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Terrorism: Who Is The Real Criminal?

By VVAW

A VVAW Editorial

VVAW has been working on the campaign to Free Ashby Leach for several months. As more and more hostages have been seized in cities around the country in recent weeks, we've found discussions multiplying, especially in Cleveland but also in other places.

Simple, people are asking what is VVAW's stand on all this? If Ashby gets off what will happen next? Society is falling apart, and still you say "free this hostage taker?"

The media is pushing the same idea, everywhere from Newsweek cover stories to CBS editorials to local papers. And the media is also supplying an answer: Burn them all! They're all lunatics and no one is safe. It's an attempt to lump together each act together with the solution of "law and order," "national unity," and working through the system for "re-dress of grievances."

But let's look at the facts and let's look at the solutions--theirs and ours.

Ashby Leach, like many of us, went into the military buying the whole system--Mom, apple pie and the flag. Getting out he wanted to forget "Nam and all its horror. He got married and went to work for the C&O railroad, part of the Chessie system, as an apprentice mechanic. While working for Chessie he tried to get the GI Bill, the same one promised by the recruiter. But he found out that Chessie didn't participate so he tried to get it by writing letters to Congress, to the union, to Chessie official, to anyone connected in any way. He picketed, he protested; what he got after five years of trying to work through the system was not only no GI Bill but also his name "removed from the seniority roster"--in other words, fired. "Redress of grievances" sounded good, he found out, but the reality of the situation was that the system doesn't work worth a damn. In America, there's "justice"--for "just-us rich."

Sick and tired, Ashby fought back. He went to the corporate headquarters of the Chessie system and held the office for nine hours. He demanded that Chessie honor the GI Bill for all its Vietnam vets, that Chessie pay back money they had cheated vets out of by not participating in the program, and that Hays T. Watkins (Chessie President) give back a flag given him by the American Legion for doing such a good job for vets.

Ashby's gun was not pointed at the hostages; it was pointed straight at the system which ripped him off. He wasn't going to hurt the workers in the office. In fact the shotgun wasn't even loaded except with copies of the letters he had written for himself and other vets with Chessie. But he is branded a criminal. He's the one, we're told, who should got to jail for violence.

From what we can see, he did nothing wrong. He went to where the problem was and demanded what was due him. It's not "crazy" to fight back--it's right. The only way we've got anything out of this damn rotten system is fighting for it. Letters, prayers, "reason" have at most won a thimbleful of justice for workers or vets.

The only reason that there isn't still slavery is because a war was fought to free the slaves, not because the slave owners suddenly saw the error of keeping humans in chains. Child labor, teenagers and small children working in mines and mills ten or fourteen hours a day: the capitalists who owned the factories gave in only after long, hard and determined struggle, not because they cared if workers' children had the freedom to grow up. The 8 hour a day--we won it, but only after years of determined struggle. And we're still fighting to keep it and even to get it back again. Ask an auto worker or anyone else with forced overtime.

The fact of the matter is that the rich don't give us anything--they take. They take us as youth and fling us around the world to protect their colonies, their markets, their cheap labor. They wring the life out of us in their factories constantly going for profits. And if we're not profitable? Just ask the old man in Mansfield, Ohio? A retired worker was delinquent $18 on his electric bill. So, in the middle of the winter, the Electric Company had his heat turned off. He Died! This worker died because the possibility of losing more than $18 was more important than his life. Did we see his picture on the cover of Newsweek? Did the police arrest the owners of the Electric Company for murder? When a war like Vietnam is fought, where is that talk? When a veterans stands up, refuses to be crushed and attacks the source of the problem, he is a criminal and must "pay the price." Under this system and in these courts, who will pay for the retired Mansfield worker?

This begins to get at the heart of the real question. The system isn't set up as an impartial arbitrator. We are constantly pumped with propaganda that justice is "blind" and we see pictures of justice holding the scales where we are all judged equally, rich or poor, factory owner or factory worker. But statues aren't always modeled after reality. The courts as well as the legislature, police, military, and other arms of the government are set up to protect the rich and their property, and to keep us down. This system is of, by and for the rich.

We back Ashby because it's right to fight back against a system that is set up to grind us down. Not because he wrote letter for five years or because the shotgun wasn't loaded--the question around Ashby's case is not what Ashby did to the system but what the system did to him.

While we're not experts on all the individual cases of hostage taking, there is one more we can comment on. In the suburbs of Cleveland, Cory Moore took over a police station and held a police lieutenant hostage. His original demands, as put out in the media, were nonsense. Things like "All white people leave the planet within seven days." As time went on his demands changed; he asked that Carter apologize for all the abuses heaped on Black people since they were brought here in chains in the 1600's. Cory did not wake up one morning in the land of milk and honey and suddenly rebel because of some psychosis or neurosis. In fact that particular police station was noted for its racist attacks on Black people. According to the Call and Post, a Black weekly newspaper, the day before Cory's takeover a Black worker and home owner in the area was arrested and beaten in his own driveway by the police. The charge was "suspicion of stealing a car." The car was his, parked in his driveway, and he was waxing it at the time.

Cory didn't wake up with a blood clot on the brain and go crazy. He was lashing out against a rotten system that had kept his grandparents in slavery and himself in wage slavery and, on top of that, had subjected him to oppression because he was Black. We don't condemn Cory Moore. Although he was a confused person, he spoke to some real questions of the oppression of Black people.

That doesn't mean we look at every act in the same way. The Nazi in New Rochelle, NY, who picked up a gun and shot his fellow workers because they were Black or Jewish should have been shot. It's only too bad that he wasn't stopped before he got to his fellow workers.

This system is falling apart. The rich want us to get together with them to save it. They try to paint every act of resistance with the same brush. They try to convince us that without them there is only anarchy, that with them, "justice," "equality," and "redress of grievance" are all available. It isn't true. Every act is not the same. It's no surprise to us that a system built on the premise of dog eat dog, profits before people, a system that kept Black people in bondage, carried out a war like Vietnam, killed an old man for $18, and offers us the "bright "futures of unemployment and war, gives rise to acts of every type. But our salvation doesn't lie with them anymore than relying on Al Capone to defend our property from Machine-gun Kelly. Our future lies in fighting them, not in crawling off in some corner and dying. It lies in protecting our brother Ashby. We must continue to fight; we must explain why these other things are happening. And we have to identify and battle against the real criminal--Cyrus Eaton, the Chessie System, and the whole damn system of which it is a part.

The press asks, "Wouldn't it have been better for Ashby to continue writing letters just a little longer?" Well, Ashby could have written letters for another 60 years and on his gravestone they could have put "He wrote letters for 65 years, died, and still didn't get the GI Bill--and no one ever knew why."