On this date eight years I published Normalizing Mass Murder and Repression, on the New York Times year long, 40 installment series, about the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. I ended with a comment on the final installment by Simon Sebag Montefiore which had a negative take on the Bolsheviks and included a swipe at Donald Trump.
One wonders if he was contractually obligated by the Times to insert the
reference to Trump. However gross Donald Trump may be, the attempted
comparison is so absurd it diminishes the power of Montefiore's
article. It is also another example showing why decent liberals are
proving so ineffective in taking on the growing authoritarian trend on
the Left. They seem to be unable to take the threat seriously, finding
it easier to take potshots at the Right for which they will be applauded
by their constituency. One day we will look back and wonder what was
the flaw in traditional liberalism that allowed it to reject the
illiberalism of the Right, but cede its position in our institutions to
the illiberalism of the Left.
We now can look back and wonder, but sadly the struggle, to the extent it even occurred, is over, and the illiberal factions of the Left have solidified their hold on most of our institutions, including the Democratic Party. At the same time, the traditional elements of the GOP have dissolved in the face of MAGA worship, resulting in incoherence on the right and the unleashing of some dark forces. The 20th century categories of liberal and conservative no longer exist as effective political groupings at the national level. We have entered a New World, one that, as of yet, has no Order.
The consequences of the refusal of the New York Times and the rest of traditional media to normalize Donald Trump and to instead create a continuing narrative designed to impede his administration and drive him from office was a disastrous decisions with reverberations that impact this country today. The then-editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, announced after the 2016 that Trump would not be normalized in the news section (for more on Baquet read Closed Ecosystem 2). The result was the creation of the Russia Collusion Hoax, (for more read Reassessing The Assessment and He's Not Your Bro). There were plenty of legitimate problems with Donald Trump that a "normal" press could have reported upon. Instead, a gullible and conspiracy-obsessed president had a real conspiracy constructed against him. We are seeing the consequences in Trump's second administration.
Below is a reprint of that article.
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With the election of Donald Trump, cries abounded on the Left that society and media needed to avoid "normalizing" the new President. In this context "normalizing"
does not mean agreeing with Trump, but rather accepting that his
statements and actions can, and should, be evaluated with some degree of
objectivity.
But while progressives decried any reasoned discussion of Trump as
normalization, one of the left's leading organs, The New York Times
(though even the Times is, based on comments on its articles, apparently
not always as crazy left as its readership demands), devoted all of
2017 to normalizing communism, one of the ideologies that along with
Nazism and fascism, made much of the 20th century a charnel house.
Last year, the Times ran a 40-part series called "Red Century: Exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution".
The series included, as you would expect for a normalization project, a
great deal of civilized discussion about the pros and cons of the
communist experiment.
But it was also carefully curated, finding little or no space in its
forty episodes to discuss communism in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, or the
recent experiment in Venezuela. It was also remarkably unreflective
about what went wrong, with little discussion of dissidents and critics
of the communist system such as Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia. Most
surprisingly there was no assessment of the monumental impact of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's revelations on the tottering edifice of Soviet
Communism. And there was a complete absence of the big picture questions
- how does human nature fit into the idea of the Soviet New Man? Is it
possible to prevent any communist society from descending into the
darkness that each Red regime has done so far?
What the articles in the series did unintentionally highlight was the
ability of idealists, or ideologues if you prefer (ideologues being
idealists you disagree with), to walk optimistically into the future
with their heads held high as they search the skies for their new world,
enabling them to avoid seeing the sea of blood they wade through.
Let's look at some examples from start to finish, with some THC comments added in brackets:
What's Left of Communism by David Priestland (February 24), an
Oxford historian and man of the Left, in which he espouses communism
with a smiley face, without ever reflecting on its feasibility. Here
are some snippets:
"So did I witness Communism’s last hurrah that day in Moscow, or is a
Communism remodeled for the 21st century struggling to be born?"
"But the flaws of laissez-faire soon came to Communism’s rescue. The Wall
Street crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed made socialist
ideas of equality and state planning a compelling alternative to the
invisible hand of the market. Communist militancy also emerged as one of
the few political forces prepared to resist the threat of fascism."
[THC here: Priestland ignores that in the end game of the Weimar
Republic, Stalin ordered the German Communist Party to focus on
destruction of the centrist parties and not attack the Nazis. And, of
course, we have the communist parties of Western Europe and the U.S.
happily supporting Stalin and Hitler from 1939 to 1941.]
