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May 21, 2007
There has been a turning point in the Bush administration, with the popularity of the Iraq war declining. When we saw Ray McGovern get network news coverage for what the public already knew long before about weapons of mass destruction and when we saw Kappes return to CIA, it was a sign that a certain agenda had already crested. From examining a pro- CIA account by Frances Stonor Saunders and an anti- CIA, anti-communist account by John A. Stormer (1964), MIM feels justified in having held out some hope that Bush would have abolished CIA or cut its wings. Oddly enough, both Stormer and Saunders say that the McCarthyist movement was not happy with CIA and this is the sort of thing that we proletarian internationalists have to account for. At this time when Ward Churchill is in the news, it is appropriate to review the McCarthyite literature.
Stylized made-for-TV accounts of McCarthyism make it a matter of persuasive testimony in Senate committees that sent McCarthy down in flames, because Amerikans were not really so bad as to red-bait everybody. That account was very convenient for the majority imperialist leadership faction, but it was false in its essentials, as we see now with the same social base going after Ward Churchill. In fact, now that we have Frances Stonor Saunders telling us that the "real" dragon-slayer of communism was CIA, not McCarthy, we can see the central tension better. It is easier to separate the bourgeois factions based on their strategies than their overall lines.
The CIA faction in the 1950s and 1960s held that the way to defeat the Soviet social-imperialists was by building a united front that included everyone except the pro-Stalin communists. So the CIA proceeded to buy the Trotskyists and Fabian socialists and work with "liberalizing Marxism" projects. Now pro-CIA accounts like that of Saunders come forward to claim credit for "winning" the Cold War. (Saunders has criticized CIA interventions in other contexts while giving CIA credit for the Cold War. If Mao were to write an account of just this question, he would agree.)
The McCarthyites led by J. Edgar Hoover did not want to include the milquetoast left-wing of parasitism. They feared that Fabian socialism led to communism and crucially they believed the UN would become the vehicle of a Fabian approach. Fabians are incremental socialists, the mildest of reformists. It would be interesting to see how U.$. politics would change if the UN left U.$. territory and then maybe kicked out the united $tates. Perhaps secondary issues in the fundamentalist Christian agenda would come to the fore.
The problem for the CIA faction was that if it became public that CIA was buying off Trotskyists and Fabian socialists, the pro-Stalin communists would have had a field day the world over. At the same time, the McCarthyites were not able to tell the difference between pro-Stalin communism and Rockefeller internationalism, not to mention mushy socialism. So the Hooverites went to red-bait people on CIA payroll and the best defense would have been the truth that they are on CIA payroll, but such a defense was not possible. It is only in retrospect that we can see the CIA quandary of operating where a majority of CIA's homebase does not understand what it is doing.
In truth, in most of MIM's history it has shadow-boxed with CIA, because both start from an international outlook. In this essay we will try to compensate for neglect of the anti-communists.
If we pick up a John Birch Society publication, it can be easy to be dismissive. After the part about Henry Kissinger being a communist, it seems all hope of political understanding is lost. We of the communist movement need more of an overall understanding of the anti-communists and we can get it in Stormer's book None Dare Call It Treason. Out of the anti-communist books I have read, this one seems to be most at the root of views most commonly expressed in red states today. Stormer was a Barry Goldwater delegate from Missouri who attended a fundamentalist church and his book gained wide distribution in the 1960s.
We have to decode anti-communism. What it is saying in the united $tates is that all bourgeois internationalism is just internationalism and all internationalism and all social-democracy and "libertarian socialism" leads to communism. So when imperialist Arthur Schlesinger specifically said to court the "libertarian socialists" as their camp, the Birchers and Hooverites objected to what became the official CIA line. Some day if it turns out that CIA pursued Noam Chomsky, we can remember Schlesinger, but most of what Chomsky is saying will still stand as true as approximating an internationalist approach. The anti- communist line is one big simplification of the world into Amerika- firsters (referred to as "patriots") and communists. In this simplification, the leadership of the united $tates falls into the communist camp. Even in 1989, Stormer was still warning about the Fabian socialists.
Over 70% of Denver Post readers in an unscientific poll say they want Ward Churchill fired. We can also point to issues like gay marriage and immigration as having similar levels of popularity. So the McCarthyites are liable to ask why they need the social-democrats, Trots and other members of the united front. Conversely, we communists should ask why the imperialists wheeled out all this artillery with Joe McCarthy in the 1950s only to have it all destroyed. At the time it certainly appeared that McCarthy had public opinion with him.
