PARIS, April 13 — Fifty Peugeot strikers invaded a meeting here of 300 top Socialist Party leaders at their national council, charging the Socialist government with betrayal in not fighting the company’s plan to lay off 8,000 workers in 2014 and close the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant. Over-running the security guards, the angry workers disrupted the meeting, loudly chanting, “No factory closures, outlaw layoffs!” and “We are workers, not vandals, the bosses are vandals!”
The Socialist Prime Minister, who had just finished a speech defending the government’s austerity policies, fled the hall when he saw the workers coming.
The strike began at the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant on January 16, with the workers setting up shop inside and outside the factory. The assembly workshop has been renamed “Strike Square.”
The three-month strike has paralyzed production which used to turn out 500 cars a day. The company has kept the plant open with the hope of producing 250 cars daily with scabs, but “Today, practically no car leaves the factory,” said a 61-yar-old worker, Harfaoul, pointing to the immobile assembly line. The workers have chased after anyone who wants to help the company function, throwing bolts and emptying fire extinguishers against office windows.
The CGT union leadership is misleading the workers in appealing to the austerity-scripted government to set up a mediation process as a solution, saying, “You mustn’t leave us alone against the bosses,” with the threat that betrayed workers will vote for the openly fascist National Front.
This is the result of being trapped in the electoral process, presented with the “choice” of the Socialists, who are following an austerity policy, or the le Pen-led National Front, but with the same result. The latter is talking alliance with the right-wing Sarkozy UMP party — which lost last year’s election to the Socialists — and hoping to develop a populist appeal among workers sold out by the Socialists.
Rank-and-file workers’ direct strike action, as at Peugeot, needs communist leadership with the goal of overthrowing the job-destroying profit system rather than being diverted into depending on still another bosses’ party as the solution to the mass unemployment built into capitalism.

Over 30,000 books on Vietnam are in print. Why is one more, Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse, of unique value? The short answer is that it can be used as educational material. It provides 262 pages of historical facts gained from interviews and ten years of research, which prove that relentless massacres of workers and peasants on the ground and from the air were a core element of U.S. policy 40-50 years ago just as they are today.
Studying this evidence can help readers think more deeply about the causes of American racism, militarism and fascism. It fortifies our argument that U.S. capitalism and its advanced form, imperialism on a global scale, must be destroyed and that only a communist revolution can achieve it. We should make every effort to have everyone we know read the book’s fully documented exposures of the atrocities and unending mass killings that took place in Vietnam for over a decade.  
How many of us have heard of “Speedy Express”? Turse describes this six-month operation across the Mekong Delta (Dec. 68 - May 69) led by the army’s 9th Division as “industrial-scale slaughter.” Led by Gen. Julian Ewell, the operation was planned against a background of an attempt to jump-start peace talks in Paris before Lyndon Johnson left office. The U.S. sought to bring the rice-rich region and its huge population under Saigon’s control before any peace agreement.
Ewell was given a free hand and resources that included “helicopter gunships firing hundreds of rounds per minute, B-52s shaking the earth . . . F-4 Phantoms dropping canisters of napalm by the ton, navy ships off the coast that could hurl Volkswagen-sized shells at targets miles inland, and Swift Boats patrolling the delta’s waterways with machine guns . . .”  The results were a “kill ratio” (enemy to U.S. dead) of 134:1 in April 1969. Ewell’s goal was to kill 6,000 or more a month. Body counts were the most important measure of success. Who were these “enemies”?
The Viet Cong generally avoided combat when faced with the full might of the Americans, and the army’s own estimates showed that enemy forces in the region never declined and may have increased slightly. “Night search hunter-killer missions” were introduced. Primitive night-vision devices were used to identify targets, and accompanying helicopter gunships raked the area with machine guns. Top adviser John Paul Vann reported that troops simply targeted any and all people, homes and water buffalo. U.S. forces shot anyone who tried to run from the helicopters. The act of running made them enemies that could be added to sought-after body counts.
Speedy Express terrorized civilians with 6,500 tactical air strikes and the dropping of 5,078 tons of bombs and 1,784 tons of napalm. It is beyond the scope of this report to discuss the genocidal effects of the herbicide that was extensively used along river banks.
In 1971, a former aid worker, A. Shimkin, served as a Newsweek reporter. A master statistician, Shimkin crunched the numbers reported at the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the military’s nightly press briefings in Saigon. He studied the ratio of “enemy kills” to weapons recovered. The 9th Infantry reported killing 10,899 enemy troops in Speedy Express and recovering only 748 weapons. During the week of April 19, the reported ratio was 699 to 9. The army responded to charges of murdering civilians by explaining that the victims were “unarmed Viet Cong.”
Turse details how Newsweek and other media refused to publish Shimikin’s and other reports of atrocities and how the military covered up war crimes. One account exposes how a young officer named Colin Powell had nothing but praise for officers accused in the My Lai and other massacres. The book’s detailed history shows how the racism used to dehumanize victims was promoted from the top down. Enlisted men did commit crimes due to ignorance and racist thinking, but Kill Anything that Moves shows that the worst racists were the officers and fascist CIA and State Department planners who relied on anti-communism to justify genocide.
U.S. racist massacres did not begin or end with Vietnam. They continue in Afghanistan. In earlier wars, North Korea was “cratered” and millions of Korean civilians were slaughtered. Napalm was used in needless fire-bombing of Japanese cities other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were saved for the greatest terror spectacle of all.
Massacres have been part of human history since the beginning of exploitative societies, but what is important for us to do is point out that capitalist “progress” has never been able to fulfill humanity’s hope for peace. The technology controlled by imperialists has led to mass slaughter of workers on an unprecedented scale. Capitalist control of education, culture and the media has resulted in too many Americans becoming complacent about the use of advanced technology to slaughter non-combatants. Americans are taught that their military is a “force for good,” as the latest U.S. Navy commercial tells us.
PLP struggled, often successfully, to raise the level of understanding of U.S. imperialism among the hundreds of thousands who participated in the antiwar movement our party played a key role starting in the early1960s.  Shaken by the mass character of that movement, the U.S. retreat from Vietnam was followed by a powerful ideological counterattack and intensified glorification of militarism.
Hollywood’s Rambo series was a crude example of the stepped-up propaganda used to support aggression in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.  The intense anti-Asian racism of the academy award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, attempted to justify the atrocities of U.S. imperialism’s war making.
The move to a better-paid volunteer army replacing an army of draftees, the promotion of patriotism and revenge for 9/11, and the demonization of “rogue states that hate democracy” make our job as anti-imperialists more challenging. With reporters “embedded,” media coverage of wars is better managed. We have to fight harder on all ideological fronts. Nick Turse’s Kill Anything that Moves can be used to help win people to our party. It should be used energetically — by students, GIs, study groups, high school and college teachers, and parents trying to bring political understanding to their children.
Close to a year ago, Challenge carried a front page story on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ midnight murders of 16 women and children in Afghanistan. We have to continue this type of exposure that pinpoints how racism leads to war crimes and how military technology is used to massacre millions, all to further the aim of U.S. imperialists to dominate the world.

