*From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- Beyond October 21: From Protest To Power (1967)

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History book review entry A Norman Mailer Novel As History-Pentagon 1967-Armies Of The Night, for some background about the famous 1967 March on the Pentagon.

Markin comment:

Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.

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Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:

If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.

Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.

That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.

That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
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Markin comment on Beyond October 21: From Protest to Power

In an earlier entry today discussing some of the personal history of my political evolution on the anti-war question I mentioned that in 1965 I was not totally committed to a philosophy of non-violence action for political change nor was I totally committed to working within the bourgeois parliamentary system. (See From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) - The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965).) By 1967, in the aftermath of the hard governmental suppression of the black riots that expressed an elementary outrage at the reality of ghetto life, a suppression supported by Martin Luther King and other black leaders, the first stirrings of armed self-defense by the Black Panthers out in Oakland, California, and the successive escalations of the Vietnam War by the Johnson Administration, I was becoming somewhat radicalized. And, more importantly, less and less wedded to those core, essentially left-liberal beliefs, that drove my earlier political views.

However, I was also not committed to the total break from the system that some of my friends, and as were virtually all of my girlfriends of the period. (One girlfriend, who I was crazy about, actually was calling for victory to the National Liberation Front, a very left position in that year.) Ironically, ironically today anyway, I was in the position of arguing that it was still possible to work in the system for social change if only we could find the right bourgeois politicians (read: Robert Kennedy) to talk “sweet” reason to. Needless to say, all those friends and girlfriends were to the left of me, mainly working with SDS, or its offshoots, and made life hell for me. Naturally, as well, relations with most of those girlfriends tended to wilt on the vine (quaint expression, right?)

But hear me out, and hear me out admittedly from today’s perspective on this. In the United States in 1960, a country with no working class party, reformist, centrist, or revolutionary, what was a dirt poor working class kid crazy for politics and crazy for social change with a little rough justice thrown in, to do? Especially in Massachusetts, the king hellion locale for putting political careers and “good works” together. So, see it wasn’t me to blame okay. Actually let’s blame the Stalinists of the American Communist Party for tying us to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party back in the 1930s when there was a good change to built a mass workers party. Hey, I don’t mind kicking the Stalinists around politically once in a while. Ya, let’s blame them.

Blame aside though, 1967 and the October March on the Pentagon that the leaflet below was addressed to was just the kind of action that I saw as necessary, “levitating” pranks and all, to grow the anti-war movement. For what purpose? Well, for one, at this point to solidify the call for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam which I had begun to take up as against my previous wish-washy “Stop the War” position. But you already know the real purpose. To pressure Senator Robert Kennedy (whose position on Vietnam was actually to the right of mine at that point) to break finally with Johnson and run against him in 1968. Such, boys and girls, is politics. It ain’t always pretty.

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Beyond October 21:
From Protest to Power

—from Spartacist leaflet distributed at 21 October 1967 anti-Vietnam War march in Washington, D.C.


The April 15th mobilization was at once the greatest success of the official peace movement and definitive evidence of its political bankruptcy. The series of demonstrations leading up to the April 15th affair not only had no effect on government policy, but the escalation of the war appears to have coincided with each demonstration. The complete ineffectiveness of the April 15th march and the cynical indifference of the Johnson administration to anti¬war sentiment has engendered a hysterical hatred of the "power structure" and a sense of frustration among the most active sections of the anti-war movement. Isaac Deutscher caught the problem exactly when he said that he'd exchange the whole huge April I5th mobilization for just one dock strike.

Mass Action—Not Kamikazes

There is widespread sentiment to make the demonstrations more aggressive, dramatic and personally involving. The result has been a turn toward self-sacrifice and personal heroics in direct physical confrontations with the "war machine." The notion that the sheer strength of will of its opponents can end the war has its logical culmination in the hippies'project to "raise the Pentagon." Except for satisfying masochistic demonstrators and sadistic cops, nothing is gained from such "confrontations." Whether the demonstrators fight back or not, under these circumstances the odds are all on the side of the cops. Such direct action is as ineffectual as large, orderly demonstrations, and more expensive to the movement in terms of bruised bodies, jail sentences and money.

Personal sacrifice can never substitute fora mass movement and it is necessary to understand this in developing a perspective for anti-war movement. This does not mean reverting to the simple pacifist humanitarianism of the official peace movement in order to get middle-class liberals on the picket lines. What, it does mean is tapping the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American society; the black ghetto uprisings and rash of militant strikes indicate the depth and explosiveness of this discontent. Some of this discontent is with the war itself, or things related to the war such as the inflation eating into real wages. But all of it stems from the fundamentally oppressive character of American capitalism, o which the slaughter of the rebellious Vietnamese peasantry is simply the most dramatic external manifestation.

You WILL Go

Closely related to the tendency of anti-war radicals to think in terms of personal assaults on the "system" is the draft-resistance campaign which has become the principal organizing focus of the purging of radicals from the army strengthens the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. The government still seeks to screen radicals out of the service. Radicals, rather than going off to prison or Canada, would be far more effective educating their fellow soldiers. The Americans who suffer most from the war are the soldiers in Vietnam, and as the war grows longer and bloodier. discontent among G.I.s and its effect on prosecuting the war could be very great indeed

Perhaps more important is the effect of student draft avoidance particularly the frenzied scrambling after 2-S deferments, which are available only to the intellectually or financially privileged on the attitude of working-class draftees. The majority of draftees are vaguely disquieted about the war and disgruntled about being drafted during a shooting war, where they could get killed. But they accept the draft as a fact of life, and the idea of refusing to go is completely alien to their whole mode of thinking They view the "we won't go" movement as motivated by physical cowardice, holier-than-thou moralism and a desire on the part of spoiled college kids to avoid the harshness of army life. The anti-war movement will never break out of the campuses and coffee-houses, and reach the masses, unless young radicals share the common experiences of all working class youth, in serving a few years in the army. Only by such measures can the debilitating, and potentially dangerous, isolation of bohemian intellectuals from the mass of the working class, so characteristic of the American left, be overcome.

For Anti-War Strike Actions

The widespread feeling that the continual repetition of big marches is ineffectual and demoralizing is correct. However, kamikaze tactics are not the answer. It is necessary for the anti-war movement to achieve the maximum social power it can muster in protests. To this end. the Spartacist League advocates concretely building for a one-day general strike in factories, offices, ghetto neighborhoods and schools as the next national mobilization. Given the existing strength of the anti-war movement, and proper organizing, such a mobilization could bring out huge numbers of workers and students, and have a severe effect on whole segments of the economy. Even on this modest scale, such a demonstration would put the "fear of god" into the government, because it would mean the anti-war movement had gone far beyond accepted forms of protest and attacked the very foundations of American capitalism production. Such a strike would be infinitely more effective than this endless series of marches whether or not decorated by the bloodied heads of martyrs.

Toward Conscious Class Struggle

Apart from being a more effective form of protest, the proposed general strike would enable the anti-war movement to widen its base among forces other than political activists and particularly to strengthen organized anti-war sentiment among workers. It would be an excellent way for anti-war trade unionists to organize among their fellow workers and inject the war question into trade union politics. Since the trade union bureaucracy would certainly oppose it the fight over the proposed strike would reinforce the increasing rank and file discontent in the unions. In fact, in many places, the strike would not only be around anti-war demands, but economic issues as well. It would then be a protest of general social discontent, and would help lay the basis for a mass revolutionary socialist party.

Protest or Power

To the extent that most anti-war activists think in terms of politics, they mean running "peace-conscience" candidates, whose sole activity consists of about six weeks of electioneering. This type of discontinuous and one-sided activity can never build an effective movement. In fact, it is seen as a gesture of protest and nothing more. However, the fundamental weakness of this type of peace candidate is not organizational inefficiency, but political. The general social program of most of these candidates the type of program King or Spock would run on is not substantially different from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, who. for purely opportunistic reasons, are unwilling to oppose Johnson. The official leadership of the anti¬war movement reinforces the hegemony of the Democratic Party, purged of the personal noxiousness and "aggressiveness" of Johnson. King or Spock would simply be a tryout for Robert Kennedy in '72.

