Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 19

The March on Washington, 50 Years Later: How the American Left Remembers It

Fifty years ago this week, the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place. The highlight was Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, now justly celebrated as one of the most famous orations in American history, standing alongside that of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

I, along with many other Americans, have my own memories of that day. I had recently left Madison, Wisconsin, to come back to New York City with my first wife and our infant daughter, where I looked for an apartment and began the long process of writing my doctoral dissertation and finding a job. I had been involved in the civil rights movement in 1959-60 at the University of Iowa, where I got my M.A. in history. I organized the picketing of Woolworth’s department store in solidarity with the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in, at which brave black students demanded to be served lunch at the segregated chain’s lunch counter. While at Iowa, my wife and I went to hear King speak at a local black church, and hence I already knew what a powerful speaker he was.

On the day of the march, I boarded an old hard-back yellow school bus at 5:00 a.m. for the long trip to the nation’s capital. The bus was chartered by people working out of Bayard Rustin’s New York office, and was officially part of a delegation of what became Students for a Democratic Society, but at the time was the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a group affiliated with the Socialist Party led by Norman Thomas. Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph were both members.

I remember one highlight. The then-segregated Maryland rest stops were open to all marchers, black and white. I recall groups of volunteers handing out free sandwiches and drinks to all marchers. Standing next to me, a black kid who was perhaps 10 or 11 laughed and said loudly: “The white power structure certainly has things well organized for our benefit today.” The march itself proved to be glorious — all ages, white and black, demanding that the American promise of equality before the law for all be realized and that the scourge of racism and segregation be ended throughout the nation as a whole.

The promise and hopes of that day would soon be shattered by the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing which killed young children at Sunday school, and by the other obstructionist attempts of Southern racists to stifle the forces demanding change and equality. The march took place as the nation recalled the recent assassination of Medgar Evers and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955.

It would be a long and noble struggle, and fifty years later, anyone with a shred of honesty knows how different the America of that day was from the one we now live in.

I have little to add to the wonderful column appearing in these pages by Rick Moran, who rightfully notes how Martin Luther King, Jr. would be stunned by the speeches at last week’s first commemoration march, where the huckster Rev. Al Sharpton was a keynote featured speaker, and where the calls of “Justice for Trayvon” and claims that the vote was being taken away from African-Americans resounded. It was apparent that in the eyes of many who spoke, we were still living in the America of the early 1960s.

The remembrances of the original 1963 March on Washington has led to scores of articles about what Martin Luther King, Jr. would say today, what he would demand if he was still alive and speaking at this week’s commemorative event. It is an exercise in which it seems every liberal and leftist is participating, with the expected results.

In most regards, what they think are the important issues are what they think King would be saying. The exercise amounts to  a litany of today’s left-wing agenda.

Writing in The Nation, Gary Younge does not disappoint in giving us the perspective of unadulterated leftism. For him, King’s historic speech was a “searing indictment of American racism that still exists.” (My emphasis.) As Younge sees it, Martin Luther King Jr. was a radical of the far Left, who only with the passage of time “went from ignominy to icon.”

Evidently Mr. Younge is too young to recall — or perhaps because he grew up in Britain, does not know — that the radicals in SNCC often referred to him behind his back as “Uncle Martin Tom” and “Martin Luther Coon.” And that self-proclaimed black revolutionaries like Malcolm X condemned King regularly as an appeaser of white power for advocating non-violence and Gandhi-style resistance.

The march itself, Malcolm X proclaimed, was “The Farce on Washington.”

Now it certainly is true that King was of the social-democratic tradition, as was the march’s chief captain and organizer, Bayard Rustin. Rustin, however, was as anti-Communist as one could be, and hence, urged King not to later waste the potential of his moral leadership of the movement by joining the anti Vietnam-war movement.

Rustin, who was a dedicated pacifist, would later sign an open letter informing Americans why he would not take part in any anti-war rallies in which speakers advocated victory for the Viet Cong or flew the National Liberation Front flags alongside that of the United States.

The Nation’s Continuing Denial of Soviet Espionage during the New Deal Years

Harry Dexter White, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and the man who created the postwar financial structure and the International Monetary Fund,  was arguably the top Communist spy working in our top government agencies during the New and Fair Deal days. As I argued in these pages a while back, economist Benn Steil’s new research revealed that not only was White a Soviet agent, he brings to the mainstream what many of us have known for years — that the New Deal administration was heavily penetrated by Soviet spies, many of them American citizens who were working for Stalin’s intelligence agencies.

This truth, no matter how documented, is something that the left-wing intellectuals and journalists who inhabit Nationland (which is what I call the climate in which they inhabit their own set of truths centered in Manhattan’s Upper West Side)  never can accept. They continue to be what John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr term “in denial.” In a recent issue of The Nation, the flagship of the Left in America, the publication ran a review of Benn Steil’s new book on White by James M. Boughton, in which the author accuses Steil and others of McCarthyite “guilt by association” and claims that those who say White was a Soviet agent are only speculating.

What The Nation has done has been well described by Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary. He writes:

The anti-anti-Communist point of view about the Cold War was discredited, but for the publishers ofThe Nation, the impulse to wave the old red flag is still strong. That often leads them, as well as some other sectors of the left such as the New York Times, to pretend as if backing the totalitarian, genocidal, and anti-Semitic regime that ruled Moscow was an innocent romantic phase that all true liberals went through. But as bad as that deplorable tradition might be, the decision of The Nation to publish material about Communist espionage as if the Venona Files had never been published is nothing short of bizarre.

