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Saturday, February 22, 2014
Next World Can't 
‘Wounds of
Waziristan’: The Story of Drones
As Told By the People
Who Live Under Them
Hear from the Director: Madiha Tahir,
a
Pakistani-American journalist who filmed interviews with the people who live in
the Tribal Areas of Pakistan under the constant presence of the U.S.-launched
drones, and in the wake of their destruction.
SATURDAY, MARCH 8,
2:00 PM
MIT –
4-231
77 Mass. Ave.,
Cambridge
<image003.jpg>
Drone victims – Are
they terrorists?
Sponsors:
Eastern Mass. Anti-Drone Network Task
Force of United for Justice with Peace, Alliance for a Secular and Democratic
South Asia,
Mass. Global Action, MIT Western
Hemisphere Project
Imagine the shoe on the other foot
by Daniel Patrick Welch
My mind is about to explode. The news is so surreal I can only cope by resorting to satire. Imagine the shoe on the other foot... [blurred dream transition scene]:
The situation is quickly spinning out of control as what Putin describes as 'peaceful protesters' arm themselves with Molotov cocktails, sniper rifles, and arms looted from police barracks. As many as 87 law enforcement have been killed, some beaten to death in broad daylight by angry mobs. The Canadian President's attempt to restore order was met with swift and harsh condemnation by China, Russia and members of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, which imposed immediate sanctions on Canada as well as travel restrictions on key members of the freely elected government. Putin, asked about the obvious contradiction between his comments praising the gangs' taking law into their own hands and professions to 'democracy' and 'free speech,' was unmoved. In response to repeated questions on how he could maintain such a position when his own ministers had been recorded planning the coup, he lashed out at reporters, Obama, and the weather. "Fuck you. We're the biggest dog on the block, and we don't have to give a shit what anyone thinks. We've toppled governments in like 50-60 countries in the last 50 years--you think some whiny bullshit is going to stop us? Don't get it twisted--we do whatever we want, and make up the lies to justify it as we go along. Then we plant stories in a corrupt and compliant press so your idiot citizens will play along. Besides... Democracy! Freedom! ����� Etc."
Just kidding. Obama actually gave the immediate order to invade Canada, essentially flattening Montreal, Toronto, Quebec, and for some reason, Calgary, saying he was "hoping to catch those red bastards with their pants down." DEFCON 5 put Beijing, Moscow, Havana and Caracas in the nuclear crosshairs as subs were positioned for a first strike against all cities. "We can't allow this kind of meddling on our borders," the president erupted at an unusually tense press conference. "I mean, can you imagine if we went and started wars in, say, Georgia and Ukraine? The Russians would go nuts, and my balls would be on the block before you could say boo. And they'd be completely within their rights."
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The Anti-Empire Report #125
An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy:
Dear Mr. Farhi,
Now that you’ve done a study of al-Jazeera’s political bias in supporting Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, is it perhaps now time for a study of the US mass media’s bias on US foreign policy? And if you doubt the extent and depth of this bias, consider this:
There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Can you name a single paper, or a single TV network, that was unequivocally opposed to the American wars carried out against Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam? Or even opposed to any two of these wars? How about one? In 1968, six years into the Vietnam war, the Boston Globe surveyed the editorial positions of 39 leading US papers concerning the war and found that “none advocated a pull-out”.
Now, can you name an American daily newspaper or TV network that more or less gives any support to any US government ODE (Officially Designated Enemy)? Like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or his successor, Nicolás Maduro; Fidel or Raúl Castro of Cuba; Bashar al-Assad of Syria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran; Rafael Correa of Ecuador; or Evo Morales of Bolivia? I mean that presents the ODE’s point of view in a reasonably fair manner most of the time? Or any ODE of the recent past like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Moammar Gaddafi of Libya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti?
Who in the mainstream media supports Hamas of Gaza? Or Hezbollah of Lebanon? Who in the mainstream media is outspokenly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians? And keeps his or her job?
Who in the mainstream media treats Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning as the heroes they are?
And this same mainstream media tell us that Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, et al. do not have a real opposition media.
The ideology of the American mainstream media is the belief that they don’t have any ideology; that they are instead what they call “objective”. I submit that there is something more important in journalism than objectivity. It is capturing the essence, or the truth, if you will, with the proper context and history. This can, as well, serve as “enlightenment”.
It’s been said that the political spectrum concerning US foreign policy in the America mainstream media “runs the gamut from A to B”.
Sincerely, William Blum, Washington, DC
(followed by some of my writing credentials)
–
Reply from Paul Farhi:
I think you’re conflating news coverage with editorial policy. They are not the same. What a newspaper advocates on its editorial page (the Vietnam example you cite) isn’t the same as what or how the story is covered in the news columns. News MAY have some advocacy in it, but it’s not supposed to, and not nearly as overt or blatant as an editorial or opinion column. Go back over all of your ODE examples and ask yourself if the news coverage was the same as the opinions about those ODEs. In most cases. I doubt it was.
–
Dear Mr. Farhi,
Thank you for your remarkably prompt answer.
Your point about the difference between news coverage and editorial policy is important, but the fact is, as a daily, and careful, reader of the Post for the past 20 years I can attest to the extensive bias in its foreign policy coverage in the areas I listed. Juan Ferrero in Latin America and Kathy Lally in the Mideast are but two prime examples. The bias, most commonly, is one of omission more than commission; which is to say it’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. My Anti-Empire Report contains many examples of these omissions, as well as some errors of commission.
Incidentally, since 1995 I have written dozens of letters to the Post pointing out errors in foreign-policy coverage. Not one has been printed.
Happy New Year
–
“Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry.”
“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems.”
So what do we have here? The NSA being used to steal industrial secrets; nothing to do with fighting terrorism. And the NSA stealing money and otherwise sabotaging unnamed financial systems, which may also represent gaining industrial advantage for the United States.
Long-time readers of this report may have come to the realization that I’m not an ecstatic admirer of US foreign policy. But this stuff shocks even me. It’s the gross pettiness of “The World’s Only Superpower”.
A careful search of the extensive Lexis-Nexis database failed to turn up a single American mainstream media source, print or broadcast, that mentioned this revelation. I found it only on those websites which carried my report, plus three other sites: Techdirt, Lawfare, and Crikey (First Digital Media).
For another very interesting and extreme example of bias by omission, as well as commission, very typical of US foreign policy coverage in the mainstream media: First read the January 31, page one, Washington Post article making fun of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba.
Then read the response from two Americans who have spent a lot of time in Venezuela, are fluent in Spanish, and whose opinions about the article I solicited.
I lived in Chile during the 1972-73 period under Salvadore Allende and his Socialist Party. The conservative Chilean media’s sarcastic claims at the time about shortages and socialist incompetence were identical to what we’ve been seeing for years in the United States concerning Venezuela and Cuba. The Washington Post article on Venezuela referred to above could have been lifted out of Chile’s El Mercurio, 1973.
[Note to readers: Please do not send me the usual complaints about my using the name “America(n)” to refer to “The United States”. I find it to be a meaningless issue, if not plain silly.]
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The US will not permit
democracy without a fight a fight from us; as true at home as it is
worldwide]
Be Part of the McCutcheon Rapid ResponseThe U.S. Supreme Court could issue its ruling in the case some are calling the next Citizens United any day. On October 8, 2013 the Court heard arguments for McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.Never before has our political campaign system been as corrupted as now with unlimited corporate spending and dark money. Our democracy is eroding before us. But all over the country people are also fighting back and demanding change. 16 states called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and related cases and the movement is growing. Now is the time to take our fight to the next level and mobilize across the country on the day of the McCutcheon ruling. Sign up for an event today! |
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Thinking for Ourselves About Venezuela
“The Obama Administration and capitalist news media want
everyone to believe a repressive Venezuelan government is attacking peaceful
protests.”
The political plan for Venezuela took stage in the streets of Washington DC February 15, 2014. Passers-by on Georgetown’s 30th Street on a freezing Saturday were perplexed at the standoff between two groups assuming opposite sides of the street. One ethnically mixed group of mostly Latino, Black, and White had taken the side of the street in front of the Venezuelan Embassy to show solidarity with Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. The group on the other side was the all white, privileged youth of the Venezuelan elite residing in the U.S. who want to see their country’s return to the days when they dominated the economic and political process.
The latter are hoping that the recent unrest in their country signals the end of the Bolivarian process and the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late President Hugo Chavez. The protest they staged at the Embassy was to help this become so.
The current situation started in Venezuela February 12, 2014 with violence perpetrated against the democratically elected government and civilians resulting in three deaths, 61 persons wounded and 69 detained. This followed what were, for the most part, peaceful marches marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of La Victoria, in which students played a critical role in a victory against royalist forces during Venezuela’s war of independence. Some student groups marched in celebration of the Day of the Student but violent anti-government demonstrators used the occasion to protest episodic shortages of some basic goods, persistent crime, and to demand the release of students who had been arrested in earlier demonstrations.
“In Merida… opposition students and youth, some armed, marched through the city centre and protested outside the state government building, and another small march was held in the nearby town of Ejido. Marchers chanted ‘Maduro resign now!’”
