Where Did You Get the Money, Anne?

Without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we may never know to what extent cultural and intellectual life in the US was shaped by schemes and resources associated with powerful US Cold War elites. Thanks to scholars like Francis Stonor Saunders (The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters), Hugh Wilford (The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America), and a handful of resourceful academics, we can piece together a shameful story of knowing and unwitting collaboration with Cold War goals across and deep within the elite academic community; we know of the widespread compromise of key, influential figures in the media to the wishes of the Cold Warriors; and we better understand why some cultural and intellectual trends seemed to flourish while others were left to wither.

At the same time, we have learned more of the repression of dissent from the Cold War consensus. Facts have been uncovered that show that “McCarthyism” was more than a momentary lapse in democratic values. The post-war repression left scars that persist, thought patterns that remain frozen, intellectual and cultural roads that continue to be blocked.

For those who study this history, twentieth century intellectual pillars like Robert Conquest, George Orwell, and Isaiah Berlin are now diminished in stature. Their witting engagement with and sponsorship by secret services and the covert promotion of their ideas shatter any claim to the intellectual integrity of their widely influential work. While this tarnishing of Cold War icons is accepted by most academic specialists, the kept mainstream media continues to herald the “truths” disseminated by similarly kept Cold War intellectuals.

With the Cold War long over, the enduring chant of anti-Soviet demonology continues, but with a new generation of intellectual charlatans conjuring the demons.

The current flock of professional anti-Communists is equally adept at turning from its defamation of the Soviet Union to defaming capitalist Russia. It really comes down to serving up whatever its masters demand.

Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) and Anne Applebaum (Gulag: A History, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956) are two of the new breed of intellectuals who espouse views that uncannily coincide with the ideological needs of our ruling elites. As I wrote in March of last year, the two brought their arsenal of invective to smear the deposed Ukraine president Yanukovych, hail the violent, extreme-right opposition, and plant the evil Russians in their apologies for the Ukrainian coup.

While Snyder’s academic credentials convey “expert” standing on his pronouncements, Anne Applebaum has parlayed a master’s degree in international relations and a career in journalism to a widely celebrated place as the leading “scholar” of Soviet-era repression. It’s fair to see her as heir apparent to Robert Conquest, owning the privilege of making ex cathedra judgments of everything Eastern European.

August publications like The New York Review of Books welcome her every thought on Soviet history or modern Eastern Europe, as does nearly every other Western medium. Curiously, none pauses to weigh-- not to mention, to acknowledge—Ms. Applebaum’s marital tie to one of Poland’s more prominent anti-Russian, right-wing, and controversial politicians, Radoslaw Sikorski. Sikorski’s racist outbursts, his extravagant life style, and his virulent anti-Russian screeds cast no shadow over his spouse’s exalted status in the West.

Sikorski’s recent scandals involving corruption and financial mismanagement are widely reported in Poland, but unaddressed in the West. In the US, the Polish power couple (Applebaum has taken Polish citizenship) is viewed as a paragon of liberalism and integrity.

But thanks to the tenacious research of an expatriate US citizen named John Helmer, evidence has emerged that suggests that Applebaum, like her intellectual forbearers, has tasted of the forbidden fruit. Polish law requires that officials and spouses report incomes, reports that are publicly accessible. According to Sikorski’s 2014 report, Ms. Applebaum earned around $800,000 from non-Polish sources in 2013. Generously allowing for income from book royalties, her WaPo and Newsweek columns, and a salary from the Legatum Foundation in London, that leaves several hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for (Helmer estimates $565,000).

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the workings of a hidden hand, a hand grateful for Applebaum’s slavish support and promulgation of US and NATO foreign policy objectives in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

Wikileaks noted this interesting bump in income (Sikorski reported his wife’s earnings as $20,000 the prior year). Applebaum responded to Wikileaks with out-of-character discomfit and the intensification of her anti-Russia hysterics. She tweeted: “Wow! Assange now using fake/libellous slander from John Helmer, who fled US after being recruited by the KGB in 80s.”

There is nothing like a dose of red-baiting to deflect the question.

Whether Applebaum can explain this sudden bounty is uncertain. But one thing is certain: the Western media will never allow it to derail the war-mongering propaganda blitz targeting Russia.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Ukraine: War on the Horizon?

As I wrote elsewhere (http://mltoday.com/tragedy-in-ukraine), Ukraine is a great tragedy for the people. Caught in the web of imperial powers, many Ukrainians were seduced by the European Union and the US into collaborating in the overthrow of the elected government. While the US and European media depicted events as reflecting a yearning for Western values and culture, they conveniently sidestepped the questions of constitutionality and electoral legitimation. The fact that the former leaders of Ukraine came to power through mechanisms worshiped in the West as the foundations of civility and the rule of law counts for nothing in the carving up of spheres of influence.

Even at the last moment, when the Ukraine government struck a deal with the opposition favorable to the anti-government insurgents and guaranteed by the EU, the Western media ignored the blatant betrayal of that agreement and the complicity of the guarantors. Shamefully, the media masked the critical role of the hyper-nationalist, Jew-baiting fascists in the front lines of the opposition’s street fighters.

In the US, the intellectual courtiers-- the obsequious academics-- dutifully filled the airwaves and newsprint with tributes to the heroic, democracy-loving opposition. They assured us that the opposition represented exactly what the US State Department said they were. How convenient!

Before the coup against Yanukovych, the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum wrote a column (Ukrainian smears and stereotypes, 2-20-14) promising to explain the Ukrainian “crisis” to those who might foolishly believe an illegal coup was brewing (“the Ukrainian crisis can seem murky”). She mocks the language of those questioning the legitimacy of the opposition in Ukraine and paints the Russians with vulgar Cold War invective and Russo-phobia: “At the same time, those who throw these terms [“fascist” or “Nazi”] around should remember that the strongest anti-Semitic, homophobic and xenophobic rhetoric in this region is not coming from the Ukrainian far right but from the Russian press, and ultimately the Russian regime.” So if the Ukrainian right are fascists, we should overlook it because the Russians are worse. Tu quoque!

It is a measure of our times that the Washington Post, on whose editorial board she serves, fails to reveal that Applebaum is married to the Polish foreign minister and is herself a Polish national, relationships that link her with the regime most ardently supportive of the opposition.

