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Beyond the Red Scare?

Protesting Jim Crow admission policy at Ford’s Theatre (Paul Robeson second from left)
Paul S. Henderson (Baltimore, March 1948)

Those of us of a certain age have wondered, since the Fall of the Wall, if and when we would finally move beyond the Cold War.

According to Malcolm Harris, we’re there—or at least we’ve moved a long way in that direction. What this means is that the anti-Communist sentiments that were whipped up during that period no longer hold sway (at least outside Hillary Clinton’s campaign), and the historical realities that were occluded by the Red Scare can now be rediscovered.

I’m thinking, in particular, of the important role Communists played in the struggles against fascism and segregation.

I imagine that if you asked the average young American what army liberated Auschwitz, they would say ours. Which is wrong, but it’s hard to blame them: Capitalism won, and we’ve moved on to new bogeymen. If you don’t need to warn innocent children away from Soviet seduction, there isn’t much need to tell them about communism at all. We can fill the gaps in the history books with patriotism.

Ignoring history, however, won’t make it go away. Without the Soviet threat, the anti-communist barricades are a little understaffed. And with faulty censors, who will stop the culture industry from making communism seem cool? The two most famous Soviets right now are probably Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, the KGB spy stars of the critically acclaimed F/X show The Americans. Despite having been created by a former CIA agent and set in the 1980s, Elizabeth and Philip aren’t the bad guys. They’re the good ones. In Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in South Africa, in Afghanistan, the American government’s policies are portrayed as worth fighting against by any means necessary. It’s a more honest description of the history than Clinton’s, in her memoir. “In the past,” she writes of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere, “American policy in the region led to the funneling of foreign aid to military juntas that opposed communism and socialism but sometimes repressed their own citizens.” . . .

You might not know it from the history books, but American communism has always been racialized. When Jim Crow laws banned interracial organization, the Communist Party was the only group that dared to flout the rule. In 1932, when the Birmingham, Alabama police went to shut down a Party meeting, a present national guardsman wrote his superior: “The police played their only trump by enforcing a city ordinance for segregation which, of course, is contrary to Communist principles.” Now we tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement within liberal parameters, but everyone who fought for black liberation was called a communist at one time or another, and not always inaccurately.

And, of course, there are many other historical events involving American communists, socialists, and other “reds” to be uncovered now that we’re moving past the “shoddy but common” recollections of the Cold War: their role in the anti-war movements, women’s suffrage, organizing labor unions, international solidarity—in addition to the arts, literature, the social sciences, the history and philosophy of science. . .and the list goes on.

As Harris sees it,

The story of communism’s struggle against fascism and white supremacy has been repressed for generations, but this grip on our collective memory is slipping fast. David Simon is planning a series about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—American leftists who fought against fascism in Spain. Steve McQueen is doing a Paul Robeson biopic, whose 1956 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee is already the most cinematic thing I’ve ever heard. When asked about his membership in the Party, he invoked the Fifth Amendment (“Loudly”), at great personal cost. “Wherever I’ve been in the world,” he told them, “the first to die in the struggle against fascism were the communists.”

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I guess we’re far enough away from the Cold War that a socialist can make a serious for the presidency—and for the art that was produced in the early decades of the Soviet Union to be appreciated in the United States.

Yesterday, Kristin M. Jones reviewed the Jewish Museum’s exhibit “The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film” for the Wall Street Journal.

In Dziga Vertov’s exuberant “Man With a Movie Camera” (1929), the camera dances, spins and materializes on rooftops, before an oncoming train and even on stage. Combining electrifying editing, naturalistic scenes and trick photography, the film evokes 24 hours of Soviet urban life, beginning with humans and machines awakening at daylight. Vertov envisioned an all-seeing “cinema eye—more perfect than a human eye for purposes of research into the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe.” Filmmakers explored various aesthetic approaches during the era, but it was a period of startling cinematic invention.

And, of course, that same startling artistic invention can be seen in the original poster for the film (created by the Sternberg brothers).

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The march to war

It just so happens, in the midst of the march to war over Ukraine, this week we’re teaching Berkeley in the Sixties and The Port Huron Statement in the Tale of Two Depressions course.

In 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society were concerned about the effects of “a half-century of accelerating destruction,” especially the policy of nuclear deterrence.

Deterrence advocates, all of them prepared at least to threaten mass extermination, advance arguments of several kinds. At one pole are the minority of open partisans of preventive war —who falsely assume the inevitability of violent conflict and assert the lunatic efficacy of striking the first blow, assuming that it will be easier to “recover” after thermonuclear war than to recover now from the grip of the Cold War. Somewhat more reluctant to advocate initiating a war, but perhaps more disturbing for their numbers within the Kennedy Administration, are the many advocates of the “counterforce” theory of aiming strategic nuclear weapons at military installations — though this might “save” more lives than a preventive war, it would require drastic, provocative and perhaps impossible social change to separate many cities from weapons sites, it would be impossible to ensure the immunity of cities after one or two counterforce nuclear “exchanges”, it would generate a perpetual arms race for less vulnerability and greater weapons power and mobility, it would make outer space a region subject to militarization, and accelerate the suspicions and arms build-ups which are incentives to precipitate nuclear action. Others would support fighting “limited wars” which use conventional (all but atomic) weapons, backed by deterrents so mighty that both sides would fear to use them — although underestimating the implications of numerous new atomic powers on the world stage, the extreme difficulty of anchoring international order with weapons of only transient invulnerability, the potential tendency for a “losing side” to push limited protracted fighting on the soil of underdeveloped countries. Still other deterrence artists propose limited, clearly defensive and retaliatory, nuclear capacity, always potent enough to deter an opponent’s aggressive designs — the best of deterrence stratagems, but inadequate when it rests on the equation of an arms “stalemate” with international stability.

