Saturday, June 2, 2018

The Left Forum Belongs In The Loony Bin Of History

I spent a couple of hours going over the program of the upcoming exercise in pseudo-lefty delusion, futility and counter-productive romanticism, The Left Form 2018.   The effect was profoundly depressing, especially in the context of fifty plus years of such absurdity engaged in by a collection of daffy idealists, conceited and frustrated obscure academics and would be daddies and mommies of some revolution that will never happen anywhere except in their fantasies and empty, self-promoting tall tales.  Especially as bought by callow and ignorant young, would-be lefties.  I know, I was once one of them.

I don't know if it was my making fun of them over the past several years but I couldn't find any planned rehashing of the corpses of the Rosenbergs or similar nonsense thought there was lots of such absurdity to be getting nowhere with.

Item One:  "Listen Socialists: The Russian and Chinese Revolutions Have Something to Say to You,"   organized by some obscurity listed as Rajendra Sahai*, the description of which contains this load of shit:

Charles Andrews, ‘Author of The Hollow Colossus’ in ‘There Is No Socialism Without a Communist Party’1 2016 saw the nationwide revival of the word Socialism in Bernie sanders’ campaign for presidency. Sanders qualified it; calling it “Democratic Socialism”, by which he meant that democratic control on capitalism will allow workers to live a life somewhat like a human being with enough income, educational opportunities for their children, affordable medical care and social security. Although he was used and then discarded by the Democratic Party, many of his supporters take socialism more seriously than ever before. The working class in the US has started to rise up after the neoliberal turn enforced by capital manifest in Thatcher-Reagan era and continued by Bush, Clinton and Obama in their own ways. The mass following of Sanders on the left and Trump on the populist right in the follow up of Occupy movement testifies to the fact that the working class is in the mood of claiming it’s place in the political space so constrained by electoral politics.

The idea that Bernie Sanders, who wasn't a member of the Democratic Party until he decided to do a vanity run for president, was "used and then discarded" by a party, much of which wished he hadn't run and whose die hard supporters included those who vocally preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, is just ridiculous and an obvious lie of the kind that old commies have told to gullible young idiots for decades.  I know, I was one of those gullible enough to give them a hearing in my youth, thought not for all that long.   If you want to see how ridiculous it gets, the long rambling "abstract" of this panel says:

Socialism today must be the answer to contemporary forms of capitalist exploitations while it draws on the success, not only on the reversal of the socialist projects in the U.S.S.R. and China.

Considering the "success" of "the socialist projects in the U.S.S.R. and China were the murders of tens of millions of people, the total suppression of socialism as anything but the crudest of state-capitalism, the destruction of independent workers organizations, the total obliteration of civil rights, invasions of other countries and the imposition of rule from Russia and Beijing, etc. what a total and complete load of shit. 

I could go through one after another of the Left Forum's panels, plenaries, etc. and get enough of the stuff to fertilize a large field.  After reading way too many of these things I did a word search on the Left Forum site's search engine and came up with the interesting results that the term "Marx" brought a list of 26 such, um, "workshops" that the term was relevant to.   I found only 18 for which "equality" was found to be relevant, almost all of those dealing with race and womens' issues and a paltry 15 for the term "democracy". 

This Left Forum, in 2018, at a time when the last vestiges of Communist rule are melting away is still carrying the torch for Soviet and Maoist communism, in countries which gave up any pretense of socialism for what is obviously its natural successor form of government, mafia rule.

I have come to the conclusion, especially from the Nation Magazine style hysteria about "Russiagate" being a Trojan horse for a new cold war instead of a reaction to an attack on American democracy, that there is likely a lot of money from the oligarchs of Putonia going into this stuff.  Just as we learned, after the fall of the Soviet Union that the old Communist Party was, in fact, getting money from the Soviet Union.  There will, apparently, be adoration of Julian Assange (check out the illustration with this "abstract")



and loads and loads of other bull shit.

Considering Assange was acting as an agent of both Putin's regime which they seem to just lurve and the Donald Trump campaign which they officially hate, AND THAT HE WAS DOING IT TO PUT TRUMP IN OFFICE! - how dishonest and two-faced can the Left Forum get? 

