Olive Sutton
If this policy is continued the price will be American lives. In the meantime, it is costing plenty of dollars. In terms of take- home pay after taxes, in terms of grocery bills, your weekly outlay for the necessities of everyday living. For with prices spiralling, the Marshall Plan is gravy for the American trusts.
And there's another price. The current deportation drive is aimed first of all at men and women who expose this war policy, who fight the enslavement of the Taft-Hartley Law, who lead the struggle for price controls, and speak up for the masses of Negro people who demand their rights as citizens, for the masses of Jewish people who protest the State Department's betrayal of the Jews of Palestine.
The vast majority of people in the world do not want another war any more than you do. They are organizing in every country to make themselves heard. The countries of eastern Europe are consolidating their new republics, ever watchful for plotters against their reconstruction and peace-building programs.
But that is precisely the kind of thing that infuriates the she- wolf whose lair is Wall Street. Deprived of their old stamping grounds for exploitation and profit because the people have claimed their resources and industries for themselves, the bankers and trusts howl with anguish. If atom bomb threats and hunger. baiting do not work, the guns go off‘as in Greece. If the Greek people won't give in to guns in the hands of Royalist-fascist troops, then American troops must go.
But Hitler with gas chambers and crematoriums could not exterminate the demand of people to be free.
It is not necessary for American would-be Hitlers to learn this the hard way, or for us to learn what our government is up to the way the German and Italian people did. World War II could have been stopped in Spain. World War III can be stopped in Greece.
That means that the Marshall-Truman program must be scuttled and a program of genuine reconstruction and peaceful trade adopted.
You can vote for this kind of a peace program in November. The Republican-Democrat Marshall Plan parties are opposed by a man who speaks in the tradition of the President who wanted the Greek people to have a chance to solve their problems through "free democratic processes," who put bread before bullets.
Henry Wallace has proposed a program of foreign aid in this tradition‘a program for reconstruction and trade, for dealing with the people through their chosen representatives, for dealing with governments pledged to preserve the peace of the world through the United Nations.
Meanwhile, we must demand an end to the shipment of arms to Greece, to the training of troops for Greece, to appropriations for Greek quislings to squander.
General Markos told the people of Greece in a New Year's Day message over the Democratic Army broadcasting station:
During the year the Democratic Army has grown, matured, and become as strong as steel ... the Americans want to crush the Democratic Army in order to put into operation their plans against the people. They want to enslave the Soviet Union and the people's democracies. But we have frustrated all their plans and realized the chief aims we set for ourselves in 1947 this year, under the direction of the Democratic government, will be a year of victory.
This year can be a year of victory for the American people, too, but we have got to fight for it all the way from now until November.
When the Spanish Republic was attacked by Franco troops armed by Mussolini, we stood up and called it aggression aggression aimed at the whole world.
Did Mussolini ever openly admit he had delivered even one hundred dollars' worth of military equipment to Franco? He did not.
Did Mussolini and his henchmen shout that they were fighting "Communist aggression" which threatened Spain?
They did.
Today the United States government has proclaimed for the world to hear that over $250,000,000 worth of military equipment has been delivered to the Greek fascists…that American military men are operating at the battlefronts with the Greek fascist army.
Today the U.S. government is shouting with the loudest of the Greek Francos: Communism…aggression…banditry.
When the Spanish Republic was attacked, we knew where our front was. We let Congress and the State Department and the White House know we knew…with delegations, picket lines, petitions, demonstrations, marches to Washington.
"Lift the embargo on arms to the Spanish Republic!" The banners were high in every street, in every city, every town.
Today Harry S. Truman, George C. Marshall, Herbert Hoover, John Foster Dulles…have branded the United States an aggressor in Greece.
Where are the delegations, the demonstrations, the petitions?
Where are the arms to lift our banners?