Others will know her as the Pulitzer prize-winning author of numerous “histories” of the Soviet era, all marked by an unconcealed hostility towards socialism. Her zeal for damning every aspect of the Soviet experience has earned her a place in the hearts of old Cold Warriors and on the pages of such rabid anti-Communist publications as The New York Review of Books. Her newly found status as a major media gas bag of the Bill O'Reilly school of historiography has apparently not tarnished her intellectual reputation among liberals.

Reaching for the same stature, her colleague, Timothy Snyder, is equally notorious with his histrionic and unfortunately celebrated book, Bloodlands, another victim-counting effort meant to equate Hitler and Stalin. Like Applebaum, Snyder is among a newer generation of offspring of Robert Conquest, the Cold War hack who gathered anecdotes and inflated them into millions of deaths at the hands of “blood-thirsty Bolsheviks.” We now know from Soviet archives that Conquest's numbers were vastly exaggerated. We now know from further revelations that Conquest enjoyed sponsorship from US security agents in his efforts to rally gullible minds in the West. Unfortunately, no one with sufficient credentials and major media access will today counter the similarly inflated horror stories of Applebaum and Snyder.

But we can wonder why Amy Goodman would invite Snyder on her radio/TV show, Democracy Now! (2-24-14) for his opinion of events in Ukraine. From a promising beginning as a Left media voice, Goodman has too often given credence to those fawning after US imperial posture in her coverage of Eastern Europe, Libya, Syria and other imperialist ventures.

Predictably, Snyder mounts a vigorous defense of the opposition:

It [the opposition] included people from—included Muslims. It included Jews. It included professionals. It included working-class people. And the main demand of the movement the entire time was something like normality, the rule of law.

Strange that Snyder could paint such a diverse, liberal picture of the opposition from his perch at Yale University, particularly when Goodman's other guest, Professor Petro, reporting from his vantage point in Ukraine, depicted an opposition welded together by fervent Ukrainian nationalism. Interestingly, the opposition-in-power's first acts, as reported by Professor Petro, were to restrict local use of the Russian language and a resolution to outlaw the Communist Party-- hardly an endorsement of diversity or liberalism. Snyder did not dispute this claim.

And Snyder demonizes Yanukovych:

And the reason why this demand [for the rule of law] could bring together such people of different political orientations, such different regional backgrounds, is that they were faced up against someone, the previous president, Yanukovych, whose game was to monopolize both financial and political as well as violent power in one place. The constitution, the legitimacy of which is now contested, was violated by him multiple times, and most of the protesters agree to that.

What a tangled argument! Snyder charges the former Ukrainian president with seriously violating his constitution which is immediately dismissed as “contested”! Which is it? Inviolable or not?

Nor does his concern for constitutionality and the rule of law lead him to condemn the opposition for ignoring the constitutionally sanctioned mechanisms for removing a president. Yanukovych's alleged “monopoly” on violence fails to account for the street violence conceded by Western media through lurid pictures of masked “protesters” throwing fire bombs and attacking police. Snyder treats Goodman's listeners to a dose of propaganda rather than a truthful commentary.

Professor Petro gently challenged Snyder's account, returning again and again to the fanatical Ukrainian nationalism of the opposition. Snyder responded patronizingly:

Yeah, I mean, as Professor Petro probably knows, that’s the subject of my specialization. And, of course, I share his concern. Svoboda takes its example from the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, an interwar, extreme-right party which I would not hesitate to call fascist. The Pravi sector also refers to the same historical symbolism. Both of them speak of the necessity for a national revolution, especially Pravi sector. They are significant.

An honest “specialist” would note that the OUN was not merely extreme-right or even fascist, but made up of Nazi collaborators responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent Soviet civilians including much of the Jewish population. The OUN's equation of Judaism and Bolshevism invited its identification with the Nazi occupiers. One would think that Snyder's “specialization” in Eastern European history would demand that he call out the opposition on this point. At the very least, he should issue a demand to purge the coup-installed government of such elements. One would think, as well, that Amy Goodman would call out Snyder on this failing.

As Ukraine moves towards becoming the flash point of a regional or even broader war, my colleagues remind my of the similarities with Europe in 1914, with imperial powers elevating threats and demands, with a reckless empowering of forces beyond anyone's control, and with nativist sentiments rabidly unleashed.

Unfortunately, we lack a significant anti-imperialist front in most European countries and the US. Even Samuel Gompers, the reactionary leader of the AFL at the turn of the last century joined US writer Mark Twain and numerous other luminaries in founding a US Anti-Imperialist League. Today, our labor movement leaders are complicit in or silent on US meddling in Ukraine and numerous other countries. And US liberals, in all too great numbers, endorse US imperialism as a crusade for democracy and the vaunted “rule of law.” With peace so desperately needed, we lack a vibrant peace movement to counter the threat of war.

We must aggressively act to change this confusion and complacency before it is too late.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

“Eradicating the Bacillus”

In the US, the last few months have seen a host of celebratory salutes to, tributes to, and commentaries on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Serious research and thought were reflected in many, reminding us of both the sacrifices and achievements made by the workers of many nationalities who established the first sustained workers’ state, the USSR. Authors and speakers touched on many aspects of the Revolution and its rich legacy of fighting for socialism and ending imperialism.

Needless to say, little (or none?) of the victories of twentieth century socialism spawned by the Russian Revolution found its way into the monopoly media; the fete for the Bolshevik Revolution was held on alternative websites, by small circulation journals, and in small meeting halls and venues. This would neither surprise nor disappoint Vladimir Lenin; rather, it would conjure memories of the difficult and stubborn work of the small, often disputatious Russian Social Democratic Party in the years leading up to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the mainstream capitalist media had no commentary on the Russian Revolution. They did.

And it was relentlessly and uniformly negative. No warm words of any kind were spared for Russian workers of 1917 and their cause. In fact, in a year when the media and its wealthy and powerful collaborators decided to resurrect the spectre of Soviet Russia in a new, hysterical anti-Russia campaign, moguls mounted a lurid, anti-Communist campaign unseen since the Cold War.

The New York Times unleashed their rabid neo-McCarthyite commentator (Communism Through Rose-Colored Glasses), Bret Stephens, to spew his venom and unsparingly and gratuitously denounce anyone that he could even remotely connect with the Revolution, from those wearing “Lenin or Mao T-shirts” to Lillian Hellman. Progressives, Jeremy Corbyn, and, predictably, Bernie Sanders are condemned, part of the “bacillus” yet to be “eradicated,” to reference his clumsy, vulgar paraphrase of Winston Churchill. They, like any of us who find any merit at all in the Soviet experience, are “fools, fanatics, or cynics.”

