The Trajectory of Resentment

When they went out into the fresh air, the representative of the agricultural department looked at the white huts, at the green orchards, and said: “Once you have removed the corpses, don’t bother to restore all this mess.

     Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing (aftermath of the Ukraine famine)

                                                                                           

Throughout the twentieth century Communists launched revolutions around the globe. They toppled governments, wiped out long standing and established social orders, imprisoned and executed opponents and imposed centrally planned economic systems that were highly touted, greatly admired and enthused over. 

These revolutions inevitably brought widespread impoverishment and ecological catastrophe.  The revolutionaries, having had power and actual records of colossal failure to defend, were then left to defend the indefensible, hence the need for the pervasive and relentless dishonesty.   From its practical beginnings Communism has been lethal for those subjected to it: no Communist governments have been able to put the ideas and ideals that are the foundation of the ideology-based convictions into practice without resorting to massive force, then lying on a regular basis to deny the reality of the coercion and the misery and revulsion of those subjected to it.  Communism when put into practice has always made liars out of its practitioners.

By the late decades of the twentieth century Communist governments had been in power long enough to demonstrate amply their many shortcomings.  The Communist ideology that had dominated political thinking across a large portion of the globe and was hailed by not only by its ruling apparatchiks but by intellectuals and fellow travelers world-wide had failed.  Communism’s original famed theoretician and champion of the laboring class was a German philosopher who never saw the inside of a factory, never did a day of physical labor in his life and lived with his family in squalor in the capital of the most industrialized modern country in the world while he avoided fulltime employment.

The man who created the first real Communist-worker state was by training a lawyer, by vocation a subversive, completely alien to the social class he came from and contemptuous of the social class he championed.  When finally in power his primary instruments of rule were the firing squad and forced requisition of grain which brought mass starvations. Communist leadership was from its inception largely a resentment laden production of disenchanted intellectuals of middle class origins. Resentment coupled with power turned into mass murder.

When their colossal failures pushed their tottering regimes toward collapse, only the intellectuals would still bitterly cling to their Marxist religion with antipathy for those who were not like them. Martin Amis in Koba the Dread refers to the Communist tetrarchy of famine, terror, slavery and failure.  [Martin, Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, New York, 2002, 30]     

This failure was manifest in the unexpected collapse of the Soviet empire and the repudiation of Communist ruled governments in eastern and central Europe.  It had become impossible for the Soviet ruling class to conceal the Soviet Union’s third world status or  to ignore or rationalize the pathetic conditions, the dismal daily existence of it citizens – the long lines and the shoddiness of everything made and consumed in comparison with the western capitalist  societies. “Communism is regime of compression: long lines, constant waiting, a limited number of extremely crowded places, people jammed in an pressed close to each other, everybody constantly at the same place the overwhelming majority, especially the urban dwellers, work for the same employer: the state.” [Istvan Rev, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism, Stanford University Press, 2005, 5] “A regime of compression” – Communism as a social and political system did compress people as much as possible attempting an extinction of individual striving and identity.

  An East-German citizen had to wait for many years to own a plastic, boxy, two cylinder Trabant, East Germany’s state manufactured automobile – available in three colors – that was pathetic beside anything manufactured in Detroit.  “[T]he West and East Asia challenged them [the Soviets] with revolutions in plastics and chemicals, then electronics, then in household durables, and finally in the world of computers—challenges that the Soviets could only incorporate into the Leviathan machinery of the Plan.” [Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, New York, 1994, 365]   Japan’s substantial economic superiority established over the Soviet Union in the 1980s had become obvious and undeniable, and its resurrection from the WWII ruins and devastation as an economic marvel and major capitalist world power made it a glaring source of embarrassment for the Soviets.    

Following the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) needed to catch the winds of self-preservation and was finally forced to reckon with the vast material waste and human wreckage produced by the insane social experiments that were the signature of his long rule.  His successors then began to relax their grip on the centrally planned economy that had ravaged and impoverished the country, though not, and still not even 35 years later, on the party’s monopoly of political power.  Mao’s mindless cult of personality, like that of Stalin’s, had invested him with superhuman wisdom and intelligence – moral, scientific, aesthetic and technical – and his whims, delusions and fantasies, elevated to policy and law, were ruthlessly imposed and enforced no matter what the extent of disaster that inevitably seemed to follow their implementation.  Once he was safely dead and suitably embalmed, even his Communist party successors could no longer afford to practice the wisdom of the Great Oarsman. Keeping the outside world from knowledge of the full extent of Mao’s wreckage wrought upon the Chinese as well as the Chinese people themselves became one of the ongoing and challenging tasks of Mao’s CCP heirs.  

