Issuing body: Emergency Conference of the Fourth International
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Our revolutionary greetings go first to all our comrades throughout the world who are victims of the repression of capitalism and of totalitarian dictatorships.
Capitalism at bay unleashes all its fury against its most implacable adversaries, the militants of the Fourth International. Our organization is the object of the most brutal and most pitiless persecution on the part of the reactionary forces of a capitalist society in its death agony. Our comrades have been thrown into the prisons and concentration camps of the "democratic" countries just as into those of the fascist countries. Wherever the Fourth International represents even a potential threat to the established order, our cadres have been hunted down, imprisoned, tortured.
While this emergency conference of the Fourth International was in session, the Stalinist assassins broke into the house of comrades Natalia and Leon Trotsky and raked their bedroom with machine-gun fire. Robert Sheldon Harte, secretary and bodyguard placed with Trotsky, was carried off, and we do not yet know what has become of him.
We lower our flag over the graves of comrades Rastrollo, Galan, Martin, Llarza and Cid, who were executed during the civil war in Spain. Forty other comrades have disappeared — very probably executed by the butcher Franco. Others are in the prisons of Madrid and Barcelona, and in the forced-labour brigades. To the hundreds of our refugee comrades who are suffering today in the concentration camps in France, we send our warmest greetings. It will not be long before they are freed by the proletarian revolution.
Robert de Fauconnet, Aimé Pasque, Medeiros, Scalaios, Hans Freund, Isidor Fassner, Erwin Wolf, Ignace Reiss, Rossini, Léon Sedov, Rudolf Klement, Rigal, Schmitt, Boitel, Liber [1]! Your names are inscribed on our banner!
In the United States, we salute in particular the militants of Minnesota who were persecuted by the FBI and sentenced by bourgeois courts to the federal penitentiary. Throughout Latin America, under bloody and thoroughly reactionary dictatorships that survive only by virtue of the support of Washington and Wall Street, our comrades are exiled, are serving long prison sentences, or have been murdered. But far from being weakened, their voices ring out, reaffirming unshakeable faith in the victory of our cause.
From Indochina, oppressed by French imperialism, our comrades, hunted, imprisoned, forced underground, nonetheless make their voice heard: the indomitable voice of the colonial slaves who continue to gather their strength to break the heavy chains of imperialist democracy. In China, our comrades, even in the front lines where they face the Japanese invader, are stabbed in the back by the agents of Chiang Kai-shek and of Stalin. Our heroic Greek comrades, thrown by the dozen into the island prisons by Metaxas, raise high and firm, with admirable courage, the banner of the socialist revolution.
The concentration camps and prisons of Nazi Germany are filled with devoted militants, indomitable Trotskyist revolutionaries who resolutely stand up to the unleashed thugs of Hitler. Our comrades in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in Denmark, in Norway, in Belgium and in Holland suffer under Hitler's boot. Some of them have been seized in the recently conquered territories and deported to Germany. We do not know what has become of them. We salute those young, unknown revolutionaries who, in Russia, fall under the bullets of the GPU still crying "Long live Trotsky!"
Neither this repression, nor these tortures, nor these murders will stop us, for our task is traced out by history, and it is our invincible programme of socialist revolution that determines us, and not the activities of a sadistic police force, the terror of the state, however powerful and totalitarian it may be.
The emergency conference of the Fourth International sends a message of solidarity to all the revolutionary militants thrown into bourgeois prisons, whether fascist prisons or "democratic" prisons, as well as into Stalinist prisons. It calls on all comrades, all sympathizers, and all class-conscious proletarians to put into practice their feelings of solidarity with all the militants who have fallen victim to Stalinist terror and capitalist oppression. The honour of the socialist revolution demands that these so painfully tried militants feel themselves supported by an active international solidarity.
Today's sacrifice guarantees tomorrow's triumph. The proletarian revolution, victorious under the banner of the Fourth International, will avenge the comrades who have fallen and will tear from their prisons those who suffer there.
## Notes
1. Editor's note, in original: Rigal (Rigaudias), Schmitt and Liber (Beaufrère) were imprisoned in France; Boitel (J. Bardin) is named in error. The other militants named fell at the front in Spain or were murdered by the GPU.