"But, officer, I'm an anti-communist!" "I don't care what kind of a communist you are!" Whack!

[Michael Pugliese]

   Lucianne Goldberg son, Jonah, thrashes Jacob Weisberg piece in last
Sunday's N.Y. Times Magazine on McCarthyism.
  Have to agree with one of his points. Victor Navasky et. al. will never
face up the fact that a few of the hundreds of thousands that went through
the orbit of the CPUSA were "spies" and passed info to the fSU. But as James
Weinstein , who incidentally met Julius Rosenberg once under another name,
noted at the time of the fracas over Radosh and Milton's book on the
Rosenberg's, most CPUSA'ers in the Cold War era, if of a certain "skill set"
and mentality would have taken the risks entailed in doing one's
"proletarian internationalist" duty. Sorry about my churlishness, but if the
New Left began the process of separation from Stalinism (oops, don't
mean to forget the Old Left anti-Stalinists from Trotskyist, social
democratic,  anarchist, and left communist/council communist quarters) what
are
post-New lefties still doing denying the truth. I suspect that some of this
has to do with the residuals of the reflex of always thinking the worst
about the American Empire and it's former
counter-hegemon, the fSU was given the benefit of the doubt. Now, post NATO
bombing esp. I'm not going to defend U.S. foreign policy which still does
not lack for examples which back up the imperialism thesis even in it's more
whacky Workers World party Leninist version, I just wish
that all of us,on the left, use facts and arguments, rather than
knee-jerkism.
                              Michael Pugliese
http://www.nationalreview.com/arguments/arguments120199.html