[Carter addressing NATO chiefs -including Callaghan The huge…]

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Carter addressing NATO chiefs -including Callaghan The huge press campaign over the trials of Anatoli Shcharansky and Alexander Ginsburg, and the statements about "human rights" from Jimmy Carter, James Callaghan and other leading imperialist politicians, amount to the most naked hypocrisy.

Only last week a 16 year old youth was shot dead by Callaghan's army of torturers, thugs and murderers in Ireland.

In Long Kesh concentration camp 300 Republican and socialist prisoners, branded "criminals" for their resistance to British imperialism, are subjected to the most barbaric treatment for demanding their status as political prisoners.

Ir September, Aubrey, Berry and Campbell face a frame up "spy" trial under the Official Secrets Act in which each face jail sentences of up to 14 years for the -*crime" of defending the freedom of the press to collect published information on the state's military apparatus.

Agee deported

Phillip Agee, the former agent who set out to publicise the outrages the Young And Carter's regime props up some of the most vicious, dictatorial governments in the world -including that in Iran, and a chain particularly those in Africa -are becoming harder to control, this section of the bourgeoisie is urging a more direct line, such as the direct use of imperialist troops in Zaire, and a return to the tactics of the Cold War.

Carter's "human rights" charade is connected with this pressure, and is in no way a move towards any form of liberalisation.

US prisoners

Indeed as soon as US ambassador Andrew Young an advocate of more developed collaboration with the Kremlin bureaucracy, let slip a remark on thousands of political prisoners in the USA, Carter immediately that in the current economic crisis of imperialism it is no longer sufficient for the US capitalist class to take steps to avoid any more Vietnam-style defeats.

Desperate for markets and for workers to exploit, they are drawn towards the idea of recapturing the lost territory in Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba and Asia.

They want to end the nationalised property relations in those countries and reintroduce exploitation, through private enterprise.

As Trotskyists we begin from the defence of the historic gains of the working class. The greatest of these gains was the October Revolution in Russia which drove out the capitalist Shcharansky and Ginsburg do nothing to defend the Soviet Union.

They hand a propaganda weapon to the most anti-Soviet sections of the imperialists, and further sully the name of communism in the eyes of . the international workers' movement.

It even jeopardises the collaborationist policy of detente, so much loved by the Kremlin leaders.

This would certainly be a heavy price to pay if the trials were simply aimed at punishing Shcharansky and Ginsburg, who both hold right wing views and are part of a group set up to assist imperialism to monitor the Helsinki agreeSWP Role in Speke New lies from Newsline...Statement by Polisario Front ment in the USSR.

In a healthy workers state such individuals could easily be dealt with through the education and mobilisation of the working class.

Even in the Stalinist regime such trials are a rarity, and must indicate acute uncertainty among the Kremlin leaders.

They knew from the outset that the capitalist media would launch a huge campaign on this issue, and that such publicity would reach into Russia itself.

But they decided to make an example of two relatively right wing Continued on Page 2