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Betrayed Illusions: The Left and the Jews

by Mojambo ( 57 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Cold War, Communism, History, Judaism, Socialism at August 22nd, 2013 - 11:00 am

The author references the notorious Slansky Trial in Prague of November 1952. There is an excellent film (you can find it here on youtube) which came out in 1970 called “L’Aveu” (The Confession)  which dealt with that purge and it is based on the book by Artur London who was sentenced to life imprisonment (and freed a few years later) after Stalin’s death. The trial was filled with anti-Semitism even though the Jewish defendants had all turned their backs on their Judaism.

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

Almost sixty-one years ago, in November 1952, in Prague, the former secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, a diehard, fanatic Stalinist, Rudolf Slansky, and 13 other prominent communists, mostly Jewish, were sentenced to death for alleged treason and Zionist conspiracy.  At the same time, Stalin’s terminal paranoia led to the execution of the leaders of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, including celebrated Yiddish-language poet Peretz Markish, and the imprisonment of famous physicians accused of trying to poison Soviet leaders. Soviet Bloc media were filled with venomous anti-Semitic harangues. Had Stalin not died in March 1953, the doctors would have been executed, hundreds of thousands arrested, millions forcibly resettled. The likelihood of a gigantic pogrom, a Soviet-style Kristallnacht,  was looming large. The official terms for Jews was “rootless cosmopolitans.” Like in the National Socialist demonology, they were stigmatized as the driving force of the execrated capitalism, carriers of decadent values, agents of treason and dissolution. Even after Stalin’s demise, his successor Nikita Khrushchev continued to encourage anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews as mercenary individuals, speculators and “genetically” un-patriotic.

How was it possible for Bolshevik internationalism to degenerate into vicious anti-Semitism, similar to the worst propaganda excesses of the Black Hundreds in czarist Russia? Where did the promises of Marxist humanism, the dream of proletarian solidarity, irrespective of language and origin, vanish?  […….]

There is a genealogy of this depressing story, a line of ideas that sends us back to the origins of modern socialism and its hostility to money, banks, profit, and capitalism in general. Not only Marxism found its roots in that search for a pure, unpolluted natural community, but also the neo-romantic movements that were to lead to Fascism. A scrupulous and immensely erudite historian of modern political passions, including socialism, Zionism, and their counterparts at the extreme right end of the ideological continuum, Robert Wistrich (who teaches at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem), wrote a real treatise on the enduring anti-Semitic propensities among left-wing revolutionary movements. Published in 2012 by University of Nebraska Press,  ”From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel” is must reading for those who want to understand the apparent paradox of the Left’s espousal of far-right conspiratorial, xenophobic delusions.

He shows how resentful ideas shaped the original socialist vision of Jews as promoters of capitalist instincts and vices. Even before the French Revolution, major Enlightenment figures expressed staunch Judeophobic attitudes. In France, Voltaire lambasted Jews as irretrievably tribalistic, whereas in Germany Hegel’s disciples regarded Judaism as a fundamentally reactionary religion, an obstacle to human emancipation.  [……..]From Fichte to Richard Wagner and to the genocidal prophets Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler, there was a line of morbid fixation on the Jews as a pathogenic factor, comparable to harmful insects whose liquidation could ensure the health of the popular community (Volksgemeinschaft).

One of the most adamant anti-Semites was Bruno Bauer, initially a close friend of Karl Marx, later his philosophical and political enemy. Marx himself maintained an ambivalent, often embarrassed and hostile, attitude to his Jewish origins. As a matter of fact, his early text on “The Jewish Question” portrayed Jews in most unflattering colors, seeing them as the embodiment of everything romantics loved to hate: selfishness, mercantilism, soullessness.  […….] Its ugly anti-Semitic stances notwithstanding, Marx’s early article became a sacred text for left-wingers who tried to address the issue of Jewish emancipation and assimilation. They all borrowed from the founding father the conviction that Jews were the incarnation of capitalist injustice, identified them with soulless plutocracy, and called for an ultimate de-Judaization of society via the ultimate revolutionary apocalypse. For Marx, a classless society meant a society without Jews as Jews. His musings on the Jewish question were philosophically preposterous, morally reprehensible, and sociologically groundless.

