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From The Militant, Vol. X No. 39, 28 September 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The plight of the Jewish people in the post-war world is one of the most damning indictments of the Allied powers.
During the war, the Allied propaganda machines utilized Hitler’s atrocities against the Jews as grist for their mills. They denounced Hitler. They pointed to his horrible concentration camps. They shed tears over the mass murder of these unfortunate victims. They made out that an Allied victory would guarantee the rescue of the Jews.
But what happened?
In Europe today the Jews live in terror. Fascist-like reaction still hounds them. Pogroms have flared in Poland, and In other countries the Jews are made victims of concerted, organized attacks. The pitiful survivors of Hitler’s lynch law wander over Europe as displaced persons not knowing when or where the next blow will descend.
Most of them are dominated by one thought. To get out of Europe. They appear to have no desire to enter the Soviet Union. They are too familiar with the purges, the anti-Semitism, and the savage brutality of the Stalin regime. Nor have the Kremlin bureaucrats done anything to change this judgment of the Jewish people. They have not offered to open the doors of the Soviet Union to Hitler’s victims!
Many of the Jews would like to come to the United States. But Wall Street is interested in fostering anti-Semitism. The obedient instruments of Wall Street who govern in Washington have kept the lock fast on the gates of America. Their ideas about the Jews do not differ fundamentally at all from those held by the Nazis.
Consequently; the Jews, seeking escape from the Allied conquerors in Europe, have found their way to Palestine – the land promised to them by Great Britain.
But there they have been received with a brutality completely in the pattern they suffered under Hitler. The British have rounded them up as they arrived on crowded ships, and herded them into concentration camps.
Behind the barbed wire of the Allied camps on Cyprus stand victims wearing the tattooed identification numbers placed on them by the Nazis!
This is how the Allies carried out their war promises to the Jewish people.
When the Jews already in Palestine began staging huge protest demonstrations, the British responded by clamping down martial law and moving troops against them. Palestine resembles a battlefield where the Allies are still continuing the Second World War, this time carrying out the task left unfinished by Hitler.
The plight of the Jews under world capitalism shows how far barbarism has advanced. As Trotsky pointed out in 1940:
“Today decaying capitalist society is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores; seventeen million individuals out of the two billion populating the globe, that is, less than one per cent, can no longer find a place on our planet. Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.”
Main Militant Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 20 June 2021
Main Militant Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 28 June 2021