If You Think I'm Going To Pass Up Pointing Out This Kind Of Corroboration, Think Again

This morning's e-mail includes a link to this New Yorker article by the estimable and heroic Masha Gessen about what sounds like a pretty bizarre commercial museum opened up in NYC that illustrates some of the things I talked about in one of my most recent posts.  The museum is New York’s new K.G.B. Spy Museum, which Gessen is quite qualified to review.  Her description of it, her point that Putin's gangster regime makes the issues she raises timely and a question she poses is exactly to the point of my post.

The new museum in New York resembles a museum one might find in Russia itself—the country that has been ruled by a former K.G.B. colonel for the past nineteen years, a place where the K.G.B. is not only glorified and romanticized but also simply normalized. In fact, this museum reminded me most of a small display I once saw in a Russian prison colony. Billed as a “Gulag museum,” it featured, among other things, items confiscated from inmates during barracks searches. In the absence of any historical or political context, everything becomes an exhibit. And, with enough cheer and an address in Chelsea, anything can be kitsch.

Imagine if the tyrant in question were not Joseph Stalin but Adolf Hitler. Imagine seeing a giant likeness of his head on a Manhattan sidewalk. Imagine a museum that offered people the option of dialling in to hear a speech by Hitler or Himmler, or invited them to be photographed in an S.S. uniform. It’s hard to imagine the Times giving such a museum an amused review, complete with a picture of the co-curators wearing Nazi uniforms.

The comparison between these two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century is not gratuitous—it is common in historical and political scholarship. And yet, for the American public, an entertaining presentation of what was probably the most murderous secret-police organization in history seems both unproblematic and commercially promising. It’s a peculiar thing to observe, particularly at a moment when Russia—and Russian espionage in particular—looms so large in the American imagination.

Something like that has been a feature of the atheist-secular pseudo-left for pretty much the entire time that the Soviet Union was up and running and, as can be seen in remnants in the secular-lefty media, it is an ongoing thing.  The Nation's scandalous behavior during and concerning the Putin regime's ratfucking of our elections, other so-called lefty magazines I've named and documented even some of the recent proclamations of the likes of Noam Chomsky * exhibit everything from collusion for money (the Communist Party documented as getting money from the Soviets) to willful dismissal of not only murder but suppression of every civil liberty that American communists whined about being denied in order to promote Stalinism here.

The secular-atheist left, to the extent that they have been part of this cover up, should be looked at with the same harshness that is used to look at Nazism and those parts of that history should be denounced and divorced from any future left. Anyone who downplayed the murder and oppression of  Communist regimes, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao, to Pol Pot, to the Kims is the moral and intellectual equivalent of Hitler apologists, they have the same moral and intellectual standing as David Irving.  That some of them have been anti-fascist while endorsing those who practiced a different form of the same thing is best seen as rival gangsters in rival crime families.   Mistaking Stalinists or Maoists as being anything like egalitarian democrats on the basis of their opposition to only one faction of gangsters was always stupid.  There's more than a world of difference between the alliance forced on FDR in WWII and the idiotic acceptance of Stalinism and, later, Maoism by people on the left, the American left has never been forced to accept such an alliance through the hardest of exigencies, it was suckered into it by the sob stories told by communists about how their rival gangsters in the American right got the upper hand on them.

There is a huge part of the romanticized, cinematic left that has to be left behind in shame because it is shameful.  It always has been and it always will be and it is a load of infectious crap that a real, egalitarian-democratic left can't carry into the future.  Anyone who wants to hold out in affection to their red-diaper upbringing or in affection for their beloved commie gramps and granny or their dear old professor or mentor is too friggin' stupid to keep around.  They'll only end up doing things like getting Trump in office.  They really don't mind that because their ideology really is more like his than it is egalitarian democracy, they are romantics for gangsterism of the past, not a future of equality.   I'd rather not lose that so that a bunch of people with "secular" or "free thinking" upbringings can promote their personal nostalgia in schlocky, sentimental movies and magazine pieces and as a framing for their "journalism".

* Amy Goodman is another one I can't listen to anymore.