The Insanity of Anti-Communism

HISS.  Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?

CHAMBERS.  Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.

               
(Hearing:  Special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities)

Stalinism has always exhibited an absolutism and dogmatism.  Stalin, Mao, Castro never appeared uncertain about anything. Self-doubt, a sense of fallibility, openness to other points of view—these were not part of the universe they inhabited. Whatever one might say about Stalinists, then and now, never have they been humble.

 Of course, no one but fanatically certain men could apply the kind of massive coercion that they did with its disruptive and lethal consequences to the millions of souls in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Cuba. This kind of collective, ideologically justified misery could only be inflicted by individuals devoted to the mindless celebration of their own genius and moral perfection.

These individuals were consummate communists, men for whom ideological abstractions and utopian fantasies were more real than the actual incalculable suffering and misery of those on whose behalf they took power and ruled over.  With their conviction of intellectual infallibility these egotistical “wrecking balls” would not only pulverize any remotely active opposition, but also pressed down very hard on anyone who seemed at all unenthusiastic about life in the paradise under construction.  For whoever failed to fall in line and cheer … abuse. Those who administered it were wholly justified; those who felt it deserved it.               

A special form of abuse, a medical ad hominem disqualifier for dissidents, was developed by Brezhnev and his gang during their own step down to a softer, gentler Stalinism.  Instead of simply shooting or jailing dissenters, as J.S. and Lavrenti did prior to 1953, after the General Secretary’s passing, the authorities would arrange for State psychiatrists to certify the uncooperative and unenthusiastic as “mentally ill.’  They could then be locked away, drugged and dismissed as “sick.”

This was a move away from the early and primitive days of the “merciless extermination of the opposition-Stalinism” that built and populated the Gulag and staged the Show Trials.  It was a feint toward both the prestige and authority of scientific medicine and procedural legality.  The authorities were simply applying the expertise of modern medicine to deal compassionately with sick people and in accordance with the law to protect them from themselves and others. 

So in the later half period of the Soviet Union, psychiatry came into alignment with the coercive organs of the Soviet state and Soviet citizens who were in any way perceived to be critical of the government found themselves as psychiatric patients incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals.

A person who is certifiably mentally ill or deranged, of course, has no credibility and is subject to the intrusive and coercive measures characteristic of prisons but in many ways worse with fewer limitations on the overseers.  A crazy critic is not a critic at all. A mentally ill person is completely at the mercy of his physician.  But when the physician is owned and operated by the State the “patient” can expect a kind of “treatment” in harmony with the interests and priorities of the ruling class.  

Once the doctor affirms the diagnosis, the patient no longer has an independent voice. No one should or will take what a mentally ill person says seriously other than as a measure of his own pathological severity. A medical label is a particularly potent form of disqualification because it carries the authority of modern medical science. What the patient thinks, says or does is in the exclusive domain of experts.  One does not reason with, refute or polemically engage with the mentally ill.  Except for the doctors who have them in their charge, they are ignored.    

            In the early 1970s two Soviet dissidents, a historian and a biologist, Roy and Zhores Medvedev wrote a book entitled, A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In it the Medvedevs related how the Soviet authorities used psychiatry as a way to punish individuals of whom they simply disapproved. “[P]ersons who aroused the displeasure of the authorities without actually breaking the law could suddenly be made to undergo psychiatric examinations.”

An extraordinarily stunning application of the political-ideological use of psychiatry was attempted in the U.S. during the second trial of Alger Hiss in 1950.  This was not a run-of-the-mill legal proceeding. The Alger Hiss—Whittaker Chambers, mid-century trials were nothing less than a head on collision of world-stage ideological forces.  For decades, the Hiss-Chambers confrontation was a polemical fault line of America’s Left and Right.  

  Hiss’s attorney hired a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Binger, who personally observed Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, during the two trials and subsequently testified as a defense witness in the second one with the aim of discrediting Chamber’s testimony.   Chambers, Dr. Binger claimed, was a mentally unbalanced man. (Dr. Binger on the witness stand:  “I think Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as psychopathic personality, which is a disorder of character, of which the outstanding features are behavior of what we call amoral or asocial and delinquent nature.”)  [Thomas Murphy’s Cross-Examination of Dr. Carl. A. Binger in U.S. vs Alger Hiss (Hiss II, Minnetonka, MN: Professional Education Group, [1987], 45.]  

