Stalinism (or new McCarthyism?)

[Vladimir Bilenkin]

Hoyte & Elena King wrote:

> I am quite suprised that there is even still a debate on Lenin's role
> in the Russian Civil War and the foundation of the Soviet State.  His
> actions are well documented and easily available to anyone (especially
> to those knowing Russian).  The Russian historian Got'e ("Time of
> Toubles") is a good place to pick up an erudite first-hand account of
> life in Moscow under Lenin. Alain Besancon discusses the philosophical
> underpinnings of Leninism ("The Rise of the Gulag"). And what about
> Lenin's role in gassing 50,000 peasants in southern Russia?  HE USED
> GAS ON HIS OWN COUNTRYMEN.

I wonder if this sort of revelations would pass unappreciated on H-Russia.
Hope not.  But I must say that this whole thread on "Stalinism" smells a
rat.  Is it a pure
coincidence that we are having this scholarly exchange visited upon us at the
time when Susan Sontag and
Michael Moore receive death threats on the phone for daring to experess
different opinions on 9/11, and so on
and so forth?  Below is a rather mainstream account of the emerging "war on
dissent" in this country, with some bits and pieces of its history, which may
suggest a different explanation as to why the plague of Marxism did not spare
some poor academic souls even in the U.S.

Vladimir Bilenkin,
NCSU

_____________________
The war on dissent

As Americans unite behind their flag, they are in no mood to tolerate
criticism, writes SIMON HOUPT. But are they sacrificing the very freedom
they are defending?

By SIMON HOUPT

Saturday, October 6, 2001 ╜ Print Edition, Page R1 (Toronto) Globe and Mail


NEW YORK -- When two airliners smashed into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center last month, writer Susan Sontag was in Berlin, glued to CNN,
the only U.S. newscast she could receive. In the 40 hours that followed, she
watched a parade of military and political experts stroll across the screen,
apparently united in their convictions over the causes of and solutions to
the terrorist attacks.

"It was amazing: To see Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, Henry
Kissinger -- they all can't stand each other -- to see them all come on and
say exactly the same thing? It made me laugh!" Sontag said in an interview.
"So I said: Why can't there be some debate?"

Stuck in Berlin by the closure of American airports, Sontag was asked by The
New Yorker to contribute to the magazine's first Talk of the Town section
published after the attacks. This is what she wrote: "The unanimity of the
sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and
media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature
democracy."

Noting that U.S. President George W. Bush had said the terrorists were
cowards, she submitted, "if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be
more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation,
high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill
others . . . whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's
slaughter, they were not cowards."

The magazine hit newsstands in New York on Sept. 17. That night, 4,000
kilometres across the country in a Los Angeles television studio,
Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher began his first show after the attacks
with a tribute to one of those killed the previous week. Conservative pundit
Barbara Olson had been en route from Washington to L.A. to promote her new
book on the show when her plane was flown into the Pentagon. Sitting a few
feet from a seat left empty in memory of Olson, Maher echoed Sontag's words.

"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away,
that's cowardly," he said. "Staying in the airplane when it hits the
building, say what you want about it, that's not cowardly."

Yikes. Maher is a contract provocateur, willing to say just about anything
for ratings, and in the past advertisers have jauntily supported his
schoolyard taunts. Coming so soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, his
comments were considered hurtful and unbecoming for a man employed by ABC
Networks, which is owned by Disney.

The day after the broadcast, FedEx pulled its ads in protest, followed by
Sears Roebuck. As Maher tried desperately to spin his words, TV stations
around the country began pulling Politically Incorrect from their airwaves.
Even after Maher offered an outright apology, as many as 17 stations briefly
dropped the show.

It was becoming apparent that the American public was in no mood to hear any
criticism of the country or its leader.

Sontag was back in New York by this time, receiving anonymous threats and
not so anonymous attacks for voicing her opinion. The New Yorker offices
were deluged with letters of complaint and Sontag was pilloried in the pages
of dozens of newspapers and political weeklies by the usual cast of
curmudgeonly columnists. A senior editor at The New Republic grouped Sontag
in with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, characterizing her as someone
who wants America's global power to be dismantled.

On the Fox News Channel, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., a
retired U.S. Army colonel suggested that any criticism of America's
impending war on terrorism might be considered treasonous.

Less than one week after the World Trade Center attack, posters appeared in
bus shelters and telephone booths around the country with the vow: "United
We Stand." Millions of flags now flutter from lawns, rooftops, window ledges
and car aerials. In words and deeds, Americans are declaring: "United We
Speak."

Dissent has all but disappeared.

