Among the Intellectualoids/Anticommunism and Mental Health
Klehr, Harvey & Evanier, David
ton correspondents are hustled in front of the camera and told to say something. Silent film from Dallas is thrown on the air unscreened, still wet from the developing process. (In one clip, we see...
...Few as they are, anyone who could survive three days of this is a force to be reckoned with...
...The conference (thirty-eight panels and plenaries) thoroughly covered the dire consequences of anticommunism: it deflowers us, poisons our bodily fluids, kills the poor, makes us fight wars against innocent people, demolishes time, spreads heterosexuality, destroys paid maternity leaves, fosters antilesbianism, eradicates abortion rights—well, it just poisons and ruins everything...
...That is the nitty-gritty...
...Alas, these victims of state John Train's most recent book is Famous Financial Fiascos (Clarkson N Potter/Crain...
...There was happy, genial applause...
...Throughout the conference, some women made it clear that there were not enough of them on the panels...
...A life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he handed out his broadside,"Anti-communism: Conspiracy and Terrorism, Psychiatry and AIDS" (hyphen in the original...
...His musings suggested that, as the Soviet Union itself has hinted, AIDS is yet another example of capitalism's dirty tricks...
...This Vishinsky had dark hair and black owlish glasses...
...Only [from] the Maurice Bishops, the Salvador Allendes, the Fidel Castros supported by the people...
...The paranoiacs would come crawling out of the woodwork on Sunday, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald before a live TV audience...
...Or Angela Davis, who conceded that "women wait on long lines in the USSR," but quickly added that "they wait on long lines in supermarkets here...
...it is instead a smokescreen for "reaction...
...What is being hidden behind the new billion dollar HIV industry...
...The Soviet Union can quite easily reverse-engineer most pieces of hardware, given enough time...
...One of Saturday's panels, "AnticomT he festivities formally began with 1 a message from John Kenneth Galbraith, who had been scheduled to give opening remarks but was unable to attend because of illness...
...He opined that "Jesse Jackson is the best Jew in America...
...She noted "how smarmy we seem before the world...
...They fluttered back to their nesting places in academia, the alternative press, college campuses, the Rainbow Coalition, senior centers, progressive unions, and Communist party headquarters, dedicated to wiping out that nasty word...
...He had reservations about the Sandinistas, but "far less [sic] reservations than I do about Ronald Reagan...
...Some analysts draw the following 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...To be sure, NBC's coverage of the assassination was crude—at times astonishingly so...
...At 6:05 p.m., Air Force One arrives at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, and NBC is finally able to do the thing it does best: show live pictures...
...They came from Sewanee, Tennessee, and Ukiah, California...
...Let us count the ways...
...It was "unique, remarkable and welcome...
...The conference was dedicated to Sean McBride, "a giant of a man .. . the only person ever to be awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize," and a onetime chief of staff of the IRA...
...ut there were flora and fauna, LP uniquely rich in color, beyond this...
...No microphones are shoved into the unwilling faces of victims...
...Here are three and a half reasons: 1. The Soviet nightmare is not West Germany, whose feeble birth rate condemns it to fade away as a great power, but China, whose proud and able population is multiples larger than the Soviet Union's and growing faster...
...It is said that the battle management of the campaign against each ICBM requires a computational power equivalent to one of the large Cray computers...
...This will surely be a problem for Styron, who will have to deal with the Times to find more scraps and clippings to write another opus like Sophie's Choice...
...The mujahedeen in Afghanistan are astonishingly reactionary . . . very unprincipled . . . deal in drugs . . . extraordinarily patriarchal in terms of their approach to women .. . and [it gets worse!] they love Reagan and now Bush...
...Its co-founders, William Schaap and Ellen Ray, fresh from the Covert David Evanier is writing a novel about American Communism...
...We can deal with that...
...Any monopoly becomes atherosclerotic...
...Opposition to Communism is unrelated to Communism...
...In one clip, we see a young Texan standing outside Parkland Memorial Hospital holding a sign that reads "Yankee, Go Home...
...Despite its length, it leaves you eager for more...
...Guyana needs a new moral vitality," Jagan continued, "a fresh flow of values . . . into the lifestream of society...
...Harvey Klehr is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and the author, most recently, of Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today (Transaction Books...
