Category: Discrimination against communists
‘Ugly socialists’: What on Earth are they smoking over at the Times of London?
worker | February 2, 2018 | 6:34 pm | Analysis, Discrimination against communists, struggle against anti-communism | Comments closed

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/417637-socialists-times-right-attractive-ugly/

‘Ugly socialists’: What on Earth are they smoking over at the Times of London?

‘Ugly socialists’: What on Earth are they smoking over at the Times of London?

John Wight
John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1
‘Ugly socialists’: What on Earth are they smoking over at the Times of London?
Like the vast majority of people in the UK seeking serious news coverage and analysis, I do not read the Times newspaper of London. A recent story carried on its front page reminded me why.

With the UK’s governing Tory Party currently tearing itself to pieces over Brexit; with the number of people sleeping rough in England now at its highest level since records began; with terrorism still constituting a threat to the British people; and with the country’s National Health Service in a seemingly unending crisis, you might think the Times – which is, after all, the country’s newspaper of record – had plenty of issues to choose from for its front page. But, no, for the Times it is deemed far more important to put on its front page a story surrounding the findings of a ‘scientific’ study claiming that, wait for it, “attractive people have a tendency to be more right-wing.”

Just think about this for a moment: this is a story that was carried on the front page not of one of Britain’s array of cheap right-wing tabloids, whose bread and butter is the sensational, salacious and sordid; but the front page of a supposedly serious newspaper, popular with the country’s political and business elite.

Clearly the authors of this study, and the people over at the Times, do not subscribe to the view that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But even if you do subscribe to that view, has anybody had a look at Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson lately? I respectfully suggest that Mother Nature does not count him as one of her masterpieces.

Moreover, haven’t the author or authors of this ridiculous report, and its publication in the Times, noticed as they travel the world the preponderance of t-shirts, caps and other items carrying the iconic image of Che Guevara, a man whose life was dedicated to communism?

Just imagine if Che, who possessed the brooding countenance and looks of a Hollywood matinee idol, and a young Fidel Castro, who wasn’t exactly lacking in that department either, turned up a Tory Party conference in Britain or a Republican Party convention in the US. It would be tantamount to putting a couple of thoroughbred stallions into a field of donkeys. Then we have Charles De Gaulle, Winston Churchill, John McCain, and Donald Trump: four avowed right-wing leaders and politicians of note who, to be frank, were and are not among evolution’s finest creations.

Oscar Wilde, a dandy amongst dandies, was a man with socialist views, though as he famously opined once, “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” But he was no slouch in the fashion or flamboyance stakes in his day, proving that taking an interest in your appearance and being left wing in your political views are not mutually exclusive. What was it Wilde said again: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

“Attractive children have been shown to experience warmer treatment from their parents,” the academic, Rolfe Peterson, of that world-renowned and respected institute of learning, Susquehanna University in the US, has written according to the Times story. Just by way of some friendly advice to the editor while we’re at it: it’s probably not a good idea when attempting to support an unsupportable generalization, such as contained in this report, to use a university that is so obscure you would struggle to locate it using the Hubble space telescope.

But, anyway, now that we’re here, on the actual substance of the claim that attractive children have been shown to experience warmer treatment from their parents, did it not strike Mr Peterson that this may just be a case of bad parenting? And what exactly is considered “warmer treatment”? Is it filling the child’s face with chocolate and sweets? Is it buying it everything it wants and more, filling the child’s head with expectation of future success and fame and celebrity? Is this what Mr Peterson of Susquehanna University and the clutch of right-wing cranks over at the Times consider to be “warmer treatment”?

Because it is precisely this malign brand of “warmer treatment” of children in the West that’s responsible for producing not balanced, caring and compassionate adults; but the archetypal right-wing sociopath, which is the norm within the Tory Party in the UK and the norm in Washington.

The real objective of this report, along with its coverage in the Times, is to place a pseudo-scientific gloss on selfishness, greed and narcissism – the very traits of those who subscribe to the mantra of me, myself, and I; such as your average Times newspaper journalist and reader. As the economist and author, John Kenneth Galbraith, once put it: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

German philosopher Erich Fromm, in his classic work ‘The Sane Society,’ points out that “narcissism is the essence of all severe psychic pathology,” and that “the most extreme form of narcissism is to be seen in all forms of insanity.” Not casting any aspersions or anything, but Hitler was not exactly the full loaf of bread, was he? And the man did have some pretty right-wing views.

