[mortuaries. Demonstrations are fired on, opposition is met…]

Scan page 7

mortuaries. Demonstrations are fired on, opposition is met with firearms.

Yet for David Owen and the Labour government the main concern is "British and western interests" and the biggest danger 'communism' The struggles of the masses are not yet linked to demands for communism. There does not exist in Iran the masses to the socialist facing the Iranian masses is ition.

At 2 o'clock the in morning, one fire truck arrived. It pulled up several hundred feet from the blaze, so far away that the water couldn't even reach the ground floor.

Everyone inside was dead.

Then: the army fire truck arrived. The navy fire truck arrived. The National Iranian Oil Company fire truck arrived. And a petrochemical company 'fire truck arrived.

After everyone was dead, the fire trucks began to put out the fire.

Police kept up the barricade. Troops backed up the police. The crowd was pushed farther and farther back from the ruins of the theatre and the charred remains of families, friends and comrades.

From 2 a.m. • 's mun that they will exchange the despotism of the Shah for the religious repression of the official opposition.

Yet the emergence to the vanguard of the struggle of the working class is a progressive and important development of the Iranian Already the working class provides the powerhorse of the opposition.

The necessity is for the working class-and its most nuannad alamanto *n tale auvallcu cicucus-cu tanc the leadership politically of the revolutionary upsurge.

In Britain and America the Shah's friends still attempt to discredit the will of the masses. Atrocities are presented ..as 'communistinspired' or the work of 'infiltrators'.

No greater manipulation of the news from Iran has yet been seen than the cinema fire in Abadan on August 19 this year when 750 people were killed in a The regime declared this to be the work of "terrortroops could be seen pulling bodies out of the wreckage and piling them onto army trucks. No one was ever allowed near the building or the bodies.

As dawn broke in Abadan on Sunday August 20, police and troop reinforcements arrived and by early morning a swarm of several hundred troops barricaded the entire area against crowds of shocked, horrified, grief stricken witnesses to one of the most desperate crimes of Pahlavi tyranny. It was not the first crime; it will not be the last. But as the burning sun rose over this scene of savage murder, the grief and shock and horror was already transforming into a raging, fearless revolutionary storm. Within hours, Abadan erupted with thundering calls of Death to the Pahlavi Tyranny! Death to the Shah! Burn him!

By the next day, Later there were cautious admissions that the masses in Iran did not accept the explanation they were given.

Socialist Press has decided to reprint extracts from Resistance, the newspaper of the Iranian Students Association in the US.

The ISAUS in its publications certainly does not fight for the socialist revolution but does stand against the Shah and against imperialism.

We have no independent means of collecting eye witness accounts to the cinema fire but believe that this account taken from Resistance' is an honest attempt to build up an accurate picture of what happened and who was responsible.

Culprit

In fact, as this extract shows, the culprit was the Shah. The police were used to baton panic stricken people back into the cinema and fire fighting equipment was deliberately held back.

Crowds trying to free people from the inferno were fired on by troops.

This is the regime that David Owen and the Labour government supports... theatre was surrounded by thousands of troops. No one was permitted near the scene.

By night, army trucks pulled up and loaded up with bodies and stole them away to mass graves in fear of people's furious and powerful rage.

At the cemetary, not one body was recognizable.

Two bulldozers, noticed by residents two days earlier near the cemetary, suddenly disappeared by Monday night. The drivers have not been seen since.

Five days before the fire, a Navy captain is reported to have told his officers 'don't go to any movies this week' "

A license has been issued' to the Tory press to witchhunt and libel revolutionaries and militant socialists.

That is: the only possible interpretation of the High Court verdict at the end of the libel suit brought against the Observer . newspaper by six members of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

The jury found that the Observer's absurd allegations of arms caches, and mistreatment of actress Irene Gorst at the WRP's residential schaol were not substantially true and did libel the complainants.

In this limited sense, they have "cleared the names" of the píaintiffs and the WRP.

But they also declared that the plaintiffs-including WRP Central Committee members Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, Roy Battersby and Roger Smith and former General Secretary Gerry Healy-"had not been materially injured".

Yet the trial had revealed conclusive proof of a joint effort by both the Special Branch and the Observer to frame up the WRP through a coordination of the witch-hun. ting article and a police raid on the WRP school.

Blacklist

And it had exposed the operation of a political blacklist in the entertainment industry through which several of the plaintiffs had suffered a drastic curtailment of work since the article was published.

Also highlighted was the scandalous role in this of Equity leader Peter Plouviez who, rather than defend Equity members from political blacklisting, actively encouraged it, pressing Gorst into taking the story to the Observer.

To declare, in spite of all this, that the plaintiffs "had not been materially injured" is bad enough. But, to add outrage to injury, the €70,000 costs of the hearing were awarded against the injured party. to the fibellous Observer!

•This is little more than an open invitation to the servile hacks of Fleet Street to fabricate even more extravagant lies about the revolutionary movement.

is certainly hard to imagine the scale of damages and costs that would have been willingly handed out to six bourgeois politicians who were found to have been libelled by a workers' paper.

Tactics

The decision in this case is a further class expression-if any were needed-ot the class nature of British justice.

There is of course no principled objection to taking legal action against libels in t Tory press. it is entirely question of tactics in en particular case.

But the outcome of the WRP's lawsuit should be scarcely a surprise to Marxists who have consistently stressed that the system of "justice" under capitalism means in reality the systematic protection of the interests and wealth of the capitalist class against the organised workers' movement.

The libel laws are as much a part of the capitalists' legal system as the laws restricting picketing the racist immigration laws, and the Criminal Trespass Law. They are designed for use by the property-owning minority against its opponents and not vice versa.

Fresh lesson

But it appears that the WRP leaders required a further expensive lesson in this basic fact of life under capitalism, and actually expected that the strength of their casé against the Observer would produce a just verdict.

In fact the real cost of the