A to the report “has snatched the trade unions from the workers &8nd has transformed them into government agencies.” The ‘Teport contains a factual out- line of the way in which the 80vernment removed elected un- ion leaders from their posts and replaced them with its. own ap- Pointees, Scores of those appoint- ed have charges filed against them for collaborating with the Nazis, the GCL statement points out, citing concrete evidence in S€vral cases. Typical of the government’s attitude toward labor, the re- Port says, is the following: “In Protest against the banning of the officials whom they them- Selves had elected, the organized Workers stopped paying subscrip- tions (dues) to those appointed by the government. The govern- Ment, by law, imposed an obli- 8atory subscription on all the ‘Wage earners, whether organized or not, as a trade union member- ship fee.” Among the™ methods of sup- Pression cited in the report are the following: | @ Union meetings are out- Swed. In cases where workers have defied the law and held Rss, they are attacked by © police and forced to dis- Perse, ®@ Workers who were active in he resistance movement are be- Ing penalized. Secretary L. Dem- €foukis of the ‘Federation of Railroag Workers and _ seven Other railroad workers have been fired on the grounds that they Were members of the National iberation Movement which led Underground opposition to the azis. Over 1,000 railroad work- Ts are in danger of losing their bs for the same reason. @ Union property is being Taided and in some (cases totally destroyed, Headquarters of the Fishermen’s Union, the Chemical : Orkers Union and several dis- pect union offices have been urned down. : @ Hundreds of unionists have €en murdered and no attempt _ 788 been made to round up the attackers. After listing a number of instances, the report says: a9 Larissa alone, which is a a ~ town of 35,000 inhabitants, ade union leaders and mem- €rs have been murdered in two a Months by fascist bands,” @ Other hundreds of unionists hy. been imprisoned or deport- ie to detention camps on iso- ated islands. Two letters from 1 idean union leaders are repro- “Uced in the report. They con- nm harrowing descriptions of persecution and torture. Another 1s Mich Yaitis, president and oy respectively of the an-Lesbic Labor Center, reports ie the two-have been impris- % ee since last May with no 3 r charges against them. According to information _ Which we have up to date,” the pecore Says, “there are over a persons in the concentra- oe camps and on the islands exile. They are members of ade unions who have been €xiled without any verdict from -®ny court, only by administrative Measures,” ‘ te ite guerillas who are now oS ting in the mountains, the ae Says, are union members 7 ee Other democrats who man- a oe to escape. They are fight- 8 against a government “which _ FRmay, May 16, 1947 etter from George Skaltsounis: does not have any real basis in the working class and in the people,” but which “keeps itself ia power thanks to foreign in- tervention and support.” “We confess in front of your commission,” the elected labor leaders state, “that we have feelings of remorse because we, the responsible leadership of the trade union movement of our country, have in many cases en- ‘couraged persecuted trade union ing leaders to stop hiding and to carry on their trade union duties openly and without paying any attention to persecutions. Greek unions suppressed, leaders murdered, exiled REPORT TO UNITED NATIONS’ COMMISSION fully documented account of the suppression of the labor movement in Greece has been presented to the United Nations investigating commission by. the legally elec- ted leaders of the Greek Confederation of Labor. The Greek government, according “We are remorseful because after such encouragement from us the president of the labor center of Salonica, B. Doukas, although he knew that he was being persecuted, went to the labor center. He was arrested, although no charge was made against him, and he was kept in prison for several months with- out being brought before a court martial. After all these adven- tures, he was drowned while he. was being transported to the island of exile. Unfortunately the ease of Doukas is not the only one.” , ~ Men of the trusts — fight the peace —. by ISRAEL EPSTEIN OME people say that wars are caused by the general cussedness of human nature. But no less an authority than the U.S. government now announces that World War Two, the biggest slaughter of them all, was caused by inter- national cartels—giant trusts stretching across national boun- daries and knowing no law but profit. In other words, big business can do more than decide whether you ‘work and what you are paid, what you buy and what it costs you. If allowed full con- trol of government policy, as in Germany, it can send you to war. ( : The U.S. charge was made in the official indictment of I. G. Farben, Nazi chemical trust tied closely to duPont, Alcoa and Standard Oi] here. Along with the Nazi steel trust linked to