The Far Left Talks to Itself
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
MEETING IN CAMBRIDGE The Far Left Talks to Itself BY ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Cambridge A three-day conference with the title "Anti-Communism and the U.S.: History and Consequences" was held...
...Since three panelists represented the CPUSA, including Gus Hall and Angela Davis of its Central Committee, how educational it would have been to have had a frank debate over this with no holds barred so far as the Communist past is concerned...
...It was his youngest brother, Patrick, who brought us back to reality where alternatives to the American media are concerned...
...So did Dr...
...The correspondents rushed to the Soviet Press Office...
...But on this occasion the informally dressed Cockburn was a fierce and ruthless polemicist, crammed to the hilt with specific examples of the malfeasance of the press...
...These people, who had been active in the Dukakis campaign at the local level, thought that effective reforms in the U.S...
...When Russia and Nazi Germany signed their nonaggression treaty, these front organizations went out of business...
...But the Cambridge conference demonstrated, if demonstration was still necessary, the wisdom of their not seeking unity with an elitist academic Marxism or the nostalgic, ghostly CPUSA of Gus Hall...
...MEETING IN CAMBRIDGE The Far Left Talks to Itself BY ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Cambridge A three-day conference with the title "Anti-Communism and the U.S.: History and Consequences" was held last month in Harvard University buildings, but not under Harvard auspices...
...Marxists were not the only ones to speak...
...Styron said it didn't sound much like the tamales and beans he had actually eaten that night with Ortega...
...Patrick, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, spent two years as the London Financial Times Moscow correspondent...
...The biologist Stephen Jay Gould spoke at one of the panel discussions...
...Angela Davis, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, is Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics and Women's Studies at San Francisco State University...
...They need all the help they can get, and the more they work together the better...
...This is a large order, especially since no scenario was provided...
...We told you so," the Marxists could say...
...But he was backed immoderately by the supposed moderator, William Schaap, director of the conference and former president of the Washington branch of the National Lawyers Guild...
...The cleaning woman was an employeeofthe government, so the correspondents should report that they had been informed by a "government official...
...More surprising, considering the predominance of blacks on the panels, almost no blacks were in the audience, perhaps 1 per cent at best...
...The door of the auditorium was locked and with difficulty they got a cleaning woman to open it a crack...
...Also missing were veterans of the nonCommunist Left or civil libertarians...
...The Deputy Foreign Minister of Cuba could not come because he was refused a visa...
...Who is lying in state...
...After the Chernobyl explosion the people of Kiev were ordered to do folk dances in the streets to show the outside world that the nuclear fallout represented no danger, even though officials were considerate enough to tell the dancers to wash their hair carefully each day...
...As the War broke out he was editing the London Daily Worker under constraints we can imagine...
...The lying in state...
...The menace, according to the moving spirits at the conference, is American imperialist capitalism itself and its direct or indirect oppression of Third World nations...
...The conference was sold out at least a week before it opened...
...Kovel's germinal paper was called "The Black Hole of Anticommunism.' It treated anti-Communism as a "pathology" that had become "the civic religion of the U.S...
...No longer is there the menace of Hitlerism to unite Communists and nonCommunists...
...It was an ideal moment...
...Few if any Harvard students attended...
...After the War his wit, which hissons inherited, was given free play in Private Eye and three volumes of reminiscence...
...It was argued that such criticism would weaken the joint effort against the common enemy, Adolf Hitler...
...Wit comes more readily in attack than defense...
...Included also was William Styron, who at the invitation of Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega had attended the meeting in San José, Costa Rica, that adopted the Arias peace plan for Central America...
...But it worked...
...The purpose was to form a broad united front under Old Left/New Left leadership...
...So did Harvey Cox, the liberationist theologian...
...This was understandable on the part of the speakers at the first general meeting...
...The meeting came just three days after the November 8 election...