Even on the question of the war itself, a program which implicitly supports American capitalism is self-defeating. The Vietnamese war is not unique. It is simply the largest in a series of colonial wars that the U.S. and all other imperialist powers have been fighting for the past century and will continue to fight until capitalism is overthrown in its main centers. In brief, the U.S. is in Vietnam to suppress a peasant revolution which challenges the dominance of U.S. business in Asia. It is futile to oppose the intervention in Vietnam while supporting the economic system which generates that intervention and the ideology that legitimatizes it.

Toward a Labor Party

Moreover, a political movement built solely around the war is incapable of unifying the various forces of discontent within American society. On the contrary, the necessary support given to the suppression of the American working class by establishment "doves" Wayne Morse is a leading Congressional advocate of government strike-breaking while the liberal establishment, including King, unanimously supported the bloody suppression of the ghetto risings—is a major obstacle to building a mass anti-war movement. Only such a revolutionary Labor Party, projecting a long-term struggle in the interest of the working masses, represents the kind of qualitative political change needed to create a serious break with the traditional parties and counter the political apathy of most workers. With the widespread discontent over the war, the rising militancy and restiveness in the labor movement, and the explosiveness of the black ghettos, the prospect for initiating such a party is better now than at any time in the last twenty years.

The anti-war movement can force Johnson to withdraw U.S. troops only if he is more afraid of it than of the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution. No demonstration, however effective and militant, can do this. Only a movement capable of taking state power can. The anti-war movement has no future except as a force for building a party of revolutionary change.

The Vietnamese War has opened many people's eyes to the horrors and injustices inherent in the mainstream of American politics. Nothing short of a fundamental change in the class axis of those politics will eliminate, these injustices.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- On German "Collective Guilt" For World War II- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to Part Two of this "Workers Vanguard" article, dated June 8, 2007.


Workers Vanguard No. 893
25 May 2007


German Trotskyists on World War II

German Imperialism and the Lie of “Collective Guilt”

The Red Army Smashed the Nazi Regime!

Workers Revolution Will Avenge the Victims of the Holocaust!

Part One

This article is an edited translation from Spartakist No. 163 (Summer 2006), publication of the Spartakist Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, German section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The article was based on a 2005 SpAD educational presentation.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation [of Germany from Nazism], there was widespread debate in society about the Third Reich and World War II. The German bourgeoisie and their SPD [Social Democratic Party]/Green government took the opportunity of the various commemorative ceremonies to advance the interests of German imperialism. In contrast to the Japanese ruling class, which honors its butchers every year—as Kohl and Reagan also did in 1985 with the SS murderers in Bitburg—the German bourgeoisie prefers, in view of their indescribably terrible crimes, to shed a few crocodile tears at commemorative events.

Other examples include building the Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin or displaying a bit of anti-fascism every couple of years by organizing an “uprising of decent people,” whenever the daily racist terror, which is promoted by the state, threatens to damage Germany’s image once again. The central ideological means they resort to is preaching that all Germans are guilty of the Nazis’ crimes—collective guilt—in order to let those who are really guilty off the hook: the German bourgeoisie, the ruling class at that time and today. The issue was and is that the German bourgeoisie wants to play a role on the world stage; to promote this goal it cynically manipulates the memories of its crimes.

With capitalist reunification and the counterrevolutionary destruction of the [East German] DDR deformed workers state in 1990 and the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92, German imperialism has become stronger. It is now undertaking the first steps to compete against the global hegemony of U.S. imperialism. “German interests” are again represented in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, on the Horn of Africa, and soon they will also be represented in Congo. In 1999, [SPD Chancellor Gerhard] Schröder and [Green Party Foreign Minister Joschka] Fischer proclaimed, “Never again Auschwitz,” which served to justify participating in the U.S.-led NATO war against Serbia. The sole purpose of this was to carry through the first military intervention by German imperialism since the end of World War II, give the Bundeswehr practical experience and station troops in the Balkans. The hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie of Auschwitz then and now only serves to pave the way for the next round of dangerous resurgence of German nationalism. “Collective guilt” chains the working class to its own bourgeoisie and prevents it from calling the bourgeoisie to account for its crimes.

On 8 May 2005, at the Berlin demonstration by the so-called Spasibo [Russian for “thank you”] alliance against the Nazis, Peter Gingold, a Jewish Stalinist and fighter in the bourgeois French resistance, made a speech (which got more than a little applause). What he said corresponded to a contribution he made in the South Baden Stattzeitung (March 2005) under the title: “For the Majority of the German Population, the Defeat of the Nazis Was Their Own Defeat.” Gingold “confirmed” this infamous assertion when he said that the Germans “didn’t prevent 1933,” that is, the seizure of power by the Nazis. But the overwhelming majority of the German proletariat was in the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] and SPD and in the unions, which at the end of the 1920s were led mostly by Social Democrats. The bourgeoisie brought the fascists to power because it feared workers revolution. The fascists were based on the petty bourgeoisie (peasants, students, the intelligentsia, civil servants, etc.) that had been ruined by the world economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, on the cops and on the lumpenproletariat, that is, the long-term unemployed and totally impoverished who had lost any connection to the working class. Fascism was the last means of rescuing bourgeois class rule.

In the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the October Revolution alongside Lenin, exposed the lies of the Stalinists and, comparing the defeat in Germany in 1933 with the experience of Russia in 1905, showed who bore the responsibility for the Nazi victory:

“The Bolshevik faction had at that time [1905] not celebrated even its third birthday. It is completely otherwise in Germany, where the leadership came from powerful parties, one of which had existed for seventy years, the other almost fifteen. Both these parties, with millions of voters behind them, were morally paralyzed before the battle and capitulated without a fight. History has recorded no parallel catastrophe. The German proletariat was not smashed by the enemy in battle. It was crushed by the cowardice, baseness, and perfidy of its own parties. Small wonder then that it has lost faith in everything in which it had been accustomed to believe for almost three generations....

“The protracted failure of revolutionary work in Spain or Germany is but the reward for the criminal politics of the Social Democracy and the Comintern.”

The Revolutionary Tradition of the German Workers Movement

With the outbreak of World War I, the SPD went over openly to the side of its own bourgeoisie by voting for war credits to the Kaiser on 4 August 1914 and then herding the working class into the slaughter of World War I. Lenin called the SPD a bourgeois workers party, that is, a party with a bourgeois program entirely in the framework of capitalism, but with a proletarian base. It was strategically necessary to split the working-class base of the SPD from its bourgeois leadership. The SPD bears the responsibility for the defeat of the postwar revolutionary wave; their betrayal was the key to rescuing bourgeois rule. The SPD drowned the [1918-19] revolution in blood and had the leadership of the KPD—Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and Eugen Leviné—murdered.

As for the young, recently founded Communist Party, it was too inexperienced. In 1923, the KPD leadership, discouraged by Stalin from fighting for power, recognized the revolutionary crisis too late. They made the call for an uprising dependent on the agreement of the left wing of the SPD, which was equivalent to giving the revolution a third-class burial (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). Since the attempts of the German working class to find a way out of the capitalist crisis through proletarian revolution—inspired by the 1917 October Revolution—were unsuccessful, the situation resulted in a right-wing radicalization of the petty bourgeoisie.

The defeat of the 1923 revolution in Germany sealed the isolation of the young Soviet workers state at the time. The developing Soviet bureaucracy took advantage of the disappointment and apathy that spread among the exhausted masses, and, under Stalin’s leadership, seized control and power over the Bolshevik Party at the end of 1923 to early 1924. Stalin replaced Bolshevik internationalism and the struggle for world revolution with the dogma of “building socialism in one country.” The Communist International, founded as the party of world revolution, was transformed into an instrument to foster illusions in peaceful coexistence between the Soviet Union and imperialism, which was decisive in chaining workers to the bourgeoisie.

This counterrevolution was political, not social; the Stalinist bureaucracy was based on the collectivized property forms that had been created by the October Revolution. Thus the state remained a workers state, although bureaucratically degenerated, and it was the duty of the international proletariat to defend it against the class enemy. For many years, the Trotskyist International Left Opposition carried out a struggle against Stalin & Co. and against the destruction of the party in order to return the Comintern to its revolutionary program.

