Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 15, 15 April 1946, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Albert Goldman, attorney for Leon Trotsky and his counsel during the hearings of the Dewey Commission investigating the Moscow Trials, has added his signature to the list of men and women prominent in labor and public life who recently sent a cablegram to the Nuremberg Tribunal calling for an examination of Rudolf Hess and other Nazi defendants on the charges of Nazi collaboration made in the Moscow Trials against Leon Trotsky and the other old Bolsheviks finally murdered by Stalin’s GPU.
As is known, neither the Tribunal as a whole nor the Russian judge or prosecutor has reacted to the proposal made in the cablegram. Hess, though examined on a score of points, was not asked a single question about the charges made in Moscow during the big trials. This failure, especially on the part of the Stalinists in Nuremberg, provides supplementary proof of the fact that the Old Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky included, were subjected to the most monstrous frame-up in history and that they now stand even more clearly vindicated than ever before.
Albert Goldman, whose signature was added to those of Max Shachtman, national secretary of the Workers Party, and Emanuel Garrett, editor of Labor Action, and to those of more than a hundred other prominent men and women, is also the leader of the minority group in the Socialist Workers Party.
However, the official leadership of that party has brought great discredit upon itself both by its failure to take the initiative in this campaign and to join in it when others took it, and its failure even so much as to mention the cablegram and its sponsors in the columns of the SWP paper.
Following the campaign begun by the English Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which resulted in an address to the Nuremberg Tribunal signed, among others, by H.G. Wells, Arthur Koestler, etc., American supporters of the fight to vindicate the name and revolutionary honor of Leon Trotsky and the other Bolshevik martyrs met to make plans for a similar campaign in the United States. To help in this work, the national secretary of the Workers Party proposed in an official communication to the Socialist Workers Party that the two join forces to make the campaign as wide and representative as possible and to discuss practical measures toward this end. The Socialist Workers Party, in its reply, rejected this proposal.
During the campaign, conducted not only by members of the Workers Party but by many others, including Norman Thomas and James T. Farrell, the Socialist Workers Party did not lift a finger to give any assistance.
After the cablegram and its sponsors were made public, not only in Labor Action, but in part in such papers as the New York Times, the World-Telegram and others, the organ of the Socialist Workers Party, The Militant, allowed the event to pass without a single reference to it.
For this incredible conduct, responsibility falls exclusively upon the shoulders of the leadership of the SWP. It shouts at the top of its lungs that it is the “only Trotskyist” organization, but is so blinded by its factional hostility to the Workers Party and to any enterprise with which the Workers Party is connected, that it resorts to actions which cannot be called anything less than sabotage of a magnificent and successful effort to vindicate all over again the great name and the revolutionary integrity of Leon Trotsky.
Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 24 January 2019