Anti-communism

  Remember Diane Keaton’s 1970s movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar?  One review called it “anti-religion, anti-women, anti-sex, anti-everything!”

You could say I’m an anti-anti.  I’m anti-antianger,  anti-anti-Muslim, anti-antidivorce, anti-antihiphop, anti-antirevolution, anti-antipacifism, anti-antipermissiveness…

And anti-anticommunist!

I recall back in the 1990s an interview with Saul Bellow in The New Yorker. (This was The New Yorker under Tina Brown, who’s always been deferential to The Big People.) Bellow got pretty self-indulgent in his later years, and in this interview he said he couldn’t imagine what motivated the anti-anticommunists, except for residual Stalinism.

A few weeks ago my history movie watch party showed a movie about Dalton Trumbo, showing the lives ruined by the anti-communist Hollywood blacklist.  I guess that Saul Bellow had no empathy for those people, not to mention the victims of Washington’s anti-communist crusade in places like My Lai and El Mozote.  One might ask, what motivated anti-antianticommunists like Bellow, if not residual McCarthyism.  What it comes down to is that Bellow wanted communism to be the issue and not anti-communism…

In 1981, at the time when the Polish government cracked down on the Solidarity labour movement Susan Sontag asked “In the early 1950s, which gave a more reliable picture of the Soviet bloc, Reader’s Digest or The Nation and The New Statesman?” Yet The Nation and The New Statesman didn’t mislead their readers about the communist order, they just ignored the communist atrocities that the rest of the American press were pointing our. (Reader’s Digest reported what the rest of the press was saying, because that’s their job!) Big deal…

What’s far more important than that is that Reader’s Digest got anti-communism wrong, while The Nation and The New Statesman got it all too right.  When Reader’s Digest ignored anti-communist atrocities, they often weren’t ignoring something that the mainstream press was reporting on anyway.  In many cases, they’d only be reported by magazines like The Nation and The New Statesman.  

Unlike Saul Bellow, I think that anti-communism should be the issue.  Stalin and Mao may have killed tens of millions, but the USA’s anti-communist crusade killed millions in places like Vietnam and Central America, and some estimates surpass 10 million.  Notice that while the Soviet Union and China largely murdered their own people, Washington largely murdered people in the Third World—out of sight, out of mind.  And don’t let people present the Cold War as a World War II-style “good war”:  the Soviet Empire collapsed largely because of its internal weaknesses.

The Cold War left a noxious legacy in the USA itself.  Blacklistees weren’t the only victims, the very rule of law was undermined!  Ronald Reagan clearly should have been impeached, but Washington let him get away with his war crimes. (I’m not just referring to the failure of Congress; in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations the mainstream press launched a big attack on… the Democrat candidates to succeed Reagan, whom they nicknamed “The Seven Dwarfs.”) The legacy of Reagan getting away with it is that successors have repeated his offences!

Anti-communism created much of the ugliness in today’s world.  The anti-communists have a lot to answer  for and shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind “The communists were worse”!