> Dear List:
> Your post sounds like an old, 1950's rant against
> homosexuality with sm substituted for queerness.
> I guess sexual reactionaries never die, they just
> change their targets.
http://www.neue-einheit.com/engindex.htm NEUE EINHEIT Internet-Statement #10/98
Historic Ties Brought To the Public About the aggressive Homosexualism ................................................................. Over a year ago on the Leninist-International list there was a flame war between advocates of gay rights on the one hand and certain Maoists on the other who held to one form or another of the notion that homosexuality was an outgrowth of bourgeois decadence. I of course took the position that the Maoists were fucked up nutcases, and that even if you take out the class factors involved in heterosexist oppression, there's also the fact that homophobia acts as a lightning rod for political reaction, much as anti-Semitism did during the Dreyfus Affair. Mark Jones was on my side on this one.
At a certain point the discussion turned to the subject of anti-Semitism, and to my utter horror, this same faction of Maoists started making a lot of spurious claims in the name of anti-Zionism, such as the claim that accusations of anti-Semitism are more often than not coverups for supporting the oppression of Palestinians, etc. Well, I agree that some accusations of anti-Semitism are spurious, but I tried to get them to at least agree to the fact that some statements are objectively anti-Semitic and ought to be condemned, no matter who they come from.
I cited as an example Louis Godena, the moderator of another list called Marxism-International. I was on that list when Godena made a certain statement, which I quoted in full for the benefit of Leninist-International. The Maoists thereon (Siddharth Chatterjee and some others, as I recall) tried to excuse Godena, saying that I had taken the statement out of context, that maybe Godena was just in a bad mood at the time, etc.
The quotation in question? Godena had written-- and keep in mind, this is verbatim-- "The US supports the Jew because of Jew money and because of the fact that the Jew dominates American law, finance, and the media."
Now, I think it's pretty obvious that such a statement is anti-Semitic no matter what context it comes from. Well, Mark Jones at least agreed with that, condemning anti-Semitism even under the guise of "anti-Zionism." Later on, the Maoists got so generally vociferous that Jones expelled them entirely. But then what happened?
Well, later on Jones-- while casting a favorable eye-- posted comments from a Russian writer saying that it didn't make sense for too many people of a certain nationality (i.e., the Jews) to have positions of influence in the Russian government, etc. Really disgusting stuff. Jones made excuses for Zyuganov's anti-Semitic comments as well. And so on. While no one disagreed with the point that accusations of anti-Semitism were being used by Western imperialism against their enemies in Russia, Jones didn't consider it an important question whether those accusations might, in fact, have merit.
As for the "National Bolsheviks" mentioned by Owen, they're only an extreme example. Huge swaths of mainstream Russian Communism are infected with anti-Semitism as well. Note, I say, not all of them. At least one Russian Communist said that Lenin must be spinning in his grave-- a statement which, given the location of Lenin's body, is empirically disprovable on purely literal grounds, but which makes the point nevertheless.
John Lacny .......................................................................... Michael writes:
> Surely you mean, Edmund Wilson, not Edmund White.
Yes, Edmund Wilson, not Edmund White, the writer of gay fiction. Wilson is the ex-Communist who was a leading "independent" writer of the thirties and forties. I hadn't really read much of him except for *Upstate*. There was nothing knee-jerk about him, I understand.
Michael writes:
> And methinks, the New
> York Times represents WASP ruling class opinion, as much as "Zionist"
> bourgeois opinion, if one wants to get religio-ethnic. As far as that
> goes,
> to descend into bourgeois empiricism, I'd say that WASP's far outnumber
Jews
> among the ruling circles. Or is New York in your mind just another way of
saying Jewish in your book?
Well, no, the NYT is decidedly *not* WASPish in its editorial line, though it does set the tone for much of the "quality" capitalist press throughout the rest of the country. The WASP establishment did not support Mondale in 1984 or Dukakis in 1988 or, even, Clinton in 1992. Nor did it support NAFTA or, initially, the WTO (or its predecessor, GATT), much less "fast-track" for the US Executive. Most of the WASP establishment is not willing to support "Israel" to the extent the NYT does (this probably stems from a long history of antipathy to "finance" [i.e., Jewish] capital). In fact, on fully 80% of national issues, I would say the weight of WASP opinion is substantially opposed to what appears in the editorial pages of the *Times* And, of course, non-Jews far outnumber Jews within what we can call the ruling class (though the percentage there is far in excess of the overall percentage of Jews within the general population). But, what does this prove? Certainly, not that rich Jews are "worse" than other rich people (this I do not believe), but that as a group within western capital they enjoy important support among a wide range of intellectuals, even Left intellectuals, and that this accounts for a good deal of the anti-Communism of the *NYT*, the *New Republic*, the *Times Literary Supplement*, and the like "as opposed to that, say, of the *Economist*, and openly fascist journals like *National Review*, and *Commentary*.
> P.S. And what about anti-communism of the working class, in U.S.? Oh, I
> forgot they're all all bought off labor aristocracy feasting off the
trickle
> down from imperialist super-profits.
Well, I was speaking about intellectuals and their masters, from whom most of the working class "learned" their anti-Communism (much as they "learn" just about everything else). And, yes, I think it pretty much of a given that the western working class has profited from the spoils of imperialism, and there are statistics to prove it.
Louis Godena
-- Michael Pugliese