" you take after your grandfather, Joe McCarthy"
Oh, how clever, you watch American Experience on PBS, or something and know the name. Only my grandfather McCarthy was a factory worker and dirt farmer who was a life long Democrat, who voted for every Democrat from Al Smith to Lyndon Johnson and who, in the angriest thing I ever heard him say, wished that Jack Ruby could shoot Lee Harvey Oswald through an eternity in hell, right after we all were appalled to see, live, the mob hit on him while in police custody. Grandpa was probably the most conservative member of my family, all of whom were strong union people when possible, and Grandpa would be considered on the far-left of 2015, farther than that as he actually believed the point was to change laws to make life better, not to preen in his superiority.
Anyone who is deputed to be on the left who in 2015 is holding a torch for the communists, especially the Communist Party of the United States or of any country, with the piles of bodies that communists ruling in many lands have piled up, is the moral equivalent of a member of the American Nazi Party. In the past I would have pointed to the total and absolutely counterproductive futility of the Communists, the communists, the anarchists, and all but a hand full of American socialists - who, unlike all of the others, actually managed to win office and, you know, DO SOMETHING, but I've decided that isn't the most imperative thing to point out about them.
One of the few British radical journalists for whom I retain any respect or affection was Alexander Cockburn and he lost a lot of my respect along the way. In one of his Beat The Devil columns in The Nation I remember he pointed out that while Hitler was murdering Jews, Jews were fighting as honored members of the Soviet military. His point was that while you couldn't be a Nazi without being an antisemite, a racist and a genocidalist, there was nothing in even Stalinism that held those as founding dogmas, certainly not in Marxism. But, much as I might have liked Cockburn, that is grotesquely dishonest argument and dishonest in the most repulsive way imaginable.
The dogmas, claims and words that constituted the formal statements of Marx, Engels, etc. are just words on pages and in the mouths of ideologues, the acts are the real substance of those political ideologies, what people do, what they are allowed to do while remaining within the bounds of those words. On what has been traditionally taken for the left, what I now call the pseudo-left, that has been practiced on both the most petty stage of mythologizing the bumble squad of ideologues in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. and up to covering up the many scores of murders committed by regimes which had and still retain the support and nostalgic affection of that pseudo-left. The tactics used in that cover up are not morally different from the ones the Nazis used when they set up Theresienstadt. Only it's easier because you just have to ignore what really happened and put up a wall of words.
I won't practice the vulgar and amoral mathematics of the Communists in which twenty-five million of THEIR corpses count but scores of millions of OUR corpses are just the price of economic and social progress. The Nazis said EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS THEIR REASON FOR MURDERING PEOPLE. The Communists, the communists, the anarchists, and any others who anyone wants to claim belongs on the left disqualify themselves by doing what the more genteel supporters of fascism do in that regard.
And I don't care who the alleged leftist is, if they wrote for The Nation, or The Progressive or got nailed by HUAC or couldn't get work in Hollywood, the victims of the regimes and political ideologies they supported got an even harder break in life. I don't even care if Warren Beatty made a movie about them and Maureen Stapleton turned them into a likable character which they reportedly weren't in real life. I don't owe those people anything except to tell the truth about them and the primary people owed that aren't them but those whose murders they ignored, covered up or supported. Anyone of them who owned up to their actions, that deserves to be told too.
I won't maintain the myths of one of the hugest moral catastrophes AND CRIMES in history as well as a total botch in politics to spare the tender feelings of the lefty desk set of today.
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