Then there was the nutty Masha Gessen-- the favorite of NPR’s resident bootlicker to wealthy patrons, Scott Simon-- who analyzes the Soviet experience in a strange brew of mysticism and psycho-babble. Even The Wall Street Journal reviewer of her new book (The Future is History) concedes that she “puts forth a[n]... argument full of psychospeak about ‘energies’ and an entire society succumbing to depression.” He goes on: “She begins with the dubious assertion that one of Soviet society’s decisive troubles derived from the state prohibition against sociology and psychoanalysis, which meant the society ‘had been forbidden to know itself.’”

“Dubious” assertion? Or whacky assertion?

But Gessen will always be remembered for embracing the term “Homo Sovieticus,” a term that will undoubtedly prove attractive to those mindlessly active in the twitter universe.

For reviewing Gessen’s book, reviewer Stephen Kotkin had the favor returned with a glowing review in The Wall Street Journal of his book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941. Joshua Rubenstein-- himself the author of another catalogue of Stalin’s evil, The Last Days of Stalin-- engages the usual verbal histrionics: “despotism,” “violent and catastrophic,” “ruthlessness and paranoia,” “draconian,” “remarkable cruelty,” “calamitous,” “crimes,” “ideological fanaticism.” These, and other shrill descriptions, pile up in a mere ten paragraphs. Rubenstein clearly reveals his anti-Soviet bias when he describes Soviet aid and assistance to the elected Spanish anti-fascist government in 1936 as an “intervention.” The interveners were the Italian and German fascists; the Soviets were, unlike the Western “democracies,” the only opponents of intervention.

Kotkin’s service to the WSJ and the anti-Soviet cause were rewarded with a long op-ed piece in the Journal in the weekend Review section (November 4-5, 2017). The Princeton and Stanford professor tackled the topic, The Communist Century, with great vigor. He sets the tone with the dramatic claim that ...communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.”

The victims-of-Communism numbers game was elaborated and popularized by Robert Conquest, a writer whose career overlapped on numerous occasions with the Cold War propaganda efforts of the UK Information Research Department, the US CIA, and the CIA’s publishing fronts. Conquest owned the estimate of 20 million deaths from the Soviet purges of the late 1930s. At the height of the Cold War, this astounding figure met no resistance from “scholars” at elite universities. Indeed, every schoolgirl and schoolboy in the crazed, rabid 1950s “knew” of the tens of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges.

Unfortunately for Conquest (though he never acknowledged it) and the many lemming-like academic experts, the post-Soviet archives revealed that his numbers were vastly inflated. In fact, they had no relationship whatsoever to the actualities of that nonetheless tragic period.

Kotkin’s claimed 65 million victims of Communist misdeeds should, accordingly, be taken with less than a grain of salt, though it is curiously and mysteriously well below the endorsed estimate of his mentor, Martin Malia. Malia, the author of the preface to the infamous Black Book of Communism (1994), endorsed that sensationalized book’s claim that 94 million lives were lost to Communism. Some contributors to the Black Book retracted this claim, noting that it was arrived at by an obsession with approaching the magic number of 100 million victims. They subsequently “negotiated” (or manufactured) a tally between 65 and 93 million. Such is the “rigor” of Soviet scholarship at elite universities.

Kotkin, like most other anti-Communist crusaders, gives away the numbers endgame, the purpose behind blaming uncountable victims upon Communism. For the arch-enemies of Communism like Conquest and the participants in the Black Book, it is imperative that Communism be perceived as equally evil with or more evil than Nazism and fascism. This charge of moral equivalence is targeted at the liberals who might view Communism as a benign ally in the defense of liberal values or social reforms. No one has done more to promote this false equivalency than Yale professor Timothy Snyder with his shoddy, ideologically driven book, Bloodlands.

Of course, the Washington Post also has its resident guardians of anti-Soviet dogma in Marc Thiessen and the incomparable Anne Applebaum. Applebaum has enjoyed a meteoric career from graduate student to journalist covering Eastern European affairs to the widely acknowledged leader of anti-Soviet witch-hunters. Her marriage to an equally anti-Communist Polish journalist-turned-politician further strengthened her role as the hardest charging of the hard-charging professional anti-Communists. Her consistent work denouncing everything Soviet has earned her a place on the ruling class Council of Foreign Relations and the CIA’s “active measure,” the National Endowment for Democracy.

She “celebrated” the Bolshevik Revolution on November 6 with a several-thousand-word Washington Post essay raising the feverish alarm of a return of Bolshevism (100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.) Applebaum repeats a favorite theme of the new generation of virulent anti-Communists: the events of November 1917 were a coup d’etat and not a revolution. Of course, this claim is hard to square with another favorite theme-- the Bolsheviks numbered only two to ten thousand followers. How do you reconcile such a tiny group “overthrowing” the government and the security forces of the fourth most populated empire in the world?

The Bolsheviks lied. Lenin was a liar. Trotsky was a liar. “So were his comrades. The Bolsheviks lied about the past… and they lied about the future, too. All through the spring and summer of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin repeatedly made promises that would never be kept.” Further, Lenin’s henchmen used the “tactics of psychological warfare that would later become their trademark” to mesmerize the population. That same easily charmed population was to later fight for socialism against counter-revolutionary domestic reaction and foreign intervention in a bloody five-year war (1917-1922), the same supposedly easily tricked population that laid down their arms and refused to fight for the Czar or his “democratic” successors. This neat picture of perfidy surely exposes a belief in both superhuman, mystical powers possessed by Lenin and an utter contempt for the integrity and intelligence of the Russian masses.

But it is not really the historical Bolsheviks who are Applebaum’s target, but today’s “neo-Bolsheviks.”

And who are the “neo-Bolsheviks”?

For Ms. Applebaum, they are everyone politically outside of her comfortable, insular world of manners and upper-middle class conservatism. First and foremost, she elects to smear the social democrats in Spain and Greece, along with Jeremy Corbyn, who may consider “bringing back nationalization.” Similarly, their US counterparts “on the fringes of the Democratic Party” (Bernie Sanders!) are condemned because they embrace “a dark, negative version of American history” and “spurn basic patriotism and support America’s opponents, whether in Russia or the Middle East.” (Sadly, my social democratic friends will likely not allow these ravings to shake their confidence in Applebaum’s equally inane pronouncements on Communism.)

