"An [insurrectionary working class] is not […] a revolution, even when it takes terrible forms… A revolution is infinitely more than a series of insurrections in town and country. It is more than a simple struggle between parties, however sanguinary; more than mere street-fighting, and much more than a mere change in government […]. A revolution is a swift overthrow, in a few years, of institutions that have taken centuries to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in their writings…" – Kropotkin, "The French Revolution", Vol. I (1909)
We’re republishing a brief report from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the main press agency of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK aka “North Korea”) regarding one of the continuous acts of military provocation that are being launched against the DPRK constantly by the puppet state of South Korea, with the permission of its colonial ruler the United States Government.
The bourgeois press of the US never stops publishing anti-DPRK propaganda attacking the beleaguered and heroic socialist country for its purely defensive military measures. Recently, the world was treated to another barrage of inane anti-DPRK propaganda over the DPRK’s ballistic missile tests, part of their purely defensive nuclear weapons arsenal. But what the U.S. and world public are not kept abreast of is the never-ending series of war provocations that have been threatening the people of the DPRK with nuclear annihilation multiple times a year. We recently republished another KCNA article from the DPRK’s Research Report of the Society for the Study of International Affairs in which the long and sordid history of joint US/S. Korean military provocations that have been inflicted upon the people of the North since 1953. This incessant, petulant bullying of the tiny DPRK by the imperialist mass murderers of the USA is n outrage, and shows just how weak the United States really believes the capitalist system is, that it feels compelled to terrorize a small nation simply because they chose to embrace socialism rather than capitalism – and then successfully defended their nation against a massive, unprovoked slaughter of 3 million North Koreans by the USA in the Korean War.
If a foreign government subjected any territory of the USA to the kind of brazen military provocation the S. Korean puppet government subjected the DPRK to on October 13th, the US Government would have gone berserk and retaliated with a massive military response. The fact that the DPRK refrained from responding in the way the US undoubtedly would have provides strong evidence refuting the lies of the bourgeois press that say the DPRK is “run by a madman”; instead this latest provocation again displays the rational and level-headed leadership of the DPRK.
This preface is going to be 5 times longer than the article already, so let’s just get to the report of the latest cowardly bullying of the DPRK by the military forces of the USA puppet government in Seoul, S. Korea.
Defend the DPRK! US Hands off the DPRK! USA Out of the Korean Peninsula!
—— IWPCHI
************************************************
Spokesman for KPA General Staff Issues Statement
Pyongyang, October 14 (KCNA) — A spokesman for the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) issued the following statement on Oct. 14:
According to a report on enemy movements in the front, the south Korean army conducted an artillery fire for about 10 hours near the forward defence area of the KPA Fifth Corps on Oct. 13. [Emphasis added by IWPCHI]
Taking a serious note of this provocative action by the south Korean military in the frontline area, we took strong military countermeasures.
The KPA sends a stern warning to the south Korean military inciting military tension in the frontline area with reckless action. -0-
We are pleased to republish the recently updated law of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) regarding their official position on the use of nuclear weapons. The bourgeois press endlessly publishes rabid anti-communist propaganda trying to demonstrate that the DPRK is a nation run by madmen and poses an existential threat to the entire world because of their small nuclear arsenal, while completely ignoring the fact that it is the mass-murdering capitalist class of the USA – the only nation in world history that has actually used nuclear weapons – with their massive nuclear arsenal, that threatens the DPRK and in fact the entire world with annihilation. As we write this, it is not the DPRK that is threatening to plunge the world into a nuclear WWIII, but the USA, with its extremely cynical and murderous manipulation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that threatens such a global disaster! This document from the DPRK demonstrates the level-headed thinking of their Communist Party’s leadership on this very important question, and can be compared quite favorably to the stated policy of the US military, which has for decades asserted that it can fight and “bounce back” from a nuclear war, so long as “only” 150,000,000 US citizens or less die in the conflict!
The “threat” that the DPRK poses to the US capitalist class and its capitalist allies exists in the fact that despite 70 years of attempts to drown the North Korean revolution, first in blood and then through murderous economic sanctions that would have long ago destroyed a similarly poor capitalist nation-state, thanks to the DPRK’s heroic dedication to the building of a planned socialist economy, it continues to defy all attempts of US imperialism to bring it to its knees. This proves once again the viability and indeed the superiority of a planned socialist economic system over the capitalist system – and it is this living, breathing fact embodied in the DPRK that poses the “threat” to U.S. imperialism. The US is afraid that the example set by the DPRK will be seen as a ray of hope for the billions of struggling workers around the world, who have been forced to suffer for generations, at the hands of western capitalist powers, the kind of hideous poverty unheard of in the socialist nations of the world.
