CONTINUES IN GUATEMALA
The May 13 Chinese Hshinhua News. Agency reported continued guerrilla activity in Guatemala, A communiqué issued by the rebel forces said that Col. Profirio del Cid was killed in a skirmish with government army patrols on a highway April 11.
The colonel was notorious for directing the mobile police force in terrorist activities in Izabel province. He was responsible for many crimes, including the murder of 13 guerrilla fighters in Concua in Baja Verapaz province and the massacre of guerrillas under the command of Captain Rodolfo Chacon.
The guerrilla communiqué said, "The people are not without protection today as they have their own armed forces to deal with all atrocities of the henchmen of the dictatorial government,"
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BEWARE THE ATROCITY STORIES
By Evelyn Sell
There's an old saying, "Don't believe everything you hear and only half of what you read." That's very good advice for people concerned with learning the truth about race relations in the United States,
The mass news media are very eager to write inflammatory articles about racial conflicts. So eager that they hardly bother to try to sift fact from fiction. Two recent examples of newspaper sensationalism reveal how little a serious person can expect from the daily newspapers as an accurate source of information,
Jacksonville, Florida, was the scene of tumultuous civilrights demonstrations during March, Daily newspapers in. Detroit carried headlines about “race riots," "7 Hurt As Vandals Roam Riot~- Torn Jacksonville," "racial clashes. . ." The articles told of Negro youths engaging in "a bloody uprising" during which police were assaulted, newsmen beaten and white persons smashed with bricks and slashed with razors,
Undoubtedly, there was some truth in the reports but it is very diffioult to know exactly what to believe as truth and what _to put down to sensationalism and outright lying. For example, early reports told of a white man who was tied to a tree and slashed with razor blades by riotous Negro youths. <A few days later the newspaper reader discovers that the story was a hoax and the wounds self-~ inflicted,
"J,C.Patrick, Duval County chief of detectives, said that after an extensive investigation into the story told by William L,. James, 25, 'We came to the conclusion he inflicted them himself,'" [Detroit Free Press, March 26.]
The second hoax story appeared in May. Eighteen-year~old college student John Jadrosich told police that he had been attacked by two young Negroes. His arms, legs and neck were slashed terribly with a double-edged razor blade. His wounds were so plentiful and deep that he needed medical. care,
Police speculated that the Negroes attacked the white student because he had caught them in the act of stealing his car, Jadrosich, however, explained the attack was prompted by antiwhite emotions. He said the Negroes approached him with the words, “White man, you're going to bleed for us,"
The wnite youth's mother immediately declared that she would not allow her son to continue his studies at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, She told reporters, "The country isn't safe anymore, We are in for a lot of racial trouble in Nassau [section
where family lives], and I don't want my children in the middle of it,
Within a couple of days the youth revealed that the entire story had been made up by him because he wanted to drop out of school but didn't want to disappoint his parents by simply quitting,
It is indeed saddening to hear of a young man who would slash himself so severely because he was afraid to tell his parents the truth, It is even sadder to think of how his story helped add fuel to anti-Negro fires of hate and fear,- How many innocent Negro youths were harrassed, picked up by police and questioned as a result of this oruel hoax? we
The young white liar confessed that he had used newspaper accounts of racial strife as the basis for his phony claim of a racial attack, He had plenty of inflammatory articles to draw from. In the days just before Jadrosich's self-inflicted slashing, New York newspapers carried horrifying stories about gangs of Harlem Negro youths who were dedicated to killing and wounding whites, It was claimed that 400 young Negroes were receiving training in the art of murder by extremists of a Muslim group in Harlem, the Now York City area containing the country's heaviest concentration of Negroes.
These reports of an antiwhite murder brigade were vigorously denied by Dr. Kenneth B, Clark, professor of psychology at New York's City College and the director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited [HARYOU]. This organization is part of the government!s program to combat juvenile delinquency. Dr. Clark pointed out that HARYOU researchers interviewed hundreds of Harlem's ghetto residents, HARYOU staff workers were in intimate contact with Negro youths over a long period of time and serious studies were made of: Harlem conditions but no such murder gang was ever uncovered,
As the civil-rights movement reaches new heights of intensity, as the white capitalist power structure and the racists strike back at militant Negroes and as impatience on both sides wells up, there is bound to be violent clashes. However, let the reader beware} Negro assaults on whites are bound to be distorted and even untrue on many occasions, Newspapers will be quick to print any sensational stories in order to increase sales. Enough lies have been exposed already to make one doubt the accuracy and veracity of most of these reports,
PSIUP POSITION ON THE SINO-SOVIET CONFLICT
ROME, May 21 -- At its recent plenum, the Central Committee of the PSIUP [Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity], adopted a programmatic document expressing the party's line on the most important current international and national problems. The PSIUP was born last January following a split to the left when the PST [Italian Socialist party] joined the Moro government. [See World Outlook January 24, It claims to have from 120,000 to 130,000 members, equivalent to one-third of the cadres and one-fifth of the militants of the PSI before the break,
Those parts of the document concerning Italian problems are, in comparison to other PSIUP declarations (for example, a resolution of the Economic Commission), in some ways a step backward; certain questions, at least, were handled much better in analogous texts of the Communist party. In fact, the programmatic document voices cen-~ trist positions that are quite confused and wrong on essential points and uses an abstract and academic language. Essentially it is a poor repetition of PCI [Italian Communist party] positions, offering a gradualist concept of the passage to socialism, acceptance of the peaceful road and an absolutely erroneous formulation of the transition program, which it conceives as a program setting up intermediate stages,
The section devoted to international problems is more interesting. However, it too echoes fundamentally the current line of the PCI. Here are the paragraphs that refer in particular to the Sino-Soviet conflict: . oo
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"In the past, the Communist parties, tied to a monolithic conception of the socialist camp, centered their battle on the defense of the conquests of the October Revolution and of the USSR as the sole socialist country, and they considered that the growth of Soviet influence was the decisive factor for the success of the socialist revolution in other countries.