But the “neo-Bolsheviks” exist on the right as well! She identifies them as those rightists who “scorn Christian Democracy, which had its political base in the church and sought to bring morality back to politics…” “If some of what these extremists [on the right] say is to be taken seriously, their endgame-- the destruction of the existing political order, possibly including the U.S. Constitution-- is one that the Bolsheviks would have understood.” In Applebaum’s bizarre world, there are Bolsheviks of both the left and right lurking under our beds! Safety is only found in the bosom of Christian democracy, that post-war artifact cobbled together by the Western powers to counter the parliamentary rise of Communism.

The anti-Communist graffiti artists, the professional defacers of the Soviet legacy, are legion. Books and commentaries by others, like Victor Sebestyen, Serhii Plokhy, Douglas Smith, Svetlana Alexievich, Amy Knight, and Catherine Merridale, join the authors reviewed here in churning out new grist for the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet mill.

With many Soviet sources now available, the practice of Cold War defamation has become a riskier business, an enterprise possibly bringing embarrassment to the most outrageous fabricators. Accordingly, the most sophisticated among the new generation of Cold Warriors have turned in a new direction: the 1930s famines in then Soviet Ukraine. With little risk of exposure and eager cooperation from the virulently anti-Communist, extreme nationalists now installed to govern Ukraine, they have started a new victim-numbers race to rally the cause of anti-Communism, a new narrative of Red wickedness.

Applebaum is right about one thing. There is evil in the air.

But it is the vicious slander of everything Red, especially the legacy of the Soviet Union.

Greg Godels (Zoltan Zigedy)

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Scoundrel Time-- Again?

A constant of life in the US has been an unrelenting diet of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism. Even before the Big Mac, children in the US were force-fed lurid stories of Soviet horrors, labor camps, and political liquidations. Popular magazines like Coronet, Readers’ Digest, Look, and Life were a constant source of tales recounting the cruelty and inhumanity of Soviet Communism just as their modern counterparts spew scorn upon Muslims.

Academics and other intellectuals built a scholarly foundation for the popular imagery, allowing media to forego the journalistic niceties of seeking corroboration or entertaining counter-claims—the evils of Communism became articles of faith. We were only to learn later what some suspected, that the much of the academic and intellectual construction was generously funded by the CIA and other government agencies.

After the demise of the Soviet Union and a world-wide retreat from Communism, the anti-Communist campaign took a strange twist. Despite the expected triumphal chest-beating, the most hysterical, wild-eyed anti-Soviet intellectuals like Robert Conquest were thoroughly discredited by newly released archival information. Their victim number-mongering proved wildly and recklessly inflated.

Paradoxically, a new breed of scholar of Soviet history, while not necessarily endorsing the Soviet project, used the evidence to construct an account of Soviet history that cast aside the demonic caricature for a more rational, persuasive depiction of the forces shaping Soviet behavior and development. While these scholars had little influence on the popular vulgar misconceptions, they were able to carve out a significant, credible, but marginal, niche in academic circles.

Though funding for hard-core anti-Communists surely declined after the Cold War, anti-Sovietism still found a happy nest in the academy and with old Cold War publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. The latter publication even softened its hard-line support for Israel while maintaining and even intensifying both its demonizing of the Soviet Union and its hatred of China and Cuba. Perhaps it is anxiety over Eastern European opinion polls that show nostalgia for the old system; perhaps the editors fear a rebirth of Marxism in the face of the persistent global economic crisis. Whatever the motive, the NYRB happily assumed the burden of keeping anti-Soviet hysteria alive and fostering a new generation of anti-Soviet writers.

The NYRB can take much credit for promoting three figures who are twenty-first-century incarnations of the Cold War intellectual: Anne Applebaum, Orlando Figes, and Timothy Snyder. All three review and lavish praise on each others’ works; all three breath the thin air of the most elevated of public intellectuals; and all three harbor a boundless hatred of all things Soviet. Applebaum’s signature work is on the Soviet penal system, an exposition sufficiently lurid to launch an otherwise undistinguished career and earn a vaunted position as a Washington Post columnist. Her ties by marriage to Polish officialdom causes no pause to Western intellectuals who see no conflict in the long standing animus of post-Soviet Polish elites towards Russia and the Soviet era.

The latest to rise above the crowd of anti-Soviet intellectuals is Timothy Snyder, whose Bloodlands enjoys fame by paralleling Soviet “atrocities” to those of the Third Reich. Snyder both trivializes the horrors of Nazism and scandalizes the legacy of Soviet achievement by pressing equivalency between Nazi brutal and calculated inhumanity and Soviet desperate and dogged resistance. Even more than the others, Snyder tosses around victim numbers with little or no attribution, numbers that are curiously and suspiciously rounded.

But now the anti-Soviet nest has been further fouled by Orlando Figes. Of the anti-Soviet triumvirate, Figes is perhaps the most celebrated, with several books, movie and theater adaptations, and radio and television performances. His books have enjoyed translation into over twenty languages and he has won numerous literary prizes. Wide acclaim has made him arguably the most respected and authoritative of the anti-Communist Soviet experts.

Despite the acclaim, and thanks to recent revelations by Stephen F. Cohen and Peter Reddaway in The Nation magazine, Figes’ reputation has been fatally shattered (at least with those who still maintain a measure of intellectual integrity).

Reddaway and Cohen take us back some years when Figes was winning several distinguished literary prizes. At that time, a number of established scholars of Soviet history found “shortcomings,” “borrowing of words and ideas…without adequate acknowledgment,” “messed up references…,” etc. One scholar asserts that: “Factual errors and mistaken assertions strew its pages more thickly than autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.” Of course shoddy scholarship has never stopped the anti-Soviet bandwagon once it gathers momentum.

Then there was the rather indecent matter of Figes launching anonymous attacks against books by other authors through his online reviews on Amazon while praising his own work. If that wasn’t sleazy enough, he denied doing it until forced to deliver a confession. Still, the bandwagon rolled on.