“Observers told Venezuelanalysis.com that they witnessed opposition protestors firing live ammunition indiscriminately into buildings, throwing rocks and attempting to storm a communal house in the city centre.”
“Violent anti-government demonstrators used the occasion to
protest episodic shortages of some basic goods, persistent crime, and to demand
the release of students who had been arrested in earlier
demonstrations.”
While the Obama Administration and capitalist news media want everyone to believe a repressive Venezuelan government is attacking peaceful protests, there are videos of protestors using fire and rocks against the police. The Merida state governor, Alexis Ramirez released a photo on twitter showing one of the armed protestors. “The governor also alleged that one student who had been arrested claimed that he had been paid 150 bolivars by far right opposition leader, Villca Fernandez to protest. Almost all students protesting wore balaclavas.”
This is the general blueprint used for essentially the same brand of regime change in Libya adapted for Venezuela. Particulars between the two countries may be different but this general strategy of U.S. imperialism is the same. Imperialism uses hidden hands to instigate incidents in countries that take anti-imperialist stands. Then it uses its media and official spokespersons to make things look to the rest of the world as if they are other than they are, demonizing the actual victims.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a February 14th press briefing, “So we are deeply concerned by rising tensions, by the violence surrounding these February 12th protests, and by the issuance of a warrant for the arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. We join the Secretary General of the OAS in condemning the violence and calling on authorities to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of peaceful protestors. We also call on the Venezuelan Government to release the 19 detained protestors and urge all parties to work to restore calm and refrain from violence.”
To claim in the same statement that they are concerned for opposition leader Lopez and 19 detained protestors, yet call on the Venezuela Government to bring to justice those responsible shows that the U.S. is up to it same old covert shenanigans. The public is not suppose to consider that bringing those responsible for the violence to justice likely means arresting Leopoldo Lopez, the ultra-right wing leader of the Voluntad Popular party who played a role in the short-lived coup against former President Hugo Chavez in 2002 and who now has been calling for intensified demonstrations and the “exit” of Maduro from the government.
“Imperialism uses hidden hands to instigate incidents in
countries that take anti-imperialist stands.”
Before going into hiding Lopez insisted that his intention is to lead peaceful protests. President Maduro has accused Lopez of trying to instigate violence in a bid to mount a coup.
Don DeBar of Community Progressive Radio in New York reported “Maduro and other senior government officials said the violence was centered with small groups operating according to a plan which was being managed by Lopez with the assistance of a handful of other opposition figures. According to a report from Informativa Pacifica, the plan was organized in Mexico and included a current mayor of a Venezuelan city, who is also a close friend of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez.
A recording of a telephone conversation surfaced that appears to show two former right wing officials discussing or planning the implementation of the violence Wednesday, a day before it began. The two former officials – Fernando Gerbasi and Mario Carratu Molina – compared what was to come to April 11, a reference to the beginning of the 2002 coup attempt against former President Hugo Chavez, that was ultimately defeated by a massive popular uprising in defense of the socialist government.”
The day things kicked off I was asked by a couple people, "What's going on in Venezuela?" One added "Twitter ablaze with reports of protests, military crackdown, deaths, etc in Venezuela...anyone know what's going on?" It is important to know and understand the machinations of imperialism so we are never caught off guard or fooled by its modus operandi or its propaganda.
It has perfected this regime change strategy of causing unrest in places to get the target government in question to react with violent repression. Then fanning social media and news media reports that accuse and depict said government of being the aggressor in the hope it can maneuver things toward their ultimate goal. Over the last decade or so we have seen this strategy attempted in Zimbabwe, Libya, Iran, and Syria.
“Countries like Zimbabwe have so far been able to fend off
such assaults.”
So, “what is going on in Venezuela” is the typical attempts by neo-colonial, imperialist backed forces inside a country to seize power by destabilizing the country away from its revolutionary path and if possible create a pretext for more direct imperialist intervention. We see it over and over again in countries taking an anti-imperialist stand and asserting their sovereign right to national self-determination. Countries like Zimbabwe have so far been able to fend off such assaults. Others like Libya were not successful.
Had counter demonstrators not been in Washington standing in solidarity with Venezuela’s Bolivarian Government, surely the media spin of what took place would have been different. It would have been one of a traumatized Venezuelan exile community desperately seeking justice and the restraint of the needlessly violent government.
Instead the coddled class of Venezuelans showed their true selves and how much of the disposition they share in common with those of them back home who can’t civilly accept the progressive course democratically chosen by the masses in their country.
Switching between Spanish and English but speaking most times in Spanish, that day they yelled racist insults at the demonstrators, raised middle fingers at us, and implied that we were homeless people getting paid to be there. “Go back to your shelter!” and “How much are they paying you? Come over to our side and we’ll pay you double.”
To them it is difficult to understand that there can be any other reason for so many people who were not Venezuelan to be there without the more selfish and superficial interests that motivate them. They are unable to understand the selflessness of revolutionary and humanist convictions. And they also called us "communistos" with the same fanatical contempt that a racist would call someone the "N" word. Evidently the Bolivarian revolution evokes from them the same crude regard and understanding of communism as propagated during the "Cold War" era.
“They yelled racist insults at the demonstrators.”
This right-wing is now planning another protest at the Organization of American States for Wednesday, February 19, 2014, the other part of an inside-outside strategy. The success of their strategy depends largely on the public swallowing their hype and lies.
When we think for ourselves about Venezuela what is obvious is that, “It stretches the bounds of credibility to argue that the government would seek to destabilize itself when it has come out the winner in two important elections (presidential and municipal), has made reducing violence and crime a top priority, has recently met with opposition mayors to find ground on which to cooperate, and seeks a peaceful implementation of the government’s six year plan (Plan de la Patria).”
This is not to mention the popularity the government has earned from providing universal healthcare, education, and processes of participatory democracy not seen in most parts of the world.
There is a real chance to make sure Venezuela does not go the way of Libya by thinking for ourselves, equipping others with the information to do the same, then taking a stand against U.S. imperialism against Venezuela.
Netfa Freeman is a long time human rights and Pan-African
activists, and a radio co-producer/co-host for Voices with Vision on WPFW 89.3
FM in Washington,
DC.
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"Today is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I’m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras."]"This blitzkrieg reorganization of our economy has left millions of Americans facing a smorgasbord of frightfully unexpected new problems"
The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet
Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever
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In Honor Of The Centennial Of The Birth Of Bernard
Malamud- The Natural- Slim Jenkins’
Dream- Take One
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
…He, Slim Jenkins, did not know when he had picked
up his grandmother’s household broom, had taken it outside and ball-less had begun
to swing that instrument into the fierce Indiana farmland winds. Swung that
broom, that faux Louisville Slugger
as that was what he called the handle from the first no fiery superstition nicknames
like Wonderboy or the Bomb from a no-nonsense world, for all it was worth. At
first slapdash as one would expect from an ageless farm boy who would have picked
up that slap-dashery from watching the farm hands carrying on the merciless
fall harvest where every blade was whacked to perdition, no prisoners taken.
Later, later after Slim had seen balls, Grandpa’s
pellets thrown at high speed at him to be swished at by a real bat, later after
he had taken his, maybe ten thousandth swing, when he was seven, just turn
seven that summer of his decision he would hoist that bat to his shoulders for
he believed, fervently believed that his life entailed an ability to hit
baseballs from both sides (left or right, right or left depending on his mood
and the day) and make a memory of where the ball would land in Wrigley Field.
Yes by then he had the bug, the dirt farmer’s son bug to get that hell out of dirt-rich
Indiana and make himself the king of diamonds just like the Babe, just like
Joe, just like the Kid.
And so he whiled away his childhood, becoming
strong, farm boy harvest strong, practicing every day after school (and on some
school hooky days all day) and always wondering where that damn ball would land
in Wrigley Field, although he had never seen the field. All he knew was that he
was destined to be the savior of that club and bring back that gold ring that
every Hoosier around would be willing to pay big money just to peek at,
although he had determined not change for that privilege. At about twelve he began
to get picked for pick-up games over in Emmetsville by the bigger boys who saw
the power of his wrists, the steadiness of his eyes and his ability to hit their
fast balls and change-ups.
In the fall of his sixteenth year, after leaving school
the previous spring (book learning school he had called it not wise to school of
life thoughts) Slim headed to Indianapolis to find a job in a factory, the Sims
Steel Plating plant, to support himself and to get himself ready to try-out off
for the Indianapolis Wolves, a farm team for the Cubs. And so his new life started
as Slim proved very competent at his place of work welding everything in sight
and mixing it up with other guys at night in the pick-up games that each factory
sponsored as part of an informal industrial league among the working stiffs of
the town.
