Blackmail, The Left’s Way to Destroy Free Speech

“In the same way the intelligentsia for many years labored unconsciously to destroy itself by hesitancy and submission in the face of unremitting blackmail from the extreme left.”

                   Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism

The “intelligentsia” referred to above by Leszek Kolakowski in his magisterial work on the history of Marxism is the class of Russian intellectuals that succumbed to Stalin’s usurpations in the 1930s. Once Stalin had obliterated his opposition by the late-1930s, genuine intellectual inquiry and the possibility for an open, honest examination and criticism of ideas and vigorous philosophical and scientific exchange essentially ended.    

The destruction of the intelligentsia that Kolakowski observed in Russia under the Bolsheviks bears an eerie resemblance to what has taken place here in the U.S. since the 1960s with the left in a non-stop, accelerated assault on American institutions.  The instrument of the destruction Kolakowski refers to is “unremitting blackmail” which now abounds. “Hesitancy and submission” are the order of the day from craven, pusillanimous university administrators such as the President of the University of California, Donna Shalala, an American Andrei Zhandov.  Her recent diktat to the UC faculty on “microaggressions” is truly ominous. See the elaborate censorship code online at the UC’s President’s Office website.

(http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/seminars/Tool_Recognizing_Microaggressions.pdf.)

“Blackmail”, this single word perhaps best describes the modus operandi of the left in shutting down the long-prized freedom of speech and tolerance for the expression of unpopular opinions and ideas in America.  Blackmail is essentially a form of coercion, and as the history of the 20^th century amply documents, the signature “achievements” of the left during this period were themselves monumental feats of coercion – Stalin’s forced collectivization of the Russian peasants in the 1930s, the  post-WWII Sovietization of central and eastern Europe, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  Many other examples, of course, could be listed.     

Blackmail has worked well for the left in the U.S. and it is perhaps worthwhile to consider an historical definition of the word in order to get a good sense of how well the left has used it to make a mockery of its unending raptures for “diversity” and to impose a mindless ideological conformity centered on victim groups and their grievances.

Blackmail: “a tribute anciently exacted on the Scottish border by plundering chiefs in exchange for immunity from pillage.”

“Plundering chiefs” actually wonderfully describes the race-careerists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, professional blackmailers, if you will. The tribute they exact is simply the fear and attention from white leaders that affirms their self-proclaimed status as “black leaders and spokesmen” and the leverage that comes with it to enforce their various demands – reparations, punishment for the failings in sensitivity, employment for “professionals” to monitor the “progress” that never comes. The immunity they offer is a temporary suspension of their accusations and threats if the submission they demand is sufficiently self-effacing and the compliance is unquestioning and complete.  Sharpton’s forte is riot fomenting. He needs to be soothed and accommodated lest mobs hit the streets.  Hillary Clinton when running for the Senate in New York arranged to meet with and kiss Sharpton’s ring, paying tribute, of course, in exchange for votes.

 (http://www.crimelynx.com/hillsharp.html)

More recently, Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley in order to appease the sensitivity police chiefs had to grovel and beg for forgiveness for his outrageous remark, “All lives matter,” betraying an insensitivity typically afflicting white politicians. “I meant no disrespect,” O'Malley said in an interview on This Week in Blackness, a digital show. “That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

(http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/politics/martin-omalley-all-lives-matter/)

Was he sufficiently contrite?  Did he really understand this depth of feeling that “all of us should attach to this issue”? Yes, all of us, of course.  Only the plundering chiefs are qualified to judge and they are not to be rushed.

O’Malley’s apology is all too typical and to get a sense of where things are headed with this kind of disgusting pandering and pathetic caving to the bullying ideologues one should contemplate the rituals of “self-criticism” in places like Mao’s China, and Stalin’s Russia where an “official” template for the interpretation of any matter of significance set the parameters for discussion. The words, the tone, the phrasing, all were rigorously circumscribed. Deviation could be quickly and easily detected and would lead to a range of sanctions.      