The bottom line is that the Hooverites/McCarthyites take an Amerika- first position whether they know it or not and from within that perspective, because of the nature of the labor aristocracy, they are correct they could go a lot further by ditching the CIA baggage. That is the real dumbocratic pressure-from-below in Amerika, not some kind of expression from the exploited due at any second. The real question is who has the false consciousness, the imperialist leaders or their junior partners in the labor aristocracy still inclined to McCarthyism to this day. Perhaps both are correct from the point of view of their respective classes, the imperialists and labor aristocracies.
So listening to Stormer, what we have to understand is that all people outside of an Amerika-first range of ideas are "communists," and saying so still includes the vast majority of Amerikans as anti- communists. In reply, the capitalism-first faction of Rockefeller type leaders says that saving capitalism is more fundamental than saving Amerika, so we have to offer equal-opportunity-exploitation rights to Third World elites. Stormer is even aware of the social basis of his movement, that the college educated are less likely to appreciate it.(p. 172, pb)
There is a lot to like about the U.$. anti-communists. They appear to want to give up the fight for international "middle forces" as Mao would call them. Both MIM and CIA would compete for them. In particular, MIM visualizes the national bourgeoisie internationally as the "middle forces," not some other idea about abortion choice or some other Democratic Party platform plank.
For that matter we need to understand the good things about Republicans more carefully. It goes beyond their support for monogamy or the possibility of "making things worse, before they get better." The other pseudo-communist parties talk as if there is an exploited majority inside u.$. borders and cannot perceive that the Republican Party can be better for our interest in the struggle for international middle forces that chauvinist wings of the Republican Party are prepared to abandon, especially if they ever finally win their battle against the Rockefeller wing.
The CIA and State Department both are willing to buck or manipulate U.$. public opinion, to the point of siding with intellectuals the u.$. majority would call "communist." For the imperialists to work with Trotskyists or Fabians is nothing new. CIA is looking at the international picture when it does this, because the Hoover line does not fly outside U.$. borders directly, at least not very well.
Now that we have Frances Stonor Saunders's book, we can see that Stormer was right about some stunning points. First we have to have a typical Bircher moment, when Stormer tells us that the leading capitalists of the united $tates are all for communism, which makes one ask, "then who is not for communism?" On the one hand, it reminds us of Hitler's tactics and it should surely work to separate the labor aristocracy's class interests from the imperialists. The labor aristocracy opposes equal-opportunity-exploitation, because the labor aristocracy believes only Amerikans should have the right to be exploiters, while the imperialists are trying to offer Third World leaders a chance to be exploiters too. Stormer makes it clear that like Hitler, he opposed the Soviet Union even in 1942 (p. 149 pb) with World War II already on. On the other hand, Stormer is actually referring to something that he concretely put his finger on: he is not living in a total fantasy world. Without naming CIA, he indicts tax- exempt foundations covered for by Eisenhower.
"Investigations proved incontrovertibly that money of American capitalists--Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Guggenheim, etc.--has largely financed those working for the establishment of a a 'new world order.'"(p. 173)Stormer said that in 1964. Stormer then picked up on large sums of money being moved around by CIA, but he did not call it that. For example, he found Carnegie funding Harold Laski to the tune of $340,000 (p. 175)--a typical CIA project. So the stunning thing is that in all this crackpot talk, the missing part was the direct role of the CIA that we now have documented more completely by Saunders. Those foundations so crucial to the academic world are heavily intertwined with the CIA, the same way a vanguard party runs the army. It looks like the FBIers documented CIA activities buying off pseudo-communists and mushy socialists before Ramparts magazine did for the New Left in the 1960s. It probably has to do again with how Liberalism has infected the communists to the point where they simply refuse to believe the extent to which CIA has bought leaders off--organizational, artistic and intellectual leaders.
A little head-to-head clash of FBI and CIA was already under way before the New Left forayed into the research:
"The Fund for the Republic, an off-shoot of the Ford Foundation, has become notorious for financing vicious and distorted attacks on the internal security program of the U.S. government, Congressional committees which investigate communism and the FBI." (p. 180)The Hooverites also wrote exposures of the Council on Foreign Relations, (CFR) bourgeois internationalists. So finally the conflict boils down to one of State Department and CIA against FBI. To rewrite the end of McCarthyism for theoretical purposes, it is a matter of the CIA representing the bourgeois internationalists intervening with Eisenhower to look to the international situation and not just the backwaters of Wisconsin. CIA carried the day, so even though Eisenhower was a Republican, Joe McCarthy went down in flames. As long as the target was pro-Stalin people, there was no disagreement, but once the Hooverites went after the Trotskyists and mushy socialists, Eisenhower intervened to save them. Had the McCarthyites stuck to attacking lower-rungs in the social pecking order, there may have been no conflict, but they went after leaders in the State Department and forced a choice in exploiter strategies.