The Betrayal by the SPD and KPD in 1933

The defeats of workers revolutions and the world economic crisis at the end of the 1920s enabled the Nazis to grow. But the workers wanted to fight and the bourgeoisie was no longer in a position to stem the danger of revolution through bourgeois democracy. There was a mass radicalization, and three consecutive bonapartist regimes—Brüning in 1930, Papen in 1932, Schleicher in 1932-33—could not get the crisis under control for the bourgeoisie, which increasingly counted on Nazi terror against the workers movement and saw the smashing of the workers movement as the only possibility to save its rule. The SPD leadership feared mobilizing the workers against the Nazis because workers would become more radicalized and slip out of the control of the SPD and its class-collaborationist program. The KPD leadership under [Ernst] Thälmann, as well as Stalin, refused, however, to force the SPD into a united front, even declaring the SPD “social fascist.” The KPD instead came up with the slogan “After Hitler, us.” In the face of the threatened destruction of the workers movement and the fascist seizure of power, this was nothing other than a declaration of capitulation.

In contrast, the Trotskyist Left Opposition warned of the danger of the Nazis taking power and fought to organize the workers in proletarian united fronts in order to smash the Nazis. The betrayal by the Stalinists and Social Democrats was enormous: while workers, organized by the hundreds of thousands into party militias, had waged street battles against the Nazis, sometimes overcoming their political divisions, the Nazis were able to come to power without a shot being fired. The betrayal of the KPD weighs twice as heavily because it was seen as the party of the Russian Revolution in which the vanguard of the proletariat was organized.

Nothing is more demoralizing than a defeat without a fight. When, following this historic betrayal, no criticism was raised in the ranks of the Third [Communist] International, the Trotskyists began to fight to build a new revolutionary International. Meanwhile, in 1935 the Stalinists came out for building popular fronts
—alliances of workers parties with sections of the bourgeoisie—against fascism. Based on class collaboration, the popular front—an obstacle to class struggle against the capitalist system that produces the Nazis—in reality paves the way for the Nazis. This was expressed most clearly in the mid 1930s when the Stalinists treacherously strangled the Spanish Revolution, which resulted in Franco’s fascists taking power.

It was the Red Army that smashed the Nazi regime and brought to an end the Holocaust—the industrial murder of millions of Jews, Roma and Sinti [Gypsies]
—and the persecution and murder of Communists and countless others. After the victory of the Red Army, the lie of the “collective guilt of all Germans” for the Holocaust and the other Nazi atrocities was a central means of defending the rule of the German bourgeoisie in West Germany. Thus the responsibility of the bourgeoisie, which had brought Hitler to power in order to smash the working class, was shifted to “the people.” And if everyone was guilty, then no one, in particular the bourgeoisie, really was. In his memoirs, And Red Is the Colour of Our Flag, the German Trotskyist Oskar Hippe powerfully described the purpose of the lie of collective guilt after World War II:

“The declaration that there is a ‘collective guilt’ in the German people also belongs to this struggle against the proletariat, since from the outset they want to discriminate against the proletariat, the overwhelming majority of the people. They want to drive home the idea that their failure was due to their inferiority, and to explain once and for all that the proletariat is incapable of taking a grip on its own fate and revolutionising society.”

After the war, the KPD and SPD leaderships had their own reasons for adopting the lie of collective guilt. It enabled them to shift the responsibility for their own betrayal—their cowardly capitulation to the Nazis in 1933 without a fight—onto the shoulders of the German working class which they had betrayed. Today DKPers [members of the present-day German Communist Party] seek to blame the Nazi seizure of power on the unwillingness of the “German people” (i.e., the workers) to fight. This is an outrageous whitewash of the betrayal of the KPD leadership. What is behind this is the program expressed in an 11 June 1945 call issued by the KPD:

“In our opinion it would be wrong to impose the Soviet system on Germany, because this road does not correspond to the current conditions of development in Germany.

“Our opinion is rather that the decisive interests of the German people in the current situation dictate another path—that of an anti-fascist, democratic regime, a parliamentary-democratic republic with all democratic rights and freedoms for the people.”

So they stood for the rule of the bourgeoisie—democratic, of course. An article in the DKP paper unsere zeit (10 June 2005) explained: “The call of the Central Committee of the KPD of 11 June 1945 is one of the most brilliant and creative texts published by the German communists in their history.”

In fact, however, Nazi leaders and the bourgeoisie fled from East Germany, where the Red Army was in power, to the imperialist West. The increasing confrontation between the Soviet Union and its imperialist “democratic” wartime allies culminated in the first Cold War. Consequently, in the late 1940s in East Germany, as in the rest of East Europe, the bourgeoisie was expropriated and a deformed workers state, the DDR, was erected on the model of the bureaucratically degenerated workers state of the Soviet Union.

World War II—An Imperialist War

One central point in the Stalinist and social-democratic propaganda on World War II, as well as in the collective-guilt propaganda, is to present World War II as a war between democracy and fascism. But World War II, like World War I, was an imperialist war; in fact it was simply the continuation of the earlier war. With regard to the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists had a side—with the Soviet Union. They also supported uprisings of oppressed colonial peoples if these were directed against imperialist domination, whether in India against Britain, in China against Japan and the U.S., in Indochina against France, etc.

After World War I, the victory of the proletarian revolution in Russia left its mark on the consciousness of all classes in Europe. And both the bourgeoisie and the Trotskyists expected revolutions as the outcome of a new world war. The capitalist rulers had drawn their own lessons from the Revolution. For example, the fraternization of German and Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front in December 1917 was initially seen by the Reichswehr merely as a sign that the Russian army was disintegrating. In the Museum of the Red Army exhibition in the Berlin district of Karlshorst, next to a photo titled “Fraternization of German and Russian Soldiers,” there is the following comment:

“In hindsight, after the November Revolution [1918] in Germany, this rapprochement of the soldiers was regarded as the beginning of subversion by Bolshevism. Later, this understanding influenced the orders of the National Socialists in the war strategy against the Soviet Union.”

The Trotskyists had prepared very thoroughly for the occurrence of a new world war. Their model was the struggle of Karl Liebknecht and of the Bolsheviks in World War I. Their principled position was presented in the decisive programmatic document, Trotsky’s 1934 “War and the Fourth International.” The “general strategic task to which the whole work of a proletarian party during war should be subordinated” is to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. It explains:

“18. The sham of national defense is covered up wherever possible by the additional sham of the defense of democracy. If even now, in the imperialist epoch, Marxists do not identify democracy with fascism and are ready at any moment to repel fascism’s encroachment upon democracy, must not the proletariat in case of war support the democratic governments against the fascist governments?

“Flagrant sophism! We defend democracy against fascism by means of the organizations and methods of the proletariat.... And if we remain in irreconcilable opposition to the most ‘democratic’ government in time of peace, how can we take upon ourselves even a shadow of responsibility for it in time of war when all the infamies and crimes of capitalism take on a most brutal and bloody form?

“19. A modern war between the great powers does not signify a conflict between democracy and fascism but a struggle of two imperialisms for the redivision of the world.”

Only one point was added to the revolutionary program for World War I: the duty of the world proletariat to fight for the unconditional military defense of the gains of the October Revolution, despite the usurpation of political power by the bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin:

“Defense of the Soviet Union from the blows of the capitalist enemies, irrespective of the circumstances and immediate causes of the conflict, is the elementary and imperative duty of every honest labor organization.”

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet Trotskyists who were imprisoned in Stalin’s camps volunteered to defend the Soviet Union with arms in hand. And when the Stalinist bureaucracy refused out of fear, the Trotskyists relinquished some of their rights and extended their working day to 12 hours to help the Soviet Union win the war.

On the question of the defense of the Soviet Union there were fights within the Fourth International; the clearest and best-documented fight was in the American section, the Socialist Workers Party. Under pressure of petty-bourgeois public outrage over the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Soviet-Finnish war, the petty-bourgeois opposition of Shachtman, Burnham and Abern wanted to give up defense of the Soviet Union. In 1940 they split the party, taking 40 percent of the membership with them.

In 1938, in “A Fresh Lesson—After the Imperialist ‘Peace’ at Munich,” Trotsky answered the central question of what bourgeois democracy actually is:

“Democracy can be maintained only so long as class contradictions do not reach an explosive state. In order to mitigate social frictions the bourgeoisie has been compelled to provide feed for a broad layer of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and the bureaucracy and aristocracy of labor. The bigger the feeding-trough the more ardent is social patriotism. The reformist feeding-trough has nowadays been preserved only in those countries which were able in the past to accumulate vast wealth, thanks to the exploitation of the world market, and their pillage of the colonies. In other words, in the condition of capitalist decay a democratic regime is accessible (up to a certain time) only to the most aristocratic bourgeoisie. The basis of social patriotism remains colonial slavery.”