The Times story is not just fake news; it is mind-blowingly infantile propaganda masquerading as news. It is astounding, if not frightening, to think that this is the quality of brain nourishment being spoon-fed to Britain’s political and business elite, its movers and shakers, so to speak. No wonder the country’s in such mess.

Oh yes, and by the way, in the same story the Times also takes the opportunity to quote the findings of an “academic” paper from last year, which would have us believe that “socialists were more likely to be physically weak.”

Really? Try telling that to the soldiers of the Red Army who smashed their way through the gates of Berlin in 1945.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The Death of Stalin: Vulgar anticommunism under the veil of “comedy”
worker | January 27, 2018 | 7:38 pm | Discrimination against communists, J. Stalin, Russia, struggle against anti-communism | Comments closed

Sunday, January 28, 2018

The Death of Stalin: Vulgar anticommunism under the veil of “comedy”

http://www.idcommunism.com/2018/01/the-death-of-stalin-vulgar.html
“The Death of Stalin” is the title of the anticommunist film which is going to be screened on cinemas. The two-minutes trailer of the movie is enough for someone to understand that it is another case of crude and vulgar anticommunism, of distortion and counterfeiting of History, as long as it shows Stalin as the “fear and terror of the nation” and other personalities of the time (e.g. Marshall Zhukov) as miserable caricatures.
But the text of the [film’s] synopsis by the distribution company ODEON which accompanies the movie and has been published in the media is also revealing. Promoting the film, the distribution company refers to it as “a comedy based on real events”: “On the night of March 2, 1953, a man is dying. A terrible stroke is wracking his entire body. He is drooling. He is pissing himself… The man is Joseph Stalin, dictator, tyrant, butcher as well a Secretary General of USSR. ‘The Death of Stalin’ is a satire about the days before the funerals of the Nation’s Father. Days that shine a sardonic light on all the madness, depravity and inhumanity of totalitarianism. Days that will see the men surrounding him fight to inherit his supreme power. And it’s all based on true events.”
“Dictator”, “tyrrant”, “inhumanity”, “totalitarianism”, “supreme power”… All the components of vulgar anticommunism, mixed in a blend and garnished with “satire” and “comedy”, so it can become more digestible and penetrating to the public.
Source: Rizospastis / Translation: In Defense of Communism.
Gulag Archipelago: Exposing the anticommunist fabrications of Solzhenitsyn
worker | January 2, 2018 | 7:12 pm | Discrimination against communists, J. Stalin, struggle against anti-communism, USSR | Comments closed

Monday, January 1, 2018

Gulag Archipelago: Exposing the anticommunist fabrications of Solzhenitsyn

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2018/01/gulag-archipelago-exposing.html
By Nikos Mottas*.
Originally published in atexnos.gr.
Translated from Greek.
 
One of the most famous and celebrated works of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag Archipelago, has been for a long time a kind of a holy bible for every anticommunist. Firstly published in 1973, it- supposedly- consists an analytical record of the conditions existed in the so-called labour camps of the Soviet Union. Within the framework of the slanderous anticommunist campaign, bourgeois historiography has extensively promoted Solzhenitsyn’s work as a source of arguments about the so-called Stalinist dictatorship and communist crime in the Soviet Union.
 
However, there is a fundamental problem in the work of the deeply reactionary Solzhenitsyn: Gulag Archipelago is a completely antiscientific book, based almost entirely in rumors, speculations, third party opinions as well as interpretations of opinions by Solzenitsyn himself! In other words, the reader of this book becomes hostage of a novel type, unverifiable, recording to alleged events by Solzenitsyn and others who supposedly saw, heard or learned something.
Even people who have nothing friendly to say about Stalin admit that Solzhenitsyn’s work is nothing but fairy tales. Let’s see what trotskyite historian and writer Vadim Z. Rogovin writes: Solzhenitsyn’s work, much like the more objective works of R. Medvedev, belong to the genre which the West calls “oral history,” i.e., research which is based almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts of participants in the events being described. Moreover, using the circumstance that the memoirs from prisoners in Stalin’s camps which had been given to him to read had never been published, Solzhenitsyn took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them [1]. In fact, Solzenitsyn edited and cited, according to his own reactionary views, third parties’ testimonials in which he added anticommunist fabrications thus creating the Archipelago fairy tale.
 
Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya, seems to confirm the fact that “Gulag Archipelago” consists a fictional and completely non-scientific book. In her autobiography published in 1974 under the title Sanya: My Life with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Reshetovskaya actually challenges the validity of what Solzenitsyn writes in Gulag Archipelago. According to Reshetovskaya, she was perplexed by the fact that the the book was accepted by the western (capitalist) world as the solemn, ultimate truth, saying that the significance of his ex-husband’s work had been overestimated and wrongly appraised. [2]. Furthermore, Reshetovskaya unveiled that Solzhenitsyn himself did not regard the book as historical research, or scientific research, but it was rather a camp folklore collection!
 
More or less, Reshetovskaya actually says that Gulag Archipelago isn’t a work that should be taken seriously or accepted as a valid source. The fact that Solzhenitsyn’s book is full of lies and inaccuracies is something that can be confirmed by a comparison of the data presented in the Gulag Archipelago with the real numbers. There lies a significant problem for the credibility of the much celebrated nobelist and former Nazi collaborator Solzhenitsyn: He presents fake numbers!
 
The following chart, published at the official journal of the Union of American Historians, includes the overall statistical data for the custodial population in the USSR from 1934 to 1953, during a period of Joseph Stalin’s leadership. Let’s now see how the numbers, researched and checked by bourgeois scientists and published at the American Historical Review, refute Solzhenitsyn’s anticommunist fabrications.
 
1st : Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s argument about 60 million deaths (!) at the Soviet labour camps consists a product of his deeply anticommunist fantasy and profound lie.
 
2st : Solzhenitsyn’s argument about 25 million detained people at the labour camps (gulags) in 1953 is a vulgar lie. In 1953, the overall number of the imprisoned people was not over 2.5 million. Two million were criminal prisoners, convicted for crimes or ordinary criminal law.
 
3rd: In the peak of his anticommunist paranoia, Solzhenitsyn had claimed that the total number of victims during Stalin’s period were… 110 million people! If this ridiculous claim was correct then, normally, the Soviet Union’s population during Stalin’s leadership (1924-1953) should have been decreased significantly. However, statistical data about the USSR’s population prove exactly the opposite!
 
On January 1926, the population of the Soviet Union was 148.6 million people. Fifteen years later, on June 1941 the population had been increased to 196.7 million. A decrease in USSR’s population took place between 1941 and 1946 (170.5 million), which is explainable by the huge casualties of the country during the Second World War. After the War, during the period 1946-1951, the Soviet Union’s population increased again, reaching 182.3 million people on January 1951 [4]. As for the annual birth rate in the USSR between 1920 and 1950, it is extremely insufficient in order to overlap (in terms of population) the number of the supposed million deaths of the Stalin era [5].
 
Solzhenitsyn is proved to be a blatant liar. Nonetheless, if someone isn’t convinced yet about the anticommunist fabrications of Solzenitsyn and the other stalinologists (e.g. Robert Conquest), there is more to come.
After the victory of counterrevolution and the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, the bourgeois government of Boris Yeltsin decided to open the official soviet state archives, hoping that they would find evidence about the million victims of the stalinist era. But, what did the official soviet state archives reveal? They revealed that the actual number of those who were sentenced to death during the period of Stalin’s leadership, from 1923 to 1952, is between 776,000 and 786,000 people [6]. The million victims of stalinism that Solzhenitsyn, Conquest and other pathetic anticommunists wrote about, consist of propagandistic fairy tales.
 
Taking all the above into account, we can now ask a final question: How credible is an anticommunist fairy tale that is full of inaccuracies and monstrous lies? How serious must someone take the fabrications of Solzhenitsyn about Socialism, the USSR and Stalin? We leave on literature critics to evaluate Gulag Archipelago as a novel. But what is clear and beyond doubt is that Solzhenitsyn’s book is a non-scientific, anticommunist fabrication full of lies and slanders. In a few words, nothing more or less than the spiritual product of a nazi collaborator, a reactionary and a fascist.
 
NOTES:
 
[1] Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, Mehring Books, 1998.
[2] Reshetovskaya, Natalya. Sanya: My Life With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Indianapolis/New York, Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1974. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html.
[3] The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1017-1049.
[4] Andreev, E.M., et al., Naselenie Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1922-1991. Moscow, Nauka, 1993.
[5] BT.Urlanis, Trends in fertility level in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the years of Soviet rule, 1980.
[6] Getty J.A, Rittersporn G, Zemskov V. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence, American Historical Review, 98:4, Oct. 1993.
 
