Posted on 03/31/2003 2:33:49 PM PST by knighthawk
In recent times the newspapers have rarely mentioned Herbert Aptheker, but half a century ago he was among the most articulate American defenders of Stalinist terror. An academic historian from Brooklyn, he was a leading theorist of American communism and an editor of Masses & Mainstream, the magazine equivalent of the Daily Worker. He considered Lenin, "the greatest figure in the whole galaxy of world revolutionary leaders." Anyone acquainted with his work knew all of this and much more. No one denied it, least of all Aptheker.
But when he died last week at the age of 87, the obituaries described a different and much blander man. They didn't mention Stalin or Lenin. They now called Aptheker a Marxist, not a communist, Karl Marx being a comparatively safe figure from distant times. The obituaries (including the one in The New York Times, reprinted in the National Post) focused instead on the relatively uncontroversial part of his career, his research in black history, particularly slave revolts, and his role as literary executor of his friend W.E.B. DuBois, a major black intellectual. The Times made Aptheker's party membership sound almost like a brief accident: "In September, 1939 ... he joined the Communist Party, because, he said, he saw it as an anti-fascist force and a progressive voice for race relations." The Times didn't say when if ever he left. As it happens, he stayed until closing time, 1991.
Aptheker's reputation was carefully laundered for burial, a common process in obituaries. We journalists like dead people to sound as nice as possible. Most obituaries don't go as far as The Globe and Mail's bizarre Lives Lived, which is now usually written by a child, grandchild, or protegé of the deceased and seems to be edited by its subject from (one assumes) a Better Place. But obits in general tend to smooth the rough edges off the recently deceased.
This seems especially the case with communists. The reason can be found hiding behind a passage in the Times obit of Aptheker: "He was a hostile witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1951, and throughout the 1950s he remained on the defensive for his radical views ..." In other words, a victim. Senator Joseph McCarthy, the political ogre of that period, claimed to be the scourge of communists but his noisy irresponsibility became a gift to communist propaganda. Being so often wrong, he made all anti-communism seem odious. Eventually liberal journalists developed a rule of thumb, for use particularly in the case of academics or moviemakers: "If the McCarthyites say they did something, they didn't do it." This rule still governs most newspaper writing about that period. At worst a newspaper will say an accusation was brought against someone like Aptheker, without saying whether it was true.
This robs both the individual and his historic period of their meaning and texture. Aptheker wrote, as hardly anyone does today, with the total confidence of a man who has history on his side; he believed in the inevitability of communism. He also took part in a peculiar intellectual movement, now mostly forgotten, the attempt to Americanize communism by inserting it into American history, recruiting a Mt. Rushmore of historical figures as precursors of Marx and Lenin.
In 1955, Aptheker enlisted both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in an essay attacking the conservatism represented by the journalist Walter Lippmann: "There is a kinship in the words of Jefferson and Lincoln with those of Engels and Stalin because the liberation of the working class and of all humanity -- the victory of Socialism -- is an extension of, a leap forward from the limited liberating results of bourgeois-democracy." Crazy, of course. But among writers like Aptheker, and their readers, that was not considered a preposterous idea.
He stuck with the party, and he maligned those who didn't. After the USSR put down the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the writer Howard Fast (author of Spartacus and other left-wing novels) decided that by believing Soviet propaganda for decades he had been the victim of "the most incredible swindle in modern times." For Fast, as for many communists, the Hungarian revolution was proof that the Soviets now offered the world "socialism by slaughter and terror."
Wrong, Aptheker informed the readers of Masses & Mainstream. "In Hungary, the slaughter and terror were fundamentally the work of counterrevolutionary forces." The demonstrations that led to violence were actually attempts to speed up "the very much delayed purification of socialism." He said counterrevolutionary forces had turned this commendable movement into an attempt to "restore landlordism and capitalism" by violence.
A dozen years later, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and snuffed out its briefly independent government, Aptheker was ready. Now he published a book called Czechoslovakia and Counterrevolution: Why the Socialist Countries Intervened. He wasn't lying, in any ordinary sense of that term. It was the peculiar genius of his communist generation that they could persuade themselves to believe the reverse of the truth. That's what made them so spectacularly interesting, in an appalling way; that's the part of their lives we should not forget.
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
Many in the editorial room there still don't accept that Alger Hiss was a spy.
He was a heavy.
"He was for decades a leading theorist of the Communist Party U.S.A. before resigning in 1991. He also was the father of Bettina Aptheker, a former leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and was a friend to 1960s radical and Black Panther leader Angela Davis. (Both women now teach at UC-Santa Cruz, where Aptheker was the chair of Women's Studies.) And it was Herbert Aptheker who, in Christmas 1965, led a delegation that included former state Sen. Tom Hayden, then the leader of Students for a Democratic Society, to Hanoi during the Vietnam War."
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He baceme more widely known because his daughter, Bettina, was very active in the leftist youth movements of the '60s. As a communist she criticized the leftist movement of the time as too idealistic. You need to be in your 50s to get a grasp of this stuff.
I would think the FR version of his obit would be 'Scumbag, Good Riddance'
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