President Clinton The White House Washington D. C. Dear Mr. President, I'm writing you concerning the case of Robert Malecki. As I understand it, Mr. Malecki was an anti-Vietnam War activist. He destroyed draft files and computer networks. He served time in prison for these acts and shortly after his release from prison was charged with conspiracy to bomb public buildings and power plants. At this point, he fled to Sweden and has been living there ever since I do not know the merits of the conspiracy charges against Mr. Malecki. But I do remember those times and how the government often brought conspiracy charges as a means to harass and break the anti-war movement. I also know that 22 years have gone by and that Mr. Malecki would like to return to the United States. Since no bombings took place and since conspiracy charges were used repeatedly to surpress dissent and might have been brought with that intent in this case, I ask you to issue a Presidential pardon for Mr. Malecki. Mr. Malecki lives in Robertsfors, Sweden and says he has not had inquiries about a possible return to the U.S. answered by the White House. Please communicate with him regarding the ending of his long exile. Sincerely Yours, Steve Trimm War Resistors League 339 LaFayette Street New York, N.Y. 10012 Gentlemen: I am writing to President Clinton in behalf of Robert Malecki, and I would appreciate if you can forward my enclosed letter and copies of recent newspaper articles concerning the Vietnam War to him. As I mentioned, I would like to hear from him, but perhaps he doesn't want his address in Sweden to be generally known. Perhaps he might want to reply through the War Resister's League. If this is so, I hope you could forward his letter(s) to me. Thank You, Paul F Carlson Dear Robert, I read of your situation in the March-April issue of "The non Violent Activist", and empathize with your frustration in not being able to resolve your problem and return to your homeland. You are to be commended highly for your courage in actively opposing the Vietnam War--and even though there was widespread angry protest during those years among our people, not enough of us had the courage to take an out spoken stand. It is painfully ironic that, after all the years since the end of that shameful war that some government people in high places are finally speaking out that we were wrong in being militarily in Vietnam. In face of all the thousands of people who were killed or maimed, so much property destroyed and the land desecrated----just finally admitting as to being wrong, has to be the understatement of the century!! As an aside, I am of Swedish descent, and have visited Sweden a number of times. We have enjoyed the beauty of that country and appreciated Sweden's active concern and involvement for the well- being of the developing countries and their concern about peace and environmental problems. With the memorabilia collected by one of my cousins in Sweden, we collaborated in writing the family histories of our forbears over there as far back as 1700, and recording the family histories of our immigrant grandparents and their descendants in this country. I would appreciate hearing from you as to your life in Sweden--as to what you have been able to do during all those 22 years. I hope you were able to live as fulfilling life as possible under the circumstances, but, I'm sure you would prefer to return to the U.S. and live the rest of your life with your name cleared and in a more normal way. I have friends who are active in Amnesty International and I will ask their advice as to the most effective wording to use in writing President Clinton in your behalf. I know there is a degree of tact and sensitivity necessary in such attempts to communicate with the "authorities". Paul Carlson Dear Robert, A copy of your letter has found its way into our hands. This is just a line to offer you our moral support, and a copy of our CD "Fighting Back" with our compliments. We wish you well and will do what we can to publicise your case. Meanwhile, the struggle goes on, and that includes, of course, the struggle for justice for the people of Bougainville, the struggle for independence for the people for East Timor (who are colonised and subjected daily to, abuse, torture and genocide by the occupying Indonesian army)-and to stop the French government testing its nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. Comradely Regards, Peter Hicks & Geoff Francis Utrect Dear Mr. Malecki, Thanks for your interesting letter that arrived at our office at 11 May. I have shown it to my colleagues of the Executive Committee at our last meeting. We decided to pass your letter on to the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection (EBCO), that is based in Brussels. I did so at 24 May when I shortly visited their office. The reason for deciding so was that the Executive Committee thought that the topics you touch upon are more in the line of EBCO than they are in ECCO,s. Personally, I am interested just as you are in what is going on now at the island of Bougainville. Through information, I gathered from some addresses in Australia I managed to get an impression of what is going on now, and indeed this matter should be addressed like e.g. the Brent Spar thing has been dealt with recently. In case you are interested in futher correspondence about this or any other matter, you can write to my private address which is: Sincerely Yours,Marc Hulst,secretary general Dear Robert Malecki, I'm now sending out No. 3 of LINK, and send you some copies with your letter which I translated into Norwegian. In next issue I,ll print