-Caveat Lector-
>From the Wasington Post, Wednesday, January 6, 1999; Page A25
The Truth About Evil By Michael Kelly
Some months ago, I wrote a column in which I expressed revulsion at an
affectionate feature in the New York Times about a small band of elderly
communists and socialists who do good works among the downtrodden of Los
Angeles and, by the way, still revere Marx and Lenin. For this, Sam
Tanenhaus, author of an estimable and honest biography of Whittaker
Chambers, takes me politely to task in the current New York Review of Books.
My finger-pointing, says Tanenhaus, is emblematic of a regrettable "revival
of the familiar cold war Manichaeanism, whereby the entire burden of world
communism is laid crushingly upon every [Communist Party] member or
sympathizer."
This is a debate worth having, for it is central to the intellectual and
cultural history of this century. It has been, you have to admit, a pretty
Manichaean sort of century: good and evil in the form of democracy and
totalitarianism duking it out for global domination; concentration camps;
gulags; a couple of hundred million dead-that sort of thing. The good was
not absolute (we had Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn on our side, alas), but the
evil was pretty close to pure.
American liberalism came to terms with one face of the century's evil-that
of the Nazis and their allies-immediately, honorably and unequivocally. The
fight to destroy the Nazi version of fascism was waged in such unabashedly
Manichaean terms that we called it The Good War (we were not being ironic
either; only Parisians and a few guys at Oxford knew about irony back then).
And organized American political liberalism-that is, the Democratic Party
and the labor movement-also came to terms soon enough with the communist
version, and firmly rejected it. But the treatment of communist fascism by
liberalism's intellectual and cultural establishments-as distinct from its
mainstream political bodies-has been profoundly different.
The intellectual and cultural elites have never come to terms with
communism as an evil on a par with Nazism and, more important, with their
role in supporting, or at least tolerating, that evil. This failure, which
is one of immense moral dimensions as well as rational, persists. (Witness
the 24-part CNN television series on the Cold War, a history massively
distorted by the light of moral equivalency that shines in Ted Turner's
dim, dim bulb of a mind.)
The failure persists and adapts because it is too large to come to terms
with. Coming to terms means not merely admitting the fundamental evil of
the communist system and its root philosophy (as opposed to admitting the
evil of one or another communist tyrant) but also admitting our own
sympathetic complicity. It means not merely reassessing the century's
political figures but its intellectual and cultural figures too. It means
reassessing us.
And this is a tremendously painful prospect, because it is a tremendously
personal one. There were never many Nazis or Nazi sympathizers in America
and very few political, cultural and intellectual figures of note among
them. But such is not the case with communism.
Twentieth-century political, cultural and intellectual history is thickly
peopled with respected and even revered figures-labor leaders, progressive
reformers, novelists, playwrights, artists, luminaries of the news and
entertainment businesses-who were deeply supportive of a system and
philosophy that we now know beyond doubt was every bit as monstrous as the
Nazi regime, was morally indistinguishable from the Nazi regime. And on the
more intimate level, when we talk about American communists or communist
sympathizers, we are talking about family.
So when we contemplate admitting the full profundity of communism's evil,
we are contemplating a radical reevaluation of everyone who traveled some
distance with that evil. We are talking about reevaluating Upton Sinclair
and John Steinbeck and Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and Charlie
Chaplin. And we are talking also about reevaluating Uncle Harry and Aunt
Edith and Grandpa and maybe even dear old Dad.
What further complicates matters is we know that Uncle Harry and Aunt Edith
are good people. They sided with the communists because they sincerely
believed in the promise of communism to address the wrongs of our own
society-its gross class inequities, its racial oppression, the rough
cruelties of capitalism.
But the fellow travelers were wrong, and in their wrong, they helped to
perpetuate a system that caused immense human suffering. To say this is not
to gainsay that most Communist Party members and sympathizers were
motivated by the desire to make a better world, nor is it to lay the whole
burden of communism's crimes on their shoulders.
It is simply to say this: At some point it becomes a seriously immoral act
to refuse to acknowledge the truth. At some point, you have to ask whether
it is morally acceptable to regard those who yet refuse to come to terms
with communism other than as people who have chosen to adhere to known
evil. And that point has been long passed.
Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107,
this material is distributed without profit to those who
have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes. For
more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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