Hollywood Conservative Blacklist: “Your kind of actor…”
Posted by Dirty Harry on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
There may not be an actual conservative blacklist in Hollywood, but there is a backdoor one. In many cases it’s not even conscious. It’s just that when you think someone’s Hitler, you don’t want to work with them. And they think we’re Hitler.
From firsthand, eyeballs-on experience I can tell you there are a number of well-known actors, directors, and producers who will not come out publicly as conservatives. And we’ve all shared the same experience: sitting in production meetings as the ugly and uninformed hammer America, Bush, Christians, and everything else we hold dear. And they do it unconcerned that the company might be mixed because their mother didn’t teach them any better and the company usually isn’t mixed.
Our decision to not speak up isn’t out of fear, we just know from experience that too many of them (not all) are willing to get ugly and are fueled by hate as opposed to intellect. The tension and harsh feelings simply aren’t worth it.
Last year, I finished an independent film I both wrote and directed. One day I had to listen to one of the actors (whom I consider a friend) announce to a location filled with 30-plus cast and crew that he wasn’t prejudiced against anyone except “those awful, racist Republicans.” My choice as the director was always towards harmony on the set, so I said nothing. However, my script supervisor — The Hot Little Number I Call Mrs. Harry — required physical restraint. You see, even though there’s not much room, she’s to the right of me.
This actor still doesn’t know my political beliefs. To be fair, a couple of others do, we’re still friends, and enjoy the back and forth of it all. But they fully understand my request that they tell no one.
Fortunately, for conservatives across the pond, things appear to be getting better. So says Tory and Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes:
…Fellowes’ passionate support for the Conservative Party, proved a stumbling block to his early acting career.
“I chose to become an actor when the business had been swallowed up by champagne socialism,” he says. “It was a kind of soft socialism which allowed you to have a table at The Ivy.
“I experienced real prejudice because of my politics. I couldn’t get an audition for the RSC or get into the National, even when a director asked for me. RSC casting director Gillian Diamond actually said, ‘We think your kind of actor is better off on the other side of the river.’ That was one of the most patronising remarks I have ever received in my life. It was disgraceful and anti-arts. I was also kicked off a TV series because the star, who was a Labour voter, wouldn’t work with me.” …
The revitalisation of the Conservative Party under the “charming” David Cameron and the sea of troubles engulfing the “wretched” Mr Brown means Fellowes isn’t as alone as he once was.
“It is nice to know that you can now vote Conservative and people will not assume that you have no talent. Most of my friends in the business are Labour; that’s the way it is. Nevertheless, they no longer feel I need medical intervention.”
No longer feeling conservatives are in need of medical attention really is progress.
Filed in General |
Buck Turgidsonon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:55 am 1“You see, even though there’s not much room,”
My ass!
“she’s to the right of me.”
So you really did marry “up.” Remember, the wife is always correct.
Opuson 22 Jun 2008 at 11:54 am 2While I believe the blacklist, conscious or not,is there, I’d like to hear some examples. Names removed of course.
Stephanieon 22 Jun 2008 at 12:39 pm 3Opus
Ask Tom Selleck about being shunned. He could tell you oodles of stuff about being ridiculed, slimed and libeled. Basically given the cold shoulder because he was a Republican. He has had to call himself an independent in order to get noticed. They have treated this fine actor and man like crap. That is black listing. Its bullcrap.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 2:46 pm 4Sorry, but the “blacklist” you describe simply does not compare with the wrecked careers faced by many liberals during the actual red scare blacklist. Zero Mostel, Phil Loeb, Howard Fast, and others endured much, much more than merely a sense of self-consciousness about their political views. And am I truly expected to believe that Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and John Milius are enduring a similar level of political persecution?
Wilson the Volleyballon 22 Jun 2008 at 2:55 pm 5I worked in a semi-professional theatre company for awhile. Anyway, everyone was liberal and most of them were great. We’d get into a respectful discussion, and agree to disagree.
But I’ll never forget this one, obnoxious, emotional actress who thought I was a Nazi because I supported Bush. Our first exchange went something like this:
Her: You want to go protest this weekend?
Me: What are we protesting?
Her: Bush.
Me: What aspect of Bush (I was willing to protest his spending habits or illegal immigration policies)
Her: Just everything.
Me: No thanks.
Her: (genuinely surprised) Why not?
Me: I voted for him.
This was followed by five to ten minutes of us getting into a heated exchange. Then…
Me: Trust me. I’ve lived all over the world. You may not agree with him, but he’s not Hitler, right?
She then gives me a look like “Oh, yes he is.”
I never understood it. I really didn’t. What do my political beliefs have to do with my ability to act well? Or write a good screenplay? Or notice the aesthetics of the medium? NOTHING!
I should re-mention again that most of the actors/crew I worked with were nothing but gracious about my political beliefs. And I was NEVER the one to bring it up. But if they discussing it, I’d throw in my two cents.
kishkeon 22 Jun 2008 at 3:41 pm 6Howard Fast’s career was “wrecked?” The man sold upward of 80 million books. He died a wealthy man. (And by the way, he wasn’t a supposed communist; he actually was an unabashed, unrepentant communist.) Same goes for Zero Mostel, whose greatest sucess (in Fiddler) came after HUAC.
Stephanieon 22 Jun 2008 at 4:25 pm 7Boo Hoo I feel so sorry for the leftys who got named for working for the enemy. You know PAMELA….Stalins files prove that they were working for the Soviets. So as far as I am concerned they were TRAITORS! The conservatives being abused, denied work and basically isolated are PATRIOTS! They love their country, they love our traditions………..hence their isolation, and non human status in Hollywood. Pamela why don’t you ask some of our film maker friends what its like being a Republican in Hollywood now. Just ask em. Instead you just threw out a few lines right out of the leftwingers dogma.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 4:26 pm 8Kishke:
Howard Fast was imprisoned for three months, and ended up publishing much of his work under pseudonyms. Zero Mostel’s career as an actor was put on hold in the ’50s following his appearance at HUAC, not really rebounding until the ’60s. During those lean times, he lost a friend — Phil Loeb. Did you look him up too? Do tell, did HIS career ever come back?
How about screenwriter Robert Lees? Actresses Karen Morley and Anne Revere? And those are just the more well known victims. Countless other performers and writers who had not yet achieved fame found their careers completely derailed.
Not to mention teachers, university professors, civil servants, and many, many others.
NO comparison. Sorry.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 4:27 pm 9Stephanie:
Where exactly are Zero Mostel, Anne Revere, and Phil Loeb mentioned in Stalin’s files?
Are Republicans in Hollywood being put on formalized blacklists? Are they being imprisoned for contempt. Are they being asked to “name names” in televised committee hearings?
Flynn35on 22 Jun 2008 at 4:48 pm 10There is a blacklist for conservative filmmakers and anyone that demands payment for making a film. You are put on a list for suing a distributor and winning. Even on the conservative side a filmmaker can get shunned by his fellow conservatives. There is a list your name goes on and the town shuts you out, there are ways to get around this and its funding from outside the industry
Carlitoson 22 Jun 2008 at 4:55 pm 11>>>Zero Mostel, Anne Revere, and Phil Loeb
For every Leftwinger you can name from those days there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of rightwingers I can’t name because they were never given a fair shot to make it in the business. Like all the Einsteins and Mozarts you’ve killed in the womb? We’ll never know. Same with the uncountable Hollywood careers you’ve wrecked. We’ll never know.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 5:00 pm 12Carlitos:
So you’re claiming that NOBODY with conservative sympathies can make it in Hollywood?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 5:01 pm 13Flynn:
The “blacklist” you describe is not a political blacklist as the blacklist in the ’50s was. Sorry, it’s just not comparable.
Plissken79on 22 Jun 2008 at 5:01 pm 14Pamela, the phenomenon McCarthyism did sweep up a handful of innocent victims and certain individuals did find their careers prematurely ended. However, there is only one death that can perhaps be attributed to Joseph McCarthy, NKVD-KGB spy Lawrence Duggan. Tens of millions of deaths can be attributed to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who the HUAC’s Hollywood “victims” supported until their dying day
Regardless McCarthy’s general charge that the Roosevelt administration and the US State Department had been incredibly lax in protecting the United States from Soviet espianoge, designed to undermine the United States’ ability to defend itself in a future war against the USSR, a charge dismissed by leftists both then and since, has been proven correct beyond a shadow of a doubt by the Venona transcripts and the Soviet Union’s own archives
However, do not ask me or anyone else on this board to feel sorry for a group of Hollywood writers and actors who proudly supported the vicious tryant Joseph Stalin and did try to use their creative energies to propagandize for the Soviet regime, whether Moscow directly ordered them to or not is irrevelevant. If Howard Fast, Zero Mostel, Anne Revere, and Philip Loeb had been avid supporters of Adolf Hitler as opposed to Joseph Stalin you certainly would have supported them “naming names” of other secret Hollywood Fascists.
The problem with leftist critics of McCarthyism is that they ignore the very real threat posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War and the international context of the late 1940s and early 1950s, or, if they acknowledge the USSR, make preposterous comparisons between McCarthyism and Stalinism. At the same period as the HUAC investigations and McCarthy’s heyday, the Soviets and their Eastern European imitators arrested, tortured, tried and shot hundreds of thousands of people for the crimes of “Titoism” or for spying for the CIA or MI6. For all the leftist complaining of the monstrous “crime” of McCarthyism, this actual crime against humanity goes completely unmentioned. We have dozens of films about McCarthyism, how many about Stalinism?
So do yourself a favor and stop shedding tears for the poor “victims” of McCarthyism and start shedding some for the real victims of the time, the hundreds of thousands shot in basements or fields in East Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, Sofia, and Moscow. You probably will not, however, because like Zero Mostel, Howard Fast, Anne Revere, and Phil Loeb, the lives of those murdered by the Communists mean nothing to you
Stephanieon 22 Jun 2008 at 5:24 pm 15Where is Zero Mostel? Why don’t you friggen read the files? The names are there. WHat you don’t believe me Pammy? Of course you don’t. It doesn’t fit what your leftleaning whack job proffessor whom you never thought to QUESTION told you.
Pam I am going to tell you a story about leftwingers. I know you won’t believe me but since I am Catholic, believe people should go to jail for lying under oath, consider this me putting my right hand on a bible and saying I swear to tell teh whole truth…..
I stood up to a leftwing commie proff at my University because she lied about Mao Tse Tung and what he did during his tenure as boss of Communist China. I wasn’t going to back down. I did all of the work, had it edited, proof read. The witch gave me an F. Why? Well question this Pam: What would you think of a skank whose office door had a cartoon of a US Army General holding up a sweater he had knitted saying something about it was good Congress allowed them the money for that or some sh*t. I let the woman have it. And when I went and complained I let the chair of the Department hear about it. He was moderate and understood as I wasn’t the only student who complained and hated her guts. But it taught me one thing, leftwing bags of scum will censor you, belittle you, do whatever the hell they can including PAM what you just did when you bring up Zero Mostel (When did Fiddler come out?????? 1964….and Zero Mostel played Teviya and your saying his career was ruined? How many people loved it? I love it….so your point is? )
Find a better example Pam. Your out of your depth.
Flynn35on 22 Jun 2008 at 5:24 pm 16Pam, a blacklist is a blacklist. Joe McCarthy didn’t blacklist anyone that is a liberal lie that has gone on for over 50 years. The Hollywood ten were all on the payroll out of Moscow through layers of channels. They were on marching orders to plead the 5th. These bums were guilty, its all in the Verona files. This is why these files have never been taken apart. However, liberals and Hollywood continue to vilified old Joe and make martyrs out of Americans who were paid commies and wanted to make this country a commie state. Today, liberals, leftist, American haters, bush haters, atheist, christian haters all run the entire media. Our schools and Universities will not tolerate any other opposing view. This industry will not allow unknown indie filmmakers that have pro American, Pro Christian themes into the marketplace. Today’s liberals are worst then the House Committee on Un-American Activities which is the correct title for the committee. Liberals have re-written history to sell their agenda.
When you can’t get work in Hollywood because you are a conservative, Bush supporter, christian, or you made a pro American film that is being blackballed for your political and religious ideals. Conservatives like myself haven’t been put on TV to tell out story, after all the liberals like to project the image that they are tolerant, when in fact they are the new American fascist. I know a lot of ’stars’ who haven’t gotten work since 2001 & 2004 when they came out to support Bush. These people are all ‘A’ stars at one time.
Stephanieon 22 Jun 2008 at 5:35 pm 17What I want to know is….what was it 14 years after HUAC and Mostel was doing his Fiddler. Hmmmm horrible censored career.
And Flynn is correct. My best example because he said it is Tom Selleck. Pam he would have been Indiana Jones were it not for his contract with Magnum PI. I think in retrospect we are lesser for it.
Opuson 22 Jun 2008 at 5:41 pm 18This certainly turned into a much more animated thread than I expected.
To me this shouldn’t be a competition of who had things worse and I won’t begin debating the blacklists from the 50’s.
But I don’t anyone can deny that there is a conservative blacklist.
Stephanieon 22 Jun 2008 at 5:56 pm 19Opus it doesn’thave to be a list…all you have to do is say I voted for Bush, Reagan, or will vote for McCain (for whatever that means.)
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:11 pm 20Plissken: the phenomenon McCarthyism did sweep up a handful of innocent victims and certain individuals did find their careers prematurely ended.
McCarthyism – defined in Webster’s as “a mid-20th century political sattitude characterized chiefly by opposition to elements held to be subversive and by the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized, indiscriminate allegations esp. on the basis of unsubstantiated charges,” resulted in a far more than merely a “handful of innocent victims” being hurt during the red scare.
The fact that you feel only one death can be blamed on the man who gave this political attitude its name (others would say Raymond Kaplan was another death that could be blamed on Joe McCarthy) does not make Phil Loeb any less a victim of the Red Scare – or of “McCarthyism.”
Plissken: Tens of millions of deaths can be attributed to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who the HUAC’s Hollywood “victims” supported until their dying day
You know for a fact that Dalton Trumbo, Zero Mostel, etc. were Stalinists until the day they died?
