The Persistence of the Communist World View
June 19, 2001
by Ronald Radosh
ON MY BOOK tour for Commies, which I am currently in the midst of, one question keeps coming up. I am asked it in both public appearances and radio and television talk shows. It is a rhetorical question, meant to imply that obviously the answer should be in the negative. It usually goes something like this: “The Cold War was in the past, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, isn’t it true that one finds very few people anymore believing in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, or any of its various remnants?” Of course, those asking it are often well meaning, and knowing themselves that one would really have to be a fool to keep on believing in so obviously a failed and flawed ideology, xpect me to answer that “yes, this is just a record of the foolishness of so many in days now thankfully gone by.”
I would really like to give that answer, but it is not the one I give. Unfortunately, the collapse of “really existing socialism,” as the Left called the Soviet Union and its offspring states, has not ended the reign of the true believers. A 1998 issue of the left-wing Utne Reader, for example, gives us an article appropriately titled “Young, Gifted and Red,” by Leora Broydo. She asks, “Where have all the commies gone?” taking the refrain from Pete Seeger’s old anti-war song. Noting that after the fall, “trying to attract young people to the party was about as easy as selling Yanni CDs at a Snoop Doggy Dog concert.” Ms. Broydo adds that “now Communism appears to be on the rebound, at least in the United States.” Ms. Broydo accepts the CPUSA’s probably inflated claim that they are now growing by 150 members a week, with 4,000 new members signing up in the first four months of 1998 alone. She wisely asks: “Why would a young American want to wave the red flag that so many equate with tyranny?” Her answer is that some always will be attracted to lost causes, and others pine for the egalitarian dream of a new order called socialism, which they find to be highly romantic. Then there are some who are purely contrarian, and nothing is more so than showing solidarity with a dead and discredited ideal, and with the old Soviet Union. As for the dark record of Communism , she notes that the YCL’s website asks: “Did Stalin kill millions?” Its answer: “Maybe. We have only been told what the capitalist class wants us to believe.” If this answer is sufficient to doubting members, they deserve a lifetime in the Communist movement.
Of course, what really draws new activists to the CP and its youth affiliate, the Young Communist League, is that the Party takes part in all the au courant issues of the day: anti-sweatshop, anti-globalization, environmental activism, anti-racism, enforcing of political correctness of the campus, etc. Seeing their members as the most active and the most committed, some naïve do-gooders can’t help but drift in their direction.
There is, however, a deeper answer. And that has to lie in the continuing mis-education coming from their elders, both in and out of the university community. Let us take one example first. It comes from none other than Mary Frances Berry, the African-American historian who is chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as readers of this page know all too well, is the main force behind the disgraceful draft report on the so-called racism displayed in the recent Florida election. Dr. Berry has been rightfully hit by all kind of writers for penning this blatant, deeply political and phony document attempting to prove that there was rampant discrimination against black Americans, and had it not occurred, Al Gore would have won Florida and the presidency.
We should, however, not be surprised at Berry’s analysis. After all, she is the same Mary Frances Berry who wrote, with the late African-American historian John Blassingame, a book titled Lost Memory in 1982, which was published in a new paperback edition in 1986. Here is what the esteemed Berry wrote in these pages:
“Blacks shared so many of the economic goals of the Communists that many of them might be described as fellow travelers.” Yet, the authors disparaged, “blacks remained cool to the Communists.” Why, do you wonder? Their answer: “Subjected to a massive barrage of propaganda from the American news media, few of them knew about Russia’s [i.e; they mean the old Soviet Union] constitutional safeguards for minorities, the extent of the equality of opportunity, or the equal provision of social services to its citizens.” Yes, even back in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was on the road to collapse, Berry and her co-author cited the old Stalin Constitution of 1936 as proof of the system’s constitutionality, and attributed the obvious hardships of life in Soviet Russia as due to the old “capitalist propaganda.” Sounds like Berry is a good candidate for membership in the CPUSA. They should send her their web page. And as for the situation of black Americans living in the last years of the 20th Century, Berry and Blassingame wrote: “The threat of genocide was real. It was roughly comparable to the threat faced by Jews in the 1930s.” So Berry believes: the Soviet Union was good for blacks; USA was practicing genocide against them. Do you really wonder whether anyone who believes such nonsense can draft a serious report about racism in the U.S. today?
Take the preposterous nature of that sentence and you cannot be surprised at Berry’s new report, which she probably drafted before the voting took place. But that charge of “genocide” against black Americans by the U.S. government is itself part of the arsenal of old 1940s Communist propaganda. Back then, the Communist leader William L. Patterson, head of the front group called The Civil Rights Congress, penned a tome he called We Charge Genocide!, which was meant to be used as evidence for the demand that the United Nations bring up the USA on charges of “genocide” before the General Assembly, where the various Communist nations and their Third World allies would embarrass the United States by strong condemnation. And of course, that campaign was picked up before his assassination by Malcolm X, who, then close to the American Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers Party, was planning a similar effort to bring the U.S. before the U.N. for new condemnation for genocide.
We possibly can forgive Berry. She is a professional agitator and obviously not too smart. But such is not the case with the highly esteemed British historian, Eric Hobsbawm. And that is why I recommend that all readers purchase the new Summer 2001 issue of The National Interest, and read the essential article by Neil McInnes, “The Long Goodbye-and Eric’s Consoling Lies.” As McInnes put it so well, “in the United States the revisionist mourning party would prolong the funeral [of Communism ] indecently, laboring as diligently as the Holocaust deniers but ever so much more respectably.”
