The fanatical consensus that the US was engaged in a life and death struggle with the specter of Communism provided a bulwark against any but the most insipid challenges to the reigning capitalist order.
Our spineless labor leaders-- today faced with Trump’s cancellation of union contracts across the Federal sector-- owe their impotence to the Cold War compact that defanged a promising, vibrant, militant union movement. Trading the purging of Communists, leftists, even international unions and locals, and the most ardent of fighters in return for long periods of labor peace and an uncontested slender piece of the economic pie, generations of labor union “managers” collaborated with both the boss and wild-eyed Cold Warriors. Their answer today to this existential threat to hundreds of thousands of workers stripped of their union rights? The AFL-CIO politely asks me to call my legislator: “Will you call your representative and urge them to sign the discharge petition and speak out in support of the Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550) right now?” The idea of a general strike, a sit-down strike, a march on Washington, or other forms of mass resistance is beyond their imagination, a faint memory of a bygone era when the labor movement had a left.
It was the Cold War that smashed the popular front and the New Deal legacy in the US. Rabid anti-Communism, guilt by association, and callow opportunism derailed the 1948 Progressive Party, an attempt to rescue Roosevelt’s social democratic coalition. Roosevelt’s party-- the Democrats-- relied on a compromised coalition between social liberals and unreconstructed segregationists until the 1970s, a tenuous coalition only held together by a common battle against Communism. The Johnson era Great Society provided the last gift from the New Deal. The Democrats soon realized that they could not afford to conduct an anti-Communist crusade in Southeast Asia and deliver a social safety net to its people. They choose guns over butter.
Our spineless labor leaders-- today faced with Trump’s cancellation of union contracts across the Federal sector-- owe their impotence to the Cold War compact that defanged a promising, vibrant, militant union movement. Trading the purging of Communists, leftists, even international unions and locals, and the most ardent of fighters in return for long periods of labor peace and an uncontested slender piece of the economic pie, generations of labor union “managers” collaborated with both the boss and wild-eyed Cold Warriors. Their answer today to this existential threat to hundreds of thousands of workers stripped of their union rights? The AFL-CIO politely asks me to call my legislator: “Will you call your representative and urge them to sign the discharge petition and speak out in support of the Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550) right now?” The idea of a general strike, a sit-down strike, a march on Washington, or other forms of mass resistance is beyond their imagination, a faint memory of a bygone era when the labor movement had a left.
It was the Cold War that smashed the popular front and the New Deal legacy in the US. Rabid anti-Communism, guilt by association, and callow opportunism derailed the 1948 Progressive Party, an attempt to rescue Roosevelt’s social democratic coalition. Roosevelt’s party-- the Democrats-- relied on a compromised coalition between social liberals and unreconstructed segregationists until the 1970s, a tenuous coalition only held together by a common battle against Communism. The Johnson era Great Society provided the last gift from the New Deal. The Democrats soon realized that they could not afford to conduct an anti-Communist crusade in Southeast Asia and deliver a social safety net to its people. They choose guns over butter.
Thanks to the Cold War, US citizens became inured to endless war and dangerous aliens under every bed-- Communists, Muslims, Foreigners, terrorists, and again-- today-- Russians and Chinese Communists! The once promised peace dividend from the end of the Cold War has been drowned by waves of new faux-threats manufactured to pose the same existential threat as the once feared Soviets and their allies.
The Cold War established the universal truth that defense of “liberty” and “our democracy” would require enormous sacrifice by all. Indeed, even “our democracy” might need to be sacrificed or closeted to protect the US from its imagined foes, a continuing fear that persists today in the forms of illegal immigrants and urban violators. As civil liberties decline, we can thank the Cold War for mass passivity and submissiveness in its face.
The broadly subscribed ideas of “the military-industrial complex” and “the deep state” owe their common usage to social structures that expanded dramatically in the Cold War.
Less well-known, perhaps, is the Cold War antecedents of the current weaponizing of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. Today, the genocide in Israel is understood by growing numbers as a Zionist project, a product of an ultra-nationalist, settler-colonial ideology. Since its origin in the late nineteenth century, Zionism has sought a homeland for Jews, scattered through a vast diaspora. For some, that homeland was envisioned aspirationally. Still others brought a democratic, egalitarian vision to the notion of Zion. But the dominant thread-- boosted by the maneuvers of the British Empire-- was the creation of an exclusive, theocratic state in Palestine.