The Left Forum is mostly useful as a study in the continued delusion of the play-left, especially its academic division,  which is banking on the people of the United States and elsewhere to finally take the words that Karl Marx published in 1848 to heart and foment their fantasy world, workers revolution.  That aspiration was understandable (if morally reprehensible) in the 1930s and maybe into the 1950s, that is if you were able to overlook the mountain range of corpses produced by communism.  In 2018 when even the Communists in China and the dwindling number of officially Communist dictatorships are dropping the pretense of workers rights in favor of a Victorian era use of workers as disposable and cheap commodities to be used and thrown away, it is utterly delusional.  One of the recent revelations of the reality of Communism is the North Korean regime selling slave labor to the mafia oligarchs of the Putin crime family. 

The Left Forum and those who participate in it won't change.  It's tempting to say they belong on the ash heap of history, but that's too obviously the practice of Marxism in reality instead of pretend theory.  I'd say they belong in the custodial care of history's loony bin.   The best thing the real left can do with the left forum is mock it and condemn its hypocrisy and dishonesty, its deluded counter-productivity and to question why they've been doing this crap to such counter-productive results for more than a half a century at this point.

Enough was enough a long, long time ago.


* 1. Raj Sahai is an engineer and a socialist, who started his activism during the Anti-Vietnam War struggles in Chicago, IL in 1968- continuing in Berkeley, CA from 1971 onwards. He has published article in India and US, has been member of the Institute for Critical Study of Society at the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland California. He has assisted in translation of the book ‘Khrushchev Lied’ by Grover Furr. His recently published article titled ‘Stalin’s Ghost Haunts Capitalism’ can be viewed thru the following Link: http://www.idcommunism.com/2018/02/stalins-ghost-haunts-capitalism.html

If you're curious to know what "Khrushchev Lied" about, here's the entire title from the listing at Amazon

Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False

Yeah, tell that to the young women whose skeletons were found buried in the gardens of Beria's place in Moscow when it was turned into an embassy, the ones he murdered after he raped them.  Apparently the Left Forum finds that level of unreconstructed Stalinist to be credible enough to have on its roster of facilitators.  If you go to Amazon to check out the listing, read the five star reviews of it, old Commies are as loony as old Nazis.

Saturday Night Radio Drama -Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way






I've decided to post all of Gordon Pengilly's Bailey's Way series, on those weeks I haven't had a chance to find other plays.  The last few weeks I haven't had much free time.   But mostly because I really like his work and I like the actors in these plays.   

Esther Purves Smith as Tanis Bailey , a young rookie constable on the the Calgary Police Service determined to make’Detective’ just as soon as she can. David LeReaney as Sergeant Mann and Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson. 

Also:  in Simply Judy 
Lindsay Burns; Terry Belleville; Les Carlson; Kate Newby; Donna Belleville; Grant Reddick; Bruce Parkhouse

in The Wanderer 
Heather-Lea McCallum; Stephen Spender; Terry Lawrence; Sharon Bakker

Friday, June 1, 2018

Hate Mail - Là-bas Encore

I get a lot of hate mail which you never see (well, since I took down my e-mail for this blog, it comes by way of comments held in moderation).  And I get a lot of hits on old posts, I suspect when someone reads something I wrote a while back and posts a link to it someplace.  I have seldom been able to figure out where that traffic comes from and I generally choose not to deal with what they say.

I do get a surprising number of hateful comments from people who object to me pointing out the health consequences of anal sex, either anal genital or anal oral contact.  Apparently lots of people have bought into the wide-spread notion that there is something anti-LGBT in telling the hard truth on that subject, that anal sex carries a lot of health risks, only one of the reasons that lots of gay men never engage in anal sex and why it is a really bad thing that so many are coerced into participating in anal sex.

I never did practice anal sex because, having taken quite a number of biology courses in high school and college and having a parent who spent a number of years as a health care worker, I knew that it was dangerous well more than a decade before the start of the AIDS epidemic.  As previously mentioned, one of my first encounters with the lunacy on that count was when someone more or less said that getting hepatitis was a rite of passage for a gay man, something I knew was just nuts.

Later, as so many of us became familiar with all kinds of health consequences associated with AIDS-HIV which we had never encountered before, I became quite radical on the topic.  I mean, if you never have, do a google search for Karposi sarcoma lesions



in all their horror.  I would include one which, seeing it in a friend before he died, something that all my previous experience had never introduced me to,  lymphangiectatic Kaposi's sarcoma  This form it takes looks all too familiar.

