Dear Progressive Reader,

I am currently in Los Angeles to attend a memorial to commemorate the life of Jerry Manpearl. Jerry was a longtime supporter of The Progressive magazine, and so many other important causes and organizations. As his daughter Terry wrote in a recent online article for the LA Progressive, “A tenacious duo of activist lawyers, Jerry and my mom Jan Goodman, have, for decades, opened their home as a progressive thought parlor and consistent stage for fundraisers in Los Angeles.” Jerry, and his lifelong commitment to a better world, will be greatly missed by all who knew him.

This week on our website, Ed Rampell reviews the new film The Movement and the “Madman.” The documentary tells the story of two large moratoriums organized in 1969 to oppose the escalation of the war in Vietnam by then-President Richard Nixon. Plus Jeff Abbott looks at the one-year anniversary of El Salvador’s curtailment of civil rights; Saurav Sarkar reports on how Seattle became the first U.S. city to oppose caste discrimination; David Helvarg examines the hopes and shortcomings of California’s efforts to slow the climate crisis; and organic farmer George Naylor pens an op-ed on the dangers of toxic pesticide drift. Mike Ervin also takes on the moves toward eliminating human beings at Starbucks; and cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates the strange path of the Trump indictments.

On March 26, 1979, the United States government won an injunction against The Progressive to halt the publication of an article about the secret of the Hydrogen Bomb. After a six-month-long legal battle, The Progressive would prevail, not in court, but because the U.S. Justice Department chose to drop the case rather than lose.

The case was really not about the “secret” of building a bomb, which author Howard Morland clearly proved was readily accessible in public documents. Rather it was about the whole regime of nuclear secrecy that undergirded the Cold War mentality of the 1950s onward. As Bill Lueders writes in his retrospective, published on the fortieth anniversary of the case, “The Big Lie that nuclear proliferation hinged on access to some sort of secret was, [editor Erwin] Knoll believed, responsible for nearly all of the political repression—the spy scares, the witch hunts, the loyalty purges—that had confounded progressive change in Cold War America. Knoll leapt at this chance to boldly challenge the nuclear-secrecy mystique.”

In a March 25, 1979 editorial The New York Times concurred, “The shouts of alarm are more dangerous than the danger they describe. The government is doing its best to intimidate the Milwaukee [federal] judge and to incite the public against the magazine.” A letter to the Times the following week echoed Knoll’s contentions, “Suppression of no-longer-secret nuclear ‘secrets’ is motivated not by the need to protect Government's monopoly of this information but to enhance its power to decide how the information will be used. In other words, Government wishes to debilitate public debate of one of the great issues of our time. . . . Continuing to argue for protecting ‘secrets’ through censorship of the press is as futile as executing the Rosenbergs.”

At 7:00 p.m. on April 10, The Progressive will host a screening of the new film Ithaka, about the imprisonment of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Assange is currently sitting in Britain's Belmarsh prison awaiting possible extradition to the United States for the WikiLeaks publication of documents showing many of the untold horrors of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The film seeks to raise awareness about the case, and the principles of press freedom that are under threat should Assange be prosecuted for the publication of this information. The film will be shown at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, and will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Assange’s father John Shipton and film producer Gabriel Shipton, along with journalist John Nichols. Tickets are available in advance at barrymorelive.com or by calling 608-241-8864. More information about the six-week-long national tour of this film can be found at: assangedefense.org/ithaka.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - The new 2023 Hidden History of the United States calendar is now available. You can order one online.

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