Hate Mail - "K. Vanden Heuvel Isn't Responsible For Her Husband"

Well, that's not true as she's published so much of his insane crap over the past years.  Though, in the end, I  don't care about personal responsibility in this, I care about her magazine giving aid and comfort to American fascists through its supporting that list of things that Katha Pollitt gave, "The Washington Times, Breitbart, Seth Rich truthers and Donald Trump Jr.?" essentially a short list to stand in for American fascism as promoted by Vladimir Putin through his support of Donald Trump and his campaign.

I don't care if vanden Heuvel is doing that through affection for or absurd faith in her husband, Stephen F. Cohen, or if she's that deranged or corrupted or blackmailed, herself.   It's the results that matter, not who is, personally to blame for them or their motives in producing them.   As it is, under her The Nation is doing the same kind of thing I've criticized the ACLU for doing, even as they strike a pose of progressive resistance to the world-wide billionaire oligarchy they enable it far more effectively than they oppose it, often on some stand of "principle" which I think is mostly to provide them with public relations deniability that they're doing just what they're doing.   It's one of the things they apparently teach them at places like Princeton (vanden Heuvel) and Columbia (Cohen), how to come up with what sounds like ethical reasons to do immoral things.

As for the possibility that Cohen's insane advocacy of Putin's fascist, neo-Nazi promoting regime is a result of blackmail, one thing we know is that the Soviet government kept record of Cohen on his many trips to the Soviet Union over his lifetime, enough so that he was barred from the country during the Brezhnev era.   Whatever dirt they might have collected on him is certainly available to the KGB guy who became crime boss Czar and his buddies.

Frankly, I think Cohen was always nuts, anyone who thought that the intellectual thugs, Bukharin or Trotsky or, you name your fantasy alternative to Stalin would not have turned to a similar level of brutality and ruthlessness to produce some kind of Communism that wouldn't have discredited itself is silly.  Communism, itself, has produced the uniform result of brutality because that is the nature of anti-democratic political systems.  They must use brutality, murder, torture, terror, to gain and maintain power because most people don't like what they want to do.  Communism is the kissing cousin of fascism and Nazism, not its polar opposite, the polar opposite of all of those is egalitarian democracy, the only system that can achieve a peaceful, decent life because it is egalitarian and it is chosen by the majority of The People.  That Western and other intellectuals seem to gravitate to anti-democratic ideologies in such large number is a symptom of a deeper problem with modern intellectualism.  Snobbery.   The Nation, whatever else it has been, has been a forum for such intellectualism which also explains how it has been able to think so hard and have so little to show for it in actual change in reality.  If that were going to work, it would have worked fifty years ago, or earlier. Instead, things have steadily gotten worse as they pose and play.