"A new left might then succeed in uniting the losers, both white-collar
and blue-collar, in the new economic order. Already, we’re seeing
demands for a more redistributive state. Ideas like the universal basic
income, which the Netherlands and Finland are experimenting with, are
close in spirit to Marx’s vision of Communism’s ability to supply the
wants of all — “from each according to his ability, to each according to
his need.” [THC: And how exactly is that to occur without the use of government force]
"There will be no return to the Communism of five-year plans and gulags." [THC: Glad he feels so confident about that.]
"Lenin no longer lives, the old Communism may be dead, but the sense of injustice that animated them is very much alive."
This piece was quickly supplemented with a very amusing correction by the Times:
Correction: February 24, 2017
A picture supplied by Getty Images was initially posted with
this essay. Editors later learned that the photograph, of Lenin giving a
speech, had been manipulated by the Soviet authorities to erase several
figures near Lenin, notably Leon Trotsky. The picture has been replaced
because such unacknowledged alterations violate Times standards.
On March 13, we had
Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today,
by Stephen Boykewich, described as a consultant to social justice
organizations. His piece isn't even about the communist revolution or
communism, it's merely an anti-American screed blaming the United States
for everything that's gone wrong with the Soviet Union and Russia.
Only a week later we have Francis Beckett, yet another British Leftist, trotting out the old theme of "
Lenin was on the right track, it was that nasty guy Stalin who made it all go wrong";
a theme buried by Solzhenitsyn and the revelations from the Soviet
archives after the Evil Empire's fall. Some sample excerpts:
After the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, the Soviet
state became a beacon of hope for the left, and Moscow a place for
pilgrimage. It was four decades before the magic faded, and the world is
still waiting for something to replace it. [THC: the kind of people
who are still waiting for something to replace it are precisely the
people you do not want anywhere near the levers of power.]
To be sure, Communist parties around the world kept the allegiance of
many hard-liners and still recruited some young idealists, but 1956 was a
turning point, and the Soviet Union as an idea was irretrievably
tainted. Thereafter, Communists were as likely to define themselves as
against Moscow as for it. [THC: Yet they would always turn to the next
group of Communist heroes who would finally get it right - we had Mao
(40-50 million dead), then Ho Chi Minh killing anyone who opposed him;
next was Cambodia Year Zero (20% of the population dead) and Fidel
(arbitrary executions, imprisonment of homosexuals, destruction of one
of Latin America's most prosperous economies).]
On April 3 it was the turn of Tariq Ali, of the New Left Review, and fanboy of Hugo Chavez, on
What Was Lenin Thinking?,
furthering Beckett's theme of the prior week regarding the brilliance
of Lenin and the sadness that under Stalin things went awry.
While its final details were obviously not advertised beforehand, the
takeover was swift and involved minimal violence. [THC: Ali is actually
describing a coup against the real revolutionary government, consisting
of social democrats! There is also no mention in his paean to the great
man that a month later he ordered the forcible dissolution of the only
legislative assembly ever freely elected by the Russian people.]
That
all changed with the ensuing civil war, in which the nascent Soviet
state’s enemies were backed by the czar’s former Western allies. Amid
the resulting chaos and millions of casualties, the Bolsheviks finally
prevailed — but at a terrible political and moral cost, including the
virtual extinction of the working class that had originally made the
revolution. [THC: Tariq Ali is not stupid. Here he is deliberately
misleading readers not familiar with history by blaming what happened
next on Lenin's enemies. Anyone who has read Lenin's own bloodthirsty
words and directives, which do not distinguish between the innocent and
the guilty, and were designed to instill terror in all, knows better.]
Nor should we forget that a few decades
later, it was the Red Army — originally forged in the civil war by
Trotsky, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Mikhail Frunze (the former two killed
in the 30s by Stalin) — that broke the military might of the Third Reich
in
the epic battles of Kursk and Stalingrad. [THC: No mention of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. I guess it must have slipped the author's
mind.]"
April 29 brought us a pathetic piece by Vivian Gornick, When Communism Inspired Americans.
The author was raised in an American communist family and was twenty
years old when Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin occurred, revealing
their beliefs were based on a lie. Sadly, she is still trying to give
meaning to that lie so many years later, to salvage something from the
deluded beliefs of her parents and herself. In reality, her family were
members of an organization under the direction of a foreign power
dedicated to the destruction of American democracy. A sampling of her
continuing delusions:
“America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They,
more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it
always said it was.”