Plissken: However, do not ask me or anyone else on this board to feel sorry for a group of Hollywood writers and actors who proudly supported the vicious tryant Joseph Stalin and did try to use their creative energies to propagandize for the Soviet regime, whether Moscow directly ordered them to or not is irrevelevant. If Howard Fast, Zero Mostel, Anne Revere, and Philip Loeb…
Do you understand how the Hollywood blacklist worked? Many of these people had already left the communist party out of disgust over either the Stalinist purges or Stalin’s pact with Hitler. They were not being asked in hearings, “Are you a Stalinist?” They were being asked, “Are you now, or HAVE YOU EVER BEEN a member of the Communist Party?” If they answered “Yes, I WAS a member,” they would be asked to provide the committee with a list of names of who they had seen at Communist meetings. Do you not understand why many people had a strong moral objection to this?
And no, for the record, – I would not have supported avid Nazis being forced to “name names” in a similar manner. Nor would have I supported Nazis or Nazi sympathizers being blacklisted in a similar manner.
Plissken: The problem with leftist critics of McCarthyism is that they ignore the very real threat posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War and the international context of the late 1940s and early 1950s, or, if they acknowledge the USSR, make preposterous comparisons between McCarthyism and Stalinism.
Wrong. Leftist, liberal, and conservative critics of McCarthy were quite aware of the Soviet threat, and anyone old enough to remember that era – or even old enough to remember the sixties and seventies – knows this. New York Post editor James Weschler, for instance, was an ex-Communist turned anti-Communist who wrote in 1947 that “It would be nice if the world were prettier, but it isn’t; espionage and sabotage are facts of modern life.” Wechsler’s concerns about espionage did not prevent him from being an early and vehement critic of McCarthy. The New York Post’s 1951 17-part series on McCarthy was entitled “Smear, Inc.–The One-Man Mob of Joe McCarthy.”
Even Henry Luce’s Time Magazine was critical of McCarthy to the point of contempt. Luce himself went so far as to publish a Letter from the Publisher (June 5, 1950) in which he commented that “some, however, both moved and confused by the charges of Senator McCarthy and others, have compounded the hysteria which says that any man is right who cries anticommunist.”
Plissken: So do yourself a favor and stop shedding tears for the poor “victims” of McCarthyism and start shedding some for the real victims of the time, the hundreds of thousands shot in basements or fields in East Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, Sofia, and Moscow. You probably will not, however, because like Zero Mostel, Howard Fast, Anne Revere, and Phil Loeb, the lives of those murdered by the Communists mean nothing to you
So your premise is that the victims of East Berlin, Warsaw, etc., make what happened to Anne Revere and Phil Loeb okay?
Would the many, many victims of Pinochet and Efrain Rios Montt make blacklisting conservatives okay?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:15 pm 21Stephanie: Where is Zero Mostel? Why don’t you friggen read the files? The names are there.
Uh, no Stephanie. Zero Mostel’s name is not there. Nor is Phil Loeb’s or Ann Revere’s.
Stephanie. WHat you don’t believe me Pammy?
I don’t believe you because you don’t seem to have a handle on what the Venona papers are. You seem to have this notion that they are a damning, clearly written confessional that revealed McCarthy to the right after all and 20 point black and white nonseriffed type. Sorry, but they aren’t.
Now I suggest you take a few deep breaths and calm down.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:18 pm 22Flynn: Joe McCarthy didn’t blacklist anyone that is a liberal lie that has gone on for over 50 years.
I didn’t say McCarthy had blacklisted anyone.
Flynn: The Hollywood ten were all on the payroll out of Moscow through layers of channels. They were on marching orders to plead the 5th. These bums were guilty, its all in the Verona files.
Do show us where in the Venona files the Hollywood Ten are mentioned.
Flynn: Today’s liberals are worst then the House Committee on Un-American Activities which is the correct title for the committee. Liberals have re-written history to sell their agenda.
Gee, I must have missed all those televised hearings of conservative screenwriters, performers, teachers, etc being grilled about their politics. When did this take place? Who conducted the hearings?
Flynn: I know a lot of ’stars’ who haven’t gotten work since 2001 & 2004 when they came out to support Bush. These people are all ‘A’ stars at one time.
Care to name a few?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:20 pm 23Opus:
You know what’s interesting? The number of conservatives here who seem to think conservatives being made self-conscious about their politics is a terrible, whopping psychic trauma — but blacklisting, even imprisoning leftists is perfectly acceptable, even laudable.
Absolutely fascinating.
kishkeon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:37 pm 24Howard Fast was imprisoned for three months,
Pamela:
Well, of course Fast was imprisoned; he broke the law. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him? Please.
And no, I did not look up Phil Loeb? Did he break the law too? Anyway, you named three and two of them did just fine; they departed multimillionaires. Two outa three ain’t bad.
(You have to about Fast’s devotion to communism when he himself was so wealthy. I guess he thought it would be a good idea for the other guy. Typical leftist.)
Carlitoson 22 Jun 2008 at 6:38 pm 25Pam,
slightly off topic, but I’m guessing everytime someone criticizes the current communist dictatorship in Cuba you respond with the same old tired Batista canard. Well, we can’t help Batista. It was before our time. But we can do something about the CURRENT tyranny there.
Same with the Hollywood blacklist. McCarthy was before my time. Can’t do anything about that, even assuming everything you say is true (which it isn’t). But we can do something about the CURRENT blacklist because it’s in the HERE and NOW, not 50 years ago.
So show us how much you care about artistic freedom in America and stop shilling for the Hollywood blacklist. Stop shilling for artistic and political intolerance in the entertainment industry. It’s not much, I know, but it’s the least a freedom-loving person like yourself can do.
kishkeon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:41 pm 26Previous post should read; “you have to wonder”
The “blacklist” you describe is not a political blacklist as the blacklist in the ’50s was. Sorry, it’s just not comparable.
Well, you’re the one who made the comparison. Harry was talking about the present-day blacklist against conservatives, and you went ahead and dragged in HUAC. Now you complain it’s not comparable.
Buck Turgidsonon 22 Jun 2008 at 6:42 pm 27Pam Troy — what do you mean by a “political blacklist?” The Hollywood blacklist of the 50s was a studio blacklist. The government did not prevent anyone from working. The studios did.
Moreover, let’s concede for the sake of discussion that today’s “blacklist” doesn’t compare with what happened in the 50s? Why does it have to be that bad to be noteworthy?
As for Fast’s “imprisonment” — being jailed for contempt (for refusing to cooperate) is not imprisonment. Your terminology is imprecise and misleading.
Finally, the CPUSA was under the direct control of Moscow. That is an incontrovertible fact. And it is why it was very important to know who was who in the CPUSA, as it such information could lead to evidence of espionage. Just because not every member of the CPUSA may have had direct communications with Moscow or direct or knowing involvment in espionage, all of them would have information that could lead to further information crucial to national security, whether they realized the significance of that information or not when asked for it. Thus “are you now or have you ever have been a communist” and “who else was a communist” are just straightforward investigative questions that propagandists have successfully brainwashed well meaning people into believing is the equivalent of drilling some poor guy over whether he is a Methodist or something.
Plissken79on 22 Jun 2008 at 7:03 pm 28Thank you,Pamela, San Francisco liberal to the core, for demonstrating the narrative of the left the typical narrative of the left Stalin and Lenin were not mass killers, only right-wing dictators are capable of crimes against humanity. The millions of victims of Communism had it coming, I suppose. You must think I am stupid if you expect me to believe you would not have supported Blacklisting American Nazis or their sympathesizers during World War II, of course you would have, since the god of the left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, did not have a problem with it.
Certainly members of the American Communist Party who broke with it over the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 and were later accused of still being supporters or members of the ACP were “innocent victims” of McCarthysim, but they composed the VAST MINORITY of those called before HUAC. Check out the works of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr on the ACP if you do not believe me. The modern left of the Nation, Mother Jones, etc has attempted to inflate them to the majority of those called before HUAC since it is no longer possible to deny the enormity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes, but this is a complete lie. The majority of those called before HUAC, such Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Henry Dexter White, the Hollywood Ten, etc were members of the ACP, and, in the case of Hiss, White, and the Rosenbergs, agents of the KGB or the GRU. Since the American Communist Party was under direct control of Moscow and its members in the late 1940s nd early 1950s were avid supporters of Joseph Stalin, they do deserve my sympathy, although they certainly have yours.
And I never claimed the mass murders committed by Communist regimes in the late 1940s and early 1950s excused the accesses of McCarthyism. I said leftists such as yourself are obssessed with McCarthyism, which produced a miniscule amount of victims when compared to the purges of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the same time. Consequently you never even mention the monstrous crimes committed by the Communist leaders the Hollywood Ten supported. The answer for this is simple, you do not care, just like, given the posts on your webpage, you do care about the victims of Islamic fundamentalists either. Again, typical San Fran liberal, victims of Communists or Islamic fundamentalists are not important, the victims of Joseph McCarthy need to lionized for all eternity as the finest example of humanity.
A few more points, Dalton Trumbo was a Stalinist until his dying day. Pinochet’s authoritarian regime in Chile prevented the emergence of an even worse totalitarian regime lead by Salvadore Allende (a KGB agent since 1950, his codename was LEADER).
And stop trying to “me-too” the Cold War. I have posted on Libertas numerous times of the contributions of Social Democrats and pre-1968 American liberals in facing the Soviet threat. I was not talking about liberals such as Dean Acheson and Harry Truman who had legitimate criticisms of McCarthy, I am talking about the modern left NOW, whose roots are in 1968 and who Acheson and Truman would have barely recognized. Since 1968 the American and European left since the 1960s have tried, just like you are trying to do now, in turning the brief episode of McCarthyism as a narrative of the entire Cold War, while endlessly ignoring the crimes of the Soviet Union and its European and Asian imitators, just as after 1975 the leftists complaining of Asian deaths during America’s war against South Asian Communism were suddenly silent when the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Communists murdered millions.
Get this through your head, if you have time between your latte-sipping, smarmy, San Francisco leftism. The blacklisting of a handful of actors, writers, and directors in the 1950s, most of whom were proud supporters of Red totalitarianism, (a regrettable inciddent, more because it damaged the reputation of anti-Communism than anything else) DOES NOT COMPARE to the deaths of tens of millions under Communist rule in the 20th century!
I will spell it out for you more clearly. Let’s add Raymond Kaplan to KGB spy Lawrence Duggan to McCarthy’s victims, just in terms of lives lost.
Deaths under McCarthyism: 2
Deaths under Stalinism: 25 million
Deaths under Maoism: 65 million
If you cannot see which phenomnenon deserves greater condemnation and greater attention as an example of a historical crime, then I cannot help you
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:12 pm 29Kishke: Well, of course Fast was imprisoned; he broke the law.
By refusing to name names. I should hope I’d have the courage and decency to be that kind of law-breaker.
Kishke: And no, I did not look up Phil Loeb? Did he break the law too?
No, he did not. He was a popular actor with forty year working career, cited in Red Channels repeatedly for his leftist sympathies, and fired from CBS after the network received four letters protesting his appearance. Blacklisted and broke and no longer able to support his schizophrenic son, he committed suicide in 1955.
Kishke: Anyway, you named three and two of them did just fine; they departed multimillionaires. Two outa three ain’t bad.
You think everyone whose careers were derailed by the blacklist died as millionaires?
Carolynon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:21 pm 30Pamela Troy: “You know what’s interesting? The number of conservatives here who seem to think conservatives being made self-conscious about their politics is a terrible, whopping psychic trauma — but blacklisting, even imprisoning leftists is perfectly acceptable, even laudable.”
Yes, Pamela, it IS laudable when punishment is visited upon a person who chooses of his/her own free will to follow a murderous regime and believe in a brutal nihilistic philosophy which has murdered millions - and which they KNOW has murdered and yet they don’t care. It becomes even more laudable to punish those people when, despite knowing the evil of what they support, still refuse to stop supporting it. To the contrary, like Walter Duranty using his skill as a writer to hide the atrocities of Stalin, the blacklisted Hollywood members used the skills of their artistry to do the same. And when they were caught, they assumed positions of messianic self-righteousness - an ‘how DARE you make me admit I was wrong?’ arrogance. None of them would have suffered, none of them would have gone to jail, none of them would lost their jobs had they only admitted the truth - not a lie but the truth - of the evils of what communism was and is. What is bizarre is that they KNEW it was evil, even you yourself admit it was evil, but they didn’t care. They refused to admit to that evil and for that they suffered the consequences, which is as it should be.
I don’t know why I’m bothering to type this. You have made clear your refusal to acknowledge reality. When anyone attempts to tell you the truth about communism, its evil, its murderousness, etc., you simply put your hands to your ears and go ‘lalalalalalalala all I want to talk about is those poor suffering, martyred blacklisted people’, etc. But you refuse to discuss the poor suffering martyred Ukrainians, the victims of the Gulags, people shot in the back as they tried desperately to crawl across the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain to escape that ’socialist paradise’ your blacklisted artists stubbornly supported. No, you go “Lalalalalalalala! I don’t want to talk about the 10,000,000 in Stalin’s Gulags, the 7,000,000 who died in the Ukrainian famine, the Poles butchered in the Katyn massacre, etc. LALALALALALA! I just want to talk about poor Zero Mostel not being able to get a job!”
Well, sorry, hon. On this site, ‘lalalalalala’ doesn’t work too well because we DO want to talk about the evils, the atrocities of communism. Which is why we have no sympathy whatsoever for those blacklisted individuals who knew that same evil, yet stubbornly supported it anyway.
jicon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:31 pm 31“No longer feeling conservatives are in need of medical attention really is progress.”
Not really. The modern Conservative party is in no way conservative, so it isn’t threatening to the left. That’s not “progress” to me.
Buck Turgidsonon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:38 pm 32Plissken: “You must think I am stupid if you expect me to believe you would not have supported Blacklisting American Nazis or their sympathesizers during World War II”
Well, she would have come around to that after Hitler turned on Stalin. Just like Pete Seeger.
kishkeon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:44 pm 33By refusing to name names.
By refusing to name names of potential enemies of the country; fifth columnists; supporters of the most bloodthirsty dictator of the 20th century. So brave of him.
It’s irrelevant anyway. He went to jail b/c he broke the law and not b/c of any Hollywood blacklist, as you implied. So his (well-deserved) imprisonment is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
I should hope I’d have the courage and decency to be that kind of law-breaker.
I think you would. Only it is neither courage nor decency. Quite the opposite.
Do I think they all died millionaires? No, of course not. Most of us do not. Why should they be any different? But I’m not about to shed tears over the fate of supporters of communism. Did they shed tears over the tens of thousands killed by Lenin and Trotsky and Beria and all the rest of their heroes? Over the tens of millions killed by Stalin? No. They supported these murderers, and continued to do so till the day they died (in some cases, such as Fast’s, entirely unrepentant). Find yourself more worthy heroes.
kishkeon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:47 pm 34Blacklisted and broke and no longer able to support his schizophrenic son, he committed suicide in 1955.