The Stalinists, entirely in line with their popular-frontist politics and their support for the bourgeoisies of the “democratic” imperialist allies of the Soviet Union in World War II, laid the blame for the war on Germany. But there was never “German guilt” for the war, because it was an imperialist war. As Lenin already explained in World War I, for Marxists the question of who shoots first is irrelevant for evaluating a war. Germany and Japan made it into the ranks of major imperialist powers only at the end of the 19th century. When it came to dividing up the world, they were too late. Since they had less reserves, they had designs on the colonies being plundered by Britain and France. The U.S. was waiting to skim the cream at the end. It went to war against Japan above all to resolve who would get to exploit and enslave China and Asia.

The Defense of the Soviet Union

The Stalinist, popular-frontist fairy tale of an anti-fascist war of the democracies served only to chain the American and West European working class to their own bourgeoisies. In 1917, the Bolsheviks had seen the extension of the Russian Revolution to the advanced imperialist countries as its only road to survival. In particular, they counted on the German working class, the strongest and best-organized in Europe. But the German proletariat had been defeated by its bourgeoisie, and young German workers, now stuck in Wehrmacht uniforms, were deployed against the Soviet Union. At the time, only the Trotskyists fought for independent class politics in the tradition of Lenin and Liebknecht. James P. Cannon, leader of the American Trotskyists, spoke to this point in 1942:

“We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its ‘democratic’ allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, is to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.”

—“A Statement on the War,” Fourth International,
Vol. III, No. 1, January 1942
(emphasis in original)

It was the Soviet Union that had to bear the brunt of this war. Even when it was in an alliance with the U.S. and Britain, the Soviet Union almost always faced 90 percent of the German troops (and at no point in the war was it less than two-thirds). As for the economic support the Soviet Union received, especially from the U.S., it amounted to at most 10 percent of its own industrial output. And it was the Red Army that smashed the Nazi regime. It brought the Holocaust to an end. It liberated Europe from enslavement and bloody oppression by the Nazis.

The policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy ruling over the Soviet state, and preventing any initiative by the masses, led to the devastating loss of 27 million Soviet citizens. Three million died in the first three months alone. Stalin trusted his 1939 pact with Hitler, even though he had been warned, for instance by the heroic Soviet spies Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi. You can also find out a lot about this in Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 1956 Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the strange title, “On the Cult of Personality.” (Except that he does not answer the question: “Where were you, Khrushchev?”) In this speech, he showed that Stalin was demoralized and hid like a coward for the first ten days following the German attack.

One of the main ways that Stalin had weakened the Soviet Union was by exterminating almost the entire officer corps three or four years earlier, including Tukhachevsky, for example. Rokossovsky, one of the most important generals in the Soviet struggle for the liberation of Europe, had fortunately not been murdered but only transferred, and was therefore able to become active again. Even Zhukov had been purged, but he was reinstated because there were not enough officers. A gigantic myth was created that Stalin led the “Great Patriotic War.” In actual fact, however, it was his generals and the soldiers of the Red Army who won the war, in spite of Stalin. Stalin’s favorite general was Vlasov, who later betrayed and went over to Hitler.

When the Stalinist bureaucracy propagated the notion that the war against Germany was a “Great Patriotic War” to defend Mother Russia, it represented a politically decisive turn. The invasion of the Soviet Union took place on 22 June 1941. Stalin made his first speech on July 3, declaring:

“The war against fascist Germany cannot be regarded as an ordinary war.… At the same time it is the great war of the whole Soviet people against the fascist German troops. This patriotic people’s war against the fascist oppressor has as its goal not only to rid us of the danger approaching us, but also to help all the peoples of Europe.”

—Exhibition catalogue, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941–1945 [The War Against the Soviet Union 1941-1945]

So, right from the beginning the war was waged under the motto of Russian nationalism. And that hindered the mass desertion of German units going over to fight alongside their Soviet class brothers against the common class enemy, the German bourgeoisie. With this, the Stalinists also managed to displace the October Revolution as the goal the Soviet working class identified with and to replace it with the Great Patriotic War. This went along with the elimination by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the entire layer of Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution.

According to the propaganda spread in the Red Army and the working class, the Germans were all fascists, the Wehrmacht was a fascist army, etc. That is why at Stalingrad there were posters and inscriptions in Russian (also documented in the museum in Berlin-Karlshorst) such as: “How Many Germans Did You Kill Today?” and “No German Should Leave Stalingrad Alive.” Later the Red Army distributed leaflets to the German soldiers to get them to capitulate, but the example of capitulation they gave was that of Hitler-loyal, arch-reactionary General Field Marshal Paulus, who had commanded the German troops in Stalingrad. They also founded the National Committee for a Free Germany, with Graf [Count] von Einsiedel at its head, in order to demonstrate, in line with the popular- front policy, that they did not want revolution but a settlement with the bourgeoisie. Other leaflets said that soldiers who did not surrender would be killed.

This had nothing to do with revolutionary internationalist propaganda, which would have exploited the fact that the soldiers they faced were German workers who may have been the children of Communists, or perhaps even Communists themselves. There was a big anti-German hate campaign by Ilya Ehrenburg, a Jewish Soviet author, who became the mouthpiece for Stalin’s own nationalist campaign. Although it was dropped after the Red Army reached Germany, the content of the Stalinist policy did not significantly change.

Although it was very difficult to defect, some did. Gerhard Bögelein, for example, was a German worker who changed sides and became a soldier in the Red Army. Right after the reunification in 1990, he was thrown into jail by the vindictive West German courts in Hamburg. Karl Kielhorn organized an anti-fascist committee in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, where they read Marx and he was recruited to the CP. We Spartakists defended Bögelein and Kielhorn against the vengeance of the Fourth Reich. Heinz Kessler, who was later a founder of the National People’s Army in the DDR, and who became an army general and then Minister of Defense, had gone over to the Soviet Union when he was a Wehrmacht soldier. We are proud to have defended him against the anti-Communist witchhunt after the capitalist counterrevolution.

The invasion of the Soviet Union spurred massive resistance, which is the main reason why the Soviet Union was able to prevail in the end. The Nazis and the Wehrmacht command believed they would win within four months. The Wehrmacht command thought that by winter the Soviet Union would already have collapsed like a house of cards; that’s why the German soldiers supposedly didn’t need any winter clothing.

There was a difference between the defense of Leningrad and the rest of the Soviet Union. In Leningrad there existed a high degree of consciousness that they were defending the birthplace of the October Revolution. And it is precisely because of the October Revolution that Hitler and his Wehrmacht leadership wanted to completely wipe out Leningrad and let the population starve to death, even if they attempted to surrender. The order was to accept no surrender. The siege lasted 900 days, and the number of people who died in the defense of Leningrad and in the city itself—about one million—was higher than the number of soldiers of American and British imperialism killed in World War II, which was a total of 800,000. But the Nazis did not succeed in taking Leningrad.

The victory at Stalingrad was a psychological turn in the war, and the military turn was the battle of Kursk in 1943. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war against the Nazis and was able in the end to beat back the German armies. The Western Allies were counting on their imperialist rival Germany and the Soviet degenerated workers state to destroy each other on the battlefield. This is why the Allies opened the “second front” only in June 1944, with the invasion of Normandy. The only reason the Western Allies opened a second front was to push back Soviet influence in Europe, fearing that the Red Army would liberate the whole of Germany.

The reports by the SD (Security Service of the Reichsführer SS) in the catalogue for the exhibition, The War Against the Soviet Union 1941-1945, give a good example of the attitude of the German population toward the Soviet Union. There is a document there on the population’s reaction to the campaign against “Soviet Untermenschen [subhumans].” There had been a Nazi exhibition on this theme in Berlin, at which the resistance group led by Jewish Communist Herbert Baum planted a bomb.

The Nazi propaganda tried to paint a picture of Jews, Slavs and Communists as “subhuman,” and with that aim they exhibited pictures taken in concentration camps of people they themselves had almost starved to death, as typical examples of the peoples they wanted to wipe out. An April 1943 SD report noted that the way the Germans viewed these people had changed, because now hundreds of thousands of workers from the East as well as prisoners of war were working in Germany. The report gives examples of how the population supported the forced laborers, who included many highly skilled workers, so that later the death penalty had to be imposed for helping forced laborers or workers from the East. Nevertheless, support for them continued. There are examples of Polish and other forced laborers in the countryside basically being taken in by families.

