Responses to Criticism of "Why the Left Won't Support the GWOT"

I recently received a scathing criticism from someone on this recent article of mine. Without going into the invective, I will respond to the legitimate points raised which were:

1. The article "oversimplifies" by lumping all conflicts as a battle between the U.S. and global communism and anyone who disagrees with this or is critical of U.S. policy must be a communist.

2. That I called the McCarthy period a "fiasco" is taken to mean I thought what he did was all wrong, yet the rest of the article sounds to him like the McCarthyist rant of a "fevered" paranoiac. He equated my criticisms of the Left to "Stalinist tactics" which would presumably see all opponents to the Iraq war in a "gulag".

Response to #1. Well of course this argument is an oversimplification in and of itself and does not track with the assertions in the article but I will answer it anyway. To wit:

a. The vast majority of people everywhere are mostly concerned with themselves and their own lives. They don't have time or inclination to flesh out the labyrinth of facts surrounding public policy issues. There is even a term in economics for it: "rational ignorance." People are generally too busy with their lives, jobs, raising kids, etc. They are the innocents in the sense that if they follow a foolish policy, it is perhaps because they haven't really examined it critically. They generally react by emotion and are easily manipulated and subliminally intimidated into viewing various issues in certain ways. This is why so many members of the organized Left have found their way into the media and film. As Stalin once said: "If I could control Hollywood, I could rule the world." So he set out to do just that.

b. The organized Left in the U.S. and probably most other places, has its origins in the development of the Communist International first by Lenin, continued by Stalin, and having remained in place in one form or another although the name has changed frequently. This is not my opinion. It is a fact, easily verified by tracing the roots of organizations and their controlling members. A great site for studying the genealogy of groups and individuals is http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/ a brilliant piece of work by David Horowitz, himself a former radical and founding member of the New Left.

c. The organized Left, as represented by people like Lynn Stewart and groups like the National Lawyers Guild, ACLU and others, remain part and parcel of that movement. Once again, this is easily verifiable fact based on known party members and the roots of these organizations. Does that mean all members of the ACLU for instance are communists committed to the downfall of the West? Of course not. The vast majority are simply people believing mistakenly they work for 'human rights" organizations in the interest of "progress". They buy the propaganda that people who say otherwise are simply "fevered neoconservatives". In fact, such groups deliberately rely on having large memberships of noncommunists in order to give them the air of legitimacy. These are all standard Leninist tactics. You might benefit by reading some of his works.

Response to #2. First of all, most people are unaware of the fact that the invective "McCarthyism" was first coined in the 1950s by the communists themselves. So was the phrase "red-baiting". But never mind all that; here are my responses:

a. McCarthy WAS on the right track. And if you consider his one set of Senate hearings on concerns regarding espionage at one U.S. Army base in Monmouth, NJ, later found to be warranted, to be equivalent to Stalinist gulag tactics, maybe you need to join Amnesty International. After all, they compared the treatment of 500 odd terrorist prisoners at Guantanimo Bay, Cuba - most of whom live better there than they ever did in Afghanistan - to the decades long incarceration and starvation and torture deaths of tens of millions of innocent Soviet civilians in the Gulag Archipelago. Who may I ask, has the "fevered" imagination?

b. What made the whole thing a fiasco, was largely that McCarthy's U.S. Senate colleagues, in typically craven fashion, saw a bigger percentage in helping to destroy him than in confronting a much more bruising battle, namely the outing of traitors within the U.S. defense and diplomatic community and the whole issue of communist subversion throughout our society. They were helped in this battle by McCarthy's own character flaws and his alcoholism, as well as a very concerted effort by the American Left to discredit him. The end result was a political establishment intimidated from looking too deeply into the ongoing treasonous activities of American communists. That made it, truly, a fiasco of epic proportions, from which we still suffer today.

However, it need not have been McCarthy. He helped his enemies in a certain way by making a lot of tactical errors. But anyone who attempted to probe deeply into these issues would be faced with similar attacks. And the attacks would not abate until the prober was successfully denounced. This tactic has been successfully used since then, the most prominent example being the "Borking" of Supreme Court Justice nominee Robert Bork.

c. The whole point of all this is that we HAVE TO RECOGNIZE that there is an organized group quite deeply entrenched in the fabric of our society, which has the destruction of our society, through violence if necessary, as its stated goal. Lynn Stewart makes no bones about this. She is quite forthright. Why do you have so much trouble seeing this?

d. And if your answer is "What's the matter with communism?" then I think you've answered the question yourself. Communism is not the only evil we have faced over the past 100 years, but it is a primary one, and it is one whose potential for catastrophic and permanent damage to what remains of our society, far eclipses anything else we face. Anyone who can slough off the communist murder over the past century of 100 million odd innocent civilians as "breaking a few eggs to make an omelet", simply needs to have his head examined.