It was in that industrial league that a scout for
the Cubs noticed Slim’s power, his ability to lay off bad pitches and to drop
balls into spots when nobody could caught them. One day the scout showed up at
Slim’s workplace with an offer for him to go to Florida come that following spring
and try-out with the Cubs. Slim was as happy as he had been since he first started
swinging old grandma’s broom (now deceased). One night just before he headed
south for his try-out in order to celebrate his good luck Slim’s factory mates
and a couple of others went to Jimmy Jacks’ Lounge over on Fourth Street for a
party. It was there that he met Maggie Mason, Maggie of his dreams, Maggie of
his…
Friday, February 21, 2014
Out In The Black Liberation Night- The 1960s Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories
Seven –A Defense Of One’s Own
All hell was breaking loose in Mississippi in 1964 after they found those boys, those civil rights worker boys over in some ditch in Philadelphia (hell was breaking out before and after too but that year got everybody’s attention North and South, abolitionist and redneck, because a showdown was coming no question). Even Jacob Block knew some hard-ass stuff was coming down as isolated as he was from white folks (and other black folk too) on his poor excuse of a share crop farm about fifty miles outside of Hattiesburg. As he thought about it afterwards, after all hell had broken loose in his little world and its environs, he should have known it would come to that, come to a confrontation with Mister, or Mister’s rednecks acting in his name. Hell, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Ezra Bond, had jumped his plantation over near Savannah, Georgia, to walk down and join Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 2nd South Carolina Volunteers and raise some hell with the boys in grey. And later some cousin had been lynched right in broad daylight down near Biloxi, a big feisty rabid white crowd watching on, watching on with glee from what he had heard just because that cousin had tried, shotgun in hand, to defense his woman when some white rascal got his lust habits on. Yes, he should have known, known it was in the blood that when the deal went down he had to do something, had to defend his own, his sweet Martha, and the little ones.
Jacob did not know how he had first found out they were coming, about the redneck rampage, maybe something overheard in Otis Junction when he went to get his monthly provisions, maybe from somebody at the Lord’s Worship Baptist Church over in Oxbridge that time he went for Jim Jackson’s daughter’s wedding. But no question either that they were coming, coming to throw the worst fear into every last “nigger” (their term, always their term even when directly speaking to a negro, just one more way to put the black man behind the eight ball) within one hundred miles of Hattiesburg once they heard that some blacks were going right to the farms to get other blacks, farmers and small town dwellers alike, to register to vote, to exercise their American-given right to have a say in things. He had never voted, never cared if he voted, and never even really tried once he had gotten wise to Mister Jim Crow and his ways even though he could, mother taught, read and write as well as any white man in the county, hell, maybe in the state of Mississippi. He wanted no trouble, wanted no part of Mister, no part of confronting Mister Jim Crow and just wanted to be left alone. And that was that.
That was that until he heard about those Philadelphia boys, and until he had heard that they had, that white trash that had been put up to it by Mister and his damn White Citizens Councils, burned down Jack Lewis’ place, his beautiful little shack that he had spent half a life time trying to fix up, when he decided to lead his fellow church people to Hattiesburg to register to vote. Jacob still did not care whether he voted or not, registered or not, but since he was, the way things were going, to be targeted anyway just for being black, poor and nothing but a sharecropper well that was enough. Enough to get him and a few fellows, young bucks, sons of farmers he had met over the years although he did not know them or their sons well, and get ready to defend their land, come hell or high water, defend the land like some avenging angels arms in hand like they were heeding some ghost call from that old black abolitionist rabble-rouser Frederick Douglass with his call “to arms, sable warriors, to arms, the hour is at hand” to fight for freedom one more time.
Yah, it had come to that, come to simple black manhood time, time to either keep that lifetime head bent down, or walk on two black feet. And when it came to that showdown they were ready as Ebby Johnson’s son, William, a veteran of Korea, showed them how to use their shotguns to effect. And that knowledge came in handy one night, one night when they heard that a gang of whites was heading up Traversville Road about ten miles from Jacob’s land in three cars shooting and slowly setting fires at random and watching their handiwork. Probably drunk too Jacob (and William) figured.
So they set an ambush around Tyler Road, dark, with high ground and easy escape. And that night, whether it ever got recorded, reported, or noted, a small cadre of black men, black avenging angels (no niggers, nigras, or even negroes now) sent a fusillade of shotgun fire down at the three cars coming up that black night Mississippi road. And, you know, no marauding rednecks ever came within twenty miles of Jacob Block’s land again. And while he never took the time to register to vote when that became easier later he was always at pains to tell everybody he knew that one sweaty fearful night he had done all the voting he needed to do…
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
So they set an ambush around Tyler Road, dark, with high ground and easy escape. And that night, whether it ever got recorded, reported, or noted, a small cadre of black men, black avenging angels (no niggers, nigras, or even negroes now) sent a fusillade of shotgun fire down at the three cars coming up that black night Mississippi road. And, you know, no marauding rednecks ever came within twenty miles of Jacob Block’s land again. And while he never took the time to register to vote when that became easier later he was always at pains to tell everybody he knew that one sweaty fearful night he had done all the voting he needed to do…
Ten Point Program[edit]
The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[43][44]1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
- We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
- We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
- We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
- We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
- We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
- We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
- We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
- We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
- We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.
- When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
- We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader
From the American Left History archives, October 25, 2010:
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 this series on Vietnamese Trotskyism:
At the most fundamental level the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism as it evolved out of the post-Bolshevik revolution Russian Communist Party inner-party disputes of the mid-1920s can be encapsulated in the differences between Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. In short, this dispute within the ostensibly communist movement is the continuation of the historic struggle in the international working class movement, and particularly in its Marxist wing, between reform and revolution. As it turns out this inner- party dispute that started out as a simple verification of Trotsky’s theory, at first applied solely to Russia, that in the age of imperialism the international bourgeoisie, and its national components, including its colonial and semi-colonial dependents no longer could, or more to the point, wanted to lead bourgeois revolutions, as exemplified by the French revolution in the 18th century came to expressed a chasm between those, like Trotsky, who favored extending the Russian revolution internationally and those, like Stalin, who wanted the Communist International, and its national sections, to merely act as agents of Soviet foreign policy.
Nowhere is the contrast between those perspectives more clearly expressed than in the struggle for the Vietnamese revolution that was central to the world-wide left-wing political milieu in the 1960s when this writer came of political age. Many of us came to defend the Vietnamese revolution first as an example of the right to national self-determination for small countries oppressed by world imperialism. Some of us moved on to defend that revolution because it was led by Stalinists, the exemplars of two-stage revolution (first a separate democratic stage, and then seemingly never, a socialist stage) and kowtowed to every move that “Uncle” Ho (and his successors) publicized. And a few of us came to defend that revolution despite its Stalinist leadership, understanding that a military victory against American imperialism was critical for revolutionary strategy and that the creation of a unitary workers state , albeit in distorted form as in North Vietnam, was a historic accretion to the international working class movement.
World-wide in the 1920s and 1930s for many reasons, great and small, personal and political, the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism was almost totally to the disadvantage of the latter. Vietnam, in the 1930s and 1940s, represented something of an exception. As the documentation provided in this series of articles points out it took the physical liquidation of the Vietnamese Trotskyism cadre (in its two competing tendencies) to break important segments of the Vietnamese working class and its allies from a Trotskyist perspective. Although, as the articles also point out, mistakes of political omission and commission were made the fallen Vietnamese comrades are worthy of honor in the history of revolutionary struggles. A truly fitting tribute to their struggles awaits a victorious workers revolution. Remember the Vietnamese Trotkyists! Remember Vietnamese Bolshevik martyr Ta Thu Thau!
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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An eye-witness account of this meeting appears in David Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956-68, Harmondsworth 1976, pp 412-5. An account by the IS appeared in Socialist Worker (18 September 1969), and one hostile to the IS was in Black Dwarf (1 October 1969). Harman’s article, Ho – He Gave the ‘Third World’ Hope, which made much the same points as his speech, appeared in Socialist Worker (11 September 1969). A letter from Peter Sedgwick defending Harman’s position appeared in Black Dwarf (26 November 1969), with an editorial reply signed by Tariq Ali, Anthony Barnett, Fred Halliday, Adrian Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham, saying that “Sedgwick ... knows little about Vietnam”. (The IS had previously published material on Ta Thu Thau in an article by Jim Scott, Ta Thu Thau – A Great Vietnamese Socialist, Labour Worker (7 September 1966).)
Some sections of the Trotskyist movement showed a distinct lack of principle on this issue. The International Marxist Group affirmed that “all talk of ‘Ho Chi Minh’s murder squads’ is an over-simplified distortion of an extremely complex situation” (Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Revolutionary, Red Mole, 15 September 1970), and Stephen Johns tried to exonerate the regime from responsibility by claiming that he had been “assassinated by a Vietminh cadre” (Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, p.119).
Ho Chi Minh’s responsibility is established in the three letters and three interviews printed in Ho Chi Minh et les Trotskystes, Chroniques Vietnamiennes, no.1, November 1986, pp.13-18, from which come the pieces translated by Richard Moore in Political Terror in Vietnam, Socialist Organiser, no.295, 4 December 1986, and by Simon Pirani in Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, pp.123-8. Tran Van Giau’s personal responsibility was raised with him when on a visit to France last year (Peter Salmon, Killer Confronted, Workers Press, 24 February 1990). Other accounts by the Groupe Trotskyste Vietnamien in France occur in Justice for Ta Thu Thau, Socialist Organiser, no.359, 9 June 1988 and Ta Thu Thau, Vietnamese Trotskyist, Socialist Organiser, no.360, 16 June 1988.