Hiss’s strategy in this trial early on in the Cold War came to be used frequently by anti-anti-Communists to discredit anti-Communism. Anti-Communism was unmasked by doctors of psychiatry as a mental illness or derangement. The Frankfurt Marxist, Theodor Adorno, at around this time had published a much ballyhooed, now disregarded book, The Authoritarian Personality that rendered as pathologic anyone who might be considered conservatively political. Chambers, as Dr. Binger had hoped to convince the jury, was to be dismissed as a psychopath, a social misfit who was striking out irrationally at a prominent figure in order to get attention and act out his anti-social impulses.

            Thomas Murphy, the government prosecutor, however, routed Dr. Binger under cross-examination.  Binger comes off as a fool. Murphy’s masterful cross-examination remains as a textbook illustration for how to impeach the testimony of an “expert witness.” Still, Binger’s clinically fabricated defamation of Chamber’s character and personality became a model for the Left to use to hammer their critics.  From the “proof” of the pathologies of their personalities flows the automatic nullification of their ideas and their arguments.  Hiss we know now falsely denied his guilt and over the decades persisted to the end with the lies.  The dumpy, frumpy, fat, anti-Communist Chambers, bad teeth and all, was the truth-teller. The urbane, Ivy league, elegant, Hiss, protégé of Felix Frankfurter and liege man for FDR, was the liar, and a traitor.

Throughout those years Hiss’s partisans continued the assault on Chamber’s character and continued to deny the fact of Hiss’s guilt.  The Leftist U.S. journal Nation for forty years insisted on the innocence of Hiss. When finally, Hiss’s guilt was no longer in question, the response was altered to say that it did not really matter. Victor Navasky, the Nation’s editor for many years and professor of journalism at Columbia University, shifted the entire moral proposition that had been in play for decades: “Espionage, is it really so wrong?”

 [Quoted from: Lawrence Helm, “The Alger Hiss Chair at Bard College,”

 www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/12/alger-hiss-chair-at-bard-college.html]  

People….People who Hate People…are?

The catalogue of GWB’s crimes against America and the planet is virtually endless.

     (From, The I Hate George W. Bush Reader, edited by Clint Willis, 2004)

One evening some years ago in those dark days when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were making America into a 21^st-century imitation of the Third Reich, I was in a Barnes & Noble book store slouched in front of the “Politics” section. There I came upon a remarkable publisher series, a collection of I Hate titles. Really. For sale were: The I Hate George W. Bush Reader, The I Hate Republicans Reader, The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice. . . Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal's War on America, and The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Truth about America's Ugliest Conservatives.  No redeeming qualities for the boys and girls on the right – ugly as well as stupid and immoral.  Ann Coulter?  

I was bowled over by the irony.  These “hate” books came from the Left, the same folks in in recent years who have criminalized hate and smeared their opposition as haters.  The Left exudes compassion and toleration, the Right? –  “antipathy for people who are not like them.”

Thus, we are now in the age of the hate smear, a variant of the Fascist-smear invented by the Stalinists in the late 1920s and 1930s.  During the Spanish Civil War, the Left perfected this smear and passed it on to their progeny.  Today those on the Left routinely resort to the F-word or its equivalent to describe those who displease them.

The Fascist-smear tactic of the Stalinist Comintern became the model for today’s hate-smear. It works like this. The accuser attaches to the opponent an opprobrious label (e.g., Fascist, Nazi, or hate monger) while at the same assuming the opposite mantle of virtue.  The attack creates morally and politically dichotomous spaces occupied by the virtuous and the villainous. The morally opprobrious villain then gets turned into a cretin, a criminal, a mental case, and as such can be marginalized and excluded from any conversation or civil exchange. You don’t talk to cretins or criminals. You ignore them or lock them up.

The hate smear is a handy way to soil the opposition for a host of reasons.  First of all, hatred is an ugly, visceral emotion – even physically distorting. It is easily associated with mental derangement and emotional unbalance and thus signals the presence of a personality both irrational and dangerous who is loose and at large. 

Hatred is also closely associated with racial and other forms of bigotry and prejudice. The Nazi imagery with all of its rich hate-drenched propaganda and rituals is a quick and easy link. People who hate people, as the Nazis did, therefore are likely to be bigoted, dangerous, and crazy. What they say and think must not be taken seriously as rational comment or opinion, but very seriously as an indication of clinical aberration or even criminal inclination. Thus, there is no place in the political or social arena for people who hate: if dangerous, they should be sequestered and forcibly separated from “normal” people. If not they should be scorned and ridiculed, then ignored and marginalized.