The DPRK has every right to defend itself by any and all means necessary, including with nuclear weapons, against any attempt by the US capitalist class and its puppets in Japan and South Korea to overthrow its socialist government! Long Live the DPRK!
—– IWPCHI
[N.B.: the text of the following document comes from the English-language website of the Korean Central News Agency, the official news agency of the DPRK. It can be found by clicking on this link.]
Law on DPRK’s Policy on Nuclear Forces Promulgated
Pyongyang, September 9 (KCNA) — The law of the Supreme People’s Assembly of the DPRK on the state policy on the nuclear forces was promulgated on September 8.
According to the law, the DPRK, as a responsible nuclear weapons state, opposes all forms of wars including nuclear war and aspires to build a peaceful world in which the international justice is realized.
The nuclear forces of the DPRK are a powerful means for defending the sovereignty, territorial integrity and fundamental interests of the state, preventing a war on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia and ensuring the strategic stability of the world.
The nuclear posture of the DPRK is guaranteed by the reliable, effective and matured nuclear deterrence, defensive and responsible nuclear forces policy and flexible and purposeful strategy for using nuclear weapons capable of actively coping with any existing and developing nuclear threats in future.
The opening of the DPRK’s policy on the nuclear forces and legal stipulation of the use of nuclear weapons are aimed to reduce the danger of a nuclear war to the maximum by preventing misjudge among nuclear weapons states and misuse of nuclear weapons.
The Supreme People’s Assembly of the DPRK decides as follows in order to make the nuclear forces, the backbone of the state defence capacity, and discharge their heavy mission in a responsible manner.
Mission of Nuclear Forces
The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall be a main force of the state defence which safeguards the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country and the lives and safety of the people from outside military threat, aggression and attack.
1) The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall regard it as their main mission to deter a war by making hostile forces have a clear understanding of the fact that the military confrontation with the DPRK brings about ruin and give up attempts at aggression and attack.
2) The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall carry out an operational mission for repulsing hostile forces’ aggression and attack and achieving decisive victory of war in case its deterrence fails.
2. Constitution of Nuclear Forces
The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall be composed of different kinds of nuclear warheads, delivery means, command and control system and all the personnel, equipment and facilities for the system’s operating and updating.
Command and Control of Nuclear Forces
The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall obey the monolithic command of the president of the State Affairs of the DPRK.
The president of the State Affairs of the DPRK shall have all decisive powers concerning nuclear weapons.
The state nuclear forces command organization composed of members appointed by the president of the State Affairs of the DPRK shall assist the president of the State Affairs of the DPRK in the whole course from decision concerning nuclear weapons to execution.
In case the command and control system over the state nuclear forces is placed in danger owing to an attack by hostile forces, a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately to destroy the hostile forces including the starting point of provocation and the command according to the operation plan decided in advance.
Execution of Decision on Use of Nuclear Weapons
The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall immediately execute an order of using nuclear weapons.
Principle of Using Nuclear Weapons
The DPRK shall regard it as its main principle to use nuclear weapons as the last means in order to cope with outside aggression and attack seriously threatening the security of the country and the people.
The DPRK shall neither threaten non-nuclear weapons states with its nuclear weapons nor use nuclear weapons against them unless they join aggression or attack against the DPRK in collusion with other nuclear weapons states.
Conditions of Using Nuclear Weapons
The DPRK can use nuclear weapons in the following cases:
In case an attack by nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction was launched or drew near is judged
In case a nuclear or non-nuclear attack by hostile forces on the state leadership and the command organization of the state’s nuclear forces was launched or drew near is judged
In case a fatal military attack against important strategic objects of the state was launched or drew near is judged
In case the need for operation for preventing the expansion and protraction of a war and taking the initiative in the war in contingency is inevitably raised.
In other case an inevitable situation in which it is compelled to correspond with catastrophic crisis to the existence of the state and safety of the people by only nuclear weapons is created.
7. Regular readiness of nuclear forces
The nuclear forces of the DPRK shall be regularly ready for action so that if an order to use nuclear weapons is issued, it can immediately execute it in any conditions and circumstances.
8. Safe maintenance, management and protection of nuclear weapons
1) The DPRK shall establish a thorough and safe system of storing and managing nuclear weapons to make sure that all the processes such as storage and management, the assessment of their lifespan and performance and their updating and dismantlement are conducted in conformity with administrative and technical regulations and legal procedures, and shall guarantee its implementation.
2) The DPRK shall take thorough protective steps for fear that nuclear weapons, technology and equipment concerned, nuclear substances, etc. will leak out.