Like their counterparts on the far Right fringe, the Nation left too ignores evidence, even though it has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that White was indeed a Soviet agent. For those who doubt this, one has only to look at the scrupulous investigation of the evidence by Haynes and Klehr, which you can find at Washington Decoded.   

Few can match the precise and careful attention to evidence that both reveal. Reading their dissection of the evidence, it amounts to irrefutable proof that White was a Soviet spy. Why, they ask, do seemingly intelligent people ignore the facts? They believe that it is not because they are dishonest, but because “we are dealing with intellectual ‘true believers,’ ideological zealots who are mentally incapable of accepting or processing information that undermines their historical world view.” (Klehr and Haynes have also written about those on the Right who ignore evidence and make assertions that new evidence refutes, and who continue to make arguments that have been disproven.)

Bradley Manning and the Rosenbergs: Traitors to the United States in Different Eras

Is there an apt comparison to be made between Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who went to their deaths in Sing Sing prison’s electric chair in 1953 for “conspiracy to commit espionage,” and Private First Class Bradley Manning, who was convicted on July 30 of 17 of 22 charges of espionage and theft?

Most people would immediately say “yes.” Writing in the Los Angeles Times, the Rosenbergs’ youngest son, Robert Meeropol, says of Manning: “I feel a kinship for him.”

The Rosenbergs provided military and atomic information to the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, both during the years of World War II and in the days of the early Cold War; Manning violated his oath to the United States when he gave classified secrets to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. Both Manning and the Rosenbergs endangered American national security out of a misguided belief that they were serving the higher interests of humanity. The Rosenbergs believed that the world working class, whose interests were protected by the Soviet Union, deserved any military secrets they desired. Manning believes that there should be no secrets, and hence any data he had access to rightfully should be told to one and all.

If we excused people who betray their country out of a delusional belief that they are doing so for a higher cause than patriotism to their own nation, then our nation would truly be in mortal danger from our enemies. Robert Meeropol doesn’t see it that way. The logic he shows in his op-ed is actually quite revealing. While the prosecutors claim that Manning was guilty of “espionage, theft and other unsavory terms,” Meeropol believes that “what Manning really did was reveal the truth of our government’s action to the American people and the world.”

He goes on to draw his analogy between the fate of his parents and that of Manning. After cknowledging that his father and co-defendant Morton Sobell “did provide valuable military information to the Soviet Union during the 1940s” — to my knowledge an acknowledgment he has never made before — Meeropol then argues incorrectly that his parents’ espionage network did not provide atomic information. Also, the experience of his parents’ trial, sentencing, and execution has led him to believe that “citizens must know what the government is doing in their name.”

Meeropol begrudges those who think “Manning is a traitor.” As he sees it, the convicted soldier only “released classified material that embarrassed the U.S. government” and might “put us at a disadvantage when dealing with other nations.” Nothing significant, evidently — just like what his father gave to the Soviets, though valuable, did not deserve a death sentence or even a conviction.

He no longer believes in his parents’ dream of “faith in the USSR,” but he understands their supposedly well-meaning motivation. But his own faith, he writes, is to “humanity as a whole.” And Mr. Meeropol has decided that Bradley Manning is only a whistleblower who, like Meeropol himself, says he feels “connected to everybody.” Reading Manning’s words, Meeropol adds: “Isn’t that how we all should be thinking?”

Well, no, it is not. The situation and threats we face do not permit us the luxury to give away secrets necessary to our national security.

Let us take a look at what Bradley Manning wrought upon us. As James Kirchick writes in the Daily News, Manning is nothing less than a traitor. Indeed, he argues that the Manning was lucky to avoid the death penalty, which Kirchick believes was well-deserved because he committed capital crimes.

First, Manning provided the names of individuals who opposed authoritarian regimes, and whose disclosure puts them at risk of attack and death in their own countries. For example, he disclosed the names of judges who were willing to take part in a trial in Lebanon of those responsible for the death of the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who had been assassinated by Hezbollah and its Syrian patrons in 2005. A cable from the U.S. ambassador stated: “These persons are at risk of being threatened or assassinated for agreeing to act as tribunal judges.”

Did we need to know their names, Robert?

Another cable given to WikiLeaks by Manning named two brave human-rights activists who were giving information about the horrors of the Assad regime in Syria to the United States.

How does that serve “humanity as a whole”?

Political Correctness Run Amok

We all know about the hazards and follies of political correctness. But this time, the powers that be in Seattle, and it seems New York City as well, have gone way too far.

The Office for Civil Rights in Seattle, a Fox News report informed us last week, instructed city workers about no longer using terms that some people in Seattle might deem offensive.

I wondered when first reading this if they were talking about scores of white employees using the N word. No, that’s not it. The words they are complaining about include the following: “citizens” and “brown-bag lunch.” Not to be outdone, New York City’s Department of Education warned about such dangerous words as “dinosaurs,” “birthdays,” and, last but not least, “Halloween.”

