5-17-05, 13:32pm
Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished philosopher, has recently written a serious book with an unserious title, “On Bullshit.” In it, Frankfurt states “It is this lack of connection with a concern for truth---this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.” Frankfurt sees “bullshit” as not necessarily lies, but a kind of advertising among people, where the statements about the product being sold may be true or false, but that does not matter to the advertisers. All that really matters is getting over, selling the image, manipulating the consumer. Karl Marx might add if he were still with us that this is the commodification of everything, including human interactions.
In the same New York Times in which I read the good news that Frankfurt’s book had climbed to number six on the best seller list, Roger Cohen published a wonderful example of the “bullshit” that mass media inundates us with. The title, “1945’s Legacy: A Terror Defeated: Another Arrives.” The terror of the Red Army liberating the concentration camps? The “terror” of the social revolution that local Communists back up by the Red Army of the Soviet Union instituted throughout Soviet liberated territories. There was terror all right—revolutions are very bloody things and those connected to a world war, the aftermath of the race war that the Nazis fought against the Soviets and something akin to it that the Japanese fought against the Chinese was especially bloody. But Cohen, who I imagine knows about the millions of Soviet war prisoners who were murdered,(he has recently written a book about a small group of U.S. POWs) the various East European fascist allies and collaborators in the mass killing, doesn’t care. The Nazis defeat and the Soviet’s victory are a matter of words, the first having no connection with the second.
Cohen cares about “bullshit” phrases like “the manipulation of memory and truth created a web of obfuscation from Santiago to Stalingrad.” Why not from Bayreuth to Brooklyn?
What is he talking about—absolutely nothing? Is he saying that the Communists and Socialists of Allende’s Chile (Santiago) are “morally” the same or worse than poor general Pinochet, the “authoritarian” leader whom the Nixon and subsequent administrations. supported against Allende.
In the 1930s apologists for fascism used the “totalitarian” theory to argue that “fascism” was a softer, warmer, fuzzier form of “totalitarianism” than “communism” and should be accepted as a defense against Communism, a lesser of two evils. The Nazis themselves found this interpretation useful as they formed the Anti-Comintern Pact to thwart anti-fascists attempts to build United Fronts against them. They also spread through their propaganda machine accounts of the great purges in the Soviet Union (which did occur and were great horrors) to defeat campaigns to build anti-fascist collective security between the non fascist capitalist states and the Soviet Union.
After the war, the same ideologues who didn’t want to fight Hitler when he was alive and kicking found it useful to proclaim him the “mirror image” of Joseph Stalin and called with a straight face for an all out war against the two “totalitarian” evils, fascism and communism. Fascism, which had been just been defeated primarily by the U.S.S.R. and insurgent left forces and Communism, which had the support not of elites and ruling groups but of oppressed masses throughout the world, wasn’t exactly a vital force anymore.
Somehow, the creation of NATO, the suppression of the Greek insurgency, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the support for dictatorships of the right everywhere, didn’t have much to do with fighting “totalitarian” fascism, although they provided many jobs for “former” fascists throughout the world, now “born again” as anti-Communist freedom fighters in the war against “totalitarian communism.”
In the 1980s, Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, borrowed from the ideas of fascist apologists of the 1930s to contend that rightwing dictatorships like those in Argentina and El Salvador were “authoritarian” states that deserved support when they were fighting “totalitarian” movements like the FLMN or socialist governments like Cuba. As you can see, Cohen really has a great deal of “bullshit” to choose from and build on, including some fairly sophisticated theory from Hannah Arendt, which I would disagree with but not call “bullshit,” but he simply throws things together.
To get back to Cohen’s one liner, “from Santiago to Stalingrad,” one might ask does he mean that the battle of Stalingrad is only a phrase to turn, not the name of the decisive battle of WWII. Cohen, perhaps because he needs filler, quotes the Russian defense minister making the point that had not the Soviets “broke the back of fascism, “you would not be living today.” Fair question, he replies (as someone of Jewish-American background I consider it a very fair question) but he then ignores the statement completely. Remember his bullshit title, one “terror” merely replaced another, like one formula TV show follows another. A world war was not won by the anti-fascist Allies against the fascist Axis.
When Putin, who put in good words for Bush in the last presidential election and is no friend of any left, mentions the collaboration of those in the Baltic states with the Nazis during the war, which also is very true, Cohen replies glibly(Professor Frankfurt mentioned in his book that the media promotes glibness as an end in itself) “ beyond this historical poker---I’ll see your ‘terror and I’ll raise you a ‘collaboration’ lies the fact that lies the fact that years of debate have not resolved how the terrible twins of the 20th century should be viewed on a scale of evil.” This is really about the words-- historical poker, terrible twins, evil, and the emotions they evoke.
