Posted on 03/31/2003 2:25:52 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
NewsMax.com
Monday, March 31, 2003
Leftist Establishment Whitewashes Stalinists
The dire warnings in George Orwell’s "1984” are alive and well in the U.S.A. The leftist establishment is downplaying the word "communist” if not wiping it from the vocabulary.
Having been embarrassingly wrong all along about Soviet and worldwide communist intentions during the Cold War, the "respected” pillars of academia and communications are ignoring communist pasts or prettying up the records of campus speakers and old hard-line leftists who die.
In Sunday’s Washington Times, Arnold Beichman writes that Columbia University had invited Eric Hobsbawm, whom the university describes as a "noted British historian,” to speak today.
"What Columbia, my alma mater, isn’t telling the alumni,” Beichman writes, "is that Mr. Hobsbawm was and still to this day is an unregenerate defender of Joseph Stalin, one of the three greatest mass murderers of the 20th century," the other two presumably being Hitler and Mao.
Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, says Columbia ignores the record of "a man who joined and remained a Communist until there was no longer a Soviet Union.”
Further, the columnist adds, Columbia’s history department, which he credits with inviting Hobsbawm, "is headed by Professor Eric Foner, whose pro-Soviet career was dissected in sobering detail in the National Interest magazine last year.”
Hobsbawm is quoted as having said he had no other option than to be a communist because the Communist Party in the 1930s "was the only thing that offered an acceptable future,” notwithstanding the millions who died in that "experiment.” He answered in the affirmative when asked if the millions of people killed under communist rule "might have been justified” if the "radiant tomorrow” he envisioned had materialized.
Well, what can you expect from Columbia University, where lazy, fatcat professors vomit forth their anti-American hatred with abandon?
N.Y. Times Still Covers for Stalin
In Sunday’s New York Post, Frederic U. Dicker reported that "two once-prominent American Communists passed on in recent days; and reading the sanitized and adulatory obituaries in The New York Times, once can only say sadly, ’There they go again.’”
The two deaths in question were "Marxist historian” Herbet Aptheker, whose longtime membership in the Central Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A. was ignored, and novelist Howard Fast, who "was a Daily Worker regular and the 1953 winner of the Stalin Peace Prize.”
"Stalin Peace Prize"? How Orwellian!
The Times said Aptheker founded American Institute of Marxist Studies in New York in 1964. Not so.
Aptheker did not "found” the institute, according to Dicker, who says in his younger days he himself attended classes there. Rather, he says, the outfit was founded "on orders of and with money from, the Communist Party, and was located less than a block away from longtime CP national headquarters ...”
Aptheker once told Dicker that "he couldn’t ever imagine reaching a conclusion as an historian that contradicted Communist Party positions, because the CP had the best brains and the best analytical tools for finidng the truth.”
One of Aptheker’s sillier quotes, recalls Dicker,, was delivered at Long Island University’s Socialist Club, of which Dicker was then vice chairman: "If the ends don’t justifiy the means, what does?”
Howard Fast was a "talented” and "prolific” novelist, but also not "merely a CP [Communist Party] member, and his involvement with the Communists didn’t ‘become known’ [as the Times claimed] in the 1950s, when he was supposedly 'blacklisted.' Fast by his own admission was a longtime open Communist activist and propagandist.”
Well, what can you expect from the New York Times, which has never apologized for running years of propaganda for genocidal maniac Stalin?
The two weekend reports of glossing over or ignoring facts that are embarrassing to the left-wing establishment are an eerie reminder of George Orwell’s novels wherein such distortions occurred under Big Brother's watchful eye.
Don't buy "socialist, progressive, liberal, humanist," or any of the other euphemisms. If someone believes that he has a greater claim to the fruits of your labors than you do, he is a thief. If he is a government thief, he is a communist.
Amen!
"Don't buy "socialist, progressive, liberal, humanist," or any of the other euphemisms. If someone believes that he has a greater claim to the fruits of your labors than you do, he is a thief. If he is a government thief, he is a communist."Needs repeating.
I know this is a couple days old, but I just got back and saw it. Wow, that's a great quote. It should be posted all over college campuses.
In essence, I agree, but if you pardon the observation, this is why we're not winning. The Reds adopt, and the Reds have adopted. To call someone a "Communist", or a "communist" is so quaint, so 1955! Since Marxism has been thoroughly refuted and discredited, the Reds won't admit to it or to its neo versions or to anything that can be again discredited. They are "progressive" now, as in the highly esteemed Progressive Caucus in the United States Congress! This is the secret formula. Pal, you can never discredit "progress" can ya?! It's time for some new tactics, and don't axe me what they might be, I'm still thinking....
But changing the jacket doesn't change the man. A socialist is a progressive is a Bolshevik is a Wobbly is a Marxist is a Leftist is a communist.
My question is this: if communism is such a grand, redeeming philosophy, why are its disciples so afraid to admit what they are? Why do they feel the need to euphemize their doctrine, to coat it with more palatable rhetoric? Their very title is a lie, or at best, an evasion.
If my aunt "claims" to have balls, that don't make her my uncle!
My point is that we have to clearly demonstrate that "progressive" equals "communist." And that the opprobrium accorded that appellation is simply a rhetorical sidestep. I don't care if they call themselves Santa's Elves, their goals coincide with those of the Communist International and Karl Marx. Whatever color you paint them, they're still Red.
As to whether anyone can argue with "progress," you'd have to ask yourself how much progress the farmers in the Ukraine experienced when Joe Stalin slaughtered and starved millions of them. Or maybe they can explain how Cuba has "progressed" right into the 18th Century with Castro at the helm. And Mao's "progressive" purges certainly helped China reduce its excess population; another "Great Leap Forward."
Progress -- at least in the Left's definition -- has plenty of room for condemnation.
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.