Now that I know you are busily trying to discern what could be wrong about using such words, let the good city fathers tell you. A member of Seattle’s Civil Rights Commission, Elliott Bronstein, readily explained in an interview with a local TV news program. “Citizen,” he explained, insulted the many people in Seattle who were there illegally and, hence, not citizens. Therefore, all those living in the area must be called “residents.” Well, I somehow think they don’t really mind, because as long as they can get driver’s licenses, a free public school education for their children, and all the benefits real citizens have, I don’t think they give a hoot about what they are called.

But don’t dare call a lunchtime meeting and announce that it’s a “brown-bag lunch,” unless you wish to be brought up on charges of racism and perhaps lose your job for offending African-American colleagues. You see, Mr. Bronstein explained, for many African-Americans, “the phrase brown bag does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used…to determine if people’s skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home.”

Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book

Today, my review of Diana West’s new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, has been posted at FrontPageMagazine, the website of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. I urge PJM readers to go and read it, and to consider the arguments I make about why I find her book to be a betrayal, but not the kind she charges existed in our past. Indeed, what I argue in the review is that her book is actually a betrayal of serious and honest history, an ideologically bound argument that ignores real evidence, distorts our past, and creates a mythical counter-narrative to understanding decisions made during WWII.

Here is my concluding paragraph:

Conspiratorial theories of history are easy to create once you are prepared to ignore the realities on the ground, or regard those who do take them into account as part of the conspiracy too. This is the path that Diana West has taken in her misconceived and misleading book. Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?  It had nothing to do with the Rubik’s Cube of diplomatic and military considerations, a calculus that had to take into account the willingness of the American and British publics to continue to sacrifice and their soldiers to die.  No, it was a conspiracy so immense, as West’s hero Joe McCarthy might have said, that it allowed Western policy to be dictated by a shadow army of Soviet agents. It is unfortunate that a number of conservatives who should know better have fallen for West’s fictions.  It is even more depressing that her book perpetuates the dangerous one dimensional thinking of the Wisconsin Senator and his allies in the John Birch Society which have allowed anti anti-communism to have a field day in our intellectual culture.

What I want to discuss is why I took upon myself the job of writing a lengthy and detailed critique of West’s book.

First, as a historian and a conservative, I believe that my responsibility is to the truth. I cannot countenance conspiracy theories, whether they come from those on the Left or those on the Right. On these pages and elsewhere, I have regularly written about the corruption of history by writers such as Howard Zinn, and the team of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. I have also written a great deal about Soviet espionage, the influence of Communism on American life, and the fallacies of anti anti-Communism.

When self-proclaimed conservatives echo the methodology and conspiratorial type thinking of those on the Left, because they consider themselves conservatives means that those of us who want a responsible, sane conservative movement, and a vibrant conservative intellectual culture, have the responsibility to speak out and to criticize, no matter what source it comes from.

An analogy can be made with the dilemma William F. Buckley Jr. faced when, in 1962, he decided to take on first Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, and later the Society itself. At the New Republic last year, Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote the following:

Having spent the better part of a decade doing research in Buckley’s archives, I can attest that it was no easy matter for Buckley to take on Welch and his Society. Many of the financial backers and readers of Buckley’s National Review magazine admired Welch and his organization; Buckley’s own mother was a Bircher. His editorial colleagues warned that criticizing Welch risked splitting the conservative movement. Buckley’s position as movement leader would be jeopardized by the liberal plaudits that predictably would follow his editorial condemnation of the Birchers; as Buckley put it privately, “I wish to hell I could attack them without pleasing people I can’t stand to please.”

Nonetheless, in February 1962 National Review ran a six-page editorial against Welch, arguing that he was damaging the anti-Communist cause by “distorting reality” and failing to distinguish between an “active pro-Communist” and an “ineffectually anti-Communist liberal.” It would be several years before Buckley excommunicated all Birchers from the conservative movement, but his editorial emphasized that “There are bounds to the dictum, Anyone on the right is my ally.”

Two years later, Buckley finally wrote his famous editorial condemning the Society. The conspiracy theories of the Society, Buckley wrote, made conservatism seem “ridiculous and pathological,” allowing liberals to portray conservatives as extremists. Conservatism, he wrote, had to expand “by bringing into our ranks those people who are, at the moment, on our immediate left…If they think they are being asked to join a movement whose leadership believes the drivel of Robert Welch, they will pass by crackpot alley, and will not pause until they feel the embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals.”

Putin and Snowden: The Continuing Humiliation of President Obama

By granting a yearly and renewable asylum to Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin has challenged President Barack Obama. He has made it clear that the famous “reset” button with Russia, signed onto and endorsed by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, meant only that the United States would allow Russia to get away with what it wanted in international affairs as long as Putin’s authority was not challenged.

Russia would continue to aid its Syrian ally, no matter what “red lines” were crossed, and all the United States would do is urge Russia to act differently. Naturally, Vladimir Putin took our complaints into advisement and went about his merry ways.

After dilly-dallying for weeks about whether or not Russia would give Snowden asylum — and actually saying that he wished he would leave — President Putin reached his decision. Snowden is now welcome, as long as any job he takes does not involve computers. Knowing his skills, the last thing the Russian regime wants is for Mr. Snowden to infiltrate its secret programs the way he did for his country of birth, where he remains a citizen.