If I were writing a fully serious response to this “bullshit” I would say that the Communist movement was a product of the enlightenment, one of the great movements of hope in the spectrum (if I were phrase mongering I might say political rainbow) that produced utilitarianism, humanism, what I would call social liberalism, non Marxist socialism, and Marxist-Leninist socialism. Communists were internationalists, anti-militarists, anti-racists, anti-elitists, and fascists were extreme versions of all of those things.
Communists made a social revolution and made societies like Russia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, qualitatively better than they were before, including in important socio-economic ways the East European countries whose contemporary nationalist movements Cohen salutes. Fascists provided protection for the existing ruling classes and built war machines to conquer and loot other peoples. Communists did use state terror, as did the British and French and other procedural liberals who in the 19th century fought Opium wars in China, suppressed national uprisings in India, invaded and subjugated Africa and produced a sort of death on the installment plan for hundreds of millions of people in the name of civilization, progress and free trade, the building a capitalist world market. Very few historians who admit most of that today will repudiate the capitalist economic foundation behind it all, even if they have in recent decades repudiated colonial imperialism. In Fascism, the terror was to a great extent the end in itself, the organization of Europe and the world on the basis of a hierarchy of “racial states,” the decimation and/or extermination of whole peoples viewed as “useless eaters” the way the ancient Romans razed Carthage, slaughtered its inhabitants, and sold the survivors into slavery.
The fascists could no more bring positive social change to places like occupied France and Greece, not to mention Poland, whose population they decimated, than Bush can bring a higher level of social equality and prosperity to the masses of Iraqi people. What the fascists could do was to cut in their minor allies, Hungarian, Rumanian, Ustasha Croatian fascists on some of the spoils from their conquests, use these nationalist rightist movements as low level henchman, helpers in genocide, and cannon fodder for the war.
But Cohen is on a “bullshit roll,” smearing capitalist conventional wisdoms around for the hell of it. Communism doesn’t get the negative reputation it deserves, Cohen contends, because it was popular with “intellectuals.” This is a line that rightists first threw around in the 1890s at the defenders of Alfred Dreyfus, the effeminate “intellectuals” of the left as against the “red-blooded” anti-Semites of the right. Joseph Goebbels, that pre-eminent “Bullshiter” of the 20th century picked it up the idea of “Cultural Bolshevism” and “Jewish intellectualism. Today it is an old staple of rightwing propaganda, recycled today by Lynn Cheney et al., who have at this point dropped the Jewish and mixed the Bolshevik with liberal, relativist and sometimes secular, in attacks on “radical university” professors corrupting the minds and morals of good American students, keeping them away from fraternities and ROTC as a way station before they become cogs in the corporate machine.
For Cohen, though, the body count continues as an indictment of Communism’s ultimate evil. “Communism” Cohen contends murdered 80 million. The most obscene expression of this concerns Vietnam, where the U.S. war killed an estimated three million Indo-Chinese. In the Vietnam War, the “body counts” were used as evidence that the U.S. and the South Vietnamese were winning the war, a fact that Cohen probably forgot and would care about if he remembered since it can’t be made to fit into twin evils between Santiago and Stalingrad.
I guess I could meet “bullshit” with “bullshit” by counting up the tens of millions who perished in China because of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion they helped to bring about, millions of Congolese that perished, and proclaim the capitalism that we today call “globalization” as the winner in the World Series of death and destruction, but that, while much more supportable factually than Cohen‘s contentions, would also be “bullshit” The Nazis had their “Nuremberg,” Cohen concludes(actually a great many of the lesser lights and some like Klaus Barbie not so small, got to work in the cold war against the Communists and socialists whom they had been trained to search and destroy) but Communists were never properly punished.
Only one “Communist” Pol Pot, has faced justice. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge were as much Marxist-Leninists as George Bush is a pacifist. Pol Pot came to power as a result of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of making Cambodia a war zone and bombing range in the Vietnam War. Pol Pot was driven from power by the Vietnamese and continued to be supported for years directly by U.S. imperialism to harass the Vietnamese and their attempt to help to reconstruct a devastated Cambodia.
All of that is true and Cohen probably knows it but he doesn’t care. Why should he? He’s filled the space. He’s put words together in an ornamental way to go with the Bush “freedom flow.” He said less than nothing in a glib way. And if he read this article, he would probably call me a Communist, which is of course true, but which he would consider a put down to what I have written. That of course would be, with apologies to Professor Frankfurt, the “ultimate bullshit” which has deformed American politics since the beginnings of the cold war.
--Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
