Child’s play

The New Neo Posted on by

Just a short while after the Afghan war ended, the articles began. They screamed “The Taliban are back;” “The Taliban are taking over;” The Taliban are currently in control of most of the country,” (or they soon will be).

So, what’s the truth? Are the Taliban like the phoenix, rising renewed in vigor from the ashes of their own seeming destruction? Or are the Taliban like the dying snake sinking its fangs into its enemies during its own death throes, as in Austin Bay’s metaphor about the Iraqi “insurgency”?

This recent article about the Taliban is a good indication that they are suffering from the sort of desperation that indicates the latter rather than the former:

Fierce fighting in recent months has devastated the ranks of the Taliban, prompting the rebels to recruit children and force some families to provide a son to fight with them, a US commander said yesterday.

The fighting has fractured the Taliban’s command structure, preventing the militants from regrouping, even though there has been an upsurge in violence, Major General Jason Kamiya, the US military operational commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview.

Despite the setback — more than 500 rebels have been killed since March — the militants are likely to step up attacks in the run-up to the Sept. 18 legislative elections, he said. ”The Taliban and Al Qaeda feel that this is their final chance to impede Afghanistan’s progress to . . . becoming a nation,” Kamiya said. ”They will challenge us all the way through Sept. 18.”

He said the rebels were desperately trying to recruit fighters to replace those killed recently, and have forced families in some areas ”to give up one son to fight.”

”They have been hit so hard, they now have to recruit more fighters. They are recruiting younger and younger fighters: 14, 15, and 16 years old,” Kamiya said. ”The enemy is having a hard time keeping its recruit rates up.”

The fact that the source of the article is the AP makes the information therein even more impressive, since the AP has hardly been known for being overly optimistic about either the Afghan or the Iraqi wars. If the AP is reporting this much, my guess is that the actual situation for the Taliban might even be worse than indicated.

Traditionally, the use of younger and younger soldiers is a sign of desperation in a military movement, the end of the road. This website of WWII Nazi posters features the following recruiting poster from a time very late in the war when the Germans were using boys hardly removed from adolescence:


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Sad, and strange.

This post began with an article about the Taliban. But, as often happens, my research on one topic led to some unexpected findings on a related, but broader subject. It turns out that, far from being exceptional, the pernicious practice of using child soldiers appears to be increasing, not just in Afghanistan but in many third world countries, especially in Africa.

I have only scratched the surface of these websites, so I can’t vouch for their content, but take a look at this one, for example. And even though I have had some disagreements with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch lately, this work reminds me of the reasons I originally joined Amnesty many long years ago (see also this, and this).

There used to be a lower limit to the age of soldiers. Strength was required–originally for hand-to-hand fighting, and later for carrying and operating the heavy weapons. The balooning use of child soldiers lately has been made possible in part because of advancements in armaments, making weapons easier to operate and carry (one example of the law of unexpected consequences, I suppose). There is also evidence that their youth makes them more likely, not less, to commit atrocities. Chilling, and sobering.

Today and tomorrow

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I’m home. I’m thankful to have had an uneventful return trip. But today has been a very hectic and busy day getting myself reorganized–or rather, that is, beginning to get myself reorganized. So, no time for blogging today, although I plan to post tomorrow.

By the way, on the plane back to Logan they showed the movie “Fever Pitch,” supposedly a light and entertaining comedy about a rabid Red Sox fan. Being a fan myself–although I plan to take the next few decades off, now that they’ve finally won the Series–I thought I’d like it. Unfortunately, though, it was lame, unconvincing, and pretty unfunny (unless they cut all the good parts to give it that G rating). Ah, well.

Publicists for terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

Austin Bay has written an article that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. It covers a great deal of territory quickly and concisely, which is what Bay himself did on his recent whirlwind visit to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The article contains some evidence that Iraqization is starting to be effective, which ultimately will be the key to success in Iraq and a smaller American presence there. Bay doesn’t wonder whether the American military can do the job in Iraq, he wonders whether US public opinion and support can be sustained long enough to let them do it. It’s an excellent question, and Bay rightly notes the enormous role the press has to play in stirring up doubts.