U.S. Steel, Opel linked to Gen- eral otors and the A. E. G. Electrical trust tied to General Electric and American Telegraph and Telegraph, it built up Hitler to fight “bolshevism.” Farben is accused of manipu- lating werld politics, maintain- a spy network that did everything from _ stooling jon unions to preparing other .coun- tries for defeat and keeping its own concentration camps for free labor. Its profits rose from 71 million German marks 1932 to 571 million in 194.2 NLY a few of the men, of the- -German trusts are in. the dock at Nuremberg, where the trial is on. any fled to Switzer- land, Spain and Argentina where they deposited gold and split profits, even during the war, with U.S. and other partner firms. In China, Farben’s Kar] Kuehn and Kurt Maier, the A.E.G.’s Wilhelm Maier and 50 or so more are helping Chiang Kai- shek wage civil war. Maier heads a munitions factory capi. talized with U.S. dollars lent to Chiang. These men who worked in. for Hitler and believe in his_ plan for German comeback based on a U.S.-Soviet war are ~ jin one of the world’s best spots for stirring it up. HE U.S, partners of the Ger- man trusts haven’t changed their spots either. General Elec- tric chairman Philip S. Reed, according to the Kilgore com- mittee, was a partner of the German AEG in an agreement to make light bulbs burn few- er hours and cost more money all over the world. Now Reed has drafted a program for the International Chamber of Com- merce urging Germany’s ‘imme- diate recovery’ and @#has_ said the Germans should have their trusts again if they want them. The president of the Inter- national Chamber of Commerce who warmly indorsed views is Winthrop W. Aldrich, chairman of the Chase National Bank. Aldrich is also a director of AT&T, whose German plants equipped Hitler’s armies in war- time. AT&T, by the way, is throw- ing“ its weight in several direc- tions. An $82,000-a-year vice- president, W. H. Harrison, is the favored candidate to administer Pres, Truman’s $250 million gift to the Greek government. Any, Hello girl, can tell you how qual- ified he is to teach the Greeks about American democracy’s con- cern for the working people. RUST politicians want to re- build not only Germany but Japan, Private trade with Japan is to start at once. Reparations claims leave untouched much military potential, including war- built underground aircraft fac- tories. The Japanese want a 100,- 000 man army for ‘home defense.’ They have shown their fitness for for such treatment by choosing a ‘businessman’s government’ and keeping labor down. The argument for allowing German and Japanese revival be- fore fascist influence has been eliminated is that it will (1) stop communism and (2) save money for U,S, taxpayers, who would have to feed them until they were politically de-loused. - World War Two, which came after Wall Street coddled Hitler for similar reasons, cost a good deal more in blceod, as well as money, than any such temporary - expense. But those were ordinary folks’ lives and dollars. The trusts did better in the war years than ever before. a { _ Marx and the Near East [ee ee OT FT Pe en ae Short Jabs OQ by ol F Bill OM 1852 on, until the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, Marx was a regular contributor to the New York Tribune. Two or three times a week he wrote letters on the political and economic conditions in Europe for the American readers of that paper. About 120 of these letters, written between the beginning of 1853 and the end of 1855, dealt with what was then the ‘boiling pot’ of European power politics. Later these particular articles were collected by his daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling and published in a huge one-volume book with the title, The Eastern Question. The articles were written in English. Engels, whose knowledge of that language was perfect, polished them off before they were mailed in order to correct Marx’s imperfections in grammar. ? F Those articles which dealt with military questions, with the armed forces and their dispositions, with military history and criti- cism, with the analysis of battles fought in the Balkans, the Crimea and the Caucasus, were written entirely by Engels. This was a sub- ject about which Marx had very little knowledge but of which_ Engels had made such a thorough ‘study that he was one of the foremost authorities in Europe. When he wrote unsigned articles on the tactics and strategy of the Civil War in the U.S. and the Franco- Prussian War, military men ‘guessed’ them to have been written by some prominent general. ¥ Turkey was the center of the ‘balance of power’ struggles at the time—the power factors being, Britain, France and Austria, on the one hand, referred to as ‘the West,’ and Russia on the other hand, spoken of as ‘the East’, That must seem familiar today to those who take their history from the daily press, with Turkey again in the center of the storm. There is this difference, however, that this time the power politics is a one-sided proposition in which