Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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# SECRET4 October 1974XAAZ-35686MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORDSUBJECT: Former Records of Ray Murphy1.  The attached documents are part of a large collection of records held by Ray Murphy during his tenure as an official of the Department of State. He transferred all of his records to CIA upon his retirement in the mid-1960's. The documents of that collection which did not meet the retention criteria of the DDO or the Office of Security were destroyed. While those which were of utility have been retained and accessioned as appropriate to the DDO records system.2.  The attached records concern Harold ISAACS who is the subject of 201-0018446 and should be classified to that file.M. Gaul HartmanM. Paul HartmanC/CIRA/RSAttachment![table description]![signature]RECORD COPYSECRET4 Oct 74201-18446E2. IMPDETCL BY 006593
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Copy: ARISSCBD:9:"Iraan, HarrietSOURCE: NET FAGS25, New York City,Cotober 22, 1936 - Page 12## EUROPE'S CRISIS; JAPAN PRAPARESBy Hansu Chen... There are numerous American Journalists of different political color and shades of opinion who are "cooperating" in this way with Japanese imperialion, but whoever has followed the writings of Harold Isaaca, Alexander Buchman, Frank Class and Wilbur Burton in The China Press, The China Weekly Review, Asia, Pacific Affairs, Now International, etc., realizes that these American Trotskyist journalists are the most vicious and most dangerous of the whole lot of reactionery journalists.Alding behind a barrage of Marxist phraseology (which noue of them has yet learned to manipulate with facility), those people are energetically conducting a campaign of lice against the Communist International, the Chinese Communist Party, the soviet Union, the Chinese Soviets and the Chinese Red Army, a campaign which aims to undermine the confidence of the outside world in the Chinese Soviet movement and the Red Army....> [Figure: A stamp that says RECORD COPY]Harold Ssnaes201-18446.H/W ATT CI To XAAZ-35786201-15446
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EUR CORIIJNISI ACTIVITIES FILESDate Oct 23.1957SOURCE: DAILY WORKERFile No. 9.00 IssaceX 4202 China.# TROTZKYITE BOOK MOURNS OVER CHINESE REVOLUTION## THE TRAGEDY OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION. By Harold D. Issacs. Stanford University Press. 352 pp $5**By ROBERT FRIEDMAN**The presses are spewing forth anti-Chinese books these days at a pace which biels to match the anti-Soviet tonat. All the old 'China hands' who served Western imperialism as banker, soldier, spy, for whatever in the Orient are now busy at the typewriter, engaged in profitable vilification of 450,000,000 people because they decided to take their fate in their own hands and build for themselves.One book which deserves, even under the cynical and opportunist reign of capitalism, some special prize for adaptability is Harold D. Isaacs' *Tragedy. of the Chinese Revolution.*Published first in 1938 as an avowedly Trotskyite tract (complete with introduction by Trotsky) calling the defeat of the Chinese workers in 1927 a "betraval by Stalin and the Chinese Communists, the same book emerges now, refurbished, to mourn the victory of the very same Chinese workers Ja generation latertof devious Trotskyite polemics, Isaacs book, has been reissued,. partly to cash in on the hate-China racket, arid partly because any stick is useful to Big Business against the liberation bound masses.Isaacs now says he no longer loves Trotsky, whose introduction has been dropped as a liability. Instead, he is an open defender of imperialist intervention against the people of the Far East.But typical of his Trotskyite weaseling is Isaacs attack on the Chinese Coimmunists of the 1920's, first because they supported Chiang Kai-shek despite the fact that he was to become the butcher of the Chinese revolution, and second because they allegedly cringed before Chiang when he turned on the workers in 1927.This nonsense, which would rule out every political alliance in history on the chance that today's ally might he tomorrow's enemy, is ironic in view of the fact that Chiang sits today on Taiwan, a discredited gangster save only in the eyes of Isaacs' political mentors.Meanwhile the Chinese people will go about their business building socialism, unconcerned by Isaacs' tears for the tragedy of 1927 or 1951.Filled with the murky intricaciesRECOH/W ATT 02 TO XAA2-35786201-18446
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COPY: MK:S8COMP.Enclosure No. 1To Des toh No. 33171 Ta Yong Yi Ping HutungFeiping, China.Oct. 5, 1934.Mr. T. A. Bisson136 Claremont AvenueMount Vernon, N. Y.Dear Mr. Bisson:I have seen the correspondence exchanged between Mr. Olass and yourself regarding the contributions you collected for the China Forum. A draft for the sum in full will be sent to you this week.I do not know in the name of whom or what Miss Smedley speaks of the China Forum. Since she was not in China at the time the Forum Suspended, nor has she corresponded with me on the subject, I consider it necessary to place before you and the other contributors an account of the circumstances in which the Forum ceased publication. Since you apparently gathered the contributors together in a meeting to hear what Miss Smedley had to say, I would appreciate it deeply if you would gather them once mors to hear my account. The enclosed is a copy of a letter, sent by me