Other efforts to create a Jewish homeland-- for example a Jewish Autonomous state in the Soviet Union-- were scorned by the Zionist leadership. It was to be Israel: installed shamefully by the victorious powers after World War II in a land already occupied by a nation long suffering under British domination. Over decades, Israeli leaders sought to displace more and more indigenous Palestinians to create a Greater Israel (from the river to the sea!). Any resistance to this displacement (what we now call ethnic cleansing) was met with the cry of “antisemitism!”.
In the mid-nineteen sixties, the Israelis, along with their powerful friends in the US, devised a devious, but ingenious plan to both populate Greater Israel and discredit and disrupt the Palestine Liberation Organization.That the US security apparatus was likely involved should come as no surprise. As Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed uncovered recently, after scrutinizing a recent release of CIA files, the Agency’s Counter-Intelligence Division under James Jesus Angleton was deeply engaged with Israeli interests, Mossad, and “the thousands coming from the Soviet Union”.
Beginning in 1963 with the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, a movement swept across the US to “Save Soviet Jewry”. In a few short, remarkable years, banners were hanging from every synagogue and a host of other buildings throughout the US. The media decried Soviet antisemitism, portraying the Soviet Union as a hotbed of Jew-hating. Politicians of both parties joined the crusade, calling for economic sanctions against the USSR, culminating eventually in the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Students were mobilized in a “human rights” campaign to condemn the Soviets.
As the chief international material and moral sponsor of Palestinian liberation-- arming and training the Palestine Liberation Organization-- the Soviet Union argued that its foreign policy rejected the Zionist project and aimed at defending the fate of an oppressed nation pushed off its land. The relentless propaganda campaign waged in the West sought to create the opposite impression-- that opposing the Zionist ideology was tantamount to antisemitism, a conflation that weighs heavily today.
The campaign furthered another goal: the wholesale exodus of privileged, educated Soviet Jewish citizens to Israel to help build Greater Israel. It became less of a campaign to attack alleged antisemitism in the USSR and more of a ruse to direct Soviet Jews to Israel.
Consequently, the main slogan of the movement became: Let My People Go!. That is, remove any emigration barriers that Soviet authorities might place in the way of a brain drain. At the time, Jews held seventeen-times more highly honored Ph.Ds as their percentage of the population. As quoted by William Mandel, Professor Zvi Gitelman of the University of Michigan wrote in his article The Jewish Question in the USSR since 1964 that Jews “play social, political, cultural, and economic roles greater than their numbers would indicate.” In fact, at the time of the “Save Soviet Jewry” campaign, Jewish cultural life was undergoing somewhat of a renaissance.
The broadly subscribed ideas of “the military-industrial complex” and “the deep state” owe their common usage to social structures that expanded dramatically in the Cold War.
Less well-known, perhaps, is the Cold War antecedents of the current weaponizing of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. Today, the genocide in Israel is understood by growing numbers as a Zionist project, a product of an ultra-nationalist, settler-colonial ideology. Since its origin in the late nineteenth century, Zionism has sought a homeland for Jews, scattered through a vast diaspora. For some, that homeland was envisioned aspirationally. Still others brought a democratic, egalitarian vision to the notion of Zion. But the dominant thread-- boosted by the maneuvers of the British Empire-- was the creation of an exclusive, theocratic state in Palestine.
Other efforts to create a Jewish homeland-- for example a Jewish Autonomous state in the Soviet Union-- were scorned by the Zionist leadership. It was to be Israel: installed shamefully by the victorious powers after World War II in a land already occupied by a nation long suffering under British domination. Over decades, Israeli leaders sought to displace more and more indigenous Palestinians to create a Greater Israel (from the river to the sea!). Any resistance to this displacement (what we now call ethnic cleansing) was met with the cry of “antisemitism!”.