Another example is when the Nazis tried to capitalize on the shooting of 4,000 Polish officers at Katyn. They dug up the graves of the Polish officers, who had been captured by the Red Army in Eastern Poland during the German-Polish war in 1939. The Polish officers were certainly hardened counterrevolutionaries, but it does not mean that we support their execution by the NKVD [Soviet secret police]. In any case, the Goebbels propaganda machine tried to capitalize on this. The SD reported that in Germany people would say: “We have no right to complain about this Soviet action, because on the German side Poles and Jews were wiped out on a much larger scale.” Of course that doesn’t fit into the distorted picture presented by collective-guilt propaganda, that all Germans were somehow Nazis and supported them.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs-"Chemical Revolution?"

Click on the headline to link to the GI Voice archival website for an outline copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
 *******
G.I. Voice was published by the Spartacist League for about one year starting in 1969 and ending in 1970. They published 7 issues total and represented the SL’s attempt to intervene with their politics inside the U.S. Army then occupying and fighting brutal war in Vietnam. There was a growing G.I. anti-war movement and this was in part the SL’s attempt to win over militant G.I.s to the views of the SL.

—Riazanov Library******

Markin comment on this series:

In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”

Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.

During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
******
Markin comment on this issue:

Of course, the question of drugs, high-grade and low recreational drugs, widespread among all layers and classes of youth in those 1960s days would almost of necessity seep into the military, and have to be addressed by anti-war GIs. Not only is military service hazardous to your health in many ways, including the obvious, it is also deadening boring. To escape, escape any way you could, was the way out for many, and not just soldiers. This problem, and for politicos, it was (and is) a problem, was to speak about the drug issue in the context of the front-line struggle against the military monster machine. It didn’t always work, especially for those marginally-radicalized soldiers who also wanted to “do a bone.” More GIs who thought they could do both (politics and drugs) found out the hard way that “big brother”, or his snitches, was in fact putting you right in his cross-hairs. The worst thing is the world was (and is) for a politico to be dismissed as an addled “dope fiend.”

Additionally this issue provides a very good exchange of views on the question of “dumbing down” when organizing GIs and putting out newspaper propaganda that I mentioned in my comment to my previous post, GIs and Black Power.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Material for a Study of British Trotskyism-The Government And The Trotskyists

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The British Cabinet discusses the Trotskyists

The first reference (CAB65/41) by the whole Cabinet to the Apprentices Strike was on 3 April 1944 where it was said by Ernest Bevin, then the Minister of Labour, that the Apprentices Strike on Tyneside, on the Clyde and in Yorkshire had been ”instigated by a group which had broken away from the Communist Party when Russia became our ally” and “The Trade Unions are doing what they can to get the strikers to return.” Bevin had provocatively refused to see a deputation and notices calling for medical examinations of strikers (prior to military call-up) were being issued while the DPP was considering the possibility of using the Trades Disputes Act of 1927. What really seemed to worry the Cabinet was the problem of coal supplies and in the document that follows some time is spent demonstrating (with considerable relief) that the Trotskyists had little support among the miners.

Two days later at the Cabinet meeting of the 5th April there was a discussion on the activities of those “fomenting strikes”. Herbert Morrison stated that he had information that the organisation referred to by the Bevin numbered about 1-2,000 members. An examination of the report shows that this was apparently learnt from his press cuttings. (It was of course a gross exaggeration, the RCP never numbered more than 400.) The Home Secretary said that he was examining documents with a view to doing something about this and submitting a report. On the 13 April the report on the Trotskyists was submitted and the Cabinet, after summarising it, simply noted it. It was initialled by the Minister but was clearly drawn up by the Security Services. No decisions were taken and it seems that the RCP was not considered important enough to warrant special measures. At about the same time in the preamble to the suggested legislation about strikers (CAB/75/19) Ernest Bevin wrote about unofficial industrial action proposing very savage penalties.

Morrison was clearly much cleverer than Bevin and was much more worried about the Communist Party. He therefore may have wanted to maintain the Trotskyists as an annoyance to the CP in the post-war period. He was very shrewd when he says “It is too early to say what the relations of the party with the International will be, but the International is loosely organised and is not likely to have the will or the means to do more than advise the party on broad issues; nor is the party under its present leadership likely to submit to any attempt at dictation.” He knew more about them than they did themselves.

Ted Crawford, July 1998

******
THE TROTSKYIST MOVEMENT
The following document (found at KV4/56 in the PRO) on the activities of the Trotskyists during the war is later than the Cabinet document and should be compared and contrasted with it. It is in two folders, one summarising experience with internees and enemy aliens and the second with Communists and Trotskyists. There are 52 pages devoted to the Communists and 6 pages to the Trotskyists. This probably accurately reflects the relative time and attention devoted to the two tendencies. The tone is very different from Morrison’s Home Office Report and reflects police and secret service agendas rather than political ones. The gross over-estimate of the size of the RCP (double what it had at its peak) should be noted in the final paragraph on the movement’s history as well as the suggestion that it had influence in the mines which was never the case. The date in the final History paragraph looks as if it should be 1945 rather than 1943 and so is probably a typographical error while in paragraph 4 the Proletarian Military Policy is misunderstood – not surprisingly.

A “HOW” is a Home Office Warrant which allows opening of mail and tapping of phones. It has to be signed by the Home Secretary. “MS” is M Section, the somewhat “semi-detached” agent-running organisation run by C H Maxwell Knight. Knight was the former Director of Intelligence of the British Fascists. (There are grounds for thinking that Maxwell Knight tipped off the traitor William Joyce [Lord Haw-Haw] at the beginning of the war so that he was able to get to Germany. Dave Turner has more information on this.) Under the 1989 Security Service Act, Home Office Warrants can also cover burglary (in which case they are called “property warrants”) though until the Act was passed it was strictly illegal for MI5 to break in anywhere - but, of course, they still did it (“while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way”, Peter Wright Spycatcher, William Heinemann Australia, Richmond, Victoria 1987, p.54).

Ted Crawford, November 1999


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THE TROTSKYIST MOVEMENT
History

In 1939 the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain consisted of several small and disorganised groups. The official section of the Fourth International was the Revolutionary Socialist League, a cluster of theorists working in the Labour Party. The only other grouping of any significance was the Workers’ International League, an independent body founded in 1938 by two South Africans, Raphael and Mildred LEE. Raphael LEE left England before the outbreak of War, consigning the leadership of the Workers' International League to his wife and James Ritchie HASTON, a young Trotskyist of some years' standing. They controlled a membership of under fifty and their monthly paper, Workers' International News, printed 1,000 copies.

In the late summer of 1939 several of the leaders including HASTON and Cyril NOSEDA, publisher of Workers’ International News, went to Eire partly to make contact with the Irish Trotskyists and partly to avoid military service and the repressive measures which they expected to be taken against their organisation. They returned to England some months later travelling on papers procured in Eire by false representation of identity. They obtained National Registration Identity cards and Ration books in the names of J.F. GLOSTER and J.F. SMITH, and were not recognised and prosecuted until June and August 1941. Until well into 1942 the WIL continued to regard itself as a semi-legal body, and its leaders relied on assumed names, rapid changes of address, and generally furtive behaviour in order to conceal their doings.

During this period they were occupied in forming a programme, training a leadership and organising the rank and file. Until this process was well advanced, no outward activity could be attempted. The danger of premature action was shown by the Sheffield conspiracy case of August 1940 in which four members were prosecuted for stealing blank medical grade cards in order to help their associates to avoid military service. One man was discharged but the others served terms of imprisonment. It is worth noting that the culprits were reprimanded by the leadership for indiscretion and indiscipline.

The war crises of 1940 compelled the Workers' International League to adopt the much disputed Military Policy of James Cannon. This admits the necessity for workers to defend their native land from attack provided the defence is operated under their control. It departs from the traditional Marxist-Leninist policy of revolutionary defeatism and has caused bitter theoretical quarrels both in this country and in the United States of America. Party members now joined the Forces instead of trying to evade service.

This modification did not affect the general tone of the WIL’s attacks on the government nor its opposition to the “imperialist” war. Passages in the July 1940 number of its paper Youth for Socialism caused the Ministry of Information to forward the Paper to the Home Office for possible action under DR2c. There was considered to be grounds for action, but on account of the very limited circulation of the paper (2,000 copies), no measures were taken.