Bay likens the Islamofascist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere to a snake which, when attacked, uses its waning strength to strike a blow by sinking its fangs into its killer. The trouble is that many in this country don’t recognize that this particular snake is slowly dying, because its biting and thrashing look so scary at the moment. He adds:

An alarming number of [those in the US] these days betray impatience with our progress in the war on terror. It leaves you wondering if anyone in Washington–at least anyone in the Baby Boomer political class–knows what it takes to win a long, tedious, unavoidable war.

Previous generations did indeed seem to have more grit in that respect. But in this they were helped by journalists who considered it their duty to shape news in order to encourage morale on the home front, not discourage it. And these journalists, and the public, were also helped by politicians with a gift for stirring rhetoric, such as Churchill and Roosevelt. When Churchill spoke of blood, toil, tears, and sweat, the British people were willing to give those things, in part because of him.

Like it or not, we now live in an age that tends to look down with irony, cynicism, and disdain on whatever military-boosting press and politically stirring rhetoric we might be offered. And I clearly recall that in the post-9/11 weeks and months, George Bush attempted to warn us all that the war against terrorism (his euphemism for the war on Islamofascism) would be a very long and hard one, perhaps at times seeming interminable. But for whatever reason–his lack of sonorous and elegant delivery among them–many do seem to have forgotten his words and their obvious truth.

The press is proud of its post-Vietnam tendency to differentiate itself from the government and the military’s aims, and to be a sort of gadfly to them both. But, agree or disagree with the domino theory, Vietnam presented no clear and present danger to our country within our own boundaries. Now we do face such danger, although the press seems reluctant to adjust to this crucial difference.

In recent years it seems that the press has replaced its old pre-Vietnam role as willing and cooperative mouthpiece of its own government and military and instead has become the unwitting mouthpiece of the terrorists–those who would destroy that government. It’s not that the press praises the terrorists, of course; it’s simply that the work of the press has the effect of increasing public weariness and fear, which are among the terrorists’ goals. Every attack is trumpeted to the skies because it’s big news, but this means that the press is now in the business of publishing what amounts to terrorist press releases. As Bay writes:

Winning the global war against Islamicist terror ultimately means curbing the terrorists’ strategic combat power, and that means ending the media magnification of their bombs.

How to end this “media magnification?” Easier said than done; we have a free press, and we wish it to remain so. It is certainly not realistic to expect the press to stop publishing news of terrorist attacks, although one wonders whether such a voluntary blackout, if it were to actually happen, would in fact deprive the terrorists of a great deal of their power.

All we can try to do is to be watchdogs of the press. That’s part of where blogs come in–to point out the effects of publicizing terror, and to try to counter the fear, negativity, and weariness that ensues.

As one of those inspiring orators of times past, FDR, said in a different context years ago, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It may not be the only thing, but it’s one of the main things, and it is as true of fighting terrorism as it was of fighting the Depression. Perhaps even more so.

Paul Robeson (Part III–conclusion)–a mind can be an impossible thing to change

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, for the source of the Itzhak Feffer story. It was Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson, Jr.

I could not locate the original account, but the story itself can be found at a number of websites. My guess is that it first appeared in one of the biographies Robeson’s son wrote about his father.

Here is the son’s version of the tale, complete with a few more details than Horowitz included :

Though he had been cleaned up and dressed in a suit, Feffer’s fingernails had been torn out….Though he couldn’t speak openly, Robeson later told his son that the poet indicated by gestures and a few handwritten words that Mikhoels had been murdered on the orders of Stalin and that the other Jewish prisoners were being prepared for the same fate. After the two friends said goodbye, Feffer was taken back to the Lubyanka and would never be seen alive again. …However, when Robeson returned home he condemned as anti-Soviet propaganda reports that Feffer and other Jews had been killed. Not once did Robeson denounce Feffer’s murder. Later on Robeson confided in his son Paul Robeson Jr. the details of his meeting with Feffer. He made his son vow not to make the story public until well after his death, “because he had promised himself that he would never publicly criticize the USSR.”

Robeson Jr., by the way, is an interesting figure himself. He is dedicated to rehabilitating his father’s image and legacy, so his version of the story is certainly meant to be a sympathetic one. He is sympathetic to his father in other ways as well, being a Communist Party member. Here’s Junior speaking on that subject:

[My father] wasn’t the communist in the family, I was,” he says. “He never joined any party. He, being a great artist, didn’t do that. He thought it would destroy his effectiveness. I, being a generation younger and not an artist, felt that the way to be effective was through an organization.