"ihe extension of the socialist zone, which reached a desisive turning point with the victory of the revolution in China, and the change in the world relation of forces between socialism and capitalism created new conditions and problems, The conflict ; between the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and China, which has reached a gravely alarming level, is situated in this framework, The socialists of the PSIUP cannot accept the theses of the Chinese Communists with regard to the struggle of working-class parties in the advanced capitalist countries, the question of Stalin, the perspective of nuclear war, It is a grave error to ignore the development of modern capitalism -- which creates new conditions for the socialist struggle -- and to replace serious analysis with ideological schemas that refer to a bygone historic stage of
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capitalism. This, moreover, reveals a profound underestimation of the reality of advanced capitalism on the part of the Chinese Communists, who have come to attribute ‘to anticolonial revolutions the decisive and preponderant role in the battle against imperialism, While the question of Stalin cannot be reduced to the so-called cult of the personality, but requires a more profound analysis of the structural causes that led to such a grave bureaucratic and tyrannical. degeneration, the Chinese. Communists have gone into exalting — Stalin and praising dogmatism, repeating the tragic error of mixing up the dictatorship of the proletariat, of which Marx spoke, with the personal power of a group of men and the jailing of socialist democracy. And if the Chinese Communists justifiably reject the atomic blackmail of imperialism, the argument frequently used to justify their refusal is unacceptable, namely that nuclear war would end with the victory of socialism and thus open a better future for humanity. Nuclear war would not only cost the tragic price of hundreds of millions of deaths, but would deal a decisive blow to the existence of humanity, to civilization, The polemical argument of the Chinese Communists, associating to a certain degree the perspectives of socéialism and nuclear war, objectively struck a hard blow against the struggle which the workers are conducting for peace throughout. the entire world,
"Nevertheless judgment of the Sino~Soviet conflict cannot be limited to rejecting these Chinese theses, but must take into account the fact that the conflict reveals a crisis in the united strategy of the international workers movement which has a tendency to deepen on the basis of a division between the industrialized countries and the economically underdeveloped countries. The Chin~ ese CP and other parties of the economically underdeveloped countries affirm that they do not find in the policy proposed by the CPSU Communist party of the Soviet Union} a line of action corresponding to their requirements and they say that they are afraid coexistence can be translated into an exclusive agreement between the biggest world powers, This creates a dramatic and complex situation, aggravated by the fact that the conflict is occurring at the level of a conflict between two states,
"The crisis produced in the socialist camp thus cannot be resolved by the method of excommunications and condemnations and by the demand for mechanical alignment of the workers parties in the world along the opposed theses. Since the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, the search for a new conception of the united relations of . — internationalism cannot lead to the mechanical alignment of class-~ conscious parties around a ‘guiding! state or several 'guiding! states,
'yhe rejection of the monolithic system of socialist states and working-class parties is widespread today, but it is only a negative indication which cannot be surmounted by mere reference to the national roads to socialism,
"The changed relationship of forces in the world imposes, in contrast, search for an up-to-date ideology and an over-all strategy for the Glass movement, It is the necessary condition for resolving in a higher unity the present conflicts, for creating anew favorable conditions for the full utilization of the immense potential arising _not only from the competition between socialist and capitalist. states, but also from anti-~imperialist, prosocialist struggles that objectively unite the working classes of the advanced capitalist. countries with the anti~imperialist movements of the peoples in the backward countries.
-."The struggle for socialism arises. from the concrete oondi~. tions of capitalist society and must thus follow different roads | according to the different historic conditions of the different parts of the world and the advanced capitalist countries. The ooordination of socialist struggles with each other and with those of the peoples in process of development arises from the fundamental need to overcome the common enemy: imperialism, It is always in the struggle against imperialism that the convergence of the class movement of the capitalist countries with the socialist countries is realized, But this dees not imply that the means and the objeo- . tives must: be identical, On the contrary, they are not only differ- - ent, they are also utilized by the socialist states with criteria - necessarily different from those’ of | the class. movement - in other countries, “ - ;
"The vicissitudes of the Communist world in Stalin's time, the denunciations made at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU on its postwar errors, the current conflict between the Soviet Union and China, prove that any attempt to arbitrarily extend to other peoples the experiences which ended in victory over capitalism and imperialism and in the building of a new socialist society, in the long run creates contradictions and conflicts of even dramatic nature within the socialist system,
‘Solidarity with the socialist states arises not only from the qualitative difference between the bourgeois state and the. . socialist state, but also from the decisive role which the socialist states play in the anti-imperialist struggles, However this solidarity cannot be confounded with the search for or acceptance of models to copy or to adopt: the experiences of the USSR and the other socialist countries are themselves a fundamental contribution to the search for the roads to socialism which the working-class movement must nevertheless follow according to its own estimate,
"This holds not. only in relation to the aim of assuring the democratio development of socialism, but also because the new rela-~ tionship of forces on a world scale due to the strengthening of. the USSR and the socialist states and the foundering of the colonial system are not in themselves sufficient to bring about the end of capitalism," ;
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PEKING