The following summary was written for us by the veteran Vietnamese revolutionary Ngo Van Xuyet, who now lives in Paris, and was translated for this magazine by Simon Pirani, and our thanks are surely due to both, as it consists of the fullest treatment of the life of this heroic figure that has yet appeared in English.
Ta Thu Thau was born on 6 May 1906 at Tan Binh (Longxuyên, south Vietnam), the fourth child of a large and very poor family: his father was a carpenter. In 1925 he began work as a teacher in Saigon. [1] At the age of 20, along with most of the ‘educated’ youth, Ta Thu Thau – in an experience he later called the “folly of his youth” – joined the nationalist group Young Annam, which was soon dissolved by the French colonial government. [2] On 24 March 1926 Ta Thu Thau took part in a mass demonstration to mark the return from France of the constitutional-nationalist leader Bui Quang Chiêu, and on 4 April 1926 in the demonstration marking the funeral of the veteran nationalist Phan Chau Trinh. [3] On 21 March that year he had taken part in a meeting in the Rue Lanzarotte, Saigon, organised by Nguyen An Ninh, for democratic liberties, and against the exploitation of Annamites, both natives from Annam and those from Tonkin. He wrote for the Annam newspaper of the nationalist lawyer Phan Van Truong. [4]
Ta Thu Thau arrived in France in September 1927 and enrolled at the Science faculty of the University of Paris. He joined the Dang Viet Nam Dôc Lap (Annamite Independence Party – PAI), and after its founder Nguyen The Truyen returned to Vietnam in 1928, took responsibility for its work. [5] The anti-colonialist monthly Resurrection, which began in December the same year, but was shortlived, was published by Ta Thu Thau in collaboration with Huynh Van Phuong. [6]
In January 1929, Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesse Patriotes (Young Patriots) [7] clashed with Annamites under the PAI’s influence. Ta Thu Thau attacked L’Humanité, the French Communist Party’s newspaper, for the “bad faith” of its account, and the French Communist Party (PCF) for its failure to intervene on behalf of the Annamites arrested at this meeting, and wrote about the “retribution to be exacted from the PCF’s Colonial Commission” for its “counter-revolutionary factional work” within the PAI. The Annamite group of the PCF’s Colonial section, led by Nguyen Van Tao [8], hoped through this work to transform the PAI members into “automatons for carrying out their edicts”, as he wrote. A leaflet written by Ta Thu Thau concluded: “From our unspeakable slavery, we cry out to all the oppressed of the colonies: unite against European imperialism, white or red, if you want a part of this world for yourselves.” In March 1929 Ta Thu Thau tried in vain to defend the PAI from its legal dissolution by the Seine district court.
From 20 to 30 July 1929 Ta Thu Thau participated in the Second Congress of the Anti-Imperialist League at Frankfurt. [9] In left-wing Paris circles, he met Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and Daniel Guérin. [10] He abandoned the nationalist beliefs of his early years and entered the Trotskyist Left Opposition. He was 23 years old.
Following the insurrection at Yên Bay, on the night of 9-10 February 1930, inspired by the Viet Nam Quôc Dân Dang (the Annamite Kuomintang) [11], Ta Thu Thau set out his political perspective in relation to the Indochinese revolution in La Verité, organ of the Left Opposition in Paris (April/May/June 1930).
When the clandestine Trotskyist Ta doi lâp (Left Opposition) was formed in Saigon near the end of 1931, Ta Thu Thau was one of its founders. But the group soon split into three factions: Ta Thu Thau organised the Dông duong công san (Indochinese Communism) group, which from 1 May 1932 published a duplicated news-sheet, Vô San (Proletarian). Huynh Van Phuong and Phan Van Chanh, who were also among those deported from France, published communist propaganda journals under the title Ta doi lâp tung tho (Left Opposition Publications). Another deportee from France, Ho Huu Tuong, together with other opponents of the Indochinese Communist Party, formed the Thang muoi (October) group. [13]
These clandestine groups were soon hit by severe repression. Forty-one people were arrested in Saigon and in the Baclieu, Baria, Giadinh and Soctrang provinces. Arrested on 8 August 1932, Ta Thu Thau was freed with a warning on 21 January 1933; but 15 activists were sentenced to between four months and five years imprisonment at a trial of 21 Trotskyists on 1 May 1933.
At the Saigon municipal elections on 30 April and 7 May 1933, Ta Thu Thau carried out legal agitation with the Stalinist Communist Nguyen Van Tao, the nationalists Nguyen An Ninh, Tran Van Thach, Le Van Thu, Trinh Hung Ngau and others. [14] This group constituted a ‘workers’ list (so lao dong) for the elections, an unusual event for Indochina. A French-language newspaper, La Lutte (The Struggle), was published to support the campaign (Annamite-language newspapers were subject to censorship); the first issue was dated 24 April 1933 and the paper disappeared the day after the election. To a stupefied reaction from colonialist society, two candidates from the ‘workers’ list’ were elected onto the municipal council.
On 15 November of the same year, following an initiative from a study circle of former students in France, Ta Thu Thau gave a lecture on the dialectic, to a large audience of students and workers gathered at a cooperative college.
In 1934, from the ‘United Front’ of Trotskyists, Stalinists and nationalists “for the defence of the working class”, the La Lutte group was formally constituted; the Trotskyists withheld their critique of the USSR and Stalinism, the Stalinists their criticism of Trotskyism, and the La Lutte newspaper reappeared on 4 October 1934.
Their election to office annulled [15], the group’s members presented themselves anew for the municipal election of May 1935. Ta Thu Thau was among those elected. Sought by the authorities for “subversive press activity”, he was given a two year suspended prison sentence on 27 June 1935, a punishment confirmed by the appeal court on 10 September 1935. On 26 December 1935 Ta Thu Thau – along with three other elected representatives of La Lutte – was arrested for making a speech in support of striking tilbury-drivers; they were released the next day. At the trial of the La Lutte newspaper on 18 March 1936, Ta Thu Thau was fined 500 francs in the Saigon court.
The coming to power of the Popular Front government in France in June 1936 [16] triggered off a vast popular movement which swept Indochina: strikes in the rubber plantations, in the Arsenal, on the railways ... and peasant demonstrations. At a meeting on 13 August 1936, principally of militants from the La Lutte group and leaders of the constitutional-nationalist party, plans were sketched out for the Indochinese Congress movement. A committee was formed to prepare a charter of democratic demands for presentation to the Popular Front government. The Congress movement was banned on 19 September 1936, and Ta Thu Thau, who had taken part in its commission for legislation for the workers, was jailed along with Nguyen Van Tao and Nguyen An Ninh. They were all released after 11 days’ hunger strike, on 5 November.
In 1937 industrial strikes and peasant demonstrations exploded again. Ta Thu Thau found himself back in prison from 18 May to 7 June, and was then condemned by the Saigon court on 9 July to two years in prison, a sentence against which he appealed. It was at this time that the PCF ordered the Stalinists to break with the Trotskyists (cf the letter from Gitton, 19 May 1937). [17] A general strike of railwaymen landed Ta Thu Thau back in prison on 23 July 1937. After a hunger strike of 12 days, he was brought back it front of the Saigon court on 17 September on a stretcher. He was semi-paralysed. Condemned on 11 November to a further two-year sentence to run concurrently, he was released conditionally three months before the end of the sentence, on 14 February 1939, on the eve of the Annamite new year.
Working with his Trotskyist comrades Ta Thu Thau continued publication of the newspaper Tranh dau (formerly La Lutte which appeared in the Annamite language from October 1938), supporting the Fourth International. In the paper’s pages he waged a campaign for the Colonial Council elections of 16 and 30 April 1939 [18],. where he was elected with his two comrades Tran Van Thach and Phan Var Hum[19] Their programme included opposition to a national loan of 33 million piastres being raised from the people “for the defence of Indochina” – and this conflicted with the position of the Indochinese Communist Party, which was aligned with that of the PCF, that France had to get her security forces into a state of battle-readiness, as a consequence of the Laval-Stalin pact of May 1935. On 1 October 1939 Phan Van Hum was condemned to five years in prison for this anti-militarist propaganda.
Ta Thu Thau was authorised to leave Saigon on 21 August 1939 to go to Siam. He intended to seek medical treatment there. But the war broke out, and he was arrested and taken back to Saigon on 11 October 1939. The newspaper Tranh dau was among those affected by a banning order on 26 September 1939, and Ta Thu Thau’s group was among those “communistic groups and associations” affected by a dissolution order (decreed in October, 1939). Condemned in the Saigon court on 16 April 1940 to five years’ imprisonment a 10-year banning order and 10 years’ loss of civil rights, Ta Thu Thau was deported to the Poulo Condore island concentration camp in October 1940.
