Istvoos Sset New Nato War Threat

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In a week when 20,000 Soviet troops and 1,000 tanks were withdrawn from East Germany by Kremlin leaders, imperialist chiefs decided last Wednesday to press ahead with an aggressive £2,000 million missiles plan that dramatically increases the danger of nuclear war.

Cutting through the wafer thin veneer of seasonal bourgeois claptrap about "peace on earth" , the anti-Soviet NATO alliance is to instal 600 UScontrolled Cruise and Pershing Il missiles on sites in Western Europe.

Prime targets

The missiles, with a range 1,500 miles, are the first Europe to have thé capacity strike the Soviet Union.

But their most immediate effect will of course be to transform the "host" countries into prime targets for Soviet retaliation or preventative strikes in the event of war.

And since the missiles are controlled not by the European governments du are toe US Carter reality not so much offering "defence" , but rather gaining a new device for forcing European imperialists into the front line of a possible catastrophic US war against the deformed Pym workers states.

At the forefront of the fight to secure European acceptance of this potentially suicidal plan has been the fanatically anti-Soviet Thatcher government, and in particular Defence Secretary Pym.

But another eager sponsor of the scheme has been West German "socialist" Premier Helmut Schmidt.

Belgium's "socialist" Foreign Minister Henri Simonet also played a leading role in winning conditional Belgian backing for the missiles.

Only in Holland was a coalition government-that of Andreas van Agt-forced into • the plan, which involved the stationing of 48 missiles on Dutch soil.

Encouraged by this NATO move, and determined to increase the striking power of US imperialism, Carter went on last Wednesday to announce a massive 5%, $9 billion, increase in arms spending.

The extra money is necessary, Carter argued, in order to give the US a "more flexible strategic and tactical military posture"

Central to his new plans is a rapid deployment strike force, requiring a new fleet of "maritime pre-positioning ships" each carrying up to three brigades of marines.

"We must understand" asserted Carter "that not every instance of the firm application of power is a potential Vietnam.

"The consensus for natienal strength and international involvement, although shaken and threatened, survived that divisive and tragic war"

Once again, therefore, the American imperialists are contemplating massive military adventures, in which hundreds of thousands are slaughtered.

The US war budget now totals a massive $157 billion, and the growing importance attached to such spending at a time of acute economic crisis for imperialism indicates the desperate lengths to which capitalism is prepared to go to defend its rule.

Such actions are not only a threat to the deformed workers' states: they run directly counter to the interests of the working class in every country of the 6 USAF -Carter ordering new warships capitalism.

Such a political answer anathema to the Kremlin Stalinists, whose privileged bureaucratic power (like that of their fellows in the deformed workers' states) rests on the preservation of an uneasy "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism on a world scale.

Threat to privileges

The Stalinist leaders recognise in the struggles of the working class a threat to their own parasitic positions.

Instead, they seek merely to use tame protest movements and diplomatic means in a bid to pressurise imperialist leaders into abandoning imperialist policies.

This is why the struggle today against the war threat and for the defence of the workers' states against imperialism requires the construction in every country of Trotskyist parties capable of leading the overthrow of capitalism and the necessary political revolution to remove the Stalinist bureaucracies.

Reconstruct the Fourth International !

No. I Nov. 1979 DISCUSSION BULLETIN 60p Price 75p including postage from: WSL, 31 Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR.

Within one week of Parliament nodding through its six monthly renewal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 18 people had been picked up in Britain in a major police sweep.

Although police are claiming that they have netted one man on their suspect list-Gerry Tuite-the round up is clearly an annual propaganda drive.

This time last year Metropolitan Police mounted Operation Santa-flooding London's West End with uniformed and plain clothes police in an attempt to heighten the political atmosphere surrounding Christmas shopping.

Among those arrested is Patrick Prendiville, aged 33, an industrial reporter with the Hibernian Weekly Review.

Prendiville, whose arrest brought protests from the National Union of Journalists, applied with two others for a writ of habeas corpus to secure their release.

But the Home Secretary had already signed an order agreeing to their being held for five extra days without charge, and the court-which is nominally sup posed to ensure that noone is held without evidence-granted the police an adjournment to prepare evidence!

Nine of those held have now been released.

The round up came ten days after two NUS delegates had been arrested under the PTA as they were travelling from Northern Ireland to the student annual conference.

The Act is unashamedly used as a means of harassing those known to have republican views; yet this year's 'debate' in the House of Commons brought fewer protests than ever from Labour MPs.

But such propaganda public displays do little to demonstrate that the British government is winning its war with Irish republicans.

Reduced confidence The blowing up of four soldiers in County Tyrone and the killing of a fifth in South Armagh brought the number of British troops killed by the Provisional IRA this year to 38 -three times the total figure for 1978.

The security forces in the North are at sixes and sevens. A number of stunning blows this year have reduced confidence amongst the Loyalist population in the North.

They are beginning to doubt whether the army can win a war against a Provisional movement which is now operating guerrilla warfare at maximum efficiency.

SDLP attempts to present a left face to Northern Catholics came to an ignominious end this week with the new leader John Hume agreeing to talks with the British government.

The talks will be doomed to Failure (and are being boycotted ›y the Official Unionists) bit Hume's about-turn will assist Chatcher in her visit to America.

She will demand that US ollections and help for repubicans in the north are cut off.

Splits among the Unionists ncrease.

Jim Kilfedder, from North Jown, who was expelled from he Official Unionists three rears ago, is to form a progresive unionist party which will eek to ignore the national juestion as best it can and make imid proposals for social eform.

If the year ends with the british Army on the defensive here is little for the working 33:2 lass in the six counties to look orward to in 1980.

The Provisionals have abanloned predictions of early uccess but remain ever locked n guerrillaism.

A spokesman for the Provos 'ouncil told the Sunday press:

We have conditioned our eople to think in terms of a ong-term struggle. We don't peculate on how long it will ake"

The Workers. Socialist ‚eague unconditionally defends he Provisional IRA against the ritish Army.

The Provos have lost 180 people killed in the last ten years and 1,000 of their number have been jailed.

Those inside and outside the ranks of the Provisionals who have been killed, injured or jailed are victims of British imperialișm in Ireland.

But the Provisionals are no substitute for a party of the working class which makes no concessions to imperialism or Loyalism and seeks to unite the working class around a revolutionary programme.

Such a party-which only Trotskyists are capable of building-would link a struggle in the North to an unremitting struggle against the Catholic state in the South where Haughey's nationalist reputation is a thin cover for his Tory politics.

*British troops out of Ireland now!

*Smash the PTA!

*Release political prison ITS!

*For an Irish WOI ters' republic!

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LONG KESH ritains: Concentrution