Page:Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (1922).djvu/24



HE Fourth Congress of the Communist International has received the news that the South African Government of General Smuts has executed four workers for having defended themselves during the mine workers' strike against the violence of the Government of lackeys in the service of gold and diamond mining capital.

The Congress denounces the South African Government, which, in the person of General Smuts, when in Europe, professed a liberal pacifist character, while in reality it does not hesitate to murder in order to suppress the working class movement.

The Fourth Congress sends fraternal greetings to the South African workers. It is convinced that not only will they not give up their fight, but that on the contrary they will learn how to draw the native workers too into the struggle against South African capitalism, and thereby ensure common and final victory. In this struggle the South African workers may rely upon the help of the Communist International, which looks upon them as one of its outposts.

HE Fourth Congress of the Communist International vigorously protests against the executions by the Irish Free State of the five national revolutionaries on the 17th and 25th November. It draws the attention of all the workers and peasants of the world to this savage culmination of a widespread and ferocious terror in Ireland. Already more than 6,000 valiant fighters against British imperialism have been thrown into jails under nauseating conditions. Scores of women have been compelled to hunger strike in prison, and already 1,800 casualties have resulted from five months' struggle against this terror, which has produced examples of horrible atrocities unparalleled by the British Black and Tans, the Italian Fascisti, or the American trust thugs.

The Free State, which has unhesitatingly used the British supplied artillery and munitions, rifles and bombs, and even aeroplanes with death-dealing machine-guns, on crowds of ordinary people as well as on the armed revolutionaries, has capped all this by the brutal executions of five men on the charge of merely having arms in their possession. This desparate shooting of prisoners is a direct outcome of the declared bankruptcy of the Free State, and is a last resort on its part to crush the resistance of the Irish masses fighting against their enslavement to the