Kasama Project Interview IV

Kasama Project Interview III

“Mao Tsetung Has Died” by Enver Hoxha

(A diary entry from Enver Hoxha’s “Reflections on China Vol. 2″ written the day of Mao Tse-Tung’s death. In it, Hoxha interprets Mao’s legacy as that of a “revolutionary democrat” who brought progress to China, but whose thought was marred by eclecticism and liberalism that impeded the development of socialism in China. Hoxha wrote this entry during the early stages of the the rightist coup d’etat in China, a former ally of Albania which had recently cut off aid to the country.)

THURSDAY
SEPTEMBER 9, 1976

Today the death of Comrade Mao Tsetung was reported. His death saddens and worries us, especially in this disturbed situation. It is a great loss for China.

In my opinion, Mao Tsetung was a revolutionary, a personality of importance, not only for China but on an international level.

Mao Tsetung led the Communist Party and the great Chinese people to the major victory of the liberation of China from enslavement by occupiers and from the reactionary clique of the Kuomintang. This was an achievement of great historic importance, both for the Chinese people and for the socialist camp and the peoples who fought and are fighting for liberation.

Under the leadership of Mao, the construction of socialism began in China. (At least, this was our belief up till recently, when we are seeing that this «construction» has gone with zigzags.) In our opinion, matters have already reached the point when the question must be asked: Which will triumph in China, socialism or capitalism? Therefore the death of Comrade Mao Tsetung gives rise to great concern amongst us about the future of the Chinese people and the course China will follow after his death. Of course, we can make no pronouncements on this at present, time will make this clear to us. May we be proven wrong, but the result of this line, which the Chinese revisionists call «Mao Tsetung thought» and which has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism, will spell nothing good for China.

Mao Tsetung, as a thinker and philosopher, as a revolutionary democrat leader of the Chinese people, is an historical personality, but history and Marxist-Leninist analysis of the situation in China will explain that while he was a philosopher with a broad culture, he was not a Marxist-Leninist. He was profoundly influenced by the old Chinese philosophy of Confucius, etc., and as the eclectic he was, he brought Marxism-Leninism into his work only in the form of mutilated principles and ideas.

It was precisely his philosophical eclecticism which made Mao what one may call a moderator for the different currents which have existed continuously in China, which he permitted, encouraged and put in allegedly dialectical «collision». However, the activity of a moderator might influence for good or for evil, but in any case such a thing could operate only so long as Mao himself was alive. Now he is dead. Will China remain red, and this red be turned into a true, fiery, revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist red?

This is what we desire and hope for with all our heart and soul, with all our communist sincerity, because this is for the good of China, the revolution, socialism and communism. We Albanian communists will remember Mao Tsetung with respect for his good aspects, for those positive ideas and his long revolutionary activity, but in regard to those political, ideological and organizational views and stands which we consider to have been mistaken and non-Marxist, we have not sat and will not sit idle without pointing them out and criticizing them. Leninism teaches us that we must always be correct and objective and not subjective or sentimental.

Regardless of our disagreement with many of his judgements, the death of Comrade Mao Tsetung saddens us also, because he always showed himself to be a friend and admirer of our socialist country and the Party of Labour of Albania and, as the communists and internationalists we are, we must not ignore this. We can say that Mao Tsetung was the main and decisive person in the Chinese leadership who assisted the People’s Republic of Albania with economic and military credits and he accorded this aid in an internationalist spirit. In the same spirit, our Party assisted China, stood beside it and defended Mao in both good and difficult times, especially against the attacks of the Khrushchevite revisionists, as well as during the Great Cultural Revolution.

Immediately we heard about his death, we decided to send a Party and Government delegation with Comrade Mehmet at the head, but in the statement which the Chinese leadership released we read that foreign delegations would not be welcome to take part in the ceremonies organized on this occasion.

Naturally, we took measures to send messages of condolence and see that wreaths were laid in Peking, to organize visits and send messages of condolence to the Chinese embassy in Tirana from the leadership of the Party, the state, the mass organizations, the educational, cultural and scientific institutions, as well as delegations from the working collectives of Tirana and a number of industrial enterprises and agricultural cooperatives of other districts.

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Stalin in the Distorted Mirror of History Falsifiers

All Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks

At the present time, anti-communism is losing its priority place in the ideology of bourgeois reformism, because today, the people of Russia can clearly compare “how it was in the communist time and how it is in Yeltsin’s time.” Another thing is that the Stalin epoch is separated by over forty years from the present time. Therefore, they instantly bring forth anti-Stalinism which is an extremely dangerous form of anti-communism.

It is important to keep in mind that many Communists perceived “as the truth” the so-called revelations of Khrushchev, made at the XX Congress of the CPSU. The bourgeois counter-revolution used them with all their might. The lie of the “Khrushchev Thaw” was fully used by the opportunists of a number of communist parties in the world. In this connection, we greet the publication of a book by Ludo Martens “Another view about Stalin” which deals a telling blow to anti-communism.

It is known that scientists are appraised by their discoveries, artists by their paintings, writers by their works. So the politicians should be appraised by the results of their rule. The rule of Stalin’s activities are enormous. Winston Churchill said: “Stalin came to Russia with a wooden plough and left it in possession of atomic weapons.”

Such results are not accidental. Stalin possessed the most important qualities of a political leader. He correctly estimated the future. He correctly promoted aims and formulated tasks. What is more — he proposed the best ways to go in achieving these tasks. He possessed a strong political will-power which helped to achieve the set aims. Stalin had a very bright personality, a great dialectical mind, many-sided knowledge, colossal efficiency and outstanding organizational abilities. He was a keen diplomat. In his daily life, he was very modest, a man without any greed or desire for riches. There is uncounted evidence of it all.

Stalin earned colossal authority in the International Revolutionary Movement as well as in the Communist Movement, and like Lenin, he earned great respect and love of the toiling masses. This people’s love converted into a great material force which helped the Soviet people to surmount trials, made by the capitalist environment, into the first Socialist State. Today, the bourgeois reformers ridicule in a ruffian manner the people’s love and esteem of the Stalin heroic generation of builders and defenders of socialism.

N.S. Khrushchev lost to a great extent his authority because he was eradicating not the “personality cult,” but people’s love of Stalin. Why was the name of Stalingrad changed to Volgograd? Why did they secretly, in a manner of thieves, remove Stalin from his place in the Mausoleum? Would it not have been sufficient to apportion a separate wall in the Mausoleum for Stalin’s sarcophagus in order to allow all those who wished to do so to come and visit it? Then it would not have been necessary to place in it next leaders of the party.

Theirs is not the same scale of activities and not the same results as that of Lenin and Stalin. After all, none of them earned the love of the people! People’s love cannot be earned in an empty place. People may sympathize with advances and promises, but not forever. As a result, Khrushchev became the object of laughs, Brezhnev of mockery, Gorbachev of scorn, and Yeltsin of hatred.

Why do the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and renegades hate and fear Stalin now? Why is it that in the USSR since Khrushchev’s time, they keep on destroying Stalin’s writings and the literature about him with such frenzy? Possibly because Stalin’s logic is able even now to charm and fascinate unprejudiced readers and investigators, to help them to separate the super-qualified steel of Leninism from the rusty scrap of opportunism, revisionism and other petty-bourgeois works, contained today in the arms of counter-revolution.

You know, the enemies of Stalin are fighting not with his epoch as a realistic past of the country, but with a completely false sick fiction. There is no truthful search for facts, but a manipulated avalanche of lies and ignorance. For instance, they write that the country paid dearly for the achievements of Stalin. As if Stalin in that period could have chosen the correct path or a wrong path of development! Between bad and worse roads? More often, the situation internally and externally forced the Soviet government to choose between bad roads and extremely dangerous roads. Many problems cropped up that demanded immediate actions according to the sources available at that moment. Therefore, they had to do with whatever was available and possible (keeping in mind that the USSR was surrounded by enemies). It is a fact that the road chosen at that time by the Soviet government headed by Stalin was the path that was optimal. Soviet Union went through the path in a few years that took other developed countries one hundred years.

Another attack was that under Stalin, people lived very poorly. We lived at that time according to the means and possibility under the prevailing conditions. The period of “self reliance” was from 1920 to 1950. USSR did not receive any help from anyone. But our economy was not in a crisis as it is now in 1941. With every year, our lives were improving. We were happier and more satisfied with every passing year.

Of course, the development of life and economy is not without problems. There were still classes, and the development had to be looked upon as to which class should be served, the majority or the minority… cooperatives or private enterprisers? The people were gaining higher understanding, moral fortitude and unity in constructing socialism and these are the people that stopped the Hitler tanks and hordes when they invaded our Motherland.

The Great Patriotic War gave credence to Stalin’s leadership and policy. He became the focal point as the leader and war tactician of the highest order. As Commander-in-Chief, his role in the war was beyond reproach by anyone, including the foreign enemies who had nothing but praise for Stalin’s leadership during the war. Today however, the so-called “war experts” have “liberated the General Command of the Red Army” from the history of the Great Patriotic War. Paradoxically, after the victory of the Soviet people in 1941-1945 years, according to the anti-communists, the victory was achieved in SPITE of Stalin! What were the true facts?

Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU emphatically said that Stalin fought the “war globally and not on the front”! Stupidity of this utterance immediately brought denials, demands of apology by the living Generals, Marshals and front-line fighters during the Great Patriotic War. Nevertheless, this Khrushchev version up to this day prevails, supported by scores of “historians,” all of them writing volumes upon volumes of lies and not having any trouble financing their books, etc., etc.

The biggest lie is that Stalin did not know when the war started, got panicky, locked himself up at the dacha outside of Moscow, was getting senselessly drunk for one week, taking himself away from every facet of governing, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

In reality, everything was much different.

JUNE 22, 1941 — Politbureau and Stalin at its head worked on the text of the speech to the Soviet people, which was delivered by Molotov, giving directives, commands on mobilization of other civilians to the ranks of Red Army, announcing the appointment of Marshals and Generals of different fronts, etc.

JUNE 23, 1941 — General Central Command was established.

JUNE 24, 1941 — Emergency meeting of the leaders of Industry to plan the war output. Held in the cabinet of Marshal Stalin.

JUNE 25, 1941 — Reserve Army was formed under the command of Marshal Budyonny.

JUNE 27, 1941 — Decision of the CC All Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to mobilize Communists and Komsomol members.

JUNE 29, 1941 — Directives of the CC AUCPB to broadcast the speech of Stalin on July 3, 1941. After that, the meeting of the Politbureau with the General Command of the Red Army.

JUNE 30, 1941 — Establishment of the State Defense Committee with Stalin as its head.

Documents of these days give the lie to the vicious lies of Khrushchev.

The most prevalent lies about Stalin is that in 1937-1938 years, the army was decimated with purges and that Stalin purged and killed 300,000 commanders and political commissars. These falsehoods and lies should look at the known facts, that the Red Army had only 140,000 commanders and political commissars in total.

In the magazine “Young Guard” (1989 — #9) there was published a document taken from the archives of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, which was presented at that time to Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov and Beria on May 5, 1940, that in 1937-1939, 36,898 commanders were dismissed from the ranks of Red Army. More than 75% of them were retired because of their age, sickness, moral grounds (drunkenness) and unworthy of service in the Red Army. From August of 1938, there was working a commission which was told to look into these cases and make recommendations. More than 30,000 requests were received by those dismissed to look into their appeals. In January 1, 1940, this commission returned to their posts more than 12,461 commanders, from those 10,700 were formerly dismissed for political reasons and now put back into ranks.

Do not forget that there were hidden enemies of the Red Army inside the CC CPSU and did their dirty work.

In the above listing of numbers in the Red Army, let us not forget that there were thousands of former Tsarist officers, who were accepted into the Red Army by Trotsky, in whose ranks were Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich and others. Most of them harbored their lost class interests and were hidden enemies of socialism, although there were hundreds who became loyal Army Officers in the Red Army and fought valiantly against the Hitler Hordes.

The main conspirator of these anti-state officers was Trotsky who was expelled in 1929 but still kept in touch and led the hidden officers in the Red Army. Let us not ignore the fact that foreign secret services were also in touch with these officers and manipulated them for their own ends.

Many so-called “historians” to this day say that in the middle of 1930s, there was no Officers Corps left in the USSR. Let us examine this falsehood again. How serious are these charges and how are they built on facts? They say that it was a planned uprising against the political leadership of Marshal Voroshilov. If this was the case, in any civilized country, this action is called a PUTSCH. In the Soviet Union, they would call this attempt an anti-Soviet pro-Trotsky agreement. This Putsch was found out and brought into the open and this was just before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. This attempt was tragic and in any tragedy, there are some innocent people that suffer, because the guilty enemies try to implicate innocent patriots, communists who had nothing to do with this attempt. Every serious student of history knows this to be a fact — examples in the historical context are many. The blame must be shared by the counter-revolutionaries and some enemies that were inside the NKVD.

In the “War and Historical Magazine” (1991 — #9) there is a photocopy of the statement by Tukhachevsky who was in charge of Internal Security of USSR. The Marshal states that he was arrested May 22, 1937, taken to Moscow on May 24 and was interrogated on May 25th. In his statement of May 26th, he says that he agrees with his sentence as was handed down by the Tribunal. He then proceeded to give facts, names of the conspirators, their actions, and gives documents. All this was handwritten in his own hand. He said that he was not forced to do this confession. The Captain who was interrogating him in no way would have been able to know the facts, the details and the personnel. It showed that Tukhachevsky, after his arrest, was demoralized by actual facts and decided to give the details himself and confess that he was guilty. The other conspirators also confessed since the proof was irrefutable.

Of course, there were mistakes in the General Command and Stalin… in what High Command of the Allies were there not — they readily admit this, but of course, the press does not condemn them or dwell of their human errors. President Roosevelt of the USA publicly admitted that one third of his decisions were wrong. Roosevelt said that America should have stepped in quicker to help the USSR and not wait for Japan to attack Pearl Harbor.

Stalin was never worried about his prestige. Whenever he made a mistake, he always said so and tried to correct it. As an example, during the Plenum of CC AUCPB in 1938, he admitted being rude and uncivil to some party people and non-party personnel. This was published in all of the newspapers in the USSR. There were people that were rehabilitated and received apologies personally from Stalin. You must remember again, that Stalin DID NOT know everyone that was sentenced, he based himself on people like Beria for information and documentation. Knowing the history as was given above, you can draw your own conclusion as to the complexity of those years.

in 1939 at the XVIII party congress, again the question was brought up of repressions. The Congress decided to eliminate the previous leadership of the organs and started cleansing the party of unhealthy and enemy elements within it.

The mistake was that the AUCPB was not regularly cleansing itself of opportunists and that did harm to its operations.

V.I. Lenin was very truthful when he said that the governing party must always cleanse itself from “false skins” and “opportunists-lap lickers”.

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Reagan’s embrace of apartheid South Africa

His foreign policy legacy includes an alliance with a racist government

By Justin Elliott

The regime of apartheid in South Africa, under which nonwhites were systematically oppressed and deprived of their rights, is remembered as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century.

