 vears. thaios, 8 years; N. Armaos, 8 years.
Also, P. Doumas; S. Papadoupoulos; Helen Douma; Dimitri Phragoudakis; L. Karouta; Th. Dermitropulos; D. Kakhrimanis; - terms unknown.
Also, Georgios Anomeritis, 25 years; Dimitrios Dodos, 25 years; Dimitrios Papaioannou, 25 years; I. Mylonas, 23 years; B. Rapanos, 8 years; A. Khouliara, 7 years; D. Despiniadis, 5 years; L. Gianakopoulos, 10 years; S. Pantazopoulos, 5 years; K. Tsebelikos, 17 years; M. Giarali, 15 years; N. Voulelis, 8 years; Khr. Vakraki, 5 years; A. Anastasiadis, 3 years.
Also, R. Vranas, 18 years; N. Anagnotopoulos, 20 years; Khr. Kalatzis, 15 years; E. Dolmadakis, 17 months; D. Kouzoune, 18 months; Khr. Koutsogiorgos, 20 years; A. 'Arkas, 20 years; S. Sideris, 16 years; T. Karageorgiou, 17 years; I. Felekis, 8 years.
which, in turn, was based on reports appearing in the Athens daily press Septem-: ber 11.
2. Correspondence can be directed to Rouge at Boite Postale 201, Paris 19, France.
Panaghoulis Writes from Greek Prison
Invites U. S. Senate to Send Him New Cage
[Greek revolutionist Alexandros
Panaghoulis has been under a suspended sentence of death since November 15, 1968, after he was convicted of an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the automobile in which dietator George Papadopoulos was riding.
[A worldwide campaign on Panaghoulis's behalf has so far restrained the dictatorship from carrying out the death sentence, but the brutal treatment inflicted by his jailers has seriously impaired Panaghoulis's health. (See Intercontinental Press, June 29, 1970, page 636.)
[His letter reprinted below wassmuggled out of Bogiati military prison in July. It was translated and distributed by the Inter-American Federation for Democracy in Greece, which has offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota.]
To the American Senators, who in a recent visit in South Viet Nam witnessed and honestly exposed the existence of the Prison-Cages of the Saigon regime, I extend an invitation to come and visit me in the Military Prison of Bogiati. They will be rewarded with a new experience about the methods of fascism in Greece. This might stimulate the philanthropic sentiments of their government, who might decide, along with the armaments they are shipping to the fascist junta, to ship also a cage for myself. A cage... healthier than the one provided for me by the junta. I'll be awaiting them ... Ellipses in original.]
Alex. B. Panaghoulis
Report Police Poisoned Brazilian Unionist
A Brazilian congressman has challenged the military dictatorship to reopen an inquiry into the death of a labor leader in prison. He has also revealed that a doctor who testified that the unionist had been poisoned has since disappeared.
Pedroso Horta raised the charges before the federal Senate in Brasília in mid-September. According to a September 23 Associated Press dispatch; "Olavo Hansen, a chemical worker, died May 9, eight days after his arrest at a labor rally. The police say Hansen was a Trotskyist agitator and that he killed himself in jail by taking parathion, an insecticide.
"The congressman contends the police tortured and then injected parathion into him to simulate a suicide."
The September 23 Paris daily Le Monde published this report on the case:
"The doctor who performed the autopsy on Brazilian union leader Olave [sic] Hansen, and revealed that the latter had been poisoned in the São
Paulo police station, has been missing since the month of July. ...
"Arrested in Sao Paulo after a demonstration called for May 1, Olave Hansen, a militant of the Brazilian Revolutionary Workers party (Trotskyist), was jailed, admitted to the prison infirmary, and found dead in a deserted area. In his report on the autopsy, Dr. Brandt Mueller declared that Olave Hansen had been tortured and had succumbed following a subcutaneous injection of a massive dose of insecticide.
"The police at the time said that the unionist had poisoned himself with this substance. Then they arrested Dr. Brandt Mueller July 13. There has been no news of him since."
Martial Law Ended in Turkey
Martial law, which prohibited strikes and demonstrations in Istanbul and sürrounding provinces since June, has been ended. The September 24 Christian Science Monitor reported that workers at one oil refinery have already gone on strike and that leftist groups plan an antigovernment campaign.
Joint Bordeaux Campaign a Success
French Trotskyists Win Favorable Hearing
The results of the Bordeaux parliamentary election, which had been awaited with considerable interest throughout France, were announced late in the evening September 20.
The most stimulating feature of this election for the capitalist press lay in the fact that it pitted a flashy new "modernist" - former l'Express editor Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiberagainst the post-Gaullist premier and local political boss Jacques Chaban- Delmas.