As we know, history is repeating itself, as “the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible war when vision and change are required.”

Thus, we would do well to consider Stephen Cohen’s argument that the American media are misrepresenting Putin and Russia.

The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to US national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines—particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin—is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.

There are notable exceptions, but a general pattern has developed. Even in the venerable New York Times and Washington Post, news reports, editorials and commentaries no longer adhere rigorously to traditional journalistic standards, often failing to provide essential facts and context; to make a clear distinction between reporting and analysis; to require at least two different political or “expert” views on major developments; or to publish opposing opinions on their op-ed pages. As a result, American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

And we should remember that Senator John McCain’s shameless denunciation of President Obama, as responsible for a “feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” was delivered in a speech the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington. As John Hickman explains,

McCain fulminated about Russian annexation of Crimea and possibly of the Russian speaking eastern half of Ukraine. Yet he was speaking to an audience that had endorsed the annexation of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, and endorses the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Hypocrisy more complete would be difficult to conceive.

American journalists allow politicians like McCain to get away with such nonsense because many fear reporting anything critical about either Israel or the Israeli lobby. They are also captives of the news frames constructed by official sources in Washington. For the Crimean Crisis the consensus news frame is that Russian behavior is a violation of a strong post Second World War international norm against territorial annexation. The historical reality is that the norm has been frequently and successfully violated: Poland annexed East Prussia, East Brandenburg, Lower Silesia, and Pomerania; Russia annexed Bessarabia and Bukovina; India annexed Goa, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli; India and Pakistan partitioned Kashmir; Indonesia annexed West Irian; Ethiopia annexed Ogaden; Turkey annexed northern Cyprus; Morocco annexed Spanish Sahara, and Israel annexed the majority of Palestine. Yes, of course some sort of justification could be offered for each of these events. There are always justifications. What is important but ignored in the outrage currently being performed about Crimea is that “the world community” did not protest strongly or effectively.

The consensus news frame also excludes reference to the complexities of Russian and Soviet history. When reporters deploy the propagandistic phrased like “Ukraine’s Crimea” they ignore the fact that Russian sovereignty over the peninsula predates American possession of the Mississippi Valley and ignores the rather artificial transfer of sovereignty over the peninsula from Russia to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, at a time when both Russia and Ukraine were part of the same country (the Soviet Union). Forget about sympathy for the difficulties faced by ethnic Russian minorities in the post-Soviet near abroad.

Between the irresponsible pandering of politicians and the cockeyed international news coverage it seems likely that many will be deceived by a simplistic narrative of Ukrainian nationalist good guys and Russian bad guys. What a pity that it always seems to take so long to realize we are being failed by our political and news media leaders.

In both cases, the march to war was prepared by simplistic narratives produced and disseminated by feckless media and politicians.

“I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people”

Pope Francis offered the only possible response to his being accused of being a Marxist. First, that the “Marxist ideology is wrong.” (How could an official of the Catholic Church, much less the Bishop of Rome, assert otherwise?) And then:

“But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”

 

That really is the only way to respond to the kinds of outrageous insults right-wing commentators and business pundits have hurled at him after the publication of Evangelii Gaudium.

And Priyamvada Gopal gets it:

The use of “Marxist” as a slur – along with kindred terms such as “socialist” and “communist” – is not a uniquely American phenomenon but is most familiar to us from the era of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, established in 1938 and, later, Joseph McCarthy’s committee.

In that context, and during the “red scares” which followed it during the cold war, these were appellations used to identify and punish any criticism of capitalism, however sympathetic or merely reformist. Indeed, any dissent from mainstream dogma was “un-American”.

As we all know, in the United States, any criticism of individual capitalists or capitalism as an economic and social system still is considered to be associated with Marxism or communism, long after the Fall of the Wall.

But I do need to correct Gopal’s rendering of the long tradition of American anticommunism on one point: the first “red scare” wasn’t in 1918 but earlier, in the nineteenth century, in response to the upsurge of union organizing and the related hunger demonstrations and then in reaction to the Paris Commune.

As Patrick C. Jamieson has explained,

News sources, especially in America, were becoming increasingly worried about the rise of what they perceived as a Communist movement in Paris. This ‘red fear’ was based on both fascination and anxiety over the ideology.  Because of the Commune’s close ties with labor unions, the International Working Men’s Association, socialists, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Commune thus “further reinforced the bourgeois notion of class war,” as Gay Gullickson notes.  “Journalists regularly referred to the ‘Reds’ in Paris and used ‘communist’ as a synonym for ‘communard’….” Some journalists even used all three terms interchangeably.  Both American newspapers and periodicals followed a similar path in criticizing the Commune and exposing it to the rest of the world. One historian notes that, “[t]he chorus of abuse in the American press quickly mounted as the Commune unfolded, and after its destruction it was frequently used to epitomize all the horrors of ‘communist’ philosophy….The Commune [brought] out [people’s] worst anxieties about the family, religion, property, and social order.” The Paris Commune became the great fear of anti-Communist Americans who saw the actions of the working class in Europe as a major threat.

So, yes, the “red menace” attacks on the pope have a long lineage in the United States, which stretch back to the nineteenth century—and have clearly outlasted the Cold War.