Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (32 page)

I had the occasion to raise this issue, on a talk show, with Victor Navasky, editor of the
Nation
and author of a book on the McCarthy period that established him in the controversy as the most articulate defender of the Old Left. When I asked Navasky if he would have similar objections to a blacklist of Nazis, he said, "The difference is the Nazi Party was illegal. The Communist Party was legal."

This was an odd position for a New Left radical. Would it have been all right to inform on members of the civil rights movement because they broke laws? Should the Communist Party have been outlawed to make the hearings legitimate? (In fact, one of the purposes of the congressional hearings, as Navasky well knows, was to see if such legislation was warranted.) If Congress had decided to outlaw the Communist Party, wouldn't Victor Navasky and other progressives be pointing to this as an example of witch-hunting, evidence of an incipient American fascism at the time? Of course they would.

In fact, Navasky draws a sharp distinction between communists and nazis that has nothing to do with legalities. In a
Newsweek
column, he wrote, "[unlike nazis] the actors, writers and directors who joined the Communist Party . . . in the '30s started out as social idealists who believed that the party was the best place to fight fascism abroad and racism at home." But this is not a plausible argument for anyone familiar with the political realities of the time, let alone a lifelong partisan of the left like Victor Navasky. There were many organizations other than the Communist Party where one could fight fascism abroad and racism at home if one so desired. Indeed, during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Communist Party was hardly the place to fight "fascism abroad" at all.

What made the Communist Party distinctive for those who joined was its belief that the Soviet Union was the future of mankind, and that preparation for a Bolshevik-style revolution in the United States was the appropriate politics for anyone interested in a liberated future. People who joined the party were given secret names so they could function in the underground when the time came for such tactics and were introduced into an organization that was conspiratorial in nature because it fully intended to conduct illegal operations. That was what the revolution required, as they understood it. It was not for nothing that they thought of themselves as Leninists.

One of the famous incidents of the blacklist period was the Peekskill riot where anti-communists broke up a public concert by Paul Robeson, at the time the most famous figure associated with the party. The pretext for the riot was a recent public statement Robeson had made that revealed what every communist secretly knew: in the Cold War with Stalin's Russia, he or she was actively pulling for the other side. What Robeson said (and I paraphrase) was that American Negroes would not fight in a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was a crude exploitation of black Americans, but it accurately reflected the sentiments in Robesods own heart and in the hearts of his comrades.

This is the missing self-perception that underlies the odd postures of the left during the Kazan affair, and indeed the postures of many post-communist leftists when they reflect on the Cold War years.

One such oddity is the way in which those who protested the Kazan honor were actually the aggressors in the entire episode, yet presented themselves as victims. Imagine what would have happened if a group of Hollywood figures had organized a protest over the honorary Oscar that the Academy gave to Charlie Chaplin some years ago. Suppose they had done so because forty years earlier Chaplin had been a communist fellow-traveler and given money and support to the Stalinist cause. Can it be doubted that cries of "redbaiting" and "witch-hunting" would issue from the left? Why was Kazan's case any different? Why didn't they see their own protest as a witch-hunt to deny an honor to someone who was on the other side of the political battle fifty years ago? Their only possible answer to this question would be: Who did Chaplin betray?

The centrality of this issue in all the responses of the anti-Kazan forces was brought home to me by a book I have been reading, called
Red Atlantis
, by the film critic for the
Village Voice
, J. Hoberman. The concluding chapter of
Red Atlantis
is a compilation of two pieces Hoberman wrote years ago on the controversy over the Rosenberg case. Like the Kazan affair, the passions over the Rosenbergs still ran high at the time, despite the fact that here, too, the historical record is closed. Just as there is no secret anymore that virtually all the victims of the blacklist were also defenders of a monster regime that was America's sworn enemy, so it is clear that the Rosenbergs were actual spies for Stalin's Russia. Hoberman does not deny either fact, but so minimizes them that they become insignificant to his argument. The climactic passage of his text contains these judgments:

Q Were Julius and Ethel guilty?
A. Affirmative. Guilty of wanting a better world.
Q Does that mean they were traitors?
A. Negative. Negative. Negative. Negative. Negative. . .
Nega. . . . How could the Rosenbergs be traitors? Traitors! To whom?...The Rosenbergs never betrayed their beliefs, their friends. They kept the faith. They sacrificed everything — even their children. In a time when turning state's witness was touted as the greatest of civic virtues, the Rosenbergs went to their deaths without implicating a soul.

Here is the mentality that explains the oddities of the Kazan protest and the left's defense of itself during the Cold War era. For the argument proposed by Hoberman is absurd to anyone not committed to the progressive faith. Isn't it the case that even nazis think of themselves as wanting the better world? Dodt we all? In other words, if Hoberman's proposition is true, doesn't wanting a better world become a license to tell any lie, perpetrate any crime, commit any betrayal? And how could he have overlooked the betrayals that the Rosenbergs did commit? If they sacrificed their children, as he admits, surely this was a betrayal. If they maintained their innocence to friends and comrades, as they did, surely this was a betrayal. If they pledged their faith to Stalin's evil regime, surely this was a betrayal of their own ideals. If they spied for the Soviet government, as Hoberman concedes they did, is there any question they betrayed their country?

It is their country and its citizens who are the missing elements in the consciousness of progressives like Hoberman, Navasky, and the anti-Kazan protesters. For them, collaborating with their own democratic government as it tried to defend itself against a mortal communist threat, is still more culpable than serving a totalitarian state and aiding an enemy power.