Despite a growing international movement to topple apartheid in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan maintained a close alliance with a South African government that was showing no signs of serious reform. And the Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress.

On a trip to the United States after winning the Nobel Prize in 1984, Bishop Desmond Tutu memorably declared that Reagan’s policy was ”immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” Reagan’s record on South Africa was also marked by at least one embarrassing gaffe, when he told a radio interviewer in 1985: “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country — the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated — that has all been eliminated.” Of course, that was simply not true, and Reagan later walked the statement back.

To learn more about Reagan’s policy on South Africa, I spoke with David Schmitz, a historian at Whitman College who has written widely on U.S. foreign policy. His new book is a biography of Brent Scowcroft. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Where did things stand between the U.S. and South Africa when Reagan entered office in 1981?

Carter had imposed sanctions and restrictions on South Africa and also had publicly criticized the South African government many times. Reagan went back to supporting the government, and he did it under the guise of the policy of “constructive engagement.” This policy had been worked out by Chester Crocker, later a Reagan State Department official, who wrote about it in Foreign Affairs in 1980.

Can you define that term, constructive engagement?

The idea of constructive engagement was that there were moderates in the South African government and so you wanted to encourage them. And if you constructively engaged with them, they would promote gradual change, political reform and so on. But to just oppose the government would make it intransigent and that would create greater polarization, and that was a situation that only extremists would benefit from. The Reagan administration saw the African National Congress (ANC) as a dangerous, pro-communist movement. So the notion of constructive engagement was gradual reform. It was also linked to Reagan supporting the Sullivan principles as a proper way to bring about change.

What were the Sullivan principles?

They were an idea promoted by an American religious leader, Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister in Philadelphia. What he said was that, if corporations agree to certain standards of fair employment in South Africa, they shouldn’t be subjected to protests or divestiture. At that time there were a lot of protests in the United States demanding that universities and corporations divest from South Africa. Sullivan argued that these principles would be part of a middle ground between two extremes that would allow for change and betterment of the conditions of blacks in South Africa. Reagan seized upon that. Constructive engagement was presented as a middle ground between apartheid forever and those that wanted immediate change — which Reagan and Crocker argued would lead to chaos that the Soviets would take advantage of.

So what did that policy mean on the ground? Were the two governments close?

Yes, the Reagan administration worked very closely with [South African Prime Minister] P.W. Botha. He came to Washington and there were meetings in Europe as well. Reagan gave a lot of public support to the South African government, portraying Botha as a moderate who was willing to start political reforms and would stay on the side of the United States and help us block Soviet influence in southern Africa.

How did that square with what was actually going on in South Africa?

Nothing was going on. The reforms were cosmetic at best. Sullivan would eventually say in 1987 that it didn’t work. The crackdown of 1986 and the reimposition of martial law just made a total lie out of the notion that there were moderates in the Afrikaner government.

Talk about that crackdown and the U.S. response to it.

There was a lot of pressure building up in the United States, and Congress was threatening to pass legislation that would put sanctions on South Africa and restrict the flow of American aid to South Africa. Reagan always said he would veto that. Then Botha gave a speech on Aug. 15, 1985, in the face of increasing unrest in South Africa — this known as the “Rubicon speech.” And he said that South Africa would never accept one man, one vote in a unitary system. Real democracy, he said, would lead to chaos. This disappointed Reagan. But he stuck with Botha. Pressure built both inside of South Africa and outside, and the protest inside of South Africa led to the imposition of martial law. Congress then voted sanctions.

Was this the incident in which sanctions were voted and Reagan vetoed and was then overruled?

Yes. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum took the lead of the Republicans. She said that the situation in South Africa was virtually beyond hope and that constructive engagement was irrelevant. This regime was not going to change unless forced to. The United States was just party to this continued oppression. That sort of broke the Republican unity behind Reagan on this policy. The larger context was that Reagan had just failed in the Philippines in trying to back [Ferdinand] Marcos to the end. The Reagan doctrine was collapsing in Central America as well, with opposition growing to his interventions there. So that was also now happening in South Africa. The House vote wasn’t even recorded, it was so overwhelming in favor of imposing sanctions. The Senate vote was more than enough to override the veto, which it did.

What about U.S. policy toward the opposition groups like the ANC and Nelson Mandela?

They called the ANC terrorists. It was just continuing this notion that the ANC members are the extremists and the South African government has these moderates, and you’re going to end up with one extreme against the other if you don’t work with the government. Clearly, it never worked. This was a flawed policy.

By the end of the Reagan years, had the policy changed?

Well, Reagan’s attitudes hadn’t changed, but the policy changed because Congress changed it and voted sanctions. That cut off a lot of the flow of American capital. Sullivan renounced his position. Bishop Desmond Tutu came to the United States in 1984 after being awarded the Nobel Prize. He speaks in the House of Representatives and says that constructive engagement is a farce, and that it just entrenched the existing order. He said Reagan’s policy was “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.”

After Reagan met with Tutu, he was asked at a press conference to talk about their meeting. Reagan said, “It is counterproductive for one country to splash itself all over the headlines, demanding that another government do something.” Then he claimed that black tribal leaders had expressed their support for American investment. He was trying to discredit Tutu’s argument that U.S. policy had hurt blacks. Anti-communism trumped so much in Reagan’s view of the non-Western world.

Would you argue that Reagan’s foreign policy extended the life of the regime in South Africa?

Yes. It gave it life. It gave it hope that the United States would continue to stick with it. It gave it continued flow of aid as well as ideological support. It delayed the changes that were going to come. Then you had the big crackdowns in ’86 and ’87. So there was harm in the lengthening. There was harm in the violence that continued.

I think a lot of well-meaning people in the United States bought the Sullivan principles and constructive engagement, because it seems reasonable. Reagan would say, “If we’re willing to talk to the Russians, why aren’t we willing to talk to the South African government?” We’re going to encourage them to moderate and reform — it sounds reasonable. But there was no real pressure. It was all talk. And it was exposed as that.

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The Butcher of Congo

Leon Rom circa 1880

By Baffour Ankomah, New African, October 1999

Only 90 years ago, the agents of King Leopold II of Belgium massacred 10 million Africans in the Congo. Cutting off hands as we see in Sierra Leone today, was very much part of Leopold’s repertoire. Today, Leopold’s “rubber terror” has all been swept under the carpet. Adam Hochschild calls it “the great forgetting” in his brilliant new book, King Leopold’s Ghost, recently published by Macmillan. This is a story of greed, exploitation and brutality that Africa and the world must not forget.

This story is actually best understood when told in reverse order. Leopold never set foot in “his” Congo Free State – for all the 23 years (1885-1908) he ruled what Hochschild calls “the world’s only colony claimed by one man”.

It was a vast territory which “if superimposed on the map of Europe”, says Hochschild, “would stretch from Zurich to Moscow to central Turkey. It was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Although mostly rainforest and savannah, it also embraced volcanic hills and mountains covered by snow and glaciers, some of whose peaks reached higher than the Alps.”

Leopold’s “rubber terror” raised a lot of hairs in Britain, America and continental Europe (particularly between the years 1900-1908). But while they were condemning Leopold’s barbarity, his accusers were committing much the same atrocities against Africans elsewhere on the continent.

Hochschild tells it better: “True, with a population loss estimated at 10 million people, what happened in the Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the European Scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries.

“With a decade of [Leopold's] head start [in the Congo], similar forced labour systems for extracting rubber were in place in the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby Cameroon under the Germans.

“In France’s equatorial African territories, where the region’s history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labour, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company ‘sentries’, and the chicotte were the order of the day. [The chicotte was a vicous whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. It was applied to bare buttocks, and left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of it sent victims into unconsciousness; and a 100 or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used by both Leopold's men and the French].

“Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French [in Congo-Brazzaville]. The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rainforest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold’s Congo, at roughly 50%.”

Hochschild cannot fathom how the reform movement in Europe focused exclusively on Leopold’s Congo when “if you reckon [the] mass murder by the percentage of the population killed”, the Germans did as much in Namibia, if not worse, than Leopold in Congo.

“By these standards”, Hochschild argues, “the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

“After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl):

‘Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot… Signed: The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.’

“In case everything was not clear, an addendum specified: ‘No male prisoners will be taken.”

By the time von Trotha’s murderous hordes had finished their job in 1906, fewer than 20,000 of the 80,000 Herreros who lived in Namibia in 1903 remained.

“The others [more than 60,000 of them]“, writes Hochschild, “had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or – to economise on bullets – bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks.”

Hochschild tries to be fair here by pointing to what the Americans and the British were doing, or had done, elsewhere.

“Around the time the Germans were slaughtering the Hereros,” he writes, “the world was largely ignoring America’s brutal counter-guerrilla war in the Phillipines, in which US troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.

“Britain [too] came in for no international criticism for its killings of Aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as Von Trotha’s. And, of course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the decimation of the American Indians.”

Hochschild then poses the controversial question: “When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo?”

He answers the question himself: “What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best [in his book, Heart of Darkness, based on the brutalities in the Congo]: ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’.”

Kurtz is Joseph Conrad’s lead character in Heart of Darkness. He is “both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, an emissary of science and progress, a painter, a poet and a journalist, and an author of a 17-page report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, at the end of which he scrawls in shaky hand: ‘Exterminate all the brutes’.”

Hochshild believes that Kurtz was Leon Rom in real life. Rom was born in Mons in Belgium. Poorly educated, he joined the Belgian army aged 16. Nine years later, aged 25 in 1886, he found himself in the Congo in search of adventure. He became district commissioner at Matadi and was later put in charge of the African troops in Leopold’s murderous Force Publique army in the Congo.

Rom’s brutality knew no bounds. It was such that even the white people working with him were shocked to their boots.

“When Rom was station chief at Stanley Falls,” Hochshild reveals, “the governor general sent a report back to Brussels about some agents who ‘have the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons’. He mentions Rom’s notorious flower bed rigged with human heads, and then adds: ‘He kept a gallows permanently erected in front of the station’.”

Conrad had himself gone to Congo in 1890 at the time Rom was committing his atrocities. “The moral landscape of Heart of Darkness”, writes Hochshild, “and the shadowy figure at its centre are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy.”

So, how did Leopold come to own such a vast territory, exploited it, killed its people, took away its riches and never set foot in it?

Three things stand out in this sad story – the naivety of the African kings and people; the misfits of Europe sent to subdue the Africans; and the superior weapons of war that the Europeans possessed which the Africans lacked.

When the first Europeans (the Portuguese) arrived in Congo in 1482, they met a thriving African kingdom. “Despite the contempt for Kongo culture,” says Hochschild, “the Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state – the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. It was an imperial federation, of two or three million people, covering an area roughly 3,000 sq miles, some of which lie today in several countries after the Europeans had drawn arbitrary border lines across Africa in 1886.”

The great fascination of the Congo at the time was its mighty 3,000-mile river, variously called Lualaba, Nzadi or Nzere by the people who lived on its banks. Nzere means “the river that swallows all rivers” because of its many tributaries. Just one tributary, the Kasai, carries as much water as Europe’s longest river, the Volga in Russia and it is half as long as the Rhine. Another tributary, the Ubangi is even longer. On Portuguese tongue, Nzere became Zaire which was adopted by Mobutu when he renamed the country in 1971. Like most things African, the Europeans changed the river’s name to Congo.

In 1482 when the Portuguese sailor Diogo C%o accidentally came upon the river as it emptied into the Atlantic, he was astounded by its sheer size. “Modern oceanographers”, writes Hochschild, “have discovered more evidence of the great river’s strength in its ‘pitched battle with the ocean’: a 100-mile-long canyon, in place 4,000 feet deep, that the river has carved out of the sea floor… It pours some 1.4 million cubic feet of water per second into the ocean; only the Amazon carries more water.”

Thanks to satellite technology, the world now knows that much of the river’s basin lies on a plateau which rises nearly 1,000 feet high 220 miles from the Atlantic coast. Thus the river descends to sea level in a furious 220-mile dash down the plateau.

“During this tumultous descent,” writes Hochshild, “the river squeezes through narrow canyons, boils up in waves of 40 feet high, and tumbles over 32 separate cataracts. So great is the drop and the volume of water that these 220 miles have as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes and rivers of the United States combined.”

In all, the river (Africa’s second longest) drains more than 1.3 million square miles, “an area larger than India,” Hochschild testifies. “It has an estimated one-sixth of the world’s hydroelectric potential… Its fan-shaped web of tributaries constitute more than seven thousand miles of interconnecting waterways, a built-in transportation grid rivalled by few places on earth.”

Thus, Congo was a jewel any colonialist would kill for. And the lot fell to Henry Morton Stanley to colonise it for King Leopold II.

Stanley was Welsh but he passed himself round as an American. He had first stumbled on the river on his second trip to Africa. Because the river flowed north from this point, Stanley thought it was the Nile.

Stanley’s background tells a lot about the brutality he unleashed on the Africans he met on his journeys. He had been born a “bastard” in the small Welsh market town of Denbigh on 28 January 1841. His mother, Betsy Parry (a housemaid) had recorded him on the birth register of St Hillary’s Church in Denbigh as “John Rowlands, Bastard”. His father was believed to be a local drunkard called John Rowlands who died of delirium tremens, a severe pyschotic condition occurring in some alcoholics.

John Rowlands Bastard was the first of his mother’s five illegitimate children. After an exceptionally difficult childhood spent with foster parents and in juvenile workhouses, John Rowlands Bastard moved to New Orleans (USA) in February 1859 where he changed his name several times – sometimes calling himself Morley, Morelake and Moreland. Finally he settled on Henry Morton Stanley which he claimed was the name of a rich benefactor he lived with in New Orleans.

Stanley would become a soldier, sailor, newspaperman and famous explorer feted by the high and mighty on both sides of the Atlantic. He was knighted by Britain and elected to parliament.

Though records show that Stanley wrote love letters to at least three women, he himself confessed despairingly in 1886: “The fact is, I can’t talk to women”. He eventually married “the eccentric high-society portrait painter” Dorothy Tennant on 12 July 1890 in a lavish wedding ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, attended by the good and great of Britain, including Prime Minister Gladstone. Yet, Hochschild provides evidence showing that Stanley’s “great fear of women” prevented him from ever consummating his marriage.

After his honeymoon, Stanley himself wrote in his dairy; “I do not regard it wifely, to procure these pleasures, at the cost of making me feel like a monkey in a cage”. To which his biographer, Frank McLynn adds: “Stanley’s fear of women was so great that when he was finally called upon to satisfy a wife, [he] in effect broke down and confessed that he considered sex for the beasts.”

Hochschild adds his own telling comment: “Whether this inference is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion -the search for raw materials, labour and markets – are all valid, but there was pyschological fuel as well.”