the " Pavlov" part - OK? Please tell me if you get any response from my readers. I know they're all very busy, each one with his/her thing for peace or whatever, so don't have to much hope for help. Now at least they'll know - for a start. Wishing you all the be with love & peace Tulle Elster Sandefjord, Norway Dear Mr. Malecki I have just read about your situation in a newspaper I subscribe to. Although I don't know quite what non-U.S. citizens can do. I thought I would write and encourage you in your attempt to return to your country. What you did in the fight against the Vietnamese War is truly admirable and courageous! I expect you know that you ran the risk of being caught, but continued to do what you believed in none the less. Most of us would like to hope that we could put our ideals first as you have done. I wish you the best of luck Yours faithfully Julie Phillips Dear Mr. Malecki, Max Watts and my wife in Australia have both sent me copies of your letter. I will do what I can to help you. What I can do is to write an article for the Queensland Humanist and circulate it to other humanist magazines in the United States. I will also contact Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton of the US Congress. She may raise the question of Bougainville in Congress as I have been talking to her staff about it. I see no point in writing to Clinton. I started protesting and demonstrating against the Vietnamese war when Kennedy was president, but your letter puzzles me. Why ask help from organisations claiming they stand on the side of the poor or working class? As I remember the protesters, they were generally middle class or academics. The poor, blacks and working class in general either supported the war or didn't pay much attention to it until it expanded greatly. Hard hats even attacked demonstrators against the war. The demonstrations didn't start getting big until US soldiers in quantity started coming home in boxes. That meant to me most Americans didn't care what the armed forces of their country was doing to the Vietnamese people. I don't think the poor and working class have changed their attitudes since the Vietnamese War. Although Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war, he didn't seem to influence many black people to do likewise. I don't believe Hoffa could have brought the working class out against the war. If the horror of Vietnam didn't rouse them, I don't think the boss of a corrupt union could have. I hope you can get back without going to prison, but why not seek the support of those such as Quakers, academics and other middle class groups who opposed the Vietnamese war? I also opposed the war since it was a clear violation of the Nuremburg Principles. I opposed the war regardless of the rottenness of the North Vietnamese government because of the United States, crimes against the Vietnamese people. In 1956 refugees fled from North Vietnamese tyranny. Political independence means nothing if you are under a tyranny. Germany was politically independent under Hitler, and the Soviet Union was politically independent under Lenin. Members of my family have fled both shits. You wrote, "We believed the Vietnamese struggle for independence was correct." Don't include me in that "We". The Vietnamese people are independent of the US and the French, but they are not independent of their own tyrants. Max Watts and I both oppose the war crimes the Australian government is committing in Bougainville. However, they are not committing genocide. They are killing many people trying to subdue them and force them to their will, not to wipe them out. Genocide is the attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group. The Nazis committed genocide against Jews and Gypsies and the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians. You write that you see no difference between the Nazi concentration camps and the bombing of the Vietnamese people. They were horrible and wrong, but they were not both genocide. Ignoring the distinction trivializes the actions of the Nazis and Turks. Max Watts and I disagree about conflicts of the left and the right. He thinks there is a great difference between left and right. I am against all dictators regardless of their ideology. The important question is how bad they are. Hitler was the worst dictator, but both Lenin and Stalin were worse than Mussolini. I will be happy to help you although that was not my initial reaction because of the points I raised above. I am happy to try to help you because, as you say, you opposed the war directly, and Clinton fled to England. You were imprisoned for destroying paper and others honoured for destroying human beings. I hope you will be able to see your grandchildren. I look at mine and sometimes think they probably would have been slaughtered if they had been children in Europe during World war 2. I would be interested in your reasons for appealing to organisations claiming they stand on the side of the poor or working class. Yours sincerely, Milton David Fisher (The author of this book takes the right to publish my answer to this last letter.) Dear David This is an answer to your letter written to me on June 26, 1995. You ended up your letter with a question about my "appeal" being addressed to organisations claiming to be on the side of the poor and working class people. H owever, before we go into that I think I should take up a lot of other things in your letter. I certainly would not want you, as a humanist, to give help to me that you might regret. Let us begin w ith your description of the "protesters" against the Vietnamese war. Certainly your