#TwitterCensorship: New Accounts on Twitter Immediately Forced to Pass Pro-Democratic Party Political Litmus Test to be Activated

The @iwpchi Twitter account has once again been censored by Twitter for no good reason at all. This is about the fourth or fifth time our account has been shut down by Twitter for alleged violations of the “Twitter Rules” – “rules” that stand in total violation of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.  It doesn’t matter at all if 99.9999% of our Tweets do not violate the “Twitter Rules”: even one failure to adhere to the COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE “Twitter Rules” “justifies” terminating the ability of a fledgling political party like ours from participation in one of the most prominent public political forums in existence. How VERY convenient this is for the capitalist class micro-minority to have corporate censors doing what state and national legislatures are legally PREVENTED from doing thanks to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights!

We have posted literally *tens of thousands* of Tweets since 2012 without violating the sacred “Twitter Rules”; yet if some political opponent of ours submits a complaint to Twitter about the content of even just *one* of our Tweets our account is summarily shut down and we are denied any legitimate opportunity to appeal the censorship. Usually we’re not even told what it was that we supposedly did to “deserve” the suspension of our account. In Silicon Valley the legal due process rights of US citizens have been overthrown and replaced by “Twitter Rules” under which accused persons are judged to be guilty until proven innocent – and then denied any semblance of legal due process! 

This is what we were shut down for this time:

 

 

 

Sick and tired of the idiotic paternalism of Twitter’s automated censorship methods, we decided to try to establish a new account just to see if it would be possible to do so. We set up a bogus email account at gmx.com and then proceeded to set up a new Twitter account.

As soon as our account was created we received the following entreaties from Twitter suggesting we follow these pro-Democratic Party accounts, starting with @JoeBiden and working the way down through the leading #DemocraticParty shills:

 

 

 

 

We immediately took screenshots of this blatantly political pro-#DemocraticParty propaganda and then we proceeded to publish our first Tweet on the website. We did not “follow” any of the Democratic Party Twitter accounts that were suggested to us.  Immediately, our account was locked and we were forced to either submit a telephone number or have our account locked out indefinitely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is this if not the most blatant political censorship in the history of the USA? Would we have had our account locked out immediately if we had “followed” the @JoeBiden account?

Obviously, the censorious swine running Twitter have serious objections to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and especially to the right of free speech which is legally considered to be an “inalienable right” of every citizen in the USA (subject only to very limited restrictions that have been worked out through the legal system over the past 240 years). 

The working class of the USA simply cannot allow the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to be superseded by the idiotic “Twitter Rules” promulgated by Silicon Valley billionaires! If Twitter continues to repudiate the Constitutional rights of US citizens to speak their minds freely on a corporate website whose services were created and launched from the USA and that were ostensibly set up to provide the citizens of the US and the world a free online forum for discussion of every topic under the sun, then we say Twitter needs to be brought under the legal formulae that regulate every other public utility and that require those utilities to provide full service to every US citizen regardless of race, creed, color or political opinion.

Of course as revolutionary Trotskyists we understand that the free speech rights of workers will never be protected under the class rule of the capitalist class. Only after capitalism is overthrown and a revolutionary socialist workers state established can the working class attain true free speech rights that will be truly “inalienable”. But that doesn’t mean that the working class has to stupidly submit to being muzzled by the billionaire scum at Twitter or any other capitalist enterprise. The working class supermajority has the power to put a permanent end to every attempt made by the capitalist microminority to regulate what the working class is “allowed” to think and to discuss!  This censorship of working-class political speech must end right now!

All social media organizations must be forced to adhere to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights when it comes to the inalienable right of workers to freely speak our minds – no matter how objectionable our ideas are to any member of the capitalist class!  We are not the slaves of our capitalist masters – and we will not stand by idly as we are gagged by Silicon Valley shitweasels who think that they have the “right” to overthrow the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights!  

—IWPCHI

Celebrating Black History in Portsmouth: “The Black Regiment”

#BlackHistoryMonth Celebrating Black History in Portsmouth: “The Black Regiment” Another great article by Rhode Island historian Gloria Schmidt sketches out the history of the very first Black regiments in US military history.

portsmouthhistorynotes

On February 14, 1778, the Rhode Island Assembly voted to allow “every able-bodied Negro, mulatto, or Indian slave in this state to enlist into either of the Continental Battalions being raised.” The Assembly specified that: “every slave so enlightening shall, upon the passing muster before Colonel Greene, be immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress and be absolutely free.” Owners of the slaves enlisted were to be compensated by the Assembly for the market value of the slave.