The same fixation functioned in non-Marxist leftist circles, from Proudhon to Bakunin and other anarchists. Wistrich explores convincingly the affinities between the far left and the far right in terms of their shared opposition to a perceived Judeo-plutocratic conspiracy. The Nazis would further exacerbate this myth, incorporating it in a broader Weltanschauung that insisted on the need to oppose both Jewish capitalism and Jewish Communism. [……..] By the end of his life, Joseph Stalin was as convinced as Hitler that the house of Rothschild (or Wall Street as its latter day metamorphosis) is behind all world-historical events.

The demonization of the Jew as the symbol of the abhorred bourgeoisie coincided, within the Left, with the efforts by Jewish luminaries and rank-and-file members alike, to deny their roots. Think of such luminaries as Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Yakov Sverdlov, Rosa Luxemburg, Ruth Fischer, and the list is endless. Both “Red Rosa” and Lev Trotsky were born to traditional Jewish families, both did their utmost to overcome that heredity and convert to a supra-national, truly universalistic identity. [……..] After all, Marx and Engels claimed in the “Communist Manifesto” that proletarians do not have a motherland. Why would they, Rosa and Leon, have one? They did not conceal their origin, but saw it as irrelevant for the much larger, more grandiose agenda of their revolutionary dreams. Did they really succeed?

Obviously, Jewish revolutionary internationalism failed. Both German and Russian socialists continued to see Jewish revolutionaries as tolerated individuals, rather than full-fledged members of the national parties. Veteran Social Democrats such as August Bebel and Frantz Mehring saw Rosa as an exalted, almost quixotic figure. In his struggle for Lenin’s mantle, Stalin did not hesitate to resort to anti-Semitic innuendo against his arch-rival Trotsky (whom he dubbed Judas) and other Jewish members of the Bolshevik Old Guard.  Publicly, at least in the 1930s, the vozhd (Leader) condemned anti-Semitism which he defined as a modern version of cannibalism. Privately, he unabashedly indulged in scurrilous anti-Semitic jokes.

The Romanian Stalinist Ana Pauker, the country’s Foreign Minister between 1947 and 1952, was first and foremost a soldier of the global communist movement. She remained loyal to the Bolshevik creed in spite of many terrible experiences, including the execution of her husband in the USSR, during the Great Purge, as a renegade and a spy. Ana Pauker was herself arrested for a few months in early 1953. When she found out that Stalin had died in March, she started to cry.

The rise of Zionism contributed the radicalization of leftist anti-Semitic prejudice. Furthermore, unable to predict the Holocaust (Trotsky was the sole notable exception), the Left remained attached to its outworn dogmas. […….] Instead of the traditional identification with the underdog, the radical Left has decided that Israel represents capitalism at its worst, a new form of colonialism and even racism.

Echoing previous follies, some of those who champion these stances happen to be themselves Jewish. In some respects, it is as if people refuse to learn from history. Perhaps instead of people I should say intellectuals: a species made up of individuals more often than not seduced (and eager to be seduced) by the siren songs of utopianism.

In recent years, leftist biases, stereotypes and delusions regarding Jews, Judaism, and the state of Israel have grown and proliferated. Ironically, most of those who promote and advocate such bigoted, conspiratorial views have no idea that they are merely recycling Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin’s murderous visions of a world without Jews.

Read the rest – Betrayed Illusions: The Left and the Jews

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Cold War, Communism, History, Judaism, Socialism | 57 Comments »

My colleague at CBS was a Communist spy

by Mojambo ( 185 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, Communism, History, Media at May 13th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

Wow, I remember Winston Burdett very well from the late 1960’s and  1970’s. He had such an impressive speaking voice, was soft spoken and came across like a knowledgeable and popular small town college history professor.

hat tip – Powerline

by Paul Miller

LIKE EVERY other American born since 1950, I was raised on some very basic and universally acknowledged notions of our country’s history.

