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The text above is from a flier put out by the
American Trotskyist youth group just prior to World War II. Youth for
Socialist Action is reproducing it to give an illustration of the betrayals
by Stalinism of the international working class. Tens of millions of
workers of from around the world would go on to loose their life during
World War II, which the Stalinists never ceased to actively support, going
so far as to oppose any efforts by labor or Blacks to strike or protest
against discrimination for fear it would disrupt the war effort.
The Young Communist League was born in the struggle
against the last world war. When the entire world, under the guise of a
struggle for democracy, was engaged in the business of scientifically
organizing mass murders, when the fields of Europe were soaked with the
blood of the world working class, and all humanity seemed sunk into the
hideous abyss of medievalism, young communists courageously raised the red
banner, the symbol of revolt against war and oppression, the symbol of the
struggle for a new society. Their slogan “TURN THE IMPERIALIST WAR INTO
A CIVIL WAR,” was heard by the war-weary masses. The Russian workers,
under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, overthrew the Tsar and organized
the new Soviet Government. The German workers overthrew the Kaiser, and
throughout the world the working class shook its fist in the face of the
their rulers, the bosses.
But since this heroic struggle over 20 years have passed, and these two
decades have tragically seen the growth of reaction and the parallel degeneration
of the Communist International. The once revolutionary movement of the
Third International, in the footsteps of the Social Democrats, has
abandoned the independent struggle of the workers for socialism and joined
in the new, more gigantic fraud of the bosses for another world war for
“democracy.”
The American Student Union, controlled by the Y.C.L., at its national
convention in December, abandoned the struggle of militant students against
the R.O.T.C. and publicly proclaimed their loyal support of Roosevelt’s
plans to use the unemployed youth on N.Y.A. to train pilots of death. The
ex-Communist Party has more than once expressed its whole-hearted support
of naval and army expansion. One cannot read the ex-communist press without
amazement at their open pro-war, patriotic propaganda. The red flag is
replaced by the American flag. The song of world working-class solidarity,
the International, is substituted by the song of American imperialism, the
Star-Spangled Banner.
You want to fight fascism? So do we; as is evident, not only by our general
propaganda, but in action by the anti-Franco demonstration in Oakland where
two of our comrades were arrested, by the anti-fascist picket line in New
York, in Los Angeles, and in many other sections of the country. But we
can’t fight fascism by supporting the system the system that breeds it. Nor
by giving our pledge of allegiance to the Roosevelt government that, in
order to prevent the workers from voicing their opposition to the
imperialist slaughter, will organize a fascist, military regime themselves,
e.g. the M-Day Plan. Fascism must be fought by the independent struggle of
the workers, by the trade union movement.
Members of the Y.C.L.! Join the revolutionary struggle against the coming
imperialist war! Join the militant struggle against the fascists! Join the
Young Peoples Socialist League, FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
BUILD WORKERS’ DEFENSE GUARDS!
ALL WAR FUNDS TO THE
UNEMPLOYED!
-YOUTH PEOPLES SOCIALIST LEAGUE, FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!!
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