The plundering chiefs now abound in the universities.  They occupy positions suitably embellished with lofty titles such as Dean of Equity and Inclusion and Vice President for Diversity and Multiculturalism.  They represent and speak for the “under-presented”.  The tribute they exact, beyond the installation in their own positions as exalted, well-compensated commissars with an ample assemblage of staff that reflects the gravitas of their mission, is a considerable power to monitor the speech and behavior of the students and the employees of the universities.  They set the highest standards for sensitivity, the observance of which requires lectures, workshops, videos, training sessions and penalties for infractions.  At the University of California as instructed by President Shalala in her recently promulgated Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send, one is forbidden the “Use of the pronoun ‘he’ to refer to all people” because it sends the message that “Male experience is universal.” Any unruly, independent-minded professor can without too much worry blow off the complaints of a dean, provost or even a university president, but when summoned by a Diversity and Equity Commissar, he will soon discover within a depth of respect and a submissive posture he never knew he possessed.    

Difficult as this may be to believe, in 1966 George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder and head of the American Nazi Party was invited to speak at Brown University by the “Open Minds Forum.” That is correct. It is not a misprint.  Rockwell also came to Michigan State University in 1967 to speak. The student who introduced Rockwell to an audience that actually quietly listened to Rockwell had this to say:

 “It is our belief that hatred is best exposed so that all may see it and all may examine its patterns and its capabilities.  It is an issue that today we must struggle to overcome. It is through an understanding hatred in others that we can overcome it within ourselves. We are a society of laws and constitutional guarantees which ought to protect and preserve that which we abhor. Yet the laws in the end will stand to protect us against tyranny and subjection.  It is my hope that our audience this afternoon will recognize and respect the constitutional guarantees given to all the citizens of this nation.  There are those who wish to destroy our lives by forcing our citizens to respond according to the methods they prescribe. This we must avoid. This man’s organization thrives on riots and other overt reactions.  Because his philosophy embodies the  emotion of hatred, do give him the satisfaction of returned hate. For this is what he is seeking.” (Strong applause)

 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDgZ7mSRyk)

These are thoughts from a time long ago and a place far way. That was then and this is now.  Then, such was the high value attached to free speech and the willingness to be exposed to the widest range of opinions and perspectives that a real live Nazi could actually visit and speak uninterrupted on an American university campus.  Now, sensitivity reigns and the only speakers admitted to ivy halls are those who will not offend, the ideologically safe ones who emit words of support and comfort. For prospective speakers to our institutions of higher learning and open inquiry, they must fit within the prim and proper confines of the narrowest range of ideological conformity.

On the fringe and outside the range of acceptability now are not Nazis and the like who once could come and go, but people like former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who had to withdraw from her speaking engagement at Rutgers University last year because of threatened disruption. How pathetic and depressing is this state of affairs and what does it portend?       

American Muslims, White Cops, and Jumping to Conclusions

On July 18th, 2015 a twenty-four year old man in Chattanooga, Tennessee named Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire, shooting seven people, including four Marines who died that day.  A navy recruiter later died. Five people were slain and two more injured by a guy who just happened to be named Mohammad, and, who just happened to have spent seven months last year in Jordan, and who, according to Reuters and the New York Times, just happened to have sent a text the night before the killings to a friend linking to a passage of Islamic text - Hadith 38 - containing the verse: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, I will indeed declare war against him.”

From CNN: “Authorities in the U.S. and abroad are working to figure out what might have motivated the 24-year-old to shoot up a recruiting center in a strip mall in Chattanooga and then drive to a Navy operations support center about 7 miles away and stage another attack. He died in a gunfight with law enforcement.” Hmmm … yes … the illusive motive. What could it possibly be? Not even a hint?  The “authorities”, of course, will leave no stone unturned until as CNN so cautiously puts it, they “figure [it] out”. Most people may have already a good idea, but the White House and the mainstream media all must exercise infinite patience. No conclusions are to be jumped at because someone somewhere might conclude that not all manifestations of Islam show it to be a “religion of peace.”

