>>> Katha Pollitt <kpollitt at thenation.com> 12/09/99 09:26AM >>> 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.
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Charles: Sorry about your family suffering, but your beef is with the bourgeosie ruling class who did it, not the Communists who were victims of the onslaught.
It is rational to say the Rosenbergs could not have won their trial by saying "we gave the Soviet secrets for peace."
It is possible to criticize CP decisions. What would you have done differently ? Taken the whole party underground ? In what way did members deny their politics ? Seems to me, members did not deny their politics. That's how the members got jailed and redlisted.
Having thought about the problem many times, it isn't clear to me what the CP could have done that would have prevented the illegal destruction of the Party. What strategy do you see that would have worked ?
Seems to me the main task of progressives today is to emphasize how mendacious, hypocritical and anti-democratic/intolerant McCarthyism shows the U.S. system to be, contra its blowing its own horn about how free it is. The CP was playing by the American rules. Legitimately building mass support in the working class and People, to win socialism legally, by elections etc. If the Party had just been allowed to exist, it would have grown because of the basic sensibleness and humaneness of its message. The U.S. ruling class realized this, and set out to destroy the Party by illegal and "unAmerican", anti-First Amendment means. U.S. capitalism couldn't risk a fair , peaceful contest with redblooded American Communists. That' s the main lesson of that era. Not that the victims, the Communists ,weren't perfect in their tactics and strategy in dealing with an onslaught that was perhaps impossible to defend against, given the disparity of power.
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What's next? the Stalin -Hitler pact was a great idea because (as I was brought up to believe) it gave Stalin time to get ready for war?
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Charles: It was a necessary evil to give the Soviets ( Stalin was one person; the war was won by millions of people) time to prepare for the war. That too is a rational statement today as well as in 1938. Before that pact, the Soviets tried mightily to get the other bourgeois nations besides Germany to sign a Pact with the Soviets. The other bourgeois nations wouldn't do it, because they wanted Germany to attack the Soviet Union to destroy it.
Also, as usual, 20/20/ hindsight gives a distorted "overknowledge" of what was rational in some past historical period. At the time of the Pact, the Nazis had not carried out anywhere near their world historic crimes such as the Holocaust or killing 20 million Soviets. At the time of the German-Soviet Pact ,Hitler was not known to be the Hitler we know today. Henry Ford and the Crown Prince of England and many others in the West , were Nazi sympathisers and supporters. Given the historic crimes of English and American Imperialism, one imperialist country looked about as bad as another. Signing a pact with one was merely an effort to divide one's overwhelmingly stronger enemies. Only 20 years earlier, during the Russian Civil War , all of those countries had surrounded and attacked the young Soviet Union. There was no reason to see the Germans as that much worse than the French, English or Americans.
CB