In the forefront of this effort is Hobsbawm, with Eric Foner and David Montgomery close behind him. Citing the French commentator Jean-Francois Revel, McInnes writes that by the year 2000, “we were confronted with a resurgence of excuses, attenuations, forgetfulness and plain misrepresentation, all in favor of a renewed belief in socialism.” It only took ten short years for those who remained relatively quiet after they received the shock of their lives to reassert their old belief system. Thus, it is no surprise that one finds Hobsbawm continually turning out a new book which McInnes dubs an “up-to-the minute exercise in apologetics.” Indeed, he goes on to show and to “pinpoint the numerous little falsehoods, half-truths and willful oversights to which a Communist apologist must resort if he is to weave a single fabric.”
For those who do not have the stomach to read Hobsbawm themselves, McInnes gives us the various gems – the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after the end of World War II is described as “the second great wave of global revolution;” Stalin’s postwar intentions, of course, were “not aggressive but defensive;” the U.S. was, during the 1950s, in the grip of “public hysteria,” and some politicians were “clinically mad.” (By deduction, Stalin, of course, was sane.) His book, McInnes writes, is simply a “farrago of lies and evasions,” made up principally of what he calls the eight major lies about Communism repeated by all its posthumous defenders.
These lies include old bromides such as the claim that Communism was not totalitarian; it was a project of the Enlightenment; true socialism was never tried – their version was a historically caused distortion, a result of the West’s opposition to socialism. In other words, the experience of the existing socialist societies – be it the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and even North Korea – cannot reflect on the purity and worthiness of the socialist idea itself. McInnes quotes Hobsbawm explaining that Communism was a “global cause,” and “history is not reason enough to abandon the chosen cause.” In other words: socialism is dead; but long live socialism! It was the Russian people who let the cause down; not socialism that gave them the raw deal from 1917 to 1989. Praise not its victims, but its perpetrators, who history “so cruelly disappointed.” What does this mean? We can weep tears for Gorbachev, but make it up by standing firmly behind Fidel Castro. As for those who lied about things like the crushing of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, or the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, condemning them as CIA and fascist coup attempts that had to be protected by Soviet troops, one must forgive the apologists. After all, they were “inspired by noble ideals.”
Then there is the myth of anti-fascism. While others practiced appeasement, Stalin and the Communists led the only true resistance. As I and my co-author Mary Habeck will show in our soon-to-be-published book Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (Yale University Press), this did not hold true even for the Spanish Civil War, the main event that helped spread the myth of Soviet “anti-fascism.” What assuming the mantle of the sainted crusade did was enable Stalin to carry out and cover up the actual practice of totalitarianism, including purges and murders, within his own country. In Spain, the fight against Franco and his generals allowed Stalin to make his moves to transform Spain into a Soviet colony, while acting through the NKVD and GRU agents on the field to purge the militants of the independent Spanish left.
And of course, to claim the mantle of anti-fascism for Stalin is to ignore the collaboration between Moscow and Berlin, the campaign against the “social-fascists;” i.e., the Social-Democrats, as well as the branding of all opponents – be they liberal, conservative or centrist – as fascist. This tactic, of course, is continued to our very day by various elements on today’s ever-present left-wing.
Finally, McInnes raises two other points used by Hobsbawm and the other apologists. The first is that of the otherwise never used invoking of pragmatism. Stalin may have been brutal, but what he did worked. As the old apologist Isaac Deutscher used to argue, Stalin raised backwards Russia from the wooden plow to the atomic pile. To make that case now, however, when the collapse of the Soviet economy has been laid bare and the nature of the state of Soviet industry has been shown to be in a form of complete collapse, however, only shows the poverty of the continuing rationales. Thus Hobsbawm says Stalin’s terror was “rationally instrumental;” in other words, it worked to achieve industrialization. And finally, there is the last point that, if Communism has failed, so has capitalism. Of course, the problem is that it hasn’t – but Hobsbawm and others will continue to focus on our system’s weaknesses and limitations to urge that socialism be developed in its place. True, we have a welfare state, and sophisticated men of industry fully realize that any just economic system must provide the means for those on the short end of the stick to survive and have the opportunity to advance. But the welfare state and social and economic reform, as distinct from revolution, goes all the way back in our country to the figures of the Progressive era, men like Theodore Roosevelt, who admonished that a progressive is a “conservative who sets his face towards the future,” and who understood that the modern economic and social system based on private ownership could not simply reward its own benefactors.
Some observers of the Communist tragedy will acknowledge its defects and horrors, but they have the ultimate excuse: whatever horrors took place, it was the fault of the United States in particular, and Western imperialism in general. Had the West not opposed, but welcomed, the forces of social revolution, none of the repressive and terrible features of the socialism that really existed would have taken place. Nothing one points to that exposes the fallacy of this argument will do any good; they will always cite one or another action of a Western power that they can claim was responsible for the resulting evil. In the long run, it does no good to even argue with such people. It is only worthwhile in order to expose their logic to prevent others from being influenced that might take them seriously if no one bothers to present effective answers. Neil McInnes has done just that, and he deserves our heartfelt thanks.
Ronald Radosh is a regular columnist and book reviewer for FrontPageMagazine.com. A former leftist and currently Professor Emeritus of History at City University of New York, Radosh has written many books, including The Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton) and, most recently, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.
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