Ironically, it is his Russian sources that finally deflated his overblown reputation. Figes’ most celebrated book, The Whisperers, allegedly drew on interviews and memoirs of Soviet citizens collected by a Russian NGO, the Memorial Society. While the English language edition drew the highest praise in the gullible “tell-me-a-tale-of Soviet-perfidy” West, the book failed to find a publisher in Russia. Thanks to Cohen and Reddaway we know that the book can’t get published in Russia because it “would cause a scandal…” The Memorial Society itself reviewed the book against its primary sources and concluded that there were too many “anachronisms, incorrect interpretations, stupid mistakes and pure nonsense.” One of the leading lights of the Memorial Society noted that Figes was “a very mediocre researcher…but an energetic and talented businessman.” The fact that so many “experts” and “intellectuals” were snookered by Figes says much about the standards and biases of Soviet studies in the West.

I cannot leave this bizarre and pathetic tale without noting that one of Figes chief promoters, the New York Review of Books, published a flattering review of Figes’ latest book in its June 21 issue. Michael Scammell, one of the lesser lights in the journal’s anti-Soviet stable, devotes numerous column inches of fulsome praise for the book while concluding with a brief “caveat” outlining Figes’ sins. Scammell declares The Whisperers a “masterpiece” while noting that the Memorial Society found “dismaying discrepancies” in the book (he buries the Cohen/Reddaway charges in a footnote). One wonders if Scammell would show the same tolerance for an undergraduate student.

Yes, it's scoundrel time, again.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

It’s Back!!!

Red-baiting lives!

Actually it never waned. Like most evils, it lurks in the shadows and under rocks until it is called on again to serve the rich and powerful. Like racism, red-baiting is a tool of division and distraction. It is designed to separate those who are weak or wavering from those determined to change a malignant political and social system. Red-baiting harnesses fear to tarnish those seeking social justice. Red-baiters sow cynicism, dampen ardor, nurture doubts and dissolve unity.

A renewed and virulent strain of anti-Communism has surfaced in the US, stretching from the imbecilic film Red Dawn to the rabid media bashing of Oliver Stone’s ten-part television series, The Untold History of the United States.

Red Dawn, currently showing in hundreds of theaters, has grossed over $31 million in revenue through December 2. Based on a moronic plot of an invasion of the Pacific Northwest by troops of the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Korea, the movie postures young patriots as forging a resistance movement against their Asian aggressors. Only in Hollywood could writers craft a plot that features a relatively poor country of twenty-five million people mounting a naked, distant aggression against the most economically powerful country in history with well over ten times the population. What next, an invasion of the Southwest from Nicaragua?

Oh, sorry, that movie was made in 1984! Actually, the current Red Dawn, found its dubious inspiration in the Reagan-era movie with the same title and an equally virulent commitment to red-baiting. We have John Milius, and his equally demented Hollywood colleagues, to thank for the fear-mongering of Red Dawn I.  Screenwriter/Director Milius bears responsibility for such stupid --though less politically dishonest – movies like Magnum Force and Conan, the Barbarian. But where those movies only enshrined ugly politics and employed right-wing icons, Red Dawn I advanced the political agenda of US imperialism and crudely served to prod domestic reaction. At a time when the struggle for international peace and détente was at a critical juncture, the film was heartily welcomed by opponents of rapprochement.

Today, Red Dawn II emerges not as a counterforce to the left, but as a pre-emption of a feared rising of the left. Even with most of the US left’s leaders chained to the Democratic Party or mired in opportunism, the rich, the powerful, and their minions recognize that the profoundly wounded economy and the dysfunctional political system provide both the seeds and fertile soil for a powerful peoples’ movement. And they hope to pollute it with red-baiting before any sprouts arise. Even with its crude, wildly implausible plot, Red Dawn II is meant to discredit any “red” or even “pink” movement before it matures.

Likewise, Oliver Stone’s new TV series on Showtime has been met with furious bashing on the part of the professional anti-Communist toadies of the mainstream media. Setting out to correct the “official” high school civics class histories of the Cold War period, Stone and his historian collaborator, Peter Kuznick, produced a ten-part serial that challenges knee-jerk anti-Communism and seeks to balance the slanders of Cold Warriors. The Untold History of the United States proposes a counter history, an account built around a number of “what ifs…” that chart a different historical trajectory absent a rapacious and predatory military-industrial complex and a destructive CIA.

Of course this does not set well with the rabid guardians of the anti-red canon. As Peter Kuznick chronicles in a recent appeal to Historians Against the War, the red-baiters are out in force.

Ronald Radosh – famous for crafting a career from equating Reds or “fellow travelers” with NKVD or MVD agents—makes an astonishing leap to connect Stone and Kuznick to the long-departed Soviet security agencies. He claims to detect similarities just short of plagiarism (leaving his claim just short of libelous) between The Untold History and a book by the late Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends. To square his circle, Radosh proffers that Marzani “…told this very story in We Can Be Friends. A secret member of the American Communist party who had worked during the war in the OSS, Marzani later was proved by evidence from Soviet archives and Venona decryptions to have been a KGB (then the NKVD) operative. His book was published privately by his own Soviet-subsidized firm. It was the first example of what came to be called “Cold War revisionism.”

Thus, by association—a favorite tactic of red-baiters—Stone/Kuznick becomes linked to the KGB through the alleged operative, Carl Marzani. Others have shown how fast and loose Radosh has toyed with the charges of “operative” or “agent” based on the thin evidence of “association.” But Marzani’s “secret” or open identification with Communism in 1952 is of no relevance to the truth conveyed by We Can Be Friends or The Untold History. Marzani argues for the following:

The next step to peace is to sit down around a conference table and negotiate. Negotiations, it should be emphasized, do not require friendship. Negotiators can sit down unsmiling and bargain grimly, yet both sides are aware that a settlement must be reached. (p.369)

If Marzani’s simple, but sane formula for improving US/Soviet relations was inspired by the NKVD, then credit to the NKVD!

We Can Be Friends was published by Topical Book Publishers. For those Reds with something to say in 1952, self-publication was often the only route. In the teeth of McCarthyite repression, leftists could not get mainstream publishers to even consider their manuscripts. Outside of the exceptional renegade publishers like Cameron and Associates, left-wing authors were forced to turn to funding a few hundred copies, as did Howard Fast with his now celebrated historical novel, Spartacus. The dark ages of the 1950s were certainly made brighter, if it was necessary for the NKVD to subsidize these fine books!