What, he couldn’t wash dishes, sell insurance, used cars, paint houses? All he could do was be an actor? Why?
magdajhawthorneon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:57 pm 35But let’s get back to Dirty Harry’s post. What I want to know is, when is Mrs. Harry going to get a blog?
Sharpshinyon 22 Jun 2008 at 7:57 pm 36The current, informal blacklist is in many ways worse than the previous, formal one.
Granted, I do not fear imprisonment, nor is it likely I’ll be called before a committee and asked to “name names.” (This is America, not Canada.)
That said, the formality of the 50’s blacklist made it relatively easy to fight. So much so, in fact, that today, every high school history text book has a chapter devoted to the evils of “McCarthyism” and the Hollywood blacklist.
But how do you fight a blacklist when the blacklisters themselves are deeply in denial of the fact that they are, in fact, blacklisting?
The shrill demands for proof from people like Pamela are part of the problem.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 8:00 pm 37Buck Turgidson: The government did not prevent anyone from working. The studios did.
So what?
Buck Turgidson: Finally, the CPUSA was under the direct control of Moscow. That is an incontrovertible fact. And it is why it was very important to know who was who in the CPUSA, as it such information could lead to evidence of espionage. Just because not every member of the CPUSA may have had direct communications with Moscow or direct or knowing involvment in espionage, all of them would have information that could lead to further information crucial to national security, whether they realized the significance of that information or not when asked for it. Thus “are you now or have you ever have been a communist” and “who else was a communist” are just straightforward investigative questions that propagandists have successfully brainwashed well meaning people into believing is the equivalent of drilling some poor guy over whether he is a Methodist or something.
Nobody had to be “brainwashed” to observe the anguish witnesses put in position went through. They watched it for themselves. Is it your contention that Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE is an example of brainwashing commie propaganda?
Please explain to me what important directives from Moscow you imagine Dalton Trumbo and Zero Mostel were receiving.
Carolynon 22 Jun 2008 at 8:12 pm 38Gosh, does someone want to get poor Pamela some throat lozenges? Her constant ‘lalalalalalalala, I don’t hear what I don’t want to hear’ has got to be making her poor throat sore.
Nicol Don 22 Jun 2008 at 8:43 pm 39Pamela Troy,
Quite frankly, you are living in a fantasy world.
Is there a blacklist against cosnervatives?
1. I can think of one job that would have put my career at the next level that I definitely did not get recommended for because of my religious and political beliefs. I cannot prove that to you, nor will I divulge my real name to gain cred. It came down to a supposed friend who would not give me a crucial reference.
2. Saying Eastwood, Willis et al are proof that there is no blacklist is bullshit. Henry Fonda and Lloyd Bridges were well known communists and never were blacklisted. So were many others. James Stewart’s wife even said Cary Grant dabbled in it for a time.
3. Conservative profs, teachers etc - do - pay a price for their beliefs. If you do not know this you live under a rock with a communist star painted on it. At my film school the head of the department had a symposium called against him because he dared to show Blue Velevet during a class on voyeurism. The feminists thought it condoned rape.
4. Are conservatives asked to testify against people with similar beliefs…in Canada, in academia…yes there are many cases. But even then…unlike communism, conservatives aren’t responsible for an ideology that has butchered more people in 100 years than every religion and capitalism in 2000 years combined.
4. Whether or not there is an actual list is irrelevant…it is all about networking, networking, networking. If someone finds you have certain beliefs or you defend a conservative POV you find yourself not invited to that party…you don’t get that phone call. Like Dennis Miller says…you never know why you didn’t get that last job. If someone says all Republicans or conservatives are racist…do you really think they will hire someone with those views?
5. I would take McCarthyism any day over now. At least it was honest. You knew what the rules were. Now…leftists say they are open and tolerant but are not. It is only when you open up several times with people you thought were your friends that you realize you set your career back. At least the right in the 50’s came at you in daylight. The left in the modern era comes at you in the dark of night standing at your door with a wounded child asking for your help. When you let them in they go for the jugular.
You obviously are not in the industry and are writing from a place of ideology. What you want to be true…not what is.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 8:54 pm 40Plissken: Thank you, Pamela, San Francisco liberal to the core, for demonstrating the narrative of the left the typical narrative of the left Stalin and Lenin were not mass killers, only right-wing dictators are capable of crimes against humanity.
???? Where exactly did I say anything so stupid? Please point me to the passage.
Plissken: You must think I am stupid if you expect me to believe you would not have supported Blacklisting American Nazis or their sympathesizers during World War II, of course you would have, since the god of the left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, did not have a problem with it.
You really shouldn’t assume that since you’re on board with the idea of blacklisting leftists, I’m on board with the idea of blacklisting right-wingers (or for that matter, interning Americans of Japanese descent.) It’s called “projection.”
Plissken: Certainly members of the American Communist Party who broke with it over the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 and were later accused of still being supporters or members of the ACP were “innocent victims” of McCarthysim, but they composed the VAST MINORITY of those called before HUAC.
The fact that you, I (and many, many American leftists and liberals) intensely dislike the Communist party does not make criminalizing membership acceptable, and that, essentially, is what was being done in the 1950s. The Rosenbergs and Alger Hills do NOT represent the majority of those called before the committees, wither the HUAC or McCarthy’s.
Plisskin: And I never claimed the mass murders committed by Communist regimes in the late 1940s and early 1950s excused the accesses of McCarthyism. I said leftists such as yourself are obssessed with McCarthyism, which produced a miniscule amount of victims when compared to the purges of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the same time. Consequently you never even mention the monstrous crimes committed by the Communist leaders the Hollywood Ten supported.
If I saw someone online attempting to minimize the crimes of the Soviet Union by defending Stalin (or Mao or Pol Pot) or implying that the victims deserved it, they’d hear from me. The same would go for anyone defending Osama Bin Laden and denigrating the victims of 9/11.
For my attitude about human rights abuses – by anyone, Communist or otherwise – read the following:
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Pamela%20Troy/17
Plissken: A few more points, Dalton Trumbo was a Stalinist until his dying day. Pinochet’s authoritarian regime in Chile prevented the emergence of an even worse totalitarian regime lead by Salvadore Allende (a KGB agent since 1950, his codename was LEADER).
So you’re on board with Allende rounding up leftists and liberals, crowding them into a sports stadium, and shooting them en masse? You’re on board with his regime kidnapping liberals and leftists, torturing them, and murdering them?
When did Allende do anything similar?
Plissken: The blacklisting of a handful of actors, writers, and directors in the 1950s, most of whom were proud supporters of Red totalitarianism, (a regrettable inciddent, more because it damaged the reputation of anti-Communism than anything else) DOES NOT COMPARE to the deaths of tens of millions under Communist rule in the 20th century!
I never said the blacklist compared to Stalin’s murders or the murders of any other dictator. (How do you come up with he figure “tens of millions?)
Is that how you rationalize the deaths of liberals and leftists Pinochett and Montt? By toting up the numbers and saying their murders weren’t so bad because communists in general killed more?
Carlitoson 22 Jun 2008 at 9:00 pm 41>>>(How do you come up with he figure “tens of millions?)
Soviet paper s
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE0DF113EF937A35751C0A96F948260
Don’t feel bad. This isn’t something you Liberals are taught, at any level of your education. Completely glossed over.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 9:02 pm 42Pamela Troy: “You know what’s interesting? The number of conservatives here who seem to think conservatives being made self-conscious about their politics is a terrible, whopping psychic trauma — but blacklisting, even imprisoning leftists is perfectly acceptable, even laudable.”
c: Yes, Pamela, it IS laudable when punishment is visited upon a person who chooses of his/her own free will to follow a murderous regime and believe in a brutal nihilistic philosophy which has murdered millions - and which they KNOW has murdered and yet they don’t care.
So what do you think should be done with American fans of Pinochet and Efrain Rioss Montt — or does supporting a dictator who “only” murdered a thousand or so not matter?
C: None of them would have suffered, none of them would have gone to jail, none of them would lost their jobs had they only admitted the truth - not a lie but the truth - of the evils of what communism was and is.
You do realize, don’t you, that many people who ended up being blacklisted had already left the Communist party years before because they hated Stalin?
C: When anyone attempts to tell you the truth about communism, its evil, its murderousness, etc., you simply put your hands to your ears and go ‘lalalalalalalala all I want to talk about is those poor suffering, martyred blacklisted people’, etc.
Do you think the crimes of communism make political repression in this country okay?
c: But you refuse to discuss the poor suffering martyred Ukrainians, the victims of the Gulags, people shot in the back as they tried desperately to crawl across the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain to escape that ’socialist paradise’ your blacklisted artists stubbornly supported…
If I met people trying to justify these crimes, they’d hear from me. I’d react with pretty much the same revulsion I show towards people who try to minimize or justify the crimes of Augusto Pinochet.
By the way, since you hate the USSR and its crimes so much — have you read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO? Specifically chapter on the methods of torture the Soviets used against dissidents?
Wadjathink?
kishkeon 22 Jun 2008 at 9:15 pm 43You do realize, don’t you, that many people who ended up being blacklisted had already left the Communist party years before because they hated Stalin?
If they hated Stalin, why’d they find it difficult to name his supporters?
If I met people trying to justify these crimes, they’d hear from me.
They would? But you’re championing Howard Fast, who never backed away from his support of Stalin, notwithstanding all the atrocities.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 9:21 pm 44Kishke: By refusing to name names of potential enemies of the country; fifth columnists; supporters of the most bloodthirsty dictator of the 20th century. So brave of him.
Yes, they were brave. Rather than put their friends through what they were going through, many of these people sacrificed their own careers. A few even went to prison.
Kishke: It’s irrelevant anyway. He went to jail b/c he broke the law and not b/c of any Hollywood blacklist, as you implied. So his (well-deserved) imprisonment is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Of course he went to jail because of the blacklist. Denying the connection of Fast being jailed for not naming names with the blacklist is denying reality.
Do you cry for the victims of Pinochet? The victims of Montt? The victims of the Shah? The victims of D’aubisson?
Plissken79on 22 Jun 2008 at 9:30 pm 45Pamela, let’s get a few things straight.
1. Being a member of CPUSA was not the same thing as being a Republican or a Democrat. Members of the party were expected to renounce their loyalty to the United States and support the Soviet Union in every aspect of their lives. Both Soviet leaders in Moscow and the leadership of CPUSA expected ALL of its members to spy on the economic, military, political and police power of the United States. This should not come as a surprise, Moscow demanded and received the same treatment from every Communist party in the Western World. So, the HUAC was correct in viewing members of the American Communist Party as agents of a foreign power dedicated to destroying the United States, because that is exactly what they were.
2. I do not know where you get the idea that Hiss, White and the Rosenbergs were the exception of HUAC witnesses as opposed to the rule, but you are dead wrong. But do not just take my work for it, read the works of Haynes and Klehr on the CPUSA, they have done more research on American Communism and its relation to the USSR than any English-language historian
3. Chile in the early 1970s faced a terrible choice between the right-wing authoritarian dictatorship of Pinochet and a left-wing totalitarian dictatorship of Allende. Allende’s Marxist economic policiec and conflict with both the Chilean National Assembly and Supreme Court were leading directly to Civil War, which veteran KGB agent Allende actively wanted. Allende was also bringing in veterans of the East German Stasi,the KGB, and Fidel Castro’s secret police to create a new Communist police service in Chile. What do you think he intended to do with it? If Allende had succeeded in dragging Chile into Civil War and building a Chilean Communist state on the Soviet-Cuban model, the death toll would have been much, much, MUCH higher than the few thousands who died under Pinochet’s rule. Chile would have become an impoverished totalitarian one-party dictatorship. Chileans under Pinochet were not free, but they wer economically better off than anywhere else in South America. Under Allende they would been completely impoverished and lacked political freedom. Also, Pinochet willingly stepped down from power without violence in 1987 and allowed democracy to resume, something Allende (or his hero Fidel Castro) never would have done. As for the stadium massacres, Pinochet, like some other right-wing allies of the US during the Cold could be quite brutal. But the alternative was far worse. One does not claim approval of Pinochet’s human rights abuses by acknowledging he was clearly the lesser of two evils.
4. As for the “tens of millions” remark, Stalin himself admitted to Churchill at the Teheran Conference in 1943 the collectivization of agriculture cost at least 10 million, historians in my field who are not far-left Gulag deniers place the death toll of the Stalin regime from 1924 to 1953 at 20,000,000 to 25,000,000. This does not even count the 13,000,000 to 15,000,000 dead under Lenin’s dictatorship (1917-1924) during the Red Terror, the famines of 1921-1922, and the Russian Civil War which the Communists directly provoked.
5. Finally, you seem profoundly ignorant about the blacklisting phenomenon. It was not something enforced by the Truman or Eisenhower administrations, but rather something the studio heads imposed on themselves. The American govenrment, unlike the Soviet government, did not own movie studios or run them. The studio heads made this choice, it was never forced on them by the government. Regardless, the failure of pro-Stalin and pro-Mao actors and writers to find jobs while the US was at war with Stalin and Mao from 1950 to 1953 is not historical tragedy on the measure of, say, Stalin’s murder of the Jewish Antifascist Committee from 1948 to 1952, or about a million other things. If I ran Warner Brothers from 1950-1953 I would not haved hired a member of the CPUSA (a Soviet agent, to remind you as EVERY PARTY MEMBER WAS AT THE TIME) to direct or write a film involving political themes while American soldiers fought the USSR’s allies in Korea. But that would be me, I also would not have hired American Nazi party members to make movies while the Normandy landings were going on either. And I would not have lost a moment of sleep over it either.
Plissken79on 22 Jun 2008 at 9:39 pm 46One other comment, Pamela, I do not think you should be so eager to wave Solzhenitsyn around anyone on this board. I am sure if you were old enough (and perhaps you were) you protested America’s assistance to South Vietnam in fighting the Vietnamese Communists, and view the war as a foolish imperial project of the US.
Solzhenitsyn bitterly and angrily denounced leftist opponents of the Vietnam War in the US and Europe as people who had lended their support to the Communists by attacking the American war effort and then said nothing as Vietnam, Laos, and especially Cambodia fell under Red genocidal rule. He was right to do so, but I am sure you would denounce him as a hopeless reactionary.
