Solidarity with our threatened militants

In recent months militants and sections of the ICC have received threats or thinly veiled calls for their assassination.

In December the UHP-ARDE [1] published on its website a text titled ‘The science and art of blockheads’ [2] which continues a call for the assassination of our militants via a macabre chain of syllogisms, which begin by openly accusing us of being “racists” and of defending bourgeois politics in a veiled way; then they establish a hierarchy of definitions that starts with “blockheads”, passing on to “stupid arses” and ends up with “imbeciles”. Upon these premises the following conclusion is drawn “AGAINST THE BOURGEOIS CAMPAIGNS OF LIES AND REPRESSION OF OUR STRUGGLES: DEATH TO THE IMBECILES!” [3]

 

A month previously, we had received in the mail box of our section in Spain an anonymous letter that finished with the following threat: “You are a gang of sons of whores and you will reap what you are sowing, little professors of shit. Signed, a lumpen”

 

Recently, in January 2005, a member of the so-called IFICC [4] threatened to “cut the throat” of a member of our section in France. [5]

 

Faced with the succession of threats by these gangsters, which are totally alien to proletarian behaviour, what should the attitude of revolutionaries and proletarian elements be? Not to give it any importance because they are just boasts or the product of a moment of over excitement? To fall into such an appreciation would be a grave error.

 

In the first place, such an attitude means forgetting the historical experience of the workers’ movement. This teaches us that the killing of worker militants has been preceded - and in great part prepared - by a succession of apparently trivial acts: false accusations, threats, intimidation. In short, a series of small links that joined together form a great chain. Thus, the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919 - perpetrated by forces following the orders of the Social Democrat executioners - had a long period of incubation: from 1905 there were serious denigrations, threats and challenges against this proletarian militant. None of these acts appeared worrying but the crime of 1919 was the manifestation of the infernal logic that they contained. In the same way, the assassination of Trotsky, executed by the infamous Mercader, was the culmination of a series of orchestrated steps by the Stalinist rabble: first Trotsky was accused of being an agent of the Gestapo; there then began a campaign which openly demanded his head. Then came the pressure on one of his sons (Lyova) which ended in what had all the hallmarks of a ‘medical’ assassination [6]. Later on there were the intensifying direct death threats by Stalinism’s Mexican hit men, leading to the tragic end that we all know about. History shows that there exists a more or less direct link between today’s threats and tomorrow’s assassinations. These are the outcome of a network of lies, threats and hate campaigns.

 

In the second place, we cannot forget the context in which these three threats we have received have taken place. In recent months we have seen a new outbreak and multiplication of the IFICC’s campaigns. As their Bulletin no 28 shows they refer to us as “bastards”; this, linked to endless insults, threats and lies, helps to produce a climate where physical attacks against the ICC are legitimised.

 

It is no accident that these threats happened in the context that we have laid out. Their authors have clearly decided on their camp. To the insults, hate campaigns, the whole fabric of lies and calumnies, they have now added calls for assassination.

 

This is not the first time that we have seen such an “intervention”. In 1995-96, in the context of an equally repugnant campaign against the ICC carried out by other protagonists, [7] the so-called GCI – a group that figures on the links page of the UHP/ARDE – used the same method of syllogisms to attack the ICC and call for the killing of our comrades in Mexico. The first premise being that our comrades had denounced the Stalinist Maoist Sendero Luminoso group in Peru. This apparently made us accomplices in the massacre of proletarian prisoners and led to the following ‘logical’ deduction: “for the ICC, as for the Peruvian state and police, to place oneself on the side of the oppressed is to support the Sendero Luminoso”. This led to another syllogism, according to which “in the worker’s camp, this kind of amalgam is considered to be typical of the police or informers”. From here to a new sophism: “these are the same Social Democratic arguments that Domingo Arango and Abad de Santillan used faced with the violent actions of revolutionary militants”. And what is the conclusion of this logic? “As a result of this type of calumny, which is really used by the state, Domingo Arango received a bullet in the head and we cannot but deplore that Abad de Santillan did not suffer the same fate” (from Communisme no 43, organ of the GCI) . [8]

 

