Frau Goering next? 15 you hear that Frau Goering is suing the United Nations for damages for the death of her husband, don’t be surprised. . Tf you read one of these days that Mussolini’s widow is suing the city of Milan for the indignities suffered by Il Duce, don’t be too upset. A precedent has been created by the govern- ment of Canada. Adrien Arcand, National Unity party chieftain, has been given permission by the crown to sue for $74,000 damages, Dr. Noel De- carie, ohe of his lieutenants, is suing for $588,000, and another for $75,000. They claim these amounts for “moral suffer- ing” and business and salary losses during their wartime internment. The department of justice believes they have the right to take the government to court. Recently Arcand held a party rally which made the headlines in the Canadian press. He said that while the time was “not ripe,” he was reassembl- ing his forces. This suit against the Canadian government for interning him. and his aides undoubtedly is part of the process of getting support for fascist ideas in this country. * It amounts to saying: “We suffered wrongly by internment while this country was at war with Hitler. The war was all a horrible mistake. We Should have been fighting Russia.” And the department of justice, in the name of democracy, assents to the government becom- ing the defendant in such a suit! Can it be that the government, or sections of it, also feels the war was a mistake, that moral uplifts must now be given to fascists? a Will Canadians allow this action to go by unnoticed and unchallenged? A study in contrasts a you wanted to pass judgment on the likely degree of humanity in the new Europe of the Eastern democracies as compared with West- ern Europe under the Marshall plan, two recently concluded war ¢rimes trials offer a criterion, In Krakow, Poland’s biggest mass war trials ended in 23 of those found guilty of the mass murders at Oswiecim being sentenced to death. Among them was Maria Mandel, 35, held respon- sible for the deaths of 10,000 women. Four and a half million people—equal to one-third the pop- ulation of Canada—died at Oswiecim of torture and starvation. Five other prisoners were given life terms, But in Franfurt-am-Main, an American War Crimes tribunal gave Friedrich Flick, German steel and armaments magnate, only seven years imprisonment. The charges against him: partici- pation in the exploitation of slave labor, looting, collaboration with the Nazi SS. Two of Flick’s associates were given even lighter sentences, in each case less the time they had spent in custody. Three more were acquitted. And, the court held, the $40,000 annual contribu- tion Flick made to the Nazi party might have been “not too high a premium to insure personal safety in the fearful days of the Third Reich.” This last, in itself, is a significant commen- tary on these fearful days of the American Cen- tury. Mililons died, and their personal safety counted for nothing with men like Flick, no more indeed than the personal safety of tlfe people of Greece and France and Italy counts © with the American magnates who doubtless look upon their “contributions” to Europe as a similar kind of insurance. Frick invested in fascism as an insurance against the working people’s in- sufferable demands for peace and security, and he made millions, Why can’t they? They might look for the answer in the dock at Krakow. IS week in Vancouver da Mrs. Ethel Darville was catapulted into public prom- inence. The local press gave her a good write-up. The lady (whom no one ever ‘heard of be- fore, either in the labor move- ment or out of it) is presumed to be against the high price of bacon and other essentials’ of life, but is super-sensitive about whom she associates with in doing any- thing about it. Her protest against high prices took the form of a very commonplace bit of red-baiting, A local Tory MP also added.a dash of spice to the vanishing pork chops, by indicating that he preferred 90-cent bacon to meetings attended by the LPP, which he regards as “a menace to Canadian society.” The meet- ing in question had no more to do with the LPP than the Ben- evolent Order of Elks, but the tory technique — assured of a good press—is to make it appear that an effective protest against soaring prices is another devilish scheme hatched in Moscow. I cite these two cases stem- ming from a “Roll Back Prices to January of 1946” meeting of Vancouver citizens, because they are symptomatic of a new “thought control’ psychosis, ‘de- signed to smother effective op- position to official government policy — regardless of whether that policy has to do with price inflation or the shipment of arms to fascist regimes abroad. Of course the trick of seeking to sidetrack every just cause of the people by open or covert red- baiting is not new. Just 100 years ago, in 1848, Karl Marx and Fred- rick Engels in the Communist Minifesto posed the question thus: “Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as com- munistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the S we see it on By Tom McEwen ANH titeti i tl H N If} Ps ) f TN] / 4 wy din, hug ah branding reproach of commun- ism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adver saries?” How better to perpetuate the legalized robbery of the people by big business and its obliging Ab- botts than to scream “Red” at every legitimate protest? How