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