Personally, I wish the American and European leftists who marched against the American War effort in Vietnam would have spent the rest of their miserable existence at the Hanoi Hilton or a collective farm under Khmer Rouge control. I would like to see how much they would have loved the Communists and hated the United States after about a week
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 9:45 pm 47N: Quite frankly, you are living in a fantasy world.
No, I just have a working knowledge of history, based not on web-browsing, but on reading books on the subject and talking to people who lived through it.
N; I can think of one job that would have put my career at the next level that I definitely did not get recommended for because of my religious and political beliefs. I cannot prove that to you, nor will I divulge my real name to gain cred. It came down to a supposed friend who would not give me a crucial reference.
I’m sorry, Nicole, but that simply does not compare with getting a subpoena to come before a committee and talk about your religious and political beliefs while the cameras roll. Nor does it compare with finding your name on a published blacklist, as some did with RED CHANNELS.
N: Saying Eastwood, Willis et al are proof that there is no blacklist is bullshit. Henry Fonda and Lloyd Bridges were well known communists and never were blacklisted. So were many others. James Stewart’s wife even said Cary Grant dabbled in it for a time.
Can you cite anything to back these claims up about Fonda, Bridges, Stewart, etc?
N: Conservative profs, teachers etc - do - pay a price for their beliefs. If you do not know this you live under a rock with a communist star painted on it. At my film school the head of the department had a symposium called against him because he dared to show Blue Velevet during a class on voyeurism. The feminists thought it condoned rape.
You think liberals hate BLUE VELVET? And you’ve never heard of liberal professors getting in trouble for movies they showed?
N: Are conservatives asked to testify against people with similar beliefs…in Canada, in academia…yes there are many cases.
Such as….?
N: But even then…unlike communism, conservatives aren’t responsible for an ideology that has butchered more people in 100 years than every religion and capitalism in 2000 years combined.
And that makes it okay for conservatives to blacklist liberals?
N: Whether or not there is an actual list is irrelevant…it is all about networking, networking, networking. If someone finds you have certain beliefs or you defend a conservative POV you find yourself not invited to that party…you don’t get that phone call. Like Dennis Miller says…you never know why you didn’t get that last job. If someone says all Republicans or conservatives are racist…do you really think they will hire someone with those views?
So nobody who’s currently making it in Hollywood has conservative views? You know for a fact that every actor we see in a movie or on TV is a liberal?
N: At least the right in the 50’s came at you in daylight. The left in the modern era comes at you in the dark of night standing at your door with a wounded child asking for your help. When you let them in they go for the jugular.
What, in the name of the Twelve Apostles, are you talking about here?
Carolynon 22 Jun 2008 at 9:45 pm 48Pamela just doesn’t quit. Facts, truth, historical quotes, etc. just bounce off her like peanuts off a Sherman tank, to be crushed to death beneath the treads of her iron-clad beliefs. Nonetheless, I was all set to roll up the sleeves once more and attempt to persuade Pamela to listen to what she is saying - better yet, to what WE are saying - until I remembered Coulter’s warning.
“Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.”
Sigh, as always, Ann nails the closed mind of a liberal.
(Hmmm, ‘closed mind’. Isn’t that redundant?)
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 9:57 pm 49P:Blacklisted and broke and no longer able to support his schizophrenic son, he committed suicide in 1955.
K: What, he couldn’t wash dishes, sell insurance, used cars, paint houses? All he could do was be an actor? Why?
Possibly because performing was what he had been doing — very successfully — for the bulk of his adult life. Second, because caring for an adult schizophrenic was and remains extremely expensive. What made the man desperate was the fact that no matter how hard he worked, he could no longer keep his son in the very good, private hospital where he was living.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:01 pm 50K: If they hated Stalin, why’d they find it difficult to name his supporters?
Because they did not hate their friends, and they had no desire to see their friends go through what they themselves were going through.
K: They would? But you’re championing Howard Fast, who never backed away from his support of Stalin, notwithstanding all the atrocities.
And if he were here defending Stalin, I’d take him on. But what’s at issue here is the way he was treated. For the record, if someone announced they were going to blacklist you because of your political views, I’d “champion” you in a similar way, even though we disagree.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:10 pm 51P: Both Soviet leaders in Moscow and the leadership of CPUSA expected ALL of its members to spy on the economic, military, political and police power of the United States.
And what information do you imagine Mostel, Revere, Loeb, and Dalton Trumbo were passing on to their Soviet masters?
P: I do not know where you get the idea that Hiss, White and the Rosenbergs were the exception of HUAC witnesses as opposed to the rule, but you are dead wrong. But do not just take my work for it, read the works of Haynes and Klehr on the CPUSA,
What passages in particular would you point me to?
P: Chile in the early 1970s faced a terrible choice between the right-wing authoritarian dictatorship of Pinochet and a left-wing totalitarian dictatorship of Allende.
Was Allende rounding up the opposition, torturing them, and killing them? Was he herding crowds of rightwingers into a soccer stadium and having them killed? Were right-wingers being “disappeared?”
Are you saying Pinochet HAD to murder all those liberals and leftists? Kidnap them? Torture them? It was that or a communist dictatorship?
P: Finally, you seem profoundly ignorant about the blacklisting phenomenon. It was not something enforced by the Truman or Eisenhower administrations,
Where did I say it was?
And what did the studio heads have to do with the blacklistings in academia, public schools, and the civil service?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:12 pm 52P: I do not think you should be so eager to wave Solzhenitsyn around
Why not? I may disagree with him about the anti-war movement, but I definitely see eye-to-eye with him on the USSR’s use of torture — and his definition of sleep deprivation, stress positions, and sexual humiliation as “torture.”
P: Personally, I wish the American and European leftists who marched against the American War effort in Vietnam would have spent the rest of their miserable existence at the Hanoi Hilton or a collective farm under Khmer Rouge control.
So you’d like to see some of my relatives in a reeducation camp. Interesting.
WHAT is it you don’t like about the Communists again? It’s obviously not their human rights violations.
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:33 pm 53c: I was all set to roll up the sleeves once more and attempt to persuade Pamela to listen to what she is saying…
LOL! Suuuuure you were, Carol.
Couldn’t think of any answers to my questions, eh?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:54 pm 54c: slightly off topic, but I’m guessing everytime someone criticizes the current communist dictatorship in Cuba you respond with the same old tired Batista canard.
No.
c: Same with the Hollywood blacklist. McCarthy was before my time. Can’t do anything about that, even assuming everything you say is true (which it isn’t).
What have I said that is untrue?
c: But we can do something about the CURRENT blacklist because it’s in the HERE and NOW, not 50 years ago. So show us how much you care about artistic freedom in America and stop shilling for the Hollywood blacklist.
Exactly how have I “shilled” for a Hollywood blacklist? Or for artistic intolerance?
Mike18xxon 22 Jun 2008 at 11:01 pm 55Whether or not the blacklist of the 50s was worse, or not as bad as, the current shunning of conservatives by Hollywood is immaterial to real principles as stack:
— The promoters of totalitarians *do not deserve* employment.
But today, the promoters of totalitarians have finally succeeded in dominating Hollywood, and so we are subjected to a never-ending stream of rancid swill such as “The Motorcycle Diaries”.
==//==
See “Hollywood’s Missing Movies” for the REAL “blacklist” — one that’s being going on ever since (the communist) Donald Trumbo took over the Screen Actors Guide: http://www.reason.com/news/show/27732.html
Jake Was Hereon 22 Jun 2008 at 11:03 pm 56Couldn’t think of any answers to my questions, eh?
I doubt that’s it. You’ve already decided to call B.S. on ANYTHING she says in reply to you that isn’t in absolute 100-percent agreement with your side of the argument. So what the f__k would be the point of answering your questions?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 11:18 pm 57Jake:
Actually, if you look at my response to her, I mainly just asked her questions. That’s hardly “calling BS.”
You folks aren’t real used to debate around here, are you?
Ludoon 22 Jun 2008 at 11:21 pm 58The phenomenon of McCarthyism was actually a brief moment in which the tables were turned in Hollywood. Leftists had maintained a stranglehold on Hollywood since early in the war. Communists ran the place like the Mafia, and kept out anyone (including crew members) who were not card-carrying reds. When a few artists, out of disgust at this situation, testified before HUAC (like Ilya Kazan) their careers actually WERE permanently ruined.As in, forever. Kazan could never make a movie again, and even his lifetime achievement award was protested by the usual coterie of Leftists in Hollywood several years ago. It was Reagan’s disgust at the treasonous intentions and iron-heel sort of control exercised by Leftists in Hollywood that animated his first forays into politics (as a Democrat.) I would like to pity the poor commies who had their careers interrupted in the 50’s (for the meager reason that they were agents of an enemy power) but considering how they have run the place like thought-police for sixty years, and have choked off and continue to choke off any dissent, I really can’t summon up even a nanocule of pity for them. McCarthyism, who cares?
Pamela Troyon 22 Jun 2008 at 11:38 pm 59L: The phenomenon of McCarthyism was actually a brief moment in which the tables were turned in Hollywood. Leftists had maintained a stranglehold on Hollywood since early in the war. Communists ran the place like the Mafia, and kept out anyone (including crew members) who were not card-carrying reds.
So you’re claiming that John Wayne was a red. And D.W. Griffith. And Gloria Swanson. And Rudolph Valentino. And Peter Lorre. And Robert Taylor. And Adolph Menjou. And Ward Bond…
Riiiight.
L: When a few artists, out of disgust at this situation, testified before HUAC (like Ilya Kazan) their careers actually WERE permanently ruined. As in, forever. Kazan could never make a movie again
Hmmm. Let’s see. Kazan testified in 1952. After that he made:
Man on a Tightrope
On the Waterfront
East of Eden
Babydoll
A Face in the Crowd
Wild River
Splendor in the Grass
America America
The Arrangement
The Visitors
The Last Tycoon
And you say he “could never make a movie again???” He made eleven! That doesn’t seem “permanantly ruined” to me. In fact, he was working pretty steadily.
Ludoon 23 Jun 2008 at 12:16 am 60Okay, so it took like 24 years, but after THAT he never made a movie again.
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 12:36 am 61LOL!
Nicol Don 23 Jun 2008 at 5:16 am 62Pamela,
I was going to respond point per point but after reading your multitude of posts here defending communism and wholesale slaughter over the past 100 years I figured I would just make myself a coffee and laugh instead.
Y’see Pam, this is what you and every other leftist fails to get. Marxists have butchered and oppressed more people in 100 years of the 20th century than every religion and capitalism combined in 2000 years. Marxists have killed more than the Nazi’s. Would you have a problem if Nazi’s were blacklisted too?
Conservatives face bias based on stereotypes. Communists were hunted out based on the the fact that they…oh, what’s the use.
As for your questioning that Henry Fonda was a communist or LLoyd Bridges etc….do you know anything about Hollywood history? James Stewart was great friends with Fonda but said numerous times, the only way they could stay friends was if they - never - talked politics because Stewart was a Republican Christian and Fonda a communist. Jeff Bridges himself said communists meetings were held in his basement as a child.
Remember, Hollywood has been suspected of being communist not because of overzealous right-wingers but because communism has been rife there throughout its history. It’s flourished since the counter-culture of the 60’s. That’s why Sean Penn loves Hugo Chavez and Sheryl Crow can sing lyrics like “my friend the communist holds meetings in his RV”.
It never went away. And again, I think you fail to see the larger point…The McCarthy hearings are not as bad as now because at least they were honest. Modern liberals claim to be tolerant but are amongs the least tolerant people in history. They intimidate through hate speach tribunals and censor with name callings. Are people asked to testify…Google Human Rights Commissions and Mark Steyn and see what you get.
Buck Turgidsonon 23 Jun 2008 at 5:16 am 63Pamela Troy sez: “Nobody had to be “brainwashed” to observe the anguish witnesses put in position went through. They watched it for themselves.”
So what? Like all good leftists, you change the subject. My point was not that they went or didn’t go through anguish, but that probing for information about who was involved in the CPUSA was a legitimate area of inquiry because it was under the direct control of Moscow. Asking someone whether he was a communist was not the same as asking whether he preferred vanilla ice cream over chocolate, or whether he was a Baptist, or any other such thing. It was more akin to asking whether he was a member of a crime syndicate, and who else was a member of that syndicate so we can ask him some questions, too.
Is it your contention that Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE is an example of brainwashing commie propaganda?
A perfect example of it, given that Miller was in fact an unreconstructed leftist who attended CPUSA meetings at least in his younger years (and maybe later too) and who always remained sympathetic to its cause.
Please explain to me what important directives from Moscow you imagine Dalton Trumbo and Zero Mostel were receiving.
More “la la la la la” from you, eh? Not every witness is necessarily a participant, but every witness has potentially valuable information that can lead to the identity of the participants, which is why it was legitimate to question all of them.
The supreme irony here is your criticism of our debating tactics when I have yet to see you address one single point directly.
Mars vs Hollywoodon 23 Jun 2008 at 5:55 am 64Is it your contention that Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE is an example of brainwashing commie propaganda?
Nah, it’s just a bad allegory built around a dumb metaphor. “Salem Witch Trials = Red Scare” fails for one simple reason:
The witches were made up. The Commies were real.
kishkeon 23 Jun 2008 at 6:15 am 65Pamela: Do you cry for the victims of Pinochet? The victims of Montt? The victims of the Shah? The victims of D’aubisson?
This sounds like one of these talking points you throw out randomly whenever things get a bit hot. I don’t and never did support any of these people. Your preciouis HUAC “victims” supported the most bloodthirsty dictators on the planet. Hey, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right? You on board with that?
kishkeon 23 Jun 2008 at 6:17 am 66Pamela:
Do you believe it’s okay for a country to go after traitors in its midst?
If yes, how do you propose that be done?
Plissken79on 23 Jun 2008 at 6:32 am 67OK, Pamela, a few final points, although I doubt it will make any difference at all:
1. Chile was faving either a left or a right-wing dictatorship in the early 1970s. Which either dictator took power would have imprisoned and killed his political enemies. Allende would have killed more, since the establishment of his Red dictatorship, would have almost certainly been acompanied by Civil War throughout Chile. Your constant railing about Pinochet’s human rights record, bad as it was, does not change the fact Chile was better off under a Right-wing authoritatian dictatorship than a left-wing totalitarian one.