The quality of Radosh’s scholarship can be judged by his emphatic claim that We Can Be Friends “…was the first example of what came to be called ‘Cold War revisionism.’” A casual glance at my tattered old copy reveals a bibliography that cites earlier writers like Frederick L. Schuman and I. F. Stone who decisively rejected the Cold War canon well before Marzani’s book arrived on the scene.

Following Radosh’s lead, other rabid anti-Communists like Michael Moynihan joined the fray in attacking Stone and Kuznick. And to its shame, The New York Times unleashed its slime merchant hireling, Andrew Goldman, to mount a bizarre ad hominem against Oliver Stone. Goldman had just served his four-week suspension for publicly inquiring of two female interlocutors whether they had slept their way to the top of their professions. Sadly, this attack well represented the level of integrity shown by most of these ruling class courtiers.

To these professional red-baiters must be added the host of professors who peddle lurid books on the “Evil Empire.” Most active is Anne Applebaum, journalist turned academic, who authors books portraying the Soviet and socialist Eastern European experience as wholly oppressive and thoroughly unpopular. Her current book, Iron Curtain, enjoys wide circulation and copious publicity from the corporate media. Applebaum’s ideological bias (her husband is Minister of Foreign Affairs in the ultra-nationalist Polish government) and selective scholarship are seldom challenged by her colleagues.

Applebaum’s work indirectly suggests that Soviet “evil” is on a par with Nazi evil or, as she and her ilk crudely put it, “Stalin’s crimes were the same or worse than Hitler’s crimes.” Yale professor, Timothy Snyder, shares no such hesitation. His popular book, Badlands, boldly embraces the equation of Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, his current career seems based upon his widely speculative, broadly calculated, and poorly evidenced victim calculation. For Snyder, there would seem to be no natural deaths in the Soviet Union or socialist Eastern Europe. In his energetic counting, victims of the Warsaw insurrection in 1944, urged by the Polish government-in-exile to rise, arguably belong on the Soviet side of the ledger since the Red Army didn’t rescue them. Of course the victims of natural famines are also laid at the Soviet doorstep. Snyder pursues his head counting with an almost perverse determination and a theological certainty.

The revival of open and widespread red-baiting is ignored by liberals at their own peril. Like the inquisitions of old, the immediate object may be the dissidents, the ideological deviants, but the real design is to terrorize the majority into submission and conformity. In the US, anti-Communism and its counterpart, racism, directly target ideological and ethnic minorities, but prove to be of even greater use in fracturing, distracting, and deluding the majority. Rampant racism and rabid anti-Communism serve the rich and powerful well by closing avenues to unity and social justice. Surely the red-baiting charges of “socialism” leveled at right-centrist Obama underline this point and send a clear message to liberals of the dangers lurking in accommodating the alarm of “Reds!” 

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Human Rights and iPhones

I have read The New York Review of Books off and on for forty years. Generally, I take it to be an easy way to follow trends in US liberal thinking. It stands as a bridge between prominent academics and a self-conscious educated, elite class. For some, it is the source for the last word in cocktail party discussions. For others, it is a channel to drift arcane, scholarly controversies towards a larger audience.

Throughout the forty years, the publication has sustained a narrow ideological range of centrist liberal thought – one conjures a picture of a reader ready to defend the Volvo, The New York Times, and the travel agency against all threats, foreign and domestic.

Running through those forty years like a thick thread is a relentless, rabid streak of anti-Communism. Early on, Robert Conquest railed against the evils of the Soviet Empire, supported by academics of the same Hoover Institute ilk. This surely didn’t separate the NYRB from the many other publications favored by liberal elites.

Later, with détente softening the Cold War hysteria, the NYRB continued to hold to a hard-line, “Scoop” Jackson version of Soviet-US relations, taking up the cause of Soviet Jews and other “dissidents.”

Similarly, those who rejected the “revisionist” US historians - historians who had taken a more measured, less demonizing view of the Communist Party USA - always found a willing partner in the NYRB.

With the departure of the Soviet Union, liberal attention turned away from the Red threat, only to find a new demon to flog in Islamic fundamentalism. Yet throughout the post-Soviet era, the NYRB continued to pound away at anything even vaguely associated with socialism or Communism. Venezuela came in for its share of battering. And of course, Cuba stayed solidly in the cross-hairs of the NYRB stable of writers. The most signal accomplishment of the NYRB in this period was to help elevate an obscure anti-Soviet academic, Anne Applebaum, into a prominent public intellectual devoted to the NYRB anti-Communist mission, a worthy successor to Robert Conquest.

The weapon of choice in attacking everything Soviet or Communist was and is the puffed up, self-righteous liberal ideological pillar: human rights. With US legal segregation removed in the third quarter of the 20th century, the last formal contradiction with 18th century bourgeois rights theory was removed as a thorn in the side of US liberalism. Finally, North Americans and their European friends could, without naked hypocrisy, tout the two-hundred-year-old doctrines that closed the door on feudalism and opened the way for the capitalist order. While new, expanded versions of human rights doctrine were proposed – versions that reflected new concerns, deprivations, and oppressions identified since the 18th century – most US liberals cling to the narrow interpretations constructed with the rise of a comfortable, cosmopolitan bourgeois class and its aspirants. Not surprisingly, the rights recognized by liberals are precisely the rights that they find most useful in their own pursuit of happiness.

Human rights organizations and campaigns exploded with the course of the Cold War and its aftermath. Nearly all reflected a naïve cultural crudeness and historical myopia, imposing standards on others that ignored historically and culturally shaped practices enjoying popular support or consensus. Many, if not most, received overt or covert support from Western governments that shaped the focus and intensity of their human rights campaigns. Neither the will of the people nor the taint of government manipulation was daunting to these campaigns.

The human rights organization favored by The New York Review of Books is Human Rights Watch, an organization that grew out of Helsinki Watch, the old Cold Warrior set up to ferret out human rights violations in the Soviet Union. Today, enjoying a generous $44 million budget, with nearly all revenue coming from the US and Western Europe, the organization has offices throughout the world and generous salaries for its directors. Its deputy director for the Americas, Daniel Wilkinson, was thrown out of Venezuela some years ago for aiding the foreign policy initiatives of the Bush administration.