The period of consolidation ended in the summer of 1941, and by the time of German attack on the USSR the League was ready with - “a fighting programme to mobilise the masses for the struggle against fascism, whether of the German or the British variety, and for the defence of the Soviet Union”. The main point of this was the placing in power of a Labour government. The Trotskyists held that the Labour leaders had sold themselves to the capitalists and would no longer provide a militant leadership. But to convince the masses of this, they held it necessary to have a Labour Government in power so that its alleged failures could be made the subject of propaganda. Then, it was hoped, the people would turn towards Trotskyism, which claimed to supply the only surviving militant policy for the proletariat. The rest of the programme aimed at control by the workers of all national services and of production - in fact the full Marxist programme. It was taken for granted that revolution was the only means of achieving workers’ control, but as England was not yet ripe for it, the Transitional Programme of “Labour to Power” had to be adopted first.

1942 was notable for the first National Conference of the movement. A constitution was adopted, comprising a Central Committee, a Political Bureau, and a District organisation on classical communist lines. The “basic documents of the Fourth International” and the Transitional Programme were formally adopted as the foundations of policy.

Negotiations were then opened by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International for the union of the Workers' International League with the Revolutionary Socialist League with a view to establishing a single British Trotskyist section under the discipline of the International. An American seaman representative was sent to England to report. The difficulties, personal and doctrinal, were many, and it was not until 1944 with the assistance of another American “observer” that the fusion was completed. At a conference in March 1944 the new British Section emerged under the name of “Revolutionary Communist Party”. HASTON was elected General Secretary, Millie LEE organising Secretary, and Edward GRANT editor of Socialist Appeal (formerly Youth for Socialism).

Considerable importance was attached by the WIL to strikes, which they regarded is being the principal weapon of the proletariat and the beet means of preparing a revolutionary situation. They therefore endeavoured to make contact with strikers in as many parts of the country as their limited forces could reach.

In 1941 the first moves were made in the industrial world. In August 4,000 women employed at Rolls Royce, Glasgow went on strike in sympathy with a WIL member who was discharged on account of his political activities in the factory. At the Dalmuir ordnance factory in October a strike broke out following the transfer of the factory from Government to private control; a conference of Ordnance Factory Shop Stewards was called at Nottingham as a result of which the ROP Consultative Committee was set up. Two WIL stewards were elected to the controlling positions and the committee continued under Trotskyist influence for the two years or so of its existence. It only achieved a very limited influence. In 1943 WIL interference was discovered in the Yorkshire bus strike (May), the RCP Barnbow strike (June) and Rolls Royce Glasgow (July).

The Betteshanger colliery strike in December 1941 was the first of the mining stoppages in which WIL influence was brought to bear. HASTON visited the district, made contacts among the strikers by selling Trotskyist literature, and afterwards wrote up the story in Socialist Appeal. They used similar methods in a number of other coal strikes throughout 1942. The mining industry they regarded as a particularly fruitful field for work owing to the chronic unrest existing in the industry. A storm in a teacup blew up in 1942 when the Yorkshire Miners’ agent in a somewhat exaggerated protest gave them publicity in the national press.

By this time the Workers' International League found its old method of canvassing at the scenes of strikes to be too primitive, and the machinery of the ROF Co-ordinating Committee was used to put forward a more ambitious plan. At a conference of militant shop stewards summoned in Glasgow by two Trotskyist convenors a provisional ”Committee for Co-ordinating Trade Union activity” was set up (June 1943). The WIL won effective control of this body and placed one of its undercover members, Roy TEARSE in the post of secretary, hoping to draw to itself the leadership of the local committees of militant workers which were springing up in some industrial areas. The strike at Vickers Armstrong’s, Barrow, in September provided the first occasion for action. TEARSE made contact with the men's leaders and undoubtedly exercised some influence on the progress of the strike. Useful publicity was also given to the existence of the committee which had been re-named Militant Workers' Federation.

In January 1944 apprentices working in the Tyneside shipyards organised themselves into a Tyne Apprentices' Guild in order to oppose the mining ballot scheme. The boys' leader was strongly under the influence of the WIL organiser in Newcastle, Heaton LEE, and received constant advice and help from him. Having this direct contact, the WIL did not need to rely on the Militant Workers Federation. TEARSE gave his instructions direct to LEE and LEE to the boys through his protégé DAVY. In March a strike of some thousands of boys was declared.

Searches under DR39A were carried out at the Trotskyist headquarters in London, the Militant Workers' Federation headquarters in Nottingham, and the houses of TEARSE, LEE and DAVY in Glasgow and Newcastle. On the evidence found, proceedings were started against TEARSE, LEE, Ann KEEN (his mistress) and Jock HASTON under the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927. DAVY appeared as a witness for the Crown. The four were sentenced to imprisonment for one year (TEARSE and LEE), thirteen days (KEEN) and six months (HASTON), but on Appeal the sentences were quashed on a point of law.

The Revolutionary Communist Party (now so called) started Defence Committees on behalf of the accused and by working in co-operation with the ILP and other left wing organisations, improved its claim to recognition as a party of the Left. It also gained some prestige from the arrest of its leaders. The legal expenses of the trial and appeal were raised with some difficulty, but after the release of the prisoners the main object of the committees was removed and they collapsed.

The arrest of TEARSE and the coming into force of D.R.l.AA put an end to the open activities of the Militant Workers' Federation and the summer of the Second Front proved to be unpropitious for industrial agitation. The somewhat spectacular progress of the Revolutionary Communist Party in industry came to a standstill. Many discussions were held on the future of the Militant Workers' Federation and of industrial work generally, but the time was not ripe for action and the future could not be usefully forecast. The party turned to purely political issues, the chief being its post-war relations with the ILP at home and with the Fourth International abroad. Party members in the Forces, were instructed to seek out the Trotskyist groups in Belgium and France, and to establish an exchange of information between them and the RCP leaders. The same method was used in Italy, and also in Egypt, India and Ceylon.

In January 1945 the Revolutionary Communist Party decided that its political position had sufficiently improved to justify its contesting a Parliamentary election. At Neath there was a move to put forward a militant left wing candidate and it was arranged that this should be Jock HASTON standing openly as a representative of the RCP. Heaton LEE was made his election agent. The Party did not hope for success, but expected to consolidate its position in South Wales and to receive an amount of national publicity which would not otherwise be obtainable. It polled 1,786 votes and forfeited its deposit.

In February 1943 the full members of the Party numbered eight hundred, with an outer circle of two thousand active associates. Twelve full time organisers were employed. All the membership must take an active part in the work and life of the organisation or they are not allowed to retain their membership.

Investigations

A small amount of work on the Trotskyist movement has been done by F2a as long as this section has formed part of the Security Services. Up to the outbreak of war most of the material in our records consisted of Special Branch reports and the products of occasional Home Office Warrants. The movement was too small and chaotic to form the subject of sustained investigation.

At the outbreak of war the Workers' International League transferred much of its activity to Ireland, and those members who remained here kept quiet. Little information came to notice, and owing to extreme pressure of communist work, few enquiries were initiated about the Trotskyists. In September 1940 many of the more up to date Trotskyist records were destroyed by enemy action; they were later reconstituted with the assistance of Special Branch. Special Branch themselves however had reduced their enquiries to a minimum as they considered as we did that the groups were negligible for the time being.

When the Workers’ International League settled down to more regular habits, a HOW was taken out on their office at 61 Northdown Street (February 1942). This yielded a great variety of interesting information particularly on industrial activities, recruitment, Armed Forces work and organisational developments. A Censorship watch on the headquarters of the Fourth International in New York and on Irish contacts also produced good results. An agent was introduced by MS into WIL circles in the summer of 1942 and produced results which later proved to more valuable than was realised at the time.

Until 1942 when the Workers’ International League made its early appearances in industry the provincial Police forces knew little about the Trotskyist movement. In the letters which F2a began to send out to the Provinces in increasing number care was taken to add a paragraph explaining the growing security interest of Trotskyism. As a result many of the more enterprising forces undertook their own regular investigations, and by the end of the war at least five police agents had been placed in the movement. Two of these (Glasgow and Birmingham) produced first class information of general interest. Our own placing of agents was not so successful. MS's man failed in 1943 and it was not until a year later that a second was found, who only lasted a few months. In this connection may be mentioned an interesting attempt by the Revolutionary Communist Party in the autumn of 1944 to run a double-cross agent against Special Branch. The latter had approached an RCP contact who reported the fact to the secret sub-committee of the Political Bureau. They instructed him to accept the proposals of the Special Branch officer and to report to them the kind of questions he was asked. From this they hoped to estimate the amount of information which Special Branch possessed and also to distract them with false information. The plan broke down however through the indiscretion of their go-between who spoke of it to an unauthorised person; it was then considered unsafe to continue.

