Demonstrations and strikes erupted throughout Australia within hours of the unprecedented dismissal of Labor party Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on November 11 by the queen’s representative, Governor General Sir John Kerr.

Kerr’s “coup” installed millionaire rancher Malcolm Fraser, leader of the conservative Liberal party-National Country party (L-NCP) coalition, as prime minister. He was commissioned to form a “caretaker” government until elections – scheduled for December 13 – are held for both houses of Parliament.

For more than six months, Lebanon has been racked by bitter and bloody fighting. The clashes have been fiercest in Beirut but have also occurred in most other major towns and much of the countryside.

As many as 5,000 persons have been killed since April, while estimates of the wounded run as high as 16,000. This in a country whose total population is about 3 million. The equivalent in terms of a country the size of the United States would be more than a quarter of a million dead.

BOSTON – More than 1,300 activists in the fight against racism from across the United States gathered here October 10-12 for the second conference of the National Student Coalition Against Racism (NSCAR).

“When the ‘Socialist’ leaders entered a bourgeois Cabinet, they invariably proved to be figureheads, puppets, screens for the capitalists, instruments for deceiving the workers,” Lenin wrote in 1917.¹

And when they have outlived their usefulness, it might be added, they are generally tossed aside like so many squeezed lemons.

Three months after the victorious liberation forces marched into Pnompenh, Cambodia remains cut off from the rest of the world. No foreign journalists were allowed to stay in the country. The only sources of news are the broadcasts of the official government radio station or the reports of refugees who have made their way across the border into Thailand or Vietnam.

Apparently even Peking is cut off. The only reports on Cambodia appearing in the Chinese news agency bulletin, Hsinhua, have been based on Cambodian radio broadcasts.

What is happening in Saigon? Two months after the liberation from imperialist domination, confusion still exists over the intentions of the new regime. Will there be rapid reunification with the North, or will the South retain an independent existence for an indefinite period? Who is actually running things in the newly liberated areas? Will the new regime move to introduce a planned economy in the South?

Major fighting occurred in Lebanon the last two weeks in May as Palestinian refugees sought to defend themselves against murderous attacks by the rightwing Phalangist militia. At least 130 persons were killed and 235 were wounded up to May 30. Two Lebanese governments fell during the crisis.

Washington’s last “humanitarian” mission in Vietnam began with a great fanfare. Both sides of Congress joined hands in granting Ford $405 million to provide a safe haven in the United States for the estimated 150,000 “loyal” Vietnamese who fled their country with the final defeat of American imperialism and its puppet regime.

But more than a month after their evacuation, most of the refugees are still crammed in makeshift tent cities or hastily patched army barracks at camps scattered from Florida to Guam.

For years the warmongers in the Pentagon advanced the myth of a “Communist bloodbath” that would follow the liberation of Vietnam. The aim was to justify their own bloody aggression. Now, with that myth exposed as just one more of the many lies spun by imperialism, they have dummied up.

Not so the Western correspondents in Saigon, however. Many of them have filed glowing reports of the new regime and the liberation forces.

The real story of the Mayagüez incident is beginning to emerge. Although all the details are still not known, contradictions and cover-ups in the official account are coming to light. The May 18 New York Times had to concede that there was some evidence “the Administration was either confused in reporting what went on, less than candid, or both.”

The truth is that the Mayagüez incident was a cold-blooded provocation.