In a recent article in NYRB entitled “The New Challenge to Repressive Cuba,” Wilkinson takes up the cause of Cuban bloggers who, by his account, are challenging “repressive” Cuba. But where are they mounting this challenge, since he concedes that few in Cuba read the blogs? Clearly, their audience is drawn from those who follow the bloggers in the US and Western Europe, those likely to draw a negative opinion of Cuban life apart from any direct exposure to the facts. There is not even a feeble attempt in the article to substantiate the picture drawn by “dissident” bloggers. Their claims stand as unvarnished “truths.” It would be as though a human rights campaign were mounted solely on the basis of the blogs of our own hysterical tea-baggers. In reality, Wilkinson presents not a report on Cuban conditions, but second- and third-hand anecdotes of those in opposition to the Cuban system. This is the work of a politically driven prosecutor and not an unbiased human rights advocate.

And who are the bloggers? Only those who write critically of the Cuban government are worthy of his attention. While he claims that there are over a hundred “unauthorized” bloggers operating from Cuba, Wilkinson only shows interest in the “at least two dozen who are openly critical of the government.” The remainder remains voiceless and its opinions are ignored. Wilkinson, like most of the corporate media, focuses on Cuba’s celebrity dissident, Yoani Sanchez, known as Generation Y. With the help of US and Western European media attention, Sanchez has established a huge following outside of Cuba, estimated by Wilkinson at a million visitors a month; her blog is translated into fifteen languages. It is not unlikely that Sanchez has a greater media exposure – a wider range of influence – outside Cuba than any Cuban “official” publication. Wilkinson (or Sanchez) never ask or explain how this could be or what this means. But surely – short of divine intervention – such a following is not possible without the overt or covert help of others of more than modest means. Only the most gullible would not suspect the hand of those committed to changing the socialist governance of Cuba. It is one thing to stand in open opposition to the Cuban government and quite another to hypocritically hide behind a posture of unbiased support for human rights.

To many of us, especially those of us blogging critically of our own government, the celebrity of the handful of Cuban bloggers so often hailed by the human rights establishment stands in sharp relief to our own lack of attention from those same advocates. They seem to have a profound blindness to the criticisms and human rights violations voiced on thousands of blogs in the US and Western Europe. Those same advocates fail to acknowledge the marginalization of opinion by a monopoly capitalist media as de facto censorship in the US and Western Europe. Moreover, our experience with this de facto censorship teaches that one does not become an overnight, world-wide media sensation without the help of a hidden hand.

Lurking in the shadows of the Wilkinson assault on “repressive” Cuba is the conceit of great-power chauvinism. Wilkinson willfully underplays the material shortcomings of a tiny island country saddled with a blockade that has hindered its development and a legacy only fifty years free from the most exploitative of colonial relations with the US. While the Cuban government has readily admitted that it lacks the means to bring its citizens fully into the Internet era, Wilkinson seeks to add this shortcoming to the human rights balance sheet.

One can only marvel at a “human rights” advocate who so cavalierly poses the interests of an admitted “at least two dozen” bloggers before the will and interests of the Cuban people. Do they share Wilkinson’s and the bloggers’ views? We do not know. Not only because our government will not let us travel there, but also because Wilkinson never bothers to ask them. It is possible – I believe it is extremely likely – that most Cubans are not only content with, but energetically supportive of, their government. This most basic of human rights –the right to have a government legitimized by popular consent – seems to elude the deputy director of Americas Watch. No doubt he scoffs at any popular government that does not agree with his own narrow vision of procedural democracy. Political diversity does not appear to be an element of Wilkinson’s notion of human rights.

There is no mention in Wilkinson’s article of the generous budget set aside by the US Congress (not to mention the secret and quasi-governmental budgets) for the express purpose of overthrowing the Cuban government. There is no comment on the activities of the US Interest Section in Havana directed towards fomenting and subsidizing opposition. One would never know that many of the so-called “political prisoners” were prosecuted for acts that any judicial system would count as acting to overthrow the government and in the interest of a foreign power. In Wilkinson’s eyes, they are political prisoners. And yet, he cannot even mention the plight of the five Cuban patriots judicially railroaded in the US for acts that would be hailed by any true human rights advocate as thwarting terrorism. Hypocrisy on stilts…

Wilkinson ends his “challenge” to Cuba with a truly pathetic paean to the iPhone attributed to Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y: “I had the desperate desire to grab [the Spanish journalist’s] iPhone and run off with it to hide in my room and surf all the sites blocked on the national networks. For a second, I wanted to keep it so I could enter my own blog…”

If this is the cutting edge of the struggle for human rights, it is no wonder that they ran Wilkinson out of Venezuela.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Fascism: What’s in a Word?

The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist. 

Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.  

Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….

Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme disapproval-- a kind of expletive.

A problem arises when the claimant-- the person using the word-- has something more definite in mind, something more exacting. A problem arises when the user of the word intends to draw an association with the real, historically concrete phenomena of fascism that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and rose tragically to ravage and terrorize nearly the entire world. 

The idea that people or organizations are preparing to organize Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silver Shirts or whatever to intimidate or overthrow conventional political processes is understandably reprehensible. But to conjure such an image in order to influence the political process, though without sufficient warrant, is misleading.

In a highly charged political context, it is not only misleading, but also unhelpful, and even incendiary.

Even a policy as sanctified by much of the left as the New Deal has been called fascist, proto-fascist, or fascist-tinged by commentators from across the political spectrum. And the “sainted” FDR has been labeled fascist by many. Critics from both left and right have seen parallels between elements of the New Deal and Mussolini’s corporatism. Still others have found similarities between the Rooseveltian Civilian Conservation Corps and Hitler’s German Labor Services. Since the New Deal was a mish-mash of trial-and-error pragmatism, it is a disservice to wed it with any particular ideology.

Of course, “fascism” depends on how we define it. Problems of definition arose immediately after World War II and the defeat of the major fascist powers. The emerging Cold War led to the US and its allies accepting a narrow definition when it came to new-found allies among former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In its conflict with the Soviets, US leaders relied on Germans and Eastern Europeans with dubious, fascist ties to advance weapons programs, utilize intelligence, and bolster anti-Communism. Vetting of fascists by ideology was a haphazard process at best.

On the other hand, attempts to link fascism to Communism was an ongoing project. Determined efforts to find common features to justify anti-Communism led to a construct called “totalitarianism.” Popularized by Hannah Arendt, Cold Warriors wanted and got a tally of supposed similarities that served their purposes and served to generate a common definition of two disparate ideologies.

