Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

by David Horowitz

  This tainting and ostracism of sinners is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith. It is what keeps the faithful faithful. The spectacle of what happens to a heretic like Hitchens when he challenges the party code is a warning to others not to try it. This is why Alger Hiss kept his silence to the end, and why, even thirty and fifty years after the fact, the memoirs of leftists are so elusive and disingenuous when it comes to telling the hard political and personal truths about who they were and what they did. To tell a threatening truth is to risk vanishing in the progressive communities in which you have staked your life — and to risk vanishing in memory, too. Hitchens's crime is not the betrayal of friendship. It is the betrayal of progressive politics, the only bond the left takes seriously.

  This is far from obvious to those who have never been insiders. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the otherwise perceptive Roger Kimball described what has happened to Hitchens under the following caption: "Leftists Sacrifice Truth on the Altar of Friendship."

  But this presumes either that they were closer friends of Blumenthal than of Hitchens, or that friendship means more to them than politics. None of the denouncers of Hitchens even claimed a closer friendship with Blumenthal as a reason for their choice. Moreover, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that these leftists would remain friends of Blumenthal should he, in turn, reveal what he really knows about Clinton's obstructions of justice and the machinations of the White House crew.

  To examine an actual betrayal of friendship one need go no further than Cockburn's New York Press column outing Hitchens as a compulsive snitch. Friends can take different political paths and still honor the life that was once between them, the qualities and virtues that made them friends. Alex was once closer to Hitchens than Blumenthal ever was. They knew each other longer and their friendship was deeper. Hitchens even named his own son "Alex" out of admiration for his friend. But in his column, Alex gratuitously smeared Hitchens (who is married) as an aggressive closet homosexual, an odorous, ill-mannered, and obnoxious drunk, a pervert who gets a sexual frisson out of ratting on his intimates.

  Not a single member of Hitchens's former circle, which include people who have known him as a comrade for thirty years, has stepped forward to defend him from the ugly slander.

  What then inspires these auto-da-fés? It is the fact that the community of the left is a community of meaning and is bound by ties that are fundamentally religious. For the nonreligious, politics is the art of managing the possible. For the left, it is the path to a social redemption. This messianism is its political essence. For the left, the agenda of politics is ultimately not about practical options concerning which reasonable people may reasonably differ. It is about moral choices that define one as human. It is about taking sides in a war that will decide the future and whether the principle of justice will prevail. It is about us being on the side of the angels, and them as the party of the damned. In the act of giving up Blumenthal to the congressional majority and the special prosecutor, Hitchens put power in the hands of the enemies of the people. He acted as one of them.

  Katha Pollitt puts it to Hitchens this way: "Why should you, who call yourself a socialist, a man of the left, help Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and Trent Lott? If Clinton is evil, are the forces arrayed against him better, with their 100 percent ratings from the Christian coalition, and their after-dinner speaking engagements at white supremacist clubs?" Of course, Katha Pollitt doesn't for a moment think that Clinton is evil. But Hitchens's new friends obviously are. Observe how easily she invokes the McCarthy stratagems to create the taint — the demonization of Hitchens's new "friends," the guilts by association that link him to them and them to the devil, the absurd reduction of the entire Clinton opposition to any of these links.

  The casting out of Hitchens, then, was a necessary ritual to protect the left's myth of itself as a redemptive force. How could Blumenthal, who is one of them, who is loyal to their cause be connected to something evil, as Hitchens suggests? How could they? All of Hitchens's attackers and all fifty-eight members of the congressional Progressive Caucus — yesterday's vanguard opponents of American military power — supported the wanton strikes against the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, without batting a proverbial lash. Every one of them found a way to excuse Clinton's abuse of disposable women like Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky. The last thing they would want to do is confront Blumenthal's collusion in a campaign to destroy one of Clinton's female nuisances because she became a political threat. After all, it is they who want the reprobate in power. In blurting out the truth, Hitchens slammed the left up against its hypocrisies and threatened to unmask their sanctimonious pretensions. This is the threat the anathema on Hitchens was designed to suppress.

  Here is my own message for the condemned man: You and I, Christopher, will continue our disagreements on many important things, and perhaps most things. But I take my hat off to you for what you have done. For your dedicated pursuit of the truth in these matters, and for your courage in standing up under fire. The comrades who have left you are incapable of such acts.

  24

  A Proper Love of Country

  THE FIRST COLUMN I WROTE for the Internet magazine Salon in 1997 was a piece about the director Elia Kazan, calling for an end to Hollywood's "longest blacklist." For more than twenty years it had been impossible to honor Kazan in Hollywood, although he was its greatest living film legend. I did not say so at the time, but I felt a kinship with Kazan in the fact that the invitation to write for Salon had ended a long exile for me from the literary culture, the result of a kind of graylist in force for exradicals like myself.

