In Praise of Red-baiting

From time to time on this blog, you will find me in "Red-baiting" mode; that is, I will occasionally write posts about the evils of Communism(the quotation from Whittaker Chambers' masterpiece, Witness, was the inaugural post in this mode). For some of my friends, my antipathy to Communism makes me a successor to that great anti-Christ of the twentieth century, Joseph McCarthy; for others, who are more inclined to sympathize with my feelings about Communism, my lonely crusade is perceived as rather quaint and anachronistic. After all, the Cold War is over (the bums lost), and nobody, except perhaps a few dinosaurs of academia and some barking moonbats at Indymedia and Democratic Underground, takes Communism seriously anymore. That may be true, but the problem, for me, is that so many in the West -- especially in the decades just before its fall -- failed to take Communism seriously in the first place, and continue to dismiss the threat of Communism in the century just past as a phantom conjured by Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon in order to keep the people cowed into paranoid submission and to feed the ravenous maw of the military industrial complex. Ask your average college Junior in the U.S. to tell you about Communism in the twentieth century, and he is likely to start with this really mean guy named Joe McCarthy and his minions who accused a bunch of innocent people (like Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg) of being Communists and whose demagoguery was -- let's say it all together now, boys and girls! -- just as dangerous a threat to American democracy as Communism itself. If they mention Stalin at all, they will concede that he killed some (perhaps "thousands") of his own people, but they will be quick to point out that Stalinism was really a deviation from true Communism, which, if you really think about it, was never really put into practice (more's the pity), and in any event, it was, like, really stupid to call the Soviet Union the "evil empire" because it was, like, just a different system, no better or worse than democracy -- just, like, different, man -- and why are people so afraid of things they don't understand? Ahem, . . . as you can see, I get a bit carried away sometimes. What disconcerts me about the image of Communism in the popular consciousness is that, while the ravages of Communism in the twentieth century are well-documented and a matter of historical record, it is the myth of Communism (a myth promulgated by "gullible" Western intellectuals, to use a charitable phrase) that has seeped into the culture.

In Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, Roger Kimball includes an outstanding chapter on Raymond Aron and his landmark anti-Communist work, The Opium of the Intellectuals. The opening passage of that chapter encapsulates quite nicely the reasons that I insist on tilting at the windmills of popular myths about Communism:

"Santayana's alarming thought that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' has at least as much relevance to the world of ideas as to the world of action. This is one reason that re-reading is just as imporant as reading. Time has a way of blunting the keenness of truth, muting its claim on our attention. The admonition we heeded yesterday we forget today: no emergency intervened to keep its lessons fresh. Human nature is a constant. The temptations and errors it faces do not change. But because circumstances are always shifting, truths need constantly to be restated if they are to maintain the grip, the purchase of truth. Re-reading is one of our richest sources of restatement. Putting us back in touch with what we once knew, what we still half-remember, re-reading can restore us to misplaced convictions, revitalize insights that have fallen fallow. Re-reading reminds us that nothing seems more vital than old truths rediscovered: as with friends, our intimacy is deepened by previous acquaintance."

We have failed to re-read the history of Communism in the twentieth century, partly because the content of that history is at odds with the hip worldview -- and unflattering to the moral vanity -- of the purveyors of popular culture. To persist in that failure is a dangerous concession to historical ignorance and even to moral blindness. Call me paranoid, but I would prefer to re-read the lessons of our recent history before some other "emergency" intervenes to keep its lessons fresh.

Maybe it's already too late. But that's a subject for another post.