Remember that when he first arrived in Hong Kong, Snowden proclaimed that he did not want to live in any country that conducted the kind of surveillance he said the United States was carrying out on its citizens: “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.” That attitude gained him supporters among the anti-American Left and the libertarian Right, both attuned to violations of civil liberties by the omnipresent State. Many called him not a traitor, but rather a whistle-blower.

Now we have hard evidence that Edward Snowden’s great concern for individual liberty and the protection of the rights of individuals from government intrusion is nothing but a ruse he used to gather support. If it was not, the last place on Earth he would take refuge is current-day Russia.

This is a government pledged with new legislation to round up and imprison gay people, that regularly fabricates charges against those brave enough to expose the regime’s corruption, and that arrests others for the crime of public opposition to the Putin government’s growing power.

Mr. Snowden actually announced that he wanted to be a “human rights activist”, by which he obviously means releasing more information harmful to the United States, whose supposed violations of human rights seems to be the only rights violations he cares about. Let him try to say something about, the members of Pussy Riot still rotting in jail, and see how long his asylum status will remain intact.

A shrewd analysis of what lies behind Russia’s new strong anti-gay laws appears by Miriam Elder in Buzzfeed. Elder argues:

The violent images, restrictive legislation, and public humiliation that LGBT people in Russia now face isn’t the product of a traditionalist backlash as much as it is a vital part of the new politics of Putin’s Russia, a nation in search of someone to define itself against.

In the old days, Soviet Russia made Jews the scapegoat. On that front, for personal reasons, Putin himself has sought to engage other enemies, leaving gays as the replacement for old-style official Soviet anti-Semitism. When Putin assumed the presidency again late last year, Elder explains:

[His reaction] has been reflexive and obvious to everyone — to launch a crackdown, arrest opposition leaders, arrest average protesters, adopt laws limiting future ability to protest. The second is more oblique: Putin has launched a campaign to shore up support in the Russian “heartland,” that mythical place far from the bustling streets of Moscow where headscarved peasants embrace core Russian concepts that don’t actually exist anymore.

Elder adds:

Demonizing gays allows Putin to tell the “heartland”: I will protect you and your “traditional” families; you are the real Russia. It also grows suspicion of the liberal opposition, presented as fundamentally “un-Russian” as they stand up increasingly for gay rights amid Putin’s growing crackdown.

The Truth About Obama’s Myth-making Statement on Ho Chi Minh’s Goals for Vietnam

Last week, President Obama met at the White House with Truong Tan Sang, the president of Vietnam. At the end of their meeting, according to the official White House release, Obama said:

We discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.

This weekend, I wrote an op-ed about it for the Wall Street Journal (unfortunately, subscription is required); I argued that Ho Chi Minh is more than likely laughing at our president from his grave. Rather than being any kind of a Jeffersonian democrat, he was a committed and disciplined Marxist-Leninist, trained at the infamous Lenin School in Moscow in the 1920s.

It is true that more than once, Ho Chi Minh made a shrewd tactical maneuver, a key instrument in the Leninist playbook. Seeking U.S. and Western support for his anti-colonial Communist movement, he decided that his effort might be rewarded with aid and military supplies against the French, and that goal could be attained more easily if he invoked the American Founding Fathers as his inspiration.

When the French withdrew from Vietnam in 1945, Ho proclaimed himself president of a provisional government, which he called the Vietnam Democratic Republic. I wrote in the op-ed:

In October 1945, just how democratic the republic would be became clear: Ho ordered the slaughter of his political opponents, including 50,000 of the then-powerful Trotskyist communists. During a trip to Paris in late 1945, Ho told the French Socialist leader Daniel Guerin, “All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.”

For those who want details on how the newly installed “democratic” leader exterminated all of his opponents, consult any of the books by the late Austrian-born social-democrat Joseph Buttinger.

Spyridon Mitsotakis writes at Breitbart.com:

The myth of Ho’s devotion to the ideals of America’s Founders comes largely from a speech he made in Hanoi upon the defeat of the Japanese at the end of World War II. On September 2, 1945, he declared: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free …

It is well known that during the war against the Japanese, the American OSS, the precursor of the CIA, flew in a team to help train and equip Ho’s troops to fight and aid in the guerrilla war led by Ho against the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam. As Mitsotakis explains, compromise and alliances with the bourgeois enemy was always considered by Leninists a tactical step in the march to attaining power. He quotes Vietnam First Party Secretary Le Duan, who explained to his cadre:

We would at one time reach a temporary compromise … with the French in order to … wipe out the reactionaries [the non-communist Nationalists, whom the Communists helped the French to hunt down] … thus gaining time to consolidate our forces and prepare for a nationwide resistance to French colonialist aggression, which the party knew was inevitable.

Perhaps the man most responsible for depicting Ho Chi Minh as a Jeffersonian democrat inspired by the American revolution was another retired OSS officer, Archimedes L.A. Patti, who had met with Ho in late 1945. This was precisely the same time Ho’s cadre were physically exterminating all political opponents, including those on the Left such as the once powerful Vietnamese Trotskyists.

