Liberals still refuse to acknowledge their historic complicity with fundamental evil:
At some point it becomes a seriously immoral act to refuse to acknowledge the truth. At some point, you have to ask whether it is morally acceptable to regard those who yet refuse to come to terms with communism other than as people who have chosen to adhere to known evil. And that point has been long passed.
The Truth About Evil
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, January 6, 1999; Page A25
Some months ago, I wrote a column in which I expressed revulsion at an
affectionate feature in the New York Times about a small band of elderly
communists and socialists who do good works among the downtrodden of
Los Angeles and, by the way, still revere Marx and Lenin. For this, Sam
Tanenhaus, author of an estimable and honest biography of Whittaker
Chambers, takes me politely to task in the current New York Review of
Books.
My finger-pointing, says Tanenhaus, is emblematic of a regrettable "revival
of the familiar cold war Manichaeanism, whereby the entire burden of
world communism is laid crushingly upon every [Communist Party]
member or sympathizer."
This is a debate worth having, for it is central to the intellectual and cultural
history of this century. It has been, you have to admit, a pretty Manichaean
sort of century: good and evil in the form of democracy and totalitarianism
duking it out for global domination; concentration camps; gulags; a couple
of hundred million dead -- that sort of thing. The good was not absolute
(we had Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn on our side, alas), but the evil was
pretty close to pure.
American liberalism came to terms with one face of the century's evil --
that of the Nazis and their allies -- immediately, honorably and
unequivocally. The fight to destroy the Nazi version of fascism was waged
in such unabashedly Manichaean terms that we called it The Good War
(we were not being ironic either; only Parisians and a few guys at Oxford
knew about irony back then).
And organized American political liberalism -- that is, the Democratic
Party and the labor movement -- also came to terms soon enough with the
communist version, and firmly rejected it. But the treatment of communist
fascism by liberalism's intellectual and cultural establishments -- as distinct
from its mainstream political bodies -- has been profoundly different.
The intellectual and cultural elites have never come to terms with
communism as an evil on a par with Nazism and, more important, with
their role in supporting, or at least tolerating, that evil. This failure, which is
one of immense moral dimensions as well as rational, persists. (Witness the
24-part CNN television series on the Cold War, a history massively
distorted by the light of moral equivalency that shines in Ted Turner's dim,
dim bulb of a mind.)
The failure persists and adapts because it is too large to come to terms
with. Coming to terms means not merely admitting the fundamental evil of
the communist system and its root philosophy (as opposed to admitting the
evil of one or another communist tyrant) but also admitting our own
sympathetic complicity. It means not merely reassessing the century's
political figures but its intellectual and cultural figures too. It means
reassessing us.
And this is a tremendously painful prospect, because it is a tremendously
personal one. There were never many Nazis or Nazi sympathizers in
America and very few political, cultural and intellectual figures of note
among them. But such is not the case with communism.
Twentieth-century political, cultural and intellectual history is thickly
peopled with respected and even revered figures -- labor leaders,
progressive reformers, novelists, playwrights, artists, luminaries of the news
and entertainment businesses -- who were deeply supportive of a system
and philosophy that we now know beyond doubt was every bit as
monstrous as the Nazi regime, was morally indistinguishable from the Nazi
regime. And on the more intimate level, when we talk about American
communists or communist sympathizers, we are talking about family.
So when we contemplate admitting the full profundity of communism's evil,
we are contemplating a radical reevaluation of everyone who traveled
some distance with that evil. We are talking about reevaluating Upton
Sinclair and John Steinbeck and Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and
Charlie Chaplin. And we are talking also about reevaluating Uncle Harry
and Aunt Edith and Grandpa and maybe even dear old Dad.
What further complicates matters is we know that Uncle Harry and Aunt
Edith are good people. They sided with the communists because they
sincerely believed in the promise of communism to address the wrongs of
our own society -- its gross class inequities, its racial oppression, the rough
cruelties of capitalism.
But the fellow travelers were wrong, and in their wrong, they helped to
perpetuate a system that caused immense human suffering. To say this is
not to gainsay that most Communist Party members and sympathizers were
motivated by the desire to make a better world, nor is it to lay the whole
burden of communism's crimes on their shoulders.
It is simply to say this: At some point it becomes a seriously immoral act to
refuse to acknowledge the truth. At some point, you have to ask whether it
is morally acceptable to regard those who yet refuse to come to terms with
communism other than as people who have chosen to adhere to known
evil. And that point has been long passed.
Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal.
washingtonpost.com
The only difference between a liberal (US) and a communist is that a communist at least knows where he's going. That's why communists always referred to "well-meaning" liberals as "useful idiots".
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