NON-SEQUITUR, LOVER OF FONER AND OTHER MARXISTS.
Charles Brown leninist-international@lists.wwpublish.com
Fri, 15 Dec 2000 10:12:56 -0500
[Eric Foner is a preeminent Marxist historian of the U.S. Civil War.]
The Nation Magazine, COMMENT | January 1, 2001=20
Partisanship Rules
by ERIC FONER =20
July 10, 2002, 9:35 a.m.
The Left’s Lion
Eric Foner’s history.
By Ronald Radosh
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review appears in the July 1, 2002, issue of National Review.
Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, by Eric Foner (Hill and Wang, 256 pp., $24)
Eric Foner of Columbia University is one of our nation's most acclaimed historians. A past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, he is best known as the author of pioneering revisionist studies of Reconstruction and of Republican ideology before the Civil War, as well as other books on ideology and politics in the Civil War era. He is also one of the foremost exponents of what has become known as "radical history": the euphemism of choice for Marxist and neo-Marxist historians who seek to overturn the old mainstream political history.
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Foner, as he reveals, was a bona fide red-diaper baby. His father, he relates, lost his job teaching history at City College of New York after a state legislative committee held hearings about the influence of Communists in higher education. (He does not mention that the hearings coincided with the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Foner's father was touting the party line that FDR and Britain -- not Hitler and the Nazis -- were the real enemy.) Ironically, the historian hired to replace him was none other than the young Richard Hofstadter, who, years later, became Foner's mentor at Columbia University's graduate school, and whose position at Columbia Foner now holds.
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In Foner's eyes, to be opposed to Communism is in fact to be an apologist for an American Empire. Thus, his chapter entitled "The Russians Write a New History" exhibits his love for the USSR of Mikhail Gorbachev, and his sadness about its demise. As a guest professor under the Gorbachev regime, Foner was thrilled by a society in which Russians embarked "on the task of reconceptualizing their nation's past" -- shedding the Stalinist past while remaining true to the ideal of Communism, rehabilitating Bukharin and a supposedly humanist early form of Marxism-Leninism. And yet, Foner is upset that the new Soviet scholars dropped concepts such as "class," never seemed to mention "imperialism," and even got rid of the distinction between bourgeois and socialist ideologies and replaced them with a "search for 'universal human values'" that Foner sees as "oddly ahistorical."
Eric Foner, James McPherson and the other Marxist historians were carefully chosen as speakers because government officials know that these professors will give them the opinions they want to hear. Speaking for this school of historians, Foner said: "In the course of the past twenty years, American history has been remade. Inspired initially by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s – which shattered the ‘consensus’ vision that had dominated historical writing – and influenced by new methods borrowed from other disciplines, American historians redefined the very nature of historical study."
News releases explained that the symposium "will explore new historical currents in linking the battlefield experience to such issues as the historical, social, economic, legal, cultural, and political forces and events that led to the Civil War" and "Sessions will focus on the institution of slavery."
Translation: A Civil Rights activist and Marxist historians will justify the need to reorient interpretations of Civil War battlefield sites away from military data to the "horrors of slavery."
This sad truth is evident from the identity of the historian who has been chosen by Disney Corp. to be its major consultant on the history to be taught at the Manassas theme park. He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country's most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Foner, as might be gathered, is fanatically anti-South and a vicious smearer of the Southern cause. It was Foner who committed the unforgivable deed of writing the smear of the late great Mel Bradford as a "racist" and fascist for daring to be critical of the centralizing despotism of Abraham Lincoln.
Eric Foner is a member of the notorious Foner family of Marxist scholars and activists in New York City; one Foner was the head of the Communist- dominated Fur Workers Union; another the head of the Communist-dominated Drug and Hospital Workers Union; and two were Marxist-Leninist historians, one, Philip S. Foner, the author of volume of a party-line history of American labor.
Eisnerizing and Fonerizing Manassas has nothing to do, on any level, with free-market ideology or free-market economic development. This impudent statist-project designed to denigrate the South should be stopped: in the name of conservatism and of genuine free-markets.
Reading this reminded me of a C-Span "BookNotes" program on which Brian Lamb asked the president of the American Historical Association, Eric Foner, about his father, Jack. Foner claimed that Jack Foner was a man "with a social conscience" who made his living through public lectures and who, along with his brothers Phil and Moe, was persecuted during the McCarthy era. When Lamb asked Foner why they were persecuted, Foner responded that his father had supported the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. But no one was actually persecuted for siding with the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The Foner brothers, on the other hand, were fairly famous Communists, one a Communist Party labor historian and another a Communist Party union organizer and leader. It is a fact that, on orders from Moscow, Communist-controlled unions in the CIO opposed the Marshall Plan's effort to rebuild Western Europe. The Marshall Plan, it should be recalled, was in part designed to prevent Stalin's empire from absorbing Western Europe as it had its satellites in the east. That's why socialists like Walter Reuther purged the reds from the CIO and also why Communists like Foner's uncle came under FBI scrutiny -- i.e., why they were "persecuted" in the McCarthy era. That Communists, like the Foners, lied at the time was understandable. They had something to hide. But why are their children lying to this day?