9. Qualitative and quantitative increasing and upgrading of nuclear forces
1) The DPRK shall constantly assess outside nuclear threats and the change in the posture of international nuclear forces and correspondingly upgrade and beef up its nuclear forces in a qualitative and quantitative way in response to it.
2) The DPRK shall regularly update its strategy of using nuclear weapons according to different situations to enable its nuclear forces to reliably perform their mission.
10. Non-proliferation
The DPRK, as a responsible nuclear weapons state, shall neither deploy nuclear weapons in the territory of other countries nor share them and not transfer nuclear weapons, technology and equipment concerned and weapon-grade nuclear substances.
11. Others
1) The Law of the Supreme People’s Assembly of the DPRK “On further consolidating the position of the self-defence nuclear weapons state” adopted on April 1, 2013 shall be invalid.
2) Relevant organs will take technical measures to execute the law.
3) None of the articles of the law shall be interpreted to restrain or limit the exercise of the DPRK’s just right to self-defense. -0-
This past week I’ve finally started to plow through the 3234 emails of US National Institutes of of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Dr. Anthony Fauci, released to the public through a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this year; and although I’ve not quite gone through even a third of them, I’ve already found several that contain very interesting material regarding what Dr. Fauci knew about the likely severity of illness the public could expect from the COVID-19 virus and when he knew it.
One of the primary mysteries to those of us who have been skeptical about the actual threat posed to the public by the “#DeadlyVirus(TM)” SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as the COVID-19 virus, is why public health officials seemed to become more and more hysterical over the alleged threat from the virus as more scientific data came in which indicated that the threat from the virus was negligible at best and posed no “existential threat” to the human race, as the bourgeois press, politicians and others would have the world believe. What kept the scientists like Dr. Fauci from actually “following the science” and from keeping public health officials, politicians and the public accurately informed of the *lessening threat* from COVID-19 that was being revealed to us almost daily as the latest scientific data came to light?
Several emails I’ve seen indicate that as early as February 2020 Dr. Fauci was telling his correspondents that, though it was too early to tell for certain at that time, there was a distinct possibility that COVID-19 pandemic might turn out to be more akin to the very severe 1957 or 1968 flu pandemics rather than the truly disastrous 1918-19 flu pandemic that killed between 50-150 million people worldwide. Somehow, this message was never relayed to the public at all; it was buried beneath a mountain of hysterical reportage of what the bourgeois press dubbed a “deadly virus” long before there were even 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the entire world. The failure of the top scientists in the US to emphasize to the press the very likely probability that the COVID-19 pandemic would not be as deadly as the 1918 pandemic led to hysterical news reporting that panicked the politicians and public health officials of the USA; and that panic was then transferred to public health officials, politicians and people across the globe who have long been accustomed to look to the US government – and particularly top US government scientists and public health experts – for leadership in how to respond to a crisis of this nature. When the US government appeared to panic, the stage was set for one of the worst public health policy disasters in human history. The Fauci emails reveal some clues as to how this global disaster got a big push from top US government public health officials.
An example: On 16 February 2020, CBS News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook sent Dr. Fauci an email in an attempt to check the veracity of an alarming email LaPook had received from a correspondent who works on Wall St.; it’s a two-part email, reproduced here with my notes added:
Part 1 of 16 February 2020 email from CBS News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook to Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID, with Fauci’s reply. Comments in red by IWPCHI.
Part 2 of 16 February 2020 email from CBS News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook, to Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID. Comments in red by IWPCHI.
The email indicates that, in mid-February 2020, Dr. Fauci – one of the best-informed scientists on Earth in regards to the latest developments in the evolving scientific understanding of the actual threat posed by COVID-19 – was of the opinion that not only was it unlikely that COVID-19 posed some kind of existential threat to the human race, it was entirely possible that it would not come anywhere near the level of deadliness of the 1918 flu pandemic; and he envisioned a possibility that it would turn out to be even less severe than the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics. They had been the result of an unusually very severe seasonal flu virus, but triggered nothing as draconian as what was about to be imposed by panicking public health officials in the USA.
If Dr. Fauci was of the opinion that, based on what he knew about the actual scientific consensus on the likely severity of COVID-19 in mid-February, that COVID-19 was possibly going to be just another “typical flu pandemic like 1957 or 1968”, WHY wasn’t that message being emphasized to state and local public health officials, politicians, the bourgeois press and the general public? WHY did Dr. Fauci stand by and allow panic to spread throughout the USA and then through the entire world without ever making an attempt to rein it in? The Fauci-LaPook email correspondence gives us one example of how that message was distorted even by those two (at that time) relatively level-headed men as the message was relayed to the public through the medium of one of the most “responsible” outlets of the bourgeois press in the world: CBS News.
