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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Where Have All the Commies Gone? They're Still Here
Wes Vernon
Saturday, June 9, 2001
WASHINGTON – Militant Marxists are as active in the U.S. as ever, and are
perhaps more influential than ever in our society. The old Soviet Union is
gone, but communists in this country did not go away, writes Ronald Radosh in
his new book, "Commies."
Nor did their allies amongst the socialists and the militants of the "New
Left," which was spawned in the sixties.
Radosh writes that as a former Communist of the "Old Left" and active
militant of the "New Left," he now sees the current "Leftover Left" going
strong.
The author was a "Red diaper baby," born to Communist parents and following
in their footsteps as he grew older.
Radosh says, "In its many shifting forms – radical feminism,
ultra-environmentalism, pro-Arabism, political correctness, the new anarchism
– this leftover Left has developed new issues and causes, all fought with the
same earnestness, arrogance, and thoughtlessness that we brought to the fight
for communism and socialism from the 1940's through the 1980's."
As yesterday's causes collapsed, Radosh relates, his old friends in "the
movement" couldn’t admit to themselves they were wrong. Instead, they repeat
platitudes about "real" socialism never having been tried because the Soviet
Union was the "wrong country."
Make no mistake, says this professor who has seen the left from the inside
for decades, "Today’s Left has no Soviet Union as a beacon, but reflexive
hatred of the American system is intact."
That could be a warning for parents contemplating sending their children off
to college. On many campuses, manifestations of Marxism dominate the
political atmosphere.
Unlike David Horowitz, whose change of heart was fairly sudden, or Whittaker
Chambers, who escaped a Communist spy nest even more abruptly, Radosh's
metamorphosis was evolutionary.
Over several decades, he appeared to go from hard-left communist to
deep-seated socialist to New Left radical to softer radical to soft
socialist, to liberal to moderate to neo-conservative.
The Rosenberg Spies
The main catalyst for his change in worldview was his research on the case of
atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He started out thinking he would
prove once and for all that the Rosenbergs had been framed. He concluded they
had not, and that Julius at least was thoroughly guilty, as charged.
When he put his findings in his book "The Rosenberg File," the left lowered
the boom and tried to block it as much as possible from reaching the public.
Just one negative letter from American historian Richard Drinnon, then
teaching at Bucknell University, led the publisher, Vintage Books, to decide
to cancel publication. No one on the left protested this form of
"blacklisting." Lawyers pointed out that the firm was legally obligated and
under contract to publish it. However, the firm was not legally obligated to
provide a book tour or publicity campaign, so the book was largely blacked
out anyway.
Later, when post-Cold War Soviet files were opened, all doubts about the
Rosenbergs' guilt was laid to rest.
Radosh quotes Thomas Powers, writing in the New York Review of Books, who
said, "Soviet spies were of the left generally, they supported liberal
causes, they defended the Soviet Union in all circumstances, they were often
secret members of the Communist Party."
Michael Harrington, the well-known socialist, made a strong effort in the
1970s to bring remnants of the Old Left into a broad socialist movement,
including an overture to Dorothy Healey, a leading ex-Communist from Southern
California.
When she came to New York in 1973, Radosh and his wife put her up in their
apartment. They talked long into the night. When Radosh said, "Well, at least
the Red-baiters were wrong about the [U.S. Communist Party] getting Moscow
gold," Healey’s response was, "No, you’re wrong. How do you think the CP
bought its building [at sky-high Manhattan real estate rates] on West 23rd
Street?" On one of her last trips to Moscow for the party, she explained,
Healey was "given a suitcase filled with thousands of dollars to smuggle into
America, to be used by the CPUSA as they saw fit."
Years later when Radosh quoted her in the conservative magazine American
Spectator, Healey threatened to sue. Radosh reminded her that his wife was a
witness to the conversation and that if she did sue, he would spill the beans
on "other things she indiscreetly told me."
Harrington tried to meld his far-left coalition into the left wing of the
Democratic Party.
At the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York's Madison Square
Garden, his Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee set up shop there in
its own name and awarded floor passes for its members.
Ted Kennedy, the Great White Hope
Radosh sat there and watched on TV a convention speech by Ted Kennedy, "whom
we regarded as the Democratic party's best hope."
Later, Harrington presided over a talk by union leader William (Wimpy)
Winpinsinger, who had "declared himself to be a socialist as he became a vice
chair of the DSOC."
Other speakers included Rep. Ron Dellums, D-Calif., and John Conyers, D—Mich.
The latter is now the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and
would become chairman of that panel if the Democrats win back control of the
House.
Earlier events by the "Democratic socialists," as they called themselves,
included a 1976 rally featuring speakers such as Rep. Bella Abzug, D-N.Y.,
and activist Marion Barry, "the future notorious mayor of Washington, D.C."
A later factor in what Radosh calls his "long journey home" focused on the
1980s struggle between the Communist and pro-Castro Sandinista government in
Nicaragua and the anti-Communist Contras.
The author started out cheering on the Sandinistas, then began urging them to
reform (when their brutal police-state tactics became too obvious for him to
ignore), then morphed into a plague-on-both-your-houses stance, and
ultimately ended up supporting the Contras. Second only to the Rosenberg
case, this appears to be the benchmark in Radosh's shift in his worldview.
It was then that he began to ask that if the liberal-left activists in the
U.S. were so wrong on this issue ("They looked the other way," he writes),
then on what other matters were they deceiving themselves.
The Clintonistas
One unpleasant incident encountered by the author involved Sidney Blumenthal,
then a Washington Post reporter and later a hatchet man for the Clinton White
House, who used distortion and "slander" to smear Radosh during his trip to
Nicaragua.
More tidbits from Radosh:
Radosh got himself into trouble during the transition period of the incoming
Clinton administration in late 1992. He blew the whistle on the publicized
(but never officially announced) appointment of Jonetta Cole as secretary of
education, "whom I knew to have been an unabashed fellow traveler."
After reading the book "The New Socialist Revolution" by Michael Lerner,
Radosh began to help organize a West Side (N.Y) chapter of Lerner's New
American Movement in 1973. Lerner was later to achieve his 15 minutes of fame
as the guru of Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning."
Joan Baez was a heroine of the radial left until she turned on the Communist
Hanoi regime for its atrocities. Then her old friends labeled her "an enemy
of the people."
Bob Dylan, Ed Asner, Mary Travers (Peter, Paul and Mary), Jane Fonda and
Bianca Jagger are among the celebrities appearing throughout the book and in
one way or another embracing the hard left and promoting its causes. So too
are the more notorious Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson.
The famous author Irving Howe, a prominent supporter of the African National
Congress in South Africa, argued to Radosh that black liberation there had to
be "our cause," even if this led "to Communist control."
David Gelber, editor of the radical David Dellinger's magazine, Liberation,
and staff director for the famed May Day protest demonstration in Washington,
would later become news director and producer in major mainstream broadcast
outlets.
And Fidel Castro's paradise? When Radosh and several of his then fellow
leftists visited a Cuban hospital and saw dazed, drugged-out expressions on
the faces of the patients, one of them screamed: "This stinks. Lobotomy is a
horror!" To which another of the group, Castro loyalist Suzanne Ross,
replied, "We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist
lobotomies and socialist lobotomies."
The examples are endless. Suffice it to say that the left of today is
carrying on the work of the left of previous decades. Yes, even without the
Soviet Union.
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