In the mid-nineteen sixties, the Israelis, along with their powerful friends in the US, devised a devious, but ingenious plan to both populate Greater Israel and discredit and disrupt the Palestine Liberation Organization.That the US security apparatus was likely involved should come as no surprise. As Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed uncovered recently, after scrutinizing a recent release of CIA files, the Agency’s Counter-Intelligence Division under James Jesus Angleton was deeply engaged with Israeli interests, Mossad, and “the thousands coming from the Soviet Union”.
Beginning in 1963 with the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, a movement swept across the US to “Save Soviet Jewry”. In a few short, remarkable years, banners were hanging from every synagogue and a host of other buildings throughout the US. The media decried Soviet antisemitism, portraying the Soviet Union as a hotbed of Jew-hating. Politicians of both parties joined the crusade, calling for economic sanctions against the USSR, culminating eventually in the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Students were mobilized in a “human rights” campaign to condemn the Soviets.
As the chief international material and moral sponsor of Palestinian liberation-- arming and training the Palestine Liberation Organization-- the Soviet Union argued that its foreign policy rejected the Zionist project and aimed at defending the fate of an oppressed nation pushed off its land. The relentless propaganda campaign waged in the West sought to create the opposite impression-- that opposing the Zionist ideology was tantamount to antisemitism, a conflation that weighs heavily today.
The campaign furthered another goal: the wholesale exodus of privileged, educated Soviet Jewish citizens to Israel to help build Greater Israel. It became less of a campaign to attack alleged antisemitism in the USSR and more of a ruse to direct Soviet Jews to Israel.
Consequently, the main slogan of the movement became: Let My People Go!. That is, remove any emigration barriers that Soviet authorities might place in the way of a brain drain. At the time, Jews held seventeen-times more highly honored Ph.Ds as their percentage of the population. As quoted by William Mandel, Professor Zvi Gitelman of the University of Michigan wrote in his article The Jewish Question in the USSR since 1964 that Jews “play social, political, cultural, and economic roles greater than their numbers would indicate.” In fact, at the time of the “Save Soviet Jewry” campaign, Jewish cultural life was undergoing somewhat of a renaissance.
One rare voice in the US resisting the Cold War entangled stereotypes of Soviet Jewry (Congress appropriated $50 million in 1972 “to assist in the movement and resettlement of Soviet emigrants”-- code for stimulating immigration to Israel) was author William Mandel. A Jewish-American who was once the United Press International expert on the Soviet Union and a Hoover Institute fellow at Stanford, Mandel wrote two well-informed books that dealt extensively with Soviet nationalities with a strong focus on Soviet Jews: Russia Re-examined (1964) and Soviet, but not Russian (1985).
Mandel acknowledged that “The overwhelming majority of Soviet Jews, like the overwhelming majority of American Jews, have no desire whatever to leave their native land. Zionism cannot admit that, because it would undermine U.S. government economic and military aid as an ally against the USSR. Therefore it maintains an unending campaign against non-existent persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union.”
Of course sane, informed voices like Mandel’s carried little weight against the media and the punditry’s relentless charge of Soviet antisemitism. Once again, hysteria, ignorance, and political calculation trumped the truth. The “Save Soviet Jewry” movement became a further example of how official anti-Communism turned the truth on its head.
Thus, it was the Cold War and its intrigues that brought the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism into the US mainstream and established it as an unassailable truth.
Overcoming these Cold War myths and indoctrinations remains one of the biggest obstacles to building a formidable left in the US.
Mandel acknowledged that “The overwhelming majority of Soviet Jews, like the overwhelming majority of American Jews, have no desire whatever to leave their native land. Zionism cannot admit that, because it would undermine U.S. government economic and military aid as an ally against the USSR. Therefore it maintains an unending campaign against non-existent persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union.”
Of course sane, informed voices like Mandel’s carried little weight against the media and the punditry’s relentless charge of Soviet antisemitism. Once again, hysteria, ignorance, and political calculation trumped the truth. The “Save Soviet Jewry” movement became a further example of how official anti-Communism turned the truth on its head.
Thus, it was the Cold War and its intrigues that brought the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism into the US mainstream and established it as an unassailable truth.
Overcoming these Cold War myths and indoctrinations remains one of the biggest obstacles to building a formidable left in the US.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
zzsblogml@gmail.com
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