Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (28 page)

This economic success provided a stark contrast to Castro's achievement. In 1959, when he took power, Cuba was enjoying the second highest per capita income in Latin America. But in the thirty years that followed, Cuba had become one of the three poorest of the twenty or so Latin American republics. Food was scarcer than it had been within the memory of any Cuban alive, and even automobiles had vanished from Cuban streets. After Pinochet announced his referendum, Castro was approached by socialist supporters in Europe who appealed to him to hold a similar election to pave the way for democracy in Cuba. He refused.

The results of Pinochet's referendum were instructive. If the dictator had won, he would have become the new president of a democratic Chile. But Chileans rejected Pinochet, and elected a more moderate candidate who was not of the left. True to his word, Pinochet stepped down. His dictatorship had indeed been a temporary measure to restore Chile's stability, prosperity, and democracy. Moreover, after fifteen years of military dictatorship, Pinochet had still received a larger percentage of the popular vote than Allende had received to get elected in the first place.

These developments prompted me to take another look at Allende's decision to institute the radical programs that led to the coup and a mini-civil war. I had long since become suspicious of the idea that the CIA was a kind of deus ex machina that could explain these events. The CIA surely had a finger in the Chilean pot, but it had become clear over time that there were limits to what the CIA could accomplish. The CIA had not, for example, been able to overthrow Castro himself, despite his proximity to the United States, the relatively small population of Cuba, and its economic weakness. It could not even oust the marxist dictator of a ministate like Grenada, or a drug lord in its own employ like Panama's Noriega. These removals required military invasions. And Chile was not a tiny island or an isthmus nation, but a relatively large country, with a long-standing democratic tradition. Moreover, if Chileans themselves saw Pinochet as a creature of the CIA, it is unlikely he would have received a greater percentage of the vote than Allende.

Allende, however, was a radical, and to his left were forces more radical still. In 1970, when he came to power, these forces were inspired by Cuba's revolutionary example. They were impatient with the frustratingly slow processes of democracy, and quickly pushed Allende into measures designed to initiate a socialist regime, which was well beyond his electoral mandate and what Chile's constitution would allow. The result was an economic and political crisis that was soon out of his control. An article in the
Wall Street Journal
after Pinochet's arrest, summarizes what followed:

Salvador Allende reached the presidency of Chile in 1970 with only 36 percent of the vote, barely forty thousand votes ahead of the candidate of the right. In Mr. Allende's one thousand days of rule, Chile degenerated into what the much-lionized former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva (father of the current president) called a "carnival of madness." Eleven months before the fall of President Allende, Mr. Frei said: "Chile is in the throes of an economic disaster: not a crisis, but a veritable catastrophe. . . ." Shortly after those remarks were made, the legal ground beneath the Allende presidency began to crumble. The Chilean Supreme Court, the Bar Association and the leftist Medical Society, along with the Chamber of Deputies and provincial heads of the Christian Democrat Party, all warned that Allende was systematically trampling the law and constitution. By August 1973, more than a million Chileans — half the work force — were on strike, demanding that Allende go. Transport and industry were paralyzed. On Sept. 11, 1973, the armed forces acted to oust Allende, going into battle against his gunslingers. Six hours after the fighting erupted, Allende blew his head off in the presidential palace with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro.
^*

Forty years of history have left us with a fairly clear perspective on these two repressive regimes. Castro bankrupted his country, tyrannized its inhabitants, and is now the longest reigning dictator in the world. Pinochet presided over his own ruthless dictatorship for fifteen years, but created a booming economy and eventually restored democracy to Chile. If one had to choose between a Castro and a Pinochet, from the point of view of the poor, the victimized, and the oppressed, the choice would not be difficult. As an American conservative, however, I did not have to do that. It was Chileans, not Henry Kissinger or Richard Nixon, who made the real decision to put Pinochet in power. Unlike the American left, which passionately supported Fidel Castro and denied the realities of the oppressive state, the American right's sympathies for Pinochet were generally muted, and did not involve blindness to the stringency of his rule. In short, Pinochet's career does not compromise conservative expectations in the way that Castro's dictatorship compromises the visions of the left.

The imprisoning of Pinochet on a trip to London to seek medical help was a minor incident in the larger narrative. It is one of those bad ideas of progressives that will come back to bite them. Consider, for example, the prospect for Castro himself should he venture abroad for medical reasons. Yet, perhaps the idea does work from the partisan perspective of the left. What made Pinochet vulnerable to this kind of arrest is that he had voluntarily retired from his dictator's role. There is no danger of a Castro doing that.

^*
A detailed study of Allende's three years in power and the causes of his fall can be found in Mark Falcoff's
Modern Chile
(New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers 1989).

W
HY DO POLITICAL "PROGRESSIVES" feel the need to lie so regularly about who they are? The question is an old one, but is newly prompted by a biography of feminist leader Betty Friedan, which establishes beyond doubt that the woman who virtually created modern feminism is a political imposter. In her path-breaking book,
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan presented herself as a typical suburban housewife not "even conscious of the woman question" before she began work on her manuscript. But now Smith professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) has shown that nothing could be further from the truth.
^*
Under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, the record reveals that Friedan was a political activist and professional propagandist for the communist left for nearly thirty years before the 1963 publication of The Feminist Mystique launched the modern feminist movement.