Image result for lymphangiectatic Kaposi's sarcoma
and that's only one of the things many of us became familiar with in the 1980s even up till today when so many stupidly believe "AIDS is over" or reliably manageable and a minor concern for those who engage in whatever stylish sexual practice makes them into a group at risk.   I saw people I knew whose brains were eaten away with tuberculosis, all manner of other secondary infections and knew several who committed suicide as soon as they started showing symptoms.

Straight people are as at risk as gay men are, worldwide it is largely a disease of straight sex and drug use.  Given the question he asked Bill Gates, I wonder if Donald Trump has ever been tested for HIV infection or other STDs.  It would certainly explain why his cover up of his medical status has been so frantic.

The number of people in the United States who become infected every year is horrific.  Anyone who knows people who engage in sex with more than one person knows someone who is in an at-risk group, many of them in the groups which are at high-risk of contracting HIV and will always be involved with trying to keep their drug regime just ahead of the incredibly resourceful virus which exists in tremendous numbers in the world population and which mutates to overcome drugs at an amazing rate.

When there are so many other means of having sex other than those which risk transmission, it is sheer and criminal insanity that the pop culture promotes promiscuity like it was promoted among urban gay men in the 1970s.   It is 35 years ago, last month, that HIV was first identified as the cause of HIV and it's clear, at least in the United States and some other places, that band that Randy Shilts wrote about is still playing on.  I looked it up, in 2007 they published a 20th anniversary edition of it.  It doesn't look like they did a 30th anniversary one last year.  I suspect at this rate they'll be able to do a 50th anniversary one and lots of what Shilts said then will still be relevant, probably about new STDs that rise up in the hook-up culture that's as irresponsible as it ever was.

When I first heard the comment about hepatitis mentioned above back in the 1960s, I was amazed that someone with college credentials (the person who said it had a PhD in English lit) could be so ignorant and clueless.  I'm not amazed anymore that so many so credentialed are so vacuous, today.  Not even with the hard school that experience keeps.  I'm not going along with that pretense.

America Behind The Lyin' Curtain Is The Real Obscenity

As suspected would happen, whoever puts up the Youtubes from Samantha Bee's show took down the "feckless c***" segment of this week's show and, inexplicably, the other segments of the show.  Which is why I was hesitant to post the segment.  That's the down-side to posting Youtubes, they get taken down rather often. 

And as suspected, people aren't talking about the reason the estimable Samantha Bee felt it necessary to use the "C" word for the artificially flavored, sugar coating Ivanka Trump is on the rotting crap of her Daddums' criminal, fascist regime. 

I can understand why Samantha Bee did it, the policy is so obscene and the virtual non-response to it is incredibly enraging.  A real response would be something that stopped it.  Our great "free press" doesn't much mount those kinds of responses to Republican evil doing.  Even this level of the vilest of evil done of by and for the most revolting of white supremacy.  I am certain that history will look back on it and all involved, especially figures like John Kelly and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions will be as reviled as the most reviled figures in 19th century racism.  Racism has been one of their most reliable tools.

The fact of biology means that the United States is not going to be a white majority country for much longer.  But it is possible for the fascists, our own native variety of it, white supremacy, to game the goddamned Constitution set up to enable them to keep power that isn't rightly theirs.  Equality, equal justice under law is the enemy of Republicans.  And the media in its most respected and influential forms will support that use of the Constitution to enable the rich and white supremacy.  I mentioned CNN's outraged condemnation of Samantha Bee using that one word for years had Lou Dobbs on spewing racist, anti-Latino propaganda virtually every night for years.  The crop of racism and sexism we are burdened with today was sown, especially by the cabloid media and hate-talk radio, over the previous years and decades. 

Donald Trump as a public figure is entirely and completely a product of television, hate-talk radio and, to a minor extent, movies and print media.  His use of a vulgar celebrity style to prop up his semi-criminal to blatantly criminal series of business scams was his substance before he decided to use politics to further it.  And at every stage that has led to Trump in the office of the presidency, the media was there pushing him and his racist criminality with billions of dollars worth of free publicity.  And, again, it was the 24-7 cabloid world that was as big a part of that as the entertainment programming wing of NBC. 