"It's all preposterous," Sontag said this week. "I'm stunned by the
reaction, because it tells something about the mood of the country. I find
that prevalence of group-think absolutely extraordinary. I find it
extraordinary that the press secretary of the President of the United States
would say people have to watch what they say as well as what they do. That
sends chills up and down my spine. If I take it seriously as a turn in the
spirit of the country, I would be much more alarmed, but I hope that's not
true.

"I just said something elementary and old-fashioned American. It's very
depressing to see how scared people are to say anything except to read from
this script. If I think that it is the beginning of a new age in which
essentially freedom of speech is only something we afford in prosperous and
calm times, then I would say that is the end of the United States of America
being a country that I admire."

Sontag might not be interested in hearing, then, that Americans have always
been quick to sacrifice freedom of speech in anxious times.

"It's part of the landscape," said Thomas McCoy, a law professor at
Vanderbilt University who specializes in the First Amendment. "When there's
a national crisis, particularly a war situation, you find widespread
attempts to suppress unpopular or inconvenient viewpoints."

The strongest condemnation of unpopular viewpoints in the wake of the Sept.
11 attacks came from presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, who chastised
Maher from the bully pulpit of the White House briefing room.

"All Americans . . . need to watch what they say, watch what they do," said
Fleischer. ". . . This is not a time for remarks like that. It never is."
The chilling effect of his comment wasn't diminished by the fact that he was
also referring to a racist remark by a Louisiana Republican congressman.
While the First Amendment prevents government from clamping down on critical
speech, private companies are free to censure their employees at whim.
Nothing in law precludes ABC from cancelling Politically Incorrect if the
network suddenly decides Maher's politically incorrect speech is more a
liability than an asset.

If they choose, advertisers may back out of sponsoring the publication of
opinions with which they or their audience disagree, as FedEx did.

Maher's comments brought "numerous general complaints," according to FedEx
spokesman Jim McCluskey. "There's an environment there where words should be
guarded carefully and there should be appropriate sensitivity to
circumstances as they exist." McCluskey offered this odd assessment of a
core American value: "I don't think freedom of speech is really at issue.
It's just the nature in which free speech is used."

Unusually, it's not just critics of the Bush administration who are being
censured. Ann Coulter, a bellicose right-wing columnist, declared on Sept.
13 that she had the solution to the terrorist threat from Islamic
extremists.

"We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and
dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and
convert them to Christianity," she wrote in a column carried on the National
Review's Web site.

After writing two incendiary follow-up pieces that editors chose not to run,
Coulter griped -- as it happens, on Politically Incorrect -- that she was
being censored. Turns out she'd spoken too soon: Coulter was dropped by
National Review only after those public complaints upset her editors.

In widely publicized incidents, two other writers were fired last month
after they criticized the actions George W. Bush took in the early hours
after the terrorist attacks.

Dan Guthrie, a columnist and copy editor at The Daily Courier in the small
town of Grants Pass, Ore., said he was fired after writing that Bush
"skedaddled" and hid out "in a Nebraska hole," waiting for the danger to
pass. At the Texas City Sun, city editor Tom Gutting was fired for voicing
similar sentiments. The paper's editor and publisher Les Daughtry Jr.
announced Gutting's dismissal in a front-page apology.

"Tom's column was so offensive to me personally that I had a hard time
getting all the way through it, and in fact, still feel ill from its effects
as I write this," Daughtry wrote. He concluded: "May God bless President
George W. Bush and other leaders. And God bless America!"

Newly wary of the sensibilities of their audiences and the pressing need to
maintain sources as the pipeline for information gets squeezed, many
journalists are holding back from asking tough questions of the
administration. Immediately after the attacks, some news anchors and many
local reporters donned red-white-and-blue flag pins, while a number of
networks replaced their usual logos with American flags or
red-white-and-blue renditions of the logos. A senior vice-president at the
Fox News Channel said the network was proud to fly a waving American flag on
screen.

"I'd sure prefer that to a hammer and sickle, I'll tell you that," Rick
Moody said, as if those were the only two choices. "I think that there's
some patriotism on camera now, and I think inasmuch as TV news often
reflects America's mood at any given moment, that's what it's doing now."

To be sure, the media's goose-stepping disappoints some Americans.

"Our media, it's so pathetic and embarrassing," said the film director and
left-wing rabble-rouser Michael Moore. Normally a frequent guest on
cable-news shows, Moore says he hasn't been called to appear on any American
TV stations since the attacks.

"I've been called by the CBC, BBC, ABC in Australia," he said in an
interview. "I've been on the nightly newscast of every Western country,
practically, and I've not had a single call from the American networks. . .
. Because I'm going to go on there and say the things they don't want to
hear. I'm going to be off message. I'm not going to sing with the chorus.
And the media is part of the chorus now. They're wearing their ribbons and
they're not being objective journalists and they're not presenting all
sides.