...It actually worked, unlike some of the other pieces of equipment...
...increasing political action through the Rainbow Coalition...
...At the closing plenary session on Sunday, the assemblage broke into small groups for discussion and thenreported on their findings...
...You know the rest...
...One recalls the televised chaos that enveloped the shooting of Ronald Reagan and marvels at this sober spectacle...
...Kovel said that the coming times would be grim, but "the U.S...
...As one person noted, there are plenty of veterans of the 1960s teaching high school just waiting for this material...
...Is Perestroika Real...
...PBS even went so far as to broadcast a program consisting entirely of footage from Kennedy's press conferences, those shameless exercises in media manipulation that made Ronald Reagan's infinitely less polished attempts at schmoozing the press look like outtakes from "The Gong Show...
...Val Moghadam, a "post-doctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University," in answer to a question, explained the difference between counter-revolutionary mujahedeen (in Afghanistan) and revolutionary mujahedeen (in Iran): the "Islamicists in Iran . . . have fewer problems with women...
...The TV audience was hearing words that at one time could have meant death for the speaker and listener alike...
...One of the interviewees is black, an unexpected sight in 1963...
...It certainly paid generous tribute to his telegenic charm on the anniversary of his death...
...Nobody knows where it comes from, although some have hunches...
...Anticommunism destroys time itself...
...Financial supporters included Sallie Bingham and Abby Rockefeller...
...I was startled to see the face of a much younger Andrei Vishinsky than the white-haired one I remembered from the 1950s when he was the Soviet delegate to the U.N...
...Blanche Wiesen Cook explained, "Everything fine and creative in American thought has been splattered and smeared" by anticommunism...
...The group is one of a growing number of radical left beehives that are trying to reshape the universe by saying old things in new ways...
...Only competition keeps you onthe qui vive...
...But the most convincing reason for perestroika is that Gorbachev probably has no choice...
...At one panel someone from the floor said that any criticism of the Soviet Union or Marxism was "pimping for the bourgeoisie...
...They should be shot like dogs," he snarled at a series of wretched anti-Stalinists who had been dragged before him...
...Cheddi Jagan said that responsibility for sexual harassment in the workplace in Guyana was due to anticommunism...
...Multiply this by thirty-eight panels...
...Breathing heavily, he said, "I am a conspiracy theorist [loud cheers...
...An old flickery blackand-white film was showing him addressing a courtroom in harsh and strident tones during the Moscow purge trials...
...This is very important...
...Plans were announced to prepare curricula based on the conference...
...The possibilities are suggested by Taiwan, which with less than 2 percent of the mainland's population has 30 percent of its GNP...
...The People's Daily World liked it...
...Their organizations are proliferating wildly...
...And glasnost: the Soviets are facing up to their criminal past, unlike post-World War II Germany and post-Vietnam America...
...Alger Hiss Professor Kovel traced the pathology back to unique American paranoid tendencies as embodied in Melville's Moby Dick...
...It's necessary, whether or not it ever really happens...
...Lyndon Johnson marches before the waiting cameras, reads a terse statement and is whisked away into a helicopter...
...Like the young lady who saw "anticommunism as basically a reaction to any kind of horizontality whatsoever...
...When asked what the perfect daily newspaper would look like, Alexander Cockburn replied that "an expanded version of the Nation magazine would be ideal...
...0 AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ANTICOMMUNISM AND MENTAL HEALTH by David Evanier and Harvey Klehr T we've hundred people came to I Boston just days after the November election to see and hear Gus Hall, Angela Davis, Cheddi Jagan, Alexander Cockburn, Philip Agee, Jack O'Dell, and Julian Bond expunge a terrible thing...
...In a message to participants, the Institute for Media Analysis traced the genesis of the Harvard gathering to a "seminal paper" entitled "The Black Hole of Anticommunism" by Joel Kovel, an IMA board member and Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College...
...Esther Kingston-Mann, a professor of Russian history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, won the Walter Duranty prize for Soviet reporting: she complained that too many Sovietologists and journalists think that the only things that matter in the Soviet Union are human rights and politics...
...How many ways is anticommunism bad...
...However, Cray's chairman told me that his big machine, quite aside from the immense amount of programming required to set it up for missile defense, would take years to reverse-engineer, by which time the knowledge would be obsolete...
...The magnitude of these achievements...