The obscenity of Samantha Bee using the "C" word (which, I suspect, she expected would be bleeped) is as nothing compared to what all of the major TV networks, including PBS did to make Trump and his criminal regime possible.  That is a program of lying and promoting immorality, racism and sexism and greed and selfishness and everything that is exemplified in Trumpism.   It is the lyin' curtain that has fallen, blocking light and morality. 

Thursday, May 31, 2018

I Just Knew It Would Be The "C" Word They Focused On

When I listened to the Youtube posting of Samantha Bee's Full Frontal this morning, I decided to post a link but I wanted to see how the media was reacting to what she, her staff and lots of us who heard it knew was going to be what got the notice of the wider media.   From her segment about the Trump regime ripping babies and young children from their parents Samantha Bee no doubt felt compelled to get people to notice what she said, so she entirely relevantly and with complete justification went where no one on TV I've known of went before:

Bee said: “No, Donald Trump didn’t invent this issue – he’s just making it so much worse. Now everyone who even approaches the border is treated like a criminal.

She continued: “So now, after decades of ignoring the issue, Americans are finally paying attention. Well, most of us. Ivanka Trump, who works at the White House, chose to post the second most oblivious tweet we’ve seen this week.”

Bee, showing a photo Trump posted of her and her son, addressed the president’s daughter directly: “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt.”

Bee added: “He listens to you. Put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to fucking stop it.”

Well, I'm sure she knew it would be calling Ivanka a "feckless cunt" that would get attention for what she was saying in the piece, something that is infinitely worse than using the "C" word.   The important question isn't whether or not she should have gone there - officially, I don't think I have the gender qualification to have an important opinion on that - it's whether or not having done it serves the clear purpose of doing it.   And I don't know. 

I do know that Jeff Sessions is probably in a permanent state of tumescence over his daily opportunity to play Simon Legree ripping Brown children away from their parents - every single thing Jeff Sessions does as Attorney General is to further white supremacy, everything, literally everything*.   He's probably looking forward to the day they can be sold as chattels.

So I'm reading that CNN has the vapors over Samantha Bee using THAT word. That would be CNN which has certainly played a role in reviving white supremacy especially when it had on Lou Dobbs pushing it every weeknight for years is in a swivet over that one word used to accurately berate Ivanka Trump who is the White, really blonde wash over the most racist presidency since the Wilson administration if not earlier, including many people who want to repeal the Civil War amendments and put people on the Supreme Court who are ideologically in favor of such a program. 

*  Including arresting as many Black and Brown and young people for having marijuana as possible.  He wants to incarcerate as a means of disenfranchisement, that has always been one of the pillars of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate strategy, especially in states with large Black populations who count for representation but whose rights can be given to white racists through disenfranchisement and vote suppression.  Republicans, right up to Maine's shameful fraud, Susan Collins are in on that one.  She was one of Sessions' biggest supporters even as the piece of racist crap openly perjured himself during his confirmation hearings.   The entire Republican Party is the party of racism and vote stealing. 

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Second Feature - The Tempest - BBC Radio 3 1974


Paul Scofield  Prospero
Jane Knowles   Miranda
Ronnie Stevens Ariel
Patrick Stewart Caliban
Richard Kay Ferdinand
Alan Rowe Francisco
Alan Rowe Master of the Ship
Anthony Daniels Adrian
Charles Kay Sebastian
Doreen Walker Singer (Juno)
John Justin Alonso
Michael Spice Antonio
Patricia Hooper Singer (Iris)
Prudence Lloyd Singer (Ceres)
Rory Kinnear Stephano
Terence Scully Trinculo
Timothy Bateson Gonzalo
William Sleigh Boatswain

DAVID CAIN 'S music played by MIKE WESTBROOK , CLIVE HEATH. CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD. BRIAN GODDING. BUTCH POTTER , JOHN MITCHELL and TRISTAN FRY conducted by THE COMPOSER

Pretty good cast and the music credits aren't too shabby either, they made good use of the medium, taking advantage of its intimacy and not having to have sets and costumes or being able to see the actors.  Ronnie Stevens was fifty when this production was done, a pretty aged Ariel. 

Stupid Mail

Hey, everyone might have one but not everyone is one.  You and your buddies at Duncan's are in the latter category. 

----------------

In related news, I'm kind of shocked that none of the atheists who held him up as a hero seems to know what became of the speed addict after the court gave him almost two-million dollars for breaking the conditions of his parole.  I mean, what could go wrong when an addict gets handed a couple of rocks. 