Here Stanley had a common link with his ultimate employer, King Leopold II. Hochschild tells how the “loveless marriage” of Leopold’s parents affected the young prince. “If Leopold wanted to see his father, he had to apply for an audience”. The cold atmosphere in which he grew up haunted him in later life. He became an “ungainly, haughty young man whom his first cousin Queen Elizabeth of England thought ‘very odd’ and in the habit of ‘saying disagreeable things to people’,” says Hochschild.

Like his parents, Leopold and his wife, Marie-Henriette “loathed each other at first sight, feelings that apparently never changed”, Hochschild continues. “Like many young couples of the day, the newlyweds apparently found sex a frightening mystery.” Queen Victoria became their sex-educator. She and her husband, Prince Albert, gave Leopold and his wife (visiting from Brussels) tips about how to consummate their marriage. Several years later, when Marie-Henriette became pregnant, Leopold wrote to Prince Albert thanking him for “the wise and practical advice you gave me…[It] has now borne fruit.”

When Leopold finally ascended the throne in 1865, his undying desire was to own colonies. He tried everything under the sun to get a colony to no avail, including offering to buy the Philippines from Spain, buying lakes in the Nile and draining them out, or trying to lease territory on the island of Formosa.

He despised Belgium’s small size. “Small country, small people” was how he described his little Belgium that had only become independent in 1830. The brutal expeditions of Stanley in Africa finally offered Leopold the chance to land his prized jewel, Congo.

Stanley had made two “journalistic” trips to Africa, first in 1869 to find David Livingstone. The second was in 1874 where, starting from Zanzibar with 356 people (mostly Africans), he “attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages” (his own words) as he plundered his way down to Boma and the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic coast.

In 1879, Stanley was off again to Africa, this time under commission from King Leopold to colonise Congo for him. Stanley used the gun, cheap European goods and plain-faced deceit to win over 450 local chiefs and their people and take over their land.

Stanley apparently remembered how the 22-sq-mile Manhattan Island in New York Bay had been “bought” from the Native Americans by the Dutch colonial officer, Peter Minuit, with trinkets valued at just $24.

If Minuit could do it in Manhattan, Stanley could do it, too, in the Congo. Only that in his case, he just asked the Congolese chiefs to mark Xs to legal documents written in a foreign language they had not seen before. Stanley called them treaties, like this one signed on 1 April 1884 by the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela:

In return for “one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand, they promised to freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever…give up to the said Association [set up by Leopold] the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories…and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories… All roads and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association.”

With treaties like this, Stanley set forth to colonise Congo for Leopold. But the French would not let them have all the laugh. They sent Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on their own colonising mission. De Brazza landed north of the Congo River, curved out an enclave for France and had a town named after him (Brazzaville). The enclave eventually became known as Congo Brazzaville, where the French too unleashed their own brutality on the local people.

Meanwhile Stanley was doing a “good” job across the river for Leopold, building a railway and a dirt road to skirt the 220-mile descent of the river. This was to facilitate the shipping of Congo’s abundant ivory and other wealth to Belgium to enrich Leopold and his petit pays. In 1884, Stanley finally left for home in England, his work for Leopold done.

Leopold next sent in his hordes, including Leon Rom, to use absolute terror to rule the land and ship out the wealth.

It was the brutality of Leopold’s agents that would catch the eye of the world and lead to his forced sale of Congo to the Belgian government in 1908.

Ivory had been the initial prized Congo export for Leopold. Then something happened by accident in far away Ireland that dramatically changed the fate of Leopold, his Congo and its people. John Dunlop, an Irish veterinary surgeon, was tinkering with his son’s bicycle in Belfast and accidentally discovered how to make an inflatable rubber tire for the bike. He set up a tire company in 1890 named after himself, Dunlop, and a new major industry was up and running. Rubber became the new gold, and Leopold was soon laughing all the way to the bank.

The huge rainforest of Congo teemed with wild rubber, and Leopold pressed his agents for more of it. This is when the genocide reached its peak. Tapping wild rubber was a difficult affair, and Leopold’s agents had to use brutal force to get the people of Congo to go into the forests and gather rubber for Leopold. Any Congolese man who resisted the order, saw his wife kidnapped and put in chains to force him to go and gather rubber. Or sometimes the wife was killed in revenge.

As more villages resisted the rubber order, Leopold’s agents ordered the Force Publique army to raid the rebellious villages and kill the people. To make sure that the soldiers did not waste the bullets in hunting animals, their officers demanded to see the amputated right hand of every person they killed. As Hochschild puts it, “the standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. ‘Sometimes’, said one officer to a missionary, ‘soldiers shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man’. In some military units, there was even a ‘keeper of the hands’, his job was the smoking [of them].”

Fortunately for the people, Edmund Dene Morel, a clerk of a Liverpool shipping line used by Leopold to ship out Congo’s wealth, discovered on his several journeys to the Belgian port of Antwerp in the 1890s that while rubber and ivory were shipped from Congo to Antwerp, only guns and soldiers were going from Antwerp to Congo. This marked the beginning of his massive newspaper campaign to expose Leopold and his atrocities in the Congo.

Morel’s campaign in Europe and America finally forced Britain to ask its consul in Congo, the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, to make an investigative trip all over Congo and report. Casement’s findings were so damning that the Foreign Office in London was too embarrassed that it could not publish the original.

Casement’s description of “sliced hands and penises was far more graphic and forceful than the British government had expected”. When the Foreign Office finally published a sanitised version of his report, an angry Casement sent a stinking 18-page letter of protest to his superiors in the Foreign Office, threatening to resign. He called his superiors “a gang of stupidities” and “a wretched set of incompetent noodles.”

In the end, the Belgian government was forced to step in and buy Congo from Leopold in 1908. Negotiations for the buy-out started in 1906. Leopold dragged his feet for two years, but finally, in March 1908, the deal was done.

“The Belgian government first of all agreed to assume [Congo's] 110 million francs worth of debt, much of them in the form of bond’s Leopold had freely dispensed over the years to [his] favourites”, says Hochschild. Nearly 32 million franc of the debt was owed to the Belgian government itself through loans it had given years earlier to Leopold.

The government also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs towards completing Leopold’s then unfinished pet building projects. On top of all this, Leopold got another 50 million francs (to be paid in instalments) ‘as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for the Congo.’

“Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian taxpayer.”, Hochschild writes. “They were to be extracted from the Congo itself.”

He finishes his book on a very high note: Calling this bit The Great Forgetting, Hochschild writes:

“From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left for Africa was not democracy as it is practised today in countries like England, France and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.

“When independence came, the country fared badly… Some Africans were being trained for that distant day; but when pressure grew and independence came in 1960, in the entire territory there were fewer than 30 African university graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, engineers, agronomists or physicians. The colony’s administration had made few other steps toward a Congo run by its own people; of some 5,000 management-level positions in the civil service, only three were filled by Africans.”

Yet on the day of independence, King Baudouin, the then monarch of Belgium, had the gall to tell the Congolese in his speech in Kinshasa: “It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence”.

No cheek could be bigger! And you could well imagine how mad the Congolese nationalists like Patrice Lumumba were jumping.

Hochschild has written an excellent book. Africa owes him a huge debt of gratitude. New African highly recommends the book for compulsory reading in African schools and universities.

Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.

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Why Yugoslavia Was Expelled from the Cominform

Below is a commonly-reprinted argument, the idea that the Titoites broke with the USSR over the question of not helping the Greek Communists enough.

Is this true? Not according to Nikos Zahariadis, General Secretary of the KKE and the symbol of Marxism-Leninism in Greece. This Yugoslav-leaning article will be followed by his essay.

— Espresso Stalinist.

Jun 28, 1948:
Yugoslavia expelled from COMINFORM

The Soviet Union expels Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (COMINFORM) for the latter’s position on the Greek civil war. The expulsion was concrete evidence of the permanent split that had taken place between Russia and Yugoslavia.

The Soviet Union had established COMINFORM in 1947 to serve as a coordinating body for communist parties in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Most Western observers believed the organization to be the successor to the Communist International (COMINTERN had been dissolved by Russia in 1943, in an effort to placate its wartime allies–the United States and Great Britain). With the hardening of Cold War animosities after World War II, however, the establishment of COMINFORM signaled that the Soviet Union was once again setting itself up as the official leader of the communist bloc nations. In addition, the inclusion of the Italian and French communist parties served notice that the Soviet Union wished to have a strong say in political developments outside of its eastern European satellites. Yugoslavia was an original member, but that nation’s leader, Josef Broz Tito, proved to be reluctant in following the Soviet line. Throughout 1947 and into 1948, Tito harshly criticized Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s lack of assistance to communists fighting for power in Greece. When Tito refused to tone down his complaints, Stalin ordered Yugoslavia expelled from COMINFORM.

After its expulsion, Yugoslavia continued to chart a communist, but distinctly independent, pathway in its domestic and foreign policies. The United States was delighted with the Soviet-Yugoslavia split, and actively courted Tito with economic and military aid in the late-1940s and 1950s. [...]

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Tito Clique’s Stab in the Back to People’s Democratic Greece

Nikos Zahariadis
General Secretary,
Communist Party of Greece

From For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy!
No. 15 (42), 1 August, 1949

Every inhabitant of Greece knows very well that monarcho-fascism would not have been able to hold out for a few months had it not been for the all-round and open aid of the American and British imperialists.

Our main difficulties arise from the fact that the Anglo-American imperialists are stubbornly trying to retain a foothold in Greece. The country is highly important to them for strategic reasons, and they are trying to turn it into a vital bridge head against the People’s Democracies and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s old plans in this respect, for instance, are well-known. However, foreign imperialism’s positions in Greece were badly shaken last year by the military defeat of monarcho-fascism in the Grammos-Vitsi area and by the collapse of its strategic plan for 1948. The People’s revolutionary movement and the democratic army extended and consolidated their positions in Peloponnesus, Rumelia, Thessaly and on the islands of Samos and Eubeia.

This placed the monarcho-fascist regime in a critical position. In their reports General Papagos, Vendiris, Tsakalotos and others openly admitted that army morale had been shaken. Hundreds of men and officers were shot. King Paul himself was compelled to speak about the moral crisis in the army. The Athens clique was in severe economic difficulties and the political crisis was steadily sapping the foundations of monarcho-fascism. Both at home and abroad, people who were by no means our friends began to realise that the only way out for the reactionaries was to reach a peaceful settlement and conclude an agreement.

The treachery of the Tito clique was disclosed at the very moment when the crisis of monarcho-fascism was coming to a head. Tito’s treachery meant serious new difficulties for our people’s democratic movement, for it strengthened the determination of the Anglo-American imperialists to retain, at all costs, their hold on Greece for the very purpose of making full use of the Tito clique and extending their base in the Balkans. At the same time the Tito clique’s over to the camp of imperialism raised the deflated hopes of monarcho-fascism.

The people’s democratic movement of our country has never, since the time of the first occupation, known of such a cunning and foul enemy as the Tito clique. The Great Serbia chauvinism of the Titoites in relation to the resistance movement in Greece was evident as far back as 1943, when the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party declared that the people of Aegean Macedonia could only win their liberation within the framework of Yugoslavia. The corollary of this was that it was the prime duty of all Macedonian patriots to fight against the Communist Party of Greece and EAM and instead to collaborate with the Tito agents.

This was the directive followed by Tito’s man in Aegean Macedonia, Tempo (Vukmanovic). This was the directive applied in practice by their chief agent, Goce. Today is it being carried out by Goce-Koramidjiev gang. During all these years the Tito clique sent thousands of its agents into the Communist Party of Greece and into EAM with the job of undermining the Communist Party of Greece and splitting the unity of the people’s liberation movement.

It is clear that Greek reaction and Anglo-American imperialism could not have found a better ally than the Tito clique. The following detail is extremely characteristic: in October 1944 when the British landed in Greece, Tempo at the head of the provocative movement against the Communist Party of Greece, informed the Communists of Aegean Macedonia that he has asked Tito for two divisions to occupy Salonika. This was before the December events; the British were not sure that they could hold Greece. Preferring to see Salonika occupied by Tito than in the hands of ELAS, the British parachuted weapons onto the aerodrome at Grupista. These were sent on to Vapsori by Tito’s agents – Tempo, Goce and Pios – to be used against ELAS. Even during the Hitler occupation Goce and Pios formed groups of Macedonian and collaborated with Tempo. It can be regarded as an established fact that, as a consequence, Evans, former representative of the British military mission in Macedonia, insisted on the network of these groups being extended. It was at the help of these groups that Goce, Pios and Keramidjiev carried out their disruptive activities against the people’s liberation movement in Greece.

In December 1944 Tito, who dreamt of snatching Salonika from people’s democratic Greece, did nothing to help us fight the British, in spite of all his earlier pompous statements. If anything, he stepped up his slander campaign against the Communist Party of Greece, especially Aegean Macedonia.

Tito organised the mass emigration of Macedonians to Yugoslavia thus depriving Aegean Macedonia of its Macedonian population. Incidentally, the Greek monarcho-fascists have been trying to the same thing for many years, hoping to change the ethnical composition Aegean Macedonia. Then again, the Titoites are trying to recruit agents from these refugees who, after the necessary training, are sent to Greece to operate against the Communist Party of Greece, EAM and our people’s revolutionary movement.

Since 1943 the Greek Communist Party and revolutionary movement have been two fires: on the one side the foreign imperialists and monarcho-fascist, on the other- the Tito clique and its executive organ, the Goce- Keramidiev gang which had and still has hundreds of Yugoslav intelligence servicemen in Aegean Macedonia. In 1944, acting on orders from Skopje, Goce crossed over to Yugoslavia with his detachment. Today Goce and Keramidjiev have their headquarters in Skopje.

Time and again the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece drew the attention of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party to the counter-revolutionary actions of these agents, proved by irrefutable documentary evidence, and demanded that their activities should be stopped. The Central Committee of the Yugoslav Party, however, did not do a thing to cut short these provocation actions.

It has been proved beyond doubt that Hristos Vlachos, who in 1947 in Salonika killed Yannis Zevgos, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Greek Party, was an agent of the Yugoslav intelligence, service and had received his instruction from Skopje. He arrived in Salonika on orders of the Yugoslav intelligence, placed himself at the disposal of General Zervas, an agent of the British Intelligence Service, and later murdered Zevgos. Five monarcho-fascist officers, some of them murderers of the people, escaped to Yugoslavia from a war prisoner’s camp with the help of Rankovic. The Central committee of the Yugoslav Party stated that it knew absolutely nothing about this, even though we gave them details of the date and the exact spot where the monarcho-fascists had crossed the border. Border officers and soldiers had informed us that the monarcho-fascists had crossed into Yugoslavia.

We have captured dozens of Yugoslav intelligence officers. In December 1948 two Yugoslav agents, Gunaris Menos and Gallios Mitsos, were detained in Prespa. These agents disclosed the names of the Yugoslav intelligence officers who had sent them and the assignment they had been given.

