Ron Capshaw is a Senior Contributor to The Liberty Conservative from Midlothian, Va. His work has appeared in National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the American Spectator.
George Orwell once wrote that “The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onward is that they have wanted to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian.” Such a sin is occurring today regarding the activities of a group claiming that the “fascist” takeover of the American government in the guise of Donald Trump justifies violent reprisals.
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In 1996, it was revealed that George Orwell gave a list he compiled of suspected Communists to a representative of MI-5. Since then, Orwell has been decried as a snitch and McCarthyite by the Left. This name-calling if nothing else, does open a fruitful historical inquiry about Orwell and the Cold War–namely, was George Orwell
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Already jittery from nuclear drills and the threat of “reds under the bed,” America in 1957 could still find solace in the comforting illusion that the Soviets, while dangerous, were hopelessly backward. “If the Russians built a dam,” an Army officer stationed in Berlin was quoted as saying, “the water would flow backwards.” True, the
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By 1948, H.L. Mencken was sixty-eight years old and had covered twelve presidential elections. The commonly accepted view of him was that his glory days as an attack dog on the cant that politicians spewed out were over. From being the most read newspaperman of his day, the 1920s, he was, by the 1930s, largely
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Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell were clearly polar opposites. Hemingway had much more plush circumstances owing to a rich wife; Orwell by turns was subsisting with his wife on an almost all-potato diet. But ideologically Hemingway claimed Orwell on the basis of the latter’s attack on Stalinist duplicity in Spain. But the history of both
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Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in many ways the epitome of liberal anticommunism, or as he liked to call it, “the Vital Center,” always greeted attacks by both the Right and the Left as proof he was correct. The same satisfaction could have been granted to Budd Schulberg, novelist, Academy-Award winning screenwriter, and for a time,
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To anti-communists, he was the leader and epitome of the well-fed Hollywood communists. Among his comrades behind closed doors, he was regarded as a “sectarian son of a bitch,” who was, outside of Stalin, the cause of defections. For the California Democratic Party during World War II, and much to their later embarrassment, he was
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One hundred years ago, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and with it came the delusions of three decades’ worth of intellectuals and sentiments that still exist today. The stature of those who defended the accompanying Soviet internal policies that led to the deaths of 20 million–far more than Hitler’s actions–was and is astounding. America’s premier journalist
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During the height of the violent protests by the anti-war movement in the late 60s, a cartoon circulated that reflected the shock parents experienced at their long-haired, profanity-spewing communist-flag waving children. In an attempt to soothe said parents the cartoon had one wife telling her husband, “Don’t worry about it, honey. Why, even Max Eastman
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When mentioned by female journalists today, Martha Gellhorn is cited as a pioneer by breaking the bounds of females reporting in combat conditions. But Gellhorn is also a pioneer in another area; that of the mainstream media. As with today’s leftist-dominated news media, Gellhorn threw objectivity to the wind (although, to her credit, she was
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In his lifetime, journalist Dwight MacDonald was regarded by his fellow New York intellectual crowd as an ambulance-chasing ideologue. From Macy’s employee to Trotskyite to liberal anti-communist to anarchist to born-again New Leftist, MacDonald gave the appearance of being intellectually promiscuous. The reality, though, is that MacDonald was the best kind of journalist: intellectually rigorous,
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In 1947, actor Humphrey Bogart, who had just signed with Warner Brothers the most lucrative contract in the history of motion pictures, awoke to see his picture on the front page of the Daily Worker praising him as a fighter for the Communist Party. An FDR liberal, Bogart had as little sympathy for communism, he
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Depending who wants to claim as one of their own, literary critic Lionel Trilling has been called a conservative, a neoconservative (a direction we are assured by neocons of where he was headed before his death in 1975), and a liberal anti-communist. One thing missed in this game of ideological scrabble is how much of
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When African-American writer and communist Richard Wright was physically expelled by his comrades during a May Day parade in 1937, he concluded that he “would always be for them, but they would not be for him.” He quietly left the Party but would not go public with his departure until 1944. What earned Wright the
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Because of his role in outing Soviet spy Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers’ other career, not that of paid witness he would become, has been overshadowed. For Chambers was a journalist par excellence. He had the distinction of having written for the New Masses, Time, and National Review. At the time of his testimony, he was
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Joan Mellen is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University, who has produced very little having to do with literature. Instead, she has focused her energies on exposing CIA criminality, specifically regarding the John F. Kennedy Assassination. As evidenced in three books — A Farewell To Justice: Jim Garrison; Our Man in
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Whenever a black conservative speaks out or even exists, white “progressive” America kicks in with charges that, if made by the Right, would be branded racist. Hence, conservatives like actress Stacy Dash are accused by the Left of having a “plantation” mentality motivated by a desire to be accepted by white America, or that they have