The hate smear also covertly slides into an insidious “medical” ad hominem attack to use against the opposition.  Haters, it is argued, are mentally ill. Their antics are betrayed by emotions which suggest that they are unstable or possess defective personalities.  The hate smear aims to eliminate opposition and dissent without having to deal with it on a rational, polemical plane.  To the extent that the accusers can make their case and convict their critics of irrational hatred, they are not required to persuade and do not have to articulate and defend their own principles and ideas with arguments and facts. From their own lofty perches of sanity and normality, they condescend to attach the irrational disqualification to their critics and move back to their protected regions of normality and high principle.  

            Second, by tarring the opposition as irrational haters, today’s Leftists artfully counterpoise themselves as the morally immaculate, the party of compassion, people of tolerance, moderation and reason.  This is consistent with the self-presentation of the Stalinoid Left from their beginnings as they have always claimed to be a historically destined vanguard, leading the march of humanity into the new and morally immaculate world they want to create.  The critics in marked contrast are deeply flawed -- irremediably so. Their thinking, perceptions, and judgment cannot be other than distorted by the untoward emotions of hatred and fear.  When in power, as we have seen with GWB, unlimited crime, the planet groans.  

Stalinism & Anti-Fascism

The Government of the German Reich and The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R., and proceeding from the fundamental provisions of the Neutrality Agreement concluded in April, 1926 between Germany and the U.S.S.R., have reached the following Agreement:..
                      Text of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939

To grasp the amplitude of Communist dishonesty both past and present one must consider the complex relationship of Communism to Fascism.    One early and enduring aspect of Communist self-promotion was its draping itself with the mantle of anti-Fascism.  Since the late 1920s the Communists have strutted about the world as the ultimate anti-Fascists, and thus the Vanguard of the Morally Superior.  “Fascism” in this scenario represented everything that was wrong in the contemporary world, and Communists were, of course, “anti-Fascist.”

            The logic of Communism as anti-Fascism is very simple, but its application, because of the infinite elasticity of the premises, makes it highly flexible and able to lead to whatever conclusions are requisite in order to justify any change in principle, policy, or goal. The most elemental syllogism is the following: Fascism is evil; Communism is opposed to Fascism; therefore, Communism is good. An “anti-Fascist” is simply another term for a virtuous person, and the syllogism is scarcely less than tautological. The logic belies the reality of what always has been the crude tribal psychology of Communism, an antagonistic world neatly divided into legions of the very Good struggling against the very Evil. “Fascism,” however, for J.S. Stalin, Mr. anti-Fascist, was always a moving target, a label of excommunication for whoever happened to be in the way of current Soviet objectives.   

In the years between 1928 and 1935, the Soviets were anticipating the world-wide collapse of capitalism. Their most successful and serious ideological rivals at that time were the non-Communist Left, especially the reform-oriented Social Democrats, who had become a power and legitimate political force in Germany.  Stalin promptly expanded the category of “Fascist” so as to make the Social Democrats appropriate objects of execration and abuse. They were now identified, “unmasked” as it were, as “Social Fascists.”  How could this be? They were Socialists, good Marxist-Leftists of sorts who like their Communist brethren scorned the pursuit of profit and thoroughly loathed the capitalists. Nevertheless they had fallen in with the Fascists, that is, the capitalists, simply by participating with them in bourgeois politics.  They competed in elections, played by parliamentary rules and eschewed violent revolution. Lenin had especially despised them for this.  His preference and practice was to kill the opposition rather than have to compete with them for voter approval.  Worst of all for Stalin, they had been politically successful in Germany, and at that time he perceived them to be his most serious competition for power and thus their assigned membership in the class of evil. 

            Stalin’s “Social Fascist” demonization of the Social Democrat Marxists in Germany turned into the perfect gift for Hitler. It fractured his major opposition on the Left and greatly assisted his consolidation of power.  But once Hitler finished the strangling of the Weimar Republic and quickly turned his Third Reich into the most menacing and formidable military force in the world, Stalin suddenly realized that he now actually needed those Fascist German Social Democrats as allies on the Left. So, in 1935, “Social Fascism” fell out of the Stalinist lexicon and the Comintern made one of its most notorious about-faces and embraced the former “Social Fascists” in an anti-Fascist alliance that became known as the “Popular Front.”  And so the Social Democrats went from being Fascist to Anti-Fascist after a few chin-strokes by the General Secretary and a consultation with his retinue of yes-men, the Politburo – Stalin was nothing if not flexible.  The former collaborators with, and enablers of, capitalism – itself a fascist enterprise – were now embraced in the Party of the Good.