Before 1778 Blacks had not been allowed to serve in the Continental Army. Rhode Island had trouble meeting its recruitment quotas with just white men, so General Varnum wrote to George Washington with the idea of allowing the ranks to be filled with Black and Native Americans. He asked Washington to send soldiers from Valley Forge to recruit these men.

Camp [Valley Forge] Janry 2d 177[8]1 Sir—The two…

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The KKK in Portsmouth

Another hideous racist New England historical skeleton dragged out of its well-hidden closet by Rhode Island historian Gloria Schmidt. Do not fail to read the Rhode Island Historical Society article linked to in this article. Although it’s creepily pro-Klan it has a wealth of information embedded (and misrepresented) in it. —IWPCHI

portsmouthhistorynotes

We don’t usually picture Portsmouth as a town that would host a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. As I research Portsmouth history I can take pride in the examples of integration in Portsmouth schools, churches and in the community in general. But Portsmouth is a town like any other town, and bigotry did exists, especially in the 1920s. Accounts in the Newport Mercury in May of 1924 record a “Fiery Cross” being burnt in a field near the Newport County Fair Grounds. Abby Sherman’s Diary on May 26, 1924 reads: “Last Night the Fiery Cross was burned on the hill on the Cory land by the Klan. There were about 200 at the meeting.” * I believe the Cory Farm was where St. Barnabas Church is today.

Fiery Cross Burns in Portsmouth

Abby’s son, Arthur Sherman, was among those listed as members of the Klan. Arthur was a prominent…

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Paleontology: Gideon Mantell’s 1825 Paper on the Discovery of Iguanodon

Illustrations from “Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil, from the sandstone of Tilgate, in Sussex By Gideon Mantell” from The Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society of London, 1825. Drawings of fossil Iguanodon teeth (figures 1-7) by Mary Ann Mantell.

 

Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil, from the sandstone of Tilgate, in Sussex By Gideon Mantell_rstl.1825.0010_iwpchi edited version. (PDF, 9 pages)

Today as I was doing my usual surfing of the Internet in pursuit of the answer to some random question that popped up in my mind – this time it was “Why were dinosaurs so large?” – I stumbled across a number of journal articles on paleontology.  Then I wondered if I could find copies of the very first scientific papers ever published on the dinosauria – and I ran across the famous 1825 publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London by Gideon Mantell: “Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered fossil, from the sandstone of Tilgate, in Sussex. By Gideon Mantell, F. L. 5. and M. G. S. Fellow of the College of Surgeons, In a Letter to Davies Gilbert, Esq. M. P. V. P. R. S. &c. &c. &c. Communicated by D. Gilbert, Esq.” It’s a classic scientific essay of course… but like many works of the period and earlier, the writer chose to include in his paper a section of a letter he received from the famous French paleontologist Georges Cuvier written in French.

So I decided to take a shot at making the essay more accessible by doing a Bing Translation and reworking the .pdf of Mantell’s paper to include the French translation of Cuvier’s remarks.  It was easy to do, though I had to make a couple of judgement calls when Bing failed to translate a word or phrase intelligibly.  It won’t be long now before no one will have to study foreign languages anymore as we’ll be able to do computer translations in real-time using voice-recognition software:  already, the Bing translations are pretty good as you’ll see with this example. 

The fascinating thing is that once I’d done the translation I was reading a Wikipedia article on Mantell’s wife Mary Ann Mantell who, some historians say, was the actual discoverer of the Iguanodon’s teeth; and that article gave a completely erroneous characterization of Cuvier’s analysis of the strange fossil teeth the Mantells had sent to him to identify!  It’s a commonly repeated story that Cuvier dismissed the fossil teeth as being merely rhinoceros teeth or fish teeth when he first inspected some of them which the Mantells had given to famed British geologist Charles Lyell  to bring to Cuvier for analysis in 1823 – which is only partially true, apparently.   Cuvier did initially dismiss the teeth as being those of a rhinoceros – but he retracted that analysis the next day.  Lyell, (though a brilliant scientist and the acknowledged “father of Geology” and one of the very first to recognize the tremendously long age of the Earth) was a religious man and would later on be a lifelong skeptic of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection; he may not have wanted to pass on to the Mantells Cuvier’s “second thought” that the teeth were from an unknown herbivorous reptile; he may have thought it was an outrageous assertion.