Betty Friedan's secret was shared by hundreds of her comrades on the left — though not, of course, by the unsuspecting American public — who went along with her charade presumably as a way to support her political agenda. As Horowitz's biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist marxist (or a camp follower thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America's Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Not at all a neophyte when it came to "the woman question" (the phrase itself is a marxist construction), she was certainly familiar with the writings of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on the subject and had written about it herself as a journalist for the official publication of the communist-controlled United Electrical Workers union. These newly disclosed facts suggest that the histories of feminism, including some written by other veterans of the communist movement like Eleanor Flexner and Gerda Lerner, apparently another Party alumna, need to be reexamined just to get the record straight.

The antecedents of Friedan's version of feminism also bear revisiting in light of the new information. Her infamous description of America's suburban family household as "a comfortable concentration camp," in
The Feminine Mystique
, probably had more to do with her marxist hatred for America than for her own experience as a housewife and mother. Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained to a reporter in 1970 that, far from being a homebody, his wife "was in the world during the whole marriage, either full time or free lance," lived in an eleven-room mansion on the Hudson with a full-time maid, and "seldom was a wife and a mother." Of course, no one paid much attention to the family "patriarch" when he supplied these interesting details, because as a male he was deemed guilty before the fact.

One indication that Goldstein-Friedan has not liberated herself entirely from the Stalinist mentality that shaped her views is the fact that she still feels the need to lie about her identity. Although her biographer is a sympathetic leftist, Friedan refused to cooperate with him once she realized he was going to tell the truth. After Horowitz published an initial article about Friedan's youthful work as a "labor journalist," Friedan publicly maligned him.

Speaking to an American University audience, she remarked: "Some historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent."

This was both false and unkind because Friedan's professor-biographer bends over backwards throughout his book to sanitize the true dimensions of Friedan's past. Thus he describes Steve Nelson as "the legendary radical, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and Bay area party official." In fact, Nelson was an obscure radical but an important party apparatchik (later notorious for his espionage activities in the Berkeley Radiation Lab), who would be a legend only to other communists and who was in Spain as a party commissar to enforce the Stalinist line. The professor also bends over backwards to defend Friedan's lying, excusing it as a response to "McCarthyism." In her attack on him she claimed, absurdly, that he was going to use "innuendos" to describe her past. This was based on the fact that he had asked questions about what she actually believed at the time, based on his examination of her published articles. Horowitz's response to what might be called Friedan's "right baiting" is all-too understanding or would be seen as such by anyone outside the claustrophobic circles of the left. "Innuendos," he explains, is a word often used by people "scarred by McCarthyism." Indeed.

Reading these passages called to mind a C-SPAN
Booknotes
program on which Brian Lamb asked the president-elect of the American Historical Association, Eric Foner, about his father, Jack. The younger Foner claimed that his father 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 disingenuously that his father was a political dissenter and had supported the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. (He repeated this misleading charade in a similar exchange with a reporter from the
Chronicle of Higher Education
.
^†
) Even in the McCarthy 1950s, no one was persecuted simply for siding with the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War.

The Foner brothers, in fact, were fairly well-known communists, one a party labor historian and another a party union organizer. It is a historical fact that, communist-controlled unions in the cio, on orders from Moscow, sought to block the Marshall Plan effort to rebuild Western Europe. This was a plan, it should be recalled, that was in part designed to prevent Stalin's empire from absorbing Western Europe which had been the fate of the new satellites in Eastern Europe. That is why socialists like Walter Reuther purged the union "reds" from the CIO and also why communists like Foner's uncle came under FBI scrutiny — that is, why they were "persecuted" in the McCarthy era. They were potential fifth column agents for the Soviet state.

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? And why are people like Betty Friedan lying, long after they have anything to fear from McCarthy committees and other government investigators?

Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal their communist pasts in the Clinton era are going to be persecuted by the American government. The folk singer, Pete Seeger, a party puppet his entire life, is a nationally celebrated entertainer and was honored at the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by President Clinton himself. Angela Davis was once the Communist Party's candidate for vice president and served the police states of the Soviet empire until their very last gasps. Her punishment for this career is to have been appointed "President's Professor" at the state-run University of California, one of only seven faculty members on its nine campuses to be so honored. Nationally, she is a living academic legend, officially invited to speak on ceremonial occasions at exorbitant fees by college administrations across the country and memorialized with rooms and lounges named in her honor-this despite the absence of any notable scholarly contributions on her part and a corpus of work that is little more than ideological tripe.

Nor does the amnesty extend merely to members of the Communist Party. In the midst of the Vietnam War, New Left icon Jane Fonda incited American troops to defect in a broadcast she made from the enemy capital over Radio Hanoi. She then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award and eventually become the wife of one of America's most powerful media moguls. In this capacity she oversaw a twenty-two-hour CNN Series
On the Cold War
equating McCarthyism with the Soviet gulag. This travesty is now an "educational" tool destined for use in classrooms in every state in the nation. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first political terrorist cult, who once officially declared war on "Amerika" and personally set a bomb in the nation's Capitol, and who has never conceded even minimal regret for her crimes or hinted at the slightest revision of her views, was appointed by the Clinton Administration to a Justice Department commission on children. Her husband and equally unrepentant fellow terrorist, Billy Ayers, is a professor of early child education at Northwestern University. The idea that America relentlessly punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if they tell the truth about what they did fifty years ago.
^‡