Boston Bombing  Whoever planted the pipe bombs that killed three people at the Boston Marathon and injured more than 150 is a terrorist who committed a heinous act of murder.  We must understand that this tragedy is just one example of many in the world.  Everyday people in Iraq, Afghanistan, India and in several African countries, routinely experience urban bombings.   Even wealthy cities, such as London and Tel Aviv, have experienced urban bombings.  They have become part of life in our unequal, unjust world. 

Capitalism Kills  The root of terrorism worldwide is the anger and suffering generated by poverty and inequality.  Capitalism is a truly brutal system, causing massive war, starvation, and racist inequality throughout the world.  This deadly profit system causes horrific destruction and loss of life from Haiti to Greece.  The U.S. has the productive capacity to produce enough food to feed the whole planet.  However, 40 million people worldwide die every year due to starvation.  This, too is a kind of terrorism, where innocent lives are lost needlessly.  Even in the U.S. today, we experience economic terrorism in the form of huge cuts in workers’ wages and benefits and massive unemployment.

US Government is one of the biggest Terrorists    One of the biggest perpetrators of terrorism is the very person who claims to be our protector, President Obama.  Obama and the US government claim that “surgical” drone strikes, using unpiloted aircraft, avoid civilians.  They say that drones offer a low-cost, politically low-risk means of prosecuting their “war on terror” without engaging U.S. troops.  However, of the untold hundreds of innocent people killed so far by drones, nearly half are children, according to a recent study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of mostly noncombatants have been killed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan alone as it fights to control the most plentiful supplies of cheap oil in the world.  These are examples of state sponsored terrorism.

Bombing and Fascism   Since 9/11, the bosses have been monitoring all workers more closely.  Although they do this in the name of security neither the country nor the world is safer today.  Similarly, the Boston bombing tragedy, will be used to win people to accept more centralized government control over our lives.  Under Obama, Supermax prisons continue to lock up 1000s in complete isolation, driving many insane. Many of these prisoners are completely innocent. Under Obama, we have more racist cop terror.  Under Obama, we have drone surveillance inside the US.  Under Obama, we have more FBI wiretapping and more cameras watching us. As the manager of the US profit empire, Obama is leading us down the path of fascism (i.e. police state). 