            Thus, Stalin’s most successful and enduring contribution to the ideology that ruled such a large part of the globe was make it the moral counterpoise to Fascism.   The Soviet Union proudly presented itself to the world as the bulwark of anti-Fascism.  Fascism was a rapacious, anti-egalitarian, political force driven by crude theories of national and racial superiority, put into practice by moral cretins. Whereas Fascists were inherently chauvinistic, imperialistic, and aligned to a narrow self-interest of class or race, Stalinism presented itself as a modern, progressive force that promised emancipation from all the traditional bondages and relationships of inequality.  Its goodness was comprehensive and ever expansive.  Women would be equal to men.  Racial bigotry and discrimination would fall away.  Social and economic and cultural differences that set people apart and put them in opposition would finally and irrevocably disappear.

Soviet Communism projected itself to the entire world as the showcase of modern humanism, a wave that pushed reluctant people everywhere toward universal equality and progress which of course was the basis of its broad appeal. Stalin discovered that the mantle of anti-Fascism was an ideal strategy that could be continuously used to associate Bolshevism with these aspirational qualities and endow the Soviet Union with a broad and sweeping moral superiority such that to be opposed to them was to align oneself with the brutal forces of reaction. To be an anti-Communist was to be a Fascist.  Though this moral dichotomy presented by Stalin and his successors had no place in reality, it was highly successful as propaganda. The anti-Communist as Fascist became a rote canard firmly and permanently embedded in the daily discourse of the Left where it continues to this day. This false imagery was certainly not impaired by the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals where the Soviets, the newly victorious anti-Fascists, sat in judgment over the vanquished, genocidal Nazis.

The Left still cannot resist the Fascist smear.  George W. Bush throughout his eight years as President was routinely denounced as a Fascist, Hitler Redux, etc. The term, “Fascist,” however now seems used less as an insult (what does it really mean, anyway?) but more as a part of a self-referential ritual of moral affirmation. Calling someone a “Fascist” announces and affirms to the world the speaker’s moral and intellectual superiority, compassion and identification with the highest aspirations of humanity. Its use further assures that others know that he is no member of the knuckle dragging lumpenproletariat.

Collusion, Corruption, Coercion

From their earliest days of manning the barricades, up to the present, filling academic chairs at universities, Marxists, representing the poor and oppressed, have relentlessly savaged bourgeois values and the capitalist system they despise.  They compose a cognitive elite, a special set of knowers who engage in a special kind of theorizing that unmasks something that is deliberately, artfully concealed, namely the exploitation of groups of people.  Action follows theory. The exploited are called by the theorists to revolution.  Marxists are activists as well as theorists.

The hard, rock-bottom premise of Marxist theorizing is that domination and exploitation underlie all of human relationships. Tension, conflict and struggle are always underneath, below the surfaces, covered up by some who benefit from the subjugation of others – collusion, corruption, coercion.  The exploited and dominated ones do not know the true nature of their exploitation which, of course, is the most insidious part of the whole business.  The game is rigged. The losers are unaware of the built in unfairness which they have been led to believe is just a part of the natural order. Their unawareness is a deliberately manufactured sphere of “false consciousness” composed of their deluded belief systems. 

But the game can only stay rigged so long as the losers remain oblivious to the reality of the “fix” and the inherent culpability of the fixers.  Once they know of their exploitation and, more importantly, who profits from it, then they can act to fix it.

Ending exploitation begins first with the task of knowing it (the collusion and corruption, are hidden from view) – the consciousness of the exploited group must be “raised” by professionals who have come to know what the rest have failed to grasp.  With the raising of consciousness comes the exposure of the true character of the dominators and exploiters. Revolution follows. The exploiters are removed from power.

“Theory” is what distinguishes Stalinism (applied Marxism) from pure gangsterism, which it very much resembles in its methods, style, and morals, and from Nazism which also brooked no opposition but did not possess a theoretical apparatus sufficiently ponderous or sophisticated as to make it widely appealing or exportable.  Theory is what enables the Stalinists to rationalize the abuse they inevitably exercise against the opposition, those they have identified as the exploiters and dominators.   The abuse ranges widely in severity. Where the Stalinists are completely in charge, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s Peoples Republic of China, the opposition faces extermination. Where they have to compete with others for power abuse comes in the form of slander, character assassination and ridicule.