Some months earlier in Ferguson, Missouri a white policeman named Daren Wilson shot and killed a black 18 year old named Michael Brown.  No caution or forbearance from the White House or the mainstream press about Daren Wilson’s motive. Jumped at immediately was this conclusion: Michael Brown, unarmed, hands up in surrender was gunned down execution-style by a white cop who hated blacks. It was obvious. Months later, after mobs looted and burned down portions of Ferguson, with the President of the United States, the Justice Department, and the mainstream press all doggedly insisting that Michael Brown was an  innocent victim of white racist policing, a grand jury declined to prosecute Daren Wilson since the facts showed this conclusion was, well, a little off the mark. Michael Brown, having just robbed a convenience store and assaulted the store clerk, was shot after attacking a policeman half his size and attempting to get his weapon.  Obama sent three White House officials to Michael Brown’s funeral, the funeral of a criminal. No White House representatives will likely be seen at the funerals for the Chattanooga victims, Marines who served their country. 

The contrast in the way the aftermaths of these two events with intense national media coverage happened to unfold points to something quite ugly that has taken hold in America. It is the work of ideologues preoccupied with the politics of grievances and their efforts to portray American institutions and their history as nothing but sundry modes of exploitation and domination.  Their ideology is shaped and animated by a false and pernicious doctrine that the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell long ago and fittingly called, “the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed” (DSVO).  Simply put: membership in a group of people (Group A) oppressed by a different group of people (Group B) means that people in Group A are  morally superior to those in Group B. Why? Group B-people are responsible for the suffering of the Group A-people and thus eternally culpable and forever morally deficient. The suffering of the oppressed group coupled with the depravity of the oppressor group means that the moral and legal comportment of any member of Group A must be judged differently (always more leniently or favorably) than that of any member of Group B. It is important to note that the culpability of the oppressor group is passed down from generation to generation. The grievances and the guilt are eternal. President Obama recently said that racism “is in our DNA” and “White Privilege”, a corollary of DSVO, is rapidly being embedded as an essential element of civic education.

The current boundaries for use of N-word illustrate perfectly how the DSVO works. The N-word used by anyone from the White-oppressor group is completely verboten. There is no word in the English language for a White person more poisonous, and the social and career penalties for speaking it are severe.  For Blacks?  Just watch an episode or so of the popular cable show “The Wire” set in urban Baltimore and highly touted for its gritty realism to grasp just how reliant upon, and fond the historically oppressed group represented in this series, are of this six-letter word.  President Obama in a recent interview uttered this racial slur eliciting shock and incredulity from white commentators. The black commentators were favorably impressed. Would they have been so if it came from George W. Bush, not that it ever would have, or even the “first Black President,” Bill Clinton?  Of course not. President Obama deployment of the N-word simply reinforces his status as the most illustrious member of an oppressed group and, of course, is justified by his possession of that unique virtue bequeathed by his membership.

  

The elites who govern us, mediate our news events and who shape the curricula of the schools and universities are also in large part the ideologues devoted to the “truth” of DSVO.  They invariably filter through the prism of their grievance-centered ideology events of violence and conflict, such as the two noted above. The interpretation must always be consistent with a DSVO story line. That is, the moral and legal culpability, the motivation and the damage that ensues from any given conflict between an oppressed-group individual (e.g., Black, Muslim) and an oppressor-group individual (e.g., White, Christian) must always reflect the historical picture of domination and exploitation no matter how much history may have changed the status of two groups or what the particular facts of the case might be.  Ideology trumps both historical change and facts. Racism and Imperialism remain the two crosses of guilt permanently reserved upon which to nail those of European-Christian heritage.

When the facts don’t fit the ideologically correct story line, they are either ignored or “adjusted” so that the “oppressor-oppressed” motif remains fully intact.  Thus, in November of 2009 after U.S. Army Major, Nidal Malik Hasan, known and feared for his Islamic zealotry, shot and killed thirteen military personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, the Department of Defense classified the massacre as “workplace violence” and the Army did not charge Hasan with terrorism.  Here then is one of the most egregious examples of reality sacrificed to ideology and the inviolateness of DSVO.  Muslims are a historically oppressed group, victims of Western imperialism. The thirteen people Hasan murdered and the thirty or so he injured, oppressor-group members, cannot be victims of a Muslim (an oppressed group member) acting in anyway remotely as a Muslim, even as a Muslim fanatic.  They must be “just some random folks”, as President Obama likes to express it, in the wrong place at the wrong time.   Reality is not allowed to interfere with ideology.                  