When Lyell returned from his visit with Cuvier and brought the Mantells the half-truth that Cuvier had dismissed the fossil teeth as having come from a rhinoceros, the Mantells were, not surprisingly disheartened.  However, in 1824 they were visited by another brilliant British geologist and paleontologist: William Buckland.  He examined the teeth and concluded that they were in fact the fossil teeth of a giant saurian.

Encouraged by Buckland’s assessment of their finds, the Mantells sent several teeth to Cuvier for a second opinion; and this time Cuvier responded enthusiastically and with amazing precision and accuracy in a letter to Gideon Mantell: 

“These teeth are certainly unknown to me; they are not [from] a carnivore animal, and yet I believe that they belong, given their little complication, their serrating on the edges, and the thin layer of enamel that revet them, to the order of the reptiles. The outside appearance could also be taken for fish teeth similar to tetrodons, or diodons; but their internal structure is very different from those of [that type]. Wouldn’t we have a new animal here, a herbivorous reptile? and just as in the land mammals today, it is among the herbivores that larger species are found, as well as in the reptiles of yesteryear, when they were the only terrestrial animals, would not the largest of them have fed on vegetation? Some of the large bones you have belong to this animal, unique, until now, in its kind. Time will confirm or disprove this idea, since it is impossible that one day a part of the reunited skeleton will not be found with portions of jaws bearing teeth. It is this last object above all that it is a matter of searching with the most perseverance.”  [Bing Translation from letter, Cuvier to Mantell, 1824; edited by IWPCHI]

So, strangely enough, I found myself once again editing and correcting a Wikipedia article based upon my own amateur research.  This is happening quite a lot these days and is one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had!  The Internet is such a tremendous resource for researchers it is hard to overstate its importance.  Almost any question I have or fact I need to look up can be answered or found in just a few minutes and with extreme precision in most cases.  Resources like the Internet Archive provide me with almost any book I can imagine, including every important rare scientific or history book I have ever searched for.  It’s become a rare event for me to not be able to locate an original source document for almost any question in history or science.  I hope that the youth of today realize how very lucky they are to have been born in this time in which all the world’s knowledge is available within a few minutes. Any youth (or adult lol) who uses the Internet only to play video games and for entertainment purposes is doing themselves a tremendous disservice.

—- IWPCHI

BREAKING: Get Your First Look at the Data on Adverse Effects of the New COVID-19 Vaccines as Reported by the US CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

We are in the process of publishing a list of raw data from the US Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) relating to the new #COVID19 vaccines.

Our search was for all adverse reactions reported so far between October and December 2020 to today’s date (2 January 2020).  We searched for vaccines from all manufacturers by manufacturer name, adverse reactions, and age (although it appears that in this set of data only the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine is represented).  Our search returned “353 total events”; but it appears that some patients reported multiple symptoms and so they are represented more than once on the list.

Considering that there are supposedly many hundreds of thousands of people who have received these vaccines, this list can not be said to represent the “typical” experience of those who were vaccinated so far.  It’s impossible for us to characterize this data in any was as representing either a positive or negative development in the overall vaccination program.

There were no deaths reported in this data though there were some people who experienced very severe symptoms who had to be hospitalized.  A cursory review of the date we’ve seen so far indicates that people of all ages reported adverse reactions to the vaccinations – young and old.  But again, we’re not doctors and so we are not qualified to evaluate this data in terms of how well or poorly these results are.  We leave that up to those of you among our readers who are so qualified.

To start your own search go to https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html and click on the “Request Form” button at the top of the page to get to the screen shown below.

These images below show the parameters we used to do the search: once you make all your selections (be sure to tick the “Export Results” and “Show Totals” boxes on panel #12 nearest the bottom) you hit the “send” button at the bottom of the page and you get your results either as a downloadable text file or you can review the results by clicking on the “Results” tab above section #1 (immediately below this note).

Happy searching!  Scroll down to get to the data; click on an image to get a larger image.

