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Who Bombed Berlin Disco?

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Who Bombed Berlin Disco? WfJRIlERS ,,1NIIII1R' 25¢ No. 402 25 April 1986 u.s. Hands Off Libya! Defend the Soviet Union! • ea an's errorlsm APRIL 22-With its dead-of-the-night bombing of Libya on April 14, the United States has proclaimed in blood U.S. Murder Mission targeted Qaddafi its criminal policy of assassination and and family, massacred civilians in mass terror against anyone and any their homes. Here, Tripoli after F-111 blitz. government the White House perceives to be opponents of Ronald Reagan's "free world." This was no "surgical military strike," as the Reaganites claimed, but a murder mission to kill Qaddafi and terrorize the Libyan population. As the Pentagon later admitted, Libyan army bases were not the targets-they bombed Qaddafi's residential compound in Tripoli, his alternate headquarters in Benghazi, his personal transport aircraft. The civilian casualties may be embarrassing to Reagan's accomplice, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (herself responsible for the gratuitous murder of hundreds of Argentine sailors during the Falklands/ Malvinas war), but they were expected too. Anti-personnel cluster bombs were dropped on Bengha­ zi. Washington wanted a visible blood­ letting. As one reporter in Tripoli noted: "The American attacks on a missile base at Surt and on Libyan vessels in the Gulf of Sidra last month, although they may have cost the lives of more than 60 Libyan sailors. made so little impact on this country's major cities that Qaddafi domestically was able to claim the engagement as a victory." -s-Washington Post, 15 April So Reagan has his "victory": he managed to kill Qaddafi's adopted baby daughter and to kill and maim more than 100 civilians. After two days of stories of gunfire in the streets and rumors of coups and Qaddafi's death­ purposeful wishful thinking by.Arneri­ hospitals where they saw surviving In the U.S. it was a media hit, timed so their planned European vacations en can intelligence-the Libyan leader victims of the raid with broken arms and that millions could hear the bombs masse out of fear of terrorist reprisals. went on TV to denounce the bombingas ; legs, faces and bodies full ofshrapnel. In dropping, live, on the evening TV news. For months, with aU his "warnings" that barbaric and "crazy." "We tell Reagan a middle-class residential neighborhood Three-quarters of all Americans re­ American tourists are terrorist targets, that he does not need to protect his reduced to rubble they spoke to out­ portedly approved of this terror raid his ordering of U.S. citizens to leave children and his people," he said. "We raged Libyans: "See now who the according to an instant popularity poll. Libya, etc., Reagan has been daring are not like you. We do not bombard terrorists are," said one. "This is the "Rambo" Reagan flexes his muscles and Palestinian refugees, Qaddafi or anyone cities." Western reporters visited the terror of the Americans." the public cheers-and then cancels enraged by the crimes of American imperialism to respond by criminally attacking, holding hostage or killing individual Americans. Not only are such random, indiscriminate terrorist attacks abominable crimes, they are playing Reagan's game, helping him whip up war fever in an American population Who Bombed Berlin Disco? that ever since Vietnam has resisted every attempt to drag them into another Something is fishy about Reagan's Well, we know about "skeptical" Dem­ likeable, but as the head of an Islamic dirty, losing colonial war. story, the pretext for the U.S. terror­ ocrats. If it's so believable, where is it? North African country, it doesn't seem The U.S. is creating terrorism with its bombing of Tripoli. The La Belle The fact of the matter is, they haven't reasonable or likely that he would order ownfar more deadly state terror. Even discotheque in West Berlin was bombed released one shred of evidence. Nothing. the mass murder of blacks and Muslims. former U.S. president Jimmy Carter April 5, killing a black American GI, What the Times (and others) did not Indeed, it seems much more like the recognized this. Referring to the death Kenneth Ford, and a Turkish woman, see fit to print, and effectively hid for a modus operandi offascist killers, who of Qaddafi's 15-month-old daughter Nermin Haney, and injuring 230 others. number of days, was the vital fact that have launched numerous murderous Hana in the bombing of Tripoli, Carter The White House claims the disco was the soldier killed was black and La Belle attacks on Turks in West Germany and remarked that if someone had killed his bombed by agents acting under Libyan was a well-known soul music club West Berlin. And when we began daughter Amy 17 years ago, "I would orders, a charge which was bought frequented by black Gis and foreign checking