Sympathetic to Ho’s desire for Vietnamese independence, Patti — as he reveals in a 1981 TV interview – believed that just as the U.S. was ready to grant the Philippines independence, he hoped that it would do the same for Vietnam. Thus Patti emphasized to Ho FDR’s hostility to the French. When he talked with Ho Chi Minh in late 1945, as he puts it:

Ho Chi Minh was on a silver platter in 1945. We had him. He was willing to, to be a democratic republic, if nothing else. Socialist yes, but a democratic republican. He was leaning not towards the Soviet Union, which at the time he told me that USSR could not assist him, could not help him because they just won a war only by dint of real heroism.

It was Patti who in his book and in many speeches related how Ho Chi Minh cited the American Declaration of Independence. Patti was a skilled intelligence officer, influenced by how Ho’s troops aided U.S. forces with valuable intelligence in the fight against Japan. But Patti too was more than gullible, and believed Ho’s claims, not realizing how the Communist leader was applying classic Leninist strategy. It was Patti who argued that Ho Chi Minh was really a nationalist rather than a Communist, and that if the U.S. had worked with him and supported his aims, the result would have been a democratic Vietnam.

Evidently, later intelligence officers were equally gullible. In the comments section of the WSJ, Alan Trustman, who identifies himself as a “lifelong Republican conservative” and “not a supporter of Obama,” posted the following:

Allen Dulles … in the presence of his son, told me that he believed Ho wanted an independent, unified Vietnam which was a democracy on the American model, but the people advising Truman were so unreasonably hostile, given Ho’s communist background, that we were not going to support Ho notwithstanding his role as the virtual head of American intelligence in Indo China during WWII.

I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trustman’s recollection. That, however, reveals that even the Republican appointed head of the CIA Allen Dulles (Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961) and brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed Ho Chi Minh’s manipulative claims.

The Truth about Obama’s Myth-making Statement about Ho Chi Minh’s Goals for Vietnam

Last week, President Obama met at the White House with Truong Tan Sang, the President of Vietnam. At the end of their meeting, according to the official White House release about the meeting, Obama said  “we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

This weekend, I wrote an op-ed about it for The Wall Street Journal. (Unfortunately, it is hidden behind a firewall) I argued in this article that Ho Chi Minh is more than likely laughing at our President from his grave. Rather than being any kind of a Jeffersonian democrat, he was a committed and disciplined Marxist-Leninist, trained at the infamous Lenin School in Moscow in the 1920’s.

It is true that more than once, Ho Chi Minh made a shrewd tactical maneuver, a key instrument in the Leninist playbook. Seeking U.S. and Western support for his anti-colonial Communist movement, he decided that his effort might be rewarded with aid and military supplies against the French, and that goal could be attained more easily if he invoked the American Founding Fathers as his inspiration.

When the French withdrew from Vietnam in 1945, Ho proclaimed himself President of a Provisional government, which he called the Vietnam Democratic Republic. “In October 1945,” I wrote in my op-ed, “just how democratic the republic would be became clear: Ho ordered the slaughter of his political opponents, including 50,000 of the then-powerful Trotskyist communists. During a trip to Paris in late 1945, Ho told the French Socialist leader Daniel Guerin, “All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.” For those who want details on how the newly installed “democratic” leader exterminated physically all of his opponents, consult any of the books by the late Austrian born social-democrat,  Joseph Buttinger.

Writing today at Breitbart.com, Spyridon Mitsotakis writes that “The myth of Ho’s devotion to the ideals of America’s Founders comes largely from a speech he made in Hanoi upon the defeat of the Japanese at the end of World War II. On September 2, 1945, he declared: ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free….”

It is well known that during the war against the Japanese, the American OSS, the precursor of the CIA, flew in a team to help train and equip Ho’s troops to fight and aid in the guerrilla war led by Ho against the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam. As Mitsotakis explains, compromise and alliances with the bourgeois enemy was always considered by Leninists  a tactical step in the march to attaining power. He quotes Vietnam first Party Secretary Le Duan, who explained to his cadre that “We would at one time reach a temporary compromise…with the French in order to…wipe out the reactionaries [the non-communist Nationalists, whom the Communists helped the French to hunt down]…thus gaining time to consolidate our forces and prepare for a nationwide resistance to French colonialist aggression, which the party knew was inevitable.”

Perhaps the man most responsible for depicting Ho Chi Minh as a Jeffersonian democrat inspired by the American revolution was another retired OSS officer, Archimedes L.A. Patti, who had met with Ho in late 1945- precisely the same time as Ho’s cadre were physically exterminating all political opponents, including those on the Left such as the once powerful Vietnamese Trotskyists.

Sympathetic to Ho’s desire for Vietnamese independence, Patti- as he reveals in a 1981 TV interview, believed that just as the U.S. was ready to grant the Philippines independence, he hoped that it would do the same for Vietnam. Thus Patti emphasized to Ho FDR’s hostility to the French. When he talked with Ho Chi Minh in late 1945, as he puts it, “Ho Chi Minh was on a silver platter in 1945. We had him. He was willing to, to be a democratic republic, if nothing else. Socialist yes, but a democratic republican. He was leaning not towards the Soviet Union, which at the time he told me that USSR could not assist him, could not help him because they just won a war only by dint of real heroism.”