LaPook took Fauci’s message from the 16 February email to the public relatively quickly; but it emerged from the profit-making machinery of the bourgeois press in a highly distorted form despite what appears to have been a relatively responsible and not at all COVID-19-hysterical reporter – LaPook himself.
On 1 March 2020, LaPook appeared on the CBS News show “Sunday Morning” to explain to the citizens of the USA what they “needed to know” about the Coronavirus. Click on the link below to see his report:
The report begins: “Coronavirus began in China several months ago, and since then, the virus — and fear of it — have been spreading around the world. There is no vaccine for coronavirus yet, but there is a treatment for fear. It’s called facts.”
He then goes on to give a pretty decent, rational and factual account of what was known about the seriousness of the COVID-19 epidemic (it was not yet a pandemic) as of March 1, 2020: “Coronavirus causes a respiratory disease called COVID-19. Symptoms include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Most cases (about eight out of ten) are mild. The more serious cases can lead to severe lung damage.” Those facts are still true to this day. He then goes on to very lucidly describe what was known about the mortality rate of the virus:
1 March 2020; CBS News “Sunday Morning” report on Coronavirus by Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook. Though LaPook’s reportage is science-based and rational – hardly sensationalizing the epidemic – check out how the World Health Organization’s increasingly frantic statement added to the online version of LaPook’s report by a news editor completely undercuts LaPook’s rational and balanced coverage. SOURCE: CBS News website
“Just two days ago, a study from China of nearly 1,100 patients with COVID-19 reported a mortality rate of 1.4 percent; that means that of every thousand people infected, 14 will die. The death rate with flu is about 1 in a thousand.
“But some scientists feel the actual rate with coronavirus may be lower, and, in fact, closer to flu, because there are likely many cases we don’t know about, either because they are mild or the patients have no symptoms at all.” (emphasis added by IWPCHI)
Here we see that it appears that LaPook – instead of simply quoting Fauci’s statements made to him two weeks earlier which we read in the email above – attributes his information to “some scientists”. This substantially weakens the impact of his information; imagine if he (or his editors) had decided to reveal that it was Dr. Fauci who had told him “the actual [death] rate with coronavirus may be lower”! It would have been headline news! But for some reason it was completely eliminated from LaPook’s report; and in the print version online, an editor immediately followed up that reassuring information with a threatening headline statement from the World Health Organization which completely contradicts LaPook’s reporting and attempts to lure the reader AWAY from LaPook’s report towards the more sensationalist headline from the WHO! These subtle edits can make all the difference between a calming effect or the inducement of sheer panic in the minds of the citizenry!
Did LaPook inform his editors that it had been Fauci who was the source for his information that COVID-19 might not be the “deadly virus” it was being portrayed as by their competitors in the bourgeois press? If not, then it makes sense that the editors might want to keep readers on the CBS website by offering them the more exciting WHO report rather than LaPook’s more balanced (but “boringly over-factual”) reportage. For the capitalist press, profits are what matters, and if you want to draw people to your news programs from your competition you have to sensationalize everything or your less-scrupulous opponents will get those all-important ratings and advertising dollars, amirite?
However: if LaPook did inform his editors that the source for that information was Fauci, why did they decide to cut it from the report – to “bury the lede” as they say in the news business? If they had decided to make THAT the headline of the report – “Fauci: COVID-19 May Be No Worse Than 1957 or 1968 Pandemics” it would have made headlines around the world and would have thrown a major monkey wrench into the machinery of the campaign to present the impending COVID-19 pandemic as an “unprecedented” event in human history! If they deliberately chose not to run with what would have been a major world-wide scoop it is a very suspicious decision in my opinion; a crime of omission, of holding back vitally important information from the public which could very well have helped tamp down the burgeoning panic and could have prevented the draconian measures undertaken starting in March, 2020: nationwide lockdowns, mask mandates, widespread closures of “non-essential” businesses and all the rest.
Could it have been Fauci himself who refused to go “on the record” on 1 March as saying that COVID-19 had just as much chance of being a “typical flu pandemic” as anything else? If his refusal to go on record as saying what he in fact typed out in his response to LaPook, then that, too is something that needs investigation. Why would he do that in the face of the growing irrationality and hysterical reactions among members of the public throughout the USA? These are seriously bad decisions that were made by either LaPook, CBS and/or Fauci of the kind Congressional investigators might some fine day want to look into.
