Hate Mail: The Habit Of Jr. High Thinking Dupes Us Into A Dead End Of False Alternatives

The response to my criticism of the detour that the various Marxists, anarchists, etc. took the American left on for much of the past century has been a reminder of how much of that was based on a ruse, itself based in some rather juvenile and obviously false modes of thinking.   The most obvious of those is an inability to analyze and see past various artificially constructed false alternatives.   The simple and liberating fact is you can reject them both for the alternative that is already present in the aspirations of egalitarian democracy.

The assertion that either you have to support communists or you have to support the American right is as absurd as the idea that you either support the Yankees or the Red Sox.  You don't have to support either of them or be sucked into their rivalry, you can oppose both of them with equal vehemence and, in the political choice, with some actual substance to your opposition other than mere local chauvinism.   And with the choice between the crypto-fascism of the American right and the red-fascism of the communists, the articulation of that opposition is far more lucid.   They both are total disasters for human rights, human life, and the foundations of democracy and a decent, peaceful life.

Yet one of the ways in which the Marxists suckered the left was by holding up that choice, "which side are you on" based on the spectacles and show trials and rituals of degradation and unjust prosecutions of the red-scare.   Those were, of course, wrong.   However,  they were a mere shadow of those which happened as a matter of course in the Soviet Union, the occupied countries in Eastern Europe and everywhere else presented as being on the right road by the very same people.   That the communists' heroes were even worse than the vulgar anti-communists who went over the line in the United States by an enormous factor is certainly true.  If the Hollywood Ten had been the Leningrad Ten and they had gone up against Stalin instead of HUAC, they'd have almost certainly been shot, likely without trial, certainly without a fair trial or due process.   The number of artists and writers who were killed by Stalin is far, far  higher than those of his supporters in the United States who were jailed or even found it hard to get work under their own name.   The violations of constitutional rights here, under the despised bourgeois political system (which, by the way, you don't have to champion as it is, either) were insignificant as compared to those in the system championed by the American communists whose rights were violated.

Of course, those victims of the red-scare who had never supported Stalin or Lenin or Mao or even Marxism, are entirely sympathetic victims of the excesses of HUAC, etc.  They were not guilty of the massive hypocrisy that the Stalinists were for the period when his crimes were already known in the West.  The report on the Moscow show trials of the group under John Dewey* wasn't anything like the first credible report of the mass murders, those reports had been coming in from credible sources within months of the Revolution.

But the vulgar, distasteful excesses of the anti-communists here, the political use that Republicans, segregationists and others on the right made of anti-communism to attack people and ideas that had nothing in common with communism, their alliance with racists, segregationists, fascists and fans of Hitler were quite useful to the communists in getting them the one thing they ever got, the unearned and unwise sympathy of many on the left.   Their use of the antics of the anti-communists was similar to that of communism by the Republicans. The Republicans used communism and the fact that the communists here supported dictators as bloody, ruthless and horrible as any to scare voters into supporting them, the communists success was far more modest, they only duped an effective part of the real left into being their stooges, damaging the left as well.   Many of the most unwise choices of those on the left were forced by that dirty dance between the Republicans and the communists and when presented with the choices they had,  Americans knew they didn't want communism, even as they did want health care and a full range of other good things that the Republicans and corporations and the media successfully prevented by associating them with communism.

The one and only thing the Marxists in the United States ever accomplished in politics was the weakening, division and discrediting of the left.   Other than that their only accomplishment is their victimization by American fascists.   They are certainly not a choice that ever was a good one for the real left and many on the left knew that.   It was the day that I realized that the left owed them nothing and could cut them and their phonied up history and legend off it felt like a burden was lifted from me.  The tension of trying to square the support of civil rights, human rights and the morality essential to support them with any kind of sympathy for those whose basic political and intellectual framing would lead to their destruction disappeared.   It felt like I saw things clearly for the first time, even if I did have to give up the misplaced idolatry I'd been taught to practice.  I don't have to like or respect the Marxists who supported some of the biggest murderers, enslavers and oppressors in history just as I don't have to support the American right who championed other murderers, enslavers and oppressors.  If either of those alternatives took power here, they'd both do the same things to people, merely organizing the economy a bit differently.   With the development of Chinese communist-capitalism, you can't even count on that difference.

*  It's a fact that the committee of luminaries assembled under John Dewey was for the goal of rehabilitating Leon Trotsky, someone who, as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman pointed out, rather convincingly, was no slouch when it came to the advocacy and use of violence, terrorism and the denial of rights and justice that the Dewey Commissioners complained he had been denied.  The fact is, he merely lost the power struggle with Stalin and managed to get away.   In reading more about the various reactions in the 1930s as the crimes of Stalin were being revealed in the West, it's striking how the intellectuals seem to worry, mostly, at times exclusively, for the lives and rights of various sects of Marxists, as compared to the millions of peasants, workers and others murdered.   Which certainly put the last nail in the coffin of my misplaced respect for them.

Update:  I should have added that a "Leningrad Ten" would have almost certainly been tortured into confessing, they and their families, including their children, many of whom would likely, as well, have been killed.   Remember that the next time you read the legend of the persecution of the actual Stalinists here, which wouldn't justify any violation of their rights, it would, though, force you to conclude that they were no heroes, either.