The Communist Party of Greece has at its disposal other damning proof of the treachery and disruptive activity of the Tito clique against the revolutionary movement in Greece. The nationalist gang of the treacherous Yugoslav leadership was always a mortal enemy to the Communist Party and people of Greece. Recent events are fresh evidence that the Tito clique helped and is continuing to help Greek and international reaction against the Greek people more and more openly.

In its communiqué of July 6, 1949 the General Headquarters of the Democratic Army stated that on July 5, 1949 monarcho-fascist troops used Yugoslav territory in order to bypass units of the Democratic Army in the Kaimakchalan area. The same day the “Free Greece” telegraph agency, basing itself on an official document (the report of lieutenant colonel Petropulos, commander of the monarcho-fascists’ 516th battalion, to General Grigoropulos, commander of the 3rd army corps), reported that on July 4, 1949, that is, on the eve of the day when the monarcho-fascists crossed Yugoslav territory, a meeting of Yugoslav and monarcho-fascist Greek officers had been held in the area of Popovolossi and Kaimakchalan. This meeting was attended by British and American officers. The Tanjug agency did not refute this fact, neither did the representative of the British Foreign Office when asked about this meeting. Again, neither did Tito deny it in his speech at Pola (Istria), on July 10, 1949. Like the Tanjug agency, he merely tried to refute the fact that an agreement had been reached allowing the monarcho-fascist to use Yugoslav territory.

Such was the Belgrade version when the United Nations Balkan Commission in Athens published its communiqué on July 21, 1949. The sole aim of this communiqué was to cover up Tito’s collaboration with the monarcho-fascists, a collaboration that had been laid bare by the General Headquarters of the Democratic Army and the Free Greece radio on July 6, 1949. This communiqué of the Balkan Commission is highly significant since, to begin with, for the first time in its history the Commission admitted that the monarcho-fascists had violated the Yugoslav frontier in the Kaimakchalan area on many occasions. It claimed, however, that this had been done by artillery and aircraft and not by infantry. Secondly, the communiqué admitted that a meeting of monarcho-fascist and Yugoslav officers had been held in the Kaimakchalan area.

After the Tito clique’s betrayal of the Greek people’s liberation struggle had been exposed in the eyes of progressive mankind and the Yugoslav people, the Yugoslav leaders found it necessary to mobilise yet another provocateur. On July 24, following the example of Tito and Djilas, Kardelj also made a statement to Tanjug on the Greek question. He denied everything: the agreement with Tsaldaris, the negotiations in the Kaimakchalan area, and the use of Yugoslav territory by the monarcho-fascists. He concluded by giving the Jesuit assurance that the Belgrade Government “continues to sympathise” with the movement of the Greek people, but that it “cannot force its assistance on them” and that “the agents of the Information Bureau who slandered Tito” are responsible for this.

We have never doubted the sympathy of the Yugoslav people. As for those who are responsible, “The Times” makes it clear when it writes that in his statement at Pola, Tito gave the Americans the necessary guarantees in advance for the dollars which he needs.

In order to mask their treachery, the traitors Tito, Djilas, Kardelj and company would have the world believe that morale of the Greek democrats is at a low ebb and that they are losing confidence in victory. As a matter of fact these Titoites are doing everything to undermine the morale of the Greek democrats. Tito’s treachery and his long-standing subversive activities against the people’s democratic movement in Greece are causing us serious difficulties. Tito has a deadly hatred for the Geek people’s liberation movement and is viciously fighting against it. But he is mistaken, and so are his monarcho-fascist allies and their common masters, if they think that they will be able to crush us.

Throughout Greece – in Rumelia, Thessaly, Peloponnesus, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace and on the islands – the Greek Democratic Army is continuing its struggle against the enemy with unshaken courage in the face of enormous difficulties. A broad strike movement covering tens of thousands of factory and office workers is gaining strength in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of peasants who are literally starving to death in the cities where they have been forcibly driven by the monarcho-fascists, hate the Athens Government with all their soul. Reaction in Greece is in the throes of an economic, political and moral crisis from which it can find no way out. The Greek Democratic Army will come face to face with monarcho-fascism in the great battles that will be fought in Grammos and Vitsi.

We are fight because we want peace, because we want to establish democracy and the independence of Greece. Reaction is out for war. It wants to crush us at all costs and is using the Tito clique for this purpose. Thanks to the assistance and solidarity of progressive mankind, including the Yugoslav people, the people of Greece will be victorious both in war and will win a people’s democracy and national independence.

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Ho Chi Minh shown as sympathetic to the Albanian-Chinese line in Khrushchev’s Memoirs

“I remember when the conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow was being held in [November] 1960 [...] The Chinese spoke out against us. Enver Hoxha conducted himself especially rabidly as an agent of Mao.

[....]

Ho came over to me then and said: “Comrade Khrushchev, you ought to concede the point to them.”
I said: “How can we concede? Why, it’s a matter of principle!”
Ho said: “Comrade Khrushchev, China is a huge country, they have a huge Communist Party. The concession should be made to them. A split cannot be permitted. It’s necessary that the Chinese sign the document together with everyone else. This document will have great international significance.”

[....]

I felt very bitter later when the Chinese decided to make an open break with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the other fraternal parties. China has powerful influence in Vietnam. A large stratum of the population there is Chinese. Pro-Chinese people even hold key positions in the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party. They have carried on their work against the Soviet Union and against our policies [...] The pro-Chinese elements in Vietnam had done everything they could to start a quarrel, to turn Vietnam away from the Soviet Union, and set our two parties fighting against each other.

After Beijing broke off all political and business relations with us, de facto, and did everything in its power against us, it began trying to impose its views on Vietnam. Unfortunately the Vietnamese Workers Party took the Chinese bait. This is very bitter for us [...] Later on, Vietnam did everything to favor China against us, against its own interests.

[....]

Our relations [with the Vietnamese] were good, and if they grew worse later, the blame for that lies not with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In my opinion, it was the result of Mao’s influence.

[....]

If ho’s alleged testament [read at his funeral] is analyzed [...] I think the document was drawn up in a pro-Chinese spirit.”

- Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Statesman, 1953-1964, p. 501-506

Kasama Project Interview II

Kasama Project Interview

CPUSA Job Interview

First Speech of Kim Jong Un translated!

State of Siege (État de Siège) by Costa Gavras

Ernst Busch – Lenin (“Er rührte an den Schlaf der Welt”)

DPRK celebrates centennial of Kim Il-Sung’s birth

PYONGYANG, April 15 (Xinhua) — The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is carrying out a great military parade here on Sunday morning to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of founding leader Kim Il Sung.

In a speech delivered at the grand event, DPRK leader Kim Jong Un lauded the historic contributions to the DPRK’s development by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong IL, and offered the highest respect and honor to the two late leaders.

Noting that the country is facing a momentous opportunity, Kim Jong Un called upon the whole nation to stick to the path blazed by his predecessors and strive for new victories.

Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony at Kim Il Sung Square in central Pyongyang. A march-past of more than 30 phalanxes of military forces is under way amid thunderous cheers and clangorous music.

The ongoing military parade is one of the many activities planned to celebrate the centennial of the birth of Kim Il Sung, who passed away in 1994.

Days ago, Kim Jong Un became first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), chairman of the WPK Central Military Commission and first chairman of the National Defence Commission.

Source

Kim Jun Un (C), supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), attends a national meeting celebrating the centenary of birth of President Kim Il Sung at the Kim Il Sung Stadium in Pyongyang, capital of DPRK, on April 14, 2012. (Xinhua/Zhang Li)

DPRK holds national meeting celebrating centenary birthday of Kim Il Sung

PYONGYANG, April 14 (Xinhua) — The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) held a national meeting at Kim Il Sung Stadium here Saturday to celebrate the centenary birthday of the country’s founder Kim Il Sung.

Kim Jong Un, first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), first chairman of the National Defense Commission of the DPRK, supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) was among those present.

Addressing the meeting, Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) of the DPRK said Kim Il Sung built socialism centered on the popular masses, and put forth fair, aboveboard and reasonable reunification proposals, including the three principles of national reunification, and provided a new program for achieving great national unity.

“Kim Il Jung set forth outstanding ideas, strategies and tactics on global independence and made an undying contribution to the socialist movement,” he said, adding he made a great contribution to accomplishing the cause of independence against imperialism “with his superb diplomatic strategy and energetic external activities.”

Similar meetings took place in all provinces, cities, counties and industrial complexes.

Kim Il Sung was born on April 15, 1912 and died on July 8, 1994.

Source

Kim Jong Un orders mass of promotions in army

PYONGYANG, April 14 (Xinhua) — Kim Jong Un, supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army (KPA), has ordered promotions for 71 senior military officers, official news agency KCNA reported Saturday.

Kim said the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea armed forces had performed great exploits for the party, revolution, country and its people and were now fully demonstrating their strength in the defense of the country and the building of a thriving nation, the report said.

According to the order, which was issued Friday, Pak Sun Hwan has been promoted to Lieut. General, Kim Yong Hwa, Son Kyong Bok and 68 others to Maj. General.

Kim said they would creditably discharge their duties as vanguard fighters of the Songun (military first) revolution in the sacred struggle to accomplish the revolutionary cause of Juche generation after generation, true to the behests of Kim Jong Il.

Juche is a political thesis of Kim Il-sung, founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which says that the Korean masses are the masters of the country’s development.

Kim Jong Un was elected first chairman of the National Defense Commission on Friday. Earlier this week, he was appointed first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission.

Source

DPRK holds parade to mark founder’s 100th brithday

BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhuanet) — The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has started a military parade to celebrate the 100th birthday of founding leader Kim Il Sung. This parade is the largest since the foundation of DPRK 64 years ago. Now let’s take a look at some live pictures in Pyong-yang.

The parade is organised by DPRK’s 1.1 million-strong military, the Korean People’s Army. The huge parade showcasing Pyongyang’s military hardware was originally scheduled for April 25. It has been brought up 10 days earlier, coinciding with the country’s founder’s birthday.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s new leader underlined the country’s “military first” policy with a budget that allocates a sizable chunk of funding to defence spending. The parade comes two days after a controversial satellite launch, which DPRK insists is for entirely peaceful purposes.

On Friday, 200,000 people rallied to mark the unveiling of huge bronze statues of the two late leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, the capital. Olive-uniformed soldiers, women in colorful hanbok gowns and men in dark-grey suits packed Kim Il-sung Stadium in Pyongyang, while Pyongyang people seem to be consumed by the festive mood.

Pyongyang is set to host scores of diplomatic and media delegations, invited to a series of celebrations on an “unprecedented” scale to commemorate the reclusive state’s late leaders and rally.

Source

Expose Ryan Towne for the Racist Fascist That She Is

As some of you may know there is a young woman out there claiming to be a Marxist-Leninist of the Pro-Enver Hoxha tendency with a bombastic and abrasive attitude towards anything in contrast to her views. This young woman goes by the name of “Ryan Towne” and some of you may well be FB friends with her.

She has been expelled from Revleft and numerous FB Communist groups for racist and Islamophobic remarks. Ryan Towne is a pro-Rhodesian settlerist, Zionist Israel apologist psuedo-leftist, it is totally arrogant of her to claim her own individual ultra-leftist/reactionary views on Hezbollah, Israel, Zimbabwe etc. deserve more merit than the millions of Communists who spent years forging the lines we have today. If the collective has spent the time and effort to create a plan to solve a problem, it should be followed out and judged on its results. One should never have the arrogance to assume that their opinion is greater than that of the collective decision making of the people. This is a total objectivist/fascist position to assume one individual knows better than the decisions making power of all people affected by the decision. It assumes that the individuals actions have no effect on anyone else.

Ryan has also come out defending Nazism, “ethnic socialism” etc. on her blog, it was soon taken down after been exposed on the forum Revleft:

Many people talk of how communism is a “noble concept” but that it can’t work. We are told how people have suffered under communism – the intellectuals and artists who were allegedly targeted and killed in Mao’s cultural revolution for example, the tens of millions of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin, the aggressive expansionism, gulags, the ridiculous notions of lysenkoism and the idea of making everyone work for equal and very low wages, the extent of state control over every one’s lives. But communism, despite all this, is still a “noble concept” and that is because there is a nugget of pure gold at the centre of this ideology -and that is socialism – an ideal of treating people fairly.

Many of the positive things about communism as it has been practiced and realised in actuality are not known to the general public. For example, that a policy of full employment was accompanied by free housing. The poorest people in Russia had a happier and more secure existence under soviet rule than they do today when they can find themselves homeless, counting themselves lucky to work unreasonable hours for little pay for capitalists, and in a society where there is a lot of corruption, crime and sleaze, and the mafia is strong. If communism “did not work” it is nevertheless true that what it was replaced with is little better, and in a number of ways worse.

Communism does work as practiced today in various nations around the world. these now are all non-white nations, non-western nations. Because they reject the western capitalist way of life they are demonised. But the people living in these countries do benefit from communism – and the communism is special there in that it is no longer internationalist and has taken on a nationalist flavour. Even Soviet Russia had to resort to rousing feelings of nationalistic pride in ww2. So these communist regimes are nationalistic and also socialistic, and yet they are undoubtedly fascist as well in that the state requires that the people obey its laws and serve the state’s existence.

The communism practiced in various countries now is different in each one. To some extent capitalism has been allowed, including allowing western capitalists to relocate factories to China, for example, and exploit the Chinese people. not good. but the variant of communism they have in china still has benefits to the Chinese people in that it controls criminal activities far more effectively than would otherwise be the case and takes a strong stance against such things as drug dealing, prostitution and pornography.

These communist countries have to be heavily ruled by a totalitarian state (and are thus basically fascist ) because the people living in them lack the altruism that would be necessary for the state to ease off and allow a natural socialistic consensus to emerge. China is a vast and over populated nation, but there is a fairly high level of homogeneity, especially in localised areas. true socialism could work if the separate areas would work as autonomous regions.

National socialism as practiced in Germany in the 3rd Reich worked like a charm because there was a high level of homogeneity, a strong sense of nationhood, and simply because the northern European/Germanic temperament is ideally suited to socialist society. Even today’s anti-Nazi documentaries with emotive titles about “the rise of evil” and so on admit that national socialist Germany was a paradise – as long as you were not one of those being hauled away to a concentration camp.

National socialism is like communism with all the failings removed. It is strange indeed that it is thought of in any way as being the opposite of communism but that mistake can be explained by the fact that Germany fought a war against soviet Russia, and the soviets needed to give the impression that national socialism was nothing like their own variant of socialism. it was the soviets who first decided to label the Nazis as “fascists” in order to avoid the use of the term “socialism” to describe their enemy. Although Hitler allied with Mussolini and the Italian fascist regime, national socialist thinkers in the third Reich have always made it clear that national socialism is a rejection of fascism. National socialism is about putting the folk before the state while fascism is the opposite. Fascism in no way implies any kind of racial loyalty and in fact would only exploit racial or patriotic loyalty as far as it benefited the state to do so – always at times of war. At present the west is ruled by a fascism in which the ruling capitalists exploit the people and seek to prevent true socialism by bringing in millions of immigrants of various races, especially third worlders. This provides them with cheap labour, causes racial conflict to replace the class conflict that capitalists fear, and prevents the folk of a nation from maintaining their territory and identity.