Beyond this most important controversy we need to pay attention to how the CBS News editors who compose their website’s written news repeatedly undercut LaPook’s intelligently-written and science-based article again and again with sensationalist headline links to other, more “exciting” panic-mongering articles designed to keep the reader in a state of confusion and fear instead of providing her with level-headed analysis of the rapidly-evolving COVID-19 story:
Source: CBS News website. Notice that most of the fear-mongering, hysterical headlines the editors keep using to undercut LaPook’s generally excellent article were published weeks ago – or even years ago during previous epidemics. (Comments in red by IWPCHI)
Source: CBS News website. Comments by IWPCHI
Source: CBS News website. (Comments in red by IWPCHI)
CBS News were of course not the only top news organizations in the world who helped stoke the fear and panic that stampeded the citizenry into accepting draconian police-state measures to “flatten the curve” for “two weeks” and which have now been flattening the world economy and leading to widespread destruction of human lives across the globe for almost two years now. Every one of CBS’s competitors were trying to outdo each other with increasingly frantic ’round-the-clock COVID-19 coverage, as we all know only too well.
From the perspective of a revolutionary socialist, these incidents illustrate the inherent weakness of the capitalist for-profit press, which makes more money the more sensationalist a story is, and in which capitalist competition between “independent” news outlets leads not to “better” “more accurate” news but to a race to the bottom for more and more lurid headlines to draw the attention of the public towards one or another news source in order to make as much money as possible. Many people criticize “communist” countries for their straight-jacketed government-run press; Socialist China was pilloried for not possessing a “free press” and for refusing to immediately publish sensationalist news reports of the “deadly virus” that emerged in Wuhan in 2019. There’s a massive amount of room for improvement in both the capitalist and the “communist” press when it comes to publishing honest non-sensationalized news reporting; the capitalist news media tends towards lurid sensationalism in their lust for profits while the so-called “communist” press of the Stalinist and Maoist types institute a deadening bureaucratic stranglehold over every word and idea published. But when it comes to coverage of vital health news coverage of emerging epidemics/pandemics like the COVID-19 pandemic that, if poorly handled, can lead to mass panic and the imposition of martial law by politicians terrified by the hysterical reactions of a citizenry driven mad by irrational fear, I know I would prefer a press that is neither crushed under the heel of ideological dogma nor profit-based; I prefer a press which is *not* involved in a life-or-death competition over advertising dollars and which is *not* compelled to compete to provide more and more sensationalized coverage in order to win the ratings wars. The bourgeois press of USA lost out to the bureaucratically-smothered state-run press of China when it came to providing the citizenry with science-based non-sensationalized news coverage of #TheGreatCoronavirusFraudOf2020 because at least Socialist China’s press was not forced to degrade itself by competing in a race to the bottom to see who could create the kind of anti-science pro-COVID-19-vaccine “news” that would win the lion’s share of hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising money from Big Pharma’s deeply corrupt and corrupting vaccine manufacturers.
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!
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!
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.
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”
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.
Twitter’s automated algorithm-based “quality control” system lays another egg.
Since 10 March 2018 our @IWPCHI Twitter account has been blocked by Twitter. They claim that it is because our account has exhibited “automated behavior” – which is absolutely not true. As anyone knows who has ever engaged us in conversation via our Twitter account, whenever we are online on Twitter we are “live” and have engaged commenters on our Tweets in sometimes quite extensive conversations. There is simply no basis for their assertion that we have used some kind of automated program on Twitter.
Here is our latest reply to the Twitter machine:
Twitter’s censors seem to focus on excluding opponents of the US capitalist state. They seek to punish their customers for their own failure to effectively combat fake bot accounts which they have allowed to proliferate in the hundreds of millions on Twitter – thereby making their service seem far more popular than it is.
This censorship is also being experienced by our sister organization “Friends of WikiLeaks – Chicago” who are also locked out of their account – for the third time – by the Twitter censorbots.
Twitter has built its Internet empire on fake accounts, which it has allowed to proliferate on its network since day 1; and recently, when the New York Times exposed the existence of perhaps hundreds of millions of fake Twitter accounts created by the “follower fraud” company “Devumi”, Twitter pretended to be “shocked, shocked!” that such things were going on in their little Internet Disneyland.
But, of course this is precisely how Twitter became the social media juggernaut it now is.
Now, to “rectify” their self-made crisis of confidence in their fraudulent follower base among their valued corporate customers, Twitter is seeking to “verify” the accounts of obviously legitimate customers by demanding that they divulge their phone numbers – or be locked out of Twitter forever. For political activists, the prospect of having to reveal their identity to Twitter is tantamount to revealing it to the US government (which can obtain the information from Twitter simply by demanding it) and, potentially, to all those who oppose their activism in the event that Twitter – like far more “secure” organizations before them – gets hacked. By forcing political activists living under repressive governments to divulge their personal phone numbers, Twitter is placing those people at risk of severe repercussions – including death – should those governments ever obtain Twitter’s database of personal customer information. To say that the new Twitter policy of requiring every customer to provide a phone number is reckless is to make an extreme understatement of the issue.
