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In the course of the second World War the labor lackeys of imperialism have deported themselves with an impudence that puts in the shade even the conduct of their peers during the first World War. Among the most brazen today as in 1914-1918 are the British labor bureaucrats. Their actions bespeak a boundless contempt for the masses. They feel themselves completely immune. They permit themselves anything and everything. This was strikingly revealed at the time of the civil war in Greece.
The news of Churchill’s bestial deeds in Greece sent a wave of revulsion through the ranks of the English workers. Laborite members of Parliament received sharp letters of protest. There was talk of engaging in strike action in sympathy and solidarity with the embattled Athenian workers.
The annual conference of the British Labor Party fell on December 13, that is, in the very midst of the battle of Athens. More than a score of unions presented resolutions condemning the policy of the British imperialists. Thereupon Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor in Churchill’s War Cabinet, got up to openly flaunt his own guilt. Said Bevin:
The steps which have been taken in Greece are not the decisions of Winston Churchill. They are the decisions of the Cabinet. I and my colleagues participated in these discussions over nearly four years ... I say boldly that I am a party to these decisions, and looking back I cannot convince myself that any of these decisions were wrong.
This self-admitted criminal, boasting of his complicity in the butchery of the Greek workers, was not even hooted down. The assembled bureaucrats listened respectfully and the overwhelming majority voted to uphold the policy of Churchill-Bevin.
But that was only a part of the whole filthy job. It was likewise necessary to justify the bloodletting in the eyes of English workers as well as of world public opinion. This particular assignment fell to the lot of Bevin’s colleague Sir Walter Citrine, knighted for his past services to British imperialism. In the capacity of General Secretary of the British Trade Union Congress, Citrine headed a Congress delegation to Greece. To do what? To completely whitewash the Churchill government. And as a necessary corollary, to besmirch in vilest manner possible the heroic Greek fighters.
CITRINE’S REPORT
The Citrine Committee reported that the ELAS was nothing but a gang of murderers who had organized “brutal murders” of civilians; that “little actual fighting took place between them and the Germans …. Arms dropped by the British had been hoarded presumably for other purposes.” The Citrine Committee swore that the ELAS did not at all represent the labor movement of Athens or Greece; reiterated that “ELAS was more concerned with returning to Athens to seize power than with fighting the Germans”; and expressed satisfaction over the timely and beneficent intervention of British troops, tanks and planes, failing which “there would have been a wholesale massacre in Athens.”
That several thousand ELAS fighters were slaughtered was doubtless hardly worth mentioning inasmuch as the Citrine Committee found that “ELAS were the dirtiest fighters our troops had encountered.” And so forth and so on. In brief, everyone of Churchill’s vile lies was repeated, embellished and countersigned.
There is a scurvy footnote to all this. It was added by such veteran renegades from communism as Liston Oak and Max Eastman. Once upon a time both Oak and Eastman ranged themselves on the side of revolutionary workers against the imperialists and their lackeys. But times have changed and so have they. It is far more comfortable nowadays to beat the drums for the imperialist bandits. However, unlike the British bureaucrats, neither Oak nor Eastman have any power to betray the workers. They represent exactly nothing. Nevertheless they are eager to help out, if only in an advisory capacity, if only as publicity agents for Bevin-Citrine and Co. And so, they, too, have rushed—in the pages of the New Leader—to whitewash the British imperialists and to heap the vilest slander on the insurgent Greek workers.
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