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During the Republican presidential primary in 2012, Saturday Night Live, in their parody of the debate, had a questioner ask the actor playing candidate Ron Paul as to whether he would rescue puppies from a burning building; to whit, he replied, “No. It’s none of my business.” Jokes, as Groucho Marx tells us, are opinions
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One hundred years ago, Bolshevik leader V.I Lenin and his small party hijacked the much larger anti-war and anti-Czar movements, which stormed the Winter Palace with him, taking control of the government, and then instituting a 73-year communist rule that claimed higher body counts than even Adolf Hitler. This, in turn, ushered in an admiration
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An image of the Right peddled by liberals–gaining even more traction in the age of Trump–is that conservatives never entertain second thoughts about their positions (“sticking to one’s guns” is some conservative’s riposte to this image); never adjust, and are locked into fixed positions. By turns, liberals congratulate themselves on entertaining the idea that they
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Because novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy was “a premature anti-Stalinist,” when the intellectual fashion in the 1930s was pro-Stalinist, one could assume from that moment on she saw through the various forms of communism. But this is not the case. In the early 1930s, McCarthy was a fellow-traveler of American communists, but this was
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In the 1950s, with China falling to the Communists, the Soviets acquiring an atomic bomb, and New Dealers like Alger Hiss being outed as Soviet spies, a popular refrain on the Right and even among some Democrats was that these events occurred because FDR was soft on communism. To combat this perception, FDR spear-carrier and
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Literary critics when dealing with the thorny issue of Ernest Hemingway’s politics have focused on a statement he made during the Spanish Civil War—a war that pitted, on one side, the Loyalists, backed by the Soviet Union, and a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco, and backed by Adolf Hitler. A Loyalist supporter whose
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When exposed Soviet Spy Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury 96 years ago this month, the far Left, personified by the American Communist Party, denounced the verdict and championed Hiss as merely an innocent New Dealer framed by fascists. Fifties’ era liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a fervent defender of the New Deal, and one
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When the Leonardo Di Carpio-powered The Great Gatsby came out in 2013, reviewers treated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel with appropriate respect, but, like those before them, had also designated it the only reason he stands with Hemingway as a major novelist. The familiar story of Fitzgerald never being able to do a repeat performance because
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In Cuba, where the main mode of transportation for officers is the bicycle, and the only flourishing trade is prostitution, one monument defies the crumbling setting. Even though the late Fidel Castro admitted that socialism had not worked in Cuba, one maxim remains as evidenced by the message on the monument: “For Peace Bread And
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George Orwell once famously said that some ideas are so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them. This was never truer than with Edmund Wilson, America’s premier man of letters in the 20th Century and 120 years old this year. As a literary critic, Wilson was solidly empirical, examining an author through their biography,
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When in 1940, the House Committee on Un-American Activities came to Hollywood to investigate suspected industry communists, they overshot their mark by including actor Melvyn Douglas. Douglas was hardly a communist; indeed, he had been battling the influence of Party members in liberal and anti-fascist groups for well over a decade. Because he became president,
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During the blacklist period, anti-anti-communists cast doubt on the sincerity of red-hunters, arguing that anti-communism was just a means for them to get publicity and money. They even peddled the legend that once Senator Joseph McCarthy was no longer a force to be reckoned after the Senate stripped him of his powers in 1954, he
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When then-President John F. Kennedy called for a “flexible response” regarding policy toward the Soviet Union, he was reacting to the policies of the Eisenhower years. Historians have labeled the latter administration’s strategy as “massive retaliation,” which meant that the United States was prepared to empty the silos at communist aggression. Sixty-three years ago this
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Eleanor Roosevelt called her “neurotic.” Then-President Harry Truman dismissed her testimony as a “red herring.” Anticommunist newspapers, who found her credible, glamorized her as “a shapely blonde.” The former First Lady was closer to the mark about the mental instability of former-spy-turned-government-witness Elizabeth Bentley but wrong on her credibility; Roosevelt regarded Bentley’s accusations that several
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Already some in the Republican Party have backtracked from de-funding Obamacare to attempting to delay repealing the individual mandate. Sen. Bob Corker last night issued an amendment to bump the timeline for repeal. Sen. Lamar Alexander has urged a gradualist form of repeal. Others, however, Ted Cruz, Eric Cantor, and Rand Paul, and most importantly,
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As a rule, science fiction is rarely written by conservatives. From Harlan Ellison to Margaret Atwood, the genre is dominated by liberals. It is easy to see why this is so. Discouraged by the present, they cope by pining for a leftist Utopia of their own big-government design. The exception, of course, was George Orwell,