Ta Thu Thau participated in clandestine workers’ and peasants’ meetings in the mining areas of Nam dinh, Haiphong and Hai duong. After the fall of Japan and the coming to power of Ho Chi Minh in August 1945 [21], Ta Thu Thau hoped to get back to south Vietnam, but was arrested by the Vietminh at Quang ngai and assassinated in September 1945. [22]
In the month following the Saigon insurrection of 23 September 1945, Ta Thu Thau’s closest comrades led the Tranh dau group into battle against the Franco-British force which aimed to reconquer Vietnam, an engagement in which some 200 Tranh dau men lost their lives; like Ta Thu Thau, the Tranh dau leaders were assassinated by Ho Chi Minh’s partisans.
We must recall that in 1939, echoing the Moscow Trials, Ho Chi Minh wrote three letters to his “beloved comrades” describing the Trotskyists as “notorious spies and traitors”, in the service of “international, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and German fascism”. To exterminate them was the implicit, but very clear, conclusion from this.
As a person, Ta Thu Thau was likeable and had great self-possession. Answering a summons by governor Pages [23] in April 1937, he declared: “A revolutionary I am, and a revolutionary I will remain as long as there is blood in my veins.”
Ngo Van Xuyet
2. France sent military missions to Vietnam from 1848 (central and south Vietnam then constituting the nation of Annam, north Vietnam being known as Tonkin). Vietnam and Cambodia were under complete French control by the 1860s, and this was extended to all Indochina with the conquest of Laos in 1893. The national independence movement took the form of bourgeois conspiracies in the early years of the twentieth century; in the early 1920s it emerged as a mass movement. A Constitutionalist Party was formed in 1923; revolutionary nationalist organisations also proliferated, of which Young Annam (Viet Nam Thanh Nien Dang) was one.
3. Bui Quang Chieu founded the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party which aroused mass sentiment against the feudal class and colonialists in the 1920s, using occasions such as Phan Chau Trinh’s funeral for this purpose. As workers' movements emerged, starting with the abortive uprisings of 1930, the Constitutionalists became extremely hostile to them and drew closer to the colonialist government and police.
Phan Chau Trinh was a mandarin at the Hue court, who quit his post in disgust at the court’s corruption in 1905, and joined nationalist veteran Phan Boi Chau in exile in Hong Kong. Returning to Vietnam in 1906, he was accused of inspiring a peasant uprising in 1908 and was jailed far three years. After being freed he continued political activity.
4. Nguyen An Ninh studied law in Paris, where he joined the nationalist movement. He returned to Vietnam in 1923 and founded the nationalist newspaper La Cloche Felée, which among other things published the Communist Manifesto in Vietnam for the first time; in the 1930s he played a leading role in the Indochinese Congress movement, and in La Lutte. The Rue Lanzarotte meeting, attended by 3,000 people, was the first-ever public political rally in Saigon. La Cloche Felée was followed by Annam in May 1926. Its editor, Phan Van Truong, had joined the nationalist movement as a student in France in 1912.
5. Nguyen The Truyen also joined the nationalist movement while studying in France, and in 1922-23 formed L’Union Intercoloniale to unite anti-imperialists from throughout the French empire. He returned to Vietnam in 1928. Back in France in 1936-37, he attempted to establish a union of oppressed nationalities together with the Algerian Messali Hadj.
6. Huynh Van Phuong came from a rich Mytho family; in 1927 he went to study law in Paris, where he joined the Trotskyist Left Opposition. Deported to Vietnam together with Ta Thu Thau in 1930, he edited the Left Opposition’s journal in Saigon, and was active in the La Lutte group. He was assassinated by the Stalinists in 1945.
7. Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesses Patriotes were French fascists, inspired by Mussolini, who emerged as a force after the 1924 election of a Radical-Socialist coalition. These were lumpen thugs, dressed in blue raincoats and berets for their public provocations, downmarket in comparison to the Croix de Feu (predominantly ex-servicemen) and Charles Maurras’ Action Directe which headed the attempted fascist coup of February 1934.
8. Nguyen Van Tao joined the French Communist Party while studying in Paris, and became a full-timer in 1927; he was deported to Vietnam in 1931, where he played a leading part in the Stalinist organisation.
9. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded under the influence of the Stalinist Comintern leaders in 1927 at Brussels, brought together pacifists and other petty-bourgeois lefts. The Frankfurt congress, which Ta Thu Thau attended, brought its short life to an end.
10. Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and historian and writer Daniel Guerin were French anti-colonialists, inspirers of numerous actions supporting colonial liberation, and founders in 1933 of an Amnesty Committee for Vietnamese political prisoners.
11. The Yen Bay insurrection began as a mutiny by Annamite troops stationed on the Chinese frontier; they massacred their officers and controlled the garrison for a night, but other garrisons either failed to rise or were defeated. The village of Co Am rose a few days later, and was suppressed by pitiless aerial bombardment. The severity of French repression following the rising finished the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dong as a political force.
12. Sun Yat Sen was founder of the Chinese bourgeois nationalist Guomindang; his philosophy combined anti-imperialist nationalism, democracy and utopian Socialist ideas.
13. Phanh Van Chanh joined the Left Opposition in Paris in 1929, and was deported along with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher, and was an editor of the Left Opposition's Saigon journal. Deported to Poulo Condore 1940-43; he was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 at Ben Sue, Thu Dau Mot. For Huynh Van Phuong see note 6.
Ho Huu Tuong began his political life as a nationalist, and joined the Trotskyist movement while studying in France, at Aixen-Provence and Lyons; he returned to Saigon in 1931. The October group, which later became the League of Internationalist Communists, supported the Fourth International and published Le Militant; it would not join the La Lutte front because this would have meant withholding public criticism of the Stalinists; its members played a leading role in forming soviet-type workers’ councils in the 1945 revolution. Ho Huu Tuong also participated in 1945, although he had renounced Trotskyism during the war.
14. Tran Van Thach, a nationalist, studied in Paris and was deported to Vietnam with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher and, following the struggle within La Lutte, became a Trotskyist in 1937. He was elected to the Saigon Colonial Council in 1939, imprisoned at Poulo Condore from 1940 to 1944, and assassinated by the Stalinists at Thu Dau Mot in 1945. Le Van Thu, another of the Paris deportees, remained a nationalist but played an active part in La Lutte and the workers’ movement. Trinh Hung Ngau, who had worked with Ta Thu Thau on the Annam newspaper, was a nationalist with Anarchist leanings.
15. The elections of La Lutte councillors were annulled on spurious grounds, such as the non-payment of taxes.
16. The elections of April-May 1936 in France gave a large majority to the Popular Front of the Communist Party, Socialists, Radicals and others. A government headed by Leon Blum of the Socialist Party took office on 2 June amidst a wave of strikes and factory occupations. The Stalinists supported this government, although they did not take part in it, thus ensuring that power remained with the bourgeoisie.
17. At this time the Trotskyists advocated intensified strike struggles against French imperialism; the Stalinists wanted an abatement of strikes on the grounds that the working class should not damage the French Popular Front government, a diplomatic ally of the USSR. The letter from French CP leader Marcel Gitton to the Indochinese CP stated “we consider it impossible to continue the collaboration of the party with the Trotskyists ...” and instructed it to cease. After the Stalinists split from La Lutte, the letter was published in it (29 August 1937).
18. Colonial Councils were administrative bodies with limited powers; there was a small property qualification for franchise.
19. Phan Van Hum was a teacher of law, literature and philosophy. He began political activity as a nationalist, but joined the Trotskyist movement in France in the early 1930s. Returning to Saigon in July 1933, he took part in La Lutte, was deported to Poulo Condore during the war, and was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 in Bien Hoa. For Tran Van Thach see note 13. Their joint letter to Trotsky appears below.
20. Bao Dai, last emperor of Vietnam, succeeded his father in 1925 at the age of 12, but did not take the throne until 1932. He collaborated with the French, and when the Japanese coup took place agreed to work with them; he abdicated in 1945, joined the Vietminh briefly, went into exile, and returned as a French puppet again from 1949 to 1955. Tran Trong Kim, a mild-mannered academic, was his Prime Minister in 1945.
21. Japan surrendered to the imperialist Allies on 14 August 1945, after the atom bombing of Hiroshima: this provoked a revolutionary situation in Vietnam. In the north the Vietminh marched from their jungle bases into Hanoi and declared a ‘Democratic Republic’ on 2 September. According to Stalin’s agreement with the Allies, the south was to be placed under French control again, and while the southern Vietminh tried to prepare for this, it was resisted by the nationalists, and by the Trotskyists who called for the workers’ councils which had sprung up to take power. The Stalinists arrested delegates to a congress of workers’ councils and managed to establish a ‘provisional government’ despite the unpopularity of their line; they stood by as the French reinvaded in October, concentrating their fire on the Trotskyists, all of whose leaders were killed.
22. According to a report published in the journal Quatrième Internationale in 1947, Ta Thu Thau was tried by a Vietminh ‘people’s tribunal’ after his arrest. Due to his great prestige in the workers’ movement, this tribunal could not be persuaded to find him guilty of anything; then he was shot anyway.