last May to the Chinese Communist Party. It has been published in China in a Chinese translation and copies have been sent abroad but has not been published in English as far as I know. I do not know the names of the people who were good enough to contribute to the Forum but their interest in the matter warrants placing before them the story of what happened to the magazine. I trust, out of simple fairness to me, you will be good enough to give them this opportunity..I greatly regret any inconvenience or embarrassment to which you have been put in this matter. I do hope, however, that my letter will enlighten you and your friends and enable you to appreciate the difficulties which have arisen. I know of no project to revive the China Forum at the present time. Should such occur, the resultant publication would be of a considerably different character from the one I edited, as will be obvious from the facts given in my letter to the C. P. I think people who are interested in supporting the revolutionary movement here should know these facts.Once again, I appreciate all the trouble you have gone to in this matter.Did you ever, incidentally, receive the article "Fascism in China" and the newsletter which I mailed to July 13 last?Yours sincerely,(Harold R. Isaacs)encl.(Copied by FD)
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COPYLetter of H. R. Isaacs to the C.C.P. concern-ing the China ForumTo the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party:The two-year period of my extra-organizational collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party has come to an end and the China Forum which I founded and edited during that time has been forced to suspend publication. In the interest of our whole movement as well as in my personal interest, I consider it necessary to record here and publish the history of the China Forum and the circumstances of its suspension. You refused me the opportunity to lay the matter before the membership of the party even when I offered to do so in your own organs and not through the columns of the Forum. When, wrongly, I permitted the Forum to go down in silence, you turned around and in your organs and near organs in China and abroad you proceeded with the usual slanders of "betrayer" and "counter-revolutionary". In so doing you didn't have the courage or the simple honesty to state that you presented the China Forum with an ultimatum and forced its suspension because in reply its editor raised questions which are being placed before the whole movement today by the International Left Opposition. Nor did you state that you deliberately smashed the Forum for this reason despite my repeated and extended offers to continue publication as before on a straight anti-Kuomintang, anti-imperialist basis, leaving these various problems to be thrashed out first privately among ourselves. In other words, you deliberately forced suspension of the China Forum despite the fact, on your own admission, that its loss was a serious blow to the revolutionary movement in China, that it meant the disappearance of an organ which for two years you had considered an extremely valuable instrument in the hands of the movement. Here, as in the broader issues which led to our differences, your blind adherence to false policies was once more demonstrative of your readiness to place your factional interests above the interests of the Chinese Revolution.In going back over the history of the Forum, I think the vicious character of your action becomes even more evident when I start with the fact that from beginning to end I functioned not as a member of the party but as a willing sympathizer who was prepared to throw all his energies into a job he saw he could do - edit and publish an organ in China which could help mobilise the forces of this country for struggle against the Kuomintang and the imperialists by exposing the regime of terror and privation which they have in common imposed upon the masses of the Chinese people. Permit me to recall at this point that I never accepted any personal remuneration for time or labor. You gave the Forum financial aid but I never received a dollar from you that was not put into the paper. I refused your offers of compensation and earned my living elsewhere. Your only claim on me was my full-hearted loyalty to the Communist ideal and our
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-2-our common dedication to the struggle against a regimeof hate and misery and oppression. In the end you for-folted this claim by ceasing any longer to be in my eyeshonest or.effective leaders of this struggle.Although you helped the Forum financially, the partyou played in building it up from the day it started inJanuary, 1932, to the day of its last appearance in Janu-ary 1934, was insignificant. My repeated requests forcooperation in matters of circulation and material forpublication went largely unsatisfied throughout that time.You never supplied me with the reports I so frequentlyand urgently sought, particularly on trade unione, strikestruggles, the Red Armies, the Red districts, etc. Every-thing thơ Forum did and became was the fruit of the workof a tiny group of devoted collaborators (the most im-portant of whom had no connection with you whatever) andmyself who had to depend almost entirely on our own re-sources for everything we did and published. At everycrisis in the Forum's existence, when it was banned bythe French authorities in Shanghai at the very outset;when it was hounded and persecuted by the American andChinese