In the middle of 1943 the activities of the Workers' International League had increased still further, and a memorandum was drawn up in F2a recommending an enlargement of the section's powers to make inquires and record the results. The recommendations which were agreed to by DDG and DDO included a more general use of HOWs, a spell of regular observation by B.6. (which had, not previously been used for Trotskyists), and the establishment of a personal link with the SB officers concerned in Trotskyist work. The historical survey attached to the memorandum was circulated to the Regional Officers, most of whom conveyed the gist of it to the Police.

Early in 1944 the Workers’ International League (now the Revolutionary Communist Party moved to new offices and asked for the installation of a telephone. A telephone check was taken out which proved to be of great value in revealing some of the inner workings of the organisation. Special facilities were also used which though fitful in working, produced several vitally interesting accounts of future plans and policy which could not possibly have been obtained by other means.

This brief survey will show the remarkable progress of the Trotskyist movement during the war period from being an unimportant handful of talkers to a disciplined body of some size, having programme, finance and organisation and the determination to use them. The investigations conducted by F2a expanded correspondingly.

The investigation of Trotskyism was found to differ considerably from that of the Communist Party in the latter stages of the war. The Revolutionary Communist Party used conspiratorial methods for its more important work. It only became an open organisation at all towards the end of the period. It conducted few public meetings and attached minor importance to them. Its chief work - industrial and international - was carried on clandestinely. Cover organisations such as the Militant Workers' Federation were favoured in industry. As far as possible only trivial correspondence went through the post and cover addresses were resorted to. Initials instead of names were used in all Party documents. Talk on the telephone was guarded. Impending members were closely scrutinised. Communications with Fourth International headquarters were carried on by courier service and by personal visits of seaman delegates. RCP members working in the ILP used pseudonyms.

It followed that the simpler methods of investigation failed to discover any of the important aspects of Trotskyist work, and if used alone would convey a false impression. It was found that close study of the Party's methods over a period of time was necessary if an officer was to interpret at all adequately the material reaching him. Often it could not be interpreted at once and had to be put aside until later developments provided a clue. This meant that the study of Trotskyism demanded a larger proportion of the Section's time and records than the smallness of the organisation seemed at first sight to warrant.
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The Security Services and Alien Trotskyists
The following excerpt from the document KV4/57 pages 22-23 relates to the Security Services war-time management of different types of aliens and comes at the end of the file. The only individuals named in it are Pierre Frank and Resi Weltlinger but it is doubtful if this last was ever a Trotskyist and he is not claimed to be one in the document. Pierre Frank was arrested in July 1940, sentenced to six months in prison and immediately re-arrested on release to be interned on the Isle of Man under regulation 18B for much of the rest of the war. These events are described by Harry Ratner in his autobiography, Reluctant Revolutionary, (details of the book on this website in Socialist Platform Publications) but, surprisingly, Molinier, who had left for South America just before the police raid in July, is not mentioned. Since, according to their own documents, the Security Services were fairly paranoid about the left wingers who were savagely sentenced for breaking the Official Secrets Act on civil liberty issues though right wingers, guilty of far more serious militarily sensitive leaks were given a reprimand, it is clear that the “Alien Trotskyists” were considered as very unimportant.

The work of contacting German prisoners of war by using the paper Solidarität, whose first issue was in May 1946, only occurred after this report was written in late 1945 and crucially, after the war. Of course there were very few German prisoners in Britain until after the Normandy landings in June 1944 as those captured in Africa and Italy earlier in the war were generally held in South Africa and Kenya where food was plentiful locally.

Ted Crawford August 2000




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ALIEN TROTSKYIST ACTIVITIES.
The Trotskyists were opposed to the war on the grounds that it was an act of imperialist aggression which served only to hinder world revolution and the establishment of the Fourth International. Despite this attitude, directed against the efficient prosecution of the Allied war effort, Trotskyists presented few serious problems of a security nature as they lacked outstanding leaders, were numerically small and their activities were adequately controlled by the Defence Regulations.

There was reason, however, to anticipate that known Trotskyists would hinder the war effort wherever possible and therefore they were not given employment in key positions or factories engaged on work of national importance.

In some instances, the provocative nature of their publications overstepped the mark and it was then necessary to prevent further repetitions. Pierre FRANK, one of the founders of the French Trotskyist Party, was arrested by the Police in 1940 and subsequently interned for complicity with a group of foreign Trotskyists in London in the production of Internationalist Correspondence, published by the Foreign Delegation of International Communists for the building-up of the Fourth International. The issue dated June 1940 included an Open letter to British workers which urged workers to set up committees in every factory and street and soldiers to set up committees and seize arms and munitions. There was no doubt that the activities of this group were directed against the war effort and that FRANK was a leading member.

In 1944, a German refugee, Resi WELTLINGER, was arrested for the forgery of two National Registration-stamps which had enabled two British Trotskyists to avoid military service.

With the end of the war in sight, alien Trotskyists, in common with British comrades, increased their activities. The Revolutionary Communist Party, aiming at leadership; of the European bloc formed a European Sub-Secretariat, through which foreign members were trained for the tasks awaiting them in their own countries. It was noticeable however that in the light of past experience; aliens were careful to keep secret their Trotskyist membership and admit only to political affiliation with the I.L.P.

From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-The History Of The Vietnam War Era Oleo Strut GI Coffeehouse From The "Under The Hood (Fort Hood, Killen, Texas) Cafe" Website

Click on the headline to link to the Under The Hood Cafe website.

Markin comment:

In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”

Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.

During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
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Markin comment:

Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.

Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
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The Oleo Strut Coffeehouse And The G.I. Antiwar Movement

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver (2008)

Writing in the June, 1971, Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. stated: "By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state of approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous... Word of the death of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units. In one such division, the morale-plagued Americal, fraggings during 1971 have been running about one a week.... As early as mid-1969 an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail... Combat refusal has been precipitated again on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders... "

Shortly after this article appeared, President Nixon announced the new policy of "Vietnamization" and direct American combat operations came to an end within a year.

In 1971, desertion rates were soaring, re-enlistment rates plummeting, and the United States Army was not considered reliable enough to enter major combat. Today, the G.I. Antiwar movement that accomplished this is little-known, but it was the threat of soldiers not being willing to fight and die that stopped that war. Soldiers refusing to fight is the most upsetting image to all of those who claim to rule, since the monopoly of armed force is their ultimate weapon to retain their power. Much of what they have promoted in the 37 years since Heinl wrote that article -- the all-volunteer Army, the Rambo version of Vietnam, the resurgence of patriotism that crested with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 --has been in direct response to the specter of GIs deciding a war wasn't worth it.

The war against the war within the American military began almost as soon as America became directly involved in Vietnam, which can be dated to the so-called "Tonkin Gulf Incident," the excuse for direct American combat.

By 1966, veterans like my old friend, former Army intelligence specialist the late Jeff Sharlet - who would later found "Vietnam GI," the major GI antiwar newspaper - had returned from their tour of duty and were trying to tell those back in America who they met at college what the real truth was about the war they had served in. Many in the campus antiwar movement did not respond to we veterans, with some purists telling us we were part of the crime for our participation. Somehow we were neither fish nor fowl to many. The result was that veterans began searching each other out.

Eventually, in early 1967, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was founded in New York City and took part as an organization in the spring mobilization against the war. No one was more surprised than the veterans at the positive response they got from bystanders as they marched together as opponents of the war they had fought.

By 1967, Fred Gardner, a former editor of the Harvard Crimson who had served as an officer in Southeast Asia, had returned to civilian life.By September, Fred had raised enough money to start the organization he had been thinking about for two years: an group that would bring the antiwar movement to the GIs still in the Army who opposed the war.

In September 1967, Gardner and a group of friends arrived in Columbia, South Carolina, home of Fort Jackson. Jokingly known as the "UFO," a play on the military support organization USO, the coffeehouse quickly became the only integrated place in the city (this was the old South of the 1960s). The regulars soon consisted not just of black and white GIs, but also students from the local university.