2. While your cowardly, pro-Communist relatives were marching against the Vietnam War my relatives were fighting it, just as right now I have relatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that might be difference between our families, one type that merely takes and complains, one that defends the other type.
Regardless, your relatives actively lended their support to the extension of Communist rule over Southeast Asia, abandoning their own countrymen to support the murderous Viet Minh and Khmer Rouge because they simply preferred Asian Communism to their own government. Since they helped the Communists win, they should have experienced exactly what a Red victory after 1975 meant for the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. Your pro-Pol Pot and pro-Ho Chi Minh relatives who complained about the fate of Asians during the war and then said NOTHING when three gulag states were constructed in southeast Asia deserved nothing less.
But really I do not think any factual point I will make is going to have a difference. Enjoy your smarmy, northern California, “I am superior to everyone” nonsense. Just remember, if the Islamic Fundamentalists win, they are not going to spare you because you hate conservatives or the current administration
kishkeon 23 Jun 2008 at 6:44 am 68Because they did not hate their friends, and they had no desire to see their friends go through what they themselves were going through.
It’s not honorable to protect friends who consort with and support the enemies of your country. It’s dishonorable.
But in any case, the reason a guy like Fast refused to testify was not to protect his friends, but that he was actually a communist, and actually supported our murderous enemies. Which is why he deserved whatever was done to him, which, sadly, was nothing much.
Stephanieon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:07 am 69Pamela Troy on 22 Jun 2008 at 6:15 pm #
Stephanie: Where is Zero Mostel? Why don’t you friggen read the files? The names are there.
Uh, no Stephanie. Zero Mostel’s name is not there. Nor is Phil Loeb’s or Ann Revere’s.
Stephanie. WHat you don’t believe me Pammy?
I don’t believe you because you don’t seem to have a handle on what the Venona papers are. You seem to have this notion that they are a damning, clearly written confessional that revealed McCarthy to the right after all and 20 point black and white nonseriffed type. Sorry, but they aren’t.
Now I suggest you take a few deep breaths and calm down.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
First off Pammy darlin I don’t believe you have ever read any of the files because had you read them you wouldn’t be sitting here screaming la la la la la….and I don’t wanna hear it. But its typical leftist twaddle when they know they are wrong, and come off freakishly shrill. Are by any chance Nanny Pelosi? Maybe your Hillary and you have nothing to do now that your not going to run for President?
You come off to me like one of the German’s in the Winds of War telling Pug Henry that Hitler was just regaining Germany’s rightful place and that he really wanted peace of course Pug knew what it really meant a piece of Poland, Austria, and a piece of Czechoslovakia. Purposeful blinders Pammy and you are guilty of wearing ones that wouldn’t have fit Seabiscuit. They are huge. It is fun when your a child to live in happy Never Never Land where your always right, because you said you were and everyone just listens, and agrees and ponders how clever you are. But Pam the real world, the world that we are talking about isn’t like that. In the real world a black list can be implied (Hope Pam knows what that word means). The Hollywood anti Conservative blacklist is implied. I brought up one example. You of course never even bothered to reply which fits what you have been doing throughout this “debate” which I would call more like a continueing series of hysterical rants by someone who sadly needs to renew her scrip for Class 1 drugs.
I find it funny the self hate that seems to ooz from every sentence.
The thing about Pinochet? I shrug. Why? Because he already answered for his crimes. Pol Pott (communist, murderer thug) died an old man somewhere in the Jungles of Cambodia and yet Pammy probably wouldn’t acknowledge that little communist issue. The man was responsible for 2 Million people slaughtered after cowards like you Pammy forced us to leave Vietnam. He got away like Castro does with crimes against humanity. But why should Pammy care about the butcheries committed by a communist dictator? The thing is PAMMY HUAC was on the right course. Elia Kazan did the loyal thing and he named names. I would have done it. Why? I don’t like traitors, I love my country and betrayal is about the most outrageously evil thing an American Citizen can commit against their nation and their fellow Americans. Sorry but the poor people who got so badly hurt deserved it. They are lucky they didn’t end up in prison. They should have.Kind of like if you spy or help through propaganda a guy like Hitler..you will be in jail. Forever. No difference between the Commies and Nazis at all. Both were centrally organized socialist entities. And Pammy, Elia Kazan was a Liberal. Also just for the record, Pammy Joseph McArthey was a US Senator, not a House Member. I don’t think you understand that there is a wide vast difference. HUAC means House UnAmerican Affairs Committee. There were no Senators sitting on the Dais at those hearings. If you need more of a civics lesson I would be glad to impart them. I doubt from the looks of it you ever had a Civics lesson in your life.
But its funny telling me to calm down and yet there you sit in your Che Guevera nightgown and matching slippers all night long railing at people? Hmmmm. Pammy darlin I was asleep while you were doing that.
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:07 am 70Nicole:
N: I was going to respond point per point
Of COURSE you were!
N: but after reading your multitude of posts here defending communism and wholesale slaughter over the past 100 years
Now, where have I done that?
Oh, wait. You guys get freaked out by questions don’t you?
N: Conservatives face bias based on stereotypes. Communists were hunted out based on the the fact that they…oh, what’s the use.
Well, Nicole, if you have so little to offer in the way of arguments that you give up so quickly, maybe you should do a little reading. I mean, outside of Ann Coulter and rightwing blogs.
N: As for your questioning that Henry Fonda was a communist or LLoyd Bridges etc….do you know anything about Hollywood history?
Yes.
N: James Stewart was great friends with Fonda but said numerous times, the only way they could stay friends was if they - never - talked politics because Stewart was a Republican Christian and Fonda a communist.
Actually what Stewart said was that they almost fell out over Fonda signing a letter objecting to the HUAC investigations in Hollywood. That’s hardly the same as saying that Fonda was a Communist. And Bridges was a FORMER communist who, as a friendly witness to to the HUAC, was unlikely to be blacklisted.
N: The McCarthy hearings are not as bad as now because at least they were honest.
You haven’t read up much about the VOA hearings have you? They were anything but “honest.” Nor was McCarthy’s famous speech to congress, the one that kicked off his career as a “Red Hunter.”
You really should read Reeve’s bio of McCarthy. It goes into great detail about just how dishonest the man was.
N: Modern liberals claim to be tolerant but are amongs the least tolerant people in history. They intimidate through hate speach tribunals and censor with name callings. Are people asked to testify…Google Human Rights Commissions and Mark Steyn and see what you get.
So you’ve had to go to Canada to find examples?
Not very convincing.
I’m still trying to figure out what you meant by this:
“At least the right in the 50’s came at you in daylight. The left in the modern era comes at you in the dark of night standing at your door with a wounded child asking for your help. When you let them in they go for the jugular.”
Want to take a shot at explaining it?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:14 am 71Buck: So what? Like all good leftists, you change the subject.
Noo, my comment about the anguish these witnesses went through was a direct response to your claim that it was a myth promulgated by leftist propagandists.
BT: Asking someone whether he was a communist was not the same as asking whether he preferred vanilla ice cream over chocolate, or whether he was a Baptist, or any other such thing. It was more akin to asking whether he was a member of a crime syndicate, and who else was a member of that syndicate so we can ask him some questions, too.
So you think membership in the Communist party should be treated as a crime? We should start keeping political prisoners?
Buck Turgidson: A perfect example of it, given that Miller was in fact an unreconstructed leftist who attended CPUSA meetings at least in his younger years (and maybe later too) and who always remained sympathetic to its cause.
Well so much for one of the greatest playwrights of 20th century America….
PT: Please explain to me what important directives from Moscow you imagine Dalton Trumbo and Zero Mostel were receiving.
BT: More “la la la la la” from you, eh?
How does a direct and pertinent question qualify as “la la la?”
BT: Not every witness is necessarily a participant, but every witness has potentially valuable information that can lead to the identity of the participants, which is why it was legitimate to question all of them.
In other words, they WEREN’T comparable to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.
BT: The supreme irony here is your criticism of our debating tactics when I have yet to see you address one single point directly.
What points have I avoided?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:15 am 72Mars vs Hollywood: it’s just a bad allegory built around a dumb metaphor. “Salem Witch Trials = Red Scare” fails for one simple reason: The witches were made up. The Commies were real.
You are unfamiliar with the parallels between the HUAC’s demand for names and the Salem witch trial investigators demand for names?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:17 am 73Pamela: Do you cry for the victims of Pinochet? The victims of Montt? The victims of the Shah? The victims of D’aubisson?
K: This sounds like one of these talking points you throw out randomly whenever things get a bit hot. I don’t and never did support any of these people.
I didn’t ask if you support Pinochet, Montt, the Shah or D’aubisson. I asked if you cry for their victims.
Do you?
K: Your preciouis HUAC “victims” supported the most bloodthirsty dictators on the planet. Hey, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right? You on board with that?
No, I have never been “on board” with the image of human beings as being nothing more than eggs for some omelet.
Are you?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:19 am 74Stephanie:
Posturing and emoting does not qualify as argument.
You’ve essentially blown your credibility. I don’t know who told you that the Venona papers dealt with people like Mostel, but they really sold you a bad bill of goods.
Where did I say that McCarthy was a house member?
Stephanieon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:22 am 75OMG Look at this continuous sewage coming from Pammy!
I figured out what Gore was making in his house…..
Robots to troll constinuously on conservative web blogs. I bet they even automatically call Hannity and Beck as well. THis is where all that energy went!
SHE IS A ROBOT SENT FROM ALGORE TO HARRANGE US!
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:23 am 76K, Pamela, a few final points, although I doubt it will make any difference at all:
P: 1. Chile was faving either a left or a right-wing dictatorship in the early 1970s. Which either dictator took power would have imprisoned and killed his political enemies. Allende would have killed more, since the establishment of his Red dictatorship, would have almost certainly been acompanied by Civil War throughout Chile. Your constant railing about Pinochet’s human rights record, bad as it was, does not change the fact Chile was better off under a Right-wing authoritatian dictatorship than a left-wing totalitarian one.
Can you offer one shred of evidence that Allende was planning the kind of bloodbath Pinochet instituted as soon as he seized power?
P: While your cowardly, pro-Communist relatives were marching against the Vietnam War my relatives were fighting it, just as right now I have relatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that might be difference between our families, one type that merely takes and complains, one that defends the other type.
My relatives include people who fought in WWII and were interned by the Japanese.
Now again, WHAT is it you hate so much about the Communists? Given that you like the idea of re-education camps, etc, for dissenters, it sounds like you actually should be a fan of the USSR and Red China.
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:25 am 77K: It’s not honorable to protect friends who consort with and support the enemies of your country. It’s dishonorable.
Actually, many of those friends who were being protected had fought the enemies of our country during WWII, and were guilty of little more than being leftists.
Do you really equate being a Communist or an ex-Communist with treason? Think it should be illegal?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:26 am 78Stephanie:
That’s the best you can do, eh?
Oh well…
Plissken79on 23 Jun 2008 at 7:58 am 79Being a member of the CPUSA during the Cold War was the same as being an agent of the Soviet Union, a nation we were fighting a (Cold) War against. It was no different than being a member of the American Nazi Party during WWII. Since CPUSA members were expected to conduct espianoge against the USA at ANY time Moscow called for it, and since espianoge conducted on behalf of ANY foreign power in the US is a crime, than it is more than safe to consider the CPUSA a criminal organization. While not all CPUSA were called on to spy on their country, each and every member understood they could be called upon to do so at any time.
Final points on Allende, the fact that he was a Communist and no Communist believes the revolution can occur without bloodshed, the fact he was a KGB agent since 1950 (and KGB agents were not recruited if they were the slightest bit averse to massive), and the fact he brought in veterans from the Stasi, the KGB, and Castro’s secret police service to create a Chilean Communist Secret Police tells me EXACTLY what his intentions were if he succeeded in creating a Red Chile. Perhaps if Allende wanted the Swedes as opposed to the East Germans to train his police force you could argue about his noble, non-violent intentions, but he did not, so you can not.
I have a great problem with Communist re-education camps, whether they were located in the USSR, China, Vietnam, or Cambodia. But your relatives clearly did not, because they marched in support of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotia Communists. They should have at least been given the same experience to those Asians who they argued would be better off under communist rule.
But Pamela, I should not be too hard on you. The hard leftist narrative of the McCarthy era, which you certainly subscribe to, is absolutely central to the secular religion of the left, as it is a sacred era with is own demons and martyrs. That this narrative has any no resemblance to actual facts about the era concerning the USSR, the CPUSA, the HUAC, or McCarthy himself is irrelevant. You clearly will not be shaken from it, no matter what factual evidence I or anyone else presents. It does not make you any less incorrect, but I actually feel quite sorry for you. It must be tough to continually believe an outrageous myth about the HUAC witnesses in the face of factual reality. By the way, I will not cite individual passages from Haynes and Klehr’s works, you need to read them all, VERY thoroughly
Stephanieon 23 Jun 2008 at 8:49 am 80Pammy again your idiotic little statement about that being the best I can do is as stupid as you are.
I was making a statement about McArthey because you are probably one of those who doesn’t know teh difference between a house member and a senator.
But I love the nasty arrogance of you knowing so much more than the rest of us. Wow, its all wrapped in such a devstatingly bitter package of self loathing. Why don’t you seek help for your problems or hasn’t the new age crap helped you. Still out there searching…..
But your a hatefilled little person thats for sure. So utterly miserable. One wonders where it all comes from.
kishkeon 23 Jun 2008 at 9:01 am 81Do you really equate being a Communist or an ex-Communist with treason? Think it should be illegal?
It should be and was illegal to consort with and support the country’s enemies, which is what Soviet Russia was at that time.
Do you think it shouldn’t be illegal?
Actually, many of those friends who were being protected had fought the enemies of our country during WWII,
Their former service in the army is of no relevance to their later association with the country’s enemies.
I didn’t ask if you support Pinochet, Montt, the Shah or D’aubisson. I asked if you cry for their victims.
Not relevant to the discussion. What is relevant is that you support those who supported the murderers of millions.
Do you think it’s okay to support those who condone murder?
What do you think should be done with people who support the overthrow of our government?
Stephanieon 23 Jun 2008 at 9:12 am 82Pammy you are a blow hard. A left leaning bomb throwing narcissistic blow hard. Why don’t you explain if you hate America so much and want to destroy her and you go on and on like a skipping old 45 vinyl record that can’t be stopped or tuned out why are you even here? This is a question that just never seems to get answered. None of the scumbag leftists I know want to leave but they hate the country. Or is it just disingenuousness on their part? Hmmmmmmm just a loud cry of NOTICE MEEEEEEEEEEEEE rather than any real belief in the crap they spew.
