Page:Meet the Communists (Flynn).djvu/4

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and other South American countries. Communists, men and women, are in every newly formed government of liberated Europe and Asia.

In fascist countries—Spain, Portugal, Greece and Argentina—Communists are among the leaders of the anti-fascist movement. In India, Egypt, Indonesia, Korea, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, among the leaders in the fight for national independence are the Communists of those countries.

COMMUNISTS IN THE VANGUARD

Wherever there are struggles for the freedom of the people—there you will find Communists in the vanguard.

The liberated people, so recently emerged from the horrors of fascism, can never forget either the earlier warnings of the Communists nor their heroism when these warnings failed. They tenderly recall Thaelman, German Communist leader murdered by the Nazis. They remember the French Communist editor of L'Humanité, Gabriel Peri, whose death words were: "If it had to be done all over I would take this road again!"

Thousands of Communists were shot, guillotined, beaten, starved, done to death in prisons, concentration camps and torture chambers by the fiendish Nazis. The blood of martyred Communists cries out for veangeance to the suffering peoples in whose cause they died. Communists who survived war and terror, who returned from exile or emerged from a living death, are now the trusted and revered leaders of their people. This is a logical result of the events of the past tragic period.

Communists had warned the people at the very beginning against Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the scheming international bankers and capitalists who supported them. Even when the menace of these sinister figures was being minimized, the Communists clearly saw the dangers they foreshadowed. Later they warned against appeasing fascism by throwing one helpless country after another into its greedy maw—China, Spain, Ethiopia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, until all Europe was engulfed in a wave of terror.

Communists had cried aloud to the people of the world that only a strong alliance and abiding friendship with the Soviet Union, the sole workers' country in the world, could defeat

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