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A question for the millennium
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Dec. 28, 1999 | But a century has resonance for us, spanning the two or three lifetimes that we have touched. For example, I can trace my own grandparents' path back to Moravia and the Ukraine, though I can't go any further back than that. My
grandparents were married just before the turn of the last century, and
their children's lives began with it. Brief as this interval is
in the overall span of time, three generations is probably enough to
understand ourselves as human beings. Looking behind us, this century of ours was mostly a stage for the
destructive dramas of a secular religious faith called "socialism." It
is a faith inspired by the dream of a social redemption realized through
human rather than divine power, through the force of politics and the
state. In its communist form, the efforts of this faith ruined whole
continents and destroyed a world of human lives. Have we learned from
these disasters, or will the passions of this faith follow us into the
century to come? David Horowitz David Horowitz's column appears on the News site every other Monday.
That is my millennium question. For an answer, I turned to the pages of the Nation, an institution of the left that participated in these dramas across the entire century, and whose editorial stances on each defining moment of the communist project have been utterly refuted by historical events. The editors of the Nation supported the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist collectivization, the infamous purge trials and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe and the Maoist tyranny in China, the communist conquest of South Vietnam and Pol Pot's genocidal revolution and, of course, Castro's long-lived dictatorship in Cuba. During the Cold War to contain the expansion of the Soviet empire, the editors of the Nation opposed the Truman Doctrine, the formation of NATO and SEATO, and the efforts of western military and intelligence organizations generally to stem the Soviet tide. Over five decades, the editors of the Nation waged journalistic war against the defenders of freedom in the West, against America's "cold warrior" presidents Truman and Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. At the same time the Nation was the defender of Soviet shills and Soviet spies like Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service and the Rosenbergs. As recently as this month -- the last of the century -- its editor was still defending Alger Hiss. Like the Bourbons of old, the editors of the Nation seem to have learned nothing essential and forgotten nothing as well. During the slow unfolding of the Marxist collapse, the socialist movement they foster as a faith was often fragmented and surreptitious. Now, at this turn of a century, the movement itself is more influential in American political and cultural life than it has been at any time in the American past. Its adherents reach into the White House and the Congress; they are the sitting leadership of the AFL-CIO and of the principal academic, professional, and arts associations, and of many of the most important media institutions as well. In this pre-millennial hour -- December 1999 -- the editors of the Nation chose to run two stories -- an appraisal of the socialist century past and a harbinger of the socialist century to come -- that provide the answer to my question. In the Dec. 13 issue, there is a long review article called "Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge En Noir [The Red in Black]," written by the magazine's longtime "European Editor," Daniel Singer, a godson disciple of the Trotskyist writer Isaac Deutscher, and the magazine's resident expert on the subject of the communist experience. The main focus of Singer's article is "The Black Book of Communism," a French treatise that attempts to sum up the human horror of the project to make a better world. According to the book's authors, during the 20th century between 85 and 100 million human beings were slaughtered in peacetime by Marxists in the effort to realize their impossible dream. As a foreword by Martin Malia reasonably suggests, "Any realistic accounting of communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia." That is the minimal lesson one might expect to learn from the unbroken record of the socialist utopias of the century just past. But it is exactly the lesson the Nation fervently rejects. Writes Singer: "Our aim -- let us not be ashamed to say so -- is to revive the belief in collective action and in the possibility of radical transformation in our lives." He refers to this passion for social redemption as "the Promethean spirit of humankind," a term that reprises the precise language Marx used when he launched his destructive project over 150 years ago. Socialism is dead. Long live socialism.
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