23. Pierre Pages was French colonial governor of Indochina throughout the 1930s.
This essay is based upon the following sources: Archives nationales (Paris) F7-13406, 13408, 13409, 13410, 13167, 13170, Archives Outre-mer D2514; La Depeche d’Indochine, Saigon, various issues 1933-40; Nguyen Van Dinh, Ta thu thau, to qudc gia toi quoc te (Ta Thu Thau, from Nationalism to Internationalism), Saigon 1938; Phuong Lan, Nha each mang Ta thu Thau (The revolutionary Ta Thu Thau), Saigon 1974; D. Hemery, Du patriotisme au marxism: l’immigration vietnamienne en France 1926 a 1930 (From patriotism to Marxism: the Vietnamese emigration in France 1926-30), in Le Mouvement social, no.90, Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Revolutionnaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine (Vietnamese revolutionaries and colonial power in Indochina), Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Ta Thu Thau: l’itineraire politique d’un révolutionnaire vietnamien pendant les annees 1930 (Ta Thu Thau: the political path of a Vietnamese revolutionary through the 1930s) in Histoire de l’Asie du Sud-Est. The translation and the notes are the work of Simon Pirani, to whom, along with the author, our thanks are due.
From the American Left History archives, October 25, 2010:
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 this series on Vietnamese Trotskyism:
At the most fundamental level the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism as it evolved out of the post-Bolshevik revolution Russian Communist Party inner-party disputes of the mid-1920s can be encapsulated in the differences between Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. In short, this dispute within the ostensibly communist movement is the continuation of the historic struggle in the international working class movement, and particularly in its Marxist wing, between reform and revolution. As it turns out this inner- party dispute that started out as a simple verification of Trotsky’s theory, at first applied solely to Russia, that in the age of imperialism the international bourgeoisie, and its national components, including its colonial and semi-colonial dependents no longer could, or more to the point, wanted to lead bourgeois revolutions, as exemplified by the French revolution in the 18th century came to expressed a chasm between those, like Trotsky, who favored extending the Russian revolution internationally and those, like Stalin, who wanted the Communist International, and its national sections, to merely act as agents of Soviet foreign policy.
Nowhere is the contrast between those perspectives more clearly expressed than in the struggle for the Vietnamese revolution that was central to the world-wide left-wing political milieu in the 1960s when this writer came of political age. Many of us came to defend the Vietnamese revolution first as an example of the right to national self-determination for small countries oppressed by world imperialism. Some of us moved on to defend that revolution because it was led by Stalinists, the exemplars of two-stage revolution (first a separate democratic stage, and then seemingly never, a socialist stage) and kowtowed to every move that “Uncle” Ho (and his successors) publicized. And a few of us came to defend that revolution despite its Stalinist leadership, understanding that a military victory against American imperialism was critical for revolutionary strategy and that the creation of a unitary workers state , albeit in distorted form as in North Vietnam, was a historic accretion to the international working class movement.
World-wide in the 1920s and 1930s for many reasons, great and small, personal and political, the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism was almost totally to the disadvantage of the latter. Vietnam, in the 1930s and 1940s, represented something of an exception. As the documentation provided in this series of articles points out it took the physical liquidation of the Vietnamese Trotskyism cadre (in its two competing tendencies) to break important segments of the Vietnamese working class and its allies from a Trotskyist perspective. Although, as the articles also point out, mistakes of political omission and commission were made the fallen Vietnamese comrades are worthy of honor in the history of revolutionary struggles. A truly fitting tribute to their struggles awaits a victorious workers revolution. Remember the Vietnamese Trotkyists! Remember Vietnamese Bolshevik martyr Ta Thu Thau!
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
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Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader
The credit for the first attempt in Britain to confront the Vietnamese Stalinists with the question of the murder of Ta Thu Thau goes to Chris Harman of the International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party), who broached the subject in his speech at a Ho Chi Minh Memorial Meeting, which was organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and held in London on 13 September 1969. This resulted in the representative of the Stalinist regime walking off the stage in protest, and considerable pandemonium in the hall.An eye-witness account of this meeting appears in David Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956-68, Harmondsworth 1976, pp 412-5. An account by the IS appeared in Socialist Worker (18 September 1969), and one hostile to the IS was in Black Dwarf (1 October 1969). Harman’s article, Ho – He Gave the ‘Third World’ Hope, which made much the same points as his speech, appeared in Socialist Worker (11 September 1969). A letter from Peter Sedgwick defending Harman’s position appeared in Black Dwarf (26 November 1969), with an editorial reply signed by Tariq Ali, Anthony Barnett, Fred Halliday, Adrian Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham, saying that “Sedgwick ... knows little about Vietnam”. (The IS had previously published material on Ta Thu Thau in an article by Jim Scott, Ta Thu Thau – A Great Vietnamese Socialist, Labour Worker (7 September 1966).)
Some sections of the Trotskyist movement showed a distinct lack of principle on this issue. The International Marxist Group affirmed that “all talk of ‘Ho Chi Minh’s murder squads’ is an over-simplified distortion of an extremely complex situation” (Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Revolutionary, Red Mole, 15 September 1970), and Stephen Johns tried to exonerate the regime from responsibility by claiming that he had been “assassinated by a Vietminh cadre” (Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, p.119).
Ho Chi Minh’s responsibility is established in the three letters and three interviews printed in Ho Chi Minh et les Trotskystes, Chroniques Vietnamiennes, no.1, November 1986, pp.13-18, from which come the pieces translated by Richard Moore in Political Terror in Vietnam, Socialist Organiser, no.295, 4 December 1986, and by Simon Pirani in Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, pp.123-8. Tran Van Giau’s personal responsibility was raised with him when on a visit to France last year (Peter Salmon, Killer Confronted, Workers Press, 24 February 1990). Other accounts by the Groupe Trotskyste Vietnamien in France occur in Justice for Ta Thu Thau, Socialist Organiser, no.359, 9 June 1988 and Ta Thu Thau, Vietnamese Trotskyist, Socialist Organiser, no.360, 16 June 1988.
The following summary was written for us by the veteran Vietnamese revolutionary Ngo Van Xuyet, who now lives in Paris, and was translated for this magazine by Simon Pirani, and our thanks are surely due to both, as it consists of the fullest treatment of the life of this heroic figure that has yet appeared in English.
Ta Thu Thau was born on 6 May 1906 at Tan Binh (Longxuyên, south Vietnam), the fourth child of a large and very poor family: his father was a carpenter. In 1925 he began work as a teacher in Saigon. [1] At the age of 20, along with most of the ‘educated’ youth, Ta Thu Thau – in an experience he later called the “folly of his youth” – joined the nationalist group Young Annam, which was soon dissolved by the French colonial government. [2] On 24 March 1926 Ta Thu Thau took part in a mass demonstration to mark the return from France of the constitutional-nationalist leader Bui Quang Chiêu, and on 4 April 1926 in the demonstration marking the funeral of the veteran nationalist Phan Chau Trinh. [3] On 21 March that year he had taken part in a meeting in the Rue Lanzarotte, Saigon, organised by Nguyen An Ninh, for democratic liberties, and against the exploitation of Annamites, both natives from Annam and those from Tonkin. He wrote for the Annam newspaper of the nationalist lawyer Phan Van Truong. [4]
Ta Thu Thau arrived in France in September 1927 and enrolled at the Science faculty of the University of Paris. He joined the Dang Viet Nam Dôc Lap (Annamite Independence Party – PAI), and after its founder Nguyen The Truyen returned to Vietnam in 1928, took responsibility for its work. [5] The anti-colonialist monthly Resurrection, which began in December the same year, but was shortlived, was published by Ta Thu Thau in collaboration with Huynh Van Phuong. [6]
In January 1929, Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesse Patriotes (Young Patriots) [7] clashed with Annamites under the PAI’s influence. Ta Thu Thau attacked L’Humanité, the French Communist Party’s newspaper, for the “bad faith” of its account, and the French Communist Party (PCF) for its failure to intervene on behalf of the Annamites arrested at this meeting, and wrote about the “retribution to be exacted from the PCF’s Colonial Commission” for its “counter-revolutionary factional work” within the PAI. The Annamite group of the PCF’s Colonial section, led by Nguyen Van Tao [8], hoped through this work to transform the PAI members into “automatons for carrying out their edicts”, as he wrote. A leaflet written by Ta Thu Thau concluded: “From our unspeakable slavery, we cry out to all the oppressed of the colonies: unite against European imperialism, white or red, if you want a part of this world for yourselves.” In March 1929 Ta Thu Thau tried in vain to defend the PAI from its legal dissolution by the Seine district court.
From 20 to 30 July 1929 Ta Thu Thau participated in the Second Congress of the Anti-Imperialist League at Frankfurt. [9] In left-wing Paris circles, he met Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and Daniel Guérin. [10] He abandoned the nationalist beliefs of his early years and entered the Trotskyist Left Opposition. He was 23 years old.
Following the insurrection at Yên Bay, on the night of 9-10 February 1930, inspired by the Viet Nam Quôc Dân Dang (the Annamite Kuomintang) [11], Ta Thu Thau set out his political perspective in relation to the Indochinese revolution in La Verité, organ of the Left Opposition in Paris (April/May/June 1930).
The artificially-created indigenous bourgeoisie is not capable of making any revolution ... the indigenous bourgeois bloc, incapable of an independent existence, has welded itself firmly to the French bourgeoisie – which holds on tight to it, and uses it to break up the revolutionary struggle in the name of Annamite nationalism.