...Bernard Lown, the founder many years ago of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and in 1980 the cofounder—with Yevgeny Chazov, the Soviet Union's present Minister of Health— of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War...
...Things will only get worse unless capitalism is smashed...
...The organizers were uneasy not only about the Communist past but the Communist present...
...What now...
...AT stake was the main contention of the conference: The American people are kept antiCommunist by capitalist-owned media, and the only remedy is to destroy capitalism itself...
...Anticommunism and the Third World,' determined what the discussion would not be about...
...John Kenneth Galbraith had been announced as the first-night speaker, but was ill and his message was read by Abby Rockefeller...
...A flood of revelations about the past is pouring out of the Soviet Union...
...Robert Gorham Davis, Columbia University professor emeritus of English, is a longtime contributor to the NL...
...Asked how the press of his noncapitalist future will be managed and by whom, Alexander Cockburn is brief and inexplicit...
...I had been wondering," Cockbum said, "what was wrong with the Italian Communist Party...
...Here, too, the selection of the speakers and the title of the session, "U.S...
...From his days there he recalled an amusing incident...
...When Meyer tried to answer, however, he was interrupted by new charges before he could finish his sentences...
...Terri Shaw, longtime reporter on Latin American affairs for the Washington Post, had been given gentler treatment personally than her paper received politically, but she was furious at the way Meyer had been bullied and said so emphatically...
...We face terrible problems in this country, and many separate groups are working passionately to correct them...
...Lest those of us at the conference forget what its theme was, surrounded as we were by Left professors who had not been sucked down into Kovel's dark hole, the cover of the three-day program had a large picture of Roy Cohn, as counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, his hand over a hearing-table microphone, whispering instructions to Joe McCarthy...
...The liveliest and most argumentative session was on the anti-Communism of the American press...
...The one whom Alexander Cockburn and the moderator were gunning for was Karl E. Meyer, editorial writer for the New York Times...
...Everyone laughed...
...His title is not surprising in the academic world as it exists today...
...They said it in the four plenary meetings...
...But since the foreign press had now discovered the death, a decision was reached...
...Discouraged Democrats turned up who had given their hearts to Michael S. Dukakis' Presidential campaign...
...They were a former Grenadian Ambassador to the Organization of American States, now a visiting professor at Williams College, a former Prime Minister of Guyana, the chief representative of the African National Congress at the UN, and a representative of the Revolutionary Democratic Front in El Salvador...
...The Globe reporter, a black woman, spoke chiefly of the underplaying of black news and went unscathed...
...They were not about to travel great distances and pay $75 to remind a hostile audience of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, or to suggest that Stalin's Gulag, Mao's Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's killing fields were not entirely the creations of the capitalist press...
...When I asked some of the black panel members why this was the case, one said, "Blacks don't read the Nation...
...Nothing in its favor was said...
...According to La Prensa it started with crab meat au gratin, went on to squab, and finished with an apple soufflé with prunes...
...The star billing given the witty dragon-slayer Alexander Cockburn was enough to bring his enthusiastic fans in full force as well...
...The real surprise came from the editor of L'Unità, who recalled that on arriving in this country he was stirred by the wealth of information in the American press, so much freer than Italian papers under the control of the different political parties...
...At the conference some 40 per cent of the speakers were professors, many from the top universities...
...At one crowded session the speakers were all three sons of Claud Cockburn, a former London Times reporter...
...Gus Hall was permitted to make the blandest of statements, unafraid of contradiction...
...Before World War II Claud, who had fought in Spain, published the Week, a political tip sheet directed against the " Cliveden set" (a name he invented...
...The attacker was Alexander Cockburn...
...In addition, the novelist told how La Prensa (the opposition newspaper, now permitted publication by the Sandinistas), reported a meal Ortega gave him...
...required working within the system, that calling for an unspecified revolutionary alternative was acopout...
...It was the first inkling of his death...
