Thanks Doug and Charles for offering a more considered response on this question than that implied in the self-righteous rhetoric of "genuflection". As most of you will know, Christopher Hitchens uses much the same strategy in his latest _Nation_ snit-fit on the same subject.
It's sobering, really, to see how long and where the aftershocks of McCartyism continue to reverberate.
Jamie (and I'm neither genuflecting nor wearing rose-colored glasses, thank you)
P.S. Anyone in need of evidence of the high regard in which Angela Davis is held in the Black community should have been at the fundraiser at which she spoke about the prison-industrial complex for the NAARPR in Chicago last spring. Upwards of 3000 seats were filled by people who knew where she was coming from, where she'd been, and why she was there to speak, and that didn't include all the people out in the lobby. Maybe the folks on this list with genuflection-anxiety should spend less time looking for evidence in books and more time out seeing about these issues "as they walk and talk" right now.
On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Andrew Kliman wrote:
>
> >too much of the left is implicated in the failure of Stalinism,
> >not excluding the "independent" leftists who genuflect to
> >"mistakes";
>
> I guess I'm caught up in this net, for some of the things I've said here
> recently. But I think the story of the CP(USA) is complex & contradictory.
> I don't understand why saying that American Communists did many admirable
> things amidst the many brutalities & idiocies that are all too well known
> is the equivalent of genuflection, though. On race, they were way ahead of
> their time; in terms of building a popular radical culture, have they had
> any equal?; and in terms of gender, there were things going on below the
> rather depressing surface (see the recent NLR article on the CPUSA &
> race/gender/class). That's not an excuse for the Gulag, but on the other
> hand, it's too easy to use the Gulag to occlude everything else.
>
> Doug
>
>
>