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘In Defense of Communism’. 
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, Mehring Books, 1998.
Murderous attack against young communists by Neo-Nazi gangsters in Ukraine

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Murderous attack against young communists by Neo-Nazi gangsters in Ukraine

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/12/murderous-attack-against-young.html
Source: kpu.ua.

In Ukraine a group of young fascists affiliated to one of the neo-Nazi parties of the country “National Corps” attacked the premises, where the youth wing of Communist Party of Ukraine gathered for plenums in Kiev. 

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine highligted in the press release on the issue that these criminal groups are controlled and supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was added that during the attack, the police came to the scene and as always did not interfere in the situation.

The Communist Party of Ukraine declared: “All gangster attacks on members of the Party, members of the Komsomol, dissidents are carried out directly on instructions and are financed by political forces that seized power in Ukraine as a result of the armed coup in February 2014.” In the press release, it was also informed that the party sent detailed information about the attack to the international human organizations, PACE, OSCE, and to the UN Human Rights Office.
Previously in December 2015, the Kiev District Administrative Court banned the activities of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In January 2016, the Ministry of Justice stated that the Supreme Administrative Court refused to open proceedings on the appeal of the CPU, which tried to challenge its ban in Ukraine.

Source: international communist press.
* * * 
KNE: Condemns the fascist attack against Komsomol’s members

In a statement, the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE) condemns the new fascist attack against the young communists of Ukraine. Among others, the statement writes: “We denounce the identification of anticommunism and repression by the reactionary government of Ukraine which is supported- and supports- fascist groups.”

“It is the same regime”, the KNE statement points out “which has created black lists for its political opponents, including, among others, cadres of the KKE such as G.Lambroulis, MP and Deputy Speaker of the Greek Parliament and S.Zarianopoulos, KKE MEP, because they showed their practical interests and solidarity of the KKE to the people of Ukraine who is shedding blood in the Donbass region.

Anticommunism shall not pass. Solidarity to the communists of Ukraine”.

KKE: Protest outside the Polish embassy in Athens against anticommunist persecutions
worker | November 27, 2017 | 8:15 pm | Communist Party Greece (KKE), Discrimination against communists, struggle against anti-communism | Comments closed

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

KKE: Protest outside the Polish embassy in Athens against anticommunist persecutions

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/11/kke-protest-outside-polish-embassy-in.html
With a protest outside the Polish embassy yesterday in Athens, members of the Communist Party of Greece expressed their condemnation of the anticommunist persecutions that take place in Poland.
The delegation of the KKE, headed by the Member of the European Parliament Kostas Papadakis, delivered to the personnel of the embassy a statement in which the Party expresses its opposition to the persecutions.
It must be reminded that the court proceedings were due to start on Monday 27/11, with the judicial prosecution based on charges of propagating communist ideology in the „Brzask” newspaper and on the Communist Party of Poland’s website.
In its statement the KKE “condemns and denounces these anticommunist measures and persecutions, every kind of prohibitions against communists such as trials against them, prohibitions of communist symbols and of spreading communist ideas. This unacceptable persecution under no circumstances is lawful because it has the support of the reactionary EU or because similar (persecutions) are promoted in other countries”.
“The prohibitions”, writes the KKE statement, “the repression measures against the activity of the communists go hand-by-hand with the overall antiworkers measures and the attack to the rights and conquests of the working class”.
“They consist part of the known propaganda about “totalitarian regime” that promotes the provocative and unhistorical equation of communism with the monster of fascism, which is born and raised by the capitalist system”.
The KKE expresses its solidarity to the communists and the class-labour movement of Poland and demands the immediate withdrawal of all persecutions against the CP of Poland, its members and cadres.
Source: 902.gr / Translation: In Defense of Communism.
Gentle Giant
worker | November 26, 2017 | 7:09 pm | About the CPUSA, Discrimination against communists, Local/State | Comments closed

https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/gentle-giant/Content?oid=2268857

GENTLE GIANT

At 79, he has outlived his most outspoken critics and several spans of public scorn. Most of those who know his name today are activists or labor liberals — and they have only praise for him, despite his long and entirely public or “open” membership in the Communist Party, USA.

