During the same period that Pathfinder's printshop produced these five new titles, it also printed several important reprints, which Pathfinder is featuring as its September Books of the Month. These are:

* Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? by Leon Trotsky;

* To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's 'Cold War' against Cuba Doesn't End by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara;

* Out Now! A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States against the Vietnam War by Fred Halstead;

* To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920--First Congress of the Peoples of the East.

Through September 30 Pathfinder will make all four titles available at a special 60 percent discount to Pathfinder bookstores. They will be available throughout the month at a 25 percent discount to members of the Pathfinder Readers Club.

The last two of the above titles had been out of stock for well over a year. At 880 pages, Out Now! is one of Pathfinder's biggest books. The preparation of this newly digitized edition--with larger, more readable type, and with greatly improved graphics--required an intensive effort by many volunteers around the world who are working on digitizing all of Pathfinder's titles.

This comprehensive account of the social movement in the United States against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 1970s was reissued in a second edition in June 1991, a few months after Washington's murderous war against the Iraqi people. A foreword to that edition by Kate Kaku placed the lessons of the fight against the Vietnam War in the context of the intensifying conflicts among rival imperialist powers that had been revealed during the Gulf War.

"For Washington, this was a war for oil, to protect imperialist interests in the Mideast, and to gain a stronger hand against its capitalist rivals," Kaku wrote. "It heralded a new march by the imperialist powers toward wars to defend their decaying social system....

"A new generation of youth, working people, and GIs [who] have become politically conscious since the Vietnam War...will find the history and politics recounted in this book an irreplaceable tool in combating these new wars and the social system that breeds them."

Revolution Betrayed, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky's explanation of the social roots of the political degeneration of the leadership of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, includes a chapter dealing with the strategic approach of the revolutionary workers movement toward the inevitable conflicts and divisions among rival imperialist powers. The young Soviet republic under the proletarian internationalist leadership of V.I. Lenin, Trotsky said, had effectively maneuvered to exploit these fissures and gain some time and breathing room in face of the economic and military pressure on the encircled workers state.

In the wake of the devastation of World War I and a fierce civil war and imperialist military assaults on the Soviet government, Trotsky pointed out, the Bolsheviks signed peace treaties with imperialist Germany and with the governments of Poland, Estonia, and other capitalist countries.

"It could never have entered the mind of the Soviet government as a whole, however," Trotsky wrote, to portray these capitalist regimes as "friends of peace," and still less "to invite the communist parties of Germany, Poland, or Estonia to support with their votes the bourgeois governments which had signed these treaties."

This was the opposite, Trotsky said, of Stalin's counterrevolutionary course a decade and a half later of urging Communist Parties in the imperialist countries to seek a so-called Popular Front with sections of the bourgeoisie most open to the diplomatic maneuvers of the Stalin government in the USSR.

One title that will be reprinted by Pathfinder's printshop this month is Revolution in the Congo. Since its publication five weeks ago, Pathfinder has already sold out the entire first run of over 2,000 copies, and is rushing back to press. The majority of these copies were sold outside showings of the movie Lumumba, which tells the story of the 1961 assassination of this leader of the Congolese revolution organized by the U.S. and Belgian imperialist governments, with cover from United Nations "peacekeeping troops."

The pamphlet will be back in stock in time for the film's opening in a number of additional cities at the beginning of September.

The murder of Lumumba was condemned by Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara in a December 1964 speech before the UN General Assembly printed in another of Pathfinder's Books of the Month, To Speak the Truth.

"How can we forget the betrayal of the hope that Patrice Lumumba placed in the United Nations," Guevara said. "How can we forget the machinations and maneuvers that followed in the wake of the occupation of that country by United Nations troops, under whose auspices the assassins of this great African patriot acted with impunity?"

Who were those assassins, Guevara asked: "Belgian paratroopers, carried by United States planes, who took off from British bases."

Workers, farmers, and youth the world over who are determined to resist imperialist policies such as those--which persist to this day, organized first and foremost from Washington--will find the last of the Books of the Month an invaluable handbook, as well. It is the documentary record of a 1920 congress organized by the Bolshevik leadership in Baku, Azerbaijan, to bring together fighters against imperialist oppression from throughout Asia and the Middle East.

Lenin said shortly after the Baku congress that its success confirmed that the internationalist program and course of the Bolsheviks are "an emblem of salvation, an emblem of struggle to the workers of all civilized countries and the peasants of all the backward colonial countries." Its proceedings "for many months to come provide food for thought and assimilation by the workers and peasants of the world."

Eighty-one years later they still do.  
 
 
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