Our seeming error? Your fault.

Last updated on: October 18, 2020 at 6:40 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Our seeming error? Your fault. 2020-10-18T18:40:20-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Opposing the murderous Soviet Union was not what the cool kids did back when I was the right age to be a kid. (I have always been temperamentally unable to be cool, even as a kid.) This continued right through graduate school until the Soviet Union fell, the truth could be found in archives, and even Gorbachev turned out to be monstrous so anti-communists waited for a (moment of) vindication. This never took place, because as one academic told me: “We were never pro-Soviet, just anti-anti-Communist.” Evidently the sins of the opposition to a murderous, genocidal regime, say a lack of proper footnoting, justified rushing off on junkets to Moscow to see the future and how it worked. The sad reality, the academic suggested to me, was that all of them bore the double burden of (very quietly) opposing the Soviet Union while being forced to publicly, loudly, and with every vote oppose American anti-communism.

That one was hard pressed to find much more than a sentence opposing the genocide in Ukraine or the gulags was the fault of boorish anti-communists. “Hadn’t I heard of the blacklists in Hollywood? People could not make movies!” This was bad, one could readily agree, but perhaps not like starving millions to death in planned famines. In fact, opposing the Soviet Union in educated company caused rapid onset of Tu Quoque .

Agree that all the evils are evil and yet the Soviet Union remained evil, powerful, and worthy of condemnation and a great silence would ensue. “Why was I so obsessed?”

Perhaps because my fellow church members were being butchered, had been butchered, and would be butchered as long as the Soviet Union endured?

Few recall Soviet savagery now: 1989 is long ago. There was no accounting, not in Russia really or here for those who were sycophants for Stalin and his successors.

I know young adults, graduate students in American universities, who deny that the gulags happened or that they were really “so bad.” Readers of a certain age or of one political perspective might be nodding along. This is bad, very bad.

Yet this same type of argument infects so many of us so often! We cannot get around to condemning the greater evil due to the mistakes (and even evils!) of some of those opposed to the world class systemic badness of a system like the Soviet Union.

Just as we cannot move forward without telling the truth of American academic support for Jim Crow and scientific racism, we cannot move forward with telling the truth about American academic sycophancy toward Soviet tyranny for decades. My childhood friend, given a lobotomy by the state of New York for the crime of being Black in America, was real. So was the Polish student down the hall from me in college who had faced the horrors of Soviet occupation.

When Black Americans tell us of the suffering of the community, we must hear and not shift blame. When Soviet era survivors tell us what American fellow travelers did to help the Soviet regime, we must listen and not shift blame. This practice of honesty in the elite academy has particular relevance at the moment.

Our corporate bosses and much of our academic class are now silent, supporting, supine before the murderous atheists in the Chinese Communist Party and the old history is being repeated. How many of our universities are co-opted by Chinese Communist money? If one mentions these facts, then too often one is told to be silent as this might help some other loathsome force. They socially distance from the uncomfortable truth with the mask of Tu Quoque.

And the answer is again the same: the evil over there does not justify the evil here. There is something genuinely dreadful about those who have little to say or do about racism, but much to say about the mistakes of anti-racists. There is a deep mental corruption in those who will not call out the vile Soviet Union or hold fellow travelers in the United States to the same standard we held Nazi collaborators after World War II. There is present evil in those who profit from the present murderous Communist regimes (China, North Korea) and have more to say about the imprudence of those who speak up against them.

Focus on the good anti-communists, making common cause against the Soviets. Find the activists against racism who are doing good work and amplify the effort. Otherwise, one begins to suspect that the Soviets, the racism, the Chinese concentration camps really are much less disturbing than the excesses of those who oppose them to some Americans. And one wonders why.

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