Yes true communism, true socialism, depends upon human nature being altruistic, and looking around us at the world it seems that such a society would be impossible. But it is not. Altruism has been scientifically proven to be a genetic trait that is lost unless it is practiced very discriminating. Animals have evolved to be altruistic – but only towards others who are closely related to them. William Hamilton’s equation demonstrates the mathematical formula for this kin selection. Altruism and socialism are almost homonyms. Socialism requires altruism and this is why, when you bear in mind the facts regarding the necessity of close relation, the most potential for a socialist society exists amongst people who are of one ethnicity and one nation. The biggest mistake of communists is to forget this rule. there cannot be a global village that is socialist – in which every ethnicity and creed cooperates in a spirit of harmony and love. We can imagine such a world perhaps, but the reality is that it can never happen and that attempts to make this happen not only fail but in fact ruin the only real chance of socialism, which is ethnic based.

Those who favour capitalism like to point to the failings of communism and say that human nature is egoistic and selfish and that people never really work for the common good. Since the most successful capitalists and politicians today are clinically psychopaths, it is not possible for these people to empathise with altruistic urges anyway. These people could never feel loyalty to blood, only to their own bank accounts. It is horrific that such people have so much power over all our lives.

Capitalists suggest that people live only for shallow material reward and they have no conscience about exploiting workers. Proudhon’s famous phrase “property is theft” is most accurate when referring to the ill-gotten gains of capitalists. Capitalists point to the Darwinist fact that animals are genetically programmed to desire to prosper, reproduce and expand. They ignore the fact that this is achieved as a group – and thus socialistic – even if the animal is not gregarious. Success in nature is about spreading ones genes and these genes succeeding within a gene pool. The capitalists abuse and twist Darwinism and that is how the abomination which is called “social Darwinism” came into the language. To capitalists, “survival of the fittest”, is about selfish exploitation by an individual and about the individual getting as good a material existence for himself, even without having any offspring at all in many cases, as possible. When we have these people in our midst it is only bad for our gene pool and the anti-nature world view that capitalists spread is killing us and raping the planet. It is a big factor behind the plummeting birth rate in the west.

The capitalists have not only twisted Darwinism but they have twisted socialism too. Many associate socialism now with a policy of supporting the least deserving and most useless people in our society. Many associate socialism with being pro immigrant – when as i have explained immigration wrecks the basis of socialism and merely strengthens the position of capitalists. Not only those who dislike socialism have these misconceptions, but the multi-racialists who claim to be socialist or communist also have these ideas. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin – none have ever advocated that third worlders should immigrate to the west and mix with whites. Trotsky made clear that he advocated black nationalism/separatism in the united states, even while the ku klux Klan at the time did not, preferring the capitalist/masonic stance that blacks be kept as slaves. (thankfully today’s KKK does appreciate the principle of ethno nationalism and has an ironically similar view to that of Trotsky in this regard).

Socialism is about contributing to society, while capitalism is about taking out of society – it is about making a private profit. when capitalists point to ways they feel they do contribute to society, from the “trickle down effect” to donations they make to third worlders, or creating jobs or adding to the economy, it is all cynical spiel with no grounds to justify it as being positive. All of these things result in pollution, unsustainable use of natural resources and surging populations in parts of the world where it is most harmful.

Capitalists have been behind all wars, including the last two world wars and the present “war on terror”. Selling arms is very lucrative, as is rebuilding destroyed infrastructure and of course war would have had to be declared on a national socialist state that had promised to hang bankers and capitalists and was printing its own currency.

Communism in the soviet states had a strange relationship with the western capitalists and that is why they did not see it as the same threat that national socialist Germany posed. as the Russian anarchist Mikhyl Bakunin pointed out :”i am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschild’s appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschild’s. this may seem strange. what could there be in common between communism and high finance? ho ho! the communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists there must inevitably exist a state central bank, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates upon the labor of the people, will always find the means for its existence…”

When it comes to a debate over which is the better, communism or capitalism, the argument always fails to realise the true biological basis for socialism and how it really could work to bring a utopia, if only the capitalist exploiters of the labour of the people would be stopped, and ethnic cohesion taken as the foundation for harmony and cooperation.

EXPEL THIS FASCIST DOG FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PAGES!

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The Face of Dr. Claw

Confessions of a fake Marxist

Pieter Boevé, a.k.a. Comrade "Chris Petersen"

As leader of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé was fêted by the world’s communist dictators for 40 years. What they didn’t know was that he was an undercover agent. Finally unmasked, he tells all to Stephen Castle There was one catch: the leader of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands wasn’t really a communist at all. Stephen Castle reports

Enver Hoxha, gesturing, meets Pieter Boeve, right, in Tirana, Albania.

Once Pieter Boevé called the masses to the barricades. Today, he waggles his walking stick at his local train station in the Netherlands. As the founder of a political party for the elderly, he is calling for an escalator to be installed. There’s no stopping some people. For Mr Boevé spent much of the Cold War preaching the word of Mao and Marx in the West. He was fêted in Beijing, toasted in Moscow and met the leaders of the Communist world.

Once Pieter Boevé called the masses to the barricades. Today, he waggles his walking stick at his local train station in the Netherlands. As the founder of a political party for the elderly, he is calling for an escalator to be installed. There’s no stopping some people. For Mr Boevé spent much of the Cold War preaching the word of Mao and Marx in the West. He was fêted in Beijing, toasted in Moscow and met the leaders of the Communist world.

Yet now, Mr Boevé peruses a menu at a café in the Dutch seaside town of Zandvoort. He muses over a Chinese option – “Chicken Beijing Lunch” – and rejects it. And then he confirms a secret that fooled the Communist world for generations. He was no lover of the red flag. He was, in fact, a spy all along.

Through the years of the Cultural Revolution and Nixon’s visit to China, he made regular trips behind the bamboo curtain. The then Mr Petersen skilfully navigated his way through the ideological lurches of his Communist hosts and visited places off limits to almost everyone else in the West as the leader

of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands (MLPN). Mr Boevé’s incredible story has made him something of a celebrity in this town of 17,000, where he is greeted in the supermarket as the “James Bond of Zandvoort”.

Over 35 years Mr Boevé met Nikita Kruschev in Moscow, Enver Hoxha in Tirana, and shook hands with Chairman Mao. But the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands he led was a sham, staffed mainly by Dutch agents.

The revelation of his extraordinary life has left left-wing activists across Europe wondering whether their comrades through the 1970s and 1980s were all they seemed to be. As a 25-year-old student and part time mathematics teacher, Mr Boevé was always an unlikely recruit to the cause of Communism. True, he was a political campaigner but his allegiance was to the Dutch liberal party, the forerunner of today’s centre-right VVD, which was instinctively capitalist in outlook.

As an increasingly confident Soviet Union sought to project its image in the West, the authorities in Moscow began preparations for a youth festival to be held in the country’s capital in 1955. Bizarrely, a request for candidates to go to Moscow for the token price of 150 guilders was sent to the Dutch liberals among other political parties. A friend in the party who worked for the Dutch secret service (BVD) approached Mr Boevé and asked if he would be willing to go to Moscow and report back to the service. Yes, said Mr Boevé, not knowing that he was embarking on a 35-year adventure of deceit and double-dealing that would give him access to some of the most senior figures of Communist Cold-War politics.

Even now, 50 years on, sipping a cola next to the fire in the Café Neuf in Zandvoort, Mr Boevé seems a little vague about why he opted for such a life. He was, he insists, never paid by the BVD though it later provided a car big enough to transport reams of Communist propaganda, and stepped in to make up his salary when he took time off between jobs to attend a lengthy indoctrination course in Beijing.

He says he retained a strong aversion to the Communist system and believes he helped, in some small way, to win the Cold War. But Mr Boevé’s main motivation may have been the intoxicating excitement of leading such an exotic double life. At one point in our conversation he turns to me and says: “Wouldn’t you have liked the chance to do something like that?” Multilingual and, by his own admission a good actor, Mr Boevé managed to blag his way into becoming the leader of the Dutch organising committee for the Moscow youth festival, vetting those who applied to go to Moscow. His BVD controllers could not believe their luck as a list of Communist sympathisers fell in their lap.

While the rest of the 700 Dutch delegation took the train to Moscow, Mr Boevé was flown there, met Mr Kruschev (“a nice man”) and made a broadcast in Dutch on Radio Moscow. In 1958, China organised its own youth festival and Mr Boevé was invited. Initial Chinese suspicious of the young Dutch liberal were overcome and he embarked on a five-day journey from Amsterdam to Beijing.

That was followed by regular visits to the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands which led to an invitation to shed his “bourgeois ideas” and join the Dutch Communist Party. As a teacher, membership of the CP was impossible, so Mr Boevé’s new political allegiance was a secret to everyone except the BVD. Then came the Sino-Soviet split which also divided Communist sympathisers. Dutch intelligence saw a chance to split the far left and prompted Mr Boevé to help set up the MLNP to follow Beijing’s line. Its propaganda may have been funded by the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands, but the organisation was controlled by seven or eight BVD agents including Mr Boevé, who adopted the pseudonym Chris Petersen.

By 1963 he was back in Beijing, this time for a formal Communist education. He was put up at the best hotel and treated as a VIP but the hospitality came with a price tag: lengthy study of the thought of Mao. “I learnt how to think in the Chinese way. It even became possible for me to make a speech in a Mao style,” he recalls. Meanwhile, Mr Boevé held down a job as director of a technical school in Schoonhoven near Rotterdam.

With financial backing from the Chinese, what became known as Operation Mongol did not even cost any money. “In fact it made a profit”, says Mr Boevé. “The Chinese always paid in dollars.” By virtue of his party position and links with the Chinese, Mr Petersen was introduced to Communists in a host of countries, travelling extensively around Europe and beyond. The Albanian embassy in Paris fixed up a visit to Tirana where Mr Boevé met Mr Hoxha (who “seemed a nice man though we know he was not” and who spoke “excellent French”).

More trips to Bejing followed with audiences with Deng Xiaoping, Chou En-lai (a “clever, educated man who spoke German and French”), and even Mao himself. Though this was only a handshake, it afforded much celebration at the BVD, which had never had any agent so close to the Chinese leader.

Back at home, Chinese diplomats in the Netherlands were told the MLPN had a membership of about 500 but the party was really made of “about 25 agents and about 15 people stupid enough to join us”, says Mr Boevé.

The Chinese were not the only ones to be fooled: one Dutch academic even donated 20 per cent of his salary to the party, money he now wants refunded by the BVD. Meanwhile, Dutch secret service agents became experts in Maoist ideology, denouncing the evils of their capitalist government. Although the Chinese knew Mr Petersen’s real name, they did not bother to monitor his movements or, if they did, failed to spot regular meetings with a BVD controller. Other clues were overlooked, including one occasion when Mr Boevé spoke publicly about how to manage the tax system in order to pay less – not usually a Maoist preoccupation.

Mr Boevé told his wife (from whom is he now separated) and two sons about his double life and seems phlegmatic about the risks. He says: “I was told, ‘if you make a mistake. If you are put in prison and you admit that you are an agent, we cannot help you. You will be on your own, and you know what that means in those countries.’ But I was never afraid, I was so sure that everything was so well organised here.”

Didn’t all the lying and deceit get him down? On the contrary, he says: “I am a little proud of what I have done. I have led a good life and I have added something to humanity.” Mr Boevé only revealed his role after being exposed in a book written by a former BVD agent, Frits Hoekstra. The revelation has placed the spotlight on his new political party for the elderly. But he still faces a struggle to make a group of three local councillors into a real political force.

But all that time in Beijing has left him prepared for the battle to come. He might just get his escalator. As Chairman Mao once put it: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

Source

Dutch math teacher admits fake communist party scam that fooled Mao Zedong

The Guardian
December 4, 2004
Jon Henley

A 76-year-old retired Dutch math teacher described yesterday how for more than 25 years he was feted by communist leaders around the world as the inspired head of a radical Marxist-Leninist party that never, in fact, existed.

As Chris Petersen, head of the supposedly 600-member Marxist-Leninist party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé travelled to Beijing more than two dozen times and met Mao Zedong. He was also welcomed with open arms in Albania by Enver Hoxha, and in the eastern bloc capitals of Europe.

“In fact we had at most a dozen members, none of whom had the faintest idea of the truth,” Boevé said on Friday from his home in the seaside resort of Zandvoort. “The whole thing was a hoax, set up by the secret services to learn all they could about what was going on in Marxist Peking.”

The Mao regime was so impressed by the revolutionary zeal of Petersen/Boevé and his MLPN that it gave him regular briefings on the chairman’s latest thinking at the Chinese mission in The Hague. Beijing even funded the non-existent party’s newspaper, De Kommunist, which was written entirely by Dutch secret service (BVD) agents.

“We took everybody in,” Boevé said proudly on Friday. “As far as I know, the MLPN was the only wholly fake radical party to have existed, and certainly the only one to have really worked. We passed inside information on every Maoist policy nuance to all the western intelligence forces. It was a wonderful adventure.”

Boevé was first recruited by the BVD in 1955 when he visited a World Student Congress in Moscow. Soon after, he was invited to China, then still the Soviet Union’s ally, for a similar communist youth junket. After the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, the Chinese began courting western communists and, egged on by the BVD, Boevé played along.

“I was invited to Peking for a month-long course on the wisdom of Chairman Mao,” he said. “It was quite a baptism of fire. I hadn’t read a great deal of Marx or Lenin at that stage, let alone Mao. But I soon got very proficient. I could spout for hours.”

The foundation of the MLPN was announced by De Kommunist in 1969. Its main role was to undermine the official Dutch Communist party, the KPN, by denouncing its deviant beliefs and unreliable conduct, and to garner information on – and gain access to – the Maoist elite in Beijing.

In the latter task, it was successful beyond the BVD’s wildest dreams. “They adored us,” Boevé said. “I was invited to all the big events – Army Days, Anniversaries of the Republic, everything. There were feasts in the Great Hall of the People and long articles in the People’s Daily. And they gave us lots of money.”

Most European Maoist groups, unable to keep up with an endless string of purges and policy about-turns, had lost faith by the mid-1980s, and the MLPN gradually began winding down its activities. But as late as 1989, after the Tiananmen student uprising, Boevé was invited to Beijing to praise the regime’s crackdown.

The existence of Project Mongol, as it was dubbed by the BVD, was successfully kept secret until this September, when another former agent, Frits Hoekstra, published a book about the service’s glory days. It caused something of an uproar in the Netherlands, a country where a fair few genuine former radicals now occupy leading positions in public life.

Boevé, who was never a salaried spy and who, despite his extra-curricular activities, rose to become headteacher of a top Dutch grammar school, said he was at first unwilling to have his name revealed. “My family knew, but no one else,” he said. “As far as my friends and former colleagues were concerned, all my travel was to do with educational exchanges.”

