Open the doors!

Submitted by Matthew on 15 July, 2015 - 11:02

By 1942 it was known in the allied states that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Jews. The “anti-fascist” powers did nothing about it. This proclamation by the Fourth International was published in the New York Militant in February 1943.


Hitler’s mass murders of the Jewish people of Europe arouse in every class conscious worker a feeling of fury against this arch-sadist evil spawn of decaying capitalism.

The full brunt of Hitler’s insane violence falls against the Jewish toilers: workers, artisans and small tradesmen who make up the huge majority of the Jews of Europe and the world. The wealthy Jews have been able, in large measure, to escape or to buy privileges the trapped poor Jews cannot secure.

Open the doors of refuge!

Anger against Hitler and sympathy for the Jewish people are not enough. Every worker must do what he can to aid and protect the Jews from those who hunt them down. The Allied ruling classes, while making capital of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews for their war propaganda, discuss and deliberate on this question endlessly. The workers in the Allied countries must raise the demand: give immediate refuge of the Jews and to all those being hounded for racial or religious reasons or for advocating social progress, who are pounding desperately at the gates. Quotas, immigration laws, visas — these must be cast aside. Open the doors of refuge to those who otherwise face extermination! The right to asylum is an elementary democratic right, which the workers and all honest democrats must support.

The workers, regardless of national, racial or religious origin, must wage war to the death against all prejudices which the capitalist class fosters in order to divide the masses by creating internal antagonism among them. Against the capitalists’ attempt to cleave the workers into warring groups, the workers must strive to unite around a program which will bring class victory over capitalism.

In its period of democratic revolution against feudalism, when capitalism was a young and progressive social system, it extended the rights of man and of citizenship to Jews and other religious minorities. Capitalism, in its imperialist period of decay, in its reactionary struggle against he proletariat, the new rising class, is taking away the democratic rights from the masses. The reactionary tendencies of international capitalism find their most developed form in fascism, which while crushing the labour movement and abolishing all democratic rights, thrusts the Jews into ghettoes more horrible than those of feudalism, ghettos that are in reality human slaughter houses.

Human salvation through socialism

The Fourth International, leader of the workers in the struggle for world socialism, welcomes the Jewish toilers into all ranks. Only by world socialism can the Jews, above all the Jewish workers, and all oppressed nations and races, be saved from the terrible fate world capitalism has inflicted on them and the even worse fate it has in store for ever-increasing numbers of them.

Only in world socialism will human brotherhood become a reality and anti-Semitism a hideous memory.

28 February, 1943

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