NEWS FROM
THE FOURTH
INTERNATIONAL
4
DENMARK Over 40 years of anti-racism ON THE seventieth birthday of Børge Trolle, a veteran of the Danish section, the April 23 issue of Klassekampen (paper of the Socialistik Arbejderparti) recalled an action by the Danish Trotskyist group during the war in which Trolle was involved:
"As socialists we fight not only for five pennies more an hour but we also have our ideals about how people should live together, and we fight every form of oppression, economic or racist."
That is what the International Communists wrote in Klassekamp in November 1943. The reason was the persecution of the Jews that started in Denmark on September 30 of the same year. The International Communists were a Trotskyist group affiliated to the Fourth International. And one of the members of the group was Børge Trolle....
"The Danish resistance helped the Jews the most"
The members of the International Communists were involved in helping Jews get out of the country after the persecutions began.
"We took part in evacuating Adelgade and Borgergade. That was a neighborhood where poor Jews lived, whom no one had thought about. They were small traders, tailors, shoemakers, second-hand goods dealers, and so on.
"Moreover, the Danish resistance movement was the one that most helped the Jews. Denmark was the German occupied country where the Nazis got the least Jews."
It was because of their work transporting Jews that a section of the comrades in the International Communists were arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
"After the transportation of the Jews, we went underground, but the Gestapo had an agent in the people around us.
"First they arrested Georg Junglas and me and other people involved in the transportation. [Junglas was a German refugee and a driving force in building the Trotskyist group in Denmark after the mid-1930s].
"Then they arrested five more. Two got to Sweden. The rest were with Knud Ellegård and were arrested."
The same issue of Klassekampen had a centerspread defending the right of political asylum in Denmark today, which the right-wing Schlüter government has been making more and more restrictive:
In the last couple of years the problems of hunger, oppression and political persecution around the world have indirectly become a problem here. Several thousands of refugees have come to this country in the hope of finding protection here that he could not find in their own countries....
In October the frontiers were virtually sealed. That was done by demanding that the refugees have a passport and visa to come into the country. It is impossible for most to get such documents.
The Socialistik Arbejderparti proposes to support a campaign to get this law changed, so that refugees will be able to get asylum in Denmark. We intend to oppose every expression of racism, whether it comes from right extremists, young green-jackets, the police or from the government itself, in the form of laws....
The Socialistik Arbejderparti sees the fight against racism and for the right of refugees to asylum as part of this struggle. It is one that we wage not only in Denmark but together with the Fourth International, in which the SAP works with revolutionary parties and organizations in other countries. * ITALY
Election accord ON MAY 5. the leadership of the Lega Comunista Rivoluzionaria (LCR) and the leadership of Democrazia Proletaria signed an accord for the parliamentary elections that will take place on June 14 in Italy. The agreement called for the publication of a joint political statement and for including LCR members on the Democratzia Proletaria slates either in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies or for the Senate, The coming issue of /V will carry material on the situation in Italy and the significance of the coming elections. *
FINEWS ISRAEL Special appeal ON THE front page of its March issue, Matzpen Marksisti, the Hebrewlanguage publication of the Revolutionary Communist League, the section of the Fourth International in Israel, notes that it was hard hit by the closure of the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in Jerusalem on February 17. [See the last three issues of /VI. The AIC functioned as service center for all the left organizations, and, among other things, offered help with printing, which is difficult for anti-Zionist groups in Israel.
"With the closure of the Alternative Information Center and the confiscation of its equipment and the printed material that was there, the editorial board of Matzpen Marksisti lost the journal's archives, the list of subscribers and all the layout material that we had, since the editors of the journal used the center for printing, writing, and proofreading."
It made a special appeal for subscriptions in order to assure continued regular publication.
At the time of the raid on the AIC, the Center's director and a leader of the RCL, Michel Warschawsky, was arrested and still faces charges of "rendering 2 services to an illegal organization," specifically the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A fund has been set up to aid in his defence. Con- 7 tributions can be sent to the Release Michel Warschawsky Fund, 2 rue Richard Lenoir, 93108 Montreuil, France. * March 9, 1987 • International Viewpoint
against the mobilization by the bricklayers' union president John Joyce and American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker. The fulminations of these right wing unionists were given a big play in the capitalist press.
consciousness in this country"
### "The demonstration's youthfulness was striking"
"Signs and banners also identified delegations from the American Federation of Government Employees; Communications Workers of America; Na-
ALTHOUGH THE International Herald Tribune reported that
75,000 people attended the April 25 rally in Washington DC against US intervention in Central America and apartheid in South Africa, this summary of the American prestige press (the New York Times and Washington Post) offered neither reporting nor direct commentary on what it itself.
acknowledged was a massive demonstration.
GERRY FOLEY
ONETHELESS, some days later, o
N May 2, the Herald Tribune present ed an opinion piece on its page, dismissing the demonstration as a belated expresssion of the spirit of
It did not make any attempt at objectivity. The article was a combination of lampoon and the hailing of a new era of triumphant free-enterprise:
great April 25 Mobilization for Justice and Peace was a melancholy indication of just how spent is the spirit of the Sixties.
And it ended with this vision of the future: "Americans have been losing the competition with the Japanese not for of scientific creativity. What
Americans lack is the Japanese talent for rota productivity, their grim-faced efficiency, their assembly-line discipline. Americans are not good at singthe company song. Competitiveness is the pursuit of material values; it will not do to be shocked to find youth in hot pursuit."
It is hard to say whether the article was a lament that the "spirit of the
1960s" was taking so long to die, or a denunciation of those who stubbornly refused to admit that it was dead.