Theory as the Stalinists practice it turns average, normal people into “enemies of the people,” “counterrevolutionary scum,” “right deviationists,” and so forth. The Kulaks in post-revolutionary Russia were marginally better off peasants a fact which the Chief Theorist in the Kremlin concluded made them exploiters and reactionaries, thus deserving of very harsh treatment as counterrevolutionaries.  Their fate was collective starvation and deportation. They were “blood-suckers,” to use Stalin’s scientific, theoretical term. Mao ordered the elimination of his opposition within the party because they were shown to be “right deviationists.”

Stalinist theory has always been highly mobile and scalable.  It has been used to clean out the bourgeois riff-raff in countries large and small, from Enver Hoxha’s tiny Albania to Castro’s Cuba to Mao’s China. “Bolshevism,” writes Martin Amis, “was exportable, and produced near-identical results elsewhere. Nazism could not be duplicated. Compared to it, the other fascist states were simply amateurish.” [Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, New York, 2003, 91]

 Stalinist theory begins with a story that explains why the world contains so much human suffering.  The story typically details the origin and constitution of two classes or groups of people – those whose suffer and those who inflict the suffering and materially benefit from it, a relationship, always, of exploitation and domination.  Also, the theory provides the story teller with great flexibility in constituting the two groups – proletariat—capitalists, peasants—landlords, indigenous people—colonialists, men—women, white people—people of color. Most importantly, the story always moves toward an uplifting, inspiring ending, one of transcendence. In the script the sufferers are destined to overcome – dramatically and heroically. They prevail and overthrow the inflictors and oppressors because they represent the morally and socially progressive forces of a historically determined outcome.  Their struggle is vindicated by the suffering they have endured. They prevail because of their moral superiority, the cause they struggle for, and the better world they promise.  

The story also is easily tailored to match the sophistication of its audience.  Zbigniew Brezezinski writes, “Communism thus appealed to the simpletons and the sophisticates alike…” {Zbigniew Brezezinski,  The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century, New York, 1989, 2] For the unlettered and unwashed it remains a simple story that identifies their oppressors and then excoriates them for the specific harms they inflict.  For the sophisticates there is for their contemplation and illumination an elaborate and challenging sociological and economic underpinning that reveals the structures and forces of oppression in play, but more importantly explains how these structures have been hidden from the oppressed so as to perpetuate the servitude and disguise the causes.   The story thus is both explanation and  revelation, “unmasking”, as the Stalinists like to put it, the oppressor, identifying him as the enemy and marking him for castigation then removal – physically in the earlier days, politically and professionally now.

The foundational moralizing narrative in contemporary Stalinism still uses a template brilliantly crafted by Karl Marx, one that weaves into its “theory” both sociological explanation and moral outrage and applies it to virtually all significant forms of human relationships.  The story becomes a manual for moral transformation.  From the beginning the story provides moral sanctification for the theorizers, built to justify whatever action is deemed necessary for advancement.  As well it is theoretically invincible, that is true as an ultimate, metaphysical, characterization of reality. Nothing empirical can ever be shown to falsify it.  Theory and practice are mutually enhancing features of an all-encompassing narrative that reaches out and folds all external criticism of the theory into support for it.   In questioning the theory and resisting the direction of the narrative, one is merely playing out the theoretically assigned role of a member or tool of the oppressor class, reacting against the progressive advance of history.  Only two classes of actors can exist in this moralizing narrative, the revolutionary (progressive) morally entitled theorists who advance the cause and wellbeing of the oppressed, and in direct opposition to them, the self-interested forces of reaction committed to the unjust status quo.

The theorists “discover” and “out” the oppressor class, expose their phony rationalizations of power and privilege, enumerate their offenses and set them for confrontation. The practitioners isolate them and then eliminate them as competitors.

The Cold War -- We Lost It

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.

Benjamin Spock, 1988

 

The 1960s stands out as a decisive period of unprecedented cultural conflict in the West and specifically in the United States.  This Kulturkampf was shaped by several major events – the Cold war, the Vietnam conflict, and the tortured history and civil rights struggle of Black America – all of which enabled the Left to craft a narrative that redefined American institutions and American cultural practices as instruments of domination and oppression and American history as a severe indictment of the society itself. Collective guilt was turned into a powerful political “weapon of the disadvantaged."