The fact that many more Black Americans are assaulted and murdered by other Black Americans than by White Americans is a fact the President, his Race-Professional associates like Al Sharpton, and the “Black Lives Matter” people seem to have little concern with and no interest in talking about.  Why?  For them it provides no political leverage and contradicts the ideologically scripted version of American race-relations that always requires an oppressor/group-oppressed/group story line.

The fact that cities such as Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta where huge numbers of Black Americans die violent deaths and endure the very worst public school systems have for decades been ruled exclusively by Black Democrats is another fact that seems to arouse no ire or warrant serious scrutiny by the ideologues who incessantly call for a “national conversation on race.” Because this nasty reality conflicts with the required DSVO story line it is ignored. The strenuous efforts of Democrat politicians to perpetuate the DSVO perhaps can help us penetrate what perhaps may be the greatest enigma in contemporary American politics: why do Black Americans so consistently and overwhelming vote for the political party that takes them for granted and does so little for them?

When ideology and reality conflict the ideologues typically do what they always do to camouflage the contradiction.  They lie, abuse their critics, assassinate their characters and when they can silence them.  Democrats now reflexively slander Republicans as racial bigots, an irony in that the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and the KKK (West Virginia Senator, Robert Byrd).   In the 2012 Presidential campaign Vice President Joe Biden told a largely Black audience in Virginia that Republican candidate Mitt Romney was “going to put ya’all back in chains.” In the magnitude of its vituperation, dishonesty and audacity, Joseph Biden puts himself in the company of that master of vile propaganda, another Joe, Joseph Goebbels.  No Democrat stepped up to dispute the Vice President or profess embarrassment for such a contemptible slander.  

In the 2016 Presidential election Americans will witness new lows in the efforts of the ideologues to paint America as a place of the worst racial hostility – irredeemable. Get ready.  

Santiago Carrillo: The Last Stalinist

The British historian, Paul Preston, recently published a biography of the late Spanish communist, Santiago Carrillo, called The Last Stalinist: the Life of Santiago Carrillo, William Collins, 2014. The book’s title, to put it politely, is a bit of a puzzle.  That Santiago Carrillo was throughout his very long, intensely political life – he died in 2012 at the age of 97 – a treacherous, diehard, unrepentant Stalinist turns out to be a verdict for which the historical evidence is so compelling, inexhaustible and eventually numbing that it fills the bulk of the 336 pages of text in Preston’s book.  

That Carrillo was the “Last Stalinist”, as the title states, remains the source of the puzzle. Never is this assertion even suggested anywhere in the book much less explained or argued.  The reasons then that bring Preston to document copiously that Carrillo was not only a consummate Stalinist but then to opine that he was the last one as well, unfortunately, can only be a matter of speculation.  So be it. 

The speculation perhaps should go to Preston’s philo-communism, a conspicuous feature of his highly prolific and meticulous scholarship on the Spanish civil war and the subsequent decades-long Franco dictatorship.  Preston rarely if ever speaks of “anti-communism” in this biography without attaching to it a sufficiently malignant adjective such as “virulent.” Preston likely could not conceive of an anti-communist who does not enjoy torturing political prisoners or bombing rural villagers.  While one can never be too vehement and strenuous in their condemnation of “fascism”, much greater toleration is considered de rigueur for the critics of an ideology whose champions in the twentieth century murdered tens of millions of people across the globe while proclaiming their idealism, humanism and love for the toiling masses.

