This was the ends-justifies-the-means philosophy of the Washington Post's star "investigative" reporter.
The Totalitarians Within | FrontPage Magazine
by Bruce Bawer On August 9, 2012
David Horowitz’s 1989 essay “Carl Bernstein’s Communist Problem & Mine,” which was reprinted at Front Page recently, not only makes points about the true nature of the Communist faith that are vital to remember. The essay also, by extension, underscores important truths about the nature of all totalitarian faiths – including Islam.
In the essay, Horowitz wrote about his upbringing in “a colony of Jewish Communists” in an otherwise ordinary Queens neighborhood. These Communists, he explained, “lived two lives.” They postured as law-abiding middle-class liberals, but were really secret agents taking orders from Moscow. What brought meaning to their lives was the hope and belief that someday they would be called upon by the Party to “go underground” and “take the lead in the revolutionary struggle” to overthrow American democracy.
Horowitz knows about this colony because he grew up in it. But you could’ve lived amidst these families for decades and not known. You could’ve thought of them as your best friends.
For a decade or so after World War II, there was a general awareness that some Americans did indeed have covert totalitarian loyalties. To most Americans, such a thing did not then seem inconceivable. The war was fresh in their memories. GIs had fought millions of people who were true believers in totalitarian ideology. Most Americans had no illusions about what Stalin and his followers stood for. The media weren’t hesitant to use phrases like “Free World” and “Iron Curtain.” If anyone did doubt the existence of Communist networks in the U.S., the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee provided proof.
HUAC had its critics, of course. One of them was Arthur Miller, whose 1952 play The Crucible introduced the idea that the HUAC hearings were a “witch hunt,” rooted in irrational hysteria, of the sort that had taken place in colonial Salem. Miller’s play would become a staple of high-school curricula – and the premise that postwar concern about American Communism had, at root, been irrational and hysterical, would become the received wisdom of post-Sixties America. Even after it became established that Miller himself, at the very least, had strong Communist ties and sympathies, the post-Sixties cultural elite held him up, perversely, as a champion of liberal values.
When it came to American Communists, the Sixties revolution turned everything upside down.
-go to link-
No comments:
Post a Comment