The badly-organised rising at Yên Bay ... without liaison between its organisation and the civilian population ... was launched on a confused ideological foundation ... a Sun-Yat-sen-ist synthesis of democracy, nationalism and socialism [12] ... a kind of nationalist mysticism.
This policy obscured the concrete class relationships, and the real, organic liaison between the indigenous bourgeoisie and French imperialism ... Those who speak of immediate and integral independence have nothing more than a mechanical and formalistic conception of the struggle. Not one of them can doubt that, behind these impressive words, there is a people within which operate perpetual molecular changes of the social classes, which are all the more imperceptible because they are veiled by the appearance of the conflict between races, which in many people’s eyes is real and eternal ... Neither terrorism nor Gandhism will resolve the colonial problem ... A revolution based on the organisation of the proletarian and peasant masses is the only one capable of liberating the colonies ... The question of independence must be bound up with that of the proletarian socialist revolution.Ta Thu Thau here criticised the Third International and the PCF for their negligence in training Marxist cadres, and for their empirical approach to the so-called “continuous revolutionary situation” in Indochina; he denounced the “false policy of the International”, the adventurist policy of the Third Period, as a result of which “proletarian revolutionaries had capitulated to the nationalist parties ...” and “the Chinese revolution had been led to the graveyard.”
Sentences
On 22 May 1930 the Annamite students in Paris demonstrated in the Champs d’Elysées against more than 50 death sentences passed against participants in the Yên Bay uprising; Ta Thu Thau was arrested, and on 30 May deported from France back to Vietnam with 18 of his compatriots.When the clandestine Trotskyist Ta doi lâp (Left Opposition) was formed in Saigon near the end of 1931, Ta Thu Thau was one of its founders. But the group soon split into three factions: Ta Thu Thau organised the Dông duong công san (Indochinese Communism) group, which from 1 May 1932 published a duplicated news-sheet, Vô San (Proletarian). Huynh Van Phuong and Phan Van Chanh, who were also among those deported from France, published communist propaganda journals under the title Ta doi lâp tung tho (Left Opposition Publications). Another deportee from France, Ho Huu Tuong, together with other opponents of the Indochinese Communist Party, formed the Thang muoi (October) group. [13]
These clandestine groups were soon hit by severe repression. Forty-one people were arrested in Saigon and in the Baclieu, Baria, Giadinh and Soctrang provinces. Arrested on 8 August 1932, Ta Thu Thau was freed with a warning on 21 January 1933; but 15 activists were sentenced to between four months and five years imprisonment at a trial of 21 Trotskyists on 1 May 1933.
At the Saigon municipal elections on 30 April and 7 May 1933, Ta Thu Thau carried out legal agitation with the Stalinist Communist Nguyen Van Tao, the nationalists Nguyen An Ninh, Tran Van Thach, Le Van Thu, Trinh Hung Ngau and others. [14] This group constituted a ‘workers’ list (so lao dong) for the elections, an unusual event for Indochina. A French-language newspaper, La Lutte (The Struggle), was published to support the campaign (Annamite-language newspapers were subject to censorship); the first issue was dated 24 April 1933 and the paper disappeared the day after the election. To a stupefied reaction from colonialist society, two candidates from the ‘workers’ list’ were elected onto the municipal council.
On 15 November of the same year, following an initiative from a study circle of former students in France, Ta Thu Thau gave a lecture on the dialectic, to a large audience of students and workers gathered at a cooperative college.
In 1934, from the ‘United Front’ of Trotskyists, Stalinists and nationalists “for the defence of the working class”, the La Lutte group was formally constituted; the Trotskyists withheld their critique of the USSR and Stalinism, the Stalinists their criticism of Trotskyism, and the La Lutte newspaper reappeared on 4 October 1934.
Their election to office annulled [15], the group’s members presented themselves anew for the municipal election of May 1935. Ta Thu Thau was among those elected. Sought by the authorities for “subversive press activity”, he was given a two year suspended prison sentence on 27 June 1935, a punishment confirmed by the appeal court on 10 September 1935. On 26 December 1935 Ta Thu Thau – along with three other elected representatives of La Lutte – was arrested for making a speech in support of striking tilbury-drivers; they were released the next day. At the trial of the La Lutte newspaper on 18 March 1936, Ta Thu Thau was fined 500 francs in the Saigon court.
The coming to power of the Popular Front government in France in June 1936 [16] triggered off a vast popular movement which swept Indochina: strikes in the rubber plantations, in the Arsenal, on the railways ... and peasant demonstrations. At a meeting on 13 August 1936, principally of militants from the La Lutte group and leaders of the constitutional-nationalist party, plans were sketched out for the Indochinese Congress movement. A committee was formed to prepare a charter of democratic demands for presentation to the Popular Front government. The Congress movement was banned on 19 September 1936, and Ta Thu Thau, who had taken part in its commission for legislation for the workers, was jailed along with Nguyen Van Tao and Nguyen An Ninh. They were all released after 11 days’ hunger strike, on 5 November.
In 1937 industrial strikes and peasant demonstrations exploded again. Ta Thu Thau found himself back in prison from 18 May to 7 June, and was then condemned by the Saigon court on 9 July to two years in prison, a sentence against which he appealed. It was at this time that the PCF ordered the Stalinists to break with the Trotskyists (cf the letter from Gitton, 19 May 1937). [17] A general strike of railwaymen landed Ta Thu Thau back in prison on 23 July 1937. After a hunger strike of 12 days, he was brought back it front of the Saigon court on 17 September on a stretcher. He was semi-paralysed. Condemned on 11 November to a further two-year sentence to run concurrently, he was released conditionally three months before the end of the sentence, on 14 February 1939, on the eve of the Annamite new year.
Working with his Trotskyist comrades Ta Thu Thau continued publication of the newspaper Tranh dau (formerly La Lutte which appeared in the Annamite language from October 1938), supporting the Fourth International. In the paper’s pages he waged a campaign for the Colonial Council elections of 16 and 30 April 1939 [18],. where he was elected with his two comrades Tran Van Thach and Phan Var Hum[19] Their programme included opposition to a national loan of 33 million piastres being raised from the people “for the defence of Indochina” – and this conflicted with the position of the Indochinese Communist Party, which was aligned with that of the PCF, that France had to get her security forces into a state of battle-readiness, as a consequence of the Laval-Stalin pact of May 1935. On 1 October 1939 Phan Van Hum was condemned to five years in prison for this anti-militarist propaganda.
Ta Thu Thau was authorised to leave Saigon on 21 August 1939 to go to Siam. He intended to seek medical treatment there. But the war broke out, and he was arrested and taken back to Saigon on 11 October 1939. The newspaper Tranh dau was among those affected by a banning order on 26 September 1939, and Ta Thu Thau’s group was among those “communistic groups and associations” affected by a dissolution order (decreed in October, 1939). Condemned in the Saigon court on 16 April 1940 to five years’ imprisonment a 10-year banning order and 10 years’ loss of civil rights, Ta Thu Thau was deported to the Poulo Condore island concentration camp in October 1940.
Coup
After his return from the camp at the end of 1944, Ta Thu Thau worked to build the Socialist Workers Party (Dan xa hoi tho thuyen). The Japanese coup put an end to French colonial power on March 1945, and replaced it with the government of Bao Dai and Tran Tron Kim. [20] By the middle of 1945, Ta Thi Thau had made his way to Tonkin, and made contact with Trotskyist militants in the Dan phuong region including Luon Due Thiep, Khuong Huu An and others who were publishing the newspaper Chieu dau (Combat) as the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of north Vietnam.Ta Thu Thau participated in clandestine workers’ and peasants’ meetings in the mining areas of Nam dinh, Haiphong and Hai duong. After the fall of Japan and the coming to power of Ho Chi Minh in August 1945 [21], Ta Thu Thau hoped to get back to south Vietnam, but was arrested by the Vietminh at Quang ngai and assassinated in September 1945. [22]
Mourn
On the subject of Ta Thu Thau’s death, here are the words of Ho Chi Minh in 1946, as told by Daniel Guerin: “He was a great patriot and we mourn him ... but all those who do not follow the line we have laid down will be broken.”In the month following the Saigon insurrection of 23 September 1945, Ta Thu Thau’s closest comrades led the Tranh dau group into battle against the Franco-British force which aimed to reconquer Vietnam, an engagement in which some 200 Tranh dau men lost their lives; like Ta Thu Thau, the Tranh dau leaders were assassinated by Ho Chi Minh’s partisans.
We must recall that in 1939, echoing the Moscow Trials, Ho Chi Minh wrote three letters to his “beloved comrades” describing the Trotskyists as “notorious spies and traitors”, in the service of “international, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and German fascism”. To exterminate them was the implicit, but very clear, conclusion from this.
As a person, Ta Thu Thau was likeable and had great self-possession. Answering a summons by governor Pages [23] in April 1937, he declared: “A revolutionary I am, and a revolutionary I will remain as long as there is blood in my veins.”