            The Cold War, which dominated this conflict, produced two distinct and radically different outcomes.  As the two major combatants moved toward the end of the 20^th century, the U.S. had extended significantly its military and technological superiority over the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy its stagnation and pervasive corruption had rendered it increasingly inefficient and uncompetitive in relation to the West. The aging Bolsheviks leaders could not reform their system without giving it up completely. They were bogged down in a feckless war in Afghanistan and pushed to edge by President Reagan with SDI. The USSR could not both continue its decades-long manic pace of armament building and its high investment with modern weaponry and provide its citizens with a standard of living that did not resemble a hard-scrabble, third world grind that would completely demoralize and alienate its workers.  In its capacity as a military colossus, a modern economic engine with a productive citizenry, and a world power, one might say, the Soviet Union had abysmally failed. The Soviets were the clear losers of the Cold war. They knew it.    

            However, viewed as a cultural battle, a struggle of ideas, aspirations and visions, the U.S. lost the Cold war.  Culture trumped economics and arms.  The irony could not be more acute and for some, more bitter. In Communist countries no one any longer took Communism seriously. Why should they have? How could they have?  In the West Marx came alive.  Virtually all of the West’s institutions over the last fifty years have marched dramatically leftward. The two bedrock bourgeois institutions of marriage and religion (the “opiate of the masses”), both despised by Marx as cornerstone elements of bourgeois fraud, have gone into a major decline since mid-century. The latter is now openly scorned and ridiculed by the secularist elites who dominate the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry, the former virtually abandoned by the lower middle-classes who benefit most from its stabilizing, normalizing effects.  Engels’s comment on marriage over a century ago captures the cynicism and disdain of Communism for the institution and sounds very much like the commentary of Western feminism a century later. “Matrimony differs from prostitution in that the first is transacted through purchase, the latter through rent.” [Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Pasionaria y los Siete Enanitos, Barcelona, 2005, 45]  Hollywood, which mid-twentieth century was socially and politically conservative, moved to the far regions of the Left. Its actors and directors dutifully trooped off to Cuba and other third world Marxist slums for Potemkin excursions, bouts of genuflection and invidious comparison with their evil capitalist home towns.  

The Vietnam War was the central causal force in this profound ideological mass migration. At its inception the military incursion into Vietnam was articulated to the American people by President Kennedy as an anti-Communist enterprise, justified as an attempt to prevent Communist insurgencies from taking control of the entirety of South East Asia.  Very quickly the picture of the war, including the attributes of the major players, was turned completely upside down by America’s own internal critics as well as those abroad in the lands of its supposed allies. The malefactors in this altered script became the Americans, who were launching a war of imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from its underclass – poor and minorities, pitted against an exploited third world people.

The veil of anti-Communism was at last torn away. American action was unmasked, in essence an expression of imperialism and racism: the white imperialists were conscripting their own oppressed black young Americans to carry out their intention to plunder and colonize Asian people whom they viewed as racially inferior, culturally insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly in its Vietnam manifestation became an external (international) reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its chauvinist history.

The copious dishonesty and arrogance of the leadership – President Johnson’s manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin events and Robert McNamara’s hubristic overreach –  also served eventually to discredit the effort.  The rapidly diminishing credibility of the Government’s case for American involvement in Southeast Asia and the first television-covered war where Americans could sit in their homes and watch their sons, brothers and husbands killing and being killed not only provoked widespread revulsion with it and its leadership but created a deep and permanent erosion of confidence in American institutions and a withering cynicism attached to its traditional ideals.  Americans then finally grimly watched the forced and desperate evacuation of their troops on television after Congress voted to stop the funding and let the country that Americans had fought and bled for over a decade to save fall to the Reds. 

Also abandoned by the Americans at the same time were the people of Cambodia who to their lasting sorrow fell under the care and supervision of Brother Number One, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  In just four years Pol Pot and his followers managed to kill twenty percent of their fellow Cambodians, targeting and butchering in particular people with education, property and skills.  Cambodia’s beautiful Buddhist temples were destroyed, and, of course, the priests.  Demographically, it was the most brutal of the twentieth century Communist revolutions, which considering what Mao and Stalin did, is saying a lot. [Robert Service, Camaradas; Breve Historia del Comunismo, 566]  Pol Pot’s vision of Communist utopia for Cambodia was as a primitive, city-less agrarian commune.  As Robert Service notes: “Not even Mao eliminated his city dwellers.  Pol Pot was unique in the Marxist tradition of treating the urban life not as a requisite for Communist progress, but as an iniquity that had to be eliminated.” [Service, Camaradas, 564.]   