into the various accounts, we have sworn as long as my life existed, I wholesale and echoed ad nauseam in the workers. When we read of this in the 7 found that a neo-Nazi outfit had would retaliate" (New York Post, 18 American bourgeois press. The lead April Los Angeles Times, we wondered. claimed the heinous bombing ofthe La April). And not everyone in Reagan's editorial in the 20 April New York In the scenario worked out in Washing­ Belle disco. This lead was buried, except America is caught up with Rambo­ Times claims that "proof of Libyan ton months ago to "get Qaddafi," the for some whispers in Berlin. mania. The family of Peter Kilburn, the complicity" is affirmed because "skepti­ bombing of the Berlin disco fell in the In the U.S., where the state­ librarian at the American University in cal Democrats in Congress" and "West time slot assigned by Reagan for Libyan sponsored "terrorism" scare is being Beirut who was slain by Lebanese Germany's ChanceUor Kohl" believe it. terrorism. Qaddafi may not be very continued on page 9 terrorists in retaliation for the U.S. raid. continued Oil page /0 i Letters I We print here two letters, editedfor Space, from the Freedom Socialist Party struggle to break the bonds of the communist, anti-labor right. In Decem­ and our replies. bureaucratic police state, you rigidly ber 1981, Clara Kaye's FSP joined conclude that if we do not agree with with the far-right Libertarian Party­ you on Poland, we no longer adhere to followers of Milton Friedman, master­ the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet mind of union-busting and mass starva­ Union as a degenerated workers' state tion from Pinochet's Chile to Thatcher's An Un-Tied Front of and the necessity to defend it uncondi­ Britain-demonstrating in San Francis­ tionally against capitalism. Wrong, co against the Polish regime's last­ Refugees from Trotskyism wrong, wrong. minute crackdown which stopped So­ It is indeed unfortunate that you lidarnosc' counterrevolutionary power New York, New York should be a programmatic or merely could not muster the journalistic integri­ bid. FSPers marched alongside liber­ March 26, 1986. tactical matter. Attendees also dis­ ty to accurately describe the political tarians who chanted "Socialism is tendencies at the San Francisco confer­ tyranny!" and carried signs saying Editor agreed over the issues, and the approach ence and state straightforwardly what "Smash the Red Tyrants." Whatever Workers Vanguard to them, that must be dealt with before regroupment and the revitalization of you think of regroupment as a tactic for this is, Trotskyism it ain't. Dear Editor: American Trotskyism can take place.... the regeneration of U.S. Trotskyism. All one has to do is to listen to any Your article on the San Fran­ You write that anyone proposing to This is the central political question Reagan speech to' know that the cisco Trotskyist Regroupment Confer­ seriously discuss Trotskyism and the which your article so deliberately commander in chief of U.S. imperalism ence ("Anti-Trotskyist Regroupment SWP must come to grips with the avoids. aims to destroy the Soviet Union... and Flunks," WV [No. 393], 12/13/85) is Spartacist League. Here we agree. But Sincerely, not in the distant future. It's pretty hard another in an unbroken series of the in dealing with you since the Freedom Stephen Durham to drum up sympathy among c1ass­ Spartacist League's sectarian denuncia­ Socialist Party's departure from the for the Freedom Socialist Party conscious workers for counterrevolu­ tions of the U.S. left, especially its SWP in 1966, we have been forced to and Committee for a tionary terrorists like the Nicaraguan Trotskyist sector. Once again you show conclude that your chronic male chau­ Revolutionary Socialist Party contras and Afghan mujaheddin. So a preference for arrogant, infantile and vinism, ultraleftism, homophobia and "Solidarity with Solidarity," the one sensationalistic polemics over comrade­ racism tear at any prospects for produc­ WV replies: Stephen Durham of the "union" Ronald Reagan loves, has ly discussion and analysis of ideas-a tive political engagement in the Trotsky­ FSP/CRSP talks of the need for become the main social-democratic tendency which ultimately pulverizes ist regroupment arena. For years, you programmatic agreement in the "Trot­ battle cry of Western imperialism's anti­ the Trotskyist traditions you claim to have sneered and jeered at the FSP and skyist regroupment arena," reports on a Soviet war drive. Durham claims uphold. What a wildly contradictory CRSP without once deigning to deal conference of grouplets where by his Solidarnosc represents the Polish work­ position for a gro.up that claims to bethe with the socialist feminist content of our own admission the participants dis­ ers' struggle to "break the bonds of the sole inheritor of Trotskyism on U.S.
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