description about "generally middle class and academic" and "poor, blacks, working class" being on different sides of the barricades is both provincial and untrue. The Vietnamese for example certainly were not middle class students. In Europe it was workers parties like the Communists and the Social Democrats with millions of members who were on our side. Most of the third world were supporting the Vietnamese. So in truth, if one were to lift your eyes over the horizon, an overwhelming majority of poor, black, working class people sided with the Vietnamese in this struggle. It was not because of the middle class or students protesting against the war in the United States that the Vietnamese marched into Saigon in 1975. However, even if I were to take your point of view saying that "hard hats" and "corrupt trade union leaders" didn't care and even sometimes attacked the demonstrations in the United States. You would still be wrong! Because there is a difference between apathy and despair in poor and working class circles, including corrupt trade union leaders and the conscious policies of the ruling class in America. The first I was trying to change, the ruling class I want to destroy. The reason for this is rather simple, for me who comes from a poor and working class background. The ruling class has always been trying to kill people like me in one way or another. Jimmy Hoffa, whom you believe would not have brought out the working class against the war. We at least gave him the alternative. Unfortunately he made a deal with Nixon and got himself killed. But if we had been successful, perhaps we would have helped end the war earlier and change the face of political protest in the United States. Instead we got a black stone in Washington and years of Rambo films and patriotism. Yes, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which by the way was a mass revolt by working class people against the Stalinists, was a great historical event. Unfortunately it was crushed by Russian tanks. The Stalinists have many crimes in their history. They were responsible for the destruction of the Spanish workers revolution against Franco. They were responsible for the destruction of the German working class by helping Hitler to power. And many other crimes. Yes in deed. However who were the victims? You know it was not only 8 million Jews. It was millions and millions of people. However the Stalinists were not alone! The great imperialists powers who wrote the treaty of Versailles which basically put Germany into slavery after the First World War are also responsible. And who devided up the world after the Second World War? The great imperialist powers and the Stalinists! And you try to tell me that it is all the fault of poor, blacks and working class people. That is unadulterated bullshit! N uremburg...I was born in 1942 and raised on American and British films about the Second World War including the Nuremburg trials. Unfortunately I can not see the difference in the Nazis use of Cyclon B or the bombings of the Vietnamese people. In fact I can't even see the difference between Cyclon B (by the way somebody just told me that it was the Bayer Corp in America that produced it for the Nazis) and birth control experts from the western industrial nations working in India today. I can't even see the difference on Bougainville. But genocide historically has been the politics of the white European Anglo Saxon (Monarchy, ruling class and their political spokesmen including white Russian chauvinism) for centuries. The American Indians being a good example. I use genocide in the broad sense and I might even be wrong however, I only have an 8th grade education and I thought that chocolate milk came from a brown cow until I was fourteen years old. Political independence you talk about in your letter. Yes, I am for political independence for peoples fighting colonialist and great imperialist interests. However, I understand also that "National" independence does mean a country can wind up with just about any kind of leaders. But I also go even one step futher in my thinking. I am struggling for independence for poor and working class people from their own ruling classes who use Nationalism to get poor and working class people to kill each other! They the poor and working class have to fight for power in their own name and their own interests. The poor and working class can only inherit the earth by taking power internationally against its own National ruling classes. It is in our interest! So obviously my appeal is directed to organisations who claim they support the poor and working class. However if a "Quaker organisation" or anybody else for that matter wants to support my letter, OK. But I must fight in the interest of poor and working class people! That you put Lenin on the same level as Stalin is just absurd. Lenin who led the Russian Revolution perhaps could be put on the same level as George Washington. I mean Lenin crushed the monarchy and George Washington crushed the British Colonialist! Stalin on the other hand is responsible for alot of stuff mentioned already in this letter and he did it along with people like Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Mussolini and so on. So if anybody has to get his history straight I afraid it is not me. Finally, my appeal. I am glad that you are going to contact some people in Washington. However don't do anything you might regret later. My goal is overthrowing the ruling class everywhere and if necessary by establishing a "dictatorship" of poor and working class people. So don't say I didn't tell you. Regards, Robert Malecki