The Communists had prevailed in Southeast Asia, not because of their military superiority but because they mastered the message and because the West was choking on its “imperialist” guilt. 

The Americans like the French before them departed in sorrow and frustration with a sense of shame and defeat.  Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers had perished on Asian soil; and for what?  Veterans returning from Vietnam were accosted and spit on by protestors from America’s elite universities.  “Fascist,” “Nazi,” “Perpetrator of Genocide,” “Baby Killer” were labels some Americans attached to the other Americans.  President Nixon had earlier invoked the final and most cynical of Vietnam era euphemisms – “Peace with honor.”  Riots in the major U.S cities, widespread demonstrations on university campuses, political assassinations, Watergate and the culminating humiliating military retreat from Vietnam helped made U.S. institutions particularly vulnerable to a Marxist interpretation of reality in which domination and exploitation is the core reality.  Marxism has run deeply and widely in 21^st-century America. No one should think otherwise.

Toleration, Attitude or Latitude?

That the corruption of the best things produces the worst….

                                                                                     David Hume

Banish the word “Intolerance.”   It is crudely and stupidly used. Those so fond of throwing it around are the worst offenders. What exactly is it that makes a person intolerant and, whatever it is, should we tolerate it or him?

Everyone is intolerant.   No one tolerates everyone or everything, nor should they.  Even Unitarians who pride themselves on their tolerant, open mindedness would not likely tolerate wife beaters, Hummer owners or members of the Mara Salvatrucha in their midst.   Consider, as suggested above, the paradox arising from:  “I will not tolerate intolerance.”   Tolerance by itself doesn’t go far.  Tolerance is less about attitude than latitude, that is, giving space to someone who advocates something you do not like or has beliefs that you disapprove of.  Being tolerant doesn’t mean that you cannot strongly disapprove of someone else’s politics, religion or moral views or that you cannot say that you disapprove.  It means that you must observe certain limits when you engage someone with opposing views or perspectives.   You attempt to separate your opponent as a person from his views.  You doubt his ideas, not his character.  You question his logic, not his reputation.   Ad hominem attacks and character assassination attempt to cut that “space” of toleration away.  They disqualify the critic as a person so that he or she cannot be taken seriously.   

The practice of toleration arose in the West as a way for individuals in competing and antithetical religious sects and denominations to live in proximity without violent conflict or attempts at subjugation.  It was understood that the competing sectarians disapproved of the religious ideas of each other but agreed not to attempt to infer with their mutual practice.   This initial sectarian “cease fire” over time evolved into an elaborate set of norms gathered under the umbrella of a “practice of toleration” that provided social space and compatibility for individuals with irreconcilable religious and philosophical views of reality. So, while rival sectarians might disapprove, strongly even, of each others ideas and views, they could still do business with each other and agree to rules of governance and order, including rules that governed dispute.

Over time two things emerged that shaped this practice of toleration.  First was a sense of intellectual fallibility – a realization that one’s ideas and interpretations might be flawed.  Second was the necessity to accord an appropriate level of respect to those with whom one disagreed.  Intellectual humility and a willingness to accord respect are closely linked.

Unfortunately, “being intolerant” is now widely confused with “disapproving” of someone, which is perverse.  You only tolerate what you disapprove of.   If you approve, toleration does not even come into play.   One of the greatest achievements of American political culture is that is that has made room for individuals from enormously diverse religious, ideological, political and social worlds to operate and compete in relative peace. Competing for influence and a voice are fundamentalist Christians, secular, humanistic atheists, Communists, free-market libertarians, survivalists, and so on across the entire social-political spectrum.  No one should be naive enough to think that individuals from such diverse and sometimes antithetical perspectives will be rhetorically gentle with each other.  

The Left, however, has come to embrace the equation of “disapproval equals intolerance” which they apply selectively, that is, to their critics, not to themselves.  For themselves they require admiration; for their opposition, contempt.  A few short years ago when they routinely called George W. Bush “stupid,” “a war criminal,” and a “Fascist,” they were simply stating facts and exercising their right to dissent.  After they won, the bar was suddenly lifted very high for the opposition: respect, civility, loyal opposition.  

How did this happen?  Long ago the Left lost any sense of fallibility and with it any tolerance for criticism.  For them, criticism equals intolerance and bigotry. Because they are infallible, their ideas cannot possibly be wrong or flawed. Anyone who disagrees must be defective, either intellectually or morally.