Leftist Liars and Ideological Suicide

...Take Rd Koppel, for instance, who devoted a special one-hour "Nightline" to the claims of a certain Jamshid Hashemi, according to whom Casey (and other Americans) met with top Iranian leaders in Madrid during the 1980 campaign, and made the dirty deal...

...Of these myths, the most celebrated is the "October Surprise" theory, according to which top officials of the 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 1980 Reagan campaign group met secretly with Iranians to arrange a deal: Iran would keep the hostages until after the American presidential elections, and the Reagan people would do something in return...

...rather, they were members of a rising lower middle class that constituted a new political force in post-World War I Italy...

...at the close of the Carter Administration, the ideological competition between freedom and Communism was still intense...

...This worldview makes it hard to explain the Reagan years, for Reagan clearly led a worldwide revolution...

...once the hostages were released, the arms traffic duly resumed...

...But those deals were made by the Carter Administration, not by the Reagan campaign team, and they are described in copious and quite embarrassing detail in All Fall Down, by Gary Sick, the magus of the October Surprise faithful...

...So much space and airtime are devoted to unsourced and unverifiable stories that little attention is given to fully documented ones that run against the current line...

...q We are dealing with a systematic campaign to rewrite American history...

...So Israel stopped, but just for the duration of the crisis...

...Its moment of weakness arrives when, for political reasons or maybe out of exhaustion, critics can no longer be prevented from pointing out the failure...

...To this end, the left has generated new myths, some having to do with the Cold War, others with the American hostages in Iran, still others with alleged malfeasance by top American officials, but all designed to show that the Reagan years were irrelevant to the destruction of the Soviet Empire, and, furthermore, were years of criminal activity by the President and his (greedy) men...

...In other words, we are dealing with a systematic campaign to rewrite American history...

...They've entered a battle that it takes evidence to win...

...In June 1988, a federal judge in Miami threw the case out for lack of evidence, and this past June an appeals court upheld the lower court's decision, including an award of $1.5 million for legal costs to be paid by the Christics and their co-plaintiffs...

...The Berman nonsense is typical of the campaign to deny that we defeated the Soviets...

...Few things in life are quite so satisfying as seeing nasty fools hoisted on their own doctrinaire petards, and the spectacle of congressional Democrats forced to expose the follies of their own failed President would be one to cherish...

...Faced with people like that, communists are perplexed, and their perplexity is fatal...

...For such zealots of disinformation, the great democratic revolution of the recent past is purely an internal matter, with no credit due the United States, and most assuredly no thanks to the Reagan people...

...Yet it is terribly important for the public to understand that the theories, like the people who advanced them, were nuts...

...The Cold War was totally unnecessary...

...Instead of swallowing the party line—that Fascism had been purely a reactionary response from the upper and middle classes to the challenges of the Bolshevik revolution and Italian Communism—De Felice argued that Fascism contained elements of a highly optimistic movement that was part and parcel of the French Revolutionary tradition...

...Others say that it was not until after Reagan was inaugurated that the Americans (usually Casey again) encouraged the Israelis to ship weapons to the Ayatollah...

...The Italian Fascists had not been wealthy industrialists defending their interest against left-wing radicals...

...when Carter left, we were terrified at the Soviet Union's dramatic military expansion into strategically sensitive areas of the world, from the Horn of Africa to Central America...

...W e are now in the midst of a great intellectual siege from the left, which hopes to impose its own highly politicized view of recent history...

...indeed, so cold was our diplomatic shoulder that the United States knew next to nothing about Iran until the spring and summer of 1985...

...The Christics' crazy theories got considerable attention, including two "Frontline" shows, the usual curtsies from Bill Moyers, close working cooperation from Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, and lots of magazine and newspaper coverage...

...And we need hardly wait for "Frontline" to bring its viewers up to date on such matters...

...As things stand today, versions of this mad view of American history keep creeping into the popular press, and particularly into some of the chic television broadcasts, like those of Moyers, whose shows on Iran-contra drew heavily on the Christie fantasies...

...Koppel noted that Hashemi, who along with his late brother Cyrus was long involved in illegal arms shipments to Iran, refused to appear on camera, so Koppel summarized Hashemi's testimony...

...and that if we do not change our profligate ways we are doomed to join the Communists on the garbage heap of history (a sort of chiliastic version of moral equivalence...

