COUNCIL EVADES RESPONSIBILITY IN BERNARD CASE
By Neil Bronson
Detroit
It has been nine months since Leo Bernard, Jan Garrett and Walter Graham were shot at Debs Hall, the Socialist Workers party headquarters here,- by anti-Communist fanatic Edward Waniolek. Since June, Waniolek has been undergoing rehabilitation at society's expense at Ionia State Hospital for the Mentally Insane. But the innocent victims -- victims not only of the gunman but of the negligence of the city of Detroit -- have received no assistance from the city or state in paying their medical costs, and friends had to assume the burial costs for the slain Leo Bernard.
The negligence of the city in this case is glaring. The killer, Edward Waniolek was known both by the U.S. Secret Service and Detroit police as a dangerous man. On many occasions he had proclaimed his intention to “kill Communists." His delusion that the U.S. was being "overrun by Communists" led him to attempt to emigrate to South ‘Africa as it was "the only free country in the world." When even the South African racists wouldn't accept him, he announced he was returning to Detroit with several guns to go into action.
Detroit police subsequently investigated him and urged his wife to have him committed. Perhaps fearing Waniolek would make her a part of the "conspiracy" that plagued his mind, she refused to have him committed. Although there exists a law in Michigan which would have made it possible in this circumstance for the police to initiate commitment proceedings, they did nothing until the Young Socialists were shot.
The months since the shooting have demonstrated that the city of Detroit has learned nothing from this experience. Even the so-called liberals on the City Council have assisted in covering up the role of the police. The police have made no investigation to determine whether or not the killer was directed to Debs Hall by any existing right-wing organizations, although it is known that the incipient fascist gang "Breakthrough," which has been involved in conflicts with the local antiwar movement, attracts such elements.
Why this investigation has not taken place is not difficult to determine. Only recently, Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh made a loud but effectless denunciation of police collaboration with right-wing hoodlums and mentioned Breakthrough by name. A critic of the mayor, however, pointed out that Breakthrough fuehrer Donald Lobsinger works for the mayor in one of the city's departments!
Last September, local civil-liberties Attorney Ernest Goodman submitted a brief to the Detroit city government pointing out the city's negligence prior to the shooting and requesting that it meet its moral obligation to the survivors by paying their hospitalization and recovery expenses. The sum involved would be negligible for the city . but would have meant a lot to the victims.
The callousness of the. City Council was made apparent at a hearing on December 20 of last year, where the councilmen demonstrated that they had not taken the trouble even to read the brief. In order to facilitate their evasion of the issues, the council chose as its chairman for the hearing Councilman Van Antwerp, a former member of. the Detroit police department who never discarded his cop image for the liberal front of most councilmen. Under Van Antwerp's guidance, the council completely ruled out the presentation of any witnesses but one and they totally ignored the urging of Garrett and Graham that they meet the request of the victims as a sort of moral bond that the city regarded its duty to protect all its citizens, regardless of political persuasion, from the type of violence perpetrated on May 16.
Friends of the victims presented the. council with petitions signed by more than 4 ,200 Detroiters urging compensation, as well as a statement signed by all active poli-
tical clubs at Wayne State University, which the. three Young Socialists had attended. ~ Subsequently, another petition signed by several leading Detroit clergymen urged that the council take positive action. The Michigan Chronicle, a Detroit paper directed at the Negro community, urged compensation in a January 7 editorial which went on to say: "The fact that Waniolek's intended victims were politically unpopular could account for the slow action on the part of the police. Could the fact that probable victims of many potential killers walking Detroit streets are Negroes account for the fact nothing is done ahead of time to stop: them either?"
On January 20, friends of the victims discovered that the council intended to pass a resolution on the request at its meeting January 24. The Wayne State University Young Socialist Alliance issued a leaflet on campus January 23. that-urged student attendance at the council meeting to support the victims' request. The leaflet briefly sunmarized the request and concluded with the statement: "Let our do-nothing council know it can't afford to ‘do nothing' in this case!"
- The police, "unable" to prevent the shooting in the spring, proved quite capable of mobilizing 200 cops -- including. the entire day shift cf the central station and the Gestapo-like Tactical Mobile Units -- to head off what they must have imagined as a massive student invasion of the City-County Building! But the student delegation attended quite peacefully and simply walked out when the council rammed through a denial of the victims' request without discussion. .
Council Chairman Edward Carey said, "The City Council, in denying this request, is denying it on the basis of legal advice and also to. give due process to the petitioners so that they can have recourse to the courts."