Stalin remains a huge problem for residents of the left disposed toward the worship of their own virtue manifested in various and sundry rituals dedicated to the execration of fascism and the lamentation of the excesses and evils of capitalism.  How, the problem seems to be, does one, determined to find in the last 100 years or so some plausible evidence of communism’s contributions to human betterment, extricate Stalin, the communist, who in alliance with the western democracies triumphed over Hitler, the eternal face of Fascist evil, from Stalin, Hitler’s partner in the rape of Poland and the Baltic states, slave-state overseer and prolific mass-murderer?

The Stalin-problem is particularly thorny when it comes to the historiography of the Spanish Civil War which the left has for a long time fashioned into a simple inspirational morality play.  The freedom-loving, democratically elected Republicans, supported by Stalin and defended by his international brigades, succumbed to the tides of Spanish fascism under the leadership of General Franco, goose stepping in a junior partnership with Hitler and Mussolini. This is the widely promulgated Manichean version of the Spanish Civil War – the forces of Good, advancing democracy, equality and freedom, confronting Evil in the form of fascism with its instinctive brutality, militarist atavism and racial bigotry. It is wonderfully free of any moral ambiguity – the losers, heroes and martyrs in opposition to tyranny and oppression, abandoned by the Western democracies; the winner, a cretin mediocrity who took his revenge, built his dictatorship and finally drifted into senescence.

Relieved of its romantic For Whom the Bell Tolls mythology, however, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, thanks to the herculean labors of researchers like Burnett Bolloten and Stanley Payne, gives way in large part to the contemplation of communist (Stalinist) duplicity and treachery sufficiently cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy, equality and freedom.  While contributing human and material assets to the Spanish Republicans ostensibly to resist the fascist rebels, Stalin’s NKVD agents were moving through Spain rounding up, torturing and murdering fellow communists, like Andreu Nin, taking control of the Army and insinuating themselves deeply into positions of governmental power.  Stalin’s Trojan horse modus operandi in Spain was a dress rehearsal for how the communists would operate to support the unfolding of “democracy” in devastated counties like Bulgaria, Romania and Poland at the end of World War II, countries that we all know became models of social equality and so bursting with confidence, prosperity and opportunity that no one was allowed to leave.

During the period of the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s assassins were also chasing his former revolutionary colleague, Leon Trotsky, around the globe until the Soviet-trained Spaniard, Ramon Mercader, murdered him in Mexico City in 1940. The Leon Trotsky of Stalin’s invention and dissemination was supposedly in league with the Franco and the fascists. In historical retrospect it is difficult to conceive how such a preposterous fiction could have taken hold with anyone, but Stalin’s dramaturgical skill in service to his jealousy and megalomania was second only to the eager gullibility of his acolytes and fellow travelers.

 

“Fascist” in the Stalin lexicon was his preferred term of abuse for whomever at the moment he saw as a competitor for power, his enemy du jour. Stalinists reserve their resentment for those who compete with them for power. When the Stalinists have power, competition is not allowed: when they are trying to get it they lie about, smear, malign, and, when they can, physically destroy the competition. Inside the Soviet Union during 1936 and 1937 Stalin purged the bulk of the old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and the senior officer corps. These were individuals, most of whom were deeply committed revolutionaries from the early days of the Bolshevik revolution.  But Stalin feared and loathed them because he viewed them as competitors for his own power base within the party. Into Spain with the support of Carrillo and the Spanish communists, he exported his signature calumnies, purges, show trials with the accompanying tortures and executions. He moved his agents against the anarchists (chronicled by George Orwell), the POUM, Francisco Largo Caballero and the socialists, the entire spectrum of the non-Stalinist left in Spain. He did so with a ferocity and ruthlessness that was directed against the forces of Franco in lesser proportions.  All of the non-Stalinist left at one time or another during the civil war linked to or tarnished with the label of fascist.

     

The Social Democrats in the western democracies during the early 1930s were “social fascists” until he needed their support in the Popular Front governments of France and Spain. Hitler, of course, was the epi-center of Nazism-Fascism except for the 1939-1941, Soviet-Third Reich friendship period when Stalin and the Fuhrer joined forces in the depredation of central Europe.