—- IWPCHI

“Dataset: The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)”
“Query Parameters:”
“State / Territory: The United States/Territories/Unknown”
“Vaccine Products: COVID19 VACCINE (COVID19)”
“VAERS ID: All”
“Group By: Symptoms; Vaccine Type; Vaccine Manufacturer; Age; VAERS ID”
“Show Totals: False”
“Show Zero Values: Disabled”
“—“
“Help: See http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/help/vaers.html for more information.”
“—“
“Query Date: Jan 2, 2021 7:59:14 AM”
“—“
“Suggested Citation: United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Public Health Service (PHS), Centers for”
“Disease Control (CDC) / Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) 1990 – last month,”
“CDC WONDER On-line Database. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html on Jan 2, 2021 7:59:14 AM”
“—“
Messages:
“1. The full results are too long to be displayed, only non-zero rows are available.”
“2. VAERS data in CDC WONDER are updated every Friday. Hence, results for the same query can change from week to week.”
“3. These results are for 353 total events.”
“4. When grouped by VAERS ID, results initially don’t show Events Reported, Percent, or totals. Use Quick or More Options to”
“restore them, if you wish.”
“5. Click on a VAERS ID to see a report containing detailed information for the event.”
“—“
Footnotes:
“1. Submitting a report to VAERS does not mean that healthcare personnel or the vaccine caused or contributed to the adverse”
“event (possible side effect).”
“—“
Caveats:
“1. <p> VAERS accepts reports of adverse events and reactions that occur following vaccination. Healthcare providers, vaccine”
“manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to VAERS. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports”
“alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain”
“information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Most reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they”
“are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports”
“should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind. </p> <p> The strengths of VAERS are that it is national in scope”
“and can quickly provide an early warning of a safety problem with a vaccine. As part of CDC and FDA’s multi-system approach to”
“post-licensure vaccine safety monitoring, VAERS is designed to rapidly detect unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse events,”
“also known as “”safety signals.”” If a safety signal is found in VAERS, further studies can be done in safety systems such as”
“the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) or the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project. These systems do not have”
“the same limitations as VAERS, and can better assess health risks and possible connections between adverse events and a vaccine.”
“</p> <p> Key considerations and limitations of VAERS data: <ul><li> Vaccine providers are encouraged to report any clinically”
“significant health problem following vaccination to VAERS, whether or not they believe the vaccine was the cause. </li><li>”
“Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information. </li><li> The number of reports alone”
“cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated”
“with vaccines. </li><li> VAERS data are limited to vaccine adverse event reports received between 1990 and the most recent date”
“for which data are available. </li><li> VAERS data do not represent all known safety information for a vaccine and should be”
“interpreted in the context of other scientific information. </li></ul> </p>”
“2.”
“3. Some items may have more than 1 occurrence in any single event report, such as Symptoms, Vaccine Products, Manufacturers, and”
“Event Categories. If data are grouped by any of these items, then the number in the Events Reported column may exceed the total”
“number of unique events. If percentages are shown, then the associated percentage of total unique event reports will exceed 100%”
“in such cases. For example, the number of Symptoms mentioned is likely to exceed the number of events reported, because many”
“reports include more than 1 Symptom. When more then 1 Symptom occurs in a single report, then the percentage of Symptoms to”
“unique events is more than 100%. More information: http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/help/vaers.html#Suppress.&#8221;
“4. Data contains VAERS reports processed as of the previous Friday. The VAERS data in WONDER are updated weekly, yet the VAERS”
“system receives continuous updates including revisions and new reports for preceding time periods. More information:”
“http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/help/vaers.html#Reporting.&#8221;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~~Fin~~

1975 Church Committee Report On “Alleged [CIA] Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders”

CIA_Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders_Vol 3-8

We are pleased to publish yet another disgusting chapter in the long, sordid history of the United States Government – namely, the long-standing policy of the micro-minority capitalist ruling class of the USA that it has the “right” to murder any foreign leader (or domestic leader we might add) that they do not like. Our hope is that by publishing these proofs of the murderous nature of the US capitalist class the workers of the USA will finally rise up and overthrow their bloodthirsty oppressors.

The US capitalist class and its bought-and-paid-for #BourgeoisPress has spent the better part of the last 4 years frantically screaming about “Russian meddling” in the 2016 US Presidential election – despite the fact that no hard evidence of any serious effort by Russia was ever launched that could have seriously disrupted the 2016 Presidential election.

This is a 376-page declaration – produced by the US Government itself – that proves that not only does the US Government “meddle” in foreign elections, it actually murders candidates it deems to be “opposing #USNationalInterests(TM)”!  The fact is that for over a hundred years, the US capitalist class micro-minority and their government have overthrown governments all over the world; and have never hesitated to assassinate political leaders that dared to oppose them – both internationally and domestically.

Unless the US working class rises up and overthrows its despotic capitalist ruling class that robs them blind 24/7/365 and murders our sisters and brothers all over the world 24/7/365 the other 95.5% of the world’s population will be forced to unite and destroy the USA from coast-to-coast and line-to-line – just as the “Thousand-Year_Reich” of Nazi Germany was destroyed by a united world in 1945.