Ngo Van Xuyet
Notes
1. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the National Liberation Front’s 1975 victory.2. France sent military missions to Vietnam from 1848 (central and south Vietnam then constituting the nation of Annam, north Vietnam being known as Tonkin). Vietnam and Cambodia were under complete French control by the 1860s, and this was extended to all Indochina with the conquest of Laos in 1893. The national independence movement took the form of bourgeois conspiracies in the early years of the twentieth century; in the early 1920s it emerged as a mass movement. A Constitutionalist Party was formed in 1923; revolutionary nationalist organisations also proliferated, of which Young Annam (Viet Nam Thanh Nien Dang) was one.
3. Bui Quang Chieu founded the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party which aroused mass sentiment against the feudal class and colonialists in the 1920s, using occasions such as Phan Chau Trinh’s funeral for this purpose. As workers' movements emerged, starting with the abortive uprisings of 1930, the Constitutionalists became extremely hostile to them and drew closer to the colonialist government and police.
Phan Chau Trinh was a mandarin at the Hue court, who quit his post in disgust at the court’s corruption in 1905, and joined nationalist veteran Phan Boi Chau in exile in Hong Kong. Returning to Vietnam in 1906, he was accused of inspiring a peasant uprising in 1908 and was jailed far three years. After being freed he continued political activity.
4. Nguyen An Ninh studied law in Paris, where he joined the nationalist movement. He returned to Vietnam in 1923 and founded the nationalist newspaper La Cloche Felée, which among other things published the Communist Manifesto in Vietnam for the first time; in the 1930s he played a leading role in the Indochinese Congress movement, and in La Lutte. The Rue Lanzarotte meeting, attended by 3,000 people, was the first-ever public political rally in Saigon. La Cloche Felée was followed by Annam in May 1926. Its editor, Phan Van Truong, had joined the nationalist movement as a student in France in 1912.
5. Nguyen The Truyen also joined the nationalist movement while studying in France, and in 1922-23 formed L’Union Intercoloniale to unite anti-imperialists from throughout the French empire. He returned to Vietnam in 1928. Back in France in 1936-37, he attempted to establish a union of oppressed nationalities together with the Algerian Messali Hadj.
6. Huynh Van Phuong came from a rich Mytho family; in 1927 he went to study law in Paris, where he joined the Trotskyist Left Opposition. Deported to Vietnam together with Ta Thu Thau in 1930, he edited the Left Opposition’s journal in Saigon, and was active in the La Lutte group. He was assassinated by the Stalinists in 1945.
7. Pierre Taittinger’s Jeunesses Patriotes were French fascists, inspired by Mussolini, who emerged as a force after the 1924 election of a Radical-Socialist coalition. These were lumpen thugs, dressed in blue raincoats and berets for their public provocations, downmarket in comparison to the Croix de Feu (predominantly ex-servicemen) and Charles Maurras’ Action Directe which headed the attempted fascist coup of February 1934.
8. Nguyen Van Tao joined the French Communist Party while studying in Paris, and became a full-timer in 1927; he was deported to Vietnam in 1931, where he played a leading part in the Stalinist organisation.
9. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded under the influence of the Stalinist Comintern leaders in 1927 at Brussels, brought together pacifists and other petty-bourgeois lefts. The Frankfurt congress, which Ta Thu Thau attended, brought its short life to an end.
10. Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and historian and writer Daniel Guerin were French anti-colonialists, inspirers of numerous actions supporting colonial liberation, and founders in 1933 of an Amnesty Committee for Vietnamese political prisoners.
11. The Yen Bay insurrection began as a mutiny by Annamite troops stationed on the Chinese frontier; they massacred their officers and controlled the garrison for a night, but other garrisons either failed to rise or were defeated. The village of Co Am rose a few days later, and was suppressed by pitiless aerial bombardment. The severity of French repression following the rising finished the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dong as a political force.
12. Sun Yat Sen was founder of the Chinese bourgeois nationalist Guomindang; his philosophy combined anti-imperialist nationalism, democracy and utopian Socialist ideas.
13. Phanh Van Chanh joined the Left Opposition in Paris in 1929, and was deported along with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher, and was an editor of the Left Opposition's Saigon journal. Deported to Poulo Condore 1940-43; he was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 at Ben Sue, Thu Dau Mot. For Huynh Van Phuong see note 6.
Ho Huu Tuong began his political life as a nationalist, and joined the Trotskyist movement while studying in France, at Aixen-Provence and Lyons; he returned to Saigon in 1931. The October group, which later became the League of Internationalist Communists, supported the Fourth International and published Le Militant; it would not join the La Lutte front because this would have meant withholding public criticism of the Stalinists; its members played a leading role in forming soviet-type workers’ councils in the 1945 revolution. Ho Huu Tuong also participated in 1945, although he had renounced Trotskyism during the war.
14. Tran Van Thach, a nationalist, studied in Paris and was deported to Vietnam with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher and, following the struggle within La Lutte, became a Trotskyist in 1937. He was elected to the Saigon Colonial Council in 1939, imprisoned at Poulo Condore from 1940 to 1944, and assassinated by the Stalinists at Thu Dau Mot in 1945. Le Van Thu, another of the Paris deportees, remained a nationalist but played an active part in La Lutte and the workers’ movement. Trinh Hung Ngau, who had worked with Ta Thu Thau on the Annam newspaper, was a nationalist with Anarchist leanings.
15. The elections of La Lutte councillors were annulled on spurious grounds, such as the non-payment of taxes.
16. The elections of April-May 1936 in France gave a large majority to the Popular Front of the Communist Party, Socialists, Radicals and others. A government headed by Leon Blum of the Socialist Party took office on 2 June amidst a wave of strikes and factory occupations. The Stalinists supported this government, although they did not take part in it, thus ensuring that power remained with the bourgeoisie.
17. At this time the Trotskyists advocated intensified strike struggles against French imperialism; the Stalinists wanted an abatement of strikes on the grounds that the working class should not damage the French Popular Front government, a diplomatic ally of the USSR. The letter from French CP leader Marcel Gitton to the Indochinese CP stated “we consider it impossible to continue the collaboration of the party with the Trotskyists ...” and instructed it to cease. After the Stalinists split from La Lutte, the letter was published in it (29 August 1937).
18. Colonial Councils were administrative bodies with limited powers; there was a small property qualification for franchise.
19. Phan Van Hum was a teacher of law, literature and philosophy. He began political activity as a nationalist, but joined the Trotskyist movement in France in the early 1930s. Returning to Saigon in July 1933, he took part in La Lutte, was deported to Poulo Condore during the war, and was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 in Bien Hoa. For Tran Van Thach see note 13. Their joint letter to Trotsky appears below.
20. Bao Dai, last emperor of Vietnam, succeeded his father in 1925 at the age of 12, but did not take the throne until 1932. He collaborated with the French, and when the Japanese coup took place agreed to work with them; he abdicated in 1945, joined the Vietminh briefly, went into exile, and returned as a French puppet again from 1949 to 1955. Tran Trong Kim, a mild-mannered academic, was his Prime Minister in 1945.
21. Japan surrendered to the imperialist Allies on 14 August 1945, after the atom bombing of Hiroshima: this provoked a revolutionary situation in Vietnam. In the north the Vietminh marched from their jungle bases into Hanoi and declared a ‘Democratic Republic’ on 2 September. According to Stalin’s agreement with the Allies, the south was to be placed under French control again, and while the southern Vietminh tried to prepare for this, it was resisted by the nationalists, and by the Trotskyists who called for the workers’ councils which had sprung up to take power. The Stalinists arrested delegates to a congress of workers’ councils and managed to establish a ‘provisional government’ despite the unpopularity of their line; they stood by as the French reinvaded in October, concentrating their fire on the Trotskyists, all of whose leaders were killed.
22. According to a report published in the journal Quatrième Internationale in 1947, Ta Thu Thau was tried by a Vietminh ‘people’s tribunal’ after his arrest. Due to his great prestige in the workers’ movement, this tribunal could not be persuaded to find him guilty of anything; then he was shot anyway.
23. Pierre Pages was French colonial governor of Indochina throughout the 1930s.
This essay is based upon the following sources: Archives nationales (Paris) F7-13406, 13408, 13409, 13410, 13167, 13170, Archives Outre-mer D2514; La Depeche d’Indochine, Saigon, various issues 1933-40; Nguyen Van Dinh, Ta thu thau, to qudc gia toi quoc te (Ta Thu Thau, from Nationalism to Internationalism), Saigon 1938; Phuong Lan, Nha each mang Ta thu Thau (The revolutionary Ta Thu Thau), Saigon 1974; D. Hemery, Du patriotisme au marxism: l’immigration vietnamienne en France 1926 a 1930 (From patriotism to Marxism: the Vietnamese emigration in France 1926-30), in Le Mouvement social, no.90, Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Revolutionnaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine (Vietnamese revolutionaries and colonial power in Indochina), Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Ta Thu Thau: l’itineraire politique d’un révolutionnaire vietnamien pendant les annees 1930 (Ta Thu Thau: the political path of a Vietnamese revolutionary through the 1930s) in Histoire de l’Asie du Sud-Est. The translation and the notes are the work of Simon Pirani, to whom, along with the author, our thanks are due.
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