Mike18xxon 23 Jun 2008 at 12:31 pm 83> 1. Chile was faving either a left or a right-wing dictatorship in the early 1970s.
> Which either dictator took power would have imprisoned and killed his political enemies.
> Allende would have killed more, since the establishment of his Red dictatorship,
> would have almost certainly been acompanied by Civil War throughout Chile. Your constant
> railing about Pinochet’s human rights record, bad as it was, does not change the fact Chile
> was better off under a Right-wing authoritatian dictatorship than a left-wing totalitarian one.
A fact which will also not change is the fact of the Chilean legislation imploring the military to forcibly remove Allende from office for his repeated violations of the Chilean constitution. (You can read the complete text of the Resolution here: http://tinyurl.com/66srkl )
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 1:49 pm 84P: Being a member of the CPUSA during the Cold War was the same as being an agent of the Soviet Union, a nation we were fighting a (Cold) War against.
So should all Communist Party Members have been rounded up and imprisoned, possibly even executed?
P: It was no different than being a member of the American Nazi Party during WWII.
We had declared war on the USSR?
P: Final points on Allende, the fact that he was a Communist and no Communist believes the revolution can occur without bloodshed, the fact he was a KGB agent since 1950 (and KGB agents were not recruited if they were the slightest bit averse to massive), and the fact he brought in veterans from the Stasi, the KGB, and Castro’s secret police service to create a Chilean Communist Secret Police tells me EXACTLY what his intentions were if he succeeded in creating a Red Chile.
That’s how you rationalize the crimes of Pinochet, eh?
What’s still kind of baffling is exactly what it is you dislike about Communists, given that you seem to have wholeheartedly embraced the tactics of the USSR, down to rounding up and imprisoning people in the “wrong” political party, sticking dissidents in re-education camps, engaging in mass murder, kidnapping and torture, etc,etc…
P: I have a great problem with Communist re-education camps, whether they were located in the USSR, China, Vietnam, or Cambodia. But your relatives clearly did not, because they marched in support of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotia Communists.
You know nothing about how my relatives felt.
I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling them, and beheading prisoners?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 1:56 pm 85K: It should be and was illegal to consort with and support the country’s enemies, which is what Soviet Russia was at that time.
So you like the idea of us keeping political prisoners?
K: Do you think it shouldn’t be illegal?
Of course I don’t think being a Communist should be illegal. I prefer living in a free country, where people don’t get arrested merely for being in the “wrong” political party.
P:I didn’t ask if you support Pinochet, Montt, the Shah or D’aubisson. I asked if you cry for their victims.
K: Not relevant to the discussion.
It is relevant when you equate my stance with not “crying” for the victims of communism.
Why are you afraid to answer this question?
K: Do you think it’s okay to support those who condone murder?
If by “support” you mean object when they are blacklisted or subjected to other forms of intimidation, yes, I do. I would “support” the people here who have condoned the murders Pinochet committed in exactly the same way.
K: What do you think should be done with people who support the overthrow of our government?
I don’t think anything should be “done” with them. Otherwise, I’d be advocating that many Christian Reconstructionists, Militia Members, Klansmen, etc. be rounded up.
Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 2:10 pm 86Patricia… the difference between the Communists and the anti-war movement of today was the the CPUSA had infiltrated the US Gov’t on behalf of Stalin’s Soviet Union. That is not a controversial statement. If the KKK and Christian Reconstructionists were in control of the world’s largest nation-state with the Red Army and an array of nuclear missiles and millions of n battle-hardedned troops, then they would be rounded up.
“Political prisoners” are prisoners of conscience”. Those should not be arrested. When that conscience truns to action — action is a criminal act. That is the difference. Communists were not just a pinochle group playing games. They advocated — and worked towards — the overthrow of free market capitalism. Some no doubt signed lists to get laid by girls or to have something to do.
It’s a fine line between prisoner of conscience and traitor deserving of arrest, but it’s neither controversial nor impossible to ascertain a difference. Many of the Balcklisters gave aid and comfort — it’s in the Constitution (which is more than just three amendments in the Bill of Rights). Did McCarthy go too far? Yes. Was he wrong? At times yes, but his larger point was correct — as opened NKVD and KGB files have proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 2:11 pm 87“When that conscience truns to action — action is a criminal act.”
Should read “turns” — that action os a crime.”
Plissken79on 23 Jun 2008 at 6:40 pm 88“I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling them, and beheading prisoners?”
Yes, because you want nothing done to stop them. When you march against the US war effort you are supporting your enemies. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. You have a perfect right to do it, but that does not any less reprehensible. If our president had listened to peacenik fools such as yourself Iraq would have descended in utter chaos and much of the coutnry would now be an Iranian satellite. Fortunately, the US military has turned the situation around and the Iraqi government has finally got its political act together. You never wanted to give them that chance, but instead preferred the country fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists.
As for your pathetic, cowardly, Communist-supporting relatives, the fact that marched against their fellow countrymen such as my grandfather and my uncle and for murderous Asian communist parties tells me all I need to know. Shame on them, and shame on you for supporting their reprehensible acts.
Of course you cannot refute anything I stated about Allende, so you stick with the same nonsense that I supported Pinochet’s crimes. I never said anything of the sort, I said Pinochet was the lesser of two evils, which you cannot refute. Your ignorance about Allende’s KGB background, the number of people murdered under Lenin and Stalin, and the fact you seemed completely unaware Communist regimes murdered hundreds of thousands in Eastern Europe during the late 1940s/early 1950s at the same time as the great “crime” of McCarthyism went on is simply astounding. I feel truly sorry for any student of yours. It must be difficult to have teacher so ignorant of basic historical facts.
But I have lecture notes for my class in Russian history tomorrow to prepare for, so I am through with this debate. Go spit on a soldier, slap a policeman, send a Hallmark card to the murderous thugs in Teheran, recycle your sandals, or whatever it is hopeless San Francisco leftists do with their spare time
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:42 pm 89Troy: the difference between the Communists and the anti-war movement of today was the the CPUSA had infiltrated the US Gov’t on behalf of Stalin’s Soviet Union. That is not a controversial statement. If the KKK and Christian Reconstructionists were in control of the world’s largest nation-state with the Red Army and an array of nuclear missiles and millions of n battle-hardedned troops, then they would be rounded up.
How about if, say, the KKK were responsible for a rash of murders, bombings, arsons, kidnappings and assaults across the US. Would they get rounded up THEN?
Cause see, that actually happened, and I don’t remember members of the Klan being picked up and imprisoned for being in the Klan.
As for the American Communist Party — they weren’t stockpiling weapons, or committing assassinations, or engaging in terrorism. They were opening schools, organizing unions, and starting up co-ops. Oh, and occasionally holding concerts. Like the one at Peekskill. Ever heard of it?
Violence took place there, but guess who was responsible?
Seems to me the Klan was a lot more lethal. So are those Christians who go around bombing clinics and assassinating doctors.
Troy: “Political prisoners” are prisoners of conscience”. Those should not be arrested. When that conscience truns to action — action is a criminal act. That is the difference.
And what criminal “action” were those Communists engaging in? Other than writing screenplays, acting in movies, teaching, etc?
Troy: Communists were not just a pinochle group playing games. They advocated — and worked towards — the overthrow of free market capitalism.
And anything other than wholehearted commitment to free market capitalism should be criminalized?
Troy: It’s a fine line between prisoner of conscience and traitor deserving of arrest, but it’s neither controversial nor impossible to ascertain a difference. Many of the Balcklisters gave aid and comfort — it’s in the Constitution (which is more than just three amendments in the Bill of Rights).
So should the blacklisted not only have been blacklisted but imprisoned and possibly executed for treason?
Pamela Troyon 23 Jun 2008 at 7:52 pm 90PT: I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling them, and beheading prisoners?”
P: Yes, because you want nothing done to stop them. When you march against the US war effort you are supporting your enemies.
You really have very little grasp of what freedom really is, don’t you?
P: If our president had listened to peacenik fools such as yourself Iraq would have descended in utter chaos
LOL! Riiight. Good thing THAT didn’t happen!
Do tell, P — how are Iraqi women faring these days? Have you bothered to find out? Are they more free than they were under Saddam Hussein, or less?
P: As for your pathetic, cowardly, Communist-supporting relatives, the fact that marched against their fellow countrymen such as my grandfather and my uncle and for murderous Asian communist parties tells me all I need to know. Shame on them, and shame on you for supporting their reprehensible acts.
I suspect most peace marchers are both braver and have a far greater grasp of what this country is about than you do.
Or in fact, than most of the posters here. Really, you guys need a civics lesson.
P: Of course you cannot refute anything I stated about Allende, so you stick with the same nonsense that I supported Pinochet’s crimes.
Don’t you?
If the fact that I marched against the war means I support the crimes of Islamic terrorists, why doesn’t the fact that you defend Pinochet’s tactics here mean you support his crimes?
P: I said Pinochet was the lesser of two evils, which you cannot refute.
You’re asking me to prove a negative. There’s not one shred of evidence that Allende had any plans for engaging in the kind of bloodbath Pinochet unleashed on Chile.
PI have lecture notes for my class in Russian history tomorrow to prepare for, so I am through with this debate.
Be sure to ask your teacher about Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on torture. You know, the one that includes sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and other things right-wingers are currently denying qualify as torture.
Buck Turgidsonon 23 Jun 2008 at 8:07 pm 91Pamela Troy sez:
Buck: So what? Like all good leftists, you change the subject.
Noo, my comment about the anguish these witnesses went through was a direct response to your claim that it was a myth promulgated by leftist propagandists.
What the hell are you talking about? No such comment appears in any of my posts above. Learn to read. I said that the left has successfully brainwashed well meaning people into believing that asking someone whether he was a communist was as insidious as asking him whether he was a Methodist. I said nothing of anguish. Of course the communists were anguished, because their hands were in the cookie jar. Every wrongdoer since Eve has been anguished upon questioning. Big deal.
So you think membership in the Communist party should be treated as a crime? We should start keeping political prisoners?
When did I say that? Again you change the subject. Membership in the Communist party means at the very least having knowledge of persons’ affiliations with an organization controlled by an enemy state, and is justification for questioning in the name of national security. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” ya know. If a subpoenaed witness does not cooperate, he can be jailed for contempt. That is not remotely the same as “imprisonment” for one’s beliefs.
Well so much for one of the greatest playwrights of 20th century America….
So you’ve been told. But let’s say he was a good artist. What’s that got to do with whether “The Crucible” was propaganda? The best propaganda is effective because it is also absorbing entertainment. If it were not, it would likely soon be forgotten, since first and foremost people want to be entertained.
How does a direct and pertinent question qualify as “la la la?”
It doesn’t, but you didn’t ask one. You asked what Trumbo and Mostel did, when no one could know without first marshaling the facts. The reason they were fair game for questioning is that they almost surely would know valuable information to let the facts be marshaled about Party members and their actions, and their refusal to cooperate thwarted that. In a lawsuit, a fact finder is free to make a negative inference from such behavior, for good reason. A recalcitrant witness is typically hiding something. So the burden shifts to you, as their champion, to demonstrate their purity. We’re waiting.
In other words, they WEREN’T comparable to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.
You tell me. And again, how would HUAC know one way or another without a thorough investigation, which begins with the questioning of witnesses?
Better not brag to your friends about this exchange. If they see your concession that the Rosenbergs and Hiss were guilty, you’ll be anathema.
Buck Turgidsonon 23 Jun 2008 at 8:10 pm 92By the way Pam, Plissken is the teacher.
Plissken79on 23 Jun 2008 at 8:20 pm 93Sure, Pamela, answer this question. What does the fact that Allende brought in veterans from the Stasi and the KGB (if you even know what those organizations were) to train a Chilean Communist Secret Police force mean to you? Or the fact he was a KGB agent for twenty years before taking power? Or the fact he openly proclaimed Chile would follow the Cuban model? What do you think he had planned for the Chilean people, and his political enemies? Answer me, what these three facts signify? You have been completely unable to do, since they demonstrate Allende was planning on brutally crushing his political enemies, as even his KGB minders admitted later (check out Mitrokin and Andrew’s works on the KGB’s activities in Latin America). There were going to be political repressions in Chile in the early 1970s regardless as to whether Pinochet or Allende seized power. But if Allende had committed them you would have ignored them (just like you did regarding Soviet crimes, since you questioned that Stalin murdered tens of millions) or justified them as part of the process of defeating the counter-revolutionaries
Your relatives who worked to undermine the war effort in Vietnam openly supported the bloodthirsty Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot. Your relatives turned a blind eye when the Communists murdered millions after 1975. Your relatives called mine baby killers and war mongers for trying to help the South Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians avoid genocide by the Reds. Your relatives commmitted a despicable act. I understand you are not willing to admit this fact but it does not make it any less true.
Antiwar protestors, whether during the Vietnam War and now in the Iraq War are degenerate cowards who think by a sick twist of logic that by supporting (but anti-American) mass murderers they are somehow committing a courageous act. They were and are profoundly mistaken, and so are you.
This is my last comment on this thread, I have better things to do with my time than argue endlessly with a hopeless left-wing malcontent
Mike18xxon 23 Jun 2008 at 8:25 pm 94Pamela: “I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling them, and beheading prisoners?”
Have you marched in opposition to totalitarian Islam or communist gulags, or has 100% of your protest activity been in opposition to US policy of the moment?
– Who the hell do you think you’re fooling?
Carolynon 23 Jun 2008 at 9:48 pm 95Damn! Little Pammy has way too much time on her hands. Would that she would spend it thinking or even listening?
But no, our luck, she spends that time in mommy’s basement tapping madly on a borrowed keyboard coming up with posts that careem away from the point of the argument like a greased pinball. Boink! She hits the wall of facts and just bounces off! Boink! Boink! She spins away from confrontation like a mad washing machine with its top off, spraying everyone with her illogic. Boink! Boink! She spins wildly in a new direction as her frantic fingers type up warped reasoning, twisted facts and fabricated philosophy that she tosses over her shoulder to thud us in the foreheads as we try to pursue her for an intelligent argument!
Damn, it’s no use chasing a greased pinball. Even if you catch it, you can’t eat it.
Carolynon 23 Jun 2008 at 10:01 pm 96Another thing. It just occurred to me that in all the months and months I spent on Libertas listening to Dirty Harry, not once did Pompous Pamela ever pop her head up from her gopher hole and chatter in our faces.