Anyone who took a mechanical view of the polls, what would be necessary to gain 51% support in the united $tates, anyone who reduced the problem down to Republicans would not see that it would be Republican President Eisenhower willing to stand against majority cracker opinion for McCarthy for the benefit of imperialism's overall interests. It was not a communist uprising of the U.$. so-called masses that stopped McCarthy. Quite the contrary, McCarthy succeeded overall in getting the U.$. communist movement to wilt. It was wrongly based in the labor aristocracy at the time anyway.
At the same time, any Third World leader looking at all this who thinks that as leader of a Third World country she will be able to buy off the people the way Eisenhower did has to be dreaming. This needs to be all spelled out, the economics behind Amerikan politics, and why it cannot just be copied.
In the battle between anti-communists and bourgeois internationalists, we would in general like to side with the anti-communists, but often for one tactical reason or another we cannot. The anti-communist position does the most to bring forward the labor aristocracy and present Amerika to the world as it really is--beer-swilling, Kraft- cheese eating and flag-waving rednecks or rubes who believe in angels and don't believe in evolution. It's enough to make any Third World leader to ask "for this, I'm going to traumatize people to modernize my country?" It will be natural to want to aim for something better when we realize that only a small minority of the united $tates is intellectually capable like the CIA or State Department.
Even more decisive is that the Third World leader can perceive in the McCarthyite reaction to 9/11 the real problem of Amerikan militarism and how the Third World will have to adjust to that by taking up Maoism. These Arab-hating McCarthyites readily bought the idea that 9/11 was connected to Saddam Hussein, so Third World leaders need to prepare for that. Instead of listening to Ward Churchill, these bozos went to war on Iraq. The CIA will put forward quirky intellectuals to throw sand in the Third World leaders' eyes, but if we have a thorough knowledge of Amerikan political realities, then we know that the Zionists are only two percent of the problem of Amerikans. The Amerikans have the time and money to be leading lights of civilization, but their system is built on parasitism and decadence. Knowledge helps us with our middle forces internationally, and that is principal. It is the reason that Bush Jr. has landed in his current international status.
Secondarily, the Hoover line also helps us detach some pseudo-leftists and show them there is no real choice but opposition to the government, instead of CIA ties. If the anti-communists really manage to cut some people from payroll that has to be good. The lazy exploiters will probably withdraw from politics then.
Of course, in the Third World we won't often see prospects of unity with the anti-communists. Only in Amerika where we are merely picking among exploiter lines, we have to look at what face Amerika puts forward to the world as principal and secondarily look at the kind of internal united front the CIA is putting together. There's nothing wrong for anti-communist purges in Amerika happening as long as the rest of the world sees that and Amerika claiming "freedom." Similarly, purging Ward Churchill goes over great in Colorado, but in the rest of the world it's just another bad image for Amerika. Only in the united $tates, england, australia and i$rael is there any prospect of 9/11 being perceived as so unconnected to U.$. oppression in the Mideast. For 90% of the world's people, Ward Churchill is just punishment of an indigenous professor for what is obvious about Amerikkkans and 9/11. The settlers of both I$rael and Amerika are the limiting factor in CIA's being able to fudge the issue for the sake of the u.$. global image, so it's a battle, but ultimately the MIM line will prevail because our internationalism is not tied down by a labor aristocracy. Instead of being despondent about our minority status, we should rejoice and see how it frees us.
Alas, Bush's possibilities as an Amerika-first president lapsed. Even as CIA criticized his work on Iraq, Bush did not move to abolish the CIA. Cheney outed one lousy agent Plame. There was talk about abolishing the UN and lopping off State Department chunks, but on the whole there was just talk that helped some people move into leadership positions, people like Bolton.