We are aware of the process that these threats are part of. We are not intimidated by this and we will respond to it in the same way as we did in 1996: “None of this is going to make us retreat. We are deepening our struggle and the whole of the ICC is mobilised to defend our section in Mexico, using a weapon that only the proletariat possesses: internationalism. The international unity of the ICC, from the bourgeois point of view, contains the intolerable inconvenience that all attempts to destroy one of its parts immediately runs into the active mobilisation and solidarity of the whole”. [9]

 

 

 

Proletarian solidarity is the main weapon against these types of attacks

We have firmly rejected the infiltration of this kind of behaviour into the ranks of revolutionaries because this is the only way to break the chain that unites the present murky calls for the “death of the imbeciles” with the assassination of communists tomorrow.

Each social class has its methods. We already know those of the bourgeoisie: on the one hand, the ‘political’ weapons of slander, threats, intimidation and blackmail, and on the other, the more direct weapons of crime, terror and torture. [10]

Naturally, these weapons do not form part of the arsenal of the proletariat and its genuinely revolutionary groups. We have other, much more effective weapons for the struggle against capitalism. One of these, the most important, is solidarity.

 

Solidarity is the strength of the proletariat, the expression of its unity. Solidarity shows its enemies that any attack on its parts will immediately encounter the reply of the whole.

 

Therefore, the ICC unanimously expresses its solidarity with the threatened comrades and sections and adopts all of the necessary measures for its defence. In the same way, we ask our sympathisers to express their active solidarity. We equally ask this of all those who take part in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism; and even if they have disagreements with the positions of the ICC, we hope that they will see the necessity to fight disgusting attacks like this.

 

Solidarity with the threatened comrades is not only the best form of defence for them but also for the defence of all the militants and comrades who struggle against capitalism. Equally it is the best contribution that we can make towards assuring the defence of communist militants tomorrow.

 

The practice of slanders, lies, threats and intimidation is totally incompatible with the goal of the world human community that the proletariat aspires to install after the destruction of the capitalist state. It is vital to eradicate the infiltration of behaviour that is nothing but the expression and reproduction of the rotting capitalist society that we want to abolish.

 

The clarification of revolutionary positions, the struggle against capitalism and it barbarity, cannot be unbalanced by the shady manoeuvres of these gangs of phonies who stealthily work behind ‘revolutionary positions’ in order to hurl poisonous darts against the true struggle for the proletarian cause.

 

 

 

Solidarity with our militants and the threatened sections!

 

 

International Communist Current 15.2.05

 

 

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[1] UHP are the initials of the Unios Hermanos Proletarios (United Proletarian Brothers). ARDE is the publication that appears to be the mouthpiece of the various groups that form the UHP.

[2] See the reply of our Section in Spain in Accion Proletaria No 180: ‘Reply to UHP-ARDE: an honest blockhead is better than a cheating scoundrel’.

[3] This underlines the cowardly and devious way in which these individuals call for the killing of our militants. With disgusting hypocrisy, they do not say things openly: firstly, they say the ICC is composed of “imbeciles” and then later on they end with “death to imbeciles”.

[4] A group of thugs that call themselves the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ and whose only activity consists of spewing forth tons of lies against the ICC.

[5] See the article denouncing this episode in Revolution Internationale no 354.

[6] See the testimonies about the strange confinement of Trotsky’s son in a Russian clinic in Paris in Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky and Vereeken’s The GPU in the Trotskyist movement.

[7] At this time it was groups like the ‘Communist Bulletin Group’ in Britain or ‘Hilo Rojo’ in Spain, along with certain other ‘circles’, who were the authors of these campaigns. We have not heard much from them since.

[8] We can see from these that the editors of UHP-ARDE have not invented anything in their cowardly calls for our assassination. They must have been inspired by the methods of their cousins in the GCI.

[9] Extract from the article ‘The GCI parasites call for the murder of our militants in Mexico’, which denounces the GCI in solidarity with our section in Mexico. This was published in all our territorial press at the time.

[10] We should point out that the lumpenised elements are deeply attracted to these bourgeois methods and this is why, in periods of revolution, they are used to fill the ranks of the ‘Frei Korps’ and similar shock troops of capital, as in Germany in 1919.