[Fwd: Re: Grumpy lefties and VENONA]

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Katha:
> My father was blacklisted in the l950s (he was a UE lawyer and worked
>on some of the Smith Act cases), the FBI used to go through our garbage.
>Arthur Kinoy was my parents' friend -- I know a lot firsthand about what
>the fifties were like for CP families. Almost half a century later, it
>ought to be possible to talk rationally about whether the CP made all
>the right decisions about how to deal with a repressive era--like having
>its members deny their politics in order to appeal to the liberals you
>all claim to despise.

As a matter of fact, I recently had an occasion to post on this question on
another list, so allow me to reproduce it:

*****   Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 01:14:29 -0500
To: marxism at lists.panix.com
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
Subject: Re: nostalgia for McCarthyism?

Carrol:
>Yes. And I was one of the people who made it then -- and I might make
>it again in a forum which I controlled. (I mean this fairly literally: if I am
>sitting at the speakers' table and control access to the mike). But it's a
>dangerous claim for reasons I gave.

The CP during the Popular Front days came closest to having a lasting
impact on inflecting Americanism a wee bit leftward, or at least making
American culture more inclusively liberal & populist, though at the cost of
being unable to defend Japanese-Americans.  But the CPers failed
nonetheless, and when the political winds changed, their Americanness got
called into question anyhow, and their fellow Americans were too cowed to
stand up.  Isn't communism always "foreign," so to speak, from the point of
view of the ruling ideas?  Agitators are always "outsiders" during Red
Scares.  Besides, not going along with imperialism is always un-American,
regardless of the self-definitions of anti-imperialists.  I might even go
so far as to say, risking a cruelly flippant hindsight, that the CP got
hoisted by its own petard, by raising the ideological stock of patriotism
and Americanism during the war time.

with due respect for all the important work done by the American CPers,

Yoshie   *****

That's my thoughts on the Popular Front.

Yoshie