Block U.S. imperialism in Iraq

The Spartacus Youth Club and Spartacist League thank The Daily Free Press for covering our event and would like to respond to the letters about us. As your article explained, we believe that those who oppose the U.S. government’s impending slaughter in Iraq ‘must go beyond anti-war sentiment and defend Iraq against American imperialist power’ (‘Remember Vietnam, BU anti-war group says,’ Feb. 28, pg. 1). We demand U.S. troops out of the Near East, while giving no political support to Saddam Hussein. This, along with our unconditional defense of the gains of the revolutions that overturned capitalism in North Korea, China, Cuba and Vietnam, provoked an indignant response from David Shideler, who is outraged that we cheer the Viet Cong’s ‘bloody success’ against U.S. military might in Vietnam (‘Communist movement discredited,’ Mar. 3, pg. 10). The blood spilt in Vietnam was that of 3 million Vietnamese workers and peasants killed by the U.S. during its losing attempt to stop a social revolution.

Shideler repeats the usual anti-communist slanders as a cover for the crimes of U.S. imperialism the greatest purveyor of death and destruction around the world. His comparison of communists with Nazis is straight out of The Black Book of Communism. In fact, the Soviet Red Army crushed the Nazis, liberating Eastern Europe and Germany, at the cost of some 20 million Soviet lives, while the United States and Britain were sealing their borders to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust. The capitalist counterrevolutions throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989-1992 plunged the populations of these countries into misery. The collapse of the Soviet Union has meant a world in which U.S. imperialism has gone unchallenged, bombing and invading countries from Somalia to Serbia. Now the United States is planning to obliterate Iraq.

It is clear from Shideler’s letter that he wants the BU administration to harass and censor us, hence his concern over funding and his statement that ‘BU must protect its name from the abuse by ideologues.’ Another call to action is the letter by Steve Raymond, ‘Violent protests wrong method,’ which implies that Marxists call for violence (Mar. 4, pg. 6). Red-baiting and violence-baiting are the tools of the trade of anti-communists. Our aim is to mobilize the social power of the working class in mass, militant struggle against capitalism. As concerns money, we do not take funding from the BU administration as a matter of principle. This administration has eagerly enrolled in the ‘war on terror,’ taking the lead in programs like SEVIS, which spies on foreign students for the government. We in the Spartacus Youth Club have protested this and other new repressive laws introduced by the government, which is shredding the rights of immigrants and citizens.

Jesse Alt

GRS ’06

President, Spartacus Youth Club