  I had no idea the shunning of Hollywood's greatest living figure would come to an end only two years later, or that it would come as a result of an honor bestowed on him by the Academy of Motion Pictures itself. Ostensibly the anti-Kazan anger was over the original blacklist of communists that was introduced into the film industry by the Hollywood studio heads some fifty years ago. Abe Polonsky and Bernard Gordon, two minor film professionals who organized the anti-Kazan protest, had been among those blacklisted at the time. Their charge against Kazan was that he had been an "informer" for the blacklisters, had collaborated with witch-hunters, and had betrayed colleagues and friends. For these crimes, they argued, the film community should continue to shun him and not give him an award.

  Let me make clear my own views of congressional investigations like the one with which Kazan cooperated. The only legitimate purpose of congressional investigations is to determine whether there should be legislation to deal with certain problems and how that legislation should be designed. It was as legitimate for Congress to hold hearings inquiring into the influence of an organization like the Communist Party in an important American industry like film, as it was for legislators to inquire into the influence of organized crime in the union movement and other areas of American life. The Communist Party was conspiratorial in nature and operated through concealed agendas. It infiltrated open organizations and set out to control them through systematic deception and political manipulation. Its own purposes were determined by the fact that it was financed and directed by a foreign dictatorial power, whom its members worshiped. Kazan deeply resented the way the Communist Party had infiltrated and taken control of the Group Theater, where he was an actor and director, to exploit it for its own political ends.

  What was not legitimate in these investigations was for congressmen to use their hearings to expose the influence of communists (or gangsters, for that matter) to the public at large. Such public hearings were, in effect, trials without the due process protections afforded by courts of law. By opening testimony to the public, the committees, in effect, tried uncooperative witnesses who were called before them. The committees became juries, judges, and executioners all rolled into one, since the mere charge of being a gangster or a communist was enough to ensure a public judgment that was punitive.

  By this standard, many congressional investigati
ons that are open, whether they are of organized crime or of communists or of executive misdeeds, as in the Iran-Contra Hearings, have the potential for such abuses and are equally illegitimate, and qualify as witch-hunts. Oliver North had no more constitutional protections than did the communists in the McCarthy era when he appeared before the Iran-Contra committee and had to sit in the dock while Senators and congressman who enjoyed legal immunity denounced him as a liar and traitor to the entire nation. On the other hand, I do not remember protests issuing from liberals over the attempted public hanging of Oliver North and the other Iran-Contra figures. Perhaps that is because the political shoe was on the other foot. Yet the only way to avoid such abuses of congressional power would be to require that all such congressional hearings be closed.

  There were other aspects of the Hollywood witch-hunt (and of Kazan's role) that were blurred in the ensuing Academy controversy. Every one of the communists Kazan named, for example, had already been identified as a communist by other witnesses. None of those he named even worked in the film industry, but were theater professionals in New York. In other words, Kazan's testimony destroyed no Hollywood careers. More importantly, it was not Congress that imposed the blacklist but Hollywood itself. This little fact, now forgotten, was dramatized by the way the blacklist finally came to an end. This was accomplished essentially through the action of one man, who was not even one of the studio heads who had initiated the process. The blacklist episode was put to an end by the actor Kirk Douglas when he decided to give Dalton Trumbo a screen credit for the film Spartacus. By putting Trumbo's name on the credits he legitimized those who had been hitherto banished and opened the doors to their return. What made the blacklist possible was Hollywood itself — the collusion of all those actors, writers, and directors (some of whom sat on their hands and scowled for the cameras the night Kazan's own exile ended) who went to work day and in a day out during the blacklist years, while their friends and colleagues languished out in the cold. The anti-Kazan protest, in short, was entirely symbolic and contained large dollops of hypocrisy and amnesia. Ultimately, it was an attempt to re-fight the Cold War. And that is why the anti-Kazan forces lost.

  Suppose the studio heads who met in 1951 to ban communists in Hollywood had instead announced that they were not going to employ nazis and racists, or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Would Abe Polonsky and Bernard Gordon and the other progressives who tried to deny Kazan his honor have come out to protest this blacklist? Would they have regarded friendly witnesses against the Nazis and racists as betrayers of "friends?" Or would they have welcomed them as men who had come to their senses and done the right thing?

  Many of those who defended the Kazan award invoked the quality of his art to overlook what he did politically. The director Paul Schrader was typical. Artistically, he told the LA Weekly, "Kazan is a giant. [But] that does not mitigate the fact that he did wrong things. I think evil things. But at the end of the day, he's an artist, and his work towers over that." Schrader explained that to say Kazan should not get an honorary Oscar was like saying that Leni Riefenstahl shouldn't be acknowledged because she worked under the heel of Hitler's propaganda machine. What Schrader (and others) conveniently overlooked was that it was Kazan's antagonists who volunteered to work for Stalin's propaganda machine, while Kazan went to the mat for America, for the democracy that had given him refuge, freedom, and unbounded opportunity.

  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 pa
ssage 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.