In Memoriam - Obituaries and appreciations

Our comrade Hendrik Patroons, alias “Pips”, passed away in Ghent on April 17, 2025. He was active from an early age in SAP-Antikapitalisten (our organization in Flanders, then called Revolutionaire Arbeiders Liga) and the Fourth International. A convinced revolutionary right up to his last days, he and his companion Marijke Colle left a lasting mark on the organization. He took part in our last national congress in December 2024, and had volunteered to be part of the technical support team for the 18th World Congress of the Fourth International in February 2025, but was unable to do so due to illness. We publish below the tribute paid to him by Alain Tondeur at the funeral ceremony in Wondelgem, near Ghent, on April 25.

I am so sad to learn of the death of my dear friend Tikva Honig-Parnass. Tikva was a fearless socialist, a committed feminist, and one of the most consistent and principled anti-Zionists I have ever known. I was privileged to work with her during the first Palestinian Intifada, when she was acting director of the Alternative Information Centre in Jerusalem, and I was editor of the centre’s monthly English-language journal News From Within.

Patrick Quinn, who died on 4 January 2025 at the age of 83, was a terrific friend and political comrade for 55 years. Compared to me, he always seemed to have a larger-than-life personality. He was extroverted, gregarious, approachable, and often affable and even playful—with amazing raconteurial gifts and a more retentive memory than a herd of elephants.

Lennart Wallster […] was strongly associated with SP’s very first days in the late 1960’s and the commitment to building the political and organizational center of the Fourth International.

Wickramabahu Karanaratne, the secretary of the New Samasamaja Party, who was ill, passed away on July 25 while undergoing treatment at the Colombo General Hospital. The press release issued by the ‘Socialist People’s Forum’ issuing condolence for his death is published in its entirety below.

A large story in American culture has now drawn to a chronological end with the death of sometime screenwriter Norma Barzman, age 103.

A belated tribute to Ernesto Herrera, who died on 10 January 2024. The shock had to be absorbed. A comrade-friend, with a hyphen of fraternity and not of union, in order to respect his personal trajectory.
Born on 22 May 1949, Antonio Maria Nuñez Guglielmi was part of the Spanish and Italian emigration that settled in Uruguay, a country that experienced exceptional growth from 1910 until the early 1950s. An activist, he chose as his pseudonym the name of a writer who, among other things, (…)

A well-known left-wing activist and the secretary of the Socialist People’s Forum, senior trade union leader Comrade Neil Wijethilaka, was laid to rest on the afternoon of Friday 12th at the Atavilawatta Cemetery, Kalutara.

Marc-Henri Reckinger, painter emeritus from Luxembourg, died on 31 August at the age of 83. He was a committed artist who openly claimed to be a Trotskyist.

It is difficult to realize today, fifty years later, the hope represented throughout the South American continent by the experience of Popular Unity in Chile. The arrival of the Allende government in 1970 opened a new page, a surge of optimism and the perspective of social transformation of the continent, in particular for Brazilian militants who had taken refuge in Chile to flee the Brazilian military dictatorship.
It was with this optimism that Túlio Roberto Quintiliano arrived in Chile (…)