And I'm still wondering if someone who gets denied parole  can sue for the violation of their court-given  right to it. 

Wednesday Night Radio Drama - Don Druick - Recipe For Murder



I'll warn you not to listen to this while you're eating supper unless entomophagy doesn't bother you


This offbeat little series is based in Montreal, the adventures of a student chief.  Not deep but fun. 


Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Aw, ABC cancelled Roseanne Barr's rebooted show after she issued a viciously racist tweet.   Talk about your dog bites man story. 

Hey, ABC, that's what happens when you hitch your wagon to a psycho, racist, attention craving, no-talent, never once in her life funny,  sleaze-slinger like Roseanne Barr. 

Anyone who expected better of her is too stupid to be employed.  

She doesn't belong in production, she belongs in custodial care. 

And About The Biggest of Atheist Assholes Are The Ones In The Anti-AA Industry

Taking the occasion of yesterday's mention of my alternative blog Not Atheists Are Assholes (But This Blog Is About The Ones Who Are) I had to wonder what became someone I wrote about five years back,  Barry A. Hazle, Jr., the drug addict who became a temporary cause célèbre among blog and rag atheists.  He was a inmate serving  a sentence for drugs who wanted to be paroled and who had agreed to the condition that he attend a 12-step group as one of the conditions of parole.  He claimed that as an atheist it was some kind of big-fat violation of his 1st Amendment Rights to be made to attend a meeting which he claimed had religious content to it.  I was surprised to find out that apparently many people and, as things turned out, courts held that there was a right to not only parole but that prospective parolees could set the terms of their own get-out-of-jail-early agreements.  Where, I wondered, were the rights of all of those people who were denied parole over and over again, some of whom would presumably have abided by the terms they agreed to but which Mr. Hazle violated and was returned to jail for breaking his parole.

At the time I wrote about the case, or, rather, the claims of the atheist media about the case, it hadn't been decided by a court, so I went back and looked at what came of it.

Well, the courts sided with Hazel and gave him close to two-million dollars to compensate him for the massive violation of his right to parole on his own terms - how that ruling figures in other cases where parole is denied, I'd be curious to know, I wonder if any lawyers have made that kind of use of it.  The same media, rag and blog, touted the ruling as a great victory in the cause of anti-religion, it was being cited as recently as last year on a website of some 2-bit Hollywood producer-director who made an anti-AA movie and has been peddling herself on slamming AA.

I wondered, though, if Barry Hazle jr. had managed to stay off of the substances he was abusing, what got him landed in jail to start with, and how, if he managed to break his addiction cycle he'd managed to do it.  I spent a half hour searching online this morning and couldn't find anything past his getting the award.  I didn't find that the government appealed the ruling or any subsequent disposition of the case or issue.  But what I'm most interested in knowing is if he managed to get clean and how he did.   If anyone knows, tell me and I'll write it up.

At the time I wrote about it I had a brother who was a victim of severe alcoholism, who died of it (now I have another who may as well have) who refused to go to AA (the only affordable treatment available after they lost their insurance) on the basis of its alleged religious content.  The very same slogans and phrases and tropes I heard from them are the ones that the "secularists" use to encourage alcoholics to go looking for largely non-existent alternatives, there are a number of such potemkin village outfits that don't really exist or exist only in a few large cities.  The atheist alternatives are mostly a fraud.   A lot of them seem to act as fronts for for-profit rehabs, many of which, being fabulously expensive, are out of reach for addicts who have lost their jobs, lost their insurance and who would never be admitted - not to mention in a lot of states those are total scams which are more likely to kill you than get you clean.  And by now you could probably use the John Oliver version of telling the hard truth about that with humor.


Re-reading that piece I wrote, looking at the atheist-"secularist" attacks on AA, looking at the still fraudulent nature of their "alternatives" knowing that one of the strongest characteristics of addiction is that addicts will latch on to any excuse to not try to get cleaned up,  yeah, lots and lots and lots of atheists are total assholes.  The ones in the anti-AA industry are some of the biggest and filthiest of such assholes.

