No. 19, Summer 2004  Table of Contents Selected articles linked

 

USA PATRIOT Act, Police-State Measures   Since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, there has been a wholesale assault on democratic rights in the United States and around the world. The population is being regimented for the open-ended “war on terror” proclaimed by President George W. Bush. Liberals wring their hands out of concern over the threat to civil liberties in this repressive climate. But the vast expansion of police-state measures in the U.S. is not an act of retaliation, or partisan “dirty tricks” – it is the result of bipartisan plans by the ruling class that predate the terror attacks of 2001. The security measures being imposed on midtown Manhattan for the Republican National Convention, like the lockdown of Wall Street and Lower Manhattan following 9/11, is a practice run for martial law – or more accurately, for “martial rule,” since as the architects of these plans state, no new laws are required to impose military control. To defeat this ruling-class onslaught, it is necessary to mobilize the working class at the head of the poor, oppressed minorities, immigrants and all those who would defend fundamental democratic rights, and to lead them in a revolutionary struggle for power. American Gestapo  (25 August 2004)

No to Bush, Kerry, Nader! Democrats, Republicans – War Makers, Strikebreakers For a Revolutionary Workers Party Seldom has the fraud of bourgeois electoral “democracy” been so blatant. The United States carries out an unprovoked imperialist attack on a semi-colonial country, Iraq, after already invading and occupying Afghanistan. The pretext for the war – alleged Iraqi stocks of “weapons of mass destruction” – goes up in smoke. The supposed liberators are revealed as torturers and murderers. Thousands of Iraqis are slaughtered in Nazi-like “collective punishment.” A puppet regime installed by the U.S. in Baghdad decrees martial law. As Iraqi resistance to the colonial occupation mounts and the body bags of hundreds of dead U.S. soldiers come back, a majority of the American population turns against the war. Yet their opposition will not be expressed at the polls. Both the partner parties of U.S. capitalism are war parties: Democrat John Kerry as well as Republican George Bush vow to “stay the course” (continue the murderous occupation). None of the capitalist candidates, including Ralph Nader and the Greens, are for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. And all of them would regiment the U.S. in the name of “security.” Terror War Elections (23 August 2004)  Other articles in The Internationalist No. 19

Iraqis Resist Colonial Occupation, Military Recruiters Try to Snare Students

Il Manifesto: Military Recruiters in U.S. Schools

Post-Soviet SL/ICL: New Zigzags on the Centrist Road

Nader and His “Left” Cheerleaders

Popular-Front Left Buzzes Around the Democrats

Boston: Disruption By Anti-Abortion Provocateur Squelched

“Anti-Authoritarian” Reformists Call Cops on Reds

Repression in Fox’s Mexico: Kidnapping, Torture and Political Murder

The Corupus Christi Massacre