The problem for the anti-communist faction of the two major parties, especially the Republicans is leadership. The seasoned capitalists such as the Rockefeller family have legions of cronies and among these they find leaders. For anti-communists, leadership fell to Hoover when he was alive. There has been corporate leader Welch. Mostly though, the anti-communists have had to look to leaders with shades of their line--Nixon, Reagan, Buchanan, Bush Jr. and Ann Coulter, not people with their whole line. In truth all of these are representatives of bourgeois internationalist capital that modulate their messages to appeal to the anti-communists. If some day we get a U.$. president with the whole hog anti-communist line, it will be a good thing signalling surrender of the Third World middle forces, but it will probably be brief, and an unconscious signal for stepped up war.
The Hooverites have faced a changing situation compared with Joe McCarthy's hey-day in the 1950s. On the one hand, college education has made inroads into their own ranks since the 1960s, something MIM has referred to as a dumbocratic influence--giving people an increased sense that their uninformed views are as good as anyone else's. Toyota is also employing some workers inside u.$. borders now and some Hoover families partake in the Internet and international communication more easily. So some slight percentage of Hooverite families have thus departed for the globalization line thanks to 50 years of change. On the other hand, among those families that remain for the Hoover line, they are becoming more articulate, better able to lead themselves. They can consume the Rush Limbaughs and others. The imperialists increasingly find themselves having to express the viewpoint of the labor aristocracy, not just manipulate it. In a nutshell, the impeachment of Clinton, the torture of Guantanamo Bay and the wiretapping all aim to appeal to this group. Bush Jr. instinctively dives for the authoritarian right-wing of parasitism with the belief that its numbers may be limitless if awakened.
The Hooverites read MIM as saying that they have two choices of "communism," the Martin Luther King globalizing kind of "communism" or the MIM-style communism. That is not a choice at all for them, and they are increasingly able to say so.
Compared with 50 years ago, there is also a change in the CIA equation. The CIA has to set up a united front tailored to shadow box with Al-Qaeda, not just the real communists. The CIA has to calculate how to build a front against Al-Qaeda the way it used to seek everyone-but-Stalin. So we heard the Bush administration float the idea of burying the hatchet with Castro. Soon after we saw the CIA fronts follow suit and stop declaiming Castro revisionism, when before they did not even oppose U.$. repression of Cubans. Having already abandoned Stalin, the CIA front for Maoism came into play in attacking Iran. We had Bush make direct personnel moves to co-opt pseudo-feminism including Third World tokens for battle with Islam. Most of the activist organizations were not ready to see Bush in particular co-opt pseudo-feminism. It's really more of a confirmation of the MIM line than they can believe, and so this has not sunken in. It's even more of a problem than the idea that the majority of Amerikans are bought off. Sentimental easy-going Liberalism has ruled on the womyn question forever.
So, because of this division among the exploiters, the Ward Churchill issue is good for us. It brings out the McCarthyites in force and brings out the capitulationism in our own ranks. In the old days, the imperialists could sell the McCarthy line to the repressive forces and army and as long as the rest of the world did not see them, it was to the imperialists' advantage to be hydra- headed. Today, the world becomes a smaller and smaller place and with the Internet, it becomes possible for Third World leaders to see better and better what is really going on in the depths of Amerikan public opinion. Being hydra-headed works a smaller percentage of the time with quicker communications. According to Alexa, 40% of MIM's readers are in the Third World. These will tend to be Third World elites, middle forces. Ultimately they will be more important than all the hopeless crackers in all the Colorados combined. The Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy is not a "middle force," as Lenin explained, because it fights more desperately than the imperialists themselves.
The key to fighting as a minority behind-enemy-lines and sticking to minority tactics is taking into account the international situation. Those unprepared to fight with minority tactics and insist on dumbocratic prejudice have automatically pitched their internationalism. The Amerika-first pseudo-communists and the anti-EU pseudo-communists who allied themselves with LePen water down their goals non-stop. The overall perspective of the CIA and State Department is more correct than that of the Birchers. That is why the CIA and State Department are willing to get ahead of exploiter opinion in the united $tates. We should too.
The alternative would be to look at the numbers and then capitulate on Ward Churchill and chide Ward Churchill for going out in front, as if there were any way to sugar-coat the issue of 9/11, as if imperialist violence and the resulting war should be sugar-coated. Instead of capitulating we should learn to fight as a minority and try to understand why a determined minority can win individual battles. In this particular Ward Churchill case we are not going to lose, but with the correct strategy, the truth is that we could lose 100 out of 100 Ward Churchill battles and still win the war, again because only a tiny minority of the world agrees with the Amerikan view of the Mideast. The last word on Ward Churchill will not be from Colorado but the international proletariat. We have nothing to gain from clouding our message. Our success hinges on piercing the false consciousness of the Third World.