State-terrorism: An American tradition

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4 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1985 By KWAME M. A. SOMBURU Official, state-sanctioned terrorism has been a major component of U.S. domestic and foreign policy since this government's inception.

It was a vital component in the campaigns to exterminate, pacify, and jail (on reservations) the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas.

Africans, both slave and free, were kept in a subordinate status through the use of brutal and murderous terror that equals and even surpasses the present actions of the South African government.

The American labor movement, too, has been a continual victim of U.S. government-sponsored terrorism throughout its history.

American history records numerous examples of such atrocities by federal, state, and local government forces, along with those committed by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

U.S. terrorism was a major factor in the bloody invasions and conquest of the Philippines (1898-1946) and Haiti (1915-1933). The insidious role of the U.S. government in foreign lands was exposed during the 1930s by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, who was a high-ranking Marine Corps officer for 27 years.

Butler stated that he "was a racketeer for capitalism" and served the interests of major corporations such as United Fruit, Standard Oil, and the National City Bank during his tours of duty in the Caribbean, Latin America, and China.

Editorial (continued from page 1) with no aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador.

These two incidents are closely connected.

U.S. workers are beginning to learn that the fight against concessions is directly tied to the fight against war. The unions cannot effectively challenge employers here while supporting a war that aims to destroy unions in El Salvador, or anywhere else.

The union bureaucrats would like to short-circuit this budding antiwar sentiment. They would like to sever its logical connection to the fight against concessions.

They propose their "Buy America" campaigns in place of a fight against the bosses. They propose red-baiting the 24 international union presidents in the Labor Committee for Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador, who oppose U.S. intervention, in place of promoting solidarity with workers in Central America.

The U.S. working class has battled some powerful enemies in recent weeks and months. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp., the nation's seventh-largest steel producer, has met with strong resistance from workers in the Northeast.

The Hormel packinghouse workers, too, are proving that labor hasn't lost its punch. And now, the Chrysier workers have also hit the bricks. They have learned that the concessions of the past won them nothing.

This state-sanctioned terrorism is a continuing factor in the policy of the American ruling class. I recently met and interviewed Samuel C. Martin, a retired Marine, who witnessed and participated in atrocities against the Vietnamese people in the 1960s.

A Marine speaks Martin was a master sergeant for 14 of his 21 years in the Marines. He was both a drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C., and a trainer-platoon leader in Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1960s. He was a skilled martial-arts expert prior to joining the Marines. He told me he joined because "I wanted to serve my country."

"I came to the Marine Corps with knowledge of how to kill with my bare hands. That's why they made me a drill instructor." Martin said that the only thing they did for him was enhance his killing abilities by giving him "the time and the purpose."

He said that the inner peace he had acquired with his martial-arts training was changed by the Marine Corps. They substituted the peacefulness that "I had in my head and they put in there the desire to do nothing but kill."

Martin taught survival skills, killing with bare hands, weapons, and use of explosives for killing and mass destruction.

In response to my question about Lt. Calley and the My Lai massacre, he said that Calley was a scapegoat. Massacres like that were a common occurrence.

He and other Marines were often given "orders to go into villages, just like Calley, with orders like, 'Sergeant, I want you to kill every fucking thing breathing? And that meant babies, children, mothers, daddies, all livestock, everything. They would say, 'it's a possible Cong [Vietnamese Communists] connection""

"You killed everything, said Martin, "everything. And I've done that probably over a hundred times, to villages.... " At that moment he asked me to stop the interview because the flashbacks were too painful to remember. Francisco.

The workers have no common ground with the bosses. They have no interest in reducing their standard of living to make the company more profitable. That is the case in every instance.

That is why thousands of working people, organized in union contingents, demanded "Jobs not War" when they marched in antiwar demonstrations on April 20, 1985.

The antiwar movement is today disVietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. Courtesy National Park Service