Posted on 01/07/2004 1:16:12 AM PST by kattracks
The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College, no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that criticism of communism was the product of hysteria. His views resemble those of Hiss, and he's not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life.
Elements of farce have been threaded through the history of this issue since the 1940s. Half a century ago, the late Leslie Fiedler, who had a nasty way of stating truths many of us would rather have avoided, remarked on the peculiar double bookkeeping of those who defended accused Soviet spies. They somehow found it comfortable to say both "They didn't do it -- it's a frame-up!" and "After all, they had a right; their hearts were pure."
History has played out precisely according to Fiedler's script. American leftists insisted for decades that Hiss was falsely condemned. When a mountain of evidence proved the case against him (and many others), the defenders began suggesting that maybe spying actually didn't matter. In the pages of The Nation, the innocence of Hiss was proclaimed obsessively for four decades. When that position finally became untenable, Victor Navasky, long-time editor of The Nation and now also a Columbia journalism professor, asked: "Espionage, is it really so wrong?" (If he'd thought of that 25 years earlier, his writers could have been saved the trouble of producing all those Hiss-exonerating articles.)
In the 1990s the American historian Eugene Genovese, having turned against Communism, wrote: "In a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression, we broke all records for mass slaughter ... we have a disquieting number of corpses to account for." But many historians have worked hard to avoid that moral accounting. Their studied, purposeful evasion of reality is the subject of a persuasive study by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (Encounter Books).
Haynes and Klehr have written books on American communists as they appeared in the Soviet archives and in the intercepted Venona transcripts from the 1940s. But despite everything, many other historians persist in showing American communists as good-hearted, noble citizens who often sacrificed themselves for a great ideal. It's like the romantic myth of the Old South, Haynes and Klehr argue, an attempt to cast a favourable light on a despicable cause by arguing for the nobility of those who pursued it. Haynes and Klehr also compare these historians to Holocaust deniers who invent fanciful explanations for damning evidence and ignore inconvenient testimony.
Even when these historians accept the newly re-affirmed facts, they may retain their old prejudices. Haynes and Klehr quote Gerda Lerner of the University of Wisconsin, who confessed two years ago that as a Communist she "wanted the Soviet Union to be a successful experiment in socialist democracy and so I checked my critical facilities ... It is easy to see now, in hindsight, that that was a serious mistake, but it was not so easy to see it then." (Actually, it was, for those who were not brain dead; but that's another issue.) It goes without saying, but Lerner says it anyway, that she continues to despise the United States. The fact that the communists were wrong about everything doesn't mean that the Americans were right about anything.
Long ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy did American communists the enormous favour of setting himself up as their enemy. He stamped anti-communism with his personality (which on his very best days was unappetizing) and it has never freed itself from his smarmy embrace.
When a young reader of today encounters an anti-communist opinion uttered in 1950 or 1960, the word "McCarthy" suddenly appears before the reader's eyes and the opinion is immediately discounted. This emerges at its clearest in the arts. If a young art critic, working through Clement Greenberg's criticism, discovers that Greenberg turned violently against Stalinism, that seems to prove that Greenberg (rather than being intelligent) was an opportunistic Cold Warrior. Young movie critics receive with their mother's milk the view that those who testified against communists before congressional committees (even great artists, such as Elia Kazan) were villains, while the mostly mediocre film people persecuted by Congress were heroes and martyrs.
Because of McCarthy, passionate anti-communism came to be considered proof of embarrassing bad taste. People considered it small-minded, nasty and provincial, like McCarthy himself. This attitude has never really changed. Today, despite the revelations of its monstrous crimes, communism still has many hard-working academics on its side, now labouring, without much opposition, to provide the old-time admirers of Moscow with the retroactive moral upgrade they continue to believe they deserve.
Just Damn.
Think of all those votes for Gore.
Come to think of it, did you ever notice that liberal journos refer to their prebends as "Blue America"? When it would better be described as "Red/Pink/Contaminated America"?
In the words of my favorite singer...
(steely)
It goes without saying, but Lerner says it anyway, that she continues to despise the United States.
And yet she is teaching at an American University? This is wrong on so many levels, least of all that she just doesn't appear terribly intelligent and admits she has trouble in that area.
Great songwriters, but bigtime liberal scumbags.
Great songwriters, but bigtime liberal scumbags.
Yes, I knew the meaning of that phrase from My Old School. Didn't know they were libs, but it comes as no surprise.
Several lines in their music indicate that at least one of them (probably Fagen) is technology-aware. I'm thinking of the line in IGY:"On that train all graphite and glitter... undersea by rail...
(steely)
Stubborness on this account given all the evidence to the contrary that has surfaced after the fall of the Soviet Union is one indication of just how much a secular religion adherence to The Cause really was. But then I'm sure that campus was the very last place to lose adherents to the phlogiston theory, too.
It's much more serious and threatening than that. The people who effectively control our universities for the most part hate America. They are dedicated to destroying capitalism and this country. They still see Utopia where the rest of us see disasater. Consider this recent statement from Robin West who teaches constitutional law, no less, at Georgetown, speaking about our Constitution:
"The political history of the United States that culminated and is reflected in the constitutional text is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life. Why should we bind or constrain our political argument, to say nothing of our political choices, by texts produced by this history of ruthlessness; of brutality; and of mindless, infantile, and at times psychotic, numbing wrath."
These America-haters now have the power to exclude faculty that might present a different point of view. They've made significant progress toward accomplishing what 70 years of Soviet Communism did not.
I suggest you start with David Horowitz's book "The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future." When one sees the enormity of the problem as he lays it out, it becomes downright scary. That's especially true because very few people, even here on FR, understand clearly just what is happening and how. I lifted West's quote from his book and it's only one example from hundreds. This book explains just how old Lefties-Socialists-Communists-Fellow Travelers are bound together out of hatred toward America rather than any real belief they can do better. Our universities are radical cesspools.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.