...The inference was that Hashemi felt he was in danger, and wished to keep his picture off the screen...

...The United States—under both Carter and Reagan—never felt strongly enough to speak loudly and clearly to the Israelis, with one exception: when the hostages were taken in our Tehran embassy, we told the Israelis that it was unseemly for them to be selling arms to a country that held American diplomats hostage...

...It may be asking a lot of those who lived through it to look once again at the Carter presidency, but we—and all those kids who have grown up in the interim and don't have any memory of those traumatic years —need it...

...The truly powerful challenges, when they come, are offered by people who may not own a single gun, but who can convincingly claim to be more up-to-date than the communists, not less...

...more scientific and sophisticated, not less...

...For example, Marlin Fitzwater joined the chorus this summer when he said that America's role in the world of the future would clearly depend more on economic strength than on military power—this at precisely the moment when the whole world was beating a path to our door because of our military might, as demonstrated in the Gulf War...

...For months, it was virtually impossible to read a newspaper, watch an evening of television, or listen to a few hours of radio without running into a supercharged attack on De Felice, not only for his historical "errors" but also for his "corrupting Italian youth...

...Unless the forces of sanity suffer an attack of cerebral paralysis, it will be a debacle for the left, since an investigation will reveal that there was indeed a conspiracy to manipulate the hostage issue for political advantage during the campaign of 1980...

...The court's unusually critical language might have been expected to attract national attention, but no papers covered it, with the exception of the Washington Times...

...Secret deals were indeed made with Iranian leaders, even deals that can fairly be described as "arms-for-hostages...

...B ut the October Surprise faithful aren't much interested in logic or historical fact...

...These individuals were said to have been part of a "secret government" that had manipulated international affairs for more than twenty years...

...First, "the dog did not bark": if the Reagan people had made a deal with the Khomeini regime, then something would have happened between the two governments after Reagan's election...

...But discussion of Hashemi's history as a "Nightline' guest would have damaged his current credibility, and Koppel preferred to cloak his guest in the mantle of the inside whistle-blower who's afraid of the bad guys he's just exposed...

...Even leading members of the Bush Administration seem eager to deny that Reagan's policies were important, or should be continued...

...These facts are incompatible with the myths the left has offered the American public for the past ten years: that Reagan was a nutty reactionary who jeopardized world peace and impoverished America (except for his rich friends...

...All that was required was a crack debating team to show how unsophisticated, unscientific, and unworldly Communism really was, and we would have been rid of Stalin, the Red Army, and the KGB a long time ago...

...But there were no contacts between the two governments...

...The De Felice interpretation was a deadly threat to the Marxist stereotype, for if he was right, the "revolutionary" tradition had been mother to both Fascism and Communism...

...smirched by its common ancestry with Mussolini's movement...

...T he left has usually understood the 1 importance of these things far better than the right, which is why the battle for the past has so often been onesided...

...indeed, he even berates us for having had the nerve to ask for support for the contras, arguing that the Sandinistas fell only after the contras were cut off (not a word about the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of Soviet support for the Sandinistas...

...The latest of these little efforts comes from the Village Voice's Paul Berman, writing in the New Republic: Communism is a failed alternative road to modernism...

...But there was more to it than mere historical disagreement: if De Felice's theories were accepted, the Marxist hegemony over "correct" interpretations of modern history would be shaken...

...Finally there is the claim that Reagan stole the presidency from Carter by making a dirty deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini...

...More than one critic suggested that he be forbidden to teach in Italian universities...

...There is a wonderful story to be told, much of it sitting in autobiographical works by the Carter people themselves...

...De Felice's offense was to have challenged the Marxist orthodoxy which then held sway over Italian political culture...

...But Hashemi had already been on "Nightline," live and on camera, less than five years before when he gave vent to a series of absurd half-truths and fantasies...

...The October Surprise faithful get around this by claiming that it was the Israelis who carried out the deal, which brings us to a second weakness in the theory: Israel had been selling weapons to Iran all along, and we knew it...

...The American left is clinging desperately to a set of myths about the past, foremost of which is the notion that the left is the only legitimate heir to the "revolutionary" tradition...

...Once released, it became the object of a major assault of cultural terrorism...

