Communist International Quotes
WWII had come while most of the world was still recovering from the Great Depression. Communists, the world over, were expecting a major revolution in America, Britain and most industrial nations. However, continuation of Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms, the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the strong American wartime economy, Eleanor Roosevelt’s human rights accomplishments at the UN, the Marshall Plan and Truman’s support of non-communist governments in Europe, and the Labor Party coming to power in Great Britain produced an atmosphere of progress and hope, which provided an alternative to a proletarian revolution and communism. The Cold War then was the only road for international communism.
This blind defense of all Soviet policies and actions by non-Soviet communist parties was typical of the day. Politics became so polarized that throughout the world, political groups took sides and defended or tolerated whatever acts their “allies” engaged in.
At the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935 the new Popular Front policy was announced. To communist hard-liners and to the far left, the policy was an abandonment of the Marxist revolutionary line.
The Russian communists were very ambivalent about the League (see {600375}).
Richard Moore, a black attorney, was representing August Yokinen, an immigrant Finn who belonged to the Communist Party, before a “Workers Court” in Harlem, New York. Yokinen was charged with treating three Black men with a lack of courtesy and accused of being a racist, capitalist, and a white chauvinist. Moore requested that Yokinen be given clemency seeing how expulsion from the party would be too extreme. The “worker jury,” however, unanimously decided to expel him.