“He’s a true organizer, of a dying breed,” says Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center.

Those who have dealt with Stanford over the years say that rather than pose as a militant, he speaks in the voice of consensus and prudence.

 Tom Flower, a Vietnam-era protester, now an Anglican minister better known for work among the homeless, argues that, “actually, John is pretty conservative about doing things that might upset people. He doesn’t like to put leaflets on people’s windshields, for example.”

But Stanford wasn’t always viewed as the mild character that he seems to be today. There was a time when he was seen as a threat to the free world.

In 1950, he entered the peace movement by circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition, which called for banning nuclear weapons, and was roundly viewed as a conspirator in a global plot to further Stalin’s aims.

Stanford says that the joined the Party on the day after his discharge from the U.S. Navy in 1946. He became an activist within weeks, soon after re-enrolling at the University of Texas at Austin. Late that year, the Houston Informer reported that Stanford gave a speech in the basement of a Baptist church, under the sponsorship of the youth wing of the NAACP.

“White students are learning that it is time for them to fight for the rights of the Negro people,” he declared, characteristically throwing in a bit of wishful thinking. “If we increase our unity, we can make of the South a place where everyone can have a decent living, health, and education facilities.”

Stanford, who is white, delivered his Houston speech to support a lawsuit by Heman Sweatt, a black postal worker, to gain admission to the University of Texas law school. It was not the kind of speech that ordinary white men gave in that era of poll taxes and statutory segregation.

“In the South in the 1930s and 1940s, there were very, very few whites who spoke out for racial equality,” explains Maurice Isserman, the nation’s leading scholar on American communist affairs. “To do so was to put your life at risk.

And in many instances, the white Southerners who were willing to take that risk were in, or close to, the Communist Party.”

Sweatt’s legal challenge, won in 1950, is today seen as a precedent to the more-famous 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which ordered the integration of all public schools.

Because of his victory, Sweatt posthumously became a Texas hero, his portrait displayed at the Institute of Texan Cultures, a scholarship and college campus named in his honor.

feat-stanford-0944_330jpg
John Stanford was one of the few whites who spoke out for racial equality in the 1930s and 1940s. Photos by Mark Greenberg

The Meerschaum pipe Members of the Communist Party customarily don’t reveal the names of members or former members who are still alive. But Sweatt’s death has freed Stanford to declare that at the time of the suit, Sweatt, too, was a Communist Party member. Unlike Sweatt, Stanford was never closeted, even if it was because he had little choice, thanks to the Texas Legislature and the Houston police. He moved to the Bayou City following his graduation from UT, and on September 16, 1948 — El Diez y Seis de Septiembre, Mexican Independence Day — the bilingual agitator was arrested for distributing Party leaflets decrying “the ruthless economic, political, and social oppression of the Mexican-American people.”

In 1951, Texas passed a Communist Control Act that required Party members to register with authorities, and prescribed a two- to 10-year prison term for failure to comply with the law. The Party decided to challenge the law’s dubious constitutionality, and Stanford, who was by then living in San Antonio, volunteered to be the test case, mailing an open letter to officials in 1952, declaring his membership. According to the plan, he was to refuse to register when the authorities responded.

But the 1950s were tough times for even the Party’s bravest members. Eleven national leaders of the group had been indicted under federal anti-communist laws, and some of them were already behind bars. After Stanford mailed his statement, the Party’s leadership found that it didn’t have the resources to pursue the Texas challenge, and ordered him to go underground.

“The Party had made a big mistake,” Stanford observes today. “It thought that fascism was coming.” He doesn’t remember everything that happened afterwards, partly because aging takes a toll, and partly, he says, because he tried to forget.

“I used to keep photo albums,” he recalls, “but when I went underground, I cut the faces out of the pictures, so that the FBI wouldn’t harass my friends. But the thing is, then I forgot, too, and can’t match names with faces now.”

To avoid arrest, he fled to Alabama, and knowing no one, found a job as a waiter at a diner and tried to lay low. But he couldn’t; it wasn’t in him to sit on the sidelines. After a few weeks in Birmingham, Stanford began attending meetings of a committee that was opposing fare hikes on city buses. Alabama bus fare activists, however, were wary of the Texan who showed up as if from nowhere; they thought that he was an FBI agent.

