FACES AND PLACES: Life on Planet Marx (09/16/01)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Life on Planet Marx

Old Marxists never die. They just move to another planet where they coach young Marxists.

Planet Marx has two continents: Draconia, which is dark and cold, and Oblivia, which is sunny and warm. Residing on the northern half of Draconia are its first explorers: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tsung (a.k.a. Mao Zedong), Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and Mengistu Haile Mariam. In coming to power in Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia, they systemically destroyed or transformed every major institution associated with the national past: family, church, school, political party, labor union. They consolidated their leadership through famine, terror, repression, and acts never before imagined. They forged a new identity for their people, an individuality based on unequivocal allegiance and devotion to the dictates of one party, one leader. Accomplishing all of this was no easy task. It required the death of 20 million people in the USSR, 65 million in China, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Ethiopia.

Living on a northern peninsula of the Draconian coast are the apostles of the ideological fathers whose crimes do not warrant major league status. Here we find Tito, Castro, Enver Hoxha, Janos Kadar, Gustav Husak, Nicolae Ceausescu and many others who either established or consolidated Marxist power in Yugoslavia, Cuba, Albania, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia and Romania.

On a cold mountain of Draconia live America's traitors: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and various government officials such as White House aides Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, and atomic scientists Klaus Fuchs and Robert Oppenheimer.

An island off the northern coast of Draconia houses members of the Old Left in America, the various secretaries of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) - Charles Ruthenberg, Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, Earl Browder, Eugene Dennis - as well as countless members of the Popular Front during the 1930s and 1940s.

On the sunny continent of Oblivia, where they live in capitalist affluence and security, one finds Marxism's many enablers. They are led by Western correspondents who found little about Marxism they didn't like. The Dean of this special press corps is John Reed, author of that Leninist panegyric "Ten Days That Changed the World." Other residents include Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who helped cover up Ukraine's forced famine, columnist I.F.Stone, who was actually a Soviet agent, and Albert Kahn, another Soviet agent who co-authored "The Secret War Against America," a best-selling World War II publication that viciously scourged such Ukrainian American national organizations as the Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Association. Also settled here are fellow travelers such as U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Joseph Davies and noted authors Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Upton Sinclair and George Lukacs. All worshipped at Stalin's altar during their lifetimes.

Basking in the warmth of Oblivia we can also find America's mini-Marxists, the so-called New Left - radical activists from the '60s and '70s such as Bettina Apetheker, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Stokely Carmichael, Diane Dohrn, Huey Newton, Jane Fonda, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and numerous others who, in hating America, loved Cuba and North Vietnam.

After their fantasies failed to materialize, the mini-Marxists began their "long march through the institutions," meaning, in the words of Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse, "working against the established institutions while working in them."

Some eventually became tenured university professors. Mimicking Soviet higher education, their social justice agenda came to include multiculturalism and political correctness. Framing all discourse around terms such as "exploitation," "hegemony" and "power," promoting cliches such as "the personal is always the political" and serving on hiring committees to make certain all new hires are "ideologically pure," the new professoriat has systematically undermined liberal education.

Today, many prestigious American universities are closed shops, home to what Tom Wolfe calls "Rococo Marxists," an intellectual element wedded to "hives of abstruse doctrines such as structuralism, post-structualism, post-modernism, deconstruction, reader-response theory."

They have a burning desire to become "benefactors to women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transexuals and other "oppressed" peoples. Slowed for a brief period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, mini-Marxists are back to doing what Marxists do best: publishing books such as "After Marxism" (Ronald Aronson) and "What's Left? Radical Politics in the Postcommunist Era" (Charles Derber).

Marxists have not been relegated to the ash heap of history. They're alive and well and living on Planet Marx.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com.

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