Since the revelations about his former life as one of the west’s most productive spooks, Boevé said reactions have varied from shock and disbelief – “How can we ever trust you again?” – to mild amusement. “My fellow members of the Zandvoort town council call me 007,” he said. “I don’t mind. I’m satisfied with what I’ve done with my life. I’ve travelled the world at someone else’s expense, and I feel did my bit. And it was certainly fun.”

Source

Comrade ‘Chris Petersen’ Was Big in China and Albania; ‘Project Mongol’ Tell-All

The Wall Street Journal
December 3, 2004

In From the Cold: He Was a Communist for Dutch Intelligence

By ANDREW HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
December 3, 2004; Page A1

ZANDVOORT, Netherlands – As secretary-general of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Chris Petersen traveled the globe during the Cold War, wowing Communist leaders with his revolutionary zeal and anti-capitalist diatribes.

“I could make speeches for hours and you would think that Mao Tse-tung himself had been my teacher,” recalls the now-retired party chief.

The Chinese Communist Party was so impressed, it regularly gave the ranting Dutchman the full red-carpet treatment in Beijing: banquets in the Great Hall of the People, an audience with Mao, envelopes stuffed with cash and tributes in the People’s Daily. Albania’s Communists were also big fans.

Now, with communism all but dead, the Dutchman has decided to come clean: Both he and his party were a sham.

He says he was never a Maoist but an opera-loving math teacher moonlighting for Dutch intelligence. His name, his politics and his party, he says, all were concocted in a plot to penetrate militant Marxist subculture.

“Nothing was real,” says the ex-Mr. Petersen, who now lives under his real name, Pieter Boevé, here in Zandvoort, a seaside resort town west of Amsterdam. The only genuine part of a revolutionary career that lasted decades, he says, was a fondness for Chinese food: The Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Boevé recalls, had excellent cooks.

The Central Intelligence Agency, which got regular updates on the mock Maoist movement, dubbed it “Operation Red Herring,” according to Dutch intelligence. (The CIA won’t comment.) The Dutch called it “Project Mongol.”

The unmasking comes at an uncomfortable time for Dutch security services, now under fire for post-Communist bungling. Having infiltrated Maoist groups with gusto, they lost track of an Islamic radical blamed for the murder last month of filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Mr. Boevé, who appeared on television in a recent documentary about the Dutch secret service while wearing a fake beard and Groucho Marx plastic nose and glasses, says his past exploits provide tips that could help con Islamist extremists, but he doesn’t envy anyone who might try: “It’s very dangerous,” he says.

In a country where erstwhile Maoists and other radicals have become pillars of the establishment, the exposure of the phony Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, or MLPN, has caused dismay and embarrassment. Frits Hoekstra, a former high-ranking security official, shocked former colleagues in September by publishing a book that described Project Mongol and other escapades. The interior minister ordered an investigation into whether state secrets were divulged. Former Maoists are aghast.

“I totally wasted 12 years of my life,” says Paul Wartena, an ex-MLPN member who was so dedicated to the cause he used to donate 20% of his salary to the fake party. He says he “had some doubts now and then” about the MLPN but stayed loyal because “I was very naive and Mr. Boevé was such a good actor.” Now a researcher at a university in Utrecht, Mr. Wartena wants Dutch intelligence to pay him back for all his donations.

Mr. Boevé, now 74, scoffs at his acolyte: “He was an idiot.”

Mr. Boevé says he, too, is upset that his caper leaked but that Mr. Hoekstra’s book forced him in from the cold.

Conning so many people, says Mr. Boevé, was “not the most beautiful thing,” but it was a great adventure. He visited China about 25 times, made frequent trips to Albania and duped radical leaders in the West. After each journey, he went to a safe house in Amsterdam to pass on tidbits of information.

Set up and run by spooks in 1969, his party, the MLPN, had its own newspaper, De Kommunist, written and edited by the secret service. As well as Mr. Boevé playing Chris Petersen, the secretary-general, it had a chairman (another fraud) and a Central Committee stacked with secret agents. To add authenticity, the party let Mr. Wartena and a handful of other true believers join its otherwise nonexistent ranks, telling them that they were part of a network of underground cells.

Mr. Boevé first started working as an informant for the Dutch secret service, then known as the BVD, in the late 1950s and started using a fake name. Invited to Moscow for a youth festival in 1957, he attended a reception hosted by Nikita Khrushchev and briefed Dutch intelligence.

Mr. Hoekstra, a former head of counterintelligence against Soviet-bloc countries and author of the recent book, says Mr. Boevé’s recruitment wasn’t at first seen as a big deal, but, rather, as part of routine tracking of local Communists.

Shortly after the Moscow festival, however, Mr. Boevé got an invitation to China, then still aligned with the Soviet Union. While in China, he kept hearing Chinese officials curse Moscow, which had just cut funding to Beijing. The move marked the start of the Sino-Soviet split – and of Mr. Boevé’s role as an unlikely prize agent.

Desperate for allies against Moscow, China searched out Communists in Europe and elsewhere. Mr. Boevé, encouraged by the BVD, offered his services. He visited China in the early 1960s for a six-week course on Mao Tse-tung Thought. He says he got good at mimicking Chinese propaganda. The main difficulty, he says, was keeping up with the wild zigzags of Chinese politics: his hosts kept getting purged.

Chinese diplomats in Holland invited the man they knew as Chris Petersen to their mission in The Hague and gave money to help finance a Maoist newspaper secretly edited by the BVD. The result was De Kommunist. Mr. Hoekstra, the former spy and now a business consultant, says he once wrote a screed against the Dutch government. “As a civil servant, it was very satisfying,” he says.

After a year, De Kommunist announced with fanfare in 1969 the foundation of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands. “In order to limit as far as possible the danger of penetration by enemy elements,” it explained, “the MLPN organization shall be based largely on the cell system, obliging all members to the greatest possible secrecy.”

For the next decade, the fake party helped the Dutch secret police divide Holland’s legitimate Communist movement, keep tabs on Maoist groups and gain access to China’s elite. “Petersen” issued regular communiques – all drafted by the BVD – denouncing real Communists as sellouts and urging voters to reject them.

Mr. Hoekstra, the former intelligence officer, said the facade of Maoist fervor did sometimes wobble. On one occasion, he says, “Petersen” started talking in public about how to take advantage of tax deductions, not something a Maoist is supposed to worry about. He says there was concern the Chinese might smell a rat, but that faded. The Dutch, he says, had the Chinese embassy bugged and heard diplomats singing “Petersen’s” praises. “We could hear everything,” says Mr. Hoekstra.

By the 1980s, purges and ideological U-turns had exhausted most Maoists in Europe, and the BVD began to lose interest in the ruse. China was no longer an enemy but a big trading partner. De Kommunist shut down. The MLPN fizzled.

Mr. Boevé, though, kept going. In 1989, when troops shot dead hundreds of protesters around Tiananmen Square, he issued a statement praising the resolve of the Communist Party in restoring order. Shortly afterward, he was back in Beijing, hailing the party and its leaders.

In a small apartment crowded with an electric organ and piles of books, Mr. Boevé rustles through plastic shopping bags full of yellowing MLPN tracts and other mementos. One is a copy of a photograph of himself meeting Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist dictator from 1944 until his death in 1985.

Advancing age has finally slowed Mr. Boevé down. He walks with a cane and can’t climb stairs. His involvement with China is limited to visits to a local Chinese restaurant. He draws giggles by humming the “East is Red,” a Maoist anthem. “It’s a very nice tune,” he says.

His political horizons have shrunk to Zandvoort. He sits on the local council and lobbies for better housing for the elderly. He has even set up yet another party: It represents old people. It doesn’t have many members, but, says Mr. Boevé, “This time they are all real.”

Source

Ex-Operative Says He Worked for F.B.I. to Disrupt Political Activities Up to ‘74

The New York Times
February 24, 1975

Joe Burton of the "Red Star Cadre"

By JOHN M. CREWDSON
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23–Despite assurances by the Justice Department that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s controversial Counterintelligence Program was halted in April, 1971, a former undercover operative says that the bureau continued as late as last June to employ program-style techniques against domestic: political groups.

The former operative, Joseph A, Burton, told The New York Times in a series of recent interviews of activities he carried out for the F.B.I. that appear similar to several of the categories of “dirty tricks” that characterized the Counterintelligence Program, or Cointelpro, effort.

Mr. Burton’s account included examples of bogus documents, informants and sham “revolutionary” front groups used to disrupt a variety of political activities in this country.

He also told of “infiltrating” labor unions and, with other F.B.I. undercover operatives, of reporting to the F.B.I. on the Republican National Convention at Miami Beach in 1972, and of encouraging and assisting demonstrations against the Nixon Administration over the Watergate scandals.

F.B.I. Challenges Assertions

An F.B.I. spokesman termed many of Mr. Burton’s allegations “distorted or false” in a statement issued today.

The spokesman reiterated that the bureau’s “Cointelpro effort had not continued beyond April, 1971, and maintained that the F.B.I. had not instructed Mr. Burton to join or report on any labor unions and had no knowledge of his involvement in any “violent” demonstrations during the Miami convention.

Cointelpro’s operation is expected to be investigated by the select committees that the Senate and House of Representatives have recently set up to examine intelligence gathering by Federal agencies.

Cointelpro was described in: a report by the Justice Department last November as a 17-year attempt to disrupt, expose or neutralize such organizations as the Communist party and the Ku Klux Klan.

In making the Cointelpro report public, William B. Saxbe, then the Attorney General, disclosed that such activities were implemented at various times during the period from 1956 to 1971, when all programs were discontinued.

No Renewal Asked

Mr. Saxbe, who became Ambassador to India earlier this month, said that during his tenure as Attorney General he had not been asked to consider the reinstatement of any Counterintelligence Programs against domestic groups and .could foresee no circumstances under which he would do so.

He also pointed out that Clarence M. Kelley, .the F.B.I. director, cautioned his agents in December, 1973, when the existence of Cointelpro was made public, that they must not “engage in any investigative activity which” could abridge in any way” the constitutional rights of American citizens.

In a subsequent speech to Duke University law students, Mr. Kelley affirmed that he would not direct the bureau to enter into domestic counterintelligence efforts without first consulting the Attorney General and the President.

Mr. Burton, who lives in Tampa; Fla., said that he and other undercover intelligence agents operated bogus “Communist” organizations, set up with the assistance of the F.B.I., to help them gain a foothold with radicals in their communities and with other revolutionary groups around the country.

‘Formed Red Star’ Group

For more than two years, Mr. Burton headed the “Red Star Cadre,” ostensibly a pro-Communist Chinese organization that he said he founded in May, 1972, “at the direction of the bureau,” and directed until he left the bureau’s employ in July, 1974.

The F.B.I., he said, supplied him with everything from the name to operating funds to T-shirts, bearing a large red star and the legend “Fight Back,” that he and his radical comrades wore to demonstrations.

Mr. Burton, a 42-year-old auctioneer and antique dealer, said he became involved with the F.B.I after he was invited by a co-worker at a Tampa janitorial service to join the Communist party.

Mr. Burton said he advised the F.B.I.’s Tampa field office of the invitation and was visited the next day by two agents, who persuaded him to adopt a revolutionary guise and to try to infiltrate radical groups in the Tampa area. He said he was later asked to infiltrate other groups in the United States and Canada.

The function of the Red Star Cadre, he said, was to “make other organizations come to us and want to discuss ideology.”

Attracted Members

He was successful in this, he said, as well as in attracting as members of his cadre a number of local radicals in whom the F.B.I. was interested.

Mr. Burton said he was later told by the F.B.I. that his efforts in Tampa were part of a larger attempt by the bureau to find and cut off funds believed to be flowing to Maoist groups in this country from China.

To provide a headquarters for the cadre, Mr. Burton said he opened a junk store, the Red Star Swap Shop, for which the F.B.I. provided half the overhead expenses while allowing him to keep the profits it produced.

The shop quickly became a gathering place for radicals in Tampa, Mr. Burton said, and he was soon reporting to the bureau not only on the cadre membership, which at its peak numbered less than 20, but also on anyone who ventured into the store, “even if they came in to buy.”

At one point, he said, the F.B.I. approached him with a plan to conceal recording and filming equipment in the store’s air-conditioning system. He said he rejected the proposal because, if the equipment was discovered, it might “get me killed.”

Sent to Miami Beach

As the fledgling Tampa group became known to other radical organizations around the country, Mr. Burton said he was called upon by the bureau to leave the city in connection with his work.

His first out-of-town assignment, he said, was to “cover” the demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in 1972 in Miami Beach, where he and other Red Star members traveled at the F.B.I.’s expense.

While his “comrades” pro-tested or slept in a large tent in Flamingo Park, also paid for by the agency, Mr. Burton said, he slipped away to telephone periodic reports to the bureau’s Miami office.

During one report, he said, the Miami agents “suggested that I try to get into one of the ‘affinity groups’ which ended up later ‘trashing’ the taxicabs” around the convention site.

But he said he demurred on the ground that “the type of Left philosophy that I was expounding at that time would not have condoned my doing that.”

“The only thing I helped to do,” he-said, “was incite people to turn over one of the buses and then told them that if they really wanted to blow the bus up, to stick a rag in the gas tank and light it.”

The protesters, he said, were unable to overturn the vehicle.

“Sense of Importance”

Asked why he had agreed to undertake such tasks in return for relatively little money or security, Mr. Burton, who never graduated from high school, replied:

“Most people work in intelligence because it gives you a sense of importance, a sense of being worthwhile and doing something worthwhile instead of mopping floors.

“I felt like, being the person that I am, the socia1 position that I’m in, the educational background and everything, that this was something I could give to my country.”

The experiences that followed the Miami trip, however, according to Mr. Burton, led gradually to frustration and, finally, to concern about the legality and propriety of what he and others were doing in the bureau’s behalf.

“When the F.B.I. came to me;” he said, “I felt honored, the most trusted person in town. After I got to know them a little closer, I said, ‘We got a monster running around in this country.’ I hate to say that, but that’s the way I feel about it.

Opposed Disruption

“I don’t see anything wrong with gleaning intelligence, but I do see it with setting up an espionage agency in order to glean that intelligence and, at the same time, to do disruptive, disorganizing types of things.”

Mr. Burton conceded that “I don’t like the left.”

“The real solution to the left,” he went on, “is to solve our social problems in the country, and then the left has no inroad. But until we can do that, then I think we should operate under the law.”

He said he had not yet received a reply to a letter he addressed last month to Mr. Kelley, the F.B.I. director, asking for some assurance that his bureau-directed activities “both inside and outside” of the country were “legal and proper and within the….jurisdiction of the F.B.I.”

Asked about the validity of Mr. Burton’s concern, Nick F. Stames, the former head of the F.B.I.’s Tampa office, declined to make any specific comment on Mr. Burton’s account.

