Communist Party" in an attempt to have certain anti-Fascist refugees deported. Thes included Victor Serge, Marceau Pivert, Julian Gorkin, and Gustav Regler, all of whom had devoted their lives to the fight for freedom and yet were accused of being leaders of a Fifth Column in Latin America.

After Treca's death, both the Stalinist press and Robert Minor, assistant national secretary of the American Communist Party, protested that the Communists were averse to murder, and Minor asserted that his party had never found it necessary to combat politically Tresca's views or activities.

But, the Mazzini Society said in a public statement, "... the files of the Daily Worker are replete with invective against Tresca." And in 1938, soon after he testified in the Poyntz case, he was attacked by the Italian National Commission of the Communist Party and by Pietro Allegra.

Allegra published a pamphlet entitled The Moral Suicide of Carlo Tresca, calling him "politically dead" and assailing him on many counts, including "defeatist acts against anti-Fascist and Republican Spain" and his having "denounced the Communists to the authorities, saying they kidnapped and killed a woman."

"It is painful enough to witness his suicide," Allegra stated. "...If he, Carlo Tresca, had lost all sense of reason and decency, then... for the sake of the public welfare and for anti-Fascism, it's a duty to put a stop to his deleterious, disgusting work as a real and true enemy of anti-Fascists...

"So for reasons of public health, in the interest of anti-Fascism. It's a civic, social work that I'm doing when I concern myself with Carlo Tresca. It's a work of protection, of elimination from society, of beings who are hateful to themselves and to society, which must oust them..." (Emphasis above is ours.)

About the same time the Italian National Commission of the Communist Party, in a statement featured in the February 28 (1938) issue of L'Unita Operaia, Stalinist paper published in New York, said:

"...Tresca's isolation is a measure of elementary defense for all anti-Fascism.

"Without any other preoccupation except that of protecting and safeguarding anti Fascism, we therefore launch a fraternal appeal to the militants of all groups or political parties,... that in the common interest they make Tresca understand that police informers will no longer be tolerated in the political and labor movement..."

Tresca Sees Grim Meaning in Communist Attack

From this statement Carlo drew a sinister meaning. Answering in Il Martello for March 7, he wrote:

"If Tresca is alive, sane, and not inclined to die, either physically or politically to (please) the melancholy, Pietrino (Allegra).. it will be necessary to put him out of the way, definitely. In a word: what is needed is a George Mink, a member of the Communist Party of America, and the murderer of our comrades Berneri and Barbieri. It must not be said that such a sanguinary and macabre idea has not come into the heads of the four