Of course, Twitter is hiding the true reason for its new censorship campaign behind the absurd claim of the US capitalist class that their chosen candidate Hillary Clinton was soundly beaten in 2016 and Donald Trump elected President solely due to “Russian meddling” in social media – particularly Twitter. They want us to believe that the flag-waving pro-US right-wing anticommunist (and in many cases outright US nativist fascist) supporters of Trump were all actually “Manchurian Candidate” voters under the spell of Vladimir Putin and a handful of pro-Putin trolls pushing Trump as the lesser evil candidate. They expect us to believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a “traitor” in thrall to Putin! What a load of crap! And Twitter’s new campaign of rampant censorship is, we are supposed to believe, simply a reaction to this Russian “meddling” on Twitter. Twitter pretends that it can’t tell the difference between Russian bot Twitter accounts created in 2016 from legitimate Twitter accounts created long before Trump was even considering a run for the Presidency. They can’t distinguish – they have no reliable method to tell the difference between Russian botnets and, say, the @IWPCHI or @FoWLChi accounts! The “Russian bot crisis” – caused by Twitter’s own incompetence at monitoring its own network thus becomes an excuse for rampant censorship of their network. Hillary Clinton was reported to have employed hundreds of thousands of fake Twitter accounts during the 2016 campaign… has she had her account locked out? No. Donald Trump is a serial violator of the Twitter “Terms of Service”: has he had his Twitter account locked out? No. Only the accounts of working-class opponents of the Democratic Party – right and left – seem to be worthy of the automated Twitter censor’s hammer. What a surprise!
This whole debacle only underscores how impossible it is to expect the capitalist class to create Internet services that provide a forum for democratic debate of issues of vital importance to the working class. It is simply not in the class interests of the bourgeoisie to provide their wage-slaves opportunities to organize the overthrow of the capitalist system. Twitter, like Google and Facebook, have rapidly evolved to become virtual extensions of the US government and its intelligence services’ data-mining operations. That these quasi-governmental capitalist behemoths should engage in rampant censorship of working-class opponents of the capitalist system does not surprise us in the least.
Bono and equally repulsive Bob Geldof shaking hands with US war criminal George W. Bush.
(UPDATED 24/25 July 2017) – We have always despised the third-rate “punk” band U2’s decidedly third-rate music as being far below the standard set by the top bands of the British Punk Invasion of the late 1970s. The very name of the band – U2 – the name of an infamous spy plane used by the US CIA to spy on the USSR during the late 1950s and early 1960s – caused suspicion among “punks” at the time it strangely emerged on the music scene, just as did “The Police” (that was another very strange name for a “punk” band and aroused our personal suspicions at the time).
It is now well known that the US Government and its secret assassination wing the CIA created pro-capitalist “cultural” organizations designed to oppose the influence of pro-working class organizations sponsored and/or influenced by the USSR. The “Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)” lured many willing – and many unsuspecting – writers and bourgeois intellectuals and academics into its fold. It has been supposed that the CIA’s operations in this area have long since been abandoned. But recent revelations – like this one – indicate that this is not true.
During the War in Iraq of 2004, the US Government announced that it was launching propaganda operations designed to influence the “Arab street” to support the objectives of US imperialism as it rampaged throughout the Mideast, slaughtering civilian men, women and children. But behind the scenes of these well-known propaganda operations of the US Government, it appears that many other operations were being undertaken to influence the minds of American and Western European youth to support the criminal objectives of the US capitalist class and their blood-soaked military.
Popular music has always been a way for the widely hated US Government to reach the “hearts and minds” of the workers subliminally. During the 1950s and 1920s the US Government sought to segregate record releases as well as radio broadcasts into separate racial categories so as to keep the working class divided and thus more easily manipulated. Until the rise of the Communist- and Trotskyist- Party-influenced Civil Rights Movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, music and the arts were kept segregated by the owners of newspapers, radio stations and record companies. Almost every attempt of black and white youth to come together to enjoy rock-and-roll concerts during the 1950s was met with police-state violence ranging from refusal to allow the concerts to occur to physical attacks on the audience and performers.
In the late 1950s and 1960s the US Government sponsored “cultural exchange” programs in which famous US jazz musicians were sent to the USSR as ambassadors of the “free world” to attempt to show the workers of socialist nation-states what they were missing. Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and many others very controversially volunteered to allow themselves to be pawns in the global culture war that accompanied the “Cold War”.
In the 1960s, rock bands who opposed the war in Vietnam were placed under US police-state surveillance and their members were arrested and thrown in jail at the slightest pretext for doing so. The FBI’s murderous COINTELPRO operation was unleashed against members of the Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and many other “anti-war” musicians.
