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Red Channels
PETER FROST looks back seventy years to the start of Hollywood’s darkest hour
J Edgar Hoover, first head of the FBI
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
THIS spring marks 70 years since the start of the notorious red-baiting and blacklisting that hit the US entertainment industry so hard and destroyed the careers and often the lives of so many talented individuals.
In many ways it started with the publication of a little booklet called Red Channels: the Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The booklet written by Ted C Kirkpatrick, a former FBI agent, and Vincent Hartnett, a right-wing television producer, listed the names of 151 writers, directors and performers.
Those names had been assembled from two main sources – first from what were supposed to be secret FBI files and also from scrutinising back copies of the American Daily Worker.
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The daughter of a legendary blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter has spoken out against the reactionary move, says MIKE SCHNEIDER
RON JACOBS is enthralled by an account of the surveillance and political repression on the left in the US
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
From sexual innuendo about Blackpool Rock to Bob Dylan’s ‘God-almighty world,’ the corporation’s classist moral custodianship of pop music has created a roll call of censored artists anyone would feel honoured to join, writes NICK MATTHEWS