Author: icsswpadmin

On the night of January 12-13, 1948, Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels, a prominent actor and director in the Yiddish language Soviet theater and winner of the Stalin prize in 1946, together with a friend, Vladimir Golubov, were killed in a hit-and-run accident on a dark street in Minsk, Byelorussian SSR.

Mikhoels was buried with honors and praised in the Soviet press. Nevertheless, rumors that he had been murdered by the Soviet state began to circulate almost immediately. During the 1960s these rumors multiplied, occasionally being repeated in official sources.

Beginning in 1991 documents began to appear claiming that Joseph Stalin had ordered Mikhoels murdered. These documents continued to appear during the 1990s. Several of them have now been inserted in Soviet archives to give the impression that they are genuine. Today the story that Stalin ordered Mikhoels murdered is repeated by all researchers and popularizers of Soviet history. 

The Mikhoels murder case is an unusually blatant example of fraudulent “scholarship” intended to smear Stalin and the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

Grover Furr is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University and a widely-published author focusing on Stalin and the USSR.

As the world marks the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Eugene E Ruyle, member of the ICSS Program Committee, reviews the history of nuclear weapons and their continuing threat to human existence.

Our speaker is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies, CSU, Long Beach and President, Veterans for Peace, East Bay Chapter 162.

In his new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thtoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, Finkelstein focuses his keen forensic eye on the canonical texts of identity politics. After methodically parsing them, he concludes that they are lacking in intellectual substance, and that the real purpose of identity politics is to derail a class-based movement bent on radical change.

Finkelstein recalls his own life in radical politics and his close encounters with the cancel culture, which left him unemployed and unemployable. He situates his personal story within broader debates on academic freedom and poignantly concludes that, although occasionally bitter, he harbors no regrets about the choices he made.

Norman Finkelstein first made his name while still in graduate school when he exposed an acclaimed national bestseller as a hoax. He went on in subsequent decades to subject Israel’s apologists as well as Holocaust hucksters to withering scrutiny.

This promises to be a very interesting session for all who want to fight the changes that are leaving millions of US citizens extremely vulnerable today.

Alexander Mckay is a UK-based political analyst and host of the fast-growing Marx Engels Lenin Institute streaming channel. He will present an examination of the changes in the Russian economy and state throughout the Putin era and how these have impacted the war in Ukraine and the plans of US Imperialism.

YouTube channel:
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCBigls8EH-PmXpjMS30gnvA

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MarxEngelsLnin?t=ri0IpUukzgvanlAmZSFg8A&s=09

Official Telegram channel of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute:
https://t.me/armc1870

Can there be peace in Korea under the US imperialistic strategy? Can there be peace in Korea when the US is at a virtual war with China? Simone Chun’s talk will show that the greatest threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia is the U.S. imperialistic quest and military encirclement of China. She will argue that the US peace movement must seriously oppose US imperial policy as a focal point of its struggle, and join its voice with the South Korean public as they campaign to regain their sovereignty and independence.

Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.