In the late 1970s the pages of the “counter-culture” magazine “Rolling Stone” – a magazine that was originally one of the primary mouthpieces of US youth opposition to the Vietnam War – were turned into recruitment posters to lure workers into the US war machine. During the late 1970s and 1980s it was ads from the US Army that kept Rolling Stone afloat financially (we cancelled our subscription and refused to read this pro-war rag).
So how is it that the frontman of the incomprehensibly popular rock band “U2” would ignore all that horrible precedent in order to make common cause with a US military that has been committing war crimes without cessation since World War II? What motivates a citizen of Ireland like Bono to join hands with the most murderous military to rampage across the globe since Hitler’s Wehrmacht?
Bono is the head of one of the myriad of fake non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that in fact are sponsored and backed by top capitalists and governmental organizations of imperialist nation-states like the US and England. Bono fronts two of these: RED – an AIDS activism organization; and ONE which is his “humanitarian aid” organization now seeking to partner with the US Special Operations Command – one of the most murderous branches of the US military, responsible for carrying out assassinations and terrorist attacks against the many enemies of the US capitalist class.
Though it is true that both of these organizations have done some commendable work in their respective areas of concern, charities like this effectively cover up for the fact that it is the capitalist system itself that is responsible for the terrible human suffering that takes place in the world. By collaborating with governments and military organizations that are primarily responsible for the vast majority of human suffering in the world, both ONE and RED serve to place a big “happy face” over the crimes being committed every day by the US Government and its military. By organizing these NGOs these do-gooders trick millions of workers into believing that their pathetically small charitable donations are going to end poverty or make a serious impact on saving the lives of AIDS victims when in fact they allow the capitalist system to continue to kill tens of millions of people every year and prevent workers from organizing to get rid of the capitalist system which is the basis for all this unnecessary suffering.
Charity work can not solve these enormous problems; it will take a socialist revolution in the US and throughout the capitalist world to finally put the needs of hundreds of millions of suffering people at the forefront of all human activity on this planet. A socialist United States of America would set as its goal not the mere “alleviation of extreme poverty” – which is the timid goal set by the United Nations Millennium Goals fraud, but to completely end poverty once and for all. That would not be accomplished by penny-pinching charity but by a systematic planned effort to nationalize the pharmaceutical industry and then mass-produce drugs to ship to any place on Earth where they are needed – for free. We would also send doctors and nurses and construction workers and all the supplies necessary to build hospitals, clinics and medical schools throughout the “third world” and train the workers there to become the medical professionals that would eradicate every preventable disease that now ravages much of the world’s 7 billion people. Capitalist charity doesn’t solve poverty and human suffering – IT PROLONGS IT AND GUARANTEES ITS PERPETUATION!
Bono’s monumental ego probably leads him to believe, quite naively, that he is influencing organizations like SOCOM to be more “humanitarian”: but in fact it is Bono and his ONE organization that are being used quite openly and cynically to put a false humanitarian face on one of the most murderous ruling classes in world history: the US capitalist class and their mass-slaughtering war machine. Not only does Bono reveal his own vast naiveté in doing this; he also exposes every one of ONE and RED’s international representatives to very legitimate reprisals against anyone who works with the murderous US military machine. In short, Bono’s crappy politics are placing the lives of every decent person in his aid organizations at risk.
Here we present to our readers the open admission by none other than Four-Star General Raymond “Tony” Thomas, Commander, US Special Operations Command that his blood-soaked organization has been openly recruited by the idiot Bono to help him develop his “humanitarian aid” organization @ONE. It was not the US military that sought to work with Bono: it was BONO who sought out the assistance of nothing less than the brutal US Special Operations Command to help him bring “humanitarian aid” to the desperate and starving people of the world. This is like asking an organization representing wolves to come to the aid of an organization representing sheep!
SOCOM’s General Raymond Anthony “Tony” Thomas III isn’t the sweet and convivial guy he pretends to be in this video. In fact he has been a key participant and leader of many of US imperialism’s most bloody and ruthless military operations of the past 40 years: from the cowardly invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 to the savage and shameless invasion of Panama in 1989 to prevent US-backed strongman Manuel Noriega from spilling the beans on US Military/CIA drug trafficking operations in South and Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal; to the savage wars and counter-intelligence operations being run to this day by SOCOM in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. Gen. Thomas – that nice smiling, friendly fan of U2 – is in fact a blood-soaked war criminal, a lifelong servant of the mass-murdering US capitalist class! There could be no better proof that the pathetic petit-bourgeois reformist Bono can’t tell his ass from a hole-in-the-ground politically than that he should seek to enlist US war criminal Gen. Thomas of SOCOM as a “humanitarian ally”!