So, the failure to join the party was a self-serving strategy on the part of the senior Robeson, rather than an ideological hesitation. In 1952, Robeson Sr. was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize by the Soviets, in appreciation of his support. If you have the stomach for it, you can read in its entirety here his fulsome tribute to Stalin on the death of the great leader shortly thereafter. A telling excerpt from it gives some insight into the education and the formative years of Paul Jr.:

[Stalin] was clearly a man who seemed to embrace all. So kindly – I can never forget that warm feeling of kindliness and also a feeling of sureness. Here was one who was wise and good – the world and especially the socialist world was fortunate indeed to have his daily guidance. I lifted high my son Pauli to wave to this world leader, and his leader. For Paul, Jr. had entered school in Moscow, in the land of the Soviets.

Robeson did some monstrous things in the cause of Communism, but he probably was able to successfully salve his conscience–at least for a while–about the Feffer incident by a bit of artistic defiance. At some point (accounts differ as to whether this was around the time of the Feffer incident, or in a 1952 visit) Robeson did make a gesture towards Jewish solidarity while in the Soviet Union–not that this helped his friend Feffer any:

In a concert broadcast live across the Soviet Union, Robeson subtly defied Stalin’s campaign against “Jewish cosmopolitanism” by ending his set with a song sung in Yiddish, Dos Partizanenlied (also known as Song of the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion), an act that was interpreted by many Jews listening to the broadcast as a sign of solidarity and sympathy. The Yiddish song was cut from rebroadcasts of the concert….

A side issue–although an interesting one–is the complicated role Jews played in Robeson’s life. Not only was Feffer Jewish, but Robeson’s son married a Jewish woman, as previously mentioned in Part II. And when I was researching the elder Robeson’s life, I noticed that the full maiden name of his wife (that’s Paul Junior’s mother) was Eslanda Cardozo Goode.

Cardozo? The same as the famous Jewish Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo? Research leads to more research–a veritable garden of the forking paths–and here is some information on Eslanda. It turns out that Robeson’s wife’s grandfather Isaac Cardozo was indeed Jewish, and a member of the prominent Cardozo family. See here for some information on Isaac’s father and brothers, and their role in the Revolutionary War.

But back to Robeson himself. As previously stated, Robeson’s later years, after his 1961 Moscow collapse, were ones of depression and illness. He died in 1976.

What a sad and terrible tale. Outraged at the injustices he had suffered, he ended up perpetuating and defending injustices himself in the name of a cause whose deeply evil nature he could not acknowledge. It is highly possible, and even likely, that his knowledge of his own complicity caused his breakdowns, although I have no way of knowing for certain (his son, of course, thinks the CIA poisoned him).

Clearly, once Robeson had cast his lot with Communism he felt there was no turning back, no matter what horrors were committed in its name. In this he was not alone.

What is it that ultimately distinguishes those such as Robeson, who refuse to abandon the cause even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, from others who are able to renounce the cause in which they once believed? We cannot know for sure. But my guess would be that it depends partly on how deeply they need to believe (the deeper the need, the more difficult to face reality), and how much they have already compromised their own integrity in the service of that cause.

For some, perhaps the implications of having to face their own guilt are simply too great. It’s almost as though they reach a point of no return, where to admit that the betrayals they committed in the service of that cause (such as Robeson’s betrayal of Feffer) would be to face their own terrible and unbearable heart of darkness. How many people can freely accept a guilt so vast, if there is a way out through denial? Sometimes, of course, as with Robeson, even that denial is incomplete, and in the end they are not fully able to escape the consequences of their own guilt, whether they ever actually acknowledge it or not.

Remember, Feffer himself had been both a loyal Communist and a Jew. Just as much of the appeal of Communism to Robeson was its promise to deliver him what he so passionately desired, a color-blind world–so, likewise, many of the early Communists came from the ranks of secular Jews who believed and hoped with all their hearts that Communism would deliver them from the anti-Semitism from which they had suffered all their lives.