The future of the United States is in the hands of the working class of the United States: will you continue to support and defend your murderous capitalist masters or will you rise up and overthrow them? If you choose to defend them then you and your families will be destroyed in a nuclear WWIII!

So wake up, US slaves! Don’t tie yourselves and your children to the mast of the sinking USS Capitalist Class! Unite and fight for an egalitarian socialist future in a socialist workers republic run by YOU!

— IWPCHI

Independent Workers Party of Chicago Statement on the 2020 US Presidential Election

You would think that it would not be possible for the Potemkin Democracy(TM) of the United States to sink any lower into the sewer than it has already sunk; but the 2020 US Presidential election proves that the sewer of the bogus democracy of the United States is very deep indeed.

With the advent of mail-in voting, electronic voting and other underhanded schemes of the US capitalist class to keep the working-class super-majority as far away from the actual levers of political power as possible, it has now become absolutely impossible for the workers of the United States – or anyone else – to effectively monitor the honesty of US elections.  The votes of the workers are now being subjected to all kinds of fraud at the local, state and national levels; fraud committed by both of the bought-and-paid-for parties of the US capitalist class micro-minority – mortal enemies of the US working class super-majority.

The US is now and always has been a fake democracy.  Initially designed by the “Founding Fathers” to exclude all people of color, women, and all men who did not own a substantial amount of real property, and especially to exclude all members of the working-class from voting, the result has always been that the hand-picked candidates selected by the ruling class have won 99.999% of US elections since day one.  Today, the working class super-majority is completely locked out of the political process – except for the necessary fraud of the pretense of a purely formal but utterly phony electoral dog-and-pony show held every 4 to 6 years.  The result of 232 years of the US capitalist class’s conspiracy to keep the working-class super-majority away from the levers of real political power at state or national levels of government is that in 2020 the US working class has NOT ONE direct representative at either the state or national levels.  To call the US a “democracy” is to perpetuate one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated in the history of the world.

It does not matter a whit whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden “wins” the US Presidential election: both of them, and both of their parties, and the US capitalist class that owns and operates them, are the mortal enemies of the working class.  The working class stands to gain absolutely nothing by voting for the hand-picked candidates of the capitalist class that has hired these candidates to expedite and enforce the perpetual, brutal exploitation of the workers.  Both Biden and Trump can be counted upon to continue to deploy their racist, murderous police forces to attack us whenever we stand up in defense of our rights just as they can be counted upon to deploy our own sons and daughters in the capitalist-class-owned-and-operated US military to attack and murder our working-class sisters and brothers all over the world.  There is no such thing as a “lesser evil” among the politicians of the capitalist parties: all of them are equally evil; all of them are the mortal enemies of the workers of the world in the final analysis.  A vote for any pro-capitalist politician is a vote against ourselves and our own and our families’ futures.

The task that lies before the workers of the USA is to immediately begin to form and build working-class parties that are truly 100% independent of the enemy capitalist class. The working class can and must finance these parties out of our own pockets.  There are approximately 275 million working-class citizens in the US: if each of them gave just one dollar a month to a bona-fide working class political party we could quickly achieve what we deserve according to our overwhelming numbers: the complete and permanent control of 80% of all the seats in the legislatures at the state and national levels.  Only then will we be able to cease to be mere observers standing outside the halls of our legislatures and relying on the hand-picked servants of the enemy capitalist class to decide whether or not to represent us faithfully in the legislatures of this nation.

To the working class, the office of CEO of the capitalist system – the Presidency – holds no allure at all.  Even if, by some mischance, we in the Independent Workers Party of Chicago were elected to serve as the CEO of US capitalism we would refuse to do so, because by doing so we would cross the picket lines from the working-class side to the side of our oppressors.  We must focus our attention on seizing our birthright: a representation in both houses of Congress that accords with our actual social weight in this capitalist nation where all the wealth ever created in the history of the USA was created by we, the workers, through our own labor-power. 

If we begin today to build workers parties, we can surely take over the legislative bodies of this nation within the next decade.  Once we do that we will be able to promulgate laws favorable to us and to rescind all laws that are not favorable.  And we can then seriously contemplate the overthrow of the hideously outdated and reactionary capitalist system that has long ago proved itself to be only capable of “achieving” global environmental destruction and the continual mass-murder of our sister and brother workers all over the world.

