THE STALINIZATION OF THE AMERICAN LEFT -- JOHN KERRY

ce, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.  (John Kerry)

n Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

    Remarks before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971

   

John Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, most likely from a stroke, stricken late during the night in his sleep. In his dotage and pathologically suspicious of doctors, Stalin’s cowering associates hesitated to call for medical assistance fearing his wrath. So he lay helpless for some time, unable to speak or otherwise communicate, soaking in his own urine before his final exodus. When his closest henchmen, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, confirmed that “the Boss” was finely and safely dead, they scurried off to the Kremlin offices to clean out the files and papers that might document their extensive complicity in Stalin’s long reign of terror and criminality.  

The Georgian Bolshevik was seventy three years old.  As the undisputed God of the Communist world his passing unleashed paroxysms of grief in the Socialist Workers Paradise of his making and regions elsewhere under the banner of the hammer and sickle. The CPSU bosses set his embalmed corpse next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum. Eight years later he would be quietly evicted by the ‘kinder, gentler’ Nikita Khrushchev after he began to ponder with his colleagues at the 20^th Party Congress the “imperfections” of the reign of the General Secretary, his long-time mentor and father of the world’s first modern terror-command state, and what they might signal for his own political fortunes.                                 

Stalin’s legacy was not just two and a half decades of repression and mass murder. He also left posterity the gift of Stalinism, a unique form of tyranny that combined systematic terror with an ideology at once rigid yet flexible and adaptable, held together with a mindless cult of personality. The ‘mold’ of J.V. Stalin stamped out a number of working copies – ambitious, overachieving Stalinists wielding vast power in many places. An assortment of vicious, self-infatuated monsters such as Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Communist chiefs of the Eastern block countries, like the Master, devoted their waking energies to the celebration of their self-perceived genius and the wreckage of the millions of lives of those under their domination. The authors of the Black Book of Communism estimate that Communist rule snuffed out the lives of some 100 million people during the 20^th century.     

Stalinism survived Stalin – survived and flourished in fact. In the 21^st century its practitioners have cleverly adapted themselves to the changing world but, like the Bolsheviks from the early days, continue to embrace Stalinism’s core conviction – that they, the Stalinists, alone possess a cognitive and moral superiority that entitles them to wield whatever power they need to smash the old, corrupt order and micromanage the lives of others. The old guard Stalinists were open, confident and ardent about what they intended to do to their real, and imagined, opposition; the 21^st- century ones tend to hide behind the customs, institutions and traditions they loath and surreptitiously work to destroy. Twentieth-century Stalinists were about Revolution: twenty-first-century Stalinists promise “transformation.”

After WWII the Stalinists of note in the U.S. could be found undercover high up in FDR’s government—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins being some of the better known, as we now know from the Venona decrypts. The America’s mainstream, however, for a season disdained every feature of Communism. During the Cold War, particularly in the early years, most Americans were appalled by the grim spectacle of Soviet imposed helotry in central and eastern Europe and the murderous fanaticism unfolding in Mao’s China, Stalinism with an Asian accent. Americans were also threatened by the Communist self-confident assertions of their superiority and inevitability. “We will bury you!" ("Мы вас похороним!") predicted Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.

Reflecting the sentiments and convictions of the American people post WWII, both the Republicans and the Democrats at least appeared resolutely anti-Communist. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was close to Joe McCarthy, and early in his career Bobby Kennedy worked for the Wisconsin senator before the American Left accomplished it’s most successful and enduring smear. Nixon of course launched his political career combating Communism in America, defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race.  Nixon dubbed her as “the pink lady … red down to her underwear.” President Kennedy warned the country of domino threat of Communism to Southeast Asia and following General Maxwell Taylor’s counsel, sent 8,000 troops to Vietnam to support the Catholic, anti-Communist, South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm.