The spice of a "leftist" danger was added when an important public opinion poll predicted a respectable 3 percent vote for Gérard Barthélémy, the candidate backed by Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle) and the Ligue Communiste (Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International). Barthélémy is a member of
Ouvrière. Jean Metais of the Lutte Ligue Communiste was on the ballot as his official alternate.
Even before the "3 percent vote" was forecast, the campaign by the two revolutionary organizations had some success in exposing the hypocrisy of bourgeois electioneering, as the sophisticated Paris daily Le Monde recognized. (See "Trotskyist Candidate Runs Against French Premier" in Intercontinental Press, September 21, 1970, page 766).
The forecasters proved wrong on the vote for Barthélémy - either that or the local election officials made some one-sided mistakes in adding up the ballots. They credited Barthélémy with .63% of the vote; Chaban-Delmas with 63.55%; Servan-Schreiber, 16.59%; the Communist party candidate Rivière, 8.63%; the bourgeois liberal Taix, 7.76%; the PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié - United Socialist party, left Social Democrats) candidate Mme Lataste, 1.36%; and assorted minor candidates with a total of 1.44%.
The most probable reason for the discrepancy between the poll's prediction and the actual vote for Barthélé- my seemingly lay in the social character of the district, Jean Metais wrote in the September 28 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste. The population of the 846
area includes an unusually high percentage of youth below voting age. Of the qualified voters, a high proportion are middle-aged and elderly.
Metais drew a balance sheet of the campaign. He did not judge its success by the size of the vote that he and Barthélémy received. On the positive side, Metais noted: "The entire Bordeaux region was well covered by the Ligue and Lutte Ouvrière. Our work was not aimed at the district as such but at all the working people in the region.
"All the factories and working-class residential areas were covered in our reaching out with revolutionary propaganda-newspapers, posters, leaflets, street meetings, playing-field meetings. Some scandalous situations were exposed and this gave rise to mobilizations on the living conditions of the workers. The campaign made it possible to publicize the firings of some shop stewards at the Tâchon plant, for example. All instances of police interference aroused strong response.
"The local press was regularly provided with detailed contributions on such subjects as "The Revolutionists' Program,'
'Healthy Profits and
Healthy Workers,' 'Education in the Service of Business, 'Are We Anti-Communists?' 'Hands Off the Palestinian Revolution.' (The press refused to publish the last contribution.)"
The campaign showed, according to Metais, that "since the Krivine campaign our two organizations have made clear progress in developing a base. We are in position to offer the youth and the workers definite perspectives for struggle. The best answer to the electoralism of the traditional organizations was to go beyond the stage of pure propaganda ... to undertake the struggles which are necessary and possible at the present time."
On the negative side, Metais felt that opportunities had been missed to raise broader political questions, such as support for the Palestinian and Vietnamese revolutions, as well as opposition to the bourgeois army.
The Bordeaux campaign was the first major joint action of the Ligue Communiste and Lutte Ouvrière, which have been engaged in unification talks for some time.
Metais wrote that the campaign had clarified some political differences between the two organizations. The main disagreement, in his opinion, was that Lutte Ouvrière wanted to concentrate on specific economic issues, while the Ligue Communiste sought to raise general political questions in addition.
The Ligue Communiste candidate felt that the experience of the campaign supported his organization's position. "The LO comrades were quite surprised to see that our speeches, even when long, were attentively listened to in the playing fields, in the street, and in front of the plants. They could see the impact of papers such as Taupe Rouge, Entreprise, Education Nationale, which offered highlevel, specific political arguments without any sugarcoating."
Metais's general conclusion on the lessons of the action was: "If the Ligue capitalizes on this campaign and aifirms its line and tactics, if unity of action is maintained in Bordeaux, our two organizations will build a revolutionary group of formidable effectiveness."
Nixon a Communist?
The Nixon administration, the United Nations, the U.S. Supreme Court, Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta King, the assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and author George Plimpton are all tied in one manner or another to a "Communist conspiracy."
This rather surprising revelation has been provided by the United States army in a 433-page "encyclopedia" entitled Communist Party, U.S. A.
Columnist Jack Anderson reported August 29 that the book "was issued by the [Army Signal] center's Office of Doctrine Development, Literature and Plans, a sort of Stone Age 'think tank,' to judge by the encyclopedia."
The book, which has been recalled by the Signal Center's commander, observes that the United Nations is "Soviet-oriented," that the Supreme Court has made it easy for Communists to "infiltrate all branches of government," and that "the Executive branch was and is the most vulnerable for Communist infiltration."
Notes
1. In Intercontinental Press, September 7, page 722, we reported that Psaradelles had been given a sentence of twelve years and three months. This report was based on a note from a Greek correspondent,