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Vol. 74/No. 35      September 20, 2010

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
September 20, 1985
The Reagan administration has imposed some mild sanctions against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. This is a concession to the deepening anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and to the growing anti-apartheid movement here in the United States. The most important of the economic sanctions will ban further imports of the Krugerrand, the South African gold coin.

Reagan said he was banning loans to the South African government. But he excepted those “which improve economic opportunities or educational, housing, and health facilities that are open and accessible to South Africans of all races.” In the past, Reagan has claimed that all U.S. investments and loans in South Africa help Blacks.

The imposition of sanctions is a blow to the apartheid regime. It reinforces the status of the murderous South African government as an international pariah.  
 
September 19, 1960
NEWARK—Gladys Barkers Grauer, Socialist Workers nominee for U.S. Senator from New Jersey, has urged Gov. Meyner to act against local officials and racist hoodlums in Hamilton Township who are trying to prevent Roderick Woodward, a Negro, from moving into his newly purchased home there.

In an Aug. 29 letter to the governor, Mrs. Grauer demanded that he probe the failure of township officials to provide Woodward police protection when racists tried to burn down his home. She also urged investigation of the township’s invoking a previously unused ordinance against Woodward requiring a health permit before a real estate sale is closed

A reply to Mrs. Grauer from the Statehouse said that the governor agreed with her that discrimination in housing “has no place in the United States.”  
 
September 21, 1935
Reformists and liberals of all shades and varieties are fond of calling Marxists “sectarians,” “dogmatists,” fantastic “extremists.” This is the way in which jelly-backboned individuals always describe those who have principles and take them seriously. It is a verbal cover that reformists use to hide their own cowardly refusal to face facts and draw conclusions.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the question of war. Reformists are grievously “offended” when Marxists are not merely scornful of every form of pacifism but fight mercilessly against it. Pacifism, far from being a force against war, in practice aids the war-makers; they describe pacifism as the hypocritical front for imperialism, a means whereby, under the pretense of opposition to “war in general,” this particular war—whichever is may be—is made morally respectable.  
 
 
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