Mr. Stames, who has recently been promoted to head the bureau’s Washington field office, did say that Mr. Burton had done “an outstanding job when he was under our control,” and that, to the F.B.I.’s knowledge, he had not engaged in any illegal activities.

Not Bring Them Together

Mr. Burton said his general instructions from the bureau could be characterized as “do not ever do anything that will bring Marxist-Leninists together in any way, do anything to prevent them from coming together.”

One element of this, he went on, was to impose “a financial, economic drain on them, keep draining them for everything you can get.”

In this connection, he said he set about ordering vast quantities of revolutionary literature, ostensibly for redistribution in Florida, from other pro-Chinese groups around the country.

Little of the material was ever passed out, he said, but the bureau continued to direct him to order it by the crate, “just because it was hurting the organization to produce the printing,” or because it was “hurting the Chinese to ship it to them.”

Mr. Burton said, however, that some of the materials he distributed were printed not by leftist organizations or by the Chinese Government but by the F.B.I.

He produced one document that he said had been approved by F.B.I headquarters in Washington, printed by the bureau and mailed to a number of Marxist-Leninist “collectives” around the country.

He said the intent of the document, which contained a number of unfounded accusations, were to undermine an incipient move by independent collectives to unite as the “Organization of United States Marxist-Leninists.”

”In the F.B.I.’s files there is a report,” Mr. Burton said, that credits the bogus document with “breaking up that organization.”

On another occasion, he said he was told that intelligence specialists at F.B.I. headquarters “thought it would he a good idea if we put out a newspaper here.”

In addition to serving as a vehicle for propaganda, he said, the publication, to be named The Southern Socialist, might provide a cover for an F.B.I. photographer to circulate freely at radical meetings and other events.

Mr. Burton, who once owned a small newspaper in Colorado, s aid he prepared a prototype edition of The Southern Socialist, but that he and an agent in the F.B.I.’s Chicago office, reputed to be an expert in Marxist philosophy, could not: agree on what line the newspaper should espouse, “and I just kind of let it die.”

Mr. Burton said that although he knew of no burglaries carried out by the F.B.I, whenever he visited the home or office of a radical leader, “I always filed an entry report on it.”

On some occasions, he said, he was asked for such details as “what kind of locks are on the door and how the windows opened.”

After one visit to the Chicago apartment of a black Communist leader, Mr. Burton said, he reported to the F.B.I. that the man kept his funds in cash secreted between the pages of the Marxist volumes in his library.

The F.B.I., he said, was “very specific in asking me, ‘Which books? Which page? What shelf?’”

Another time, he said he noticed some letters in the office of another radical group from an American professor, “who was in Iran working with this militant organization.”

He said he was asked by the bureau to assess “the chances of getting in there and photographing them,” but replied that the office was so well guarded that “you can’t even get a telephone serviceman in there.”

The F.B.I., he said, then offered to supply him with a small, expensive camera “developed in the Soviet Union,” but Mr. Burton, concerned about losing his cover, rejected the offer.

During the first year he worked for the F.B.I., he said he subsisted entirely on the meager profits of the swap shop and the salary earned by his wife and declined, out of patriotism, to accept any payment for his services.

But as his finances dwindled, he said he reluctantly agreed in the spring of 1973 to begin accepting compensation from the bureau.

Assigned to Union

Although the payments eventually reached $400 a month, he said, he found it .necessary to ask the bureau for help in finding a second job to supplement his income.

The F.B.I. told him, he said, that they had long wanted to “get somebody in” the Tampa local of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which had organized a Westinghouse Corporation plant there that produced equipment for the nuclear power industry.

The bureau told him, he said, that the electrical union was “controlled by Communists,” and that to ingratiate himself with the other members, he should “come off as a Marxist.”

Although Mr. Burton by then had a reputation as a strident revolutionary and although there was a waiting list for employment at the plant, he said, he was hired immediately and assigned to the daytime shift, unusual for a new worker.

One F.B.I. official in Washington conceded that “we got him a job at Westinghouse,” but denied that Mr. Burton had been assigned to infiltrate the union or that the bureau had prevailed upon Westinghouse officials to falsify some aspects of his employment application.

Mr. Burton said that during his five months at Westinghouse, he was asked by the F.B.I. to provide information on “anybody” connected with U.E. – what heir sentiments were and how they felt.”

The bureau was especially interested, he said, in the union’s chief Tampa organizer, who had played a key role in the vote to unionize, and Mr. Burton said he kept them advised on what the man “was doing, where he was, what time he was there, and who he was meeting with.”

Important to Union

According to one union lawyer, the outcome of the vote was of the greatest importance to the union.

A rejection of the national contract, he said, would have been “a real crisis” and would have undermined the union’s bargaining position with the company in other plants.

Among the information Mr. Burton was asked to get by the F.B.I., he said, was an estimate of “how many people would reject the contract.”

He said he had made discreet inquiries and reported that it would be accepted without a single negative vote, but that the bureau, terming such an outcome unlikely, expressed disbelief.

The contract was accepted unanimously, a union official said.

Although union officials said that Mr. Burton’s radical proselytizing had made him suspect among his fellow workers as a “company agent” or worse, it apparently did little to damage his stature within the organized labor community.

Several months later, he said, he successfully carried out an assignment to infiltrate a local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, whose efforts to unionize Tampa garbage collectors had attracted the bureau’s attention.

Mr. Burton, who said he earned nearly $3,000 for his F.B.I. work during the first half of last year, said he was also paid about $400 each month to cover his operating expenses in Tampa, plus additional funds to finance out-of-town trips, including “about 10″ to meet with radical organizations in Canada.

Some of the bureau’s money, he said, was contributed by him in the name of Red Star to pay for the activities of domestic and foreign leftist groups, including a wing of the Canadian Communist party, which he said he had been assigned to infiltrate and disrupt.

On one occasion, he said, he was approached by the leader of the Tampa chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which sought American withdrawal from Vietnam.

Wanted to Merge

The veterans, he said, wanted to merge with the Red Star Cadre and to share expenses on a headquarters office.

“I called the bureau,” Mr. Burton said, “and they said, ‘Yeah, go ahead, we’ll give you the money.’”

Although the two groups never formally merged, Mr. Burton said he and two other operatives the bureau had placed in the Red Star organization did join the veterans’ group at the F.B.I.’s direction.

He said that at the F.B.I.’s direction, he began giving the veterans $50 a month in bureau money to pay half of the rent on the office.

He said that at first he took his assignment seriously and began helping the veterans’ Tampa chapter to recruit new members, but was told by his F.B.I. superior, “We don’t want to do that, we’re trying to kill them in Florida.’”

Mr. Burton said he then reversed his course and began to promote an internecine dispute between the Tampa chapter and the group’s national office that resulted last August in the chapter’s expulsion from the organization.

Anti-Nixon Group

Another organization that Mr. Burton said the F.B.I. encouraged him and his two fellow operatives, both former military intelligence officers, to “get control of” was the Bay Area Citizens Opposed to Nixon, which conducted demonstrations in and around Tampa during the Nixon Administration’s Watergate difficulties.

The group organized a protest last March when then Vice President Ford visited Tampa, he said, adding that shortly before the visit, he and the two other operatives met with bureau agents to plan for their participation in the demonstration.

One of the F.B.I. agents, Mr. Burton said, agreed to provide anti-Nixon placards for the three operatives to distribute to protesters who did not have signs.

Short of gaining outright control of the group, Mr. Burton said, the bureau’s hope was “that we could control demonstrations, make them move when we wanted them to, make them shout what we wanted them to.”

Despite their apparent lack of success, he said, the F .BI. did not abandon its efforts to neutralize the group. He said the same technique, complete with F.B.I.-provided placards, was employed again a few weeks later during a protest outside Tampa’s Federal Building, where the F.B.I .has its offices.

Source

F.B.I. Reportedly Harassed Radicals After Spy Program Ended

The New York Times
March 23, 1975

By JOHN M. CREWDSON
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 22 – The Federal Bureau of Investigation continued disruptive techniques and harassment against domestic political groups after its controversial counterintelligence program was terminated, according to two former senior F.B.I. officials.

The F.B.I., one of the former officials asserted, was carrying out what could properly be described as counterintelligence both before 1956, when the counterintelligence program, or Cointelpro, was initiated, and: after April, 1971, when the program ostensibly was halted by J. Edgar Hoover, then the bureau’s director.

The assertions by the two former officials support the accounts of three F.B.I. informants who have told The New York Times of their use of Cointelpro-style disruptive techniques against a variety of radical political groups since 1971.

They also coincide with allegations by the Socialist Workers party, based on F.B.I. documents the party has received in connection with a lawsuit, that the Government continued its attempts to disrupt the party and harass its members as late as last year.

Both the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have maintained that Mr. Hoover officially ended Cointelpro in a memorandum dated April 28, 1971, which stated that, “effective immediately, all Cointelpros operated by this bureau are discontinued.”

Possible Exceptions Hinted

The memorandum added, however, that the bureau would continue to consider, “on an individual basis,” recommendations from agents and field supervisors for counterintelligence action “in exceptional instances.”

Clarence M. Kelley, who took over as F.B.I. director in mid-1973, has said that no such counterintelligence operations have taken place during his tenure. But he has expressed a desire for legislation that would give the bureau emergency authority to conduct such operations.

Mr. Kelley said in an interview last year that although the matter was under discussion with the Attorney General’s office, the constitutionality of such discretionary authority had proved to be a “very difficult” question that might not lend itself to resolution.

One of the former F.B.I. officials said that Mr. Hoover had authorized the 1971 memorandum ending Cointelpro after confidential documents disclosing some aspects of it were stolen from the bureau’s office in Media, Pa., and subsequently made public.

Mr. Hoover, the source said, had acted because of “concern about his image,” but he added that counterintelligence operations, some bearing Mr. Hoover’s personal approval, were continued in the Bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division.

Following the theft at Media, Pa., Carl Stern, a reporter for NBC, obtained a court order under the Freedom of Information Act that allowed him to receive copies of some Cointelpro documents.

Other suits compelling similar disclosures have been filed by the Socialist Workers party, a principal Cointelpro target; Muhammad Kenyatta, a black civil rights activist, and others.

Last year, William B. Saxbe, then the Attorney General and now Ambassador to India, ordered the Justice Department to make an internal study of Cointelpro, the results of which he made public in November.

Mr. Saxbe disclosed that between 1956 and 1971, the F.B.I. had implemented Cointelpro efforts aimed at foreign espionage agents, the domestic “New Left,” so-called “white hate groups,” the American Communist party, “black extremists” and the Socialist Workers party. A seventh and most secretive category was called “special operations,” about which no details have been made public.

The Justice Department’s report, written by Henry E. Petersen, then the head of its Criminal Division, termed some of the Cointelpro techniques “troubling” and “egregious.”

: The entire program, the report said, had been implemented by the bureau on Mr. Hoover’s instructions and was almost entirely unknown to any of the five Attorneys General under whom he served between 1956 and 1971.

‘Isolated Excesses’

In making the report public, Mr. Saxbe called some of the incidents “improper,” but characterized them as “isolated excesses” in the bureau’s general program to disrupt, confuse and neutralize the political: groups in question.

There are indications, however, that Mr. Petersen and his investigators may not have seen all the bureau’s Cointelpro documents.

For example, F.B.I. materials; obtained by the Socialist Workers party through its lawsuit and made public this week showed that the bureau attempted to discredit John C. Franklin, who was the party’s candidate for Manhattan Borough President in 1961, by providing details of Mr. Franklin’s criminal record to Charles McHarry, then a columnist for The New York Daily News, who published the information.

The report prepared by Mr. Petersen states that “there were no instances” in the Cointelpro files in which the bureau had disclosed information to “friendly media sources” regarding members of the Socialist Workers party.

In addition, members of the party have submitted more than 50 sworn affidavits that, according to Peter Camejo, its Presidential candidate concerned “Cointelpro-type” incidents since 1971.

Examples of Cointelpro activities disclosed in the Justice Department report included the following:

The sending by the F.B.I. of anonymous or fictitious materials to political groups or their members that were designed to “create dissention and cause disruption.”

The use of informants to disrupt a group’s activities.

Notifying employers, credit bureaus and families of individuals’ “illegal, immoral, radical and Communist party activities in order to adversely affect their credit standing or employment status” or family relations.

Joseph A. Burton, a Tampa, Fla., resident, said in a recent interview that between 1972 and 1974 he worked as a paid. F.B.I. operative assigned to infiltrate and disrupt various radical groups in this country and Canada.

Many of Mr. Burton’s activities as he described them, including the dissemination of bogus F.B.I. documents to revolutionary groups and establishing a “sham” political group, the “Red Star Cadre,” for disruptive purposes, appeared to fall within several of the categories of activities undertaken by the bureau during its Cointelpro years. In particular, he said, his F.B.I. superiors told him in 1974 of the existence of an effort within the bureau to put the Vietnam Veterans Against the War “out of business” in the state of Florida.

Two other former F.B.I. operatives, Harry E. Schafer 3d and his wife, Jill, told of similar disruptive activity they undertook at the bureau’s direction during the same period.

The Schafers, who used a similar bogus New Orleans front group, termed the “Red Collective,” as a base, were interviewed in January in a Southwestern city where they then lived.

They asked at the time that their names be kept confidential for fear of retribution by leftists, but the couple has since been identified by The New Orleans States-Item and other publications.

Mrs. Schafer said that in early 1973, about three years after becoming an F.B.I. informant, she organized a demonstration in front of the F.B.I.’s New Orleans office to raise money for the militant American Indian Movement, whose members then held the South Dakota village of Wounded Knee under siege.

Because of her efforts, she and her husband were invited by militant Indian sympathizers to come to Rapid City, S.D., to aid the cause of the movement.

At Rapid City, the Schafers said, they set up, with the F.B.I.’s permission, an alternative fund-raising operation that diverted money from the American Indian Movement to an unidentified group of Indians, “who were legitimately interested in the welfare of their own people.”

Mr. Schafer, a licensed pilot, said that after the besieged village had been cut off by United States marshals, he accepted a shipment of food and supplies from the Indians and, with the knowledge of his F.B.I. superiors, agreed to fly it from a point in the Middle West and drop it by parachute over Wounded Knee.

But he purposely delayed his arrival, Mr. Schafer said, by reporting “inclement weather,” at stopovers along the way, arriving in South Dakota after the siege had ended and the supplies were no longer needed.

Source

U.S. Citizens Used by F.B.I. Abroad

The New York Times
February 16, 1975

Bureau Confirms Practice—Authorities Say It Does Not Violate the Law

By JOHN M. CREWDSON
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15—The Federal Bureau of Investigation periodically dispatches American citizens on intelligence-gathering missions outside the United States, according to a 42-Year-old Florida man who says he and others have been used for that purpose.

The man, Joseph A. Burton, who for more than two years, beginning in May, 1972, posed as a Marxist in order to infiltrate revolutionary groups here and abroad, told The New York Times that he had made “about 10″ sorties into Canada at the F.B.I.’s direction.