Until………Libertas kicked Dirty Harry off its site.
Only then, in that moment did Pam abruptly spring into existence. Only in that moment did leftist, butt-of-Stalin-kissing Pam appear out of the woodwork to stick her tongue out, harangue, bully and mock us. Mock the ‘us’ who have followed Harry.
Just as importantly, mock the ‘us’ who have left Libertas.
Hmmmmmm.
Stephanieon 24 Jun 2008 at 6:25 am 97I think you are right Carolyn. I think Pammy has long worn out her welcome. I personally am sick of her whining, bitter bs and the useless lies she spews. She has a lot of gas…they have medicine for that.
Its funny about peace protestors. I had one blocking my car when I was driving to work in DC in 03′. I always played Darryl Worely’s Have You Forgotten and Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue with windows wide open. Anyway this assjack stands there holding up his Anti American bigoted leftwing facist slogan bearing sign and is screaming. I turned down the music and waved him over and said, if you don’t move your flabby vegan ass I am gonna run you over. Get the hell out of the way. Then I turned up the music and the wave of red nazis parted.
We had a Code Pink Psycho bothering us at a Pro Troops rally and what was funny is she was taking pictures of the women at the rally. I got really mad and told her to leave or she would wish she had and no more pictures. These protestors when confronted with the realization they could get their butts kicked or worse are cowards unless they have numbers with them. This stupid b*cth was in the middle of well over 5K Pro War people who had come to that rally including some pretty mean looking biker babes and she was there by herself, with her acid red colored hair, dirty pink fuzzy hoodie, and dreary badly done makeup. I was ready to rumble.
Kiton 24 Jun 2008 at 6:49 am 98Stephanie,
This Daily Show (I know, I know) bit has a good thrashing of the peace protestors by a former Marine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_cV15mipeg
Pamela Troyon 24 Jun 2008 at 7:12 am 99PT: So you think membership in the Communist party should be treated as a crime? We should start keeping political prisoners?
BT: When did I say that?
You strongly implied it when you said that asking someone “are you now and have you ever been a Communist “is more akin to asking whether he was a member of a crime syndicate, and who else was a member of that syndicate so we can ask him some questions, too.”
BT: If a subpoenaed witness does not cooperate, he can be jailed for contempt. That is not remotely the same as “imprisonment” for one’s beliefs.
How is it different?
PT: Well so much for one of the greatest playwrights of 20th century America….
BT: So you’ve been told.
Riiight. Twentieth century literature is a commie plot.
PT: How does a direct and pertinent question qualify as “la la la?”
BT: It doesn’t, but you didn’t ask one. You asked what Trumbo and Mostel did, when no one could know without first marshaling the facts.
Actually, I asked “what important directives from Moscow you imagine Dalton Trumbo and Zero Mostel were receiving,” given that you’re justifying their treatment on the grounds that they were commie spies working for Moscow.
BT: The reason they were fair game for questioning is that they almost surely would know valuable information to let the facts be marshaled about Party members and their actions, and their refusal to cooperate thwarted that. In a lawsui…
That information being…?
PT:In other words, they WEREN’T comparable to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.
BT: You tell me. And again, how would HUAC know one way or another without a thorough investigation, which begins with the questioning of witnesses?
Because the Julius Rosenberg worked in the Army Signal Corps and Alger Hiss worked in the State Department. Exactly what sensitive material were the folks in Hollywood supposed to be passing on to the Reds? George Cukor’s latest project?
BT: Better not brag to your friends about this exchange. If they see your concession that the Rosenbergs and Hiss were guilty, you’ll be anathema.
Now there’s an interesting remark. Are you in the habit of boring your friends with accounts of your exchanges in the comments sections of blogs?
Pamela Troyon 24 Jun 2008 at 7:23 am 100P: Sure, Pamela, answer this question. What does the fact that Allende brought in veterans from the Stasi and the KGB (if you even know what those organizations were) to train a Chilean Communist Secret Police force mean to you?
Cites, please.
P: Or the fact he was a KGB agent for twenty years before taking power?
Cite?
P: Or the fact he openly proclaimed Chile would follow the Cuban model?
Not surprising. He was a socialist.
P: What do you think he had planned for the Chilean people, and his political enemies?
A socialist society. So far I’ve seen absolutely nothing to indicate he had plans to pepper Chile with the mass graves of his political opponents — as Pinochet did.
You’ve implied here that you are a teacher of Russian History. All I can say, Plissken, is that your comments here do not come across as the work of a serious scholar. Most historians and historical researchers I’ve known, whether or liberal or conservative, tend to be more thoughtful and nuanced. They generally understand how argument works, and are used to defending their premises without histrionics and without resorting to the kind of personal insults you’re prone to here.
And I repeat, it’s odd that you claim to loathe the Communists so much when you actually have embraced the USSR’s approach to dissent.
Stephanieon 24 Jun 2008 at 7:26 am 101HOly crap she is still here. The Gorebot lives! I knew it! I wonder when her reactor battery will run out. Damn! What is the half life of these bottom feeders? I thought she’d get bored. Dirty filthy hippy fembot with stringy greasy hair must be hooked into an outlet in her house. Pammy darlin tell us what are your bills like? Or does the hospital add it onto your bill? Freak.
Pamela Troyon 24 Jun 2008 at 7:28 am 102Pamela: “I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling them, and beheading prisoners?”
Mike18xxx: Have you marched in opposition to totalitarian Islam or communist gulags, or has 100% of your protest activity been in opposition to US policy of the moment?
Do you understand the function of protest? In most cases it’s an effort by citizens to alter the policy of their own government.
kishkeon 24 Jun 2008 at 8:18 am 103Pamela: I wrote “It should be and was illegal to consort with and support the country’s enemies, which is what Soviet Russia was at that time.”
I then asked:
“Do you think it shouldn’t be illegal?”
My question clearly concerned consorting with and supporting the country’s enemies; yet, you answered as follows:
Of course I don’t think being a Communist should be illegal. I prefer living in a free country, where people don’t get arrested merely for being in the “wrong” political party.
That was utterly dishonest, but is typical of your modus operandi.
K: Do you think it’s okay to support those who condone murder?
Pamela: If by “support” you mean object when they are blacklisted or subjected to other forms of intimidation, yes, I do. I would “support” the people here who have condoned the murders Pinochet committed in exactly the same way.
K: What do you think should be done with people who support the overthrow of our government?
Pamela: I don’t think anything should be “done” with them. Otherwise, I’d be advocating that many Christian Reconstructionists, Militia Members, Klansmen, etc. be rounded up.
Yes, well, that’s why you’re so protective of these traitors and their fellow travelers. B/c you don’t think treason merits punishment, or that support for murder deserves censure. Apparently, the only crime you find distasteful is that of denying a person the right to work as an actor or screewriter. In other words, you’re nuts.
Mike18xxon 24 Jun 2008 at 11:13 am 104> >Pamela: “I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition
> >to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t
> >have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling
> >them, and beheading prisoners?”
>
>Mike18xx: Have you marched in opposition to totalitarian
>Islam or communist gulags, or has 100% of your protest
>activity been in opposition to US policy of the moment?
Pamela:
Sharon Fergusonon 24 Jun 2008 at 2:01 pm 105Guys, guys…!! All Pam is doing is demonstrating the definition of insanity by her constant repetition of lies that her favorite dictators want her to spout: repeating the same mantra expecting different reactions.
Pam dear - your ass has been p0wned by SEVERAL on this thread and yet you persist. Honey, take a valium and pick up a copy of the Federalist papers…and breath deeply. You’re gonnna strain a muscle or something.
Communism sucks, Pam. And so does your defense of it. If there were communists in Hollywood, they deserved being pinpointed. Communism FAILED.
Kiton 24 Jun 2008 at 2:04 pm 106Pamela Troy,
What is your opinion about the sickness of Fidel Castro?
Just curious?
Stephanieon 24 Jun 2008 at 3:43 pm 107Fidel caught aids…we all know it. He ran into Yasser Arafat at a UN meeting 25 years ago…oopps best not to spread lies.
Hey if anyone wants to go absolutely ape poo check out the message board for Andy Garcia’s Lost City. OMG the red bags filled with scum are out of their minds!
Pamela Troyon 25 Jun 2008 at 6:54 am 108PT: Of course I don’t think being a Communist should be illegal. I prefer living in a free country, where people don’t get arrested merely for being in the “wrong” political party.
K: That was utterly dishonest, but is typical of your modus operandi.
So, if you weren’t equating being a communist with “consorting with and supporting our country’s enemies” when you said, “It should be and was illegal to consort with and support the country’s enemies, which is what Soviet Russia was at that time” — what was your point?
K: Yes, well, that’s why you’re so protective of these traitors and their fellow travelers. B/c you don’t think treason merits punishment, or that support for murder deserves censure. Apparently, the only crime you find distasteful is that of denying a person the right to work as an actor or screewriter. In other words, you’re nuts.
If you’re equating being a communist with treason and murder, how is it “dishonest” for me to assume you wish being a Communist to be illegal?
Pamela Troyon 25 Jun 2008 at 6:56 am 109Kit:
My opinion about the “sickness of Castro?” I had no idea it was a subject of controversy. Yes, as far as I know, the man is sick, and is probably going to die soon. What kind of opinion do you expect?
Are you asking if I’m cheering or crying? I’m doing neither.
Pamela Troyon 25 Jun 2008 at 6:58 am 110Stephanie Ferguson:
Where, exactly, have I “defended communism?”
Mike18xxon 25 Jun 2008 at 12:19 pm 111> >Pamela: “I’ve marched for peace here, in opposition
> >to the Iraq war. Do you think that means I don’t
> >have a problem with murdering uppity women, veiling
> >them, and beheading prisoners?”
>
>Mike18xx: Have you marched in opposition to totalitarian
>Islam or communist gulags, or has 100% of your protest
>activity been in opposition to US policy of the moment?
Pamela: >cricket.wavcow_mooing.wav
Pamela Troyon 25 Jun 2008 at 1:17 pm 112Mike, I’ve already responded to that question.
Do you even understand the function of protest?
Mike18xxon 26 Jun 2008 at 2:29 pm 113Pamela: I’ve already responded to that question.
— No you didn’t.
Pamela: Do you even understand the function of protest?
— Yes. I understand perfectly well that an absence of hypocrisy is necessary for rational people to take you seriously.
Pamela Troy on 24 Jun 2008 at 7:23 am #
P: Sure, Pamela, answer this question. What does the fact that Allende brought in veterans from the Stasi and the KGB (if you even know what those organizations were) to train a Chilean Communist Secret Police force mean to you?
Cites, please.
— “Stasi, The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police”.
— Allende’s KGB case officer, Svyatoslav Kuznetsov.
P: Or the fact he was a KGB agent for twenty years before taking power?
Cite?
— Allende first went to Moscow in 1954….trust me: you don’t want to pursue this angle if you wish your fantasies to remain intact.
P: Or the fact he openly proclaimed Chile would follow the Cuban model?
Not surprising. He was a socialist.
— He was a communist who intended to implement every bit of Castro’s totalitarianism.
P: What do you think he had planned for the Chilean people, and his political enemies?
A socialist society.
— A totalitarian state
So far I’ve seen absolutely nothing to indicate he had plans to pepper Chile with the mass graves of his political opponents — as Pinochet did.
— As Che Guevara did?
And I repeat, it’s odd that you claim to loathe the Communists so much when you actually have embraced the USSR’s approach to dissent.
— Smug, assholy conflation of one principle with it counter. Communism is totalitarianism, and to be a “revolutionary” communist is to agitate for its spread; therefore, to be a revolutionary communist is to be a conspirator in attempted grand-larceny and mass-enslavement.
Pamela Troyon 26 Jun 2008 at 5:58 pm 114Or as Che Guevara. See the difference between us is that that I consider political murder wrong no matter who does. it.
And here, by the way, is what the KGB thought of Allende:
“In the KGB’s view, Allende’s fundamental error was his unwillingness to use force against his opponents. Without establishing complete control over all the machinery of the State, his hold on power could not be secure.” (Extract from the archive of KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin.)
Surely you realize that this “them or us” justification being used to excuse Pinochet’s mass murder of leftists and liberals is the same tired old refrain used by every political mass murderer from Hitler to Stalin to Montt to Pol Pot?
Frankly, I have to wonder about you people. You not only seem unwilling to read and understand arguments from liberals or perceived liberals. You seem unwilling to read and understand your own words.
When you equate membership in the Communist party with being a murderer or a thief or a traitor, you strongly imply that mere membership in the Communist party justifies imprisonment, or even execution. When you equate my defending the rights of Communists with defending Communism or liking Communism, it does not say much for your ability to distinguish between Communists and non-Communists. And when you declare that Pinochet was right to round up, torture, and kill people for the heinous crime of being Communists or Communist sympathizers I have to wonder how safe I or my liberal family would be if you folks had your way.
Pinochet killed people for doing precisely what many Americans take for granted — for supporting a politician they liked, for passing out leaflets, for speaking out in opposition to right-wing policies. And you think it was okay to kill them for it? To kidnap people, torture them?
Should I be killed for doing these things? My husband? My parents? My siblings?
Plissken79on 26 Jun 2008 at 6:26 pm 115Pamela, live in your fantasy world, you would not have batted any eye when Allende carried out his purge of counter-revolutionaries. The frustration the KGB had with Allende was that he was waiting too long to suppress political resistance, not that he was ultimately unwilling to do so. Check Svyatoslav Kuznetsov’s memoirs No one on the left would have given any thought to the victims of Allende’s Marxist dictatorship, just like no one on the left cares what Castro does now
Your intellectual weakness is compounded by your attributing to me justification of Pinochet’s crimes. He was the lesser of two bad options, that does not mean I approve of what he did. It is like claiming Eisenhower approved of Stalin’s crimes when he recognized a military alliance with the Soviet regime against the Nazi regime during the Second World War was preferable to allying ourselves with the Nazis against the Soviets. Again, the lesser of two evils.
Your basic ignorance about Allende, the purges of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and your endless obsession with McCarthyism at the expense of the much greater crime of Stalinism only demonstrates your intellectual immaturity. Marxism-Leninists are not interested in creating “socialist societies” along the lines of San Francisco leftism. They were interested in creating totalitarian regimes.
the HUAC was absolutely justified in investigating the CPUSA during the late 1940s and early 1950s since every CPUSA member was expected at any time to spy on their country. Your peacenik family can distribute as many leaflets and march in as many “peace rallies,” meaning “Al Qaeda can kill as many people as it wants, better to than have anyone actually try to stop it” rally. I do not care, it is your right as an American citizen. But that does not change they fact that by doing so you are demonstrating your foolishness, cowardice, and degenerate moral compass.
