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The Militant, 28 September 1946


Help Us to End Terrorism
Against the Greek People!

An Appeal from Greece to Workers of All Countries


From The Militant, Vol. X No. 39, 28 September 1946, p. 3
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Comrades:

For months now our country has been transformed into a horrible hell. Gangs – both official and otherwise – have invaded the towns and villages and are spreading death and terror everywhere. Full-scale military operations with the most modern weapons are being carried out against the poor peasants in all sections of the country. Those houses that the war had spared in devastated villages are today being burned, by the hordes of the monarchist government. Extraordinary courts-martial are functioning without pause. Every day death sentences are pronounced and the firing squads execute by the dozens the most heroic sons of the laboring people. Dragnets, raids and patrols by the police keep the working class quarters in unceasing anguish and terror. The Slavo-Macedonians are literally exterminated by fire and sword. All through the country mass arrests are being carried out.

In unhealthy transfer prisons and jails, workers and poor peasants of both sexes and of every age are piled in together in an unbreath- able atmosphere. The desert islands of the Aegean Sea are once more receiving their loads of deportees.

Those who are arrested, ifv they are not assassinated outright, are submitted to torture which makes one shudder.

The trade unions are practically dissolved, their offices forcibly occupied by police and provocateurs. Labor printshops are daily attacked by the savages. The labor newspapers are hit by the unbridled repressions of the state and fascist gangs.

A barbarous pogrom is unleashed against the entire working class, against the poor peasants and the national minorities.

There is not the slightest exaggeration in this appeal. On the contrary, no written report can come anywhere, near describing the terrible situation in Which we are living.

Comrades, more than anything else, solidarity among all the exploited and the slaves of the world, surmounting frontiers and fatherlands, Is one of the finest and grandest features of the bloody history of class societies. In the name of this solidarity we appeal to all the workers of the entire world, asking that you intervene immediately in defense of your brothers in Greece.

Our case is yours. The hand that is sowing death, mourning and terror in our country is the hand of the monster that rises out of the chaos into which rotting capitalism is plunging the world. A fate similar to that of our country awaits the masses everywhere that the working class retreats or undergoes defeats.

To crush the monster at its birth everywhere that it makes its appearance – that is the task of the workers of all countries.

We Trotskyists who throughout the history of our movement have never lowered the banner of proletarian internationalism, we who because of our unshakable loyalty to international socialism have known under all regimes prison, firing squads and persecutions of every sort – we believe only in the solidarity of our class, and ask only your help.

We as workers can have nothing to do with the UN, that united bandits’ organization.

Our class has its own means and its own methods. And those means and methods are powerful and unbeatable.

If for one moment the voices of hundreds of millions of workers rose together «m a rumble of protest against the filthy orgies of which your brothers are the victims, the executioners and assassins here would be paralyzed, and, with them, the executioners and tyrants of the whole world.

Workers, brothers, in the name of international class solidarity, in the name of socialism, take up the defense of the workers of our country.

Central Committee of the Internationalist Communist Party of Greece (Trotskyists)

 
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