"The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was
approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans
were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of
these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin,
and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose
lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives
save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them — and they
are in history."
Sarah Jaffe of The Nation informed us of The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism
(June 6), in which it turns out commies were just true American
reformers, albeit many a little more intense (and under the direction of
a hostile foreign power).
In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the
historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and
dispossessed elements of American society.” It was the black workers
drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political
choices as much as the varying dictates that came from the Communist
International, Moscow’s directorate for foreign parties. [THC: This is a
continuation of the carefully cultivated academic myth that Soviet
communism was the only social justice alternative in the America of
those times. Conveniently ignored is that in the 1920s and 1930s the
Socialist Party under Norman Thomas was fiercely anti-communist
precisely because its members understood that the inevitable result of
communism was intolerance, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.]
And we have an unexpected bonus from Ms Jaffe. Turns out
intersectionality, the latest poison introduced into our society, a
poison designed to turn Americans against one another, actually
originated with communists!
These arguments were championed by organizers like Claudia Jones, a
black leader within the Communist Party U.S.A. and a journalist for its
newspaper, The Daily Worker. According to Charlene Carruthers, the
national director of Black Youth Project 100,
Ms. Jones expounded the idea now known as intersectionality decades
before that term became so ubiquitous that Hillary Clinton used it in a tweet
on the campaign trail. For Ms. Jones, understanding the lives of black
women and the economic and social position they occupied would create a
better understanding of the system of capitalism as a whole. It
followed, Ms. Carruthers explains, that black women’s work was central
in the struggle to replace the system.
What American Communists, at their best, pioneered was to show how
effectively grass-roots movements can challenge the racism, state
violence and economic exploitation that people face in their daily
lives, and connect those fights to a broader vision of a just world. [THC: One is sometimes left just speechless.]
On August 7, Fred Strebeigh may have written the most preposterous entry
in a series already chock full of ridiculous attempts to normalize the
abnormal. It's titled
Lenin's Eco-Warriors about how, under Lenin, a "
longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping",
the Soviet Union became a global pioneer in conservation! For anyone
familiar with the wreckage of the Soviet Union's natural environment (see, for instance, the Aral Sea) and
the incredible levels of pollution caused by its insane push for
centrally planned industralization at the expense of every other
consideration in society this article is an insult.
Strebeigh's article is also a prime example of normalization that in
other circumstances would never see the light of day in the Times. The
Nazi Party in Germany enacted the most far reaching environmental and
worker safety laws of the day, yet I don't think the Times would be
comfortable promoting that as part of a "balanced" assessment of the
legacy of the Third Reich.
Wait a minute! I may have been wrong about the Strebeigh piece being the most preposterous. On August 12, the Times published
Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism
by Kristen Ghodsee. It's a cheery, upbeat piece of fluff. Turns out
the sex was great, as long as you otherwise kept your mouth shut, and
did what you were told. Enjoy!
Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and
privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major
state investments in their education and training, their full
incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances
and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has
received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual
pleasure.
Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t
limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social
and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” It was state socialism’s
answer to work-life balance: “Even the best stimulation, they argued,
will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked,
worried about her future and financial stability.”
Enough of this silly stuff! On August 28, Odd Arne Westad, who despite
his weird name is a professor at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of
Government so we know he must be incredibly brilliant, tells the sad
story of The Cold War and America's Delusion of Victory. Turns out the Cold War was a regrettable event that happened despite "people of good will on both sides". It takes a sophisticated Harvard professor to equate freedom with slavery but Odd is up to it.
The next month we learned from Helen Gao about
How Did Women Fare in China's Communist Revolution? Turns out they did pretty well, if they lived.
On October 2, the astoundingly shallow Times reporter Alessandra Stanley wrote about The Communist Party's Party People, which starts off "There was no better time or place to be a Communist than in San Francisco in the spring of 1945" [THC: I believe the same holds true today regarding San Francisco].
A week later we heard from another leftist Brit professor, John Sidel, on
What Killed The Promise of Muslim Communism?, in which he remembers that "
For a brief moment after the Bolshevik uprisings of 1917, it looked like
revolution might be waged across vast swaths of the world under the
joint banner of Communism and Islam", [he thinks this is a good thing!] and laments:
One effect of the failure of revolutionary forces to mobilize under the
joint banner of Communism and Islam was to deeply divide Muslims,
weakening their capacity first to fight colonialism during the first
half of 20th century and then to resist the rise of authoritarianism
across the Muslim world. [THC: Wait, you're saying communism is not authoritarian?]