In this amazing video, the head of the US Special Operations Command expresses his own astonishment that a rock star such as Bono would ask to work hand-in-glove with the US military. But we wonder if this kind of co-operation between U2 and the US military hasn’t been going on since U2 was created and suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the late 1970s, during a punk-rock upsurge in which U2 seemed at the time to be totally out of sync with. Is it possible that in a “Congress For Cultural Freedom”-like propaganda operation, U2 were created – or at least co=opted and then promoted – by UK and US intelligence agencies in order to create political pressure against the IRA and to get them to disarm and become the lame, housebroken “loyal opposition” they currently are? And then once that mission was accomplished, U2 were used to create the US and UK-govt sponsored NGO @ONE which has just now been revealed as a collaborator of the US war machine? You be the judge. We just found out about this ourselves today so we are only now beginning our investigation into this scandal.
If you take the time to watch the entire video you will see that US War Criminal Gen. Thomas makes several far more important revelations about the US joint military operations with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria as well as an ominous threat of impending military attacks on the besieged North Korean degenerated workers state. He represents the ongoing threat to human civilization posed by the continuation of the rule of the US capitalist class and their mass-murdering military.
“While this Administration’s approach to foreign crises mostly differs from that of its predecessor, there is at least one conspicuous exception, a heavy reliance on Special Operations Forces. Their commander explains the role SOCOM and SOF perennially play in responding to flash points around the globe and building partner-nation capacity to provide for their own defense.
“Featuring:
Raymond “Tony” Thomas, Commander, US Special Operations Command
Moderator: Catherine Herridge, Chief Intelligence Correspondent, Fox News”
U2 revelations begin at 30:05 of video. Our transcript of the interview relating to the revelations about U2 follows below:
*******************
[Dialogue on this subject begins at 30:05 of video – IWPCHI]
Moderator: “Just to shift gears; you’re always looking for new partnerships, right?
Raymond “Tony” Thomas, Commander, US Special Operations Command: “Always”.
Mod: “Always. OK. So you met recently with the singer Bono or his team… right?
Thomas: Right
Mod: … you gonna work with him? Not …
Thomas: I hope so! This was str…
Mod: on stage, or…
Thomas: … this was strange… and, uh, actually, a member of his team’s here today. And we, we met with him to try to put some meat on these bones. Uh, but the interesting thing… uh… Bono came to… to Tampa with U2 – and I’m a huge U2 fan – so this… it was pretty easy when he said “hey can I meet with and General Luttell [ph – IWPCHI]?” [SOCOM shit laughs and gives “thumbs-up” sign] Yeah, rock on, let’s do this.
Mod: [laughs]
Audience: [laughs]
Thomas: … so, uh… so before one of the best concerts I could ever imagine, he spent about 40 minutes describing all his efforts through the “ONE Foundation” that he’s trying to do around the world. And the fascinating part was… he acknowledged… he said… early on, he said: “the last group of people I ever expected to be hanging around with was a bunch of military people!” And I thought about that for a second and I thought: “Yeah, because you have the perception that a lot of others do: that we’re just a bunch of knuckle-dragging pipe-swingers um… who… “call on ’em when you need to do something desperate but otherwise, how could they be helpful?” His [Bono’s – IWPCHI] late-life epiphany (he’s 54 years old) is that “you know what? All the humanitarian assistance that I’m trying to push around the world doesn’t happen without security; you [the US military – IWPCHI] seem to provide security and you seem to want to stabilize places – either ahead of time, before a conflict or as we’re wrapping up post-hostilities – might we do things together?” And I’m thinking: “Absolutely! You’ve got an 8-million-person organization that runs the gamut of… of positive humanitarian activities… um… that need the trappings of security or that need that kind of… you know… synergy and symbiotic relationship… sign us up!” So we’re trying to actively… and we’re global, like he’s global… so it’s kind of a ‘match made in heaven’ in terms of the opportunity. Now, again, ask me six months from now um… “have you done anything more than admire U2 music more than you did before”…
Mod: [laughs]
Thomas: … um, I hope I can tell you “here’s where we’re actually moving out” and it’s… and it’s a great… kind of… you know… um… ah… match of… varied capabilities that they’re doing… um… that are proven to… a lot of humanity.
Mod: Your plan is to try and make something work, right?
Thomas: And, and I think it’s free money. So why, uh, why not? Uh… He literally is offering the entree for…to.. uh… for… to marry up with his activities, so… and there’s others out there like him that, uh, I think we have not taken advantage of in the past. They’re also turning their focus on – which absolutely plays to our strong suit or to our party effort. Um.. they’re about countering violent extremism.
Independent Workers Party of Los Angeles 