"The media has always given in to the government," Moore insisted. "In the
early years of Vietnam, the media was all behind it. They didn't switch
until Walter Cronkite took off his glasses," and made his famous "Stalemate"
broadcast in February, 1968, in which he suggested that the war might be
unwinnable. "It took four years for the first media person to say, 'This is
wrong,' " Moore said.

Recently, Moore was told that his publishers at HarperCollins (which is,
like Fox News Channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch) would hold off on
distributing his newest book. Entitled Stupid White Men and Other Sorry
Excuses for the State of the Nation -- with such chapter titles as Kill
Whitey, A Very American Coup and Idiot Nation -- the book was supposed to
hit stores a few days ago in a sizable print run of 100,000. Last he heard,
Moore said, the company is considering pulping the books.

"My problems pale in comparison to [the victims of the attacks and their
families], so I'm not whining about it. I'm just saying this is a time when
writers and artists need to really act with courage, stand up, say the
things that they need to say, and trust that there's enough of the American
public that will hear what you're saying."

On Sept. 12, Moore posted a diary entry on his Web site, MichaelMoore.com,
suggesting that perhaps the U.S. didn't have the moral authority to decry
the activities of terrorists.

"We abhor terrorism -- unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing. We paid
and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who
killed more than 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty
thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers! We fund a lot
of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we
never let the human suffering THAT causes interrupt our day one single bit."

The response? Moore says his site is getting more than one million hits per
week.

"People are desperate," he says. "They're looking for alternative sources of
information." Since the attacks, he has received more than 70,000 e-mails.
Most of them are supportive but he acknowledges that many are not. "The tone
of the hate mail that I've received is as vicious and violent as it's ever
been toward me, in terms of threatening to kill me and do other things to
me."

Clearly, the American people are in no mood for speech that might challenge
their certainties. Thursday night on Politically Incorrect, political
cartoonist Dan Rall was roundly booed when he reminded the audience that
George W. Bush's victory in November's presidential election was still
unresolved. "That's so Sept. 10th," scolded a patronizing Bill Maher. "It
really is."

The impulse to clamp down on critical speech isn't new. In 1918, with
American troops dying in Europe, socialist Eugene Debs was charged and
convicted under the war-time Espionage Act for protesting the First World
War. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and disenfranchised, losing his
citizenship for life. (Debs still managed to run for president from prison
on the Socialist ticket and earn about one million votes.)

During the Red Scare of the 1940s and '50s, which Senator Joseph McCarthy
masterfully exploited, public fear of Communists in America was so strong
that the Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer found two-thirds of people
polled in 1954 said a Communist shouldn't be permitted to speak. Sixty per
cent said an atheist shouldn't be permitted to speak.

"The Cold War was viewed as a major national crisis," said Prof. McCoy, "so
any dissenters were being dragged before the House Un-American Activities
Committee and fired from their jobs in Hollywood and universities.

"It just seems that when we feel the need to pull together against a common
enemy, our normal American tolerance for dissent is a casualty of that felt
need to pull together."

In a nation that haughtily markets itself to the rest of the world as a
haven for free speech, why is dissent regarded as unpatriotic, as
un-American, during times of crisis?

Moore thinks it's something in the national character of Americans. He is
censoring himself in publishing comments that might prove hurtful to the
twin-tower victims -- one of his friends was on the plane that slammed into
the south tower -- but he is trying to understand how the tragedy occurred.

"I still can't get out of my head how three guys with box cutters keep 90
people at bay. And yet I don't want to blame the victims for not doing
anything. But what is it in us -- they cut one person's throat, we watch one
person die and then we're paralyzed with fear? What is that?"

Moore is trying to tread carefully, but he believes the national character
is revealed in both the media's obsequiousness and the apparently passive
behaviour of the passengers on at least two of the planes. "We're a nation
that is very weak-kneed and very weak-willed, and we talk a big harrumph,
alright?"

Sontag chalks up the need for unanimity to something else. "It's a kind of
magical thinking that's similar, I suppose, to what's keeping people off
airplanes. No one wants to take an airplane now . . . they're all empty,
they've all become jinxed, and in the same way there is a kind of magical
thinking that if we all just put out our flags and say exactly the same
thing, we're safer. I don't understand it."

Prof. McCoy doesn't understand it, either, but he can appreciate the
inherent irony. "In the course of banding together to defend what we believe
in, we have a tendency to sacrifice one of the core beliefs that we're
defending. That is ironic, but it is an observable fact."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                http://members.home.net/lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------