This collection of occasional essays by noted Marxist historian Eric Foner provides useful insight into the ever-changing, if reliably utopian, progressive mind. Foner covers a range of subjects, including blacks and the U.S. Constitution, revisionist history in Russia and South Africa, American freedom in a global age, and why there is no socialism in America. The unifying themes are "the politics and purposes of historical understanding" and the relationship between the historian and his own world.
Foner's world is impeccably and indelibly progressive. Raised in a "Communist-oriented" family, young Eric "did not have to wait until the upheavals of the 1960s to discover the yawning gap" that separated America's claim to be a land of liberty from its social and political reality. Influenced by the Communist Party's fight against racism, his family had a "preoccupation with the past and present condition of our black fellow countrymen." In this environment Foner learned how a commitment to social justice can infuse one's view of history. In effect, it gave him a headstart on the road to academic distinction—he is a former president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Such honors make him the preeminent tenured radical of his generation.
Foner is an old-line, "New Left" thinker. Social constructivism and cultural studies are not for him. The question who owns history, the burning question raised in the 1990s by controversies such as the Enola Gay exhibit and the Columbus quincentennial, is a multiculturalist distraction for committed leftists like Foner. Anyone reading this book for instruction on the philosophical questions raised by postmodernist scholarship will be disappointed. Still, cultural radicalism has its uses, and Foner is sympathetic to it. This is expressed here in his defense of historical revisionism, on which radical cultural studies depend, against a suspicious public that wants a celebratory national history.
Foner says such an attitude misunderstands the nature of historical study. Historical revisionism began with the ancient Greeks, he argues. More recently, Progressive Era icons Charles Beard and Carl Becker "demolished the notion that historical truth is fixed and permanent and that fact and interpretation can be sealed off from each other." Indeed the search for new perspectives is the "lifeblood of historical understanding." So each generation rewrites history to meet the needs of the times—"new political, social, and cultural imperatives."
Of course like all historical relativists, Foner presents this assertion as a matter of fact rather than interpretation. Moreover, he reassures us that history is not myth and invention but rests on commonly accepted professional standards. He observes: "Historical truth does exits [sic], not in the scientific sense but as a reasonable approximation of the past." Yet distrust of revisionism persists. The real problem is that people don't pay enough attention to academic historians. The "most difficult truth" for people outside the academy to accept, Foner laments, is that "there often exists more than one legitimate way of recounting past events." Who then owns history? "Everyone and no one—which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery."
More Marxist/Socialist 'Civil War History' Pt. II
Marxist historian Eric Foner, also noted in Curry's article bemoans the fact that older versions of the Battle of Gettysburg seem to paint the battle "as a morally neutral conflict between two equally honorable foes." Foner even complains that Ken Burns is too soft on the South!
MOMENT OF TRUTH
(For the Anti-American Left)
Every movement has its moment of truth. At an "anti-war" teach-in at Columbia last week, Anthropology professor Nicholas De Genova told 3,000 students and faculty, "Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live--a world where the U.S. would have no place."
De Genova continued: "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus."(1) This was a reference to the ambush of U.S. forces by an al-Qaeda warlord in Somalia in 1993. The Americans were there on a humanitarian mission to feed starving Somali Muslims. The al-Qaeda warlord was stealing the food and selling it on the black market. His forces killed 18 American soldiers and dragged their bodies through the streets in an act designed to humiliate their country. In short, America can do no good, and nothing that is done to America can be worse than it deserves.
The best that could be said of the crowd of Columbia faculty and students is that they did not react to Mogadishu remark (perhaps they did not know what "Mogadishu" referred to). But they "applauded loudly," when the same professor said, "If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine."(2)
In other words, the American left as represented by faculty and students at one of the nation's most elite universities wants America to lose the war with the terrorist and fascist regime in Baghdad. In shorts, the crowd might just have well applauded the professor's first statement as well.
The phrase "a million Mogadishus," has a resonance for those of us who participated in an earlier leftist "peace" movement, during the war in Indochina. In 1967, at the height of the conflict, the Cuban Communist leader, Che Guevara (still an icon among radicals today) called on revolutionaries all over the world "to create…two, three, many Vietnams," to defeat the American enemy. It was the Sixties version of a call for jihad.