...That theme originated with a paper written in 1968 by Joel Kovel, a member of the Board of Advisers of the Institute for Media Analysis, now Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College...
...He certainly does not cite as models the press of countries where Communism is in power...
...No, she said, the chess match was moved...
...Bella Abzug, J. William Fulbright, Gore Vidal, and George Wald were conference sponsors...
...Nothing had been announced...
...Styron described antiCommunist falsehoods in accounts of the meeting by Times reporter James LeMoyne...
...Who can say anything in its favor...
...A questioner rose to complain angrily that the audience was being fed antiSoviet slanders...
...At other sessions you could hear Daniel Ellsberg, Ring Lardner Jr., Howard Fast, Jessica Mitford, Paul Sweezy, editor for 50 years of Monthly Review, and Philip Agee, the former CIA agent who, since writing Inside the Company, has been kicked out of country after country, allegedly for collaborating with Cuban and Soviet intelligence...
...Patrick provided another example of Soviet public relations that was not so funny...
...Its many advisers, including Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti and Ramsey Clark, have their own constituencies that knew what kind of agenda to expect...
...What...
...The other journalists were from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Amsterdam News, New York's oldest black newspaper, and L'Unità, the Italian Communist newspaper...
...The Minister of Defense...
...This was at the time of the Moscow trials, which should have unsettled anyone's confidence in Communism...
...they asked despairingly...
...The same is true for those who responded because of notices in the alternative press...
...They said it in the 35 workshop sessions, often running 10 at a time, onsubjects like "Anticommunism and the Social Transformation of the South," "The World Costs of Anticommunism," "AntiSovietism in America, What are its Sources...
...This was the one occasion to which panelists had been invited in order to be attacked...
...Anothersaid, "They can't afford the $75...
...As a result, almost no unsympathetic challenges came from the floor...
...Older comrades in attendance remembered what happened to the American Communist Party when Nikita S. Khrushchev's revelations made anti-Stalinism official...
...Cockburn could cite omissions and distortions in Times reporting on Central America which were indeed indefensible...
...The Institute for Media Analysis, which organized the event, publishes the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a continuing exposé of American intelligence activities and agents...
...And they said it again and again, to 1,300 people who came from all over the country and paid $75 to listen...
...The strategy was to ignore everything that is being confirmed now, making the conference—despite the intelligence and experience it brought together— utterly irrelevant...
...They contribute to the flood of academic Marxist and New Left periodicals that have appeared since '68, often subsidized by the universities themselves...
...Two who attempted this at the general meetings were shouted at angrily by the audience, and their questions were rejected by the moderators as not relevant to the theme of the conference...
...His protest, entirely in tune with the title and theme of the conference, showed why some disappointed participants, although they had little chance to say so, felt the conference was politically out of date, represented a dead end...
...If you don't believe that, you have been brainwashed by the media...
...But that was exactly what the organizers of the conference did not want...
...Cockburn, columnist for the Nation, In These Times and the Wall Street Journal, is a personally engaging Anglo-Irish wit...
...During a dull time for news, he and a colleague went to see a session of a championship chess match...
...This was a broad conference with well-known participants from many disciplines...
...It might seem strange that people should travel from Alaska and Hawaii to attend a conference with so negative and arid a title...
...Had they been raised at this conference, they would have been angrily rejected as McCarthyism...
...During the United Front period of the late '30s the Communist-run League of American Writers and League Against War and Fascism welcomed liberals and progressives of all sorts, so long as they refrained from any criticism of Stalinism and the USSR...
...It would not be about the possibility of giving democratic forces in Third World countries the kind of support that will keep them from having to choose totalitarianism of the Left as the only possible escape from totalitarianism of the Right...
...Andrew Cockburn, the middle son, has written a book on American overestimation of Soviet attack capacities, and is being sued because of a documentary he did on the CIA and drugs...
...Something else is happening here...
Vol. 71 • December 1988 • No. 21
