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Communism's True Believers Won't Give Up

June 27, 2010

Alger Hiss.jpgAlger Hiss, left

(Editor's Note: The author questions the persistence of pro-Communist views on US campuses despite Communism's deplorable record. The real reason Communism's "useful idiots" won't give up  is that they are all funded by the central banking cartel, i.e. The Rockefeller/Rothschilds, who also funded the USSR. The writer of this article avoided this truth because he too is funded indirectly by them. We all are. They create our money as a debt to them. Communism is just the epitome of their power gradually being embodied in the New World Order.)


by Robert Fulford

(The National Post, January 3, 2004)

The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology.

But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria.

His views resemble those of Hiss, and he's not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for Communism remains part of American university life.

DOUBLE BOOKKEEPING

Elements of farce have been threaded through the history of this issue since the 1940s. Half a century ago, the late Leslie Fiedler remarked on the peculiar double bookkeeping of those who defended accused Soviet spies. They somehow found it comfortable to say both "They didn't do it -- it's a frame-up!" and "After all, they had a right; their hearts were pure."

History has played out precisely according to Fiedler's script. American leftists insisted for decades that Hiss was falsely condemned. When a mountain of evidence proved the case against him (and many others), the defenders began suggesting that maybe spying actually didn't matter.

In the pages of The Nation, the innocence of Hiss was proclaimed obsessively for four decades. When that position finally became untenable, Victor Navasky, long-time editor of The Nation and now also a Columbia journalism professor, asked: "Espionage, is it really so wrong?" 

In the 1990s, the American historian Eugene Genovese, having turned against Communism, wrote: "In a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression, we broke all records for mass slaughter ... we have a disquieting number of corpses to account for."

But many historians have worked hard to avoid that moral accounting. Their purposeful evasion of reality is the subject of a persuasive study by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (Encounter Books).

Haynes and Klehr have written books on American Communists as they appeared in the Soviet archives and in the intercepted Venona transcripts from the 1940s.

But despite everything, many other historians persist in showing American Communists as good-hearted, noble citizens who often sacrificed themselves for a great ideal. It's like the romantic myth of the Old South, Haynes and Klehr argue, an attempt to cast a favourable light on a despicable cause by arguing for the nobility of those who pursued it.

Haynes and Klehr also compare these historians to Holocaust deniers who invent fanciful explanations for damning evidence and ignore inconvenient testimony.

Even when these historians accept the newly re-affirmed facts, they may retain their old prejudices. Haynes and Klehr quote Gerda Lerner of the University of Wisconsin, who confessed two years ago that as a Communist she "wanted the Soviet Union to be a successful experiment in socialist democracy and so I checked my critical facilities ... It is easy to see now, in hindsight, that that was a serious mistake, but it was not so easy to see it then." (Actually, it was, for those who were not brain dead; but that's another issue.)

It goes without saying, but Lerner says it anyway, that she continues to despise the United States. The fact that the Communists were wrong about everything doesn't mean that the Americans were right about anything.

MCCARTHY

Long ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy did American Communists the enormous favour of setting himself up as their enemy. He stamped anti-Communism with his personality (which on his very best days was unappetizing) and it has never freed itself from his smarmy embrace.

When a young reader of today encounters an anti-Communist opinion uttered in 1950 or 1960, the word "McCarthy" suddenly appears before the reader's eyes and the opinion is immediately discounted. This emerges at its clearest in the arts.

If a young art critic, working through Clement Greenberg's criticism, discovers that Greenberg turned violently against Stalinism, that seems to prove that Greenberg (rather than being intelligent) was an opportunistic Cold Warrior. Young movie critics receive with their mother's milk the view that those who testified against Communists before congressional committees (even great artists, such as Elia Kazan) were villains, while the mostly mediocre film people persecuted by Congress were heroes and martyrs.

Because of McCarthy, passionate anti-Communism came to be considered proof of embarrassing bad taste. People considered it small-minded, nasty and provincial, like McCarthy himself. This attitude has never really changed.

Today, despite the revelations of its monstrous crimes, Communism still has many hard-working academics on its side, now labouring, without much opposition, to provide the old-time admirers of Moscow with the retroactive moral upgrade they continue to believe they deserve.

http://www.robertfulford.com/Communism.html

 




Scruples - the game of moral dillemas

Comments for "Communism's True Believers Won't Give Up"

Tony Blizzard said (June 28, 2010):

I'm tired, very tired, of McCarthy always getting a bad rap. Those who profess to be on the same side as McCarthy are as bad or worse about it than those who hated him.

McCarthy was NOT any of the things he is constantly accused of. He was the only real American hero in my now fairly long life. He did NOT cause misery of innocents at all. He was not a braggart nor was he overbearing. He had every last one of those commie bums dead to rights. His hearings were close to my first real political interest. They were televised, at least in part. At the time I could not understand why the average American was paying scant attention to the mind-boggling facts he was bringing out every day concerning people in high places in this country. Or why the media seemed luke warm in their reporting of those facts.

McCarthy's revelations were proven true when the soviet imploded and KBG records were opened for a time. Every one of those finks he accused was in those records as an agent of the soviet union but the media did not over report those facts, to be more than generous. Apparently those in academia, the last bastion of communism in the world, never even read them once. Or, more likely of course, they simply ignore this inconvenient truth and continue their slimy tissue of lies in which they have invested their entire careers.

The fact is that it is the media and academia which is lying, it was never McCarthy. If any bunch in this country is "smarmy" it's the media - plus academia, as well as those politicians the media praises as a matter of course. These scum have been demonizing good people and praising real demons, as their religious dogma, for over a century.

But who rightly attacks them as McCarthy is wrongly attacked to this day? Even "patriots" put the onus on McCarthy instead of on the communists. Which is one more reason why I rant more to "patriots" than to the sworn enemies of America. The "patriots" are doing more damage in their gross ignorance of the truth of things political - and economic, as well as religious. They echo fake patriot gurus such as Limbaugh and Beck without a damned clue as to what they are backing. Their ignorance is not bliss, it's a disgrace.


Patrick said (June 27, 2010):

Another case of follow the money to its evil satanic source. Reminds me of a relevant quote from the author Upton Sinclair-" It is difficult to get a man or woman to understand something, when his salary depends upon
his not understanding it."


Henry Makow received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982. He welcomes your comments at