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	Workers Vanguard No. 865	3 March 2006

Military Recruiters Off Campus!

Drop Charges Against U of C Protesters!

(Young Spartacus Pages)

We reprint below a statement issued by the Chicago Spartacus Youth Club on February 27.

On February 21 four activists protesting against military recruiters were arrested at the University of Chicago (U of C). Spartacus Youth Club supporters joined several other students protesting Marine recruiters at the Reynolds Club. When two protesters, Jeremy Cohan and Ben Fink, refused to end their protest, the campus cops arrested them. As the SYC led chants of “Administration hands off!” and “Recruiters off campus!” the cops dragged out Tom Discepola and Brian Stapleton who are supporters of the SYC. In trying to justify these outrageous arrests, director of the Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities (ORCSA) Sharlene Holly slanders the SYC. According to the Chicago Maroon (24 February), “Holly said they [supporters of the SYC] escalated the protest and created a dangerous environment.”

This is an outright lie. The four protesters were arrested on bogus charges of disorderly conduct for exercising their right to free speech. This is an attempt by the U of C administration, backed up by the Chicago cops, to suppress and intimidate anyone who opposes military recruitment and the occupation of Iraq. Students should demand: Drop all the charges against the anti-military recruitment protesters now! No retaliations! No disciplinary actions! Administration hands off the protesters!

U of C: Complicit in
U.S. Imperialist Crimes

All of U of C’s pretensions to being about the “life of the mind,” where students are free to think and express their opinions, are nothing but a bunch of lies. This was made clear when the administration called their cops to arrest student protesters in order to protect the military recruiters. U of C is a pillar of bourgeois society and plays a role in the maintenance of the bourgeois order. A main function of U of C is to train the next generation of ideologues, technocrats, capitalist politicians, corporate lawyers and spies needed by the bourgeoisie to perpetuate its rule.

U of C has a history of aiding U.S. imperialism; the Economics Department of Milton Friedman helped braintrust Pinochet’s bloody junta which came to power in Chile in 1973 and murdered, tortured and starved to death tens of thousands of workers and leftists. In fact, there is a bigger case for “weapons of mass destruction” at U of C than there ever was in Iraq. This is exemplified by U of C’s involvement in the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear weapons technology that enabled U.S. imperialism to obliterate and kill hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is no surprise that the killer spies of the CIA seek recruits for their bloody terror at U of C. Only five days before the protest against the Marine recruiters, the SYC initiated a protest on campus against CIA recruiters, chanting slogans such as “the biggest terrorist in the world today is U.S. imperialism and the CIA!”

U of C is also a leading landlord in Chicago’s largely black South Side, whose private army of campus cops terrorizes the black residents of the surrounding neighborhood. It was at this campus in 2004 that black student Clemmie Carthens was beaten by campus cops when they saw him hugging a white woman. It is no wonder then that it was at U of C earlier this year that white students at May House held a racist “Ghetto” party and thought they could get away with it. We call for the opening of U of C to the surrounding black neighborhood as part of our fight for free, quality education for all. Nationalize the university! For open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all students!

Not One Person, Not One Penny
for U.S. Imperialist Army!

The SYC is opposed to military recruiters on campus. At campuses like U of C they seek to recruit the next generation of the elite officer corps whose job is to oversee U.S. imperialist slaughter and occupation. Meanwhile, in high schools and on more plebeian college campuses, military recruiters use promised tuition assistance and job opportunities to lure working-class youth, including a disproportionate number of black and minority youth, into signing up to be the cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. We say: not one person, not one penny for the imperialist military!

The imperialist military cannot be reformed to become a force for good in the world. The SYC opposes any extension of the U.S. imperialist military onto college campuses and high schools. We urge students to protest military recruiters as part of the struggle against the brutal occupation of Iraq and the entire imperialist system. Military recruiters off campus now! End militarism and war once and for all through worldwide socialist revolution!

The SYC is opposed to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. imperialists. The U.S. crusade against Iraq, carried out under the administrations of Bush Sr. and Democrat Clinton as well as George W. Bush, has killed over 1.5 million Iraqis as the result of UN sanctions alone and hundreds of thousands more during both wars and the current occupation. We took a side in defense of Iraq in the lead-up to and during the war, standing for the defeat of our “own” bourgeoisie. We called for class struggle at home against the U.S. capitalist rulers. As Marxists we understand that imperialism is not a bad “policy” that the capitalist rulers can choose to carry out or not depending on the “conscience” or the will of the populace; it is a system based on cutthroat economic competition between imperialist nation-states over markets and spheres of influence. This will always be the case as long as the capitalists are in power.

This is why we fight to win students to the side of the working class, the only force in society with the power and objective interest to smash capitalism. The working class is the source of all the profits that the capitalist class usurps for themselves. By withholding their labor power, the working class has the power to shut down production and stop the flow of profits. It is this social power that has to be mobilized in the fight for socialist revolution to establish an egalitarian society based on human need rather than profit. Down with the colonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan! All U.S. troops out now! U.S. hands off Iran! Down with imperialist nuclear blackmail!

Much has been made of a banner held by some of those protesting the Marine recruiters that read “Don’t join the Marines, join the American Nazi Youth Corps.” As an example, in the February 24 Maroon article ORCSA head Holly says: “Many members of the University of Chicago community were hurt, outraged, and offended by the swastikas, Nazi references, and shouts inviting people to join them to kill Muslims and other minorities.” What’s outrageous is these Marines recruiting students to carry out racist imperialist slaughter! What really outrages this administrator is that these youth exposed this fact.

It is obvious that the banner was intended to compare the U.S. war machine to Nazism. Though the Bush regime is made up of a bunch of Christian fundamentalist warmongers, this is not fascism. War, repression: this is what bourgeois democracy looks like. From the Philippines to WWI, WWII and Vietnam, millions have been slaughtered in the name of “democracy.”

Those students opposed to war often look to the Democratic Party as the “lesser of two evils.” The Democrats just like the Republicans are committed to the maintenance of the capitalist order. The Spartacus Youth Club fights to win youth to the perspective of building a Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter. Join us!