The. essence of. the legal advice received by the council was that state law exempts the city. from such a suit and thus the statement that the victims could take the city to court was fantastic.
Friends of the victims are now urging that a broader citizens' committee be constituted to collect funds to defray the hospital. expenses. Contributions may be sent to Emergency Medical Fund for Garreth and ‘Graham, c/o English Dept., Wayne State Mniversity, Detroit, Michigan 48202.
TROTSKYIST POSITION IN THE FRENCH ELECTIONS
[The following resolution on the legislative elections to be held in France on March 5 and March 12 was adopted in January by the Nineteenth Congress of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, the French section of the Fourth International. ]
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The populace by a big majority, particularly among the workers, is now following the electoral campaign and will participate in the legislative elections on March 5 and March 12. Due to this, the elections are an important political event toward which it would be wrong to adopt an attitude of abstention. But, on the other hand, we know that the elections can by no means transform society in any way. Social forces can be mobilized in them and, to a certain degree, they can hold back or facilitate certain developments depending on how they go.
Against the Gaullist candidates, against the spokesmen of the reactionary formations of the right and ultraright, the policies of the two big workers parties do not make it possible to turn the elections into a class against class demonstration of the workers against the capitalist system and for socialism. The Socialist party is associated, in the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left [FGDS], with bourgeois formations which, in addition, press this electoral grouping in the direction of an alliance or an agreement with formations that stand still further to the right. This pioc stands without a clear position against the American imperialist aggression in ~ ietnam.
Due to its reformist program of "genuine democracy" and its electoral deal with the FGDS, the French Communist party is not offering to the workers the only correct solution in this period of the decline of bourgeois democracy and of a strong state in the service of capitalism. As for the PSU [Parti Socialiste Unifié -- United Socialist party], it offers a motley crew of candidates ranging from a rather marked left socialism to a neocapitalist technocratic position that is little different from that of. the "left Gaullists." This formation has just made a deal with the FGDS in favor of Social
Democratic candidates, conventional or radical, who have nothing in common with the working class.
Because of its numerical weakness, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (French section of the Fourth International) is unable to undertake an electoral campaign of sufficient scope nationally to enable the vanguard workers to register their class views in accordance with the program of revolutionary Marxism. A limited campaign in one or two districts would not have sufficient response.
In the popular vote, as it has developed in relation with the laws of the Fifth Republic and the evolution of the workers parties, the electoral platforms do not constitute a means of testing class relations in the country. These are indicated only by the way the various social classes regard the political parties.
Since the end of the second world war, the majority of the French working class, including its most militant sectors, has voted for the candidates of the French Communist party, while the Socialist party has enjoyed the support of only a minority sector of the working class -- the most politically backward.
Despite long experience, the bulk of the workers continue to view the French Communist party as the one they consider capable of achieving their aspirations. That is why, in order to give the greatest force to a simple vote of class opposition, the Parti Communist Internationaliste (French section of the Fourth International) calls on all the workers and all the partisans of a socialist society to vote in the first round for the candidates of the French Communist party whose relative success will be felt everywhere not so much as a measure of the power of this party as an indication of where the working class in France stands.
This vote does not in any way signify acceptance of the policies of the French Communist party. In particular it cannot signify approval of the agreement reached with the FGDS. In the second round, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste asks the voters to support, not the “candidate of the left," but the worker candidate highest on the list Las determined in the first round]. By worker candidate we mean any candidate of the French Communist party, the Socialist party or the United Socialist party, so long as this is not taken as a label for candidates who are obviously outside the workers movement like Mendés—France or Lacoste. We urge the vanguard militants, unionists and politically conscious workers everywhere to take the floor in the public meetings of the workers parties to express the genuine aspirations of the working class, to condemn class collaboration and to demand a policy of class struggle.
A new edition of the combination of workers parties with bourgeois formations (like the Popular Front, Tripartyism, etc.), if it should win the majority of votes needed to form a government, could only lead once again to the process of capitulation which, to say the least, has been of service only to reaction. Only a United Front of Workers Parties on the basis of a completely anticapitalist program can succeed in mobilizing the broad toiling masses to kick out the Gaullist regime and install a government of the workers to attack the capitalist regime and undertake the building of a socialist society. We urge all those who vote for the traditional workers parties to come out in favor of this demand as the only means of transcending the present situation and sweeping out the leaders committed to class collaboration.
200 FRENCH YOUTH VOLUNTEER FOR VIETNAM
According to the February 16 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde, 200