The working class worldwide suffers from U.S. imperialism’s march to wider wars.  Our class’s answer remains to intensify class struggle against these murderous rulers and their poisonous profit system. We can see this happening in Pakistan’s mass strikes, and in workers’ mass protests in Greece and Spain. We see renewed struggle beginning to emerge in the U.S., with the fight -backs against racist cop terror and anti-Wall Street demonstrators in cities across the country.

The only solution is communist revolution  Progressive Labor Party is a revolutionary communist party dedicated to eliminating capitalism as the only way to end imperialism, fascism, racism, sexism, exploitation, poverty, and terrorism.  If we want peace in the world, we must eliminate the war-makers.  We are fighting for communism—a society run by workers where the wealth is distributed according to need not profit.

March on May Day  May Day is a holiday celebrated worldwide.  It was inspired by a massive general strike for the eight-hour work day organized by workers in Chicago in 1886.  On Saturday, April 27th, in Brooklyn NY, Progressive Labor Party will march to fight to smash all forms of terror including imperialist war and racist police terror, and to end racism, sexism, and wage slavery.  Join us! 

As North Korea continues to defy the U.S. with the threat of more nuclear weapons tests, it no longer seems impossible that the small country’s military rulers might spark a second Korean War (see box). What is certain, however, is that the underlying inter-imperialist struggle is an even graver danger for the world’s working class. As China enables North Korea’s missile rattling, a widening conflict with the U.S. seems to be growing.
North Korea’s latest war-leaning rhetoric was provoked by U.S. rulers, who conducted joint war exercises with South Korea in March. Pyongyang, North Korea is following the pattern set by the U.S. as it moved from World War II into the Cold War against the Soviet Union by way of mass slaughters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the U.S. rulers had the atom bomb, they had to show they could use it — otherwise, they would lose deterrent power against their enemy. But if North Korea’s military is attempting to make its meager atomic arsenal a realistic threat, there could be unintended consequences for both sides.
While Beijing doesn’t directly call the shots in Pyongyang, China has propped up North Korea with fuel and cash and reliable support at the United Nations, all for long-term, geo-strategic reasons. A nuclear-armed, super-militarized, virulently anti-U.S. North Korea buffers 880 miles of China’s land border, as well as adjacent waters. Its growing potential to nuke South Korea weakens the leverage of the 30,000 U.S. troops who remain in the South.
Currently U.S. war planners are focused firmly on China, the main economic, political, and military challenge to U.S. imperialism. This explains the U.S. rulers’ fervent attempts to assemble an alliance of anti-China powers for any future confrontation. It also accounts for their furious anti-communist media blitz against North Korea, which is repeatedly referred to as a “communist state.” In fact, a communist state—one where the working class holds state power—exists nowhere in today’s world, and certainly not in fascist North Korea.
Unintended Consequences
As shown by the warships and planes stationed off the Korean peninsula, President Barack Obama and the capitalist class he represents are taking North Korea very seriously. As ex-Defense Department hack Patrick Cronin, now senior director at the finance capital- and Pentagon-funded Center for a New American Security think tank, wrote in Foreign Policy (4/5/13):
The Korean Peninsula is on a knife’s edge, one fateful step from war….There is no single red line that, when crossed, would trigger war, but the potential for miscalculation and escalation is high….The desire to show strength, the fear of looking weak, and the presence of tons of hardware provides more than enough tinder that a spark could start a peninsula-wide conflagration. An accident — such as a straying missile, an incident at sea or in the air, a shooting near the Northern Limit Line or the Demilitarized Zone — could trigger an action-reaction cycle that could spiral out of control if Pyongyang, running out of threats or low-level provocations, were to gamble on a more daring move. It might calculate that a bold gesture would sow doubt and dissent in South Korea, drive a risk-averse United States to back down and restrain its eager ally, and hand China a fait accompli in which Beijing has no alternative to protecting its upstart neighbor.
From the Council on Foreign Relations, another ultra-imperialist policy factory, comes an even more ominous message. Korea expert Scott Snyder warned that a “miscalculation could have deadly consequences.. [W]e had the Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter passing through South Korea during [North Korea’s winter nuclear] exercises and...signaling to the North Koreans that the U.S. had a nuclear response as an option” (CFR, 4/1/13).
The short-term possibility of war in Korea, or in Iran, could embroil U.S. capitalists in a local or regional conflict. Presently, their longer-term outlook remains fixed on China, which outnumbers the U.S. in population by about four to one. According to Chuck Hagel, Obama’s new defense secretary, U.S. rulers are desperately seeking a war-making coalition to include India, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey. While India’s population nearly matches China’s (1.27 billion against 1.36 billion), U.S. strategists find it lacking in loyalty and purpose.
The Rothschilds are pro-U.S. British billionaires who own the influential Economist magazine. They recently ran an editorial (3/30/13) criticizing India for failing to pull its weight against China weight or to proclaim its allegiance to the U.S. war machine:
India is often spoken of in the same breath as China because of its billion-plus population, economic promise, value as a trading partner and growing military capabilities.... But whereas China’s rise is a given, India is still widely seen as a nearly-power that cannot quite get its act together.... India’s huge potential to be a force for stability and an upholder of the rules-based international system is far from being realized. One big reason is that the country lacks the culture to pursue an active security policy.... India should start to shape its own destiny and the fate of its region. It needs to take strategy more seriously.... And it needs a well-funded navy that can become both a provider of maritime security along some of the world’s busiest sea-lanes...to shoulder the responsibilities of a great power. Most of all, though, India needs to give up its outdated philosophy of non-alignment.
U.S. Becoming A
Second-Rate Power?
U.S. rulers are haunted by the growing threat that rival imperialists will displace the U.S. as the world’s top dog. They know if they lose control over the world’s vital resources, especially oil and gas, they will become a second-rate power. They realize they must build for the contingency of an expansive conflict down the road, even as they plan for what may be more imminent combat in Korea or Iran.
These bosses also have an Achilles heel — racism. To motivate the U.S. military, they promote a racist outlook by demonizing the enemy as sub-human, much as they did in Iraq. But workers in the countries which the U.S. seeks as allies have long been victims of the same imperialist, colonial racism. And the Pentagon cannot assume that its own troops will automatically follow its racist lead.
For the working class, the picture is fundamentally different. Wars of all sizes, forced upon us by competing capitalist nation states, may well occur in the short term. Our long-range goal, however, lies in forging a working-class, communist revolution from the crucible of any profit-driven world war.
May Day — The Workers’ Answer
Our class’s necessity, in short, is to turn imperialist war into class war for a worker-run society. We can achieve this only by building a mass, revolutionary communist party of millions, the Progressive Labor Party. To that end, we must win workers and youth in all the rulers’ organizations, including the military, to the necessity of wiping out the capitalist profit system, the root of all evils afflicting our class.
That’s why building PLP is the order of the day, symbolized by the masses of workers and youth who will celebrate and march on May Day, the holiday of the international working class. May Day was born in the 1886 general strike of Chicago’s workers for the eight-hour day. It continues to unite the world’s workers by fighting against capitalism’s exploitation, racism, sexism and war. On May Day, as noted by communism’s founders, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, our class marches under one flag. We hold the red flag high, led by one communist party worldwide for our emancipation from the hell of the bosses’ profit system.
Join us!