Vietnam, as we now know, was a disaster for the Americans, fifty-seven thousand soldiers who perished fighting there, and, of course, for the Vietnamese all of whom ended up living under a repressive Communist regime. The Vietnam War marked a major turning point for Americans in their engagement with Communism. Rife with political assassinations, race riots and radicalized universities during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. hard-turned to the Left. Vietnam became for the Left a propaganda fulcrum used to de-moralize America, its traditions, history and promises, all exposed as a various elements of false consciousness that disguised its essential character – a viciously, hopelessly racist, rigged system propped up with a phony, exploitative Christianity and Horatio Alger mythology.

America, John Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech promised would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty”. Liberty-Schmiberty, throw away lines for the naive and the dummies. Such sentimental schlock was quickly turned upside down by our adversarial intellectual class who were busy polishing their favorite Marxist leitmotifs and disseminating a view of American history (Charles Beard comes to mind) that that read exploitation and oppression into the country’s foundational fabric. 

Southeast Asia refracted through the hermeneutical Marxist lens became a theater of imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from America’s underclass – poor and minorities dragooned and dropped into rice paddies half way around the world to bomb, napalm, and devastate a colonialized third world people. The American presence in Vietnam stripped of anti-Communist rhetoric was shown to be in essence about its true core, aggression and racism: the white imperialist descendants of American slave owners were conscripting young, black Americans, discriminated against and marginalized from the slums at home, to wage war on Asian people whom they (the leaders) viewed as racially inferior, culturally insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly in all of its ugly Vietnamese contortions became an external (international) reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its chauvinist history.

One especially notable indictment of American racism in Vietnam came from none other than the future Massachusetts U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry, who had returned home from active duty to throw away his service medals and help organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Among other symbolic gestures of condemnation of the U.S. government prosecution of the war, Kerry carried a North Vietnamese flag in a protest march. His book, The New Soldier denounced the architects of the war as racists hiding behind a phony vale of anti-Communism. “We are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism…  [W]e watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.”

It would not be quite correct to say that Kerry was opposed to the war.  It was far more than that. The war itself was a manifestation of something much worse for him. “The country doesn't realize it yet but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.” It is difficult to know what to make of this sweeping, slanderous verbiage, a poisoned cocktail of vituperation and nihilism that one might expect to hear from a raging anarchist on a street corner, not from a decorated veteran testifying before Congress. This “monster” was made up of his comrades in arms some of whom had died believing, perhaps, that they were about more than dealing and trading in violence. Kerry’s personal history and ascendance to high office—from a 1960’s anti-war radical, communist sympathizer to high establishmentarian is a splendid prototype of the political trajectory of many of our current elites and helps to explain why American political and social institutions now bear scant resemblance to what they were a generation ago.

Thus: many years later when he appeared before a national audience to accept the Democrat Party’s nomination to run for the Presidency, Kerry opened his speech with a snappy salute and announced that he was “reporting for duty”, apparently having calculated for purposes of garnering votes that the “biggest nothing in history” he had fought in and subsequently with great fanfare denounced as an enterprise concocted and conducted by war criminals was now an illustrious entry in his autobiography. And so, from John Kerry, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” as he put it in his testimony before Congress … to John Kerry, the proud war hero! This was the sort of amoral reversal that reminds one of an earlier volte-face from a cynical power monger, Joseph Stalin: Stalin was for Hitler (Mototov-Ribbontrop pact 1939) until he was against him (1941-1945). Kerry’s opportunistic affinity for Stalin-like switcheroos was captured in his risible, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the Iraq war] before I voted against it." Needless to say, Kerry did not during his Presidential campaign bring up the authorship of The New Soldier and his characterization of the U.S. effort in Vietnam as he so delicately put it, “a filthy obscene memory.”

Kerry's ambition to be President in 2004 was foiled in part by emergence of his former naval Swift Boat comrades from the Vietnam days who had served with Kerry and told the voters the truth about his self-exaggerated war heroics and reminded the voters of his sweeping condemnations of the American military in which he served. For their efforts they were smeared by the Left for doing what Stalinists most resent from those who oppose them, telling the truth.