Hate Bait

I have been accused of being a red-baiter because I said that if Bernie Sanders had the Democratic nomination that the Republican-fascists would use his former membership in the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party to sink his chances of winning in the first several days of his campaign.

That's not red-baiting, that's realism.   If I'd accused him of membership in some communist party or other, that would be red-baiting, that's not what I did.   When it's a fact of someone's political CV, pointing out the use that the Republicans would make of it, that's realism.

The fact is that even today, in 2016, membership as a mature adult in the Socialist Workers Party is a definitive political liability in most if not all of the United States.  You might not like that that is true, but that doesn't do a single thing to change the fact that it makes Bernie Sanders an all but guaranteed loser as a presidential candidate.

The fact is many of the people who joined Marxist parties, the Leninists, the Stalinists, the Maoists, even those who drearily kept at it after the revelations of Khrushchev in 1956 and, heaven help us, into the dismal, pathetic twilight of Soviet Marxism in the Brezhnev years (like being an SWP delegate in 1980) were supporting mass murderers, oppressors, enslavers, imperialists no less than supporters of Nazism and western imperialism.   Those who hid under the fig leaf of being "Trotskyists" only differed in that their guy didn't get to put his ability to murder and oppress into fullest practice as the dictator.   His intentions in office are likely to have been a part with his career inside the Soviet government.

Today, in 2016, it's well past the point where anyone should have any illusions about the nature of American communism and Marxism, it was nothing to look back on with any kind of romantic illusions.  It is fittingly a political liability for anyone who was part of it just as being part of white supremacy should be a political liability and, we can only hope, in this election the tide doing that will turn and racism will become the liability it always should have been.

That is if the free-speech puritans don't try to suppress the condemnation of it.

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Also, someone got pissed off that I slammed one of those people in journalism who I detest the most, Nat Hentoff, as smarmy and self-fixated a character as has ever dribbled out columnage by the bucket full for decades.

That he has gone from promoting some of the most counterproductive lines of nonsense - nonsense which has benefited oligarchs in their attempt to buy the United States, lines of assertion that make up the arguments of such oligarchy sponsored Supreme Court hacks as Rehnquist, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy, that he has gone from doing that at places like The Progressive magazine, The Village Voice and on chat shows and panels and the blah, blah, blahosphere to being a Cato Institute shill is about as clear evidence as ever was of the real nature of free speech absolutism.

I will go into the problem of free speech absolutism in a fuller sense later, just as I have in the past. For now, since the topic is politics, the big problem with it there is that it empowers lies and when that's done, it gives lies an advantage over the truth, especially when that truth is inconvenient to those with the most money and power.   The fetish of even-handedness, and "fairness to all points of view" that comes with the pose have been decisive in giving us some of the worst presidents and congresses in the history of the country.

I am convinced that that line of junk had two sources, the higher end publishing and media industries that wanted to make lots of money out of the lucrative trade in legalized porn, soft to harder and the Marxists who harbored fevered dreams of entering the mainstream of American politics, leading to revolution and their inevitable and dialectic determined rule in the United States.  There was no rational probability that, especially with the example of what Marxism meant in practice in the Soviet Union, its occupied states in Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere that it would be imposed here through the truth of it being told.

There has always been something massively ironic about the whining and complaining about violations of free speech, free press, free association, etc. made by American Communists, the Soviet sponsored ones or the Maoists, in that the systems and countries and dictators they looked to as models were entirely more ruthless violators of all of those rights than HUAC or red-channels ever dreamed of being.  As it turned out, bad as it could get at times in the United States, they had more freedom to advocate for some of the most massive violators of the Bill of Rights freedoms than the U.S. government ever attempted.  Even the awful eugenicist and arch conservative so often falsely presented as a liberal, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. supported their right to advocate violent revolution from the bench of the Supreme Court, he thought that advocating the violent overthrow of the government was a higher right than a woman to her bodily integrity and her right to control her own fertility.

Well, guess which side won from the con job.   It turned out that when there was "more speech" the oligarchs used that "more speech" to sink the Marxists and not only them, but the real, equality, justice and economic justice left.  Though sinking Marxism might be seen as a service to the country it was not on behalf of democracy, that real alternative to the red-fascism that Marxism turns into in the real world, it was on behalf of market fascism in which the oligarchs own the market and so the country.  And porn was not only compatible with that, it was massively profitable and had the gratifying effect of training people to see other people and themselves as objects and commodities. Porn fits right into the explicitly vulgar, non-idealized, materialism of the right even more so than it does the pseudo-scientific materialism of Marxism.

Now, I wouldn't credit someone like Hentoff with having anything so developed as a sense of who his free speech absolutism was serving, for a hack writer like him it was merely a shtick, a vehicle of leftish puritan self-righteousness, something to gain esteem through as he posed as a significant figure on the left, something to scribble columnage about between his endless repetitions about that TV show he produced with Billie Holiday and Lester Young and you know.  The way he went on about that you'd think he put every note in her mouth.  Like virtually all columnists I don't think it was ever anymore than that to him and, since he was part of the media, it was a safe thing for him to write about because the publications that paid him made money off of  the sex industry as well.  The Village Voice certainly did.

And now that the Village Voice dumped him in his senectitude rectitude, he found his natural element as an intellectual prostitute at the Koch financed Cato Institute.   That speaks more eloquently as to his real character than any mere freely spoken words would.