Submitted by mike payne, Aug 15, 2007 22:07

I found Christopher Willcox's review The Saga of Sacco and Vanzetti a very disturbing article. What Mr Willcox seems to be saying is that the anarchist pair might really have been guilty and even if they were not guilty we should not mind too much because they were disloyal, had probably committed other crimes and were in possession of a set of beliefs that linked them to the barbarism emerging in the Soviet Union.

The contrary case is clearly that they might well have been innocent of the crime they were charged with or either one of them might have been innocent of the crime committed by the other. Should this be true then the state itself has at least one more murder upon its bloody hands. Disloyalty is in itself not a crime in democratically inclined societies and the way to deal with people who maintain that the state is a parasitic growth upon society and always favors the wealthy and the powerful against the working man or woman is to introduce legislation that shows the contrary not string up those daring to ripple the smooth flow of human affairs with their concerns. If they were guilty of other crimes then they should have been charged with them and found guilty beyond reasonable doubt or set free as innocent. Finally, of course, it was in many cases anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti who found themselves the first victims of the increasing repression in Red Russia and those beyond its borders often did much good work pointing out the reality of which other sections of the left chose to willfully ignore.

This is important, of course, because there is a new intolerance emerging in the world and a new set of people being looked on as not deserving the rights we supposedly cherish - such as presumption of innocence, the right to remain silent, freedom of association and the rest. Some are emerging from places like Guantanamo Bay with disturbing stories and others, subjected to rendition, do not emerge at all. The rights of all were diminished when the two anarchists were done to death all those years ago; the liberties of us all are on a turning point today.

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