Thus, the Cold War created both a narrow and broad interpretation of fascism-- one for practical purposes, the other for propaganda purposes.

As the Cold War warmed in the 1980s, academics like Stanley Payne (Fascism, Wisconsin, 1980), made attempts at more independent, nuanced, and objective definitions of “fascism.” Payne engaged in comparative historical analysis and arrived at his typological description of fascism. Unfortunately, it suffered somewhat from raw empiricism and a failure to properly weigh the factors disclosed. To its credit, it undercut the Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism by emphasizing anti-Communism as a common feature of fascism, and not conflating it with Communism. 

Further, Payne in 1980 recognizes the historically met concept of “liberal authoritarianism” -- a form of illiberal liberalism-- that might serve to explain much of the confusion of our anti-Trump left today, who are anxious to dispense with the Bill of Rights to save “our” democracy.

In a recent essay regarding the “fascism is imminent” fashion of today, noted liberal commentator, Patrick Lawrence, riffs on the concept of “liberal authoritarianism.” Lawrence declares in his article This Isn’t Fascism posted on Consortium News that “I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And [as] far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.”

Unfortunately, while Payne still serves as a keystone for contemporary Western academic scholarship, the old Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism has resumed, particularly under a new wave of retro-Cold Warriors like Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder. 

But more consequentially, the charge of fascism-- invoked irresponsibly-- has served as a weapon in electoral politics. Specifically, many in the Democratic Party-- bereft of an appealing program-- charge that a vote for Biden is a vote against fascism. Given that Biden’s failure on inflation and his bloody war-mongering are rejected, especially by youth and the Party’s left wing, portraying Trump as a fascist is an act of desperation, but an act that will ultimately do little to forego the rise of Trump and his ilk.

Again, invoking Lawrence:

Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.

One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.

We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.

Opportunistic voices on the left will often draw a crude analogy with the rise of Nazism. They argue the simplistic and false case that disunity on the left opened the door for Hitler’s ascendency to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933. They repeat an old whitewash of history-- dismissing Hitler’s backing by the German capitalists, the perfidy of the weak government, and the betrayal of the Social Democrats. They ignore the economic crisis, the rulers’ failure to address the crisis, and the peoples’ desperate search for a radical answer to that failure. An unquestionable sign of that desperation was the continuing growth of the votes for the Communist Party, along with the decline in votes for the Social Democrats, and other centrist parties.

Nazism was not inevitable, but ushered in on a fear of revolution, of workers’ power, by a despairing ruling class. That was the reality wherever fascism seized power in twentieth-century fascism.

Today, the answer to a deepening crisis of capitalist rule that is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses is not rallying support around the failed policies that created and deepened the crisis. The answer is not to cry wolf or remind the people that matters could get worse. They know that!

The answer is to develop real answers to the despair facing working people-- reducing inequality, raising living standards, guaranteeing health care, increasing social benefits, improving affordable public transportation, protecting the environment, improving public education, and so on. These issues have existed for many decades, worsening with each passing year. There is no mystery. We are offered only two parties and they are determined to evade these issues. 

Lawrence makes a similar point:

I suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it [fascism] to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.

We name it wrongly... I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.

But that still leaves us with the question: What is fascism? Is there no cogent definition?

Indeed, there is one that springs forth from a deep and thorough study by the late Marxist thinker, R. Palme Dutt. Published in 1934, soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers) locates fascism in the cauldron of the rise of Communism, a deep economic crisis, and the collapse of capitalist class legitimacy.

Dutt, unlike servile academics weaving a bizarre, historically challenged link between Communism and fascism, discovers direct ties between capitalism and fascism (p. 72-73).

Fascism manufactures its ideology around its practice. Dutt explains: 

Fascism, in fact, developed as a movement in practice, in the conditions of threatening proletarian revolution, as a counter-revolutionary mass movement supported by the bourgeoisie, employing weapons of mixed social demagogy and terrorism to defeat the revolution and build up a strengthened capitalist state dictatorship; and only later endeavoured to adorn and rationalize this process with a “theory” (p. 75).

Dutt’s operational definition contrasts favorably with the failed attempt by writers like Payne who attempted to engage comparative studies in order to arrive at a superficial typography of fascism.

Dutt further adds the class dimensions, absent in nearly all non-Marxist definitions:

Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements, dominantly petit-bourgeois, but also slum-proletariat and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance-capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working-class revolution and smash working-class organizations (p. 82).

Elegant in its simplicity, robust in its comprehensiveness, Dutt’s explication of fascism aptly characterizes historic fascism from the march on Rome to the Generals’ coup in Indonesia and Pinochet’s regime in Chile. When social conditions deteriorate drastically and workers and their organizations threaten the capitalist order, the rulers throw their support behind counter-revolutionaries prepared to defend and strengthen the capitalist order, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy.

These institutions and organizations fester within bourgeois society as latent counter-revolutionary forces ready to be unleashed at the right moment by a desperate capitalist ruling class.

Clearly, Dutt’s study and elucidation of fascism clears the muddy waters stirred by today’s alarmists and opportunists. There is no imminent threat of revolution; the revolutionary left and the workers’ organizations currently pose little threat to the capitalist order, unfortunately. 

There is no emergent organized mass movement responding to a counter-revolutionary call. The mass movements of the right-- the Black Legions, the KKK, the Proud Boys, the militias, etc.-- do exist, should conditions ever ripen for a mobilization against the working class; but for today, they remain unacceptable to most of the ruling class.

For the most part, the capitalist class, especially its dominant monopoly sector, is satisfied to conduct its business within the confines of bourgeois democracy. “Finance-capital… the big industrialists, landlords and financiers…” defend and protect the two-party system because they regard it as functioning adequately, though the “lawfare” attacks piling up on Trump and the rabid media attacks against him show that an important section of the ruling class considers his unpredictability to be a threat to stability. 

Others think that his buffoonery and bluster serve as a safety valve for the discontent infecting the citizenry, much as Berlusconi’s clown-act pacified and entertained Italians unhappy over their political fate for three decades.

In any case, Trump does not pose the threat of fascism that many would like us to believe. 

We need to find other words to describe the deep crisis of bourgeois legitimacy that we are enduring, words that do not force us into a frenzied defensive posture that deflects us from finding real solutions to a real and profound problems facing working people. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com