Feffer and the other Jews learned the truth too late, and they were destroyed. Robeson closed his eyes, but in the end I think the truth destroyed him in a different way.

San Francisco

The New Neo Posted on by

In San Francisco today, and it’s not even foggy. I am fortunate enough to be staying with relatives/friends who live not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Who doesn’t love San Francisco? It’s such a unique and lovely city–and of course there’s the food. I hope I don’t give the impression I’m obsessed with food–but, well, it is one of the major pleasures of life, and San Francisco is one of the best places to indulge. So, I plan to do just that, and there’s a birthday celebration (not mine) this evening that should provide a good venue for doing so.

Whenever I drive or walk around this beautiful place, the thought keeps recurring to me: what do they do about these hills in the snow? How can they get up them in the ice? And then I remember that no, I’m not in New England, and there’s never any snow here. For some reason that’s a hard concept for me.

Paul Robeson (Part II): a mind can be an impossible thing to change

The New Neo Posted on by

In attempt to begin to answer the questions posed at the end of Part I, I did a bit of research.

Here, for background, is some general biographical material on Robeson, showing what a trailblazer he was, the sort of discrimination he faced, and some of the emotional turmoil of his life (notice, once again, how the article glosses over Robeson’s Communist alliances, to the point of making him seem almost like an innocent victim of McCarthyism):

Paul Robeson (1898 – 1976)

Born Paul Leroy Robeson on April 9th 1898 in Princeton, Paul Robeson (as he was later to become known) was the youngest of 5 children. His parents were Reverend Drew and Maria Louise Robeson. His father was a former slave who had escaped to freedom at the age of 15 and had gone on to earn theological degrees at Lincoln University. Paul’s mother was a schoolteacher.

When Paul was just 6 years old, his mother died after her clothing caught fire over a coal stove. He was not at home when the accident occurred. A couple of years later in 1907, his family moved to Westfield where Paul’s father built a small church and started ministering. Paul started attending an integrated public school for the first time.

By 1910, Reverend Robeson had moved his family to Somerville and became the pastor of St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion Church. Around this time, young Paul started showing his talents in music, athletics and oratory.

When Paul was 17 he won a 4-year scholarship to Rutgers in a state wide written competition. He became the 3rd African-American to attend the 500-student private college. At 6′ 2″ and weighing 190 lbs, Paul made it into the football squad, but he was benched when Washington and Lee College refused to take to the field against a black man. His coach regretted it and didn’t bow to peer pressure after that. In fact, Paul was placed on the All-American team of coach Walter Camp and during his 4 years at the university, Paul racked up 15 varsity letters in 4 sports and became Rutgers’ star scholar, orator and singer.

In May 1918, Paul’s father died at the age of 73. Two years later, Paul started attending Columbia University Law School and paid for his own tuition by tutoring Coach Sanford’s son in Latin and playing professional football. It was during 1920 that he met Eslanda ‘Essie’ Goode, who was a pathology technician. She later became his wife and was the one who encouraged Paul to take the title role in ‘Simon The Cyrenian’ at the Harlem YMCA. His performance caught the eye of several experienced theatre people.

In April 1922, Paul made his professional acting debut as Jim in ‘Taboo’ at the Sam Harris Theatre. He also starred in a British production of the play entitled ‘Voodoo’ in London.

Paul graduated from law school in 1923 and was taken on by Louis William Stotesbury at Stotesbury and Miner, a New York law firm. However, a white secretary refused to take dictation from Paul and so he resigned ending his short law career.

Paul’s path continued in the arts and he debuted in the lead role of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘All God Chillun Got Wings’ in Greenwich Village. The play caused some controversy as it cast a white woman as Paul’s wife. During 1924, Paul also sang his first formal concert at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and starred in his first film entitled ‘Body and Soul’.

In 1925, Paul did a 16-sing concert of black spirituals in New York and it launched him into the spotlight. He was signed with an agent, James B. Pond, and toured and recorded 4 albums for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Although he was becoming a huge success, Paul was still being treated badly in the USA and was denied hotel accommodation in many cities during his concert tour in 1926. He continued to tour in 1927 and Essie gave birth to their only child, Paul Robeson junior in early November.

In 1928, Paul performed the song ‘Ol Man River’ in the play ‘Show Boat’ in London. It created such a sensation that he performed for the King of Spain after the Prince of Wales recommended it.