Near the top of the list of things written in stone was that the McCarthy era was a shameful period of paranoid witchhunting and blacklisting based on fabricated or imagined allegations, and that the man it was named for, former Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, was one of our greatest villains — a man who saw communists everywhere he looked, and who publicly vilified hordes of perfectly innocent people and ruined their lives for no other reason than his own personal gratification.

What a surprise, then, to find out that one of the most prominent broadcasters of the McCarthy era, and a man I looked up to 25 years later when he was at the height of his career and I was just a kid hanging around the CBS newsroom, had actually been a spy for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

A real spy for the USSR? Was that even possible?

The newsman’s name was Winston Burdett, and for many years he was a familiar, comforting presence on the radio and on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” reporting from Rome, where he especially gained distinction for his coverage of the Vatican.

To me, as a young assistant editor on the CBS News foreign desk from 1977 to 1981, he was a friendly, but intimidating, voice on the other end of numerous international telephone calls.  [……..]

Burdett was just one of the broadcasting giants who had me in awe. There was Walter Cronkite, of course, whose program I nominally worked for, but who only spoke five or six words to me in the three-and-a-half years I toiled no more than 30 feet from his desk. The other old-timers were friendlier. Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, Dallas Townsend, etc., etc. — these men had actually worked with Edward R. Murrow, for God’s sake.  [……..]

I don’t remember the McCarthy era coming up much, but if it did, it could only have been with scorn. Nobody mentioned that one of the people we put on the air every day had worked, in his youth, to help overthrow the government of the United States in favor of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

It wasn’t that Burdett’s role was a secret. He admitted it — first, in a letter to his bosses at CBS in March 1951, and later to the FBI and in testimony to a congressional committee. But 25 years later, with the McCarthy era neatly put in its “national embarrassment” cubbyhole — an era of hyperventilated accusations, not actual spying — nobody talked about it, and Burdett was allowed to continue his broadcasting career in peace.  […….]

Secrets revealed

The 1990s, however, also happened to be the time when quite a few of the Soviet Union’s secrets started to emerge. The USSR collapsed in 1990, and there was brief access to some of its Stalin-era espionage archives. In 1993, a former KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, was permitted to copy some of those documents, which he turned into a book, “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.”

And in 1995, the United States declassified more than 2,500 cables which had been intercepted in the 1940s and early 1950s between Soviet agents in this country and their handlers in Moscow. Decoding those cables had been called the Venona Project, and several books examined their revelations in detail, including “Venona — Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,” by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

Lo and behold, the secrets that were suddenly spilling out of Moscow and Washington revealed that Joseph McCarthy and his supporters, while they unfairly targeted some people who were innocent, actually grossly underestimated the extent of Soviet espionage in the U.S. government. Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Dexter White, Laughlin Currie and Laurence Duggan were just the most prominent names among hundreds of American citizens who not only gave Moscow the atom bomb, but a very long list of other diplomatic, military and industrial secrets, helping Stalin enslave his own people, send millions to their deaths by violence or starvation, conquer Eastern Europe, start the Korean War, and nearly bring the world to a nuclear Armageddon. And these American traitors did so not because they were paid, but because they believed Soviet communism was a better form of government than American capitalism and democracy, and they wanted it to succeed and spread.

Even during the notorious period from August 1939 to June 1941 — when Stalin had a peace pact with Hitler, helped himself to half of Poland, and made it possible for the Nazis to conquer Europe and launch the Holocaust — the Americans stayed loyal to the communist dictator.

