No. 622, May 5, 1995

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No. 622, May 5, 1995 soC!: .••, . ... iiIl&AllA'.X_523 No. 622 4!!11' ~!t~~:-,- 5 May 1995 In Wake· 01 Oklahoma ·;llrICi·ty: Government launches Assault on Your Rights The death toll is climbing toward 200 which killed 84 people, as part of a strat­ in the April 19 bombing of the Alfred P. egy of provoking chaos, is typical of Murrah federal building in Oklahoma their M.O. Extreme nationalists, who see City. The blast, which reportedly came whole peoples as their scourge, also from several thousand pounds of ammo­ engage in such criminal slaughter of ran­ nium nitrate fertilizer mixed with fuel dom people, as in the ethnic-national oil and a detonator, tore away a huge butchery racking the former Yugoslavia. swath in all nine floors of the steel­ So do the imperialists, who have regu­ reinforced concrete structure. The build­ larly slaughtered whole populations in ing housed a broad spectrum of govern­ the name of freedom and democracy. ment agencies, from the Social Security The Oklahoma bombing may well Administration and the Department of have been modeled after a strikingly sim­ Agriculture to the Secret Service, the ilar scenario described in The Turner Drug Enforcement Administration and Diaries, a 1978 novel by West Virginia the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire­ white-supremacist William Pierce. (In arms (BATF). Overwhelmingly, the vic­ this book, which is it bible for American tims of this act of indiscriminate terror fascists, a fertilizer bomb destroys FBI were ordinary government workers, headquarters at 9: 15 a.m.) Former Green black and white, who staff the offices in Beret colonel Bo Gritz, who in 1988 ran the building. Most wrenching were the for president on the ticket of the racist pictures of dead and dying children being Populist Party and is now the fUhrer of carried from the rubble of the day-care a "militia" group in Idaho, praised the center. blast as "a Rembrandt-a masterpiece of Immediately, the news media began Banali/Gamma-Liaison science and art put together." Tom Metz­ whipping up an anti-Arab hysteria say­ Government seizes on bombing of Oklahoma City federal building for "anti­ ger, leader of the fascist "White Aryan ing the suspects were "men of Middle terrorist" crackdown on civil liberties. Above: FBI SWAT team during 1994 Resistance," tipped his hat to the Okla­ Eastern origin," running shots of the VVorld Cup soccer games. homa carnage, saying, "Evidently, these 1993 NYC World Trade Center bomb­ people ... saw the Federal building as a ing, comparing the blast to the 1983 strategic military target, and these are ions attacking civil liberties which the cover to a wholesale abrogation of every­ bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in the kind of things that happen at war" White House has been trying to get one's rights-authorizing them to open Beirut. Every paper featured stories (New York Times, 23 April). through Congress for a couple of years. your mail, listen in on your phone caIls, about "foreign terrorists" striking at the These fascist killers grow from the Among them are: secret trials for "sus­ keep tabs on who you associate with, "heartland of America." Arabs through­ fertile soil of racist U.S. imperialism. pected terrorists," using the military for and assert a state monopoly of armed out the U.S. felt under siege. But During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the domestic police enforcement, unlimited force. They're not really afterthe fascists, the next day the government revealed Pentagon reveled in raining bombs on harassment and surveillance of dissident who at bottom are the creatures of this that the suspects were two white Iraq's cities, killing thousands of civil­ organizations, blanket authorization for racist ruling class, but the labor move­ American men. Moreover, it turns out ians, destroying hospitals and water­ wiretaps, and escalating the ongoing ment, blacks and other minorities-those that captured bombing suspect Timothy works. In that "Desert Slaughter," the campaign against the constitutional right the capitalist rulers consider "the enemy McVeigh is an Army veteran associated arrested suspect in the Oklahoma bomb­ to bear arms. within." with the right-wing paramilitary "militia ing case, Timothy McVeigh, "served Such police-state measures have long In justifying his "anti-terrorist" crack­ movement." with the Big Red One's 2nd Battalion of been used against leftists, blacks and any­ down, Clinton pointed a finger at "hate" From the "war on international terror­ the 16th Infantry, which performed one one else the government puts on its "ene­ speech, later adding, "whether it comes ism," the government's line suddenly of the most grisly operations of the mies list." But the bipartisan embrace of from the right or the left." But the kind shifted to a war on "extremism." Behind ground war-the burial [of] many Iraqi this repressive arsenal, which is cyni'1llly of bloodthirsty mass murder seen in the this "anti-extremist" crusade is an accel­ soldiers, some still alive, by armored being sold over the dead bodies in Okla­ Oklahoma bombing is the hallmark of erated drive by both capitalist parties to vehicles equipped with plows" (New homa City, is intended to legitimate its the fascists, whose view of their per­ ram through a whole York Newsday, 25 April). It's not surpris­ extension to the population as a whole. ceived enemies is "the only good one is oc panoply of repressive ing that out of such barbarism can come In the name of combating "terrorism," a dead one." The 1980 fascist bombing ~ measures. The Clinton a twisted, Nazi-like mentality. the government w'!nts to give a legal of the Bologna train station in Italy, ..... administration imme­ This government is in fact the biggest diately seized on this terrorist and mass murderer of them all. o,.,., horrendous atrocity to Don't forget the A-bombing of Nagasaki o place Qn the "fast track" and Hiroshima, as well as the firebomb­ ~ 00 an ominous "Omnibus Wby "Labor Party Adlocales" ing of Dresden and Tokyo! The 1985 ...:t Counterterrorism Act," bombing of the Philly MOVE commune l"­ N as well as draconian was the Reagan government's message LI"I Doesn't Advocate a LaborPartv N new FBI "guidelines." to black America that anyone who steps Clinton's "package" is ~~~.... ~.···SEEPAGE3 ---.... ~~- out of line would face the full brunt of ..... chock-full of provis- continued on paRe 8 13 May 1985-Ten Years Later MOVE Massacre We Will Never Forget This May marks ten years since the in prison hellholes-virtually the only Jamal quotes Ramona Africa, who spent heinous crime was approved right at the Mother's Day 1985 siege of Osage Ave­ "growth industry" in America. The racist seven years in prison for the "crime" of top. Philadelphia police met with the FBI nue in Philadelphia, when eleven black and reviewed strategy and tactics two vendetta against MOVE and those who being the sole adult survivor of the days before the operation against MOVE people, including five children, were dared defend them continues in ominous massacre: began .... From Reagan's top cop this was killed and hundreds were burned out of moves by the Philly cops to silence the "To blame MOVE for that massacre is no surprise. The people wh.o salute SS their \:l6mes in the police/FBI bombing voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal and force his like an armed robber blaming the murder graves in Germany brought Bitburg back of the MOVE commune. The racist execution. The black journalist and for­ of his victim on the victim by saying he to Philly with a bang. This was no 'fire­ fight,' it was a firestorm: Dresden in slaughter, ordered by Democratic mayor mer Black Panther had long been in the shouldn't have resisted, he should've given in to the robber and he wouldn't America .... Wilson Goode and orchestrated by the cops' gun sights; he was framed up and have gotten killed .... The bottom line is "This, was a willful racist massacre of feds, was a signature of the Reagan years. sentenced to death in the wake of his that this government came to kill MOVE people with no name (they called them­ The Philadelphia body count was ex­ courageous defense of MOVE prisoners on May 13, not to arrest us," selves 'Africa') who had committed no crime .... ceeded on 19 April 1993, as Democratic arrested in the 1978 murderous police The Spartacist League and Partisan "We communists say black Democrat president Clinton and Attorney General assault on their Powelton Village home. Defense Committee fought for Ramona Wilson Goode is as guilty as Republican Janet Reno ordered the BATF/FBI assault In a recent column from death row Africa's freedom until her release in Ronald Reagan and the racist cops for the murder of eleven blacks, women and which resulted in the deaths of 86 men, titled "Judicial Approval of Mass Mur­ 1992, and continues to aid and demand women and children in the compound of der," Jamal exposes the whitewash children alike. The liberals now apologize freedom for the nine MOVE members for this calculated obliteration of a black the racially integrated Branch Davidian amnesty given this March to the police still in jail as a result of the 1978 Powel­ neighborhood-to do otherwise requires religious group outside Waco, Texas. and government murderers in the MOVE ton Village raid. a break from the whole myth of the 'new black power' at the voting booth, organ­ Today, a decade after the MOVE mas­ bombing: "The U.S. Court of Appeals Immediately after the 1985 MOVE sacre, wholesale attacks on the black in Philadelphia recently decided that the ized through the Democratic Party of massacre, stressing that a communist George Wallace and Jesse Jackson ...
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