The following year Paul and Essie were refused entry into the Savoy Grill in England and repercussions about this were felt all the way to the Parliament.

In 1930, Paul played Othello and found it to be his most fulfilling role to date. His wife published a biography on him entitled ‘Paul Robeson, Negro’. This fuelled the tension between them and they started speaking of divorce. In 1931 however, Paul fell ill with a nervous disorder after a 3-month concert tour of the USA and was bedridden for a week. This was to be the first sign of a depressive disorder that would shadow his life.

The divorce talks were back on the cards for the Robesons in 1932, but they reconciled after Paul’s mistress, an English actress called Yolande Jackson, broke off their engagement to marry a Russian prince.

In 1933 Paul starred in his first “talkie”, Paramount’s ‘The Emperor Jones’ and a year later toured the Soviet Union and wanted to settle his family there in 1935 as he felt all races were treated equally.

In 1936 Paul featured in 2 films, ‘Song of Freedom’ and ‘King Solomon’s Mines’. He also decided to send his son, Paul Jr to a Soviet Model School in the hopes it would shield him from the racial oppression of American schools.

Paul filmed the movie ‘Jericho’ in Egypt and helped Max Yergan found the Council on African Affairs (CAA) in 1937. He went on to establish the Negro Playwrights’ Company in 1940. When Paul became a chair for the CAA in 1941, the FBI placed him under surveillance believing him to be a Communist.

Paul received the NAACP’s highest honour, the Springarn medal in 1945 at a ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel. His son, Paul Jr married a Jewish girl, Marilyn Paula Greenberg in June of 1949 and hostile crowds threatened their wedding procession.

Paul became the first American banned from TV in 1950 when NBC stopped his appearance on ‘Today with Mrs. Roosevelt’ under the new Internal Security Act. All this stemmed from his being labelled a Communist and in 1953 he was blacklisted from record companies, but he funded his own label and recorded 2 albums, ‘Paul Robeson Sings’ and ‘Solid Rock’.

In 1958 Paul celebrated his 60th birthday and India declared a Paul Robeson Day on March 17th. Paul also released his autobiography entitled ‘Here I Stand’ and his passport was finally returned to him after many years.

During 1961 Paul suffered an emotional collapse whilst on a visit to Moscow and was hospitalised for several months. He suffered throughout the year from bouts of exhaustion and chronic depression. He was finally diagnosed in 1963 at a Berlin clinic as having Paget’s disease (a bone disorder) and at the same time, Essie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. On December 13th 1965, Essie died just before her 70th birthday. The following year, Paul moved in with his sister, Marion, who cared for him.

It wasn’t until 1974 that the FBI stopped investigating Paul Robeson and 2 years later, in 1976 Paul suffered 2 strokes in less than a month and died at the age of 77 in Philadelphia.

Note the staggering effects of racism on Robeson, and how it dogged his footsteps most of his life despite all his fame. Note that his father had been a slave. Note another Jewish connection through his son’s marriage (more about that later). Note the fact that he had a severe emotional collapse while visiting Moscow in 1961 (the same site as his meeting with Feffer but over ten years later, and about five years after the shattering revelations contained in the Khrushchev Report, detailing Stalin’s crimes).

This article offers some insight into what caused Robeson to become a Communist–or, rather, an extreme Communist sympathizer (apparently, he was quite careful never to officially join the Party):

A critical journey at that time, one that changed the course of his life, was to the Soviet Union. Paul Robeson author Duberman depicted Robeson’s time there: “Nights at the theater and opera, long walks with [film director Sergei] Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories … all in the context of a warm embrace.” Robeson was ecstatic with this new-found society, concluding, according to New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins, “that the country was entirely free of racial prejudice and that Afro-American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. ‘Here, for the first time in my life … I walk in full human dignity.'” Diggins went on to assert that Robeson’s “attraction to Communism seemed at first more anthropological than ideological, more of a desire to discover old, lost cultures than to impose new political systems. … Robeson convinced himself that American blacks as descendants of slaves had a common culture with Russian workers as descendants of serfs.”