Later the same month we had yet another lament from a professor; this one an American from Hamilton College,
When New York City was the Capital of American Communism by Maurice Isserman. The good professor regrets that:
With the onset of the Cold War, and of a second Red Scare more pervasive
and longer-lasting than the original, Communists found themselves
persecuted and isolated. [THC: I wonder why secret members of a party
who accepted direction from a totalitarian foreign power devoted to the
destruction of American democracy would find themselves persecuted and
isolated?]
On a serious note, the Isserman piece is part of a larger, and largely
successful effort to rewrite the history of American communism.
(1) As with
many of the pieces in the Times series it cast American communists as
idealists who were just ahead of their time. A couple of years ago I
watched a panel discussion on C-Span. The panelists were authors and
researchers who, in recent decades, have done remarkable research
exposing the depth of Soviet espionage in the United States and the
complicity of American communists in the spying, as well as the evidence
of direct Soviet control of the American Communist Party (the most
prominent of the researchers being Harvey Klehr, whose work I
recommend). They had their own lament. According to the panelists
there is no new research work in academia looking further into this
aspect of American communism even though the speakers said there is
still much unreviewed documentation out there. Instead, grad students
are discouraged from pursuing such research and the academic journals
devoted to this subject focus on articles stressing the reformist nature
of American communism and the undeserved repression party members
experienced.
The series came to a close on November 6 with Simon Sebag Montefiore's
essay, What If The Russian Revolution Had Never Happened? Thankfully,
Montefiore is no apologist for communism (his book
Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar is a masterpiece). He writes to remind us of the reality:
The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world
based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps,
after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of
human history.
That
virtuous idealism justified any monstrosity. The Bolsheviks admired the
cleansing purges of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror: “A revolution
without firing squads is meaningless,” Lenin said. The Bolsheviks
created the first professional revolutionaries, the first total police
state, the first modern mass-mobilization on behalf of class war against
counterrevolution. Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture
with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist
ideology. Their zeal justified the mass killings of all enemies, real
and potential, not just by Lenin or Stalin but also Mao, Pol Pot in
Cambodia, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. It also gave birth to slave
labor camps, economic catastrophe and untold psychological damage.
(These events are now so long ago that the horrors have been blurred and
history forgotten; a glamorous glow of power and idealism lingers to
intoxicate young voters disenchanted with the bland dithering of liberal
capitalism.)
Of course, Montefiore cannot resist taking a swipe at Donald Trump:
But Lenin’s tactics, too, are resurgent. He was a sophisticated genius
of merciless zero-sum gain, expressed by his phrase "Kto kovo?" —
literally, “Who, whom?” asking the question who controls whom and,
more important, who kills whom. President Trump is some ways the
personification of a new Bolshevism of the right where the ends justify
the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears, and the
exploitation of what Lenin called useful idiots.
One wonders if he was contractually obligated by the Times to insert the
reference to Trump. However gross Donald Trump may be, the attempted
comparison is so absurd it diminishes the power of Montefiore's
article. It is also another example showing why decent liberals are
proving so ineffective in taking on the growing authoritarian trend on
the Left. They seem to be unable to take the threat seriously, finding
it easier to take potshots at the Right for which they will be applauded
by their constituency. One day we will look back and wonder what was
the flaw in traditional liberalism that allowed it to reject the
illiberalism of the Right, but cede its position in our institutions to
the illiberalism of the Left.
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(1) 2026 Update In October 2023, Maurice Isserman resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that NYC Mayor Mamdami and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain members of. In 1982 Isserman was a founding member of the DSA, the lead founder being the late Michael Harrington. Isserman and Harrington actually were Democratic Socialists. I believe Harrington was mistaken in many of his political ideas but he was a decent and moral person, unlike the current leadership of the DSA. The DSA is another of the many institutions in America that carry the same name from decades ago but have been subverted from within and are now completely different in substance. The current DSA is a authoritarian communist organization heavily seasoned with settler-colonist ideology. It is an enemy of civilization.
Isserman resigned for several reasons, including:
1) The DSA's failure to denounce what he described as the "anti-Jewish pogrom" by Hamas on October 7, which he characterized as "politically and morally bankrupt".
2) The capture of the DSA by groups like Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and the Communist Caucus—which value ideological purity over democratic socialist values. He described these groups as "entryists", writing, "In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who,
without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized
bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture
them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original
members".
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