In the late Sixties, I was the editor of Ramparts, the largest magazine of the New Left and I edited a book of anti-American essays with the same title, Two, Three, Many Vietnams. Tom Hayden a leader of the New Left (later a Democratic State Senator and activist against the war in Iraq) used the same slogan as he called for armed uprisings inside the United States. In 1962, as a Marxist radical, I myself had helped to organize the first protest against the war in Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, America had only 300 "advisers" in Vietnam, who were seeking to prevent the Communist gulag that was to come. John F. Kennedy was President and had been invited to speak on the campus. We picketed his appearance. Our slogan was, "Kennedy's Three R's: Radiation, Reaction and Repression." We didn't want peace in Vietnam. We wanted a revolution in America.
But we were clever. Or rather, we got smarter. We realized we couldn't attract large numbers of people by revealing our deranged fantasies about America (although that of course is not how we would have looked at them). We realized that we needed the support of a lot of Americans who would never agree with our real agendas if we were going to influence the course of the war. So we changed our slogan to "Bring the Troops Home." That seemed to express care for Americans while accomplishing the same goal. If America brought her troops home in the middle of the war, the Communists would win. Which is exactly what happened.
The nature of the movement that revealed itself at Columbia is the same. When the Mogadishu remark was made, it was as if the devil had inadvertently exposed his horns, and someone needed to put a hat over them before others realized it. That someone was the demonstration organizer, Professor Eric Foner, the prestigious head of Columbia's history department. Actually, when Foner spoke after De Genova at the teach-in, he failed to find the Mogadishu remark offensive. Instead Foner dissociated himself from another De Genova comment to the effect that all Americans who described themselves as "patriotic," were actually "white supremacists."
But the next day when a reporter from New York NewsDay called Foner, the professor realized that the Mogadishu remark had caused some trouble. When asked now about the statement he said it was "idiotic." He told the reporter, "I thought that was completely uncalled for. We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers." Foner did not say (and was not asked) how he thought organizing an anti-American demonstration to protest America's war in Iraq and express the hope that we lose would not encourage the enemy and possibly lead to American deaths.
Eric Foner is the scion of a family of American Communists (and American Communist leaders) at that. In the Sixties he was an anti-American Stalinist. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he wrote a piece in the London Review of Books saying, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." After receiving much adverse reaction, he wrote a self-exculpatory piece for The New York Times explaining that his uncertainty was actually patriotic.
Eric Foner's cover-up reflects a powerful tactical current in the movement to derail America's war in Iraq. Until now, the largest organization behind this movement has been "International ANSWER," which thanks in part to the efforts of the War Room and www.frontpagemag.com has been revealed as front for a Marxist-Leninist party with ties to the Communist regime in North Korea. According to a comprehensive (but partisan and sympathetic) report in The New York Times(3), some factions of the left became disturbed that the overtly radical slogans of the International ANSWER protests were "counter-productive." Last fall, they met in the offices of People For The American Way to create a new umbrella organization called United for Peace and Justice that would present a more palatable face to the American public.
As it happens, the name of the new organization was similar to that of one of the two main groups behind the national protests of the anti-Vietnam movement. It was called the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and it was a run by the American Communist Party. (As it happens, the other organizer of the national demonstrations was the MOBE, which was run by the Trotskyist Communist Party.)
The New York Times has attacked from the flank. Instead of meeting Operation Iraqi Freedom and its splendid moral, strategic, and tactical success head on, the Times has trotted out a Marxist historian, Eric Foner, to divert us from the central issues with an entry from Karl Marx's dictionary.
Foner wants America "to engage in a dialogue with the world about the meaning of freedom." He strains to persuade us that freedom includes such things as economic security, while he laments the "internationalization of current American concepts of freedom." He slips in a dig at the institution of slavery. He suggests that we respect other countries' "ways of thinking about the social order, which may not exactly match ours."
Politically Correct History
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The political left in America has apparently decided that American history must be rewritten so that it can be used in the political campaign for reparations for slavery. Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., of Chicago inserted language in a Department of Interior appropriations bill for 2000 that instructed the National Park Service to propagandize about slavery as the sole cause of the war at all Civil War park sites. The Marxist historian Eric Foner has joined forces with Jackson and will assist the National Park Service in its efforts at rewriting history so that it better serves the political agenda of the far left. Congressman Jackson has candidly described this whole effort as "a down payment on reparations." (Foner ought to be quite familiar with the "art" of rewriting politically-correct history. He was the chairman of the committee at Columbia University that awarded the "prestigious" Bancroft Prize in history to Emory University’s Michael A. Bellesiles, author of the anti-Second Amendment book, "Arming America," that turned out to be fraudulent. Bellesiles was forced to resign from Emory and his publisher has ceased publishing the book.)
Eric Foner, an ornament of Columbia University's Marxist firmament, trivialized the attack by announcing himself unsure "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
that is FACT.
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