Monday, May 28, 2018

He's The One Who's Qualified To Work At FOX

Simps is the one who not only worked for the Murdoch empire already, he's the one who is an active practitioner of the FOX style of,  um, "journalism," he's an habitual liar who continually  misrepresents what other people say. I don't think someone who is on record as saying Rupert Murdoch should be deported back to Britland and those who he lies about should be able to sue his properties into extinction and him into the flames of hell has the kind of qualifications to work for him as Simps does.   

I once started a blog, as can be seen on the left side panel that was named, Not All Atheists Are Assholes, but lots of them are complete A-holes.  Simels is one of those and so are so many others of the rump of regulars are at Eschaton.   Those are the kind of atheists I write about.  Apparently the shoe pinches. 

There Is No Reason To Lie For And Every Reason To Tell The Truth About Those Dear Old Commies Of Fable

She  [Muriel Gardiner] speaks slowly, choosing her words with precision

Got a lot of sleep yesterday so, back a day early

Simple Simps apparently didn't take my long weekend off to stop peddling lies about me at Eschaton, cluelessly citing one of his heroes, one of the more proven liars on the pseudo-left, Lillian Hellman, as a weapon.  Specifically and cluelessly using her book "Scoundrel Time" which apart from me being quite confident he never read, was as full of self-serving lies as her more read book of lying memoirs, "Penimento" from which Hollywood romantically and as dishonestly extracted her totally and quite easily proven false yarn about "Julia" to make into a movie.  Movies are probably the third easiest way to peddle lies, TV and hate-talk radio being more effective.*   My primary criticisms of Lillian Hellman aren't that she was a communist, something which the ever stupid Simps doesn't realize Hellman, herself, denied being, with her typical self-serving display, it's that she was a massive liar and a hypocrite and all around sleaze who successfully sold herself to the gullible, research-phobic play-left through  personally created public image. 

You don't have to take my word for it.  As I've noted before people who knew her, people who were used by her,  and people who researched her and fact checked Hellman's claims did that, both before and after Hellman, the heroine of "free speech" sued my distant cousin Mary McCarthy for telling the truth about the fact that Hellman was all liar.

Here's one, Phyllis Jacobson, writing in the independent socialist forum New Politics.

Her memoirs, particularly Scoundrel Time, published in 1976, Mellen writes,

"rained upon Lillian Hellman torrents of incredulity. In this account of her travail under McCarthyism she seemed unregenerate in her Stalinism. Nor would she even now admit that she and Hammett were Communists. Fighting back, she accused liberal anti-Communists of attacking "radicals" rather than capitalists and imperialists. But she was at last being held accountable and it stung."

Hellman's publisher, Little Brown, backed out of its contract with Diana Trilling to publish a collection of her essays in which Trilling replied to Hellman's charges against her and her husband, Lionel. Hellman, the ultimate civil libertarian, demanded that Trilling agree to have her remarks about her edited. When Trilling refused, Hellman persuaded Little Brown not to publish her book. It was later published by Harcourt.

But worse was yet to come in the person of Mary McCarthy who had said publicly, "I think every word she writes is false, including 'and' and 'but'," a statement she repeated on the Dick Cavett show. In a rage, Hellman contacted her lawyer, noted civil libertarian Ephraim London, and demanded that he institute a suit against the Educational Broadcasting Company and Mary McCarthy. Despite warning her that she would lose, Hellman insisted that he proceed. She, after all, was a millionaire and could easily stand the cost of a lawsuit while McCarthy had no money to speak of.

McCarthy started producing evidence of some of Hellman's lies, including her statements indicating that she knew nothing about the Moscow Trials. Hellman had, she pointed out, signed statements applauding the guilty verdict. But then she produced the most damaging of all Hellman's lies, the chapter in Pentimento, the second volume of her memoirs (later made into the film, Julia with Jane Fonda playing Hellman (Julia) to Vanessa Redgrave's anti-fascist activist), in which Hellman portrays herself heroically carrying money into Nazi Germany for her socialist activist friend. A complete fabrication. Hellman had appropriated the life of Muriel Gardiner who later told her own story in Code Name Mary, a story Hellman had learned from their mutual friend, lawyer Wolf Schwabacher. Told by London that she would have to produce evidence of the real Julia to proceed with her case against McCarthy, Hellman was frantic and became tangled in a web of additional lies. She actually had the chutzpah to plan to visit Muriel Gardiner to ask Gardiner to say that she was not Julia, a meeting that never came off. Hellman still hadn't thought her way out of her dilemma when McCarthy's attorneys' motion to have the case dismissed on the basis that Hellman was a public figure was denied. The case was scheduled to proceed. But it never did. Hellman died before that could happen.

