Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (31 page)

In that same spring, the Motion Picture Academy honored Elia Kazan, a theater legend who had been blacklisted for nearly half a century by the Hollywood left. He, too, was called a "Judas" by leftist members of the Academy protesting his award. Kazads sin was to testify before a congressional committee about fellow communists who were also loyal supporters of Stalids monstrous regime, and who conducted their own blacklist of anti-Stalinists in the entertainment community. Kazads most celebrated film,
On the Waterfront
, scripted by another disillusioned communist, Budd Schulberg, depicts a longshoreman who "snitches" to a congressional committee that is investigating organized crime, specifically a mob that controls his own union and exploits its membership. It is a thinly veiled commentary on Kazads and Schulberg's experiences in the left.

"Snitching" is how the progressive mob regards the act of speaking truth to power, when the power is its own. The mafia calls its code of silence
omerta
, because the penalty for speaking against the mob is death. The left's penalty for defection (in those countries where it does not exercise state power) is excommunication from its community of saints. This is a kind of death, too.

Cognizant of these realities, I avoided informing on friends or even "outing" them, during my own journey out of the left many years ago. In fact, my first political statements opposing the left were made a decade after I had ceased to be an active participant in its cause and when the battles I had participated in were over. This did not make an iota of difference, however, when it came to my former comrades denouncing me as a "renegade," as though I in fact had become an informer. I was subjected to the same kind of personal betrayal Hitchens is experiencing now. With only a handful of exceptions, all the friends I had made in the first forty years of my life turned their backs on me, refusing to know me, when my politics changed.

This tainting and ostracism of sinners is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith. It is what keeps the faithful faithful. The spectacle of what happens to a heretic like Hitchens when he challenges the party code is a warning to others not to try it. This is why Alger Hiss kept his silence to the end, and why, even thirty and fifty years after the fact, the memoirs of leftists are so elusive and disingenuous when it comes to telling the hard political and personal truths about who they were and what they did. To tell a threatening truth is to risk vanishing in the progressive communities in which you have staked your life — and to risk vanishing in memory, too. Hitchens's crime is not the betrayal of friendship. It is the betrayal of progressive politics, the only bond the left takes seriously.

This is far from obvious to those who have never been insiders. Writing in the
Wall Street Journal,
the otherwise perceptive Roger Kimball described what has happened to Hitchens under the following caption: "Leftists Sacrifice Truth on the Altar of Friendship."

But this presumes either that they were closer friends of Blumenthal than of Hitchens, or that friendship means more to them than politics. None of the denouncers of Hitchens even claimed a closer friendship with Blumenthal as a reason for their choice. Moreover, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that these leftists would remain friends of Blumenthal should he, in turn, reveal what he really knows about Clinton's obstructions of justice and the machinations of the White House crew.

To examine an actual betrayal of friendship one need go no further than Cockburn's
New York Press
column outing Hitchens as a compulsive snitch. Friends can take different political paths and still honor the life that was once between them, the qualities and virtues that made them friends. Alex was once closer to Hitchens than Blumenthal ever was. They knew each other longer and their friendship was deeper. Hitchens even named his own son "Alex" out of admiration for his friend. But in his column, Alex gratuitously smeared Hitchens (who is married) as an aggressive closet homosexual, an odorous, ill-mannered, and obnoxious drunk, a pervert who gets a sexual frisson out of ratting on his intimates.

Not a single member of Hitchens's former circle, which include people who have known him as a comrade for thirty years, has stepped forward to defend him from the ugly slander.

What then inspires these auto-da-fés? It is the fact that the community of the left is a community of meaning and is bound by ties that are fundamentally religious. For the nonreligious, politics is the art of managing the possible. For the left, it is the path to a social redemption. This messianism is its political essence. For the left, the agenda of politics is ultimately not about practical options concerning which reasonable people may reasonably differ. It is about moral choices that define one as human. It is about taking sides in a war that will decide the future and whether the principle of justice will prevail. It is about
us
being on the side of the angels, and
them
as the party of the damned. In the act of giving up Blumenthal to the congressional majority and the special prosecutor, Hitchens put power in the hands of the enemies of the people. He acted as one of
them
.

Katha Pollitt puts it to Hitchens this way: "Why should you, who call yourself a socialist, a man of the left, help Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and Trent Lott? If Clinton is evil, are the forces arrayed against him better, with their 100 percent ratings from the Christian coalition, and their after-dinner speaking engagements at white supremacist clubs?" Of course, Katha Pollitt doesn't for a moment think that Clinton is evil. But Hitchens's new friends obviously are. Observe how easily she invokes the McCarthy stratagems to create the taint — the demonization of Hitchens's new "friends," the guilts by association that link him to them and them to the devil, the absurd reduction of the entire Clinton opposition to any of these links.

The casting out of Hitchens, then, was a necessary ritual to protect the left's myth of itself as a redemptive force. How could Blumenthal, who is one of them, who is loyal to their cause be connected to something evil, as Hitchens suggests? How could
they
? All of Hitchens's attackers and all fifty-eight members of the congressional Progressive Caucus — yesterday's vanguard opponents of American military power — supported the wanton strikes against the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, without batting a proverbial lash. Every one of them found a way to excuse Clinton's abuse of disposable women like Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky. The last thing they would want to do is confront Blumenthal's collusion in a campaign to destroy one of Clinton's female nuisances because she became a political threat. After all, it is they who want the reprobate in power. In blurting out the truth, Hitchens slammed the left up against its hypocrisies and threatened to unmask their sanctimonious pretensions. This is the threat the anathema on Hitchens was designed to suppress.

