Posted on 12/27/2005 7:31:22 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Why is it that liberals, progressives, leftists, humanists and the like seeking a brave new world for the rest of us often resort to lying or cheating to turn their vision into reality?
Upton Sinclair was the socialist author of The Jungle in 1906. He meant his book as an attack on what he and other socialists termed “wage-slavery” but the book’s main claim to fame was as an exposé of unsanitary practices in the meat processing industry. It was Sinclair’s sort of writing that President Theodore Roosevelt termed as “muckraking.”
Sinclair also wrote The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction book that attacked organized religion, as well as almost 90 other books, novels, pamphlets and tracts. Literary critic Alfred Kazin, himself a left-winger, described Sinclair as having “…a talent for facts, a really prodigious capacity for social research.”
Of interest to Californians was that Sinclair had run for Governor of California as a Socialist in 1926. He ran again as a radical Democrat in 1934 but lost badly in a highly contentious general election. He didn’t even earn the endorsement of President Franklin Roosevelt as the Democrat Party and the Socialist Party were distinct, but not quite yet without a difference as is the case today.
Upton Sinclair was, in many ways, the prototype for many leftist social activists to follow. Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) in all of his left-wing, hyper-commercial, self-promoting excess could be considered the ultimate evolutionary output of the line that began with Upton Sinclair (in Sinclair’s defense, he, at least, eventually disavowed Stalin).
Michael Moore is now widely known to consider facts as irrelevant to the case that needs to be made when attacking anything American and good. Thankfully, lies are more easily combated in today’s world of Internet communications than they were 50 or 100 years ago, which brings us back to Upton Sinclair.
Courtesy of a December 24 Los Angeles Times piece by Jean O. Pasco entitled, “Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Exposé” we see a more ancient example of the sort of ends-justify-the-means rationalization we’ve come to expect from the left.
In the piece, Pasco reveals a shocker: Sinclair withheld the truth about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two leftists who murdered two men while stealing money to finance their revolutionary activities.
The historical importance of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and its aftermath to the American left and their war on American institutions cannot be overstated.
Prominent left-wing attorney Fred Moore defended Sacco and Vanzetti during the widely covered 1921 trial. Moore politicized the trial, claiming that his clients’ leftist political convictions were the real reason for their arrest amidst the beginning of the Red Scare era. Despite this, the trail ended in a conviction for the pair.
Later, Fred Moore lost his enthusiasm after learning that his clients were truly guilty. The Italian murderers fired him.
Still, the American left continued to agitate over the lack of justice for Sacco and Vanzetti. Enter Stalin’s secret propagandist, Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg took up the cause in 1925 and raised over half a million dollars in the U.S. alone for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. Curiously, the committee only saw $6,000 as the remainder of the money went to bolster Soviet Communism by attacking American exceptionalism.
To weaken America in its fight against communism, Münzenberg knew he had to destroy one of America’s strongest weapons, the worldwide view of America as the land of opportunity. Münzenberg’s use of the Sacco-Vanzetti legal controversy was cast as an example of American right-wing imperialist persecution of the working class and it, and other cases like it, led to the disaffection of many American intellectuals. This, in turn, allowed the recruitment of Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss and others. Interestingly, Münzenberg underling Otto Katz was able, especially after the start of the Great Depression, to co-opt Hollywood resources for Stalin too.
By the time Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed in 1927 – a long six years by the standards of the day – the uproar over the perceived political nature of their conviction would lead 25,000 people to march in protest in Boston with additional demonstrations in the U.S., Europe and Latin America.
The conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was condemned by the ACLU. In 1977 then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis (the Democrat nominee for President in 1988) issued a proclamation asserting that Vanzetti and Sacco had been treated unjustly.
The aftermath of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair made it difficult to oppose Communist activity in America as liberals, backed by the ACLU, used the case as an example of American tyranny over the politically non-conforming and the poor. Thus, anyone registering genuine concern over treasonous left-wing activity would himself be attacked by the ACLU and its allies.
Known by historically-minded conservatives as “anti-anticommunism,” this crusading mindset by the left in America made the Cold War all the more dangerous by disarming a large segment of the American population to the notion that the Soviet Union and communism was a deadly enemy to be resisted. Instead, the theory of “moral equivalency” took hold, largely due to the efforts of people such as Upton Sinclair whose influential writings portrayed the United States as a bad nation with no standing to criticize the U.S.S.R., a socialist workers’ paradise.
