Monday’s Wall Street Journal ran an interesting review of a newly published biography of John S. Service by Jonathan Mirsky.
Drummed out of the State Department during the McCarthy period, Service was long viewed as a victim of irrational anti-communism, and he was rewarded by the liberal elite culture with an appoint at Cal Berkeley. Well, as it turns out, Service really did pass along top-secret documents to the Chinese communists.
So it goes. The entire mythology about anti-communism in the 1950s turns out to be just that—a myth. It wasn’t a “witch hunt,” a term meant to suggest that communist spies and collaborators were imaged and not real. KGB files and late in life confessions show that the State Department and other agencies in Washington actually had people who took the other side in the Cold War.
American conservatism has countless things to regret. Reading William F. Buckley on civil rights in the 1950s provides a good example. But American conservative intellectuals have come to terms with their past, and we do not hold the the absurd and morally corrupt notion that we have no enemies on the Right. Not so liberals, who have failed to come to terms with their historical legacy of blindness to and complicity with enemies on the Left.
December 22nd, 2009 | 4:40 pm
If we have so much to regret, maybe we should become liberals. Maybe the liberals are right. Maybe the liberals have superior moral vision and clarity after all. They never seem to regret anything. Their view becomes history’s view. As it is said of the Supreme court: conservative decisions are provisional; liberal ones eternal.
Or maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about being on the wrong side of history as opposed to simply, well, being wrong. Sometimes history is wrong. Take Good Friday for instance.
December 22nd, 2009 | 4:56 pm
“Communism is fascism with a human face,” Susan Sontag told the gathering of American leftists at Town Hall back in 1982. Everyone else who spoke that evening had offered up some variation on anti-anticommunism, and here she was staking out a position that was anti-anti-anticommunist. (Sorry, but it really was that convoluted. You’d think the first two “anti”s in that formulation would cancel each other out, but they didn’t entirely.) This provoked a great controversy. The Nation ran a symposium on it shortly thereafter:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19820227/sontag
The point being that there have always been a few candles in the darkness that is the general failure of the American left to treat communism as seriously as it has treated fascism and nazism.
December 23rd, 2009 | 8:48 am
Virtually everyone in my generation grew up with that myth: that activities to expose and fight communism in the 1950s were nothing more than illiberal paranoia–a “witch hunt”.
Apparently there were quite a few communists or communist sympathizers in the media because that is the narrative they’ve been spinning and upholding for the last 50 years: these people were blameless. Time has revealed that most of the “victims” of these inquiries were actually communists and were actually saboteurs and spies giving aid and comfort to those who would destroy us.
Joe McCarthy may have been a dunce, but there is considerable irony now in Edward R. Murrow’s “have you no shame?” remark. Its effect–like Cronkite’s assertion that we lost the war in Viet-Nam–was made possible only by the existence of a media gatekeeper that controlled all the sources of news and, consequently, the narrative.
Now that the media has lost its stranglehold on public discourse, and the truth is available to anyone who cares to seek it, matters are considerably different.
December 23rd, 2009 | 11:28 am
Look, the only reason they’re smug is because we’ve been too polite to confront them with the glaring evidence of their moral and political bankruptcy.
If liberal politicies were “progressive” as in ‘good for human beings’, and they as individuals were morally and intellectually superior…. then please explain why in EVERY case where they have ruled cities and counties these places have failed to become utopias.
One would think 40 years enough time to prove whether high taxes, regulation, bureaucracy, and all their ‘war on poverty’ programs were in fact good for the citizenry. In every case it’s produced decay and decadence, political corruption and crime.
Far from being intellectually superior, they’re amazingly myopic and stupid. But they do have great PR. That’s one thing all Communists have excelled in (that, and running prisons). But take the mask off and what have you? Certainly not evidence of moral virtue, civic growth and public improvement.
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