A new generation of college-aged students, for whom the Cold War and communism is a distant phenomenon, have had democratic socialism legitimized for them by Bernie Sanders. It is just one short step for this same generation to argue that if socialism is a goal worth fighting for, then perhaps communism too was a worthy endeavor. The millions murdered by Stalin, Mao, Fidel Castro, and the other Communist leaders may simply be something they are not aware of. I would suspect that perhaps only 1 percent of Bernie’s supporters have even heard of, let alone read, The Black Book of Communism.
Still, it comes as a shock to suddenly find articles in liberal magazines asserting how worthwhile communism was, and expressing sadness and despair at its demise. The historian Paul Kengor writes humorously that “the Sanders campaign could mass-produce bumper stickers boldly touting ‘Bolsheviks for Bernie’ sandwiched between grinning faces of Marx and Lenin and our contemporary products of the American university would shrug and cheer.”
Sadly, Kengor is not far off the mark. In the last week of April, the New Republic, for decades an anti-Communist liberal magazine, ran an article by Malcolm Harris titled “Who’s Afraid of Communism?” An editor of the journal New Inquiry, Harris writes for the purpose of rehabilitating American Communists as well as the Soviet Union. That is why he sees anyone advocating a hawkish foreign policy as an anti-Communist who is on the wrong side of history. Thus he favorably compares Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. Why? Because Clinton has praised NATO, even calling it “the most successful military alliance in probably human history.” Harris is bothered that many people think NATO had something to do with the victory over Nazism, and he asserts that these deluded people view the World War II Allies as a “proto-NATO.” He is concerned that millennials might believe the Western nations, not the Soviet Union, won World War II. Not only that, the Soviet Union was the power that liberated Auschwitz.
And worst of all, he argues, people believe “capitalism won,” and the history books do not let youth know the truth about the Soviet Union, because “the history books [are filled] with patriotism.” Evidently, Harris is unfamiliar with the widespread influence of Howard Zinn or the leftist gender-race-class construct that now dominates the historical profession and rules the roost in university history departments.
As for anticommunism, he traces it to pro-slavery forces who argued slavery was opposed by Communists and quotes two young historians who argue that pro-slavery writers “formulated the first generation of American anticommunist rhetoric.” He chastises American history books for supposedly not having “room for left-wing internationalism.” Textbooks, after all, were written in a “time when Marxists were the Bad Guys and people who questioned that got in trouble.”
Turning to race, Harris raises the old argument that it was American Communists above all who fought Jim Crow laws in the South. Civil rights history supposedly leaves this out and tells the story of the civil rights movement “within liberal parameters.” Yet Harris’s version will be familiar to anyone who reads widely in scores of books published in the past two decades. The great majority of writers on the topic discuss the role of Communists in much the same way as Harris. Perhaps America’s most celebrated historian is Eric Foner, professor emeritus at Columbia University. In his highly acclaimed book The Story of American Freedom, as the historian of American communism Theodore Draper wrote, Foner “shows no such enthusiasm for any other organization [except the American Communist party] in all of American history.” Foner’s goal, Draper added, was to “rehabilitate American communism.”
Harris concludes by falsely arguing that “the story of Communism’s struggle against fascism and white supremacy has been suppressed for generations” and that it is only now being rectified, as historians write about the heroism of the Communist-led Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought Franco’s army during the Spanish civil war. He calls them “American leftists who fought against fascism in Spain,” rather than what they actually were—a Comintern army fighting to help turn the Spanish Republic into what would have been the first “People’s Democracy,” similar to those established by the Soviets in Eastern Europe after World War II. Or, as my friend the late Bill Herrick, a Lincoln Brigade veteran, wrote in his memoir Jumping the Line, “Yes, we went to Spain to fight fascism, but democracy was not our aim.”
Harris looks forward as well to a new Hollywood biopic by Steve McQueen on Paul Robeson, the African-American singer who was noted not only for his singing and acting, but for his constant defense of Stalinism and the Soviet Union, which he viewed as far superior to American democracy. He proudly quotes Robeson’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), in which he said, “Wherever I’ve been in the world, the first to die in the struggle against fascism were the Communists.” Nowhere mentioned is the Nazi-Soviet pact, which caused all Communists worldwide to change their line overnight and to argue that Hitler’s Germany was a benign power, while the dangerous imperialists were Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
As for Robeson, his bold fight for full rights for African Americans blinded him to the Soviet Union’s policies, which were far more repressive than any in the United States. It is well known that Robeson betrayed the Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer. In Moscow in 1949, Robeson asked to see his “good friend” Feffer. The KGB fattened Feffer up and took him out of Lubyanka, where he was awaiting execution. When Robeson met him, Feffer put his hand across his throat to let Robeson know what his looming fate would be. Yet Robeson refused to tell the truth about the Soviet Jewish poet when he returned to the United States. Robeson told the waiting press he had seen Feffer and that the poet was fine and in good health. He later explained to his son that he did not want to give American warmongers justification for their anti-Soviet policies. Feffer was executed in August 1952, and shortly thereafter Robeson was rewarded for his loyalty to the Soviet Union with the Stalin Peace Prize.
The Malcolm Harris essay in the New Republic was bad enough. But the same week, a theater critic, Michael Feingold, wrote a two-part article in Theatermania, in which he has a regular column. Feingold wrote about the playwright Arthur Miller, whom he does not seem to realize was a secret member of the American Communist party. Writer Alan Wald revealed some years ago that Miller regularly wrote for the Communist party press under a pseudonym. Feingold actually asks, “Were such people, strictly speaking, Communists, any more than those accused in Salem were witches?”
His answer is simple: “in most cases, probably not at all.” They were simply “liberal-minded, educated people, seriously concerned about solving America’s social problems.” It does not occur to him that one could share that concern and deal with it more effectively than by joining America’s Stalinist party, whose main goal was always to gather support for Moscow’s foreign policy. Feingold says it’s “hard to conceive of the well-paid screenwriters who were stigmatized” and blacklisted as being willing to carry “Kalashnikovs on the barricades.”
But no one ever thought or claimed that about them. The role of Stalinist writers was to propagandize for the ideal of communism through their cultural work. (Of course, some American Communists were certainly willing to join the KGB or the GRU’s spy networks in the United States.)
Why does Feingold like the Reds? Because, he says, they did things like circulate petitions “for the recall of some particularly odious right-wing officeholder.” Or, as the famous saying of the ’30s put it, “Communists were just liberals in a hurry.” Turning to the Rosenberg case, about which he clearly knows next to nothing, Feingold notes that any information Julius and Ethel Rosenberg gave the Soviets about the atomic bomb was only of “secondary importance” and falsely writes that Ethel Rosenberg “had nothing whatever to do with the matter.”
He also writes that thousands of Communists exposed by HUAC did nothing and that being an actual party member “was a nebulous concept anyway.” Tell that to the many Communists who took Marxism-Leninism very seriously and were willing to give their lives for the cause, as they constantly bragged. Feingold’s jejune conclusion: “The Devil was loose in 1956 Washington, as in 1692 Salem: his emissaries were the witch-hunters, not those they accused.”
We can no doubt expect more such “revisionist” history of American Communists. Writers concerned with the truth would do better to turn their attention to the thousands of real victims of communism around the world. One suspects that they’re not really after the truth, though. Their intention is to provide heroes for today’s new leftist movements and to spin an Aesop’s Fables version of American communism for the edification of progressive millennials.
Ronald Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, writes frequently about communism and anticommunism.