James Murphy, a spokesman: at F.B.I. headquarters here, confirmed in a telephone interview that the bureau has in the past sent American citizens abroad for intelligence purposes, but he declined to discuss specific cases.

The F.B.I., according to a former high official there, has “no right to run [intelligence] operations in a foreign country—that’s the C.I.A.’s jurisdiction.”

But neither he, nor legal authorities in and out of’ the Government who were asked about the practice, could point to any statute prohibiting the bureau from gathering intelligence overseas.

Another undercover operative, a woman with whom Mr. Burton occasionally worked, confirmed in a separate interview that she had made a month-long visit to China nearly four years ago in connection: with her work for the bureau.

Mr. Burton, an auctioneer and antiques dealer who lives in Tampa, Fla., told The Times that he ended his relationship with the F.B.I. last summer after becoming concerned about the legality of some of the; tasks he had undertaken, including the Canadian ventures.

He said that, last month, his doubts led him to write to: Clarence M., Kelley, director of the bureau, seeking assurances that his work outside the United States was “legal and proper.”

He has received no reply to that letter or to an earlier one. F.B.I. officials will not say whether a reply is forthcoming.

Apart from his concern that he may have violated the law, Mr. Burton’s account of his activities and that of his fellow operative provide an insight into a little-known aspect of the F.B.I.’s operations at a time when the agency is coming under increasingly stringent scrutiny.

Last month, the Senate set up a select committee to examine intelligence-gathering by Federal agencies, including the F.B.I. and the Central Intelligence Agency, whose occasionally overlapping jurisdictions have created some difficulties in the past.

Talk of Albania

Although his forays outside the United States were confined to Canada, Mr. Burton said, “There was some talk of my going to Europe and also going to Albania. The bureau would have let me go to Albania. They wanted me to go.”

He was in the process of securing an invitation to visit the tiny Communist country, he said, when be decided to break off his relationship with the bureau.

Mr. Burton said he was once asked by an F.B.I. superior whether he would “like to go to Mexico, walk into the Chinese embassy and say that you’ve got this organization in Tampa and that you want to work with the Chinese.”

Mr. Burton then headed a, sham “revolutionary” group in Tampa, called the “Red Star Cadre,” that, he said, had been set up as a front for his F.B.I. work. He said he told the inquiring agent that he would not “insult the Chinese by trying to pull something that stupid on them.”

During the Canadian trips, he recalled, his instructions were: to develop contacts with members of the Canadian Communist party’s pro-Chinese wing, and to report to the F.B.I. on their activities, including any signs that the organization was passing funds from China to Maoist groups in the United States.

Accompanied by Woman

On two of the trips, he said, he was accompanied by an American woman who had adopted a similar radical pose in the New Orleans area, and who told him that she had visited China to gather political intelligence for the bureau.

The woman, a 36-year-old housewife and mother, confirmed in an interview in the Southwestern city where she now lives that she spent four weeks in China in 1971 with one of the first groups of Americans allowed into that country after President Nixon’s announcement that he would visit there.

When first asked about that trip, the woman said, “It’s better not to discuss any F.B.I. operations outside the count try.”

But after being assured anonymity, she conceded that she had entered China “before Nixon” as part of a “delegation made up of American radicals,” and had made “four or five” trips into Canada as well.

The woman asked that she not be identified for fear of reprisals from the left against her or her husband, with whom she had worked in penetrating leftist political organizations in Louisiana and elsewhere.

‘A Detail Specialist’

The reports she submitted to the F.B.I upon her return, she said, were filled not only with information about her traveling companions, but also with her observations of Canton, Shanghai and Peking, the Chinese capital, where, she said she had been introduced to Premier Chou En-lai.

“I was concerned about everything,” she replied when asked what sort of information she supplied to the bureau. “I was a detail specialist.”

Asked whether she now entertained any misgivings about her work, her voice trembled as she said, “I spent a month in China, wondering if I was ever going to go home again: wondering if they were ever going to find out what I was doing.

“I feel like I’ve put my life on the line for a good cause, and I don’t feel like that all ought to go down the drain because someone wants to make a sensational story.”

The former F.B.I. intelligence official said he had read the woman’s reports on China, but could not recall whether any of the information had been shared with the C.I.A.

Hoover’s Strategy for ‘Glory’

On more than one occasion when the F.B.I. sent a covert operative abroad, the official said, J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the bureau, would “instruct us not to advise” the C.I.A. of the Intelligence that was produced.

“He wanted to outscoop the C.I.A.,” the man said. “He wanted the F.B.I. to come back with valuable information which he would give to the President over his signature, so he would get the glory.”

Added the official: “He was wrong.”

When first asked about Mr. Burton’s activities, officials of, the bureau here said that all queries should be addressed to Nick F. Stames, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Tampa field office, under whom Mr. Burton had worked.

Mr. Stames, who last week was notified that he was being transferred to the bureau’s Washington field office, said repeatedly in a recent interview that he would not respond in any way to Mr. Burton’s disclosures or charges beyond the following statement:

Services ‘Discontinued’

“Joseph A. Burton volunteered his services to the Tampa F.B.I. office in May. 1972, and was able to establish contact with several Marxist-Leninist groups.

“He was paid for his service in providing information and expenses incurred in connection with its acquisition.

“During his periods of assistance to the F.B.I. Burton was instructed not to engage in any illegal activities and we have no information indicating he did engage in illegal activities.

“Burton’s services were discontinued in July, 1974, at his own request, as he indicated he desired to provide security for his family and because he was no longer willing to be associated with the Communist revolutionary movement.”

The former F.B.I. official said that the bureau maintains agents in a number of foreign capitals who serve as “legal attaches” and who have their offices inside American embassies. But he said that their role was officially limited to performing a “liaison” function with foreign policy agencies and that they were barred from “positive,” or active gathering of intelligence.

Not Special Agents

Mr. Murphy, the spokesman for the bureau here, said that the F.B.I. was “not operational outside the country” and, without confirming that either Mr. Burton or the woman had ever traveled abroad, he pointed out that neither was a special agent of the F.B.I.

Asked how he would describe the pair, Mr. Murphy replied that they were considered “paid informants.”

A spokesman for the C.I.A., which is charged by law with the gathering of intelligence outside the United States, said his agency would have no comment on any reports concerning the F.B.I.’s external intelligence operations.

Told of the bureau’s description of him as an “informant,” Mr. Burton bristled.

“What information did I sell them?” he demanded. “When they called me and told me to go to Canada, was I selling them information? When they asked me to set up ‘Red Star,’ was I selling them information?

“If the bureau asked me to go to Canada or Pennsylvania or anywhere,” he went on, “at first they would say, ‘Do you want to go?’ After a while they just said, ‘You’re going to Canada.’”

Full-Time Help

Both Mr. Burton and the couple from New Orleans pointed out repeatedly that they had worked virtually full time for the F.B.I.

Mr. Burton produced a letter from Mr. Stames showing that, in addition to travel and other expenses; he was paid $2,923 for his work for the bureau during the first seven months of last year.

The New Orleans couple said that during their service as undercover intelligence operatives they received an average of “about $16,000″ a year from the bureau.

Told of Mr. Murphy’s explanation that, because he had not graduated from the F.B.I. Academy as a special agent he was officially considered an “informant,” Mr. Burton laughed and replied:

“The only thing I didn’t learn [by not attending the academy] is how to pick up a phone and say, ‘This is not your F.B.I. We didn’t do it, no, We don’t know them, thank you for not calling us’

“That and the karate course, I think, are the only two things I missed.”

Dismissing an informant as “somebody who asks, ‘How much will you give me for some information,’” Mr. Burton emphasized that he received instructions from and made reports to his F.B.I. superiors on a daily basis, and that he was directed both here and abroad to act “in other than a passive role.”

As his first Canadian assignment, he recalled, he was instructed to attend a conference of the Canadian Communist party’s pro-Chinese wing, an organization of which he said he eventually became a voting member and to which he periodically donated funds supplied by the F.B.I.

Without seeming to do so, Mr. Burton said, he had been able to cause a “rift” among some of the leftist organizations represented at the conference. Upon his return to Tampa, he said, the bureau “congratulated” him on his success.

Displaying anger at what he deemed attempts by bureau officials to play down the importance of his activities, Mr. Burton asserted that last July, just before he broke with the bureau, he was told by an agent:

“If you want to do a book on your association with the bureau someday after this has all settled down, we would be more than happy to help you, and we will supply you with a publisher.”

Mr. Burton said he declined the offer, saying that, “By the time you cut out everything I want to put in, there wouldn’t be any book.”

Source

Speech Delivered by Comrade Joe Burton on the Occasion of the First Anniversary of the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist)

EROL Note: Joe Burton was an FBI informant who created the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist) as part of a government effort to infiltrate and disrupt the anti-revisionist movement.

North America News Service: Daily Release has received for publication the following News Release of the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist), Tampa, Florida, May 27, 1973. The News Release is a speech delivered by Comrade Joe Burton on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist).

Comrades, we are honored to be one of the sponsors of the upcoming Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists, to be held August 18 through September 2, 1973, in Chicago, Illinois. We consider it a great privilege and a serious responsibility to also be seated on the Preparatory Committee of the Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists. We have actively and with great enthusiasm, democratically participated and voted on all occasions when the Preparatory Committee has met, as you have heard on the most recent occasion from our report to the Red Star Central Committee.

We are most grateful to the Communist Parry of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and to its leader, Comrade Hardial Bains, for the assistance they have given us. We consider the party building task our most primary objective. Without a Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), guided by Mao Tsetung Thought, in the United States of America, the revolutionary drive of the working class cannot move forward. Only with a Communist Party, united on correct political line of Marxist-Leninist Mao Tsetung Thought will the highest aspirations of the proletariat be established. This is our goal. This is our task. This is what is to be done! This is the challenge to which our answer is. . . We Can, We Will!

And how do we find ourselves today? Facing the storm of fascism, the raging torrents of revisionism, the ever present gluttony of imperialism, and the exploitation of the masses by monopoly capitalism and the exploitation of our friends over much of the world, by either social or capital imperialism. We find ourselves a little wiser, a little more mature, a little more experienced, and vastly more dedicated. And how has this come about?

This has come about as a result of our bruises, our scars, our infectious feet, acquired from walking into the marsh with those we trusted, those whom we believed (because they called themselves communist) would not mislead us! This has all come about as a direct result of our honestly striving to put info practice political line that we most enthusiastically wanted to believe was correct, based on the words and quotes of our friends. And how have we determined the correctness of line? By taking it out to the masses. And Comrades, in all honesty, the masses have rejected much of it. Comrades, we have made gross errors, we have walked deeply into the marsh. . . while thinking we were on the revolutionary path. And who shall we blame for all of these costly and time consuming mistakes? Shall we blame those who authored this counter-revolutionary action, or inaction as the case has often been? No Comrades, we will not let ourselves off this easily. Yet the day will come when they will be held responsible before the people for all the pseudo Marxist-Leninist direction. But today we will put the blame squarely where it belongs, on the shoulders of the leadership of the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist), squarely where it belongs on the shoulders of the State Secretary, myself, and others who did not protect the organization, to the point of near annihilation! Squarely on the shoulders of we who caused all of us to call friends enemies and enemies friends on the word of others! Of those who would manipulate us to their own advantage, we advocated trust. This was erroneous and irresponsible on our part, as was to lay down the Red Book on which Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist) was founded, and to attack our Afro-American friends’ struggles as though they were counter-revolutionary. To sum it up, Comrades, we shall bring the blame home where it belongs, to those of us who are still here! To those of us whose revolutionary action came in the final analysis and summing it up to he this (Don’t unite, Don’t fight, just stay up and read books all night!). This summation may sound silly and juvenile, but it clearly puts us in perspective! And how shall we correct these mistakes, how shall we rid ourselves of this infection of the marsh?

We shall study, oh yes, Comrades, we shall still study, but we will apply our studies to the concrete conditions that exist here, and we shall enthusiastically read Mao Tsetung Thought with particular problems in mind––! Then put into practice what we have learned. We shall, with the revolutionary spirit that the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist) was founded on, expose the capitalist to the masses. And how is this to be done? By wide dissemination of Mao Tsetung Thought applied to the situation!

As you know, we were in the past deeply involved in the exposing, repudiating and fighting the capitalist exploitation of the masses and especially the exploitation by capitalists of the low income proletariat, as regards to housing here in Tampa. We shall once again take up this fight, statewide, guided by the revolutionary spirit of Chairman Mao Tsetung. We shall carry on the wide dissemination of Mao Tsetung Thought, we shall adopt the slogan INTERNALLY as well as EXTERNALLY, (No investigation, no right to speak). This will end our past problem of too much informal talk and feeling that we must answer every abstract supposition presented to us! We shall also build the strength of our resistance movement so as to guarantee our democratic right to enthusiastically disseminate Mao Tsetung Thought amongst the masses. We shall once again endeavor to disseminate Mao Tsetung Thought statewide, to be untiring in our efforts to put out the call to any and all honest Marxist-Leninist to join the fighting forces of peoples revolution and the Red Star Cadre (Marxist-Leninist), to unite with any and all on correct political line based on Mao Tsetung Thought, who are willing to put into action the dissemination of Mao Tsetung Thought and aid in the fight against this fascist state, temporarily controlled by capital, so as to end its exploitation of the masses and cause it to cease and desist from its glutonous imperialistic adventures of exploitation, death and destruction abroad.

Comrades, we are aware that to many we have been the freak of the South, as far as well organized groups go, we know we have been called names, and accused because of our backwardness, but not once, Comrades, has any one individual or organization attacked our revolutionary spirit. We realize that we have made gross errors and we have now set ourselves on the path reputing these incorrect views, correcting our mistakes. We are aware that when our group was but an infant, some said, “Look it can barely crawl,” or “it doesn’t even know how to read”, or “They can’t quote much Lenin”, or worst of all, “Let’s see how we can use this backward group of rubes from Florida.” Well Comrades, thanks to our faith in the masses and our only way of proving correct line is by tailing it to the masses, those who would have used us, found us not to be quite as manipulative as they would have liked and they failed!

But let us not get caught up in boasting, there is a long struggle ahead though we still admit to the kernel of truth that we are backward, let us enthusiastically strive to remedy this situation in the future by studying the works of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and the great Chairman Mao Tsetung. We are no longer infants, we have to shoulder our responsibilities and carry forth the tasks set before us. We must march straight forward with great strength and dedication and take our rightful place in the fight to overthrow Capitalism and smash imperialism.

And lest we should ever forget our experiences of the past year – remember our slogan for the second year – “Depend on; trust in the masses!” The politics of the capitalist is based on cliques! The correct politics of the Proletariat is their absolute faith in the masses.

Long live Chairman Mao Tsetung – who has taught us to serve the people!

Published: North America News Service: Daily Release, June 4, 1973.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba

Source

Mark Twain on the French Revolution

“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror,’ if we would but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the guillotine, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

— Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”