Pasco’s piece lays bare Sinclair’s true role in promoting left-wing myths in America through his lying about Sacco and Vanzetti. In a recently uncovered 1929 letter from Sinclair to his attorney he wrote that Sacco and Vanzetti attorney Fred Moore “…told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.” Sinclair continued, “I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point. I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case.”
A later Sinclair letter comes into its full meaning in light of the newly discovered correspondence, “My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book,” Sinclair wrote to a friend who worked at the Socialist Daily Worker newspaper.
The book Sinclair was referring to was Boston, his fictional attack on the American system for how it treated Sacco and Vanzetti.
As the son of one of the group of Boston revolutionaries told Pasco, “They all lied. They did it for the cause.”
They all lied for the Cause.
Remember that the next time you see the heirs to this shameful legacy with their banners and bumper stickers trying to break our resolve in the face of evil. Their forefathers did their best to weaken America. They succeeded to a certain extent and we are still struggling with their shameful legacy. But, thankfully, the American ideal is strong and resilient and most Americans see these self-loathing fools for what they are: liars for an unworthy cause.
BTTT
Very good post. History.
Because that's all they have?
Well, some things never change. The ACLU was stirring up trouble at that time with Sarco and Vanzetti, defending communists and perverts etc. while the leftists closed ranks and present a united front.
You change the names of the lawyers and clients and it could have been written today regarding Tookie, Castro and Saddam.
If the left didn't lie, they would have near zero public support due to the proven outcomes of their policies.
As a note to you right wing socialists (compassionate conservatives) out there in the GOP today, stop imitating the left's tactics with your "free drugs for geezers", "family values don't stop at the border", and sucking up even more power for the government at the expense of liberty in the name of "public safety". I don't care if New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Atlanta get wiped off the map, all of those towns and people aren't worth forfeiting God-given liberties the American people have fought for and defended for 229 years. And both sides of the aisle should stop buying votes today with my childrens' and grandchildrens' money.
They believe unequivocally in "the ends justify the means" If the cause is justified, in their mind, any means necessary to achieve it is acceptable. Unfortunately for the rest of us their cause is the destruction of America.
excellent comparison between the left then and the left now
Not only that, they know damn well there's precious little fact, no sense, no humanity and no logic to their vision, so honest persuasion can never work, and they know it.
Agreed!
Absolutely. . .
. . .and of course, one cannot be a good 'Totalitarian' without being, first. . .a good 'Utilitarian'. . .
'Moral equivalency'. . .now the bedrock of Liberalism's political correctness. . .
Because that's all they have?
Sure. You lecture at colleges about racism, but have no concrete examples of it, so you vandalize your own car with racial epithets (and end up doing prison time for it). Or you're an anti-christian bigot (even though you're the chair of the religion-studies department at the local college), so you make a phony police report about some good ol' christian boys roughing you up on the side of the road. Or a couple of druggies kill you for drug money, but because you're gay the crime is framed as an anti-gay murder and you're turned into a martyr. Or...
bttt
The Lying Left, Then and Now, by Chuck Devore
This is a very good article. Good History. I just saw it in my January 9th Human Events newsweekly.
"Why is is that the left always resorts to lying and cheating?
Because that's all they have?"
Well, yes. But also, why not lie? If you don't believe in God, etc, why not lie?
Hitler perfected using the lie in politics. Not that the lie has never been used in politics before.
Viability.
Leftist ideology is underpinned by tenets which are constantly refuted by outcomes of their implementation. This means that lying, pretzel logic, subterfuge, revisionist history, and lately their most valuable tactic, CHANGING THE SUBJECT, are necessary to maintain and propagate.
Leftism rests on emotion, not logic; therefore viability and propagation can be maintained and fostered with mere rhetoric. What they say doesn't have to be true, it just has to be stated in order for the faithful to continue the willfull self-delusion.
Fine post. I'm going to "steal" it and use it on some others I have been argueing with on some other threads. They are using the same logic described in your post.
And they are pretending to be conservatives.
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