Reports of joint meetings

              JOINT MEETING OF THE IFTU AND LSI, 
Brussels, 28th July, 1936.
On the 28th July, 1936, the Executive of the International Federation of Trade Unions and the Bureau of the Labour and Socialist Internationals met jointly in Brussels to discuss the position in Spain and the grave world situation. The joint meeting immediately decided on practical assistance for the fighting comrades in Spain and addressed an appeal to the workers of the whole world.
The joint meeting also adopted a separate resolution against the terror in Latvia and the persecution of the Labour Movement in this country, as shown by the parody of justice in Riga.
The resolutions passed run as follows :
THE CAUSE OF SPAIN'S FREEDOM IS THE CAUSE OF UNIVERSAL DEMOCRACY!
At the joint meeting of the Bureau of the Labour and Socialist International and the Executive of the International Federation of Trade Unions, held on 28th July, 1936, in Brussels, the following appeal was adopted unanimously :
With an overwhelming majority the Spanish people, consulted in the most loyal and regular manner by a moderate government, pronounced itself last February 16th, 1936, in favour of the People's Front parties and especially of the Spanish Socialist Labour Party.
A Government composed of Democratic Republicans without the participation of the Socialist Party was constituted. This Government tried to satisfy the aims of the masses, to bring relief to the poverty and to the sufferings of the workers and
peasants.
Immediately a campaign of terror set in, marked by a series of acts of violence which expressed the fury of the reactionary parties beaten at the ballot box, and the hatred of the rich menaced in their privileges, thus provoking inevitable reprisals.
But reaction did not stop at that. For ten days treacherous generals, royalists and Fascists, in whom the Republic had mistakenly reposed its trust, rose in arms against the legal Government of their country which they have plunged into the most atrocious civil war, thus hoping to drown in a wave of bloodshed both the Republic and Democracy.
In the teeth of these criminals the working class and the whole of Spanish democracy rose in heroic fight to which even the most hostile of the capitalist papers could not deny their respect. Already the sinister plot of the rebels is doomed to failure.
The Labour and Socialist International and the International Federation of Trade Unions stand wholeheartedly at the side of the Spanish workers and peasants in their heroic struggle for the Republic and Democracy.
All over the world the masses realise that the tragic events which are now happening in Spain open another phase in the international struggle between Fascism and Democracy. 
The Fascist States themselves, the Fascist parties in every country have stressed this character by bringing efficient help — secretly or avowed — to the Spanish rebels in their criminal enterprise against their country. This alone would suffice to enforce upon us our duty of international solidarity towards our Spanish brethren to help them in a concrete, material and immediate form.
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