Lillian hellman was not only a liar but, despite her disclaimers, an unregenerate Stalinist. In Scoundrel Time she wrote

"Communist-haters, particularly among intellectuals, wrote and talked a good deal about the violence they could suffer at the hands of American Communists ... but I think that was a very doubtful charge. About foreign gunmen I know only what I have read, but the American radicals I met were not violent men."

It is hard to believe, for example, that anybody could have thought of V. J. Jerome, the theoretician of the Party, as a man with a bomb or a gun.

To be sure, when Hellman wrote of "radicals" she didn't mean radicals at all. She meant the likes of V. J. Jerome, among others. Why should she have found it "hard to believe" that he could be thought of "as a man with a bomb or a gun"? Hellman admired his European counterparts, after all, and they not only used bombs and guns but were responsible for mass murder in those countries -- the Soviet Union, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland -- where they had power. They were totalitarian ideologues dependent on violence for the retention of power. Why should we believe that the difference between them and V. J. Jerome was anything more than an accident of geography?

Hellman said that "radicals" like herself had done no harm. She was mistaken. By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism, she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

There were many others who fact-checked Hellman's lies and exposed the truth that  Hellman's romantically peddled mythology, which is all that Simps knows about her, was a series of lies.  One was Martha Gellhorn who wrote a scathing article in Paris Review which minutely dissected only some of the lies of Hellman, especially those told in "Pentimento" unfortunately most of it behind a paywall which I can't afford to cross, though I read it at the time and it has been much cited.  Another is no less than Muriel Gardiner whose real story as part of the anti-Nazi underground was certainly used by Lillian Hellman to write herself  into a simulation of history as a heroine.  A real story that she stole after just about certainly being told about  by a mutual acquaintance of Gardiner and herself, Wolf Schwabacher.  Even While the, by then,  litigious liar, Lillian Hellman,  was still alive and that one great lie of hers was being exposed, Muriel Gardiner pretty well proved that's what happened.

In the introduction to her book, Gardiner writes, "Soon after Lillian Hellman's book 'Pentimento' appeared in 1973, friends and acquaintances of mine began telephoning me, saying, 'Muriel, you must be 'Julia. ' I was indeed struck by the many similarities between my life and her heroine's. On my next visit to Vienna, I asked Dr. Herbert Steiner, director of the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, what other American women he knew of who had been deeply involved in the Austrian anti-Fascist or anti-Nazi underground. He knew of none."

Perhaps not wishing to be sued by the millionaire Hellman who was spitefully ruining Mary McCarthy, Gardiner apparently didn't feel free to state the obvious truth, that Hellman had used her story to write a self-glorifying fable, as seen in a major Hollywood movie.

Does Muriel Gardiner believe she is "Julia"?

"I don't know," she says, sitting in the sunny living room of her 23-acre farm. "I cannot prove that I am or that I am not."

She speaks slowly, choosing her words with precision. "Only since speaking with Dr. Herbert Steiner, who said he couldn't locate any other American woman, even through the memories of many resistance workers who are still alive, did it make me think that maybe I am 'Julia.' "

She pauses. "I would never claim to be, unless some other completely new evidence comes up."

Others are less uncertain. Lillian Hellman has repeatedly said that Gardiner is not "Julia." In a 1979 edition of "Pentimento," she wrote that she could not reveal the dead woman's true identity for legal and personal reasons. In a telephone interview last week from her home on Martha's Vineyard, Hellman said she is "disturbed" by the suggestions that she may have borrowed her story from Gardiner's life. "She Gardiner is not 'Julia,' and I will not tell you any more than that. If I have to reveal 'Julia's' name, it won't be to a newspaper."

What is pretty certain, now that her yarn has been fact checked, including having everything from Hellman's claimed time-line for the story having happened to her reporting on seeing a production of Hamlet in Russia which can be documented to have not happened,  is that she lied it up to make herself a heroine to the gullible who are still willingly gulled by her lies.