there is only a West and no East, since the Soviet Union is not engaged in maintaining any balance of power. In a recent number of Collier’s (May 10, 1947), this Near East question is considered worthy of being spread over four pages. The article ‘Dithers at the Dardanelles’, written from Istanbul by Ed- ward P. Morgan, is couched in the style euphemistically known as objective, but it is pure propaganda for American imperialism— is anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Turkey is pictured as a poor little country of 17 millions attempting to defend itself, not against the grasping fingers of Anrerican oil-barons but against its perennial enemy, Russia. : é : Even Marx is mustered to help poor little Turkey. Morgan quotes “an elert American educated Turkish editor,” who by chance came upon a copy of The Eastern Question (in eight fat volumes) in Paris. Here is the quotation as it appears in Collier’s as taken from the Turkish paper Vatan: “If Russia gets control of Turkey, its power will be doubled and it will become the master of all Europe. Such an event will constitute a misfortune of indescribable magnitude.” i is what Marx wrote in the New York Tribune on April 12, 1853, reprinted in The Eastern Question (without any transla- tion): “For the moment the revolution seems to be suppressed, but pee. it lives and is feared as deeply They lie in any language 45 ever. Witness the terror of the reaction at the news of the late rising in Milan. But let Russia get possession of Turkey and her strength is in¢reased nearly half, and she becomes superior — to all the rest of Europe put together. Such an event would be an unspeakable calamity to the revolutionary cause” (emphasis by Marx). It sounds different, doesn’t it? Leave out a few words at the beginning and a few at the end, and—Presto! : Marx hated reactionary Tsarist Russia as he hated everything else reactionary. He did not have any love for reactionary Turkey either, that Turkey which kept the peoples of the Balkans and Egypt and the Arabs in bondage. But 100 years has made a great difference in the picture. His- tory has changed the set-up. There is no more a reactionary Russia. Only a smal] section of the ‘West’ has any occasion to fear the Russia of today—the imperialist aggressors and war-mongers, who have ‘the same objectives as the Tsar had in 1850. These it is today, who are carrying on the ‘balance of power’ politics. To the old gang is added the parvenus of American imperialism who are the leaders | in this political trickery. They want to buy up the Turkish terri- tories (cheap) to give them absolute control of Near East oil and so they can establish a bridgehead for launching war against the Soviet Union. ; : Turkey had a revolution, too, but it has been sold out. Today the Turkish people are no better off than they were under the Sul- tans. And the successors of Kemel Pasha, Ataturk, are selling Tur-— key cheap—for one hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of war material. In one of these letters to theNew York Tribune, Marx quoted @ paragraph from the London Times which well might be worth the consideration of the people in contro] of Turkey today. It is dated October 4, 1853. “The Times speaks of Turkey thus: ‘A state which is yet so impotent as to require European protection at every men- ace of aggression from without or insurrection from within, must so far pay the penalty of its weakness as to receive aid indispensible to its existence on the terms least onerous to its supporters,.” Turkey is not getting 150 million dollars for nothing. The Turk- ish revolution was fought and won to free Turkey from foreign domination. It is now sold to America for that paltry sum. When Turkey was borrowing from the Soviet Union ‘everything went into the reconstruction of the country, now ‘gifts’ from the imperialists must all be spent for military purposes alone. 2 Although the over-all political picture of that part of the world has changed and is now entirely different, one thing remains the same, the people who were trying to win some measure of political and economic liberty from their oppressors were denounced as ‘reds’. The peasants of Wallachia and Moldavia at the mouth of the Danube were carrying on a struggle against both Turkey and Russia. _ The revolutionary wave that swept Europe in 1848 and the fol-— lowing few years still invoked terror in the minds of the reaction and Marx reported on July 1854, that “The Russian government ful- minated against the Wallachian people in manifestoes addressed to — Europe, wherein they were charged with having established a re-. public and proclaimed communism.” = : cms So the hide-bound reactionaries, the Bevins, the Trumans, the Duplessis, the un-Americans, who today denounce and shout ‘com-. munist’ at the struggling governments of Poland, Yugoslavia and’ Bulgaria, are not very original. Their ideological ancestor, Tsar _ Nicholas I, was a century ahead of them. : ae : PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 5 Se