 

With “fascism” being so protean, flexible and reversible in its attachments, it seems absurd to try to render the Spanish Civil war as a battle of democracy against fascism when in many ways it more resembles a conflict of two vicious ideologies, or, if you will, a battle between fascists – brown ones and red ones.

  

Preston’s detailed and elaborate biography of Santiago Carrillo is immensely valuable in its capturing the essence of Stalinism in the life of a single individual, particularly his obsession with power and his unwavering, unprincipled will to destroy those who are obstacles to, or are competitors for, the prize of holding absolute domination over the lives of others.  Like Stalin, Carrillo was a betrayer who left a staggering range of victims – his father, his mentor, his first wife, his colleagues, individuals who interfered with his political ambition deeply steeped in a utopian ideology. He was, as Preston demonstrates, heavily responsible for the arranging and carrying out the Paracuellos massacres of thousands of prisoners in the later months of 1936.

    

It is worth noting the irony at the beginning of Preston’s biography of Carrillo where he notes how much Franco and Carrillo were alike in certain fundamental ways – “[H]e shared with Franco a dedication to the constant rewriting and improving of his own life story … In his anxiety for advancement, he was always ready to betray or denounce comrades. Such ruthlessness was another characteristic that he shared with Franco.” (xii-xiii)  For Preston, however, in Franco there never resided a single redeeming human quality. There is no best or worst that could be said about him.  He is no more than a Spanish Hitler, as he argues in his book, The Spanish Holocaust, a moral monster who like Hitler deserves only execration.

But for Preston, his Spanish Stalinist, as the title of the last chapter suggests (“From Public Enemy No. 1 to National Treasure”), in the end achieves an atonement of sorts. “The best that can be said about him is that he played a key role in the transition to democracy by helping to convince the right of the moderation of the left.” (336)  This “best” is no small achievement: the Spanish people, it now turns out, owe Carrillo a considerable debt. He becomes their benefactor, in effect, “helping” those on the right overcome their unreasonable fear that the left might be less moderate than they want to appear to be.  The left remains pristine and the right grudgingly and belatedly moves toward compromise.  So with this rendering, Carrillo late in his career becomes not the “last Stalinist”, as Preston puts it, but rather a former Stalinist, a good guy, so to speak, a pragmatist with the highest achievable aspirations in mind for a truly democratic Spain, not the lying, treacherous, morally repugnant ideologue he once was who connived, murdered, and betrayed nearly everyone around him in a good long imitation of the General Secretary of the CPSU, the man he so long served and admired.

“The worst that can be said about him,” continues Preston, “is that while the central objective of most of those with whom he worked and sometimes clashed was the struggle against Franco, his main priority was his own eminence. Accordingly, he betrayed his comrades and appropriated their ideas.” (336)  Hardly! A lot worse can be said about him, some of it earlier in the book by Preston himself.  However, with this final rendering, yet one more Stalinist-Carrillo emerges, not the “last” one or the even the “former’ one as noted above, but the only Stalinist. Stalinism in Spain, thus it would seem, was largely confined to the person of Carrillo, a disappointing aberration in a collection of otherwise virtuous individuals, committed to a free and democratic Spain.  Had Carrillo and his people, not Franco prevailed, all no doubt would have been forgiven, and reconciliation and democracy for the Spanish people would have come to fruition forty years earlier.

   

It should finally be noted that Preston mentions in passing Carrillo’s 1977 speaking tour in the United States with stops at Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins University (318).  No mention is to be found anywhere of protests at these universities by virulent anti-communists or anyone perhaps offended by such a gracious welcome extended to a butcher and errand-boy for one of history's most vile dictators.* From The Harvard Crimson, November 22, 1977: “Professors and graduate students from local universities will dine with [Santiago] Carrillo at the Center for European Studies before this evening's speech, Peter M. Lange, Associate Professor of Government said. Carrillo will hold a press conference at the Center at 4 p.m. today, he added.”  So, last or not, unrepentant or not, for those Stalinists who live long enough, there is forgiveness and dinner with the Harvard faculty. 

*Dedicated to my good friend, Tom Moore, who would have been deeply offended.