authorities in the summer of 1933, when throughBritish police pressure it was thrown out of every avail-able printing ship in the city; when the pseudo-FascistBlue Shirts again and again threatened the printing plantwhich I built up partially through personally contractedloans it was invariably through my own initiative, withthe help of the little Forum staff, that we pulled our-selves up by the bootstraps every time and carried on toa point in January this year where the Forum was flourish-ing and growing daily in circulation, prestige, and in-fluence despite the many formidable obstacles in its way.The formation of the China Forum Readers Association,which in the brief space of three months spread to elevencities in five provinces, developing into & mighty potential weapon for the revolutionary movement, was the prod-uct of spontaneous action on the part of the Forum'sreaders, later sponsored and led by the paper itself.All these were the Forum's own achievements, not yours.By your arbitrary and criminal action you shattered thenin the full stride of their growth. Because to my bitterdisappointment I had not nor could I secure the resourcesto carry on myself - owing largely to the difficult condi-tions of work and the impossibility of getting revenuefrom the paper itself - all that had been achieved andwas to be achieved was ground into the dust.II.From almost the very beginning of my active work -which I date from the time I began reporting events inChina in a Communist way - a number of questions presentedthemselves to me in increasingly forcible form. Thesearose originally from my discovery of the gross distor-tions and exaggerations which I found to be characteristicof Communist propaganda in China and abroad. I definopropaganda as the skilful, clear, accurate and whollytruthful reporting of the facts linked to an incisive,purposive
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-3-purposive interpretation and a plan of action for dealing with the facts in a revolutionary way. I learned 06:04 no sie and work of Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades who taught us that the truth comes from the masees themselves and that only dienster can result from telling them lies. I have never learned to the contrary that it was my revolutionary duty to work in any other way although I soon found that the present day Communist Party press makes a practice of distinguishing between propaganda and truth.Examples of exaggeration and distortion most strik-ing to we were naturally those which applied to China, bocause here I could check allegations with known facts. I first wrote these down to the ignorance or incapacity of individuals. I felt that Communist editors abroad would publish accurate facts about China if they could get them. Accordingly with a friend I tried to set up. an independent mail news service and sent weekly bulletins to papers all over the world giving brief, sharp, factual accounts of what was going on. This was in the fall of 1931 after my return from the area of the great Central China floods of that summer. I scarcely understood then why this service failed to secure any response from the Communist press abroad. After about three months I had to suspend it for lack of support. It simply didn't get published except in a few organs which were not official Communist Party papers, including the New York Militant.It wasn't long before I began to perceive, with a deeper study of international events and the history of the Chinese Revolution, that a consistent thread ran through the distortions and exaggerations which I found not only in brief casual reports of current events but in the solemn pronunciamentoes. made by delegates before plenums of the E.C.C.I. I discovered that these departures from the truth were made necessary by the official premise that ever since the catastrophe of 1937 a mighty, upsurg-ing revolutionary movement has been marching forward in China to the very brink of seizure of power under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. I discovered that these exaggerations were necessary because the prem-ise vas false and along with it all the basic tenets of the policies being pursued by the Communist International and the Communist Party in China. I cannot begin here to give a summary of some of these distortions (which I verbally cited to you by the dozen) ranging from particu-lar incidents (the wilfully false picture given of the cotton mill strike in Shanghai in January, 1933, even to the point of transposing it to February to heighten the lapression given of the workers' role in the Shanghai war) to high flown generalisations like the statement recently made before the Plenum of the S.C.C.I. that the C.C.P. has won over the majority of the Chinese working class and the peasantry.In denying the factual truth of this premise, whence flows the whole policy of the Communist Party in China, I deprecate not a whit the magnificent militancy and courage of Chinese workers, striking again and again and fightingagainst