As to me despising Hellman for being a communist, something she denied being, I don't feel the slightest reluctance to point out that communism is an anti-democratic ideology whose adherents deserve criticism on that, alone.  Then there is the fact that Hellman was not only a communist, though she didn't have the guts to join the party, she was a Stalinist at the height of Stalinism who claimed she signed on to support of his infamous show-trials, complete with mass executions, torture, etc. because she didn't pay much attention to the widely known and documented coverage of them in the press of the time.  As were such crimes as the planned famine in Ukraine which murdered millions, as were Stalin's other mass murders.

There is no less of a reason to slam someone who enjoyed the freedom of the United States and Western democracy who supported a brutal, mass murdering dictator who called himself a "communist" than one who called himself a Nazi. I gave up that game of pseudo-leftism of pretending that "our" mass murderer was the nice kind of mass murderer.   Communism is as much an attack on democracy as its kissing cousins, fascism and Nazism.  The American, British, French, etc. communists and Communists did, as Phyllis Jacobson pointed out, prove to be damaging to the real, egalitarian-democratic left because they latched onto the real left like a hagfish, sucking the life out of it through both discrediting it and distorting its politics through distracting it into futile cul-de-sacs such as defending pampered Hollywood commies and such further lies as the claimed innocence of the Rosenbergs.

I despise communism and especially Communism just as I despise fascism and Nazism and for exactly the same reasons.  The additional reasons I gave in the last paragraph only add to why, today, I despise them even more.   I really despise the kind of American communists and Communists who signed onto things like that 1938 letter supporting Stalin's show trial-torture-murders.  They really were the equivalent of the German American Bund, as so many of them would prove when they did the Moscow ordered U-turn to support peace with Hitler during the brief period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, shortly afterwards.

As late as 1983, the real heroine, the real anti-Nazi spy might have had to carefully, precisely, choose her words to avoid being sued by Lillian Hellman, the hypocritical liar who stole her story to make herself a phony heroine.  But, that wicked old witch is dead,we only need to be careful to tell the truth.

There is no reason to continue lying to prop up the false-front, movie-set myth of the likes of Lillian Hellman in 2018, there never was.  They never produced anything but lies and damage to the real left and its only real reason to exist, egalitarian democracy.   It is one of the stupidest things that, on the basis of the massive mythologizing of the anti-anti-communists of show biz and Hollywood to maintain the tired old lies of the pseudo-left into a new generation.  Those myths, from dozens of movies and TV shows do everything to damage the real left and its only hope for success.  After seventy-years of pushing that mythology, the American People, the effective, electoral majority, will never buy it.  Nor should they.  It's well past time for what passes as an intelligentsia to face that hard fact and throw their cherished myths onto the ol' ash heap of phony history.

Which reminds me, I haven't looked to see what the absurdity, the Left Forum, is putting together as a program next week.

* The extent to which the lie that Hollywood is liberal might be taken as a reason that the play-left is more ineffective at propaganda than the right.   For every iconic Hollywood lefty movie, The Front, Trumbo, etc. which romanticized and lied about the nobility of the show-biz commies which were sucked up by the "left" the more effective propaganda vehicles of TV and radio were dominated by the fascists, with the help of the lefty supported "civil liberties" industry which paved the way for fascist lying with total impunity, which damaged, mostly, the common enemy of the commie-left and the fascists, traditional American liberalism. 

It was the real American left who, not supporting the idiocy of communism, had a chance of winning elections who were most damaged by lies.  Truth serves that real left even as it is the enemy of communism and fascism.  The freedom to lie only benefited those who would benefit from lying.   Many, perhaps all of the founders of what developed into the "civil liberties" industry were Marxists and communist sympathizers.   That is until people like Roger Baldwin and others at the ACLU found it more convenient to turn from defenders of Soviet dictatorship into anti-communists and so many others joined the overt American fascists.  I don't think those who remained fervent Stalinists and, later, Maoists are in any way less deserving of disdain than the ones who joined up with American fascism.

It might be news to Simps but I have no problem with despising all of them.  Which side are you on, might have made a good song for Pete Seeger to sing but any side that requires lying to maintain it is no side to be on, ever. 

Ironically, the other day he also claimed that I could get a job at FOX, a network I said should be sued into extinction and its owner deported if not imprisoned for collusion to subvert democracy.  What's most ironic is that Simels periodically brags about having worked for one of Rupert Murdoch's sons.   I've never worked for anyone from the Murdoch clan nor would I because I don't trust any of them.