It was in the book by Haynes and Klehr that the name Winston Burdett popped up. The book revealed that in 1937, as a young reporter for a left-wing newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle, Burdett joined the Communist Party of the USA, which was controlled and funded by Moscow, and which was used to attract supporters among the American public, and especially from its universities and labor unions. The CPUSA was also used to recruit spies, and Burdett soon agreed to become one.

According to the declassified Venona documents, he was told by his handlers to volunteer for an assignment for the Brooklyn Eagle to Finland, where he would pretend to be a disinterested journalist, but where he would actually gather intelligence to help the USSR defeat Finland after the Soviets invaded it in November 1939. Later, with World War II raging across the European continent, Burdett also travelled to Romania, Turkey and other front-line countries on behalf of the Soviet government.

[……..]

But Burdett’s past haunted him. In 1951, CBS was under pressure to purge its ranks of known communists, and the network’s owner, Bill Paley, asked every employee to sign a “loyalty oath,” disclosing whether he had ever been a “member of a group which advocated the overthrow of our constitutional form of government, or which has adopted a policy approving of acts of violence to deny other persons their rights under the United States Constitution, or of seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”

‘An idealistic guise’

For most employees, having to answer such a question was a silly annoyance. But Burdett’s answer to the momentous question on the CBS loyalty oath was, “Yes.”

He had joined the communist Party in 1937 when he was 24 years old, he said in an accompanying letter to his CBS bosses, because “to a young person, Communist notions present themselves in an idealistic guise.”

Since then, he said, communism had become “as abhorrent to me as anyone I know,” but that he had only realized after his period of youthful foolishness what the Communist Party was “in fact, all about, and how dishonest it was, both morally and intellectually.”

He apologized for embarrassing CBS, but he also called his story “rather banal,” and said his activities as a communist union activist had been harmless. In fact, he was covering his tracks: Only later did he admit to the FBI and to a Congressional committee that he had been much more than a simple member of the Communist Party; he had been a hostile spy in the middle of a war.

In his 1955 congressional testimony, Burdett made a full confession and identified numerous other members of the Communist Party of the USA in the 1930s, including some in prominent positions in the media, academia and politics. Because he “came clean,” CBS decided not to fire him, and it may have been the furor over naming names that led to his exile to the Rome bureau for the rest of his career.  […….]

As the decades passed, what had been a notorious story in the 1950s was forgotten. On a recent trip to New York, I asked several of my CBS colleagues in the 1970s who also knew Burdett whether they’d ever heard anything about his espionage career.

They all said, “No.”

[…….]

Read the rest –  When you find out your colleague was a Communist spy

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Posted in Cold War, Communism, History, Media | 185 Comments »

Vienna, Austria 1913

by Mojambo ( 195 Comments › )
Filed under History at April 24th, 2013 - 12:00 pm

Vienna 100 years ago on the eve of the outbreak of The Great War. Vienna’s cafe society, cosmopolitan atmosphere and intellectual life was attractive to an eclectic bunch of people (and some of the greatest future tyrants ever to be seen).

by Andy Walker

In January 1913, a man whose passport bore the name Stavros Papadopoulos disembarked from the Krakow train at Vienna’s North Terminal station.

Of dark complexion, he sported a large peasant’s moustache and carried a very basic wooden suitcase.

“I was sitting at the table,” wrote the man he had come to meet, years later, “when the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered.

[……]

The writer of these lines was a dissident Russian intellectual, the editor of a radical newspaper called Pravda (Truth). His name was Leon Trotsky.

The man he described was not, in fact, Papadopoulos.

He had been born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was known to his friends as Koba and is now remembered as Joseph Stalin.

Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century.

It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established.

The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practised on the city’s Berggasse.

The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia’s leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times.

Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler.

In his majestic evocation of the city at the time, Thunder at Twilight, Frederic Morton imagines Hitler haranguing his fellow lodgers “on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons”.

“His forelock would toss, his [paint]-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, [and] stalk off to his cubicle.”