Here is my own message for the condemned man: You and I, Christopher, will continue our disagreements on many important things, and perhaps most things. But I take my hat off to you for what you have done. For your dedicated pursuit of the truth in these matters, and for your courage in standing up under fire. The comrades who have left you are incapable of such acts.

T
HE FIRST COLUMN I WROTE for the Internet magazine
Salon
in 1997 was a piece about the director Elia Kazan, calling for an end to Hollywood's "longest blacklist." For more than twenty years it had been impossible to honor Kazan in Hollywood, although he was its greatest living film legend. I did not say so at the time, but I felt a kinship with Kazan in the fact that the invitation to write for
Salon
had ended a long exile for me from the literary culture, the result of a kind of graylist in force for exradicals like myself.

I had no idea the shunning of Hollywood's greatest living figure would come to an end only two years later, or that it would come as a result of an honor bestowed on him by the Academy of Motion Pictures itself. Ostensibly the anti-Kazan anger was over the original blacklist of communists that was introduced into the film industry by the Hollywood studio heads some fifty years ago. Abe Polonsky and Bernard Gordon, two minor film professionals who organized the anti-Kazan protest, had been among those blacklisted at the time. Their charge against Kazan was that he had been an "informer" for the blacklisters, had collaborated with witch-hunters, and had betrayed colleagues and friends. For these crimes, they argued, the film community should continue to shun him and not give him an award.

Let me make clear my own views of congressional investigations like the one with which Kazan cooperated. The only legitimate purpose of congressional investigations is to determine whether there should be legislation to deal with certain problems and how that legislation should be designed. It was as legitimate for Congress to hold hearings inquiring into the influence of an organization like the Communist Party in an important American industry like film, as it was for legislators to inquire into the influence of organized crime in the union movement and other areas of American life. The Communist Party was conspiratorial in nature and operated through concealed agendas. It infiltrated open organizations and set out to control them through systematic deception and political manipulation. Its own purposes were determined by the fact that it was financed and directed by a foreign dictatorial power, whom its members worshiped. Kazan deeply resented the way the Communist Party had infiltrated and taken control of the Group Theater, where he was an actor and director, to exploit it for its own political ends.

What was not legitimate in these investigations was for congressmen to use their hearings to expose the influence of communists (or gangsters, for that matter) to the public at large. Such public hearings were, in effect, trials without the due process protections afforded by courts of law. By opening testimony to the public, the committees, in effect, tried uncooperative witnesses who were called before them. The committees became juries, judges, and executioners all rolled into one, since the mere charge of being a gangster or a communist was enough to ensure a public judgment that was punitive.

By this standard, many congressional investigations that are open, whether they are of organized crime or of communists or of executive misdeeds, as in the Iran-Contra Hearings, have the potential for such abuses and are equally illegitimate, and qualify as witch-hunts. Oliver North had no more constitutional protections than did the communists in the McCarthy era when he appeared before the Iran-Contra committee and had to sit in the dock while Senators and congressman who enjoyed legal immunity denounced him as a liar and traitor to the entire nation. On the other hand, I do not remember protests issuing from liberals over the attempted public hanging of Oliver North and the other Iran-Contra figures. Perhaps that is because the political shoe was on the other foot. Yet the only way to avoid such abuses of congressional power would be to require that all such congressional hearings be closed.

There were other aspects of the Hollywood witch-hunt (and of Kazan's role) that were blurred in the ensuing Academy controversy. Every one of the communists Kazan named, for example, had already been identified as a communist by other witnesses. None of those he named even worked in the film industry, but were theater professionals in New York. In other words, Kazan's testimony destroyed no Hollywood careers. More importantly, it was not Congress that imposed the blacklist but Hollywood itself. This little fact, now forgotten, was dramatized by the way the blacklist finally came to an end. This was accomplished essentially through the action of one man, who was not even one of the studio heads who had initiated the process. The blacklist episode was put to an end by the actor Kirk Douglas when he decided to give Dalton Trumbo a screen credit for the film
Spartacus
. By putting Trumbo's name on the credits he legitimized those who had been hitherto banished and opened the doors to their return. What made the blacklist possible was Hollywood itself — the collusion of all those actors, writers, and directors (some of whom sat on their hands and scowled for the cameras the night Kazan's own exile ended) who went to work day and in a day out during the blacklist years, while their friends and colleagues languished out in the cold. The anti-Kazan protest, in short, was entirely symbolic and contained large dollops of hypocrisy and amnesia. Ultimately, it was an attempt to re-fight the Cold War. And that is why the anti-Kazan forces lost.

Suppose the studio heads who met in 1951 to ban communists in Hollywood had instead announced that they were not going to employ nazis and racists, or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Would Abe Polonsky and Bernard Gordon and the other progressives who tried to deny Kazan his honor have come out to protest
this
blacklist? Would they have regarded friendly witnesses against the Nazis and racists as betrayers of "friends?" Or would they have welcomed them as men who had come to their senses and done the right thing?

Many of those who defended the Kazan award invoked the quality of his art to overlook what he did politically. The director Paul Schrader was typical. Artistically, he told the
LA Weekly
, "Kazan is a giant. [But] that does not mitigate the fact that he did wrong things. I think evil things. But at the end of the day, he's an artist, and his work towers over that." Schrader explained that to say Kazan should not get an honorary Oscar was like saying that Leni Riefenstahl shouldn't be acknowledged because she worked under the heel of Hitler's propaganda machine. What Schrader (and others) conveniently overlooked was that it was Kazan's antagonists who volunteered to work for Stalin's propaganda machine, while Kazan went to the mat for America, for the democracy that had given him refuge, freedom, and unbounded opportunity.