Stanford’s arrangement with the Party — like a scene from a movie about the French Resistance — was that he was to stay out of view for six months, then place a classified ad in the leading daily newspaper, saying that he had lost a meerschaum pipe. The person who called to report the discovery of the meerschaum, the plan went, would become his contact with the Party.

Stanford placed the ad and a young woman called. He asked her to meet him at the diner on a Sunday morning, when business was slow. Joanna Tylee walked in, she recalls, and upon seeing the Texan whom she remembered from the bus fare meetings, thought that she had walked into a trap.

The pipe plot had a happy ending: Joanna Tylee is today Jo Stanford. Following their marriage, John returned to San Antonio, and with her, reorganized the city’s frightened Communists and raised two children in the Jefferson neighborhood.

A Rosewood raid Back in Texas, prosecutors hadn’t forgotten Stanford. Through informers, they and the FBI kept eyes on the quiet-spoken protester, and as late as September 1963, San Antonio Express and News headlines assured its readers that “D.A. Still Studying Stanford.”

Officials had plenty of authority under which to act against him: Augmented by new measures, Texas laws by then prescribed 30-year prison terms for unregistered Reds. But the feds asked that Texas officials wait to nab Stanford until he could be designated as a Communist by the federal Subversive Activities Control Board, which delivered its finding on December 26, 1963.

Hours later, search warrant in hand, seven men from the district and state attorneys offices knocked on the door of the Stanford home, which was then on Rosewood Street, in the Beacon Hill area. John Stanford wasn’t home; Jo admitted the raiders and promptly telephoned the press. Meanwhile, her visitors began boxing some 2,000 books and various papers, including the couple’s marriage license, insurance policies, and mortgage schedule. The raid lasted for five hours. When reporters arrived, according to the Express and News, Jo welcomed them with, “Come on in and join the party!” But then she caught herself. “Or should I use another word?” she joked. The searchers claimed that the raid was necessary to prove that Stanford was imperiling public safety by selling Communist books and tracts through a mail-order bookstore in his home called All Points of View, which he had been operating since 1961.

In the months that followed, Stanford and his attorney, the late Maury Maverick Jr., were frequent subjects of the local press, whose handling of the affair betrayed an acquired admiration for the suspect. Reporters described Stanford as “affable,” and “pipe-smoking,” a designation that, in days before bongs, connoted “reflective” and “calm.”

Litigation over the book seizure wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where Maverick pointed out that among the confiscated items were copies of legal opinions on anti-communist laws penned by Justice Hugo Black.

“The reference to Justice Black’s opinion brought chuckles from the bench and several humorous exchanges that brightened the hushed dignity of the marble courtroom,” Express writer Ned Curran reported from Washington when the Court heard the case.

To almost no one’s surprise, the Court ruled the raid on Rosewood invalid, and the DA’s men, driving a borrowed red-and-white pickup, returned Stanford’s books to Rosewood.

They probably didn’t intend to aid or encourage the unarmed Stanford to overthrow the government, but the lawmen also gave him a gun, a .38-caliber pistol that had been taken for evidence in an unrelated case. Stanford, who has always claimed that he is for “socialism by peaceful and democratic means,” promptly returned the weapon.

Lingering suspicions Stanford’s victory before the Supreme Court kept him under public glare even after the ruling was old news. In 1965, an Express reporter grilled Stanford, who attended a demonstration to protest the killing of Reverend James Reeb during the Selma-to-Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps hoping to tarnish the voting rights movement, the reporter asked Stanford to justify his presence at the event. “I participated for the reason tens of thousands participated across the country — as a protest against the brutality being practiced against the Alabama Negroes,” Stanford shot back.

Six months later, his activities were again assailed in the local press when he sent anti-war leaflets to a mailing list that he had compiled, drawing a complaint from a soldier’s mother — not in San Antonio, but in distant El Paso.

“I believe the wars in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic endanger the lives of all American servicemen — including this woman’s son,” he told an inquisitor from the Express.

In the years since Vietnam, Stanford has taken part in dozens of other causes: the unionization of Valley farm workers, the campaign to Free Angela Davis, protests over U.S. involvement in Central America, and since 2001, Thursday peace vigils at the San Fernando Cathedral.

At protests against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he is saying much the same thing today that he has said since 1946. “Capitalism doesn’t have a future,” he maintains. He insists that Soviet interests were only a marginal concern of his. “We weren’t concerned about Stalin’s policies during the 1950s, we were fighting against the poll tax,” he says.