It was Patti who in his book and in many speeches related how Ho Chi Minh cited the American Declaration of Independence. Patti was a skilled intelligence officer, influenced by how Ho’s troops aided US forces with valuable intelligence in the fight against Japan. But Patti too was more than gullible, and believed Ho’s claims, not realizing how the Communist leader was applying classic Leninist strategy. It was Patti who argued that Ho Chi Minh was really a nationalist rather than a Communist, and that if the U.S. had worked with him and supported his aims, the result would have been a democratic Vietnam.

Evidently, later intelligence officers were equally gullible. In the comments section of the WSJ, Alan Trustman, who identifies himself as a “lifelong Republican conservative” and “not a supporter of Obama,” posted the following:

Allen Dulles, …in the presence of his son, told me that he believed Ho wanted an independent, unified Vietnam which was a democracy on the American model, but the people advising Truman were so unreasonably hostile, given Ho’s communist background, that we were not going to support Ho notwithstanding his role as the virtual head of American intelligence in Indo China during WWII.

I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trustman’s recollection. That, however, reveals that even the Republican appointed head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, (Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961) and brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, believed Ho Chi Minh’s manipulative claims to wanting not a Communist Vietnam, but a democratic country modeled on our system.

That claim was reinforced by the PBS documentary series on Vietnam. That program was countered by a relatively little known documentary “Televisions’ Vietnam: The Real Story.” It can be watched here on You Tube. The participants include Stephen Morris, a historian of Vietnam, who states that “If he was primarily a communist, as I’ve argued, this means that he did constitute a security threat to the United States and the free world, because of his commitment to the internationalist communist community, led by the Soviet Union. The second reason is, if we recognize the fact that he was primarily a communist, we understand why his victory constituted a great setback for the cause of human rights in his own part of the world, because, as a communist, he felt it necessary to use aggressive violence against non-communists who might potentially threaten his power.”

That documentary, shown on a few PBS stations in 1985, made the salient points that were all but ignored by the editorial writers and pundits, who preferred to continue with the usual narrative about Vietnam—that of the left who saw Ho Chi Minh as a righteous leader of democratic forces fighting for his people’s freedom.

Today, as Vietnam’s still Communist government moves along with a state controlled capitalist economy guided by a rigid one-party state, its leaders have, as even The New York Times reported, “cracked down at home, imprisoning bloggers, religious leaders and dissidents; curtailing labor laws; and again taking control of what one Vietnam expert called the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.

Ho Chi Minh is long gone; his legacy lives on in the Communist controlled Vietnam he created. Improving relations, trade and mutually beneficial arrangements between our country and Vietnam should not include continuing to spread the myth about Vietnam’s founder seeking a country modeled on our Constitution and Declaration of Independence.  One has to ask: Can’t President Obama move beyond the myths of the anti-war movement that his mother and other mentors evidently taught to him?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

92 Professors Go After Mitch Daniels, and Embarrass Themselves!

JULY 25, 2013

 

This is Cross-posted from Minding the Campus, the higher ed site of The Manhattan Institute.
By Ronald Radosh

The vultures in academia are out to get Mitch Daniels Jr., the president of Purdue University and former governor of Indiana. Inside Higher Ed reported last week that in e-mails he sent out while Governor, Daniels tried to get Indiana universities to stop using the best-selling  A People’s History of the United States , written by the late uberleftist professor Howard Zinn.  Now, the site reported on Monday, historians nationwide are demanding Daniels be called to task for his position. In one e-mail that especially offended the online higher education magazine, Daniels wrote: “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this session. Which board has jurisdiction over what counts and what doesn’t?”Daniels quickly posted an explanation for his position on Purdue University’s website. Daniels wrote:

My emails infringed on no one’s academic freedom and proposed absolutely no censorship of any person or viewpoint. In fact, the question I asked on one day in 2010 had nothing to do with higher education at all. I merely wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn’s textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people in Indiana’s public K-12 classrooms.

After establishing that serious historians think little of Zinn, he added: “I want to be equally clear that if Howard Zinn had been a professor at Purdue University, I would have vigorously defended his right to publish and teach what he wanted. Academic freedom, however, does not immunize a person from criticism and certainly does not confer entitlement to have one’s work inflicted upon our young people in the K-12 public school system.”

The Reading List

Daniels’ statement was not sufficient for the historians, including 92 professors in various fields teaching at Purdue. Daniels got in touch with Inside Higher Ed’s editors, and told them that he simply did not want his teachers exposed to “falsifications” of history, and that his position had no “implication for academic freedom.” On that, as we learned last week from my PJ Media colleague Roger Kimball, Daniels is also correct.

The historians offer the following arguments. Prof. Robert J. Helfenbein, who teaches something called Urban and Multicultural Education–whatever that might be–says he tries to teach future social studies teachers in high schools “multiple perspectives,” and that even those who disagree with Zinn “see a worth in reading a historian take on this very different perspective.”

Let me pose a hypothetical question to Prof. Helfenbein. If he taught biology and evolution, would he assign a creationist textbook to his students, informing them that the perspective and theory had to be considered, alongside those authors who wrote from a Darwinian perspective? I think we all know the answer. It is the same one given to the claim by Holocaust deniers that their point of view too must be considered. As Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University has often argued, one should not debate such a purveyor of untruth, and thus give legitimacy and credibility to unscientific and false arguments that have no merit whatsoever. There are no grounds whatsoever that all arguments have to be considered, no matter how many followers, in this case, that Howard Zinn has.

