Vol. 80/No. 13      April 4, 2016

 

25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

April 5, 1991

The United Nations report featured in the International Socialist Review supplement to this issue exposes in detail the widespread devastation caused by the seven-month war against Iraq. The criminal economic sanctions and the relentless bombing assaults have resulted in life-threatening shortages and a full-scale catastrophe for the Iraqi people.

The report shows the true face of imperialism and what it has in store for working people. The war against Iraq and the destruction resolved nothing for its crisis-racked capitalist system and only made things worse for working people everywhere. Far from being in a “post war” period, the ruling capitalist classes are and will continue to be driven toward more brutal imperialist wars.

Washington’s embargo, backed by majority vote of the UN Security Council, was itself an act of war.

April 4, 1966

Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D.- Conn.) expressed shock when the General Motors Corporation admitted it had hired a battery of snoopers to pry into the private life of Ralph Nader, critic of the auto industry’s failure to promote safety standards.

Ribicoff said General Motors’ action “was most unworthy of American business.” GM President Roche said he agreed.

If Roche were feeling belligerent that day he might well have declared that what his firm had done was merely an integral part of the American Way of Life, with the federal government setting the example and pace in the field.

GM might well have pointed to the State Department spokesman who said that surveillance orders are considered routine in the Department and that the practice goes back at least two decades.

April 5, 1941

The most reliable and indispensable instrument to British capitalism in the war is the trade union bureaucracy. It is through leaders like Bevin, Morrison, Citrine, Alexander that British imperialism entraps the working class into fighting solely for the interests of capitalism.

Suppose Churchill had tried to force the total conscription of labor on the English proletariat by himself. Suppose an out-and-out Tory government had given to itself the totalitarian powers enacted into law in the Emergency Power Act. This act gives the government the right to arrest and detain in prison without any charges, without any trial, without any explanation of any kind, any person it sees fit — for the duration of the war! It gives Churchill the right to conscript all men and women, of whatever age, and to send them to work or to other duties anywhere in the land.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home