<HTML><HTML>Nobody can deny that Stalinism in power committed untold crimes, perpetrated monstrous betrayals and propagated outrageous lies. Nor can anyone dispute that most post-1928 Party members accepted these crimes, betrayals, lies and capricious line changes. They did so out of sincere belief in the infallibility of the Kremlin, because they knew that deviation would mean ostracism and expulsion, or from a combination of these motives. To point these things out is not anti-communist. But it is anti-communist to argue that most Party members adhered to the CP in order to spread lies and commit betrayals. They joined because they wanted to bring about a revolution leading to a classless society, or, in the case of those who recruited during the Popular Front period, because they wanted to fight fascism and/or deepen New Deal reforms. To fault rank-and-file party members for their naivete, religious dogmatism or spineless conformism is not anti-communist. To impute to them sinister motives, comparable to those of the Nazis, is. Also, throughout the Cold War, and even since 1917, capitalist governments and their ideologues vociferously condemned the USSR as undemocratic. This was sheer hypocrisy. The capitalists hated the Soviet Union not for its lack of elected government or citizen rights, but for the fact that its factories and banks were not private property, and its economy closed to capitalist investment. It was not abetting the enemies of the Soviet Union, as the Stalinists claimed, to expose the police-state methods of the ruling apparatus. It was necessary, however, to accompany such exposure with a clear indication of the standpoint from which it was being made: that of those who wanted to redeem socialism rather than bury it. It was all too easy, however, to blur the distinction between anti-Stalinism and the disingenuous democratic bleating of the bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeois camp followers, or, what amounts to the same thing, to elevate political democracy to the status of the supreme value, transcending both class and the nature of the USSR's economic regime. Those who blurred the distinction usually wound up in the "democratic" imperialist camp, as the examples of George Orwell, Max Shachtman, Irving Kristol, Paul Berman and so many others clearly attest. All ancient history? Not entirely. We can see parallels among those--like Hitchens--who use legitimate abhorrence of Islamic fundamentalism as an excuse for backing the invasion of Iraq. </HTML>