"I'd Rather Be a Lamppost in Moscow"
Evanier, David
"I'D RATHER BE A LAMPPOST IN MOSCOW" BYDAVID EVANIER D r. Herbert Aptheker passed away in March at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times could not restrain its admiration, calling him a...
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...On that score I believed him and I do today...
...He was the hottest, last true believer with a volatile personality...
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...We would wait patiently, impressed...
...There was an inspired lunacy about him...
...But I didn't want to be a lamppost in Moscow...
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...When I was an adolescent in the mid-1950s, Herbert Aptheker became my mentor...
...Aptheker adopted me for a while, introduced me to his daughter Bettina, even gave me the galleys of his book, The Truth About Hungary, and asked me, a kid, for my "dialectical criticism?' In the book he stated without hesitation that the Soviet invasion was a progressive coup that was necessary to defeat an American-manipulated fascist coup...
...At other times he turned his back on the class entirely for long periods of silent contemplation, gazing out the window...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21...
...he was far more useful above it...
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...I had taken his course mainly to meet girls and find a family...
...I could do no wrong with these people...
...Stalin's words of inspiration were on the blackboard...
...I knew about Soviet slave-labor camps...
...He was pure, upright, incontrovertible, brilliant, almost overcome by internal fury...
...Sometimes I thought he was about to explode and physically attack a questioner...
...For the record, I would like to add a few dashes of realism to this historical revisionist portrait of this "anti-fascist" who was eminently capable of joining the Communist Party in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin Pact...
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...as] a dominant voice on the American Left in the 1950s and 1960s and as one of the first scholars to denounce American military involvement in Vietnam...
...I loved to watch him, with his blazing red hair and equally blazing eyes...
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...I remember Aptheker whispering to me that Tennessee Williams was "on our side?' that Stanley Kowalski was a "splendid revolutionary," and that Williams's plays were magic (he was right about that...
...He gave one the feeling that he could hold up the entire rotting edifice of Stalinism on his shoulders...
...He had Scientific Reasons...
...He conferred intellectual legitimacy—or seemed to—on the idea that the Soviet Union was the perfect embodiment of national liberation, equality, and peace and that the United States was the new reincarnation of Nazism, racism, and war...
...So deep ran his hatred of America that he later become a true progenitor of the New Left...
...Aptheker fascinated me—he was the raging heart of the Left...
...He was a rock...
...I was lying...
...in a shaking voice, Aptheker quoted a Brecht poem that Communists did not kill, they stopped killing...
...But I can only guess that he knew everything and was perhaps the party's most trusted figure...
...The party was pleased with David Evanier is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter...
...He spat out that American leaders were villainous—"garbage," a "nest of vermin?' "scum?' "human animals?' "lice "bedbugs," "trash" [with] "the morals of goats, the learning of gorillas?' Aptheker was speaking to a typical Communist ragtag crowd of that declining period: droolers, fat boys in shorts, white socks, and sneakers, FBI agents, Communist singles...
...At the time, Aptheker was giving his last lectures at the dying Jefferson School of Social Science, a CP front in New York City...
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...He desperately required the black and white certainties that ideology provided...
...He recently defected from Hollywood...
...Weaklings might be deserting the cause, but not Aptheker...
...In those days American Communism was reeling from Khrushchev's speech about Stalin's crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary...
...I remember telling him how splendid his book was...
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...I never believed Aptheker's words, but as a boy I liked the confiding and learned tone in which he spoke to me, the special dispensation he gave me...
...But despite all that, all anyone seems to talk about is how lifelike its sound is...
...But like other ideologues, if instructed to do the right thing, they could do it with passion and sometimes even do it well...
...And he quoted approvingly the black Communist leader, Benjamin J. Davis, famous for saying, "I'd rather be a lamppost in Moscow than president of the United States?' Aptheker also told me of his own youthful days risking his life battling Jim Crow in the American South of the mid-1930s...
...The New York Times could not restrain its admiration, calling him a "prolific Marxist historian" who "joined the Communist Party because he saw it as an anti-fascist force and a progressive voice for race relations...
...The party was decimated and to Aptheker I was a shining "representative of the youth," which is the way he introduced me to the comrades...
...He maintained that the Communist government was supported by Hungarian workers who welcomed the Soviet tanks...
...Above ground, he was a tank...
...American Communists could betray a good cause in a heartbeat (and Ralph Ellison wrote brilliantly of their abrupt abandonment, literally overnight, of Harlem in Invisible Man...
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...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 him...
...He loved the word "indubitably?' A chronicler of slave rebellions—which he exaggerated to suit his ideology—sometimes he started "talking black": "The man says this, theman says that?' he intoned...
...For a kid like me, from a broken home and a lot of anger, it was glorious to watch such a man of delicious extremes...
...I loved it...
...I'm sure Herbert Aptheker was never a part of the CP's espionage underground...
...The Times praised Aptheker's "work on black history and his outspoken defense of civil rights...
...He had a scholarly mien, but strip away that veneer and barely beneath the surface was a permanent state of rage...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