In a separate statement offered by historian Michael Kazin of Georgetown University, who authored his own harsh critique of Zinn–which Daniels actually cited as evidence of how even left-wing historians had disdain for Zinn–Kazin wrote that Daniels “should be roundly condemned for his attempts to stop students from reading Zinn’s big book and for calling Zinn a liar.”  In so doing, Kazin the leftist undermines his own well-known case against Zinn, as he tries to prove that when under attack, “there are no enemies on the Left.”

Zinn Wanted to Change the Future

Daniels was not saying students should not read Zinn’s book–thousands unfortunately do–but only that it was harmful to have his so-called history used as a text particularly in elementary and high schools. Kazin goes on to say that while it is true he does not “think much of Zinn’s interpretation of US history,” it is nevertheless “an interpretation.”

Kazin should know better. Zinn himself believes, as I pointed out in these pages some time ago, that history was not about “understanding the past,” but rather, “about changing the future.” That statement alone should disqualify anyone from ever calling him a historian again.  Yet Kazin then argues that when Daniels says that Zinn is a “biased writer,” it “just shows how little he understands how history is now and has always been written.”

Yes, historians do have a “point of view” that is their starting point for understanding the past. What Zinn does, as his numerous detractors have pointed out, is to create cardboard heroic stick figures as heroes who fought oppression, in order to give today’s radicals the courage to press forward as they identify heroes from the past they can be inspired by. This is not history, but rather old style CP agit-prop. This is hardly surprising, since Zinn was a long-time Communist Party member, who only left its ranks when he felt the CP had become soft and was not extreme enough.

If that is not enough, the American Historical Association, the main organization of U.S. historians, released an official statement that they “consider any governor’s action that interfered with an individual teacher’s reading assignments to be inappropriate and a violation of academic freedom.” They went on to argue that hence they disagree with the “spirit and intent” of Daniel’s actions when he was Governor.

Now, 92 of Daniel’s own faculty have issued an open letter condemning their own University chief official. First, the professors start out with a statement which is easily proven to be completely false. They write: “Whatever their political stripe, most experts in the field of U.S. history do not take issue with Howard Zinn’s facts, even when they do take issue with his conclusions.”

Getting the Rosenbergs Wrong

Let me give one major example, which as readers know, I am most familiar with. In the latest edition of his A People’s History, Zinn writes:

The Rosenbergs were charged with espionage.  The major evidence was supplied by a few people who had already confessed to being spies, and were either in prison or under indictment.

He continues to challenge the credibility of key witness Harry Gold, whom he asks: “Did Gold cooperate in return for early release from prison?” As for Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass, the other major witness, Zinn writes: “Did Greenglass…also know that his life depended on his cooperation?” His implication is clear: the key witnesses lied in order to get themselves a good deal. He also repeats the canard that Greenglass was an “ordinary-level machinist” and “not a scientist” who therefore could not give the Soviets anything of value. He suggests, without evidence, that Gold and Greenglass coordinated their testimony while awaiting trial in New York City’s Tombs prison.

First, the Rosenbergs were charged with “conspiracy to commit espionage,” and not espionage. Second, it is clear that Zinn had not even read the book I co-authored, The Rosenberg File, or Allen Hornblum’s The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb, or Steven Usdin’s Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley. Had he been even slightly familiar with these books, he would have easily found that much of what he writes in his few pages on the Rosenberg case are factually wrong, as are his scenarios he so fancifully surmises about with any evidence. Indeed, the rest of his paragraphs read like the old Communist propaganda about the case he had learned in the years after the Rosenbergs’ arrest when he was an active CP member. He does not even take into account any of the recent revelations available while he was still alive. His account, in simple terms, is a blatant lie.

Zinn Dodged Soviet Revelations

Indeed, in the edition he published in 2009 for young readers, Zinn went further. By then, he had ample time to catch up with evidence widely available indicating the Rosenbergs’ guilt, starting with the Venona decrypts, that had been released in 1995! Zinn writes in this last volume that came out the year of his death:

Although the evidence against the Rosenbergs was weak, the government executed them as spies. Later investigations proved the case was deeply flawed. But at the time, everything from movies and comic strips to history lessons and newspapers urged Americans to fight communism.

Reading the above, it is clear that Governor Daniels has very good reason to object to young students learning their “facts” and history from Howard Zinn.

Let us return to the Open Letter by some of Purdue’s faculty. They continue to assert that two of the historians whom Daniels cites in opposition to Zinn, the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the late Oscar Handlin, were part of the “consensus” school whose members believed that they had a right to speak for all Americans, and to leave out the oppressed—of which the faculty members provide us with the list, as if we do not know what groups it is composed of.

Next they turn to positive reviews of Zinn, and they cite in particular the endorsement of him by Columbia University’s highly regarded historian, Eric Foner. They do not pause to note, however, that Foner is a bona fide Red Diaper Baby, who as the late Theodore Draper pointed out in a New York Review of Books article about Foner’s own history of the United States, the only group he unreservedly praised without criticism as a force fighting for freedom, was- you guessed it- the American Communist Party. Draper writes:

Foner shows no such enthusiasm for any other organization in all of American history. His evident resolve to rehabilitate American communism derives from a peculiarly truncated version of the Party’s history. Because Foner gives it so much importance, an innocent reader might think that the period of the Popular Front was the most important and characteristic phase of the Party’s history…. In only one brief sentence does Foner allude to spying for the Soviet Union. He writes: “There undoubtedly were Soviet spies in the United States.” In fact, the spies were American Communists who were managed by resident Soviet agents who were not themselves spies…. Anti-Communists come in for something “perilously close” to defamation. … The section on American communism shows Foner at his most tendentious. The problem is not that he favors the American Communists but that he does so unhistorically.

