Today, Sixty Years Later, A Yawn On Both Their Houses - Hate Mail

I can tell you precisely what I was reading when I realized that after dutifully reading Victor Navasky's Naming Names, after reading who knows how many articles in The Nation and other venues of lefty obsession with the Hollywood Blacklist and a sampling, though far less, of the opposing narrative, that I am left with not having, as the saying goes, much of "a fuck left to give" about it.

It was while I was reading this review about Alan Casty's, Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal and Joseph Litvak's, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture.  I had become curious about the liberals who were certainly no part of either the HUAC side but who were, nonetheless, entirely anti-communist, a position that I'd been led to think about by reading about Rex Stout and others who had started Freedom House.  NOT that that side were without their own moral problems, for example a number of them ending as Vietnam War hawks.

Reading some of Casty's book which, if nothing else, showed how the opening of the archives of the Communist Party* and other documents had made Navasky's classic book seriously out of date and seriously lop-sided in its presentation, had led to me reading the review.  One of the conclusions that reading more instead of less about the period would show that just about no one was honest about their motives or diligent in their moral review, no two people probably had one exactly definable motive in what they did.  None of the generalizations in Navasky or Casty or those I read about in other things would seem to produce a sufficient general classification of the good guys and bad guys in the dramatis personæ.   Unfortunately, I had to send the Casty book back, inter-library loan, and it was way too expensive to buy so I never finished it.

I think just about all of those held up as heroes on the left were as big a bunch of whatever bad could be said about those on the other side, they were, almost to a person, a total asshole.   As you may have guessed, I came to truly loathe Lester Cole.   The big difference is that HUAC, the FBI and others were assholes who SOMETIMES, quite often abused their power and office and, certainly, the money men were huge assholes, as well.  Some like J. Parnell Thomas compounded their role as a total piece of shit as a member of congress with being a crook (he took the fifth during the investigation and trial that sent him to the same prison as some of the Hollywood 10), in far too few cases getting what was coming to them.

But, for crying out loud, the great and huge wrong done to the Hollywood 10 was that they lost lucrative work writing crap for the movie industry and they got short prison sentences on minor charges.   As I've pointed out recently, while they were holding strong for their fellow Stalinists and their other buddies and, in many cases, the Stalinist American Communist Party, Stalin was murdering real writers - many of them communists with far better credentials of opposing fascism than the Hollywood scribblers and typists.  I've mentioned The Night of the Murdered Poets**, in which thirteen of those were arrested in 1948, about the beginning of the Red Scare here, railroaded by Stalin for being Jewish,  died on the order of Stalin after they were held for years and tortured into confessing to crimes they didn't commit in 1952.  Another died in prison after falling into a coma, Lina Stern was the only one of them who survived and regained a job anything like what she'd had before,  after Stalin died.  She was a scientist whose work the Communist government decided made her valuable so they didn't kill her.  You know, like why Mengele kept some Jews alive.

If I'm going to shed (crocodile) tears for a list of those long dead and the victims of brutal mistreatment by anti-democrats who abused their office and power, I'll take the Dead Poets. Only I'd rather focus on people who are alive and who might be saved from that, today.  I can't do anything for the ones who are long dead and whose oppressors and killers are dead, too.  Look on the bright side, they might be in hell.

Casty's writing about the treacheries of the Communists during the years in the run up to the United States entering The Second World War, their off again on-again anti-Nazism, their willingness to turn on other anti-fascist, anti-Nazi factions who were not under the control of Stalin, their general role as tools of Soviet foreign policy as opposed to egalitarian democracy are worth reading because it reveals just what a bunch of total assholes they were.  Those are some of the people we are still supposed to hold in the highest regard according to the conventional lefty narrative.  If even half of what he said is accurate, they were no better than the America First crypto-Nazis who were their sometimes allies in keeping the United States out of the fight against Hitler.   He noted that they suspended their more than a thousand day protest outside of FDR's White House, to protest things like Lend-Lease the very day before Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union.  Talk about timing.

*  They'd been sent to Moscow for safe keeping from the American government.  Such safe keeping lasted until the Communist government died and we could read that, in fact, they'd been taking orders from Moscow, pretty much the whole time they were denying it.

** As ususal while answering hate mail, I don't have the time to go looking for a better list from a better source, as far as I can see, this list at Wikipedia is sufficent:

Peretz Markish (1895–1952), Yiddish poet, co-founder the School of Writers, a Yiddish literary school in Soviet Russia

David Hofstein (1889–1952), Yiddish poet

Itzik Feffer (1900–1952), Yiddish poet, informer for the Ministry of Internal Affairs

Leib Kvitko (1890–1952), Yiddish poet and children's writer

David Bergelson (1884–1952), distinguished novelist

Solomon Lozovsky (1878–1952), Director of Soviet Information Bureau, Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, vigorously denounced accusations against himself and others

Boris Shimeliovich (1892–1952), Medical Director of the Botkin Clinical Hospital, Moscow

Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952), assistant to and successor of Solomon Mikhoels as director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater

Joseph Yuzefovich (1890–1952), researcher at the Institute of History, Soviet Academy of Sciences, trade union leader

Leon Talmy (1893–1952), translator, journalist, former member of the Communist Party USA

[ My bolding and underlining.  You have to wonder how many of his former comrades in the US. CP mourned him.]

Ilya Vatenberg (1887–1952), translator and editor of Eynikeyt, newspaper of the JAC; Labor Zionist leader in Austria and U.S. before returning to the USSR in 1933

Chaika Vatenburg-Ostrovskaya (1901–1952), wife of Ilya Vatenburg, translator at JAC.
Emilia Teumin (1905–1952), deputy editor of the Diplomatic Dictionary; editor, International Division, Soviet Information Bureau

Solomon Bregman (1895–1953), Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Fell into a coma after denouncing the trial and died in prison five months after the executions.

Lina Stern (or Shtern) (1875–1968), a biochemist, physiologist and humanist and the first female academician in the Russian Academy of Sciences and is best known for her pioneering work on blood–brain barrier. She was the only survivor out of the fifteen defendants.

Update:  Simels, I'm not going to bother answering any of your lies, if you want to argue with what I said, address what I said, not what I didn't say as you translate into your idiocy because you can't argue anything else.

I don't care if Duncan and your fellow dolts who haven't had enough of the stupidity that Eschaton has been for a long time now - since those like NTodd and Phila gave up on it - lie about what I've said or, rather, what you lie about what I said.   After that piece by Kevin Drum I've concluded that paying attention to Eschaton leads even smart people to say stupid stuff.

You know, about the only good thing left to having participated in Eschaton is it led me to understand that not believing in sin leads people to not caring about the truth and they're left with figuring that any lie that might get them what they want should be told.  It explains how the commies were such a bunch of friggin' liars and how their apologists, today, don't care about it now that the documentation of their lies is available.