Workers Vanguard No. 1022
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19 April 2013
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Waco Massacre: We Will Not Forget
April 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the government’s massacre of
over 80 men, women and children of the integrated Branch Davidian religious sect
outside Waco, Texas. For more than seven weeks, an array of police forces had
laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound following a raid by the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms aimed at arresting the group’s leader, David
Koresh, on false charges of illegal weapons possession. The government was out
for blood—and lots of it—after four Feds were killed in the initial assault,
which took the life of a two-year-old girl and a number of church members.
Finally, the state got its revenge through a massive attack that burned the
compound to the ground, with the trapped members of the sect perishing in the
inferno.
From the outset of the siege, the Spartacist League and Partisan
Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization
associated with the SL—protested the government vendetta against the Branch
Davidians. On 8 March 1993, as tanks rolled into Waco, the PDC sent a protest to
Democratic president Bill Clinton demanding that “all troops, tanks, police and
federal agents be removed from the area.” The letter pointed out, “We think you
would do well to take the advice of the newly elected President Lincoln, who
when asked what he proposed to do about the polygamous Mormons replied, ‘I
propose to let them alone’.”
Attorney General Janet Reno justified the assault by raising the
spectre of “child abuse.” This was forcefully answered by Bob Buck, a West
Virginia steel worker who had been railroaded to prison for defending his union
on the picket line during a bitter 1991-92 strike. In a letter to the PDC, Buck
wrote: “They were so damned concerned for the children they unleashed an armed
assault on the house they lived in and filled it full of bullet holes;…gassed
them, and ultimately burned them to death. Ain’t America great. I’m glad Mrs.
Reno isn’t concerned about me.”
The SL and PDC protested the Waco holocaust outside federal offices
in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Shamefully, the reformist left
turned a blind eye to the atrocity or joined in blaming the victims, just as
almost every one of them did when Philadelphia’s black Democratic mayor Wilson
Goode ordered the bombing of the predominantly black MOVE commune in 1985. Our
intention was, and is, to sear the memory of these acts of government mass
murder into the consciousness of the working class, whose historic interest lies
in revolutionary struggle to sweep away the murderous capitalist state.
We print below the bulk of the press release issued by the SL
announcing the protest demonstrations, which began in Manhattan the day of the
massacre.
* * *
The charred corpses of 87 men, women and children who perished in
the firestorm resulting from the FBI’s barrage of CS gas, flash-grenades and
battering rams are the direct responsibility of the White House. President
Clinton gave the green light, Attorney General Janet Reno personally supervised
the plan, and the FBI’s storm troopers moved in to carry out the government’s
“final solution” against the small, integrated Branch Davidian religious sect in
Waco, Texas. After a murderous raid by federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
agents armed to the teeth and a 51-day siege, almost a hundred people have now
been subjected to a flaming apocalypse for the sole “crime” of being a
non-conformist religious sect which dared to defend itself against government
assault.
An SL spokesman, in condemning this outrage, noted that the Branch
Davidians received the same death sentence meted out to the black MOVE commune
in Philadelphia, bombed by the Philadelphia police on Mother’s Day (May 13)
1985, using C-4 plastic explosives donated by the FBI. Eleven black people were
murdered there, including five children, and an entire black neighborhood was
laid to waste. “Like the racist cop beating of L.A. black motorist Rodney King,”
said Spartacist spokesman Marjorie Stamberg, “the Waco holocaust is the domestic
image of America’s ‘New World Order.’ This is U.S. imperialism’s ‘Desert
Slaughter’ in Iraq brought home.”
A banner outside the compound of the racially integrated Branch
Davidian religious sect said, “Rodney King—We Understand.” It is no accident
that the feds’ onslaught in Waco came two days after the slap-on-the-wrist
verdict for two racist cops in L.A. With troops poised to occupy the inner
cities coast to coast, amid a massive police-state mobilization, the racist
rulers breathed a collective sigh of relief that the urban ghettos and barrios
did not explode in outrage over another outright racist acquittal. They seized
the moment to incinerate the Waco commune.
In the gray light of dawn, the FBI moved in the heavy
artillery—M-60 Combat Engineering Vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles and
heat-seeking reconnaissance planes—in a bid to drive out or exterminate the 70
adults and 25 children still inside the wooden structure. The whole area had
already been ringed with razor-sharp concertina wire. Electricity and water were
cut off. The intent was to create a firetrap with no escape. Naturally there
were no firefighting vehicles present to put out the flames. Now the government
wants to blame the victims, but the Waco assault was deliberate mass
murder, decided at the White House.
On Sunday, Vice President Al Gore wept tears for those who died 50
years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But the methodical burning down of the
Waco commune, carried “live” on television, recalled nothing so much as the
Nazis’ razing of the Warsaw ghetto. Clinton/Gore have carried out their own
holocaust against another religious minority who evidently have “no right to
exist” in this racist capitalist society. The Clinton administration has carried
out its own Operation Prairie Slaughter, igniting a massive firestorm against
its perceived domestic “enemies,” a small group who did no harm to anyone.
The Spartacist League spokesman noted, “From Republican Bush to
Democrat Clinton, the racist rulers show what they have in store for anyone who
dares to defy the state. The murder of these innocent people, burned at the
stake by this bloodthirsty government, cries out for vengeance. It will take a
socialist revolution to mete out real justice to the police torturers of Rodney
King, to the FBI arsonists in Waco, to the U.S. military bombers of
Baghdad.”
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