So the reason Foner praises Zinn is because, he, like Zinn, is pro-Communist, considers the United States to be an enemy of freedom, and agrees with Zinn’s falsified history, or to use the old Trotskyist term, “the Stalinist falsification of history.”

Zinn Needed for ‘Critical Thinking’?

The Purdue professors claim, in their conclusion, that they seek to introduce students to “critical thinking,” and that for that esteemed reason, Zinn must be included in any curriculum. Teachers, they say, have the duty to use “controversial scholarship” if they so choose, so that the “conventional wisdom” of past generations can be challenged.

In making that case, they reveal their own limited and false view of what history offers us. History is a way of learning about the past, so that we can understand from what roots we came. It is not a mechanism meant to provide inspiration for leftist agendas, or for that matter, for conservative ones. If conventional wisdom turns out to be accurate, it should not be overturned. In the case of American communism, which both Professor Foner and the late Howard Zinn believe was a force for good in the fight against the would-be oppressors, they might ask whether or not in that case, the conventional wisdom of the time turned out to be more accurate than the revisionist case made by Zinn and Foner.

It is my hope in that his honest and forthright decision to oppose the teaching of Howard Zinn, President Mitch Daniels, Jr. of Purdue University will stand firm, and continue to teach his faculty and the rest of America a real lesson in the true meaning of academic freedom and courage in fighting against the forces of leftist political correctness.

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- See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/origi...

How a Stealth Communist Wrote the New Deal National Labor Relations Act, and Hid his True Beliefs

You may not have heard of Leon Keyserling — he was one of the bright young men who rushed to our nation’s Capitol to work for FDR after he was elected president, and who helped to fashion a great deal of the New Deal legislation. As his obituary in The New York Times pointed out:

As an aide of Senator [Robert F.] Wagner, a Democrat, [NY] Mr. Keyserling helped draft such measures as the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act.

Later, as his Wikipedia entry shows, he went on to work for President Harry S. Truman and continued to advise him on major domestic programs.

His most recent biographer, Donald K. Pickens, argues that Keyserling was what he calls a representative of “integrative liberalism,” which he defines as a phrase that best explains the realistic and pragmatic quest for a “deeper national community” that would unite all Americans around economic growth and a government commitment to programs to help the needy and regulate business. Hence, it would be a “country in which no one is left out.” According to FDR’s other aide, Rexford Tugwell, it meant a series of programs which they helped build for the New Deal that was accomplished “without resort to revolution or abandonment of the Constitution.”

His previous biographer, W. Robert Brazelton, argues that Keyserling believed in economic growth as the prerequisite for progress, but that he understood that some sectors of the economy were weaker than others, as were some groups in society, and hence that meant the federal government had to institute policies to maintain full employment. In other words, like other mainstream liberals, he believed the economy needed government programs to keep it in keel, and that it was the job of government, not the free market, to create full employment.

You might wonder, at this point, why I am even writing about him. The answer comes from a review that appeared recently in The Times Literary Supplement (London) of July 12, 2013, by David Hawkes, a review that unfortunately is not available online.  Hawkes offers the first review of a recent book by a left-wing historian named Landon Storrs titled The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left.

Storrs presents a typical left-wing narrative of the 1930s. As she develops her story, Professor Storrs argues that the Red Scare of the 1950s forced out of government an entire group of reformers who believed in social-democracy, and who were dismissed and marginalized by McCarthyite zealots who quashed dissent in the name of fighting subversion, as those fighting to oust them failed to distinguish between mainstream socialists and Communists. As the publisher’s summary states:

Storrs demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.

In her book, Storrs tells us that Keyserling and his wife Mary were “prime targets of the anticommunist right.” Both “publicly dismissed their experience” with the loyalty investigations of the 1950s, she writes, “as fleeting manifestations of Red Scare hysteria.” Nevertheless, when Leon Keyserling advised Truman, Storrs acknowledges that the couple “took leading roles on behalf of policies that were at the top of conservatives’ most hated list, including price control, high wages, strong protection of union rights, and the European Recovery Plan.” The essence of what they supported were policies that favored “directing more of productivity’s gains to wages rather than profits.”

Later the Keyserlings would dissemble, arguing that they had always been political centrists though they were actually on the left of the Democratic Party. Later they would serve Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society endeavors, and are remembered by many, Storrs writes, “as loyal Johnson Democrats who favored Cold War military spending, backed U.S. policy in Vietnam, and argued that poverty could be eliminated through economic growth rather than redistribution” of wealth.

It is at this point that historian Storrs uncovered the hidden truth about Leon and Mary Keyserling, a truth that undermines her own thesis, and comes as a revelation that many might have missed, if not for the Hawkes review: Both were not only secret Communist sympathizers and members of various Party front groups, but Leon Keyserling actually advocated violent revolution while he was in the New Deal writing reform legislation!