And in the same article we find Robeson’s response to the Khrushchev report and its revelations:

After World War II, when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union froze into the Cold War, many former advocates of communism backed away from it. When the crimes of Soviet leader Josef Stalin became public–forced famine, genocide, political purges–still more advocates left the ranks of communism. Robeson, however, was not among them. National Review contributor Joseph Sobran explained why: “It didn’t matter: he believed in the idea, regardless of how it might be abused. In 1946 the former All-American explained his loyalty to an investigating committee: ‘The coach tells you what to do and you do it.’ It was incidental that the coach was Stalin.” Robeson could not publicly decry the Soviet Union even after he, most probably, learned of Stalin’s atrocities because “the cause, to his mind,” Nation contributor Huggins theorized, “was much larger than the Soviet Union, and he would do nothing to sustain the feeding frenzy of the American right.”

So it seems that Robeson’s love for Communism was rooted in his idea that it was the antidote to the racism that had tormented this very proud man all his life. In this, of course, he was utterly mistaken, but it was a powerful dream that he could not relinquish: “Here, for the first time in my life…I walk in full human dignity.” When push came to shove and Stalin’s crimes became known, Robeson, like so many others, faced a choice between clinging to an ideal and rejecting that ideal because of the horrifically flawed reality that it had become. Like so many others, he clung to the power of the dream rather than face a harsh reality. (Once again, in describing this, I am not offering an excuse; merely an explanation. Robeson is responsible for his own moral failures.)

By this time, Robeson’s betrayal of Feffer had already occurred. Robeson was a brilliant man and one who believed deeply in human rights. If I had to guess, I would say that at some later point it became nearly impossible for him to continue to deny to himself that he had been tragically mistaken in serving a cause that in fact had made a mockery of those ideals. Caught in a trap, he couldn’t see his way towards renouncing his Soviet dream and his own complicity in those very crimes. But the knowledge of what he had done may have seeped in anyway, causing a deep and irreconcilable depression. It is no accident, to my way of thinking, that Robeson’s first breakdown occurred in Moscow, post-Khrushchev. The scene of the crime–or crimes.

(Conclusion tomorrow…Part III.)

Gastronomic interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to put in a plug for the best Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles, IMHO: the Carnival on Woodman in Studio City. Cheap, plentiful, and delicious–who could ask for anything more?

For me, Mideastern food is the best type of food on earth. I first ate it when I was about seven years old, and it was a revelation. An uncle took us to an Armenian restaurant in Manhattan, and when I took my first bite I thought, “Where have you been all my life?” It was as though until then I’d been eating in black-and-white, and now the food was in Technicolor. In those days, the only ethnic foods around tended to be Italian (pizza and spaghetti, and if you were really adventurous, some lasagna), and old-time Chinese of the chow mein and chop suey variety, plus a few soggy eggrolls.

For years afterwards, I made quite a pest of myself unsuccessfully begging my parents to take me back to the Armenian restaurant. It wasn’t until I was grown up that Mideastern food became readily available, and I could indulge my craving. I also acquired a stable of Mideastern cookbooks, and cooked up a storm.

If you go to the Carnival, order the combo appetizer plate: tabooli, falafel, baba ganoush, and hummus. Or, actually, order anything.

(Driving up to San Francisco this afternoon. More culinary adventures await.)

Paul Robeson (Part I)–a mind can be an impossible thing to change

The New Neo Posted on by

This post isn’t really another one about Radical Son, although it was sparked by a story that appeared in the book.

Horowitz relates a bloodcurdling incident in the life of the great Afro-American actor, singer, football player, Columbia Law School graduate, and Sovietophilic Communist-supporter Paul Robeson. The story, and that of Robeson’s life in general, illustrates the depths to which adhering to the party line brought this otherwise great man–and those depths, as you shall see, were very deep.

The trajectory of Robeson’s life is a highly cautionary tale of the ideological seduction of a gifted man by what was originally an idealistic dream, his failure to see the horror that dream had become, his severe moral compromise as a result, and the cost of that compromise to him and others. Robeson was a perfect example of just how very difficult it can be for a mind to change, no matter how insightful or otherwise intelligent that mind might be.

Here, by the way, is the basic liberal/leftist view of Robeson’s life: Afro-American artist as victim. As we shall see, if you stick with me through this one, the truth is far more complex–and, I think, far more interesting.

