REPRESSION CHARACTERISES GRENADA

KINGSTON — Anti-labor laws, repression, a military economic
pact with the Chilean junta and a corrupt bureaucracy characterize the
government of the island of Grenada, led by prime minister Gairy.
These accusations were made in Kingston, Jamaica, by Bernard
Coard, Grenadian member of parliament and Executive Committee
member of the island’s New Jewel Movement.

This year Gairy has issued three decrees banning strikes, slowdowns
and any other kind of industrial action in the ‘‘essential’’ services.
Security forces break into homes and arrest any citizens on the mere
suspicion of being ‘‘an opponent of the government.”’ Gairy openly
boasts about the fact he receives arms from the Chilean junta.

BELFAST: DOCKERS ACT FOR RELEASE OF WORKMATE

BELFAST — Belfast dock workers, protested the detention of one
of their workmates in Liverpool under the Terror Act, by blocking the
city’s port and laying siege to the direct rule offices of the Stormont
(parliament) in one of the biggest industrial actions in years.

Dockers from Belfast’s deep water docks travel regularly to Britain
for training courses and the latest group were given the usual clearance
by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But one of the party of 9 workers

was detained. Irish Transport and General Workers Union secretary .

Michael Mullins has cabled British prime minister Callaghan demand-
ing the worker’s immediate release.

NKOMO TERMS ANGLO-U.S. PLAN FOR ZIMBABWE ‘DEAD’

LUSAKA — Joshua Nkomo, joint leader of the Zimbabwe Patriotic
Front, has discounted chances for a peaceful transition to black major-
ity rule in the country, saying that the issue can only be settled by
military means.

Nkomo made his remarks in a British Broadcasting Corporation
radio interview from Zambia. Answering questions of listeners from
Britain, Nkomo said the Anglo-American plan for all party talks was
dead as a result ofa new offensive by Rhodesian forces and the arrest of
Patriotic Front supporters under martial law.

SOMOZA CONDEMNED AS ‘BLOODY DICTATOR’

MOSCOW — The Soviet Peace Committee has condemned Anas-
tasio Somoza as ‘‘a bloody dictator’’. In a statement the Committee
said, ‘The participation in the Nicaraguan dictator’s punitive opera-
tions of U.S.. and Chilean mercenaries, as well as counter-
revolutionaries sent from the U.S., is a source of profound anger and
indignation for the Soviet people. The threat of direct military interfer-
ence in Nicaragua by Latin American dictatorial regimes is growing.

‘*The just struggle of the Nicaraguan people has the support of all the
peoples of progressive Latin American countries and the whole
world’’, the statement concludes.

Cuban premier Fidel Castro is escorted by Algerian president Houari
Boumedienne on his arrival in the Algerian capital. The Cuban leader
was returning from Ethiopia where he attended a solidarity conference

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCTOBER 6, 1978—Page 4

BIDITORILALL
COMIMUBINT

Promises, promises — that is one
commodity Liberals and Tories believe
workers should get more of. But long
experience teaches that under Liberals
or Tories, it’s the corporations who get
the profits, and the workers who get the
big stick. Recent words and deeds of the
old parties show they need a jolting chal-
lenge from labor.

The Liberals showed where they stand
with their crisis policies of mass unem-
ployment, unchecked corporation pro-
fits, runaway inflation and the slashing of
a host of social benefits of which family
allowance and unemployment insurance
are two. What they stubbornly refuse to
do is to take the reasonable suggestion of
cutting the nearly $5-billion annual arms
burden and beginning to right their
wrongs by using the money for social
needs, including job creation.

Far from righting the Liberal wrongs,
the Tories want to put their own stamp
on them. While Tory leader Clark pre-
tends his concern for working people,
his lieutenant Jelinek cries outright for
abolition of union rights for workers in
the public sector. (Can the private sector
be far behind?)

