Democratic Power does not condone assassinations or political violence, but we do remember that Vladimir Lenin, leader of the October Revolution in Russia executed the Tsar of Russia. In defense of Lenin, we point to the military situation that Russia found itself in: a civil war and an invasion by all the imperialist powers and an attempt by reactionary forces to free the Tsar through military force when he had already been imprisoned by the Provisional Government of the February Revolution.
Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who organized the assassination of Haiti’s US-installed client president Jovenel Moise, deserves the same consideration. President Moise had set off a wave of protests by raising gas prices only to smash them, openly collaborating with gangs in “Assassinations, Ambushes, Hostage-Takings, Rape, Arson, Home-Invasions,” according to the International Federation of Human Rights. (FIDH) This decision by the president, combined with the failure to hold scheduled elections for Parliament in January, created an intolerable threat to the security of Haitian people and democracy. Within the context of assassination attempts and economic warfare against Venezuela’s Maduro and Venezuela as a whole, Doctor Sanon saw the security threat as the main obstacle to the creation of a just government. For this reason, Doctor Sason hired a Venezuelan security company and Colombian ex-military commandos, who refused to assassinate President Maduro on behalf of US imperialism. The use of violent gangs and secret weapons, such as Covid-19, to terrorize the population, placed the guilt on the government and required decisive security measures on behalf of the public. In such times of hardship, doctors could find themselves targeted merely for exposing the wounds or lab results of their patients.
While the security threat is real and a legitimate topic of discussion, security actions alone, based on security concepts in the law or in the Constitution of the Republic, cannot fully explain the situation or prepare a just response. The history of revolutionary movements shows us that, in order to secure victory for the revolution, revolutionary leaders must escape direct confrontations with the government even under intense pressure, in order to delay the confrontation until the people’s movement has matured to the point where it can found a new a state to organize the arrests and prosecution of the old state’s leadership and their base among the violent reactionaries. As is well known, violent reactionaries get a get-out-of-jail-free pass from the state in order to conduct their operations with impunity, at times firing live ammunition at protesters from directly behind or within police lines. With Sason in jail, the state will have immeasurably more power in restricting his communication. Perhaps feeling isolated from a mass movement, he sought to establish his own personal dictatorship instead of a “democratic dictatorship” of the proletariat based on the conscious action of the people to create a new state. This alone, not any legal appeal for security and human rights, however moral and just, can replace the old chaotic failed state that exists, not only in Haiti, but everywhere as a result of the corrupting influence of capitalism, a system based on slavery for the majority and limitless personal wealth for a select few.
Democratic Power can only promise that after the workers have created their own state, that they will revise cases of leaders such as Sason and demand their release on the grounds that the political situation made their actions necessary. Any state, however, created upon hostility towards Democratic Power will not have such arguments available to them. For that reason, the SEP must abandon the nano-bureaucratic campaign against Democratic Power and establish principled relations with the entire membership, current and suspended, of the SEP based on the right to organize factions and address the general membership within an organized forum. Failure on this front will only bring forward more leaders such as Sason, eliminating through direct force whatever advantage imperialism has gained from dividing the Trotskyist movement.
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