_How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War_
http://tinyurl.com/48pn8s
FRENCH
"In 1940 the French Trotskyists were divided into two tendencies over
perspectives which were ultimately as far away from each other as they
both were from that of Trotsky. Beginning from the conception that the
defeat of French imperialism and the occupation of French territory
were leading, not only to national oppression, but to the rebirth of a
genuine `national question' in which all cl***** were interested, as
in a colonial country, the majority of the POI, organised around the
committees which published La Verit=E9, outlined a strategy according to
which the bourgeoisie of an occupied country becomes the natural ally
of the workers' movement, and the latter devotes itself completely to
`national resistance'. Conversely, the La Seule Voie (The Only Road)
group, which had emerged from the PCI, and subsequently became the
CCI, denied that an imperialist nation could ever become an oppressed
nation following a military defeat, and considered that national
demands were `the im****tation of bourgeois ideology into the
proletariat in order to demoralise it'."
GREEK
"We do not have the means here to discover the truth about the
policies of the Greek Trotskyists and how they could have escaped the
dreadful fate that awaited them. Rene Dazy quotes from a do***ent of
1943 in a Greek Trotskyist publication: `The Anglo-Americans will come
to restore state power to the bourgeoisie. The exploited will only
have changed one yoke for another.'29 If that really was the case,
then it is clear that the Greek Trotskyists sentenced themselves to
death by confining themselves to negative perspectives and not taking
their place in the mass movement.
"Michel Raptis, at that time European Secretary of the Fourth
International, and writing under the pseudonym of M Spiro, recalled
just after the events of December 1944 what Trotsky had written about
the era of armed struggle. He paid tribute to the activity of the
Greek m***** when `a wind of revolution blew through the workers'
districts and suburbs of Athens', declaring that their activity would
`stand among the finest examples of the proletarian movement'. But he
said nothing about what the Greek Trotskyists were doing. He also
stated that `despite the official ideology of its Popular Frontist
democratic and petit-bourgeois leader****p', the EAM `retained
considerable class independence in action'.30 There is nothing more,
and often much less, to be found in the do***ents of the Fourth
International."
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