You leftists are all the same, you are so deeply insecure in your beliefs that you equate criticism of your actions and statements with attempts to censor you. You can say whatever you like, but that does not mean you are exempt from criticism for it, even if you live in the People’s Republic of Northern California.
Besides, you do not need to worry about right wing internt posters killing your ultra-left family or yourself, if the Islamic fundamentalists whom you nothing should be done to stop win this conflict, it is they who will kill you. And nothing you post on Buzz Flash will save you.
One more point, I am not the student in the Russian history class I mentioned, I teach the class. Right now I am instructing my students on the horrors committed by the regime the Hollywood Ten proudly supported, a support you apparently have no problem with.
Pamela Troyon 26 Jun 2008 at 7:03 pm 116PLISSKEN: Pamela, live in your fantasy world, you would not have batted any eye when Allende carried out his purge of counter-revolutionaries. The frustration the KGB had with Allende was that he was waiting too long to suppress political resistance, not that he was ultimately unwilling to do so.
Allende killed himself because he hoped to minimize the bloodshed of Pinochet’s coup. There is nothing to indicate he was planning the mass killings you invoke, and your assertion that I “would not have batted an eye” in the face of such killings does not arouse confidence in your ability to predict either violence or love of violence. This claim about me is based on nothing more than the fact that I disagree with you. It’s an attempt to justify your own willingness to countenance mass murder so long as it’s done in the name of the free market.
Where have I equated the criticism I’ve encountered here with attempts to censor me? Where have I equated criticism anywhere with attempts to censor me? Can you cite a single instance?
Murderous right wing Muslims, murderous right wing Christians, murderous right-wing Pinochet lovers — I don’t see much difference between them. They’re all cut from the same cloth.
Yes, yes, I know. You’ve claimed to be a teacher of “Russian history.” As someone who has known quite a few university teachers of history, both liberal and conservative, all I can say is that you don’t come across here as having the intellectual or scholarly chops that usually comes with teaching at that level. Most of them have a better handle on argument and are much less prone to descend into personal attacks.
Your intellectual weakness is compounded by your attributing to me justification of Pinochet’s crimes. He was the lesser of two bad options, that does not mean I approve of what he did. It is like claiming Eisenhower approved of Stalin’s crimes when he recognized a military alliance with the Soviet regime against the Nazi regime during the Second World War was preferable to allying ourselves with the Nazis against the Soviets. Again, the lesser of two evils.
Your basic ignorance about Allende, the purges of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and your endless obsession with McCarthyism at the expense of the much greater crime of Stalinism only demonstrates your intellectual immaturity. Marxism-Leninists are not interested in creating “socialist societies” along the lines of San Francisco leftism. They were interested in creating totalitarian regimes.
the HUAC was absolutely justified in investigating the CPUSA during the late 1940s and early 1950s since every CPUSA member was expected at any time to spy on their country. Your peacenik family can distribute as many leaflets and march in as many “peace rallies,” meaning “Al Qaeda can kill as many people as it wants, better to than have anyone actually try to stop it” rally. I do not care, it is your right as an American citizen. But that does not change they fact that by doing so you are demonstrating your foolishness, cowardice, and degenerate moral compass.
You leftists are all the same, you are so deeply insecure in your beliefs that you equate criticism of your actions and statements with attempts to censor you. You can say whatever you like, but that does not mean you are exempt from criticism for it, even if you live in the People’s Republic of Northern California.
Besides, you do not need to worry about right wing internt posters killing your ultra-left family or yourself, if the Islamic fundamentalists whom you nothing should be done to stop win this conflict, it is they who will kill you. And nothing you post on Buzz Flash will save you.
One more point, I am not the student in the Russian history class I mentioned, I teach the class. Right now I am instructing my students on the horrors committed by the regime the Hollywood Ten proudly supported, a support you apparently have no problem with.
Mike18xxon 26 Jun 2008 at 7:24 pm 117Pamela:
> In the KGB’s view, Allende’s fundamental error was
> his unwillingness to use force against his opponents
Yeah; having a “CIA-funded” opposition in the same hemisphere kinda puts the damper on that sort of thing, especially when the fate of Cuba is fresh on everyone’s minds. http://therealcuba.com/Page8.htm
But thanks for reminding everyone exactly what the Soviet Union’s intentions were for Chile.
> Pinochet killed people for doing precisely what
> many Americans take for granted — for supporting a
> politician they liked, for passing out leaflets,
> for speaking out in opposition to right-wing
> policies. And you think it was okay to kill them
> for it? To kidnap people, torture them?
You assume you have me painted into a hypocritical corner…but you do not, because I do not worship at the electroplated shrine of “democracy”. Germany was a democracy in the 1930s — and it elected the Nazis. Malaysia and Indonesia were democracies in the 1990s — and they elected Islamofascists. Europe’s fate awaits similarly: http://tinyurl.com/5vheg9
IMO, democracy is the most corrupt form of government which those who seek to rule others have yet devised, by delegating the responsibility for tyranny to thousands. As a pure function of time, the likelihood that any democracy will morph into a totalitarian entity approaches 100%.
http://tinyurl.com/6orjuz
==//==
Reprise moi: “Communism is totalitarianism, and to be a “revolutionary” communist is to agitate for its spread; therefore, to be a revolutionary communist is to be a conspirator in attempted grand-larceny and mass-enslavement.”
> Should I be killed for doing these things?
If “those things” be conspiracy to implement grand-larceny and mass-enslavement — I’m not seeing a down-side there.
“Grapeshot: n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.” (The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, 1911)
Mike18xxon 26 Jun 2008 at 7:35 pm 118Pamela: “Allende killed himself because he hoped to minimize the bloodshed of Pinochet’s coup.”
Oh, horseshit.
He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison after being convicted of treason by the very same Chilean legislature which passed the Resolution of August 22, 1973 imploring the military to forcibly remove Allende for treason: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Breakdown_of_Chile’s_Democracy
That, and he hoped to make a martyr of himself (after blowing his brains out with Castro’s gold-engraved gift AK-47).
The “coup” in Chile occurred later, when Pinochet refrained from returning governmental power to the civilian legislature. (Anybody who tells you that the coup constituted the military ouster of Allende is either ignorant of Chilean history, or a leftist lie-peddler.)
Plissken79on 26 Jun 2008 at 8:21 pm 119Simple, Pamela, your ridiculous question asking all of us whether if we wanted you and your liberal family to be killed because you supported causes we did not agree with.
And someone who did not know of the Eastern European and Soviet purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s as well as doubted Stalin murdered “tens of millions” has no buisness lecturing anyone on factual material. Facts for you are something to be discarded whenever inconvient (such as widespread CPUSA espianoge in the United States, among many other facts I and numerous others have pointed out)
Mike18xxon 26 Jun 2008 at 10:51 pm 120Where aging commies turn out to pasture: http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/
Pamela Troyon 27 Jun 2008 at 6:47 am 121Plissken:
Where do I indicate that I didn’t know about the purges?
You seem to be reduced now to just making stuff up.
Pamela Troyon 27 Jun 2008 at 6:54 am 122Mike:
Most historians agree with my assessment of Allende’s suicide. Not yours.
Given the comments I’ve seen here about Pinochet — and about leftists and liberals in general — my question is not “ridiculous.” Face it. You guys can’t tell the difference between someone defending the rights of Communists and someone being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer.
The coup in Chile was happening as Allende killed himself. Within days after the tanks rolled in, people were crowded into a sports stadium and being systematically executed. Claiming it did not qualify as a “coup” at that point is simply beyond absurd.
Mike18xxon 27 Jun 2008 at 1:12 pm 123Pamela: Most historians agree with my assessment of Allende’s suicide. Not yours.
“Most historians” is simply your euphemism for “Marxist academics”.
Allende never left a suicide note. He did, however, speak of martyrdom prior. He never spoke of saving lives or other such rubbish interpretations.
> The coup in Chile was happening as Allende killed himself.
*Bullshit*.
— The military ouster of Allende from power was authorized by the Chilean legislature’s Resolution of August 22, 1973. I have provided you the link twice.
As I said, the “coup”, proper, came later.
Pamela Troyon 28 Jun 2008 at 11:37 am 124Mike: “Most historians” is simply your euphemism for “Marxist academics”.
You make my point. LIke I said, you’re unable to distinguish between people who simply disagree with you on issues like Chile, the blacklist, etc., and bonafide Communists or Marxists.
For the record, the only Marxist with whom I’ve ever discussed the issue of Allende’s death insisted that he was murdered — not a suicide. So your claim that “Marxist academics” insist that Allende killed himself to avoid bloodshed doesn’t really wash. In fact, it’s the Marxists and Communists who have most frequently insisted that he was killed by the coup plotters.
M: The military ouster of Allende from power was authorized by the Chilean legislature’s Resolution of August 22, 1973. I have provided you the link twice.
As I said, the “coup”, proper, came later.
Sorry, but all you’re doing here is engaging in rather clumsy historical revisionism, apparently under the delusion that if you just remove the pejorative “coup” from what Pinochet did, it will somehow make A-Okay all those murders he committed from day one.
Mike18xxon 28 Jun 2008 at 1:50 pm 125> In fact, it’s the Marxists and Communists who have most
> frequently insisted that he was killed by the coup plotters.
They did that up until around fifteen years ago, when Allende’s doctor’s accounts became more wide-spread, and “He was murdered!’ propaganda became untenable. Thus, now, the “fall-back” propaganda in which Allended (erstwhile hero always) offs himself magnanimously to prevent further bloodshed.
It’s rubbish.
> Sorry, but all you’re doing here is engaging in rather clumsy historical revisionism.
Bullshit. The passage of the Resolution was news everyone in Chile knew from reading their own newspapers: The Chilean legislature requesting the military to forcibly remove a treasonous president from office.
Pinochet’s coup, proper, came days after Allende’s removal, when he refused to return government power to the legislature.
Pamela Troyon 28 Jun 2008 at 4:43 pm 126Your attempts to claim that Pinochet’s coup was not, in fact a coup when he and the other military usurpers rolled out their military and began killing liberals and leftists en masse is not just ridiculous but beside the point.
If you guys are going to whine about a current Hollywood “blacklist” of conservatives because you feel a tad self-conscious talking about your politics in Hollywood, it’s mighty hypocritical of you to then defend the real Hollywood blacklist, which resulted in people not just feeling embarrassed, but losing their jobs and their careers. Is making a conservative self-conscious about his or her politics a cardinal sin — but firing or destroying the career of a leftist for his or her politics laudable?
If you guys are going to defend such policies by comparing Communists to atomic spies, thieves, murderers, and other criminals, then for God’s sake take responsibility for your words and consider their implications — especially when you repeatedly show yourself incapable of distinguishing between bona-fide Communists or Communist sympathizers and someone who simply disagrees with you about the blacklist or about Pinochet.
And if you are going to revile anyone you label Communist on the assumption that all Communists admire or countenance the crimes of Stalin, it is the height of hypocrisy for you to then admire or countenance the crimes of people like Pinochet or Rios Montt.
Political repression is political repression. Ascribing one level of morality to blacklisting or killing the opponents of leftists and another to blacklisting or killing the opponents of right-wingers is the worst kind of moral bankruptcy. And it seems to be endemic here among the conservatives posting comments to this site.
Mike18xxon 29 Jun 2008 at 4:28 pm 127> “If you guys….”
Hey: You were talking to ME.
Your “theory” of the Chilean coup is *bullshit*, Pamela.
— It is plainly obviously that you have no bothered to visit the link provided to the Chilean Legislature’s Resolution of August 22, 1973, “The Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy” authorizing the military removal of Allende.
Here’s the link again: http://tinyurl.com/66srkl
….bah; you’ll just stiff it again, so I’ll post the whole bleedin’ thing:
==//==
Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy
by Chilean Chamber of Deputies, translated by José Piñera
The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy’s English-language version is provided by Chilean economist and former presidential candidate José Piñera at his pensionreform.org website; see first link for additional languages, including original Spanish. Piñera has also written an expository account# of the Chamber proceedings, shedding insight into many of the characters involved.
* http://www.josepinera.com/icpr/pag/pag_jp.htm
# http://www.josepinera.com/pag/pag_tex_nuncamas_en.htm
“This is the complete text of the resolution that Chile’s Chamber of Deputies approved by 81 votes against 47, on August 22 1973. The resolution includes a list of the legal and constitutional violations committed by the government of President Salvador Allende. In the absence of a viable impeachment procedure, it “represents” the military ministers in the cabinet of president Allende, among other authorities, with this “grave breakdown of the Republic’s constitutional and legal order.” Likewise, it reminds them “that, by virtue of their responsibilities, their pledge of allegiance to the Constitution, and to the laws of the land . . . it is their duty to put an immediate end to all situations herein referred to that breach the Constitution and the laws of the land.” After this call to “immediate” action by the equivalent of the US House of Representatives or the UK House of Commons, 18 days later, on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Armed Forces removed from office the President thus charged with violating the Chilean Constitution.” — José Piñera
August 22, 1973
The Resolution
Considering:
1. That for the Rule of Law to exist, public authorities must carry out their activities and discharge their duties within the framework of the Constitution and the laws of the land, respecting fully the principle of reciprocal independence to which they are bound, and that all inhabitants of the country must be allowed to enjoy the guarantees and fundamental rights assured them by the Constitution;
2. That the legitimacy of the Chilean State lies with the people who, over the years, have invested in this legitimacy with the underlying consensus of their coexistence, and that an assault on this legitimacy not only destroys the cultural and political heritage of our Nation, but also denies, in practice, all possibility of democratic life;
3. That the values and principles expressed in the Constitution, according to article 2, indicate that sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, and that authorities may not exercise more powers than those delegated to them by the Nation; and, in article 3, it is deduced that any government that arrogates to itself rights not delegated to it by the people commits sedition;
4. That the current President of the Republic was elected by the full Congress, in accordance with a statute of democratic guarantees incorporated in the Constitution for the very purpose of assuring that the actions of his administration would be subject to the principles and norms of the Rule of Law that he solemnly agreed to respect;
5. That it is a fact that the current government of