Jack Ross responds to criticism of his anti-Communist/anti-Zionist post of the other day:
If Gail grew up in a communist household, then she would likely accept the fact that yes, Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign was dominated by the Communist Party, that yes there were many Communists in the Roosevelt administration, and yes, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and the Lincoln Brigade were all supportive of Stalin.
The stunning thing about Wallace in ’48 was that the issues which defined his career and his campaign – Zionism, free trade, and industrialized agriculture – could not be more anathema to what matters to American progressives today. That bizarre campaign was as if Dick Cheney should run for president in 2012 as a "peace candidate" transparently on the Israel amen-corner line.
With respect to Alvah Bessie, it doesn’t suprise me, I don’t believe he was even the only one of the ten who remained a Soviet party-liner to the end. And nothing more or less was behind that letter, for someone in that orbit to say that they "never considered themselves to be any kind of Marxist" is vintage.
The point is that the much larger culture of the Hollywood Jewish left, which by and large were merely fellow travelers, remained unreconstructed in the politics of that era. As I often admonish Phil, to refer to them as "Progressive Except on Palestine" gravely misses the point, as that same progressivism allowed them to also heartily endorse Stalin’s genocides as well as the nakba of the ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe, the greatest act of ethnic cleansing in history, in the popular front era.