...the editor of Znamia, 1988 O ne day last spring, on a trip to Moscow to talk to ministries and institutes, I turned on the television in my hotel room...
...Don Feder, in the Boston Herald, likened the happening to "cockroaches gathering to protest DDT...
...The mood was idiotically happy...
...Jesse Jackson's treasured adviser on foreign policy, Jack O'Dell: "Anticommunism is the ideology of hatred that has been a spin-off of the big lie about the Soviet Union...
...pushing the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" and National Public Radio to the left...
...Something awful has happened, and everyone wants to be as dignified about it as possible...
...For many years, one of the official heroes held up for the admiration of Soviet youth was an enthusiastic boy who denounced his own parents for a deficiency of socialist zeal...
...Whence floweth this freshness...
...Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook was not happy: "We stand morally isolated before the world, allied with South Africa and other killer countries . . . always bellowing, when we are not shrieking, and thumping and bumping and burping our bombs and tanks and missiles Communist Communist Communist . . . incredible shrinking American heart . . . polluted the discourse . . . debased .. . deformed . ." Zoologist Stephen Jay Gould offered up his sunny view of personkind: "Ordinary daily behavior is geniality . . . we step aside for people, we say thank you to the man who sells the newspaper, we smile at a child . . . there are acts of ordinary geniality even on Times Square . . . the species is peaceful . . . the problem is the kind of government we have...
...Indeed it's a recurring Russian idea: Peter the Great tried something similar, as did Lenin with his New Economic Policy (NEP...
...Blanche Wiesen Cook, a historian, announced that "there are more of us than there are of them...
...Kovel looked deeply into himself and saw a black hole: "We all have to deal with our own internalizedanticommunism . . . an exploitation of the deep structures of racism for the purpose of managing threats to capitalist rule . ." How could something so . . . low . . . so smarmy . . . as anticommunism understand something so exalted, so totally unrelated to it, the exact opposite of it, as Communism...
...Chet Huntley's grim features could have been carved out of a tree stump, and Bill Ryan, the radio man, looks like he just drove up from Grover's Corners for a day in the big city...
...The next day Cockburn referred to Corsini's remarks as an example of the moral collapse of Italian Communism...
...is weakening and has less capacity to enforce a megalomaniacal ideology like anticommunism...
...2. Some military analysts underline that the Soviet Union is not yet technically able to manage the most complicated aspects of space defense...
...Alexander Cockburn offered his nuanced view of why media moguls are anticommunist: "Communism means taking money away from rich people...
...But it was also, in a strange way, innocent...
...They came to Harvard for a three-day conference on "Anticommunism and the U.S.: History and Consequences" sponsored by the Institute for Media Analysis...
...In the wake of that long weekend, the flash studios were scrapped and the bureaus were expanded and the networks began to take themselves seriously as purveyors of news...
...sabotaging newspaper vending machines (inserting false fronts on boxes with "progressive" news about El Salvador, etc...
...Action Information Bulletin, which specializes in exposing American intelligence agents abroad, have turned their creative efforts to finding new ways to give peace a chance...
...This is what anticommunism does...
...He labeled James LeMoyne of the Times a liar and asked, "How do we deal with the press—with a monolithic newspaper like the New York Times which demonstrates such incredible schizophrenia...
...China, by shedding some of Marxism's impedimenta—all farms belong to the farmers, for instance—is booming, while the Russians are just whispering about incentives...
...Women and children, housing and unemployment, welfare rights...
...An old man was grimly reciting his memories of the bad times, not so long ago, when a daring phrase could send you to Siberia, perhaps not to return...
...A man-in-the-street interview is conducted outside Rockefeller Center...
...he said...
...The interviewees unanimously blame the assassination on right-wing cranks...
...The problem was that "they" were keeping the truth from the American people...
...No one says anything particularly fatuous or overbearing...
...Deng himself has complacently said that if perestroika does not work, then the Soviet Union willlose its superpower status in the next century...
...The tone was set at the first evening's symposium on "Choosing the News...
...Dwight Eisenhower, in New York to give a speech, offers a few scrambled, calming platitudes...
...There were sponsors like Bella Abzug, Gore Vidal, Bernie Lown, and William Styron...