Young demonstrators may dismiss Stanford as too old, and his trademark causes too dated to be relevant now, but they don’t suspect him, as their forerunners did, of joining their protests with a hidden agenda in mind. The ironies of history are endless, and one of them is that it’s not because he has spent more than 50 years on the barricades, but because there is no longer a Soviet state, that nobody questions Stanford’s sincerity today.

Solidarity with the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) – Condemn the anticommunist persecutions
worker | November 24, 2017 | 7:05 pm | Communist Party of Poland, Discrimination against communists | Comments closed

Friday, November 24, 2017

Solidarity with the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) – Condemn the anticommunist persecutions

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/11/solidarity-with-communist-party-of.html
Anti-communist persecution against the Communist Party of Poland continues. On 27th of November the court proceedings will restart. The judicial prosecution based on charges of propagating communist ideology in the „Brzask” newspaper and on the party’s website continues for two years.
This trial is a part of a campaign made by the government to illegalize the Communist Party of Poland.
This persecution is taking place simultaneously with the anti-communist policy of rewriting history and removing monuments and names of the streets associated with communism and workers’ movement from the public space.
We call for organising solidarity protests against the political persecution in front of Polish embassies all over the world on 27th of November.
Anti-communist represions in Poland were condemned by 67 parties that participated in the 19th International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties. The common statement is the following:
We denounce the persecutions against our Polish comrades. These persecutions, as well as the persecutions in other EU member-states, go hand in hand with the intensification of the anti-popular offensive, aim at equating Communism with the fascist monster; they aim at erasing the achievements of Socialism from the collective memory of the peoples.
100 years after the October Revolution, the peoples can and must draw conclusions from the anti-communist political positions of the EU and of the bourgeois governments that are becoming more intense. They must trust the Communists and demand the satisfaction of their modern needs, organizing their struggle against the capitalist system, the monopolies and their power. All charges against the CP of Poland and its cadres have to be dropped immediately. Hands off the Communists of Poland, the Communist ideology and their unrestricted action. Solidarity with the CP of Poland!  Anti-communism shall notasdfsadfasdfass!”
CP of Poland emphasized that the following trial would be a part of a campaign by the government to illegalize the Communist Party. It said, “This persecution is taking place simultaneously with the anti-communist policy of rewriting history and removing monuments and names of the streets associated with communism and workers’ movement from the public space.”
The CP of Poland called for organising solidarity protests against the political persecution in front of Polish embassies all over the world on the trial day, November 27th.
The motion against the persecutions was signed by the following parties:
Communist Party of Australia
Party of Labour of Austria
Communist Party of Azerbaidjan
Progressive Tribune Bahrain
Communist Party of Bangladesh
Communist Party of Belarus
Communist Party of Brazil
Brazilian Communist Party
New Communist Party of Britain
Communist Party of Bulgaria
Party of the Bulgarian Communists
Socialist Workers Party of Croatia
Communist Party of Cuba
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
Egyptian Communist Party
Communist Party of Equador
Communist Party of Estonia
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Workers’ Party
Communist Party of India
Communist Party of India (Marksist)
Iraqi Communist Party
Communist Party of Kurdistan
Tudeh Prty of Iran
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers Party of Ireland
Communist Party of Israel
Communist Party (Italy)
Jordanian Communist Party
Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan
Party of the Communists of Kyrgyzstan
Workers Party of Korea
Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist Peoples’ Front (Lithuania)
Party of the Congress for the Independence of Madagascar
Communist Party of Mexico
Party of the Communists of Republic of Moldova
Communist Party of Nepal
Communist Party of Norway
Palestinian Communist Party
Paraguayan Communist Party
Communist Party of Peru (Patria Roja)
Peruan Communist Party
Philippine Communist Party (PKP-1930)
Portuguese Communist Party
Romanian Socialist Party
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Russian Communist Workers Party
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Communists of Serbia
Communist Party of the People of Spain
Communits of Catalonia
Communist Party of Sri-Lanka
South African Communist Party
Sudanese Communist Party
Communist Party of Sweden
Syrian Communist Party
Syrian Communist Party (Unified)
Communist Party of Tadjikistan
Communist Party of Turkey
Communist Party of Ukraine
Union of Communists of Ukraine
Communist Party of Uruguay
Communist Party of Venezuela