What is missing from these progressive hearts, after all is said and done, is a proper love of country, and therefore a sense of the friends, neighbors, and countrymen they betrayed. A proper love of country does not mean the abandonment of one's principles or the surrender of one's critical senses. It means valuing what you have been given, and what you have, and sharing the responsibility for nurturing and defending those gifts, even in dissent. The Old Left, the Stalinists, the people whom Kazan named, betrayed their country and the real people who live in it, their friends, their neighbors, and ultirnately themselves. They may have betrayed their country out of ignorance, or out of misplaced ideals, or because they were blinded by faith. But they did it, and they need to acknowledge that now by showing humility towards those, like Kazan, who did not.

O
N NEARLY TWO HUNDRED OCCASIONS in the three years before the breaking of the China scandal, including innumerable campaign appearances and three State of the Union addresses, the president of the United States looked the American people in the eye and assured them that, because of his policies, "there are no more nuclear missiles pointed at any children in the United States." If you are Bill Clinton, the truth of this statement probably depends on what "are" means.

But to the rest of us who live in the shadow of a nuclear Armageddon, the president's statement is a morally repulsive and dangerous lie. The shred of truth out of which Clinton has woven his politically useful deception is a meaningless, post-Cold War agreement between Russia and the United States not to target each other's cities. But even if Russia were not a country in a state of near dissolution, the stark military reality is that United States intelligence services normally have no way of telling what targets Russia's leaders have actually chosen for their nuclear warheads. In fact, it would take a mere fifteen seconds for Russian commanders to re-target any of the hundreds of strategic missiles tipped with multiple nuclear warheads they have ready to go.

More important, the Russians are energetically planning for the possibility of nuclear war with the United States. And they are not alone. Thanks to technology transfers courtesy of the Clinton Administration, China and North Korea are also armed with long-range missiles capable of reaching the American mainland. And they are not parties to the non-targeting agreement. Thanks to six years of tenacious, dedicated opposition by the Clinton Administration to the Strategic Defense Initiative, moreover, America has no defense against incoming missiles and no prospect of deploying one for many years.

By every reasonable measure, the post-Cold War world is a dangerous one, perhaps even more dangerous than the world during the Cold War itself. That is the conclusion that any responsible commander-in-chief would draw and that is what he would tell the nation whose security depends on his political judgment.

It is the assessment that any responsible administration would have acted on in the last seven years. But the actual response of the Clinton Administration during those years, as documented by the veteran military reporter Bill Gertz, in his disturbing new book,
Betrayal,
are different indeed:

• While the Clinton Administration has cut America's military by 40 percent and dramatically drawn down America's nuclear forces, the general in charge of Russia's rocket forces has publicly boasted that his are still at 90 percent of their combat effectiveness during the Cold War. The same general admits that his nuclear command and control systems are already stretched y percent beyond their life expectancy (and thus susceptible to unauthorized acts by rogue commanders).
  
• While threats from nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism continue to grow, Clinton has used his veto power to resist every effort by Republicans in Congress to authorize an anti-missile defense program. This opposition was mounted in the name of will-o'-the-wisp "arms control" agreements with the Russians (who have failed in the past to respect them) and under the assumption that there was no imminent threat of a missile attack to the United States. In pursuit of these chimeras, as Gertz has documented, Clinton was willing to go behind the back of his own Pentagon and collude with the Russians in blocking the development of a United States anti-missile system. This attitude only changed with the discovery of the wholesale nuclear spy leaks under the Clinton watch and the imminent publication of the
  Cox Report.
  Even then, the Clinton Administration refused to make a decision whether to implement such a program until June 2000, which ensured that the nation would remain defenseless in the face of a potential missile attack well into the future.
  
• While the Clinton Administration has stopped all development of nuclear weapons and is in the process of drawing down America's existing forces and while Clinton's Department of Energy chief (in charge of nuclear weapons development) publicly assailed America's "bomb building culture" and, for the benefit of potentially hostile powers, declassified information on 204 nuclear tests, Russia and China are engaged in a full-scale nuclear arms race to develop and expand their own arsenals. The express purpose of these large-scale nuclear buildups is to gain military superiority over the United States.
  
• While the United States has largely closed down its own underground military shelters, Soviet rulers are devoting massive resources (in a country on the verge of famine) to building an underground nuclear bunker the size of Washington, D.C.. The evident purpose of this bunker is to allow the Russian elite to survive a nuclear attack so that Russia can prevail in an all-out nuclear war. There is no country besides the United States that could qualify as an enemy in such a war. Meanwhile, Clinton is sending a billion dollars to Russia earmarked for its "nuclear disarmament program" even though the government's own General Accounting Office has already determined that millions of these dollars are going to Russian scientists working to
  build
  new nuclear weapons for the Russian military.
  

Now the
Cox Report
has revealed that even while the Clinton Administration was steadfastly "engaging" China as a friendly power, the Chinese were systematically plotting to infiltrate the Democratic Party and current administration, subvert America's electoral process, and (with the help of the president himself) steal America's advanced weapons arsenal. The result is chillingly captured in the
Wall Street Journal's
summary of the bipartisan report: "The espionage inquiry found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles and guidance systems. Targets of the spying ranged from an Army antitank weapon to nearly all modern fighter jets. Most of the theft wasn't done by professionals, but by visitors or front companies. Lax security by the Clinton Administration is blamed in part, and satellite makers Hughes and Loral are criticized."

Loral and Hughes are the companies that provided the Chinese with the technology to deliver their nuclear payloads. They were able to accomplish this with indispensable assistance provided by the Clinton White House that allowed them to circumvent technology controls instituted for national security purposes by previous administrations. Loral and Hughes are large Clinton campaign contributors. In fact, the head of Loral is the largest electoral contributor in American history.