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An oft-repeated phrase by liberal anticommunists about Joseph McCarthy, that he may as well have been a KGB agent for all the damage he did to the anticommunist cause, inspired Richard Condon to write his Cold War masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate, a tale of a Soviet sleeper agent directing her brainless headline-grabbing senator husband to
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Early on in her work, Karen Paget notes that many on the sixties’ far left misunderstood liberal anticommunism, and hence lumped it in with the Right. Although she does make distinctions between both varieties of anti-communism, she succumbs to sixties’ era views of the CIA as fascist. She treats her portrayal of the CIA penetration
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In his last great battle in a lifetime of dust-ups, the late Christopher Hitchens, in the aftermath of Sept. 11th, coined the term “Islamofascists” to describe and denounce the Muslim world. Linking it to 20th-century fascist movements, Hitchens elaborated: “The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult
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Waving lists is as old as the Republic. But when Senator Joseph McCarthy waved his, 66 years ago, it became much more than the usual political gesture. By waving a list he asserted showing 205 communists currently harbored by the Secretary of State, he worsened an already panicky situation, giving the angry public ready-made answers
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With the death of Lillian Hellman in 1984, biographers freed from her threatens of lawsuits and blocked access to primary sources, were finally able to mount a considerable archaeological effort regarding Dashiell Hammett. As a result, they have been able to track down his letters, his screen treatments, and the unpublished stories he wrote or
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“I am willing to stand or fall on this one.” So said Senator Joseph McCarthy, 50 years ago, who was already embattled two months into his investigations, which began in February of 1950 when he waved a list numbering–depending on who you wish to believe, McCarthy or his foes–205 or 57 Communists currently employed in
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Late President Richard Nixon would call it “gutsy.” Others called it “sisso,” the Finnish word for chutzpah. No matter how it was expressed, they were right about historian Allen Weinstein and his groundbreaking book on the Alger Hiss case published 35 years ago. Today the consensus among scholars is that Hiss was, as two juries
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Historian Eugene Genovese has been categorized by pundits as following the familiar trajectory of ex-Stalinists who, having repudiated past allegiance, lurch violently to the Right. Pundits point to his speeches at the Conservative Political Action Committee, and his 1994 confessional, explaining how he and his generation defended Stalin’s murderous policies as evidence of the movement’s
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In 1984, a nearly broken Winston Smith told his inner-party torturer O’Brien that despite the government’s control over the truth, it would somehow prevail. This was never more true than in the case of Jan Masaryk, who died on January 2nd, 67 years ago. Stroll down in Czechoslovakia today and there is a statue proclaiming
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Cold War scholar Kai Bird once stated that the ultimate sin of McCarthyism was that it did not take into account context. By this he meant that Joe McCarthy was ignoring the defensible, if wrong-headed reasons people became communists in the Great Depression. After all, capitalism seemed to be failing, the Russian 5 year plan
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Before his death, Christopher Hitchens recoiled from claims by both conservatives and his former comrades on the Left that he had moved rightward because of his support for The War On Terror. Hitchens countered that he still found the Vietcong “heroic,” still found Che Guevera an admirable figure, and still described himself as “a Marxist:
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Members of the Algonquin Round Table considered themselves the most sophisticated thinkers in twenties’ America. Wised up by the tragedy of World War I, in which many members served, they were adepts of mindless leader-worship and self-importance. But by the 1930s several of them succumbed to both idolatry, albeit secular, taking themselves very seriously by
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John Patrick Diggins, a man I consider a mentor, once told me of an encounter he had with liberal journalist Murray Kempton in the 1970s. Kempton knew of Diggins’ work on communists-turned-conservatives. “I see you like to write about people who change their mind,” he said, following up with: “I like to write about people
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Upon its release in 1974, Chinatown was billed as “neo-noir.” No one in Paramount publicity bothered to define this term, but the implications are that, in light of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, it was a more wised-up version of the genre that begat The Big Sleep and Maltese Falcon. This was totally unnecessary, even
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Of all the literary critics, Leslie Fiedler might be the one with the most labels attached to him. He has been portrayed as a post-modernist (on the strength of him being the first to utter the word); as a Queer Theorists–his 1948 breakthrough essay–“Come Back To The Raft A’gin Huck Honey”–argued that the relationship between
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Every March, celebrators of Women’s History Month trot out all the usual names to be praised for their iconoclasm: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinham, Hillary Clinton. But forgotten in this old medley is one who was every bit as feminist. Consider the career of the never-celebrated Susan La Follette. She had the same
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In his excellent book on the 1964 Presidential campaign, Rick Perlstein located what we today call social conservatism with candidate Barry Goldwater. Bemoaning the “slipping away” of “traditional values of individual responsibility,” and the rising “moral decay,” Goldwater, at first glance, would seem to have supported the Defense of Marriage Act were he alive today.
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