In Radical Son, Horowitz writes that during WWII Josef Stalin had created a group called the Jewish Joint Anti-fascist Committee, designed to improve relations with his anti-Fascist Western allies such as the United States. The Russian Yiddish poet Itzhak Feffer was a member of the group (one of the Jewish parts of the “Committee”). While on a visit with the group to the US, he and Robeson (who spoke fluent Russian, by the way) became fast friends. After the war was over, however, in the late 1940s, Stalin–who had murdered countless people from the 30s on–now decided it was the Jews’ turn, after all. Feffer was a fairly well-known literary figure and a Party stalwart, but this didn’t prevent him from being among those arrested.

There were rumors in the US about what was happening. Robeson visited the Soviet Union around this time and asked to see Feffer. Horowitz writes:

[Robeson] was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was the Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin’s police brought Feffer out of prison, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked him how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. “They’re going to kill us, ” he said. “When you return to America, you must speak out and save us.”

After his meeting with the poet, Robeson returned home. When he was asked about Feffer and the other Jews, he assured his questioners that reports of their imprisonment were malicious slanders spread by individuals who only wanted to exacerbate Cold War tensions. Shortly afterward, Feffer, along with so many others, vanished into Stalin’s gulag.

It was not that Robeson had not understood Feffer’s message. He had understood it all too well. Because it was Robeson, near the end of his own life and guilty with remorse, who told the story long after Itzhak Feffer was dead.

This story literally made the hair on my arms stand up. I knew Robeson had been a Communist, or at least a Communist sympathizer (although whether or not he was technically a Party member is more or less irrelevant, so openly dedicated was he to the cause). But how could he have been guilty of such betrayal on a personal level? And why? I also wondered about Horowitz’s source for the story. Perhaps it wasn’t even true. To whom did Robeson tell it “near the end of his own life and guilty with remorse,” and why?

(To be continued…in Part II.)

More evidence that I’m not so young anymore

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, I don’t quite get it.

I was in the elevator at my Woodland Hills motel, and in walked a lovely young girl. By “young girl” I mean she was somewhere between sixteen and twenty-six; I can’t quite tell the difference nowadays. Long pale straight blond hair, angelic features, sweet as anything, polite and smiling. Her T-shirt, black and sleeveless, had the following printed on the back in large letters, “Vomit is erotic.”

Yes, well of course. I’ve often thought so. Haven’t you?

I can only imagine her T-shirt was ironic. But it seemed very very sad to me, nevertheless.

Journalists through the decades: tenure?

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve written quite a bit about the book Radical Son, in which David Horowitz details the process by which he changed from activist leftist to neocon (see here and here for examples of my posts).

But the book is one of those gifts that keeps on giving. One of the most intriguing aspects of Horowitz’s tale, at least to me, is found in certain throwaway details that have taken on a different light in recent years, post-9/11.

Although the book was published in 1997 and therefore the portraits Horowitz paints of various figures on the journalistic left are frozen at that point, time has of course moved on and we’ve seen some interesting changes happen to a number of those people.

Horowitz isn’t the sort to pull his punches, so part of his book is an attempt to show how very vicious some of his former colleagues on the left were when he “turned.” The phenomenon I described here, in “Condescension and leaving the political fold,” was operating very strongly in Horowitz’s life when he emerged from a few years of thought and relative political inaction to announce his change of mind in a series of hard-hitting articles and lectures. As apostates, he and his writing partner Peter Collier not only found doors closed to them in the publishing world that had heretofore been open, but Horowitz experienced a great deal of personal animosity from former friends (including a woman who actually spat at him, I seem to recall):

Although we [Horowitz and Collier] were best-selling authors, there were no longer friendly pages for our writings in its influential liberal journals–the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and (now that we had shown what our apostasy meant), the Washington Post. These were reserved for our literary executioners–Gitlin, Hitchens, Blumenthal, and friends.

These names may be strikingly familiar to you. Todd Gitlin is a prominent leftist critic of Bush, and Sidney Blumenthal is a former Clinton aide who is well-known as one of Clinton’s biggest defenders during the Lewinsky scandal. They are both still on the same side as they were when Horowitz wrote his book.