Presiding over all, in the city’s rambling Hofburg Palace was the aged Emperor Franz Joseph, who had reigned since the great year of revolutions, 1848.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his designated successor, resided at the nearby Belvedere Palace, eagerly awaiting the throne. His assassination the following year would spark World War I.

[…….]

“While not exactly a melting pot, Vienna was its own kind of cultural soup, attracting the ambitious from across the empire,” says Dardis McNamee, editor-in-chief of the Vienna Review, Austria’s only English-language monthly, who has lived in the city for 17 years.

“Less than half of the city’s two million residents were native born and about a quarter came from Bohemia (now the western Czech Republic) and Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), so that Czech was spoken alongside German in many settings.”

The empire’s subjects spoke a dozen languages, she explains.

“Officers in the Austro-Hungarian Army had to be able to give commands in 11 languages besides German, each of which had an official translation of the National Hymn.”

And this unique melange created its own cultural phenomenon, the Viennese coffee-house. Legend has its genesis in sacks of coffee left by the Ottoman army following the failed Turkish siege of 1683.

“Cafe culture and the notion of debate and discussion in cafes is very much part of Viennese life now and was then,” explains Charles Emmerson, author of 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War and a senior research fellow at the foreign policy think-tank Chatham House.

“The Viennese intellectual community was actually quite small and everyone knew each other and… that provided for exchanges across cultural frontiers.”

[……..]

“You didn’t have a tremendously powerful central state. It was perhaps a little bit sloppy. If you wanted to find a place to hide out in Europe where you could meet lots of other interesting people then Vienna would be a good place to do it.”

Freud’s favourite haunt, the Cafe Landtmann, still stands on the Ring, the renowned boulevard which surrounds the city’s historic Innere Stadt.

Trotsky and Hitler frequented Cafe Central, just a few minutes’ stroll away, where cakes, newspapers, chess and, above all, talk, were the patrons’ passions.

“Part of what made the cafes so important was that ‘everyone’ went,” says MacNamee. “So there was a cross-fertilisation across disciplines and interests, in fact boundaries that later became so rigid in western thought were very fluid.”

Beyond that, she adds, “was the surge of energy from the Jewish intelligentsia, and new industrialist class, made possible following their being granted full citizenship rights by Franz Joseph in 1867, and full access to schools and universities.”

[…….]

Alma Mahler, whose composer husband had died in 1911, was also a composer and became the muse and lover of the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Walter Gropius.

Though the city was, and remains, synonymous with music, lavish balls and the waltz, its dark side was especially bleak. Vast numbers of its citizens lived in slums and 1913 saw nearly 1,500 Viennese take their own lives.

No-one knows if Hitler bumped into Trotsky, or Tito met Stalin. But works like Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mr Hitler – a 2007 radio play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran – are lively imaginings of such encounters.

The conflagration which erupted the following year destroyed much of Vienna’s intellectual life.

The empire imploded in 1918, while propelling Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Tito into careers that would mark world history forever.

Read the rest – 1913: When Hitler,  Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place

 

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Posted in History | 195 Comments »

Russia marks 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death

by Mojambo ( 4 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, Communism, Headlines, History, Russia, World War II at March 5th, 2013 - 9:21 pm

Today another Stalinist died – Hugo Chavez

MOSCOW (AP) — Russians are marking the 60th anniversary of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with devotees laying flowers at his tomb in Moscow while critics blame the former Soviet leader for millions of deaths in purges and prison camps.

Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Communists credit him with leading the country to victory in World War II while others condemn the brutal purges that killed millions.

Liberal Moskovskie Novosti’s Tuesday cover featured “Stalin. Farewell” with the dictator’s face scribbled over with childish graffiti. Staunch Communist daily Sovetskaya Rossiya ran a cover story on Stalin headlined “His time will come.”

An opinion survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment has revealed Stalin has remained widely admired in Russia and other ex-Soviet nations despite his repressions.

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Posted in Cold War, Communism, Headlines, History, Russia, World War II | 4 Comments »

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