...Wilbert Tatum, publisher of the Amsterdam News, one of the leading black newspapers in the United States, was nostalgic: "I am saddened . . . because I recall my days at Camp Unity and sitting around the campfire singing 'I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me.' " He recited the whole damn thing, then he recited his own editorials...
...As word of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald is broadcast, you suddenly and forcibly realize that the conspiracy theories with which you grew up are absurd, that the assassin was captured within two hours of the shooting and that nobody in his right mind doubted at the time that he was the assassin...
...many seemed to have just crept out of the woodwork...
...Arts & Entertainment deserves high praise for having chosen to ignore the Kennedy myth and show instead the poor but honest face of broadcast news before the fall...
...In other words, the Soviets can't readily compete in the highest-tech part of strategic defense, although they started earlier, have emphasized it more, and are well ahead of us in some aspects—e.g., particle beams...
...One of the best kept secrets of today's world is the social achievements of the USSR...
...None of the on-screen faces are especially pretty...
...The bronze coffin bearing Kennedy's corpse is manhandled into a waiting hearse...
...He cited a report that said that "as regards sexual gratification, public officeholders show particular favor to those who submit 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 to their urge to be sexually gratified...
...Michael Parenti, a political scientist who recently complained in the Guardian that the Moscow News was too anticommunist, jumped up and down in the front row for recognition...
...At the war on Nicaragua, at the New York Times...
...Meanwhile, Oswald's Marxist past and his membership in a group called "Fair Play for Cuba" are reported, and you breathe, together with Bill Ryan and Frank McGee and the rest of the country, a sigh of relief: Thank God he was a Commie...
...And so it went...
...Anticommunism was a weed, a deep pathology, a generalized dementia...
...At the end of the broadcast, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley materialize in their respective studios, their voices firmly under control, ready at last to put theirstamp on the terrible events of the day...
...Irving R. Levine, NBC's man in Rome, checks in with a fuzzy-sounding transatlantic telephone call...
...The IMA spells anti-Communism without a hyphen...
...Sean Gervasi of the Institute for Policy Studies generated surprise and delight in the audience by speaking with originality and freshness of "the murderous insanity generated by anticommunism...
...44 T FK Assassination: As It Hap-J pened" is a rare opportunity to see what TV news looked like in its awkward age...
...Then the scene shifted to today, in Red Square, a few hundred yards from where I was sitting at that moment...
...Kovel: "Anticommunism is always cynical manipulation...
...Nathaniel Lehrmann attended many panels, with a comment for almost every question period...
...Perhaps TV learned the uses and abuses of glamour from Kennedy himself...
...So you have to shake things up on occasion...
...There were many new faces at the conference, newly activated college students, reactivated war-horses, and many who were just returning to the fold...
...The institute "saw the evolution of anticommunism as a pathology which had become the civic religion of the U.S...
...The "rapporteurs" were required to be women...
...Looking ahead, the Soviets must transform their economy and government drastically to keep up with the traditionally hostile Chinese...
...Abby Rockefeller read his letter, in which he said that "I regard this conference as an important step toward reason...
...The minute you imply that the people who own the newspapers the wealth the land the labor the capital the banks the industry organized to suit their interests you're a conspiracy theorist...
...The only actual Communist on the panel, Gianfranco Corsini, a correspondent for Italian Communist newspapers, praised the diversity of the American press and said the range of opinion available through American THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 29 munism and American Intellectual Life," was moderated by Kovel, the Hiss prof...
...Among the suggestions for future action: pressuring newspapers for positive reporting on the socialist countries...
...Ben and Jerry donated ice cream...
...Their social welfare guarantees...
...more conferences just like this one...
...Jacqueline Kennedy, her stockings caked with blood, walks behind it...
...William Styron was outraged...
...There were in fact some men still on the panels, and this too seemed almost an element of anticommunist pathology.mass media was far superior to that in other countries, including Italy...
...He noted that "the notion of Soviet expansionism and the desire for world conquest is probably the greatest myth of the twentieth century...
...Anticommunism is no more capable of understanding the reality of Communism than racism is capable of perceiving the reality of the Afro-American experience...
...Simply not true...
...The conventional wisdom about the assassination of John F. Kennedy was that it was the making of TV news...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL, PONDERING PERESTROIKA by John Train "Our past has become unpredictable...
...paranoia were indeed shot like dogs...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