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-4-against terrific odds in defense of their very lives;nor the noroio struggles waged by peasants all over thecountry; nor the fight of the Red Armies against theKuomintang, I merely respect the cold, indisputable factthat these struggles are defensive, not offensive, thatthey are isolated, desperate and unorganised. With veryfew exceptions - a few small strikes here and there andthe larger exception of the Red Army - they are withoutorganized revolutionary leadership. Moreover the develop-ment of this leadership, the task of the C.P., is proceed-ing at a tragically retarded pace owing to the falsepolicies and inept tactics of the party.In denying the presence of a mighty revolutionaryupsurge (1.6., a vast, organised march toward the seizureof power) I respect facts made still clearer perhaps whencompared to the facts and figures of the monster mass move-ments of the 1925-27 period. The tragic errors of theCommunist leadership in 1987 were primarily responsiblefor the decapitation of that great movement and becauseno lessons have been drawn from those evente to this veryday, these errore, monstrously accumulated, are still re-sponsible for the tragedies of today. But for the purpoвеof our comparison here, let us for examplo take the singlefact that in 1936 in Greater Shanghai there were 257strikes. In 1933 there were 82. Let us remember thaton the eve of the workers' seizure of power in Shanghaiin March, 1937, there were more than 800,000 workere,handicraftsmen and petty traders out on the streets fight-ing with arms in hands for demande of a far-reaching pos,litical character. A close check for the entire countryin the latter half of 1933 showed me that less than one-thirtieth of that number were engaged in strikes and otherdisputes during any given month and that almost invariablythe demands were defensive demands against wage cuts andlockouts. Moreover, the lack of cohesive leadership -often in departments of the same factory or in one or moreof a group of factories - or even sometimes lack of eventhe most elementary organization has in almost everycase led to deadening failure and relatively easy betrayalby the yellow "labor leaders" and "mediators of theXuomintang. In 1935 the shooting of thirteen students.by British police in Shanghai was the touch-off for ageneral strike which paralyzed the city and which wasBeconded by vast sympathy strikes which broke like aseries of tidal waves over the entire country. In Janu-ary, 1932, when the Japanese imperialists used the ShanghaiInternational Settlement as a base for operations whichcost the lives of tens of thousands of Chinese, not asingle strike interrupted the normal course of the pub-lic or other services in that settlement. In the factoriesthere were no strikes but a large scale lockout to whichthe overwhelming majority of Shanghai's workers submittedwithout protest.The dogged, persistent struggle carried on by smallsections of the rank and file workers in isolated instancesin recent years is tribute to the magnificent fibre ofChinese
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-6-Party has failed to translate the realities of everyday events into its program and tactics.I cannot here go into the many-faceted problems and issues which flow from these facts with regard to the policies and tactics of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Nor extending to the international scene need I go into the terrific effects of the German catastrophe nor the storm of questions which has been directed at the C.I. leadership whose responsibility in the disaster has become nakedly clear to unnumbered Communists and Communist sympathizers the world over. Nor into the whole set of implications which arise from the policies of the C.I., with particular reference to the late developments in Soviet foreign policy, the Litvinov-Roosevelt agreement, the forthcoming mooted entrance of the U.S.S.R. into the League of Nations and in a smaller but equally character istio way, the forthcoming association of the U.S.S.R. with the Institute of Pacifio Relations which hopes to höld ita next talkfest in Mo৪০০৯. These problems, with their many specific links to the Chinese questions, were the basic questions over which I soon began to take issue with the official views of the Party and the International.III.But precisely because at all costs I desired to carry on the Forum's oven struggle against the common enemy - against the Kuomintang and the imperialists - I sedulously avoided bringing these issues into the columns of the paper, increasingly against my better judgment. I leaned over far backward in this respect. This expressed itself in many of the current issues with which we had to deal.I ask you to recall the whole uphill fight which the Forum waged on behalf of Paul and Gertrud Ruegg in the spring and summer of 1933 during which time I repeatedly warned against the emphasis which was being placed on the legal aspects of the case and the negotiations with the Kuomintang to the detriment of mass pressure and the capitalization of the case for political purposes. You paid lip service to the need for mass pressure - partiou- larly here in China- but in fact the "legalities" and futile negotiations remained the major pillars of the de- Tense. Until in the very end I finally rebelled, I wasn't even permitted to give Ruegy his honourable and rightful title secretary of the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secre- tariat. Yet, although I felt the struggle for the Ruegga was being seriously handicapped by the tactics being pur- sued, I carried on the fight with all the energy at my command and you will recall that it was I who created the local defense committee and was chiefly responsible for the widespread press propaganda and the considerable sympathy which we aroused. Yet the strictly non-political attitude which Ruegg was forced to assume at the trial (in contrast to the highly political atitude of his prosecutors) was in my opinion one of the major reasons for