Spanish seamen

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arms Imperialist governments last week suffered a nasty setback in their smooth arrangements for the international distribution of arms.

Mass meetings of merchant seamen at four major Spanish ports (Bilbao, Valencia, Cadiz and Las Palmas) voted to impose blacking on all arms shipments to the Latin American dictatorships, Southern Africa and Morocco.

Their action comes after a spate of revelations of the Spanish government's involvement in arms dealing. As part of its programme to 'democratise' the Francoist dictatorship, the Suarez regime has plunged enthusiastically into an orgy of weapon buying.

After satisfying their own soaring demand for arms to use against the working class 'domestically' these lovers of freedom and democracy planned to siphon off the surplus (at a comfortable profit. of course) to their friends and allies who gun down workers in other realms.

This project now seems to have misfired as the Spanish seamen gave other European workers their fine example of He is now believed to favour a coalition of Social Democrats and the right wing of the Socialist Party but he has yet to Again the season of the reversal of verdicts' in Peking.

• The signature of the Sino-Japanese peace treaty by restored deputy premier Teng Hsiao-ping in Tokyo was marked by a significant ceremony near the Chinese capital.

The 'East is Red' People's Commune • was officially "debaptised' and re-named the 'SinoJapanese Friendship' Commune.

Japan, US imperialism's main outpost in the Pacific, thus ioins a select group of Stalinist states-North Korea, Cambodia and Rumania-thus honoured.

More significant than the relabelling of Communes is the 'rehabilitation' of the demonstrators at Tien An Men Square, in Peking, in April 1976, which brought the last, short ascent of the Maoist 'gang of four' and their (then) close ally, Hua Kuo-feng, now in uneasy tandem with Teng. peasants and so weaken the bourgeoisie's best friends, the Stalinist and reformist leaders.

The official press may maintain a stony silence on how Teng came to be cast down as a 'capitalist roader' in April 1976 but Teng himself can hardly have forgotten that Hua, then Mao's 'favourite son', joined enthusiastically in the slanderous chorus against him.

It is probably the growing momentum of Teng's faction within the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy that has brought official leaks •to French journalists in China of the possible rehabilitation of Liu Shao-chi.

Liu, then a close associate of Teng, and a veteran of the civil war, became Mao's number one 'Cultural Revolution' victim.

The former head of state disappeared in 1967 after orchestrated mass denunciations as 'China's Kruschev' He is now reported still alive; his rehabilitation' would represent a reverberating repudiation of Mao.

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INTERNATIONAL

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