But the other name, Hitchens, refers of course to Christopher Hitchens. Two of the most negative portraits in Horowitz’s book–and, as I said, he’s not one to pull punches, so the negative portraits are very negative–are those of Hitchens and the leftist Paul Berman, both of whom Horowitz reports as having been especially cutting and personal in their attacks on him (not very hard to believe about Hitchens, but Berman surprised me).

Both Hitchens and Berman have themselves undergone certain, shall we say, changes since the book was written. Although both still self-identify as being on the left–Berman especially–both have came close to becoming apostates themselves post-9/11 (although neither has gone anywhere near as far as Horowitz has in that respect), and both have gotten flak from former colleagues for their support of the Iraq war.

It is especially interesting to me that these two were vociferously and personally opposed to Horowitz at the time of his turning, and yet later both ended up doing a not insignificant bit of turning themselves, a fact which strikes me as deeply ironic. Now, Hitchens himself has experienced some of the ostracism he dealt out to Horowitz. Of course, Hitchens being Hitchens, he probably couldn’t care less (or, if he does, he’ll never tell).

But here is Horowitz’s vivid portrait of Hitchens back in the late Reagan years, when Horowitz had just said goodbye to the left, and both men were appearing on the public television show “Book Notes,” hosted by Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s (in a remarkable feat of media longevity, Lapham remains its editor–and you may recall him as the man whose name recently, like that of Robert Fisk, became a verb, in Lapham’s case for his remarkable time-traveling abilities prior to the 2004 Republican Convention):

As a Trotskyite himself, Hitchens had few illusions about the utopias that the Left had built, but–like Tom Hayden and Jim Mellen–he was driven by internal demons that could not be pacified. This inner rage fueled his animus against the country that had treated him so well, and prompted him to compose a recent article which provided a rationale for Shi’ite terrorists at war with the West…Sitting across from me at Lapham’s right, Hitchens looked like a badger, his mood black and his head, with hooded eyes that scowled in my direction, sunk deep into his neck cavity. As soon as we began the proceedings, his bile spilled onto every surface; souring the entire mood of the show, which reached its nadir when I mentioned the passage in which I had written about my father’s funeral. “Who cares about his pathetic family?” Hitchens snapped.

It is interesting to note that, although Hitchens has for the most part come over to the neocon side, and thus I appreciate and agree with quite a few (although not all) of his articles and points of view, Horowitz’s description of him strikes me as spot on. When Hitchens is on one’s side, his biting wit and ability to skewer the opposition are appreciated; when he is on the other side, beware. But, agree or disagree with him, he does seem to be motivated by an anger that appears to have some sort of internal genesis, and his nasty remark about Horowitz’s father ties in perfectly with strains noted in the recent dialogue between Hitchens and his brother. One can safely say that Hitchens was certainly not then and is not now a sentimentalist about family.

One particularly fascinating detail of the above quote was that, according to Horowitz, Hitchens had written an article that seems to have been some sort of apologia for Shi’ite terrorists. The post-9/11 Hitchens would probably like to forget that.

Speaking of forgetting, I wondered whether, now that Horowitz and Hitchens have moved closer together in policy matters and have shared the strange experience of losing friends and colleagues over it, they are now on speaking terms with each other despite their conflicted history.

Well, it turns out they are; apparently politics does make strange bedfellows, unmakes them, and then makes them once again. In this 2002 article by Horowitz, he writes, “Christopher [Hitchens], who is also my friend…” And then there is this, promoting a rather remarkable excursion, “Tour London with Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz.”

Horowitz’s book is replete with names from the past that still resonate now, in addition to Hitchens. The same crew of commentators and journalists seems to have been around for decades: Alexander Cockburn, Lewis Lapham, Seymour Hersch, Sidney Blumenthal, Eric Alterman, Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Hendrick Hertzberg, and Martin Peretz. All have roles, small or large, to play in Horowitz’s book, and all are still writing in very influential periodicals today. Most of them are more or less on the same side now as they were then; only a few are “changers” like Horowitz and Hitchens.

It made me realize the huge influence a rather small number of people has had in shaping political perceptions in the US and around the world for many decades. In how many other fields would a book written about events occurring mostly in the 60s through the 80s contain so many names that were still highly influential in the year 2005? Do journalists, like academics, have tenure?