Greek people rule thenselves."
GREEK WORKERS IN GERMANY DEMONSTRATE AGAINST ATHENS COUP
Frankfurt
Tens of thousands of Greek workers and students in West Germany participated in mass demonstrations against the military dictatorship set up in Greece.
May Day was a real day of international solidarity in Germany as Spanish workers, protesting against the Franco regime in their own country, marched side by side with their Greek comrades.
The demonstrations were impressive since there are more than 1,000,000 workers from abroad -- from Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and many other countries -- who were the real source of the postwar German "economic miracle."
Many of them belong to the German trade unions, thus the labor bureaucrats were somewhat taken aback at the way the "foreign workers" stamped their mood on the marches in face of the usual efforts of the union leaders to turn May Day into a popular holiday given over to dancing and singing in folklore style.
The Greek workers concentrated on democratic slogans such as "Freedom and Democracy"; "Military Dictatorship -- Modern Slavery"; "Motherland of Democracy -- Under Military Dictatorship?" "Freedom for the Political Prisoners."
They also chanted for the release of Papandreou, the parliamentary leader whose temporizing policy with regard to the monarchy and the reactionary officer clique helped pave the way for the coup.
The Spanish workers tended to link up their democratic slogans with anticapitalist slogans. One of the main ones was "Long Live the Proletariat -- Down with Capitalism."
They also linked the events in Spain and Greece with what is happening in Vietnam and demanded that the "Yankees Get Out of Spain." They denounced the U.S. role in Vietnam.
The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, whose headquarters is in Brussels, condemned the military dictatorship in Greece and called for the restoration of democracy.
The official union paper Welt der Arbeit [Labor World] defended the cause of Greek democracy and the Metal Workers Union paper Metall, which has the largest circulation of any labor paper in the world [2,000,000] carried the Greek events on the front page with a photograph of Greek demonstrators making the appeal: "German People, Martyrs of Fascism, Be with Us!"