[lbo-talk] dregs and drugs

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Apr 26 12:29:58 PDT 2005


Doug Henwood wrote:


>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>It's aesopian language, Kelley. For almost 40 years now it has been very
>>unfashionable for leftists to sneer at "Commies" and they needed a
>>substitute. So they substituted "Puritan-Baiting" for "Red Baiting." No
>>real difference -- both practices are based on using a label with no
>>material content but with immense emotional force.
>
>Hey, I could swear there were actual commies at one time. It was all
>an illusion?

I've long thought that the line popular among some liberals that it was "paranoia" on the part of the US elite to worry about commies was an insult to commies, since they were extremely important to union organizing and civil rights work from the 1930s through the postwar red purge. And ditto the line popular with otherwise admirable people like Chomsky that the cold war wasn't really about communism, when in some sense it was. There were profound issues at stake, no?

Curiously there was a real sexual component to anticommunism (and a number of prominent anticommunists were closeted or repressed homos). And there was something to that too - Harry Hay was a communist, no? So it's very unlikely that similar psycho-ideological structures would underlie "puritan baiting" and "red baiting," since the redbaiters were more likely to be puritans. But of course that may be too psychological for you, even though you are making assumptions about motives here, contrary to your own advice.

Doug



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