A few months later, Gardner returned to San Francisco where he established Summer Of Support (later called "Support Our Soldiers") which was to coordinate the spread of similar coffeehouses to other Army bases. The first two were to be outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and outside Fort Polk in Louisiana. The Missouri coffeehouse managed to open, while the organizers sent to Louisiana were run out of town before they could even obtain a site for a coffeehouse. Fort Hood was chosen to replace the Fort Polk operation. At the time, no one knew what a momentous decision this would be.

In August, 1967, riots broke out in Detroit, and the 101st Airborne Division was sent to stop it. This was the first time active Army troops had been used to quell a civil disturbance in the United States since the Civil War. In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and riots spread across the country. In response, the Army was called on to establish an organization for suppression of riots that were feared that summer as the time got closer and closer to the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Chicago that August.

Fort Hood in 1968 was the main base where Vietnam veterans who had six months or less left on their enlistments were sent upon completion of their tour of duty in the war. Somehow, the Army thought that these combat veterans would be perfect for use in suppressing the war at home.

The Army brass weren't the only ones who didn't know the mood of the troops. Neither did we. These were men who had experienced the Tet Offensive, men who had known the truth before Tet - that America was not winning the Vietnam War. They were turned off from their experience and unwilling to participate in a new war, a war against their fellow citizens.

Killeen at the time was a typical "old South" garrison town. The town lived off the soldiers, but hated them at the same time. Soldiers at Fort Hood were seen by the businessmen in town as being there strictly for the picking. Avenue D was a collection of loan sharks (borrow $30 and pay back $42 - the payday loan industry's been around a long time), pin ball palaces, sharp clothing stores - one had $100 alligator shoes, a brilliant green Nehru jacket in the window with 12 feet of racks stacked with cossack shirts in satin colors - insurance brokers, and overpriced jewelry stores. If a soldier walked into one of these establishments and didn't pull out his billfold within ten minutes, he'd be asked to leave.

Local toughs - known by the derogatory Texan term "goat ropers" - carried on their own war against the GIs, who they would try and catch alone at night and with assault and robbery on their minds. The local police generally sided with the "good old boys" against the "outsider" GIs.

The town was as segregated as any in the South; there was an active Klavern of the KKK to enforce segregation. Killeen had grown from a population of 500 in 1940 (when Fort Hood was established to train Patton's coming armored corps) to around 35,000 by 1968. It was not a place that was going to welcome "outside agitators" from California and Massachusetts, as we were. I remember an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who visited that September and told me he considered Killeen more dangerous than Sunflower County, Mississippi.

The Oleo Strut opened on July 4, 1968, with a public picnic in the local park. GIs had been checking the place out over the previous month as the staff worked to set it up, and there was a large enough crowd that a reporter from the New York Times thought the event important enough to write a story about, that received national play.

The coffeehouse was given the name "The Oleo Strut." An oleo strut is a shock absorber, and we saw this as a metaphor for what we hoped the place would be for the soldiers we hoped to work with. We had no idea what a shock we were about to absorb.

Within a week of opening, soldiers were coming in at night to tell us of riot control training they were taking part in during the day. They'd been told they were going to Chicago to "fight the hippies and the commies" who were going to show up for the Democratic Convention the next month. They were terribly upset at the thought of having to possibly open fire on Americans who they agreed with about the war and the need for change here in America. Soldiers were talking about deserting, about running away to Mexico, about "doing something."

Our response was a little yellow sticker, two inches by two inches. On it was a white hand flashing the "peace sign," backed by a black fist. We printed up 1,000 of them and passed them out. GIs said they would put these on their helmets if they were called into the streets, to identify themselves to the protestors. At this point, the Army got very upset with us.

The Monday of the convention, 5,000 troops were ordered to board the transports. They were headed for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Chicago, as backup for the Chicago Police Department.

As the soldiers were preparing to board the airplanes, the bravest act of antiwar protest I ever knew of happened.

43 Black soldiers, all combat veterans, refused to board the airplanes. Due to the self-separation of the races on the base, we had no idea this was going to happen. The Black troops had organized themselves. They knew what they were going to get for this. The minimum qualification to be one of those who would refuse was the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, so the Army wouldn't be able to call them cowards.

As this was happening on the base, we were on the way from our house to the Oleo Strut, when we were stopped by the Killeen Police. A search of the car found drugs - we knew immediately we were set up, since we were completely drug-free. We also knew immediately what a terrible threat this was, since at that time the possession of a joint could get one a sentence of 20 years in Huntsville Prison, as had recently happened to an SNCC organizer in Houston who'd had marijuana planted on him by an undercover officer. We were scared. In the end, only Josh Gould was held, since he had been identified as our "leader." He would stay in the Bell County Jail for six weeks until the Bell County Grand Jury would vote a "no bill" on the indictment, thanks to the tireless efforts of local attorney Davis Bragg.

The world knows what happened in Chicago. A government cannot put soldiers on the street without the prior knowledge that if they are ordered to crack heads, they all will. No one knew how many of the GIs would carry out their threat of resistance if put in the streets, so all were held back. Deprived of their military backup, the Chicago Police Department staged their historic "police riot." The GI antiwar movement had inflicted its first major blow against the government.

In the months following, the antiwar movement took hold at the Oleo Strut. Soldiers started publication of "The Fatigue Press," an underground newspaper we ran off down in Austin on a mimeograph the local SDS chapter found for us on the UT campus. In November, 1968, GIs from Fort Hood staged an antiwar teach-in at UT, despite the best efforts of the Army to close the base and prevent their participation. We also endured the daily reports of the court-martials of the 43 Black GIs, each of whom received several years in Leavenworth and a Dishonorable Discharge for their courageous act.

Perhaps most importantly, a GI named Dave Cline walked through the front door that September. Wounded in action with the 25th Infantry Division the year before, Dave was only now out of an extended tour of Army hospitals to deal with his wounds. He was completely dedicated to the cause of opposition to the war, and became the center of the GIs who were involved in anti-war activities on-base. He became the editor of Fatigue Press.

In later years, the rest of the country and the world would come to know Dave Cline, who spent all his life until his death on September 15, 2006, from the wounds he received in Vietnam, fighting for peace and justice as the President of Veterans for Peace. He fought the Veterans Administration for proper care and benefits for all Vietnam vets, fought for both American and Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange; he fought against America's intervention against the Central American revolutions in the 80s; he stood up against the attack on Panama, the Gulf War, and intervention in Somalia in the early 90s; he opposed the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999 and traveled to Vieques to show solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their fight to stop the U.S. military using it as a practice range; he organized against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and as his last act organized a Veterans for Peace caravan to bring relief to New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and neglect by every level of government.

A GI Dave knew in the 25th Infantry Division was so impressed by him that in 1986, that GI - Oliver Stone - memorialized him as the main character of "Platoon."

Things weren't all heavy politicking. Then as now, Austin had an active music scene and I was able to find bands willing to make the trek up I-35 to entertain the GIs. The most popular of these bands that fall of 1968 was a new blues band fronted by a great young singer who was only 16. Given they couldn't play in the Austin bars due to his age, they were happy to come up and play for the peanuts I could offer. The place would be packed whenever they appeared. 18 years later, in 1986, when I was at the United States Film Festival in Dallas, Stevie Ray Vaughn recognized me and thanked me for being the first guy to ever give him a break.

Over the years between 1968 and 1972, when the Oleo Strut finally closed, many name musicians came and entertained the troops. Among them were Pete Seeger, who played to a packed house in 1971, s followed by Country Joe McDonald and Phil Ochs.

By 1970, there were some 20 coffeehouses - not all part of Support Our Soldiers - to be found in the vicinity of Army, Air Force, Marine and Navy bases across the country. Their most important role was giving soldiers who had come to understand how wrong the Vietnam war was the knowledge they were not alone. Eventually, this dissent within the military spread to the front lines in Vietnam, as reported by Colonel Heinl.

Of the three original SOS coffee houses, the UFO was closed in 1970 by a court order declaring it a "public nuisance." The coffeehouse outside Fort Leonard Wood succumbed to harassment and threats in 1969. The Oleo Strut stayed open till the war ended in 1972.

Today, the site of the coffeehouse on the corner of 4th and Avenue D (101 Avenue D) is an office complex. One can still, however, find the red paint in the cracks of the sidewalk that was thrown on the door and windows weekly, back 40 years ago.