What the Tories really stand for was
revealed by Clark in the press, Sept. 27.
Facing smartly backward, he said: “We
will get government out of areas in which
it doesn’t belong by ‘privatizing’ agencies
like Petrocan, Canadair and Northern

Arms and the real threat

To make people believe a lie unhesitat-
ingly, it must be a monstrous lie; so said
the Nazi propagandists. The armaments
manufacturers, with their apologists in
the big business media, have taken this to
heart. Thus our skulls are assaulted with
the cry that the USA, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization powers, including
Canada, must escalate the arms race by
insane leaps, because of a mythical threat
from the Soviet Union.

The defence Canadians really need is
defence of our own lives, our standards
and our future, threatened by this mon-
strous lie.

Armaments production is the richest
profit vein ever struck by a clique of
monopoly corporations; it robs the pub-
lic treasury, depresses every worthwhile
facet of daily life, and wipes out jobs —
because modern arms production is not
labor intensive.

The big media hide these facts, as well
as the fact, known to Western
economists, that in the socialist USSR
nobody profits from arms manufacture.
They know the USSR needs every rou-
ble, every worker for its peace-time tasks,
to outstrip the West, yes, but not in arms,
in quality of life.

Those reasons and the USSR’s loss of
20 million lives in World War II are be-
hind dozens of Soviet arms limitation
and disarmament proposals at the UN. A
veritable flood of UN evidence is buried
or distorted by the capitalist media.

The rich Toronto Star’s Sunday series"
of full-page excerpts from a fictionalized
World War III, said to have been written
by a British general, fans flames of
hatred against the USSR, a crude device
to seduce Canadians into accepting

Old parties face backward.

Transportation Limited, and by invok

ing’ a ‘sunset’ law on Crown corporatio#
which have outlived their usefulness.” @
sunset” law would automatically
Crown corporations at a cut-off daft
“useful” to the corporate elite.) ;

Instead of putting resources and oth
socially essential enterprises under pu
lic ownership and democratic contr
Tories would destroy whatever influen®
the public has by handing over all
sources and transport to the corpol
tions. Honesty should have made hil
include the post office, hydro elect
health insurance and other fields whet
huge profits await at our expense.

Making the Tory position quite clea!
Clark said on Sept. 24 a year ago, thal!
Conservative Party cabinet would tak
the authority, without reference to pal!
ament to roll back union gains it con
dered “excessive”. The fact is, Tor@
have considered every working-cla
gain since 1867 “excessive”.

The by-elections offer a chance !
reply to these Liberal and Tory salesm@!
of the same goods. They offer a chan
to strengthen labor’s voice in parliamet!
— in the first place by voting Cont
munist. It’s an opportunity for by
election voters to take the first steps ©
ward effecting the general élection nee?
to elect a progressive majority, includif
Communists, to parliament.

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bloated arms budgets at the expense 0
their families, and to hide the source ®
the real drive for world supremacy.

“Back in Oct. 1951 the magazine, Co
lier’s devoted 52 pages to a similar fat’
tacized ravaging of the USSR, to sell arms
and to trade on hatred stirred by the U.S
war against Korea. Collier’s lost its creat
bility and died. Are we now seeing th®
Sunday Star’s death throes? p |

Another big daily, Sept. 22, filled most
of a page attacking so-called “Suicida’
Appeasement” of the USSR. In it U.5
arms drummer .Eugene RostowW
launched a vicious attack on arms
negotiations, particularly SALT II. Thé
monstrous lie he wanted believed was
that detente is bad, arming for war
good, no matter how many social ben
fits or lives are sacrificed, or how close
brings us to nuclear obliteration. This
indeed a war against facts.

There is no rational response but de-
tente and the struggle for peace, exp?
sure of the network of lies, and dete!
mined efforts to unite all forces for pea®
and disarm the arms makers.

More exactly . .

It has been pointed out to us that it w#
inappropriate in an editorial last issue,
use the reference “rats disguised #®
labor’s friends,” in a paragraph befor®
the one taking Stephen Lewis to task f
his remarks about the Inco strike. Wé
therefore withdraw this reference. SU”
fice it to say that in writing the kind of
column he did in the Toronto Star t
days after the strike call, Lewis becam®
objectively, a strikebreaker.

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