The future, as always, is in our own, reliable hands: the hands of the vast working-class super-majority.  There is literally nothing standing in our way that we, in our overwhelming numbers, can not overcome; however, we do not have much time left before the capitalists launch the next world war.  Either the working class will take power out of the hands of the greed-maddened and murderous capitalist class and overthrow capitalism in the next decade or the capitalists will plunge the world into a nuclear WWIII.  Only the working class, by taking power into our own hands, can prevent this from happening.

There are only two kinds of workers on this planet: revolutionaries and slaves.  We call upon all the antiracist, anti-sexist, pro-union, and anti-capitalist revolutionary workers to join with us in this great project to reject the dead-end capitalist future of racism, sexism, poverty and war in favor of a  fight for a socialist future of global egalitarian prosperity and peace for ourselves, our children and for all future generations.  Revolutionary workers: join us!

Dump the Republicrats!  Build A Workers Party!  Fight For A Workers Government!  Fight For A Socialist Future!

—- IWPCHI

1955 House Un-American Activities Testimony of Late, Legendary US Comic Actor Zero Mostel

We are pleased to present to our readers the complete testimony of the late, great US Comic actor and Communist, Zero Mostel, who was brought before the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and an attempt was made to compel him to testify against his former friends and comrades in the Communist Party of the USA – which he heroically refused to do.

1955 House Un-American Activities testimony of Zero Mostel

Zero Mostel, for those of you who may not recognize the name, was of course the brilliant comic actor – I would argue one of the greatest of the 20th century – who appeared in legendary film comedies like Mel Brooks’ “The Producers”

and who was the original star of the Broadway comedy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (as well as its movie version) and originated the role of “Tevye” in the Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof”.

According to Wikipedia, Mostel – like tens of thousands of other politically active working-class men and women – had probably joined the Communist Party in the depths of the Great Depression. Like millions of workers all over the world suffering from the collapse of the global capitalist system during the Great Depression who had been won over to revolutionary socialism, Mostel was openly critical of the capitalist status quo.  Thus his reputation even before the war was one of being an opponent of the US government.

In 1942, Mostel’s “MGM contract was terminated, and his role in Du Barry Was a Lady was truncated, because studio executives were upset that he participated in protests against another MGM film, Tennessee Johnson, which protesters believed had downplayed the racism of former US President Andrew Johnson.” [Source: Wikipedia, “Zero Mostel”]

Mostel was drafted into the US Army in 1943; during his service (which lasted for less than a year) he was “under investigation for alleged Communist Party membership.”  He was granted an honorable discharge in 1943 and spent the rest of the war entertaining troops via performances given under the auspices of the United Service Organizations (USO).

After the war, his career resumed under contract with 20th Century-Fox; he also acted in Broadway plays and on television throughout the late 1940s and early ’50s.  He appeared in a number of movies for Fox, including the Oscar-winning “Panic In the Streets”, directed by close friend and supporter Elia Kazan.  But in 1951, with rumors swirling that Mostel was about to be subpoenaed to testify before HUAC, 20th Century-Fox suddenly canceled his contract.

He was originally subpoenaed on 19 July, 1955 to testify before HUAC in New York on 19 August 1955; but as he was about to star in a play in Los Angeles, the inquisition magnanimously granted him the right to testify before it in Los Angeles on 14 October 1955.  It is this testimony that is included in the book we are presenting today.

Mostel won worldwide admiration for refusing to testify to HUAC against his former and, perhaps, current Communist Party comrades – an act that required tremendous courage in the viciously anticommunist McCarthy era in the USA. During his testimony he ridiculed the bosses at 20th Century-Fox who were co-operating with HUAC in attacking him for his revolutionary socialist political beliefs by referring to the corporation as “Eighteenth Century-Fox” and telling reporters “What did they think I was going to do – sell acting secrets to the Russians?”

HUAC – which was a thoroughly bipartisan project of both the Democratic and Republican parties – persecuted scores of brilliant US communist writers, actors, musicians and trade union leaders for daring to stand up against the brutally racist, exploitative and murderous US capitalist class.  The Honor List of HUAC’s targets include such legendary and brilliant communists as Paul Robeson, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, Pete Seeger and Dalton Trumbo and Great Depression and WWII-era communist sympathizers such as musicologist Alan Lomax and actor/writer/director Orson Welles.  Their names will go down in history as among the greatest heroes the working class has ever produced, while the name of HUAC and its agents and inquisitors will go down to eternal and universal condemnation by revolutionary socialist workers who will remember it as one of the finest examples of the true worker-hating and neo-fascist nature of the US capitalist class.

—- IWPCHI