...Some say that, even before election day, William Casey (the deus ex machina of the piece) got the Israelis to ship weapons to Iran...

...Indeed, the results of the Reagan years are so palpably different from those that would have been produced if Reagan had been anything like the left's description of him that a further rewriting of the past has been necessary...

...The battle over Italian history proved to be decisive in the war for the Italian future, and the same will likely hold true in our own country...

...Their highly charismatic leader, Dan Sheehan, raised a lot of money—and made many converts— on college campuses and, predictably, among the Hollywood geopolitical set...

...In addition to the lack of any serious evidence to support it, there are at least two obvious reasons for rejecting the October Surprise theory...

...It proved so explosive that the publisher held it in the warehouses for several weeks until the spring elections were over...

...you have only to compare today's foreign policy issues with those we faced at the end of the Carter presidency...

...And they don't have it...

...It might even be a real turning point in understanding our own history, just as the debate over Fascism redirected Italy's political culture in the 1970s...

...It was a bitter fight, but in the end the enormous mass of evidence on De Felice's side swung the battle in his favor...

...Interview on Fascism has become one of Italy's all-time bestsellers, and has been translated and published from Japan to Argentina...

...For they have whipped themselves into such a frenzy that they are actually going to conduct an investigation in Congress this autumn...

...And anyway, as De Felice showed in Rome fifteen years ago, even single individuals can win decisive victories against the disinformers...

...Simple, no...

...As in Italy, the outcome of that debate will go a long way toward determining the ability of our children to understand the present and rationally shape the future...

...Therefore, the neat moral dichotomy between Communism (good) and Fascism (bad) was blurred, with Fascism enhanced by its revolutionary past and Communism beMichael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 17...

...better educated, more worldly, not less...

...Fitzwater might have noted that Japan has not become a superpower, and will not until and unless Japanese military might is on a par with ours...

...Even some of our most famous journalists are prepared to accept some mighty unlikely tales from some mighty unreliable souls...

...The court's rejection of the Christics' appeal was devastating, and pointed up that, in over two years of discovery, the plaintiffs had been unable to present any witnesses or produce any facts to support their allegations...

...Perplexed by the trenchant criticisms from the supremely up-to-date debaters, the Soviet Empire would have been swept away...

...No particularly deep thinking is required to understand this...

...Even today, while the sun sets on the Soviet Empire and the leaders of the world come on pilgrimages to Washington, the left's intellectuals are busily spreading the new lies: that our actions were irrelevant to the collapse of Communism— or, worse, delayed its arrival...

...It is no accident, as the Marxists would say, that the success of De Felice's view of history has parallelled, and contributed to, the collapse of the Italian Communist party, now a pathetic shadow of its formerly menacing self...

...government and large corporations...

...Tbday, most everyone acknowledges that both political freedom and a free market are necessary for economic, political, and intellectual prosperity...

...What that "something" was varies according to the teller...

...In May 1986, the Christics filed suit against twenty-nine individuals, alleging a massive conspiracy to advance a right-wing agenda through murder, drug trafficking, and other sinister practices...

...One of the prime movers in the rewrite movement has been the Washingtonbased Christie Institute, a collection of left-wing activists who gained Jesuit sponsorship a few years ago and ever since have brought sensational lawsuits against the U.S...

...Michael Ledeen LEFTIST LIARS AND IDEOLOGICAL SUICIDE World events since 1980 differ so widely from what leftist rhetoric would have predicted that the left's ideologues have had to resort to myths and distortions...

...Now is the time to retell it...

...The very shrillness of tone and silliness of content that characterizes so much of the current campaign shows how weak the spokesmen of the left feel themselves to be...

...It would be nice to have a small army of truth-tellers to combat the mythmakers, but prospects are poor...

...There would have been talks, or at least contacts...

...The Iranians would certainly not have let Reagan make such a deal and then ignore them...

...Today we grapple with the end of Communism...

...By now, sixteen years later, it is he who has defined the debate on the history of Fascism, and his opponents have by and large either acknowledged the accuracy of his analysis or lost credibility...

...I n the middle of 1975, Professor Renzo De Felice of the University of Rome—the outstanding historian of the Fascist period, and the great biographer of Mussolini—published a book with the unassuming title Interview on Fascism...

...This sense of weakness has led them into a monumental miscalculation with regard to the October Surprise...