better to scare off the non-politi- cal, economically-harassed house- wife than to keep yelping at her through the medium of press, platform and radio, that the pow-> ers menacing her very exist- ” ence are not™ the food prof- © iteers and the financial plun- derbund — but the Reds. Abbott’s aus- terity plan — a carbon copy of the Marshall formula, strip- ped of its high- sounding official Tom McEwen claptrap, has a simple design— to financially augment a reaction- ary and hostile foreign policy at the expense of the Canadian peo- ple. Any and all effective oppo-' sition to this with the the Hitlerite technique. | seers the caption “Obscuring the Picture” the January 13 issue of the Vancouver Sun sets out to take Harold Pritchett, IWA district president to task editorially for his criticism of a previous (and typical red-bait- ing) editorial in its January 7 issue, ; With the air of a modern Solo- mon (minus the wisdom) the Sun scribe takes a six-point flier into the realm of higher politics. Point number one asserts that “it is not necessarily dangerous to ship arms to nations which may them- selves be in danger of being over- run.” That of course is in defense | Ie il f) ry Ey Larne nendl i ay Ml cull ; Ih, Published Weekly at 650 Howe Street By THE TRIBUNE PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD. Telephones: Editorial, MA. 5857; Business, MA. 5288 Tom McEwen Editor Subscription Rates: 1 Year, $2.50; 6 Months, $1.35. Printed by Union Printers Ltd., 650 Howe Street, Vancouver, B.C. Authorized as second-class mail by the post-office department, Ottawa FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 1948 - deliberate confusion. plan is’ met . ST TIM MMU nM MMIII of the King government supply- ing arms to Chiang Kai-shek. The Sun said pretty much the Same back in the thirties when Canada was shipping scrap-iron and other war materials to Ger- many, Italy and Japan. It did however,” see great danger in shipping arms to Republican Spain to defend herself against being “overrun by the Franco- Hitlerite fascists. Point two, in defense of the _ Abbott austerity plan denies it has any relationship to the "Mar- shall Plan. The Sun scribe should read the Financial Post—and take Abbott’s word for it that since “we need U.S: dollars” we must of necéssity attune ourselves to the economic demands of the Wall Street donors. Even the Greeks, the Turks, and Chiang Kai-shek have learned to sing that song. Point number four in the Sun’s editorial dithyramb on the Taft- Hartley labor law, its relation to the Marshall Plan, and the rela- tion of each to the Republican Congress and the Democratic ad- ministration, is a masterpiece ot The Sun can see no political tie-up be- tween the Marshall Plan and the Taft-Hartley slave law. A grade four school boy from Athens or Hankow could tell the Sun’s po- litical economist that the Mar- shall Plan and the -Taft-Hartley law are the opposite sides of the same coin—designed to serve the interests of reaction at home and abroad, Slavery, in its moderm industrial form, takes. on many aspects, Destruction of collective bargaining, abrogation of civil and political rights, denial of the rights of the Constitution to citi- zens — these can produce a new slavery, the kind desired by Hit- ler and now aimed at by Wall St. Finally, although apparently known to the Sun’s ersatz econo- mist, “the spirit and intent of the King government’s new industrial- economic policy ... .” is direet- ed... not as Pritchett insists, ex- clusively to the U.S.A., but in “the opposite direction,” which we take to mean on a world front? In order to get across its anti- communist propaganda the Sun conveniently forgets about those Marshall dollars—the lettuce that baited the Abbott austerity trap in which we are now caught, One of the distinguishing fea- tures about professional red-bait- ers is their ability to dispense with facts, bd ame : An il re = ra \ " “Don’t you wonder how that thin man carries that huge box?” Greece and China thos the mountains of western Greece, at the town of Ko- nitza, the Greek Democratic Army under General Markos is giving the Truman Doctrine a run for its money. In- spired by the newly formed republican government, some- where in the mountains, the guerillas have thrown a panic into the quisling regime at Athens. The monarchists are begging for more money, for more arms—and, above all, for a few divisions of American soldiers, _ ‘ General William G. Livesay, head of the U.S. Miiitary mission, flew into Washington to talk that over, and then flew right back again. In addition to warning European countries, especially Russia, ndt to recognize the new re- gime, Under-Secretary Robert Lovett would not comment. on requests for more funds, or for direct military aid. But that’s in the cards, it’s clear, as the Truman Doctrine has demonstrated it can’t be enforced without leading directly to American participation in war against other ‘peoples. In far-off Mukden, chief city of southern Manchuria, it is the same story. Four billion dollars in goods, money and material for Chiang Kai-shek have not stopped the Chinese Communist armies at all. In fact, the New York Times discovered recently that nine major centers of guerilla activity are functioning south of the Yangtse Valley. All of northern China is hanging by a thread. PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 4