**********************

1950 Korean War: Prelude to 2013?

When World War II ended, the Korean peninsula, in the wake of its occupation by the defeated Japanese fascists, was “temporarily” divided into North and South. The South was controlled by former fascist collaborators with the Japanese who were now protected by U.S. rulers. The North was led by anti-fascists who had fought these collaborators.
In June 1950, a war erupted between North and South. The U.S. said the North invaded—a claim open to dispute. On June 25, the early editions of the New York Times ran an Associated Press dispatch reporting that the South’s troops had crossed into North Korea. But later editions dropped that story and launched a full-scale media offensive claiming the North had initiated the clash.
Whatever happened, the conflict became a war between the Soviet/China-backed North and the U.S.-backed South. The Cold War became hot. The U.S. drove the North’s army toward the border with China. Commanding General Douglas MacArthur wanted to cross that border, but the tide turned when massed Chinese volunteers drove the U.S. forces back into the South. U.S. President Truman fired MacArthur. Eventually the U.S. ruling class decided it had no choice but to settle the conflict at the original North-South dividing line, which has stood to this day, with 30,000 U.S. troops staying in the South. One million Koreans lost their lives in the war.
Unfortunately, the Soviet Union — having kept many capitalist features, including the wage system — failed to develop communism and reverted to a state capitalist regime. The North Korean leadership, caught up in the Cold War against the U.S. and its South Korean puppet, became a Soviet puppet. Following the Soviet example, it developed into its present fascist state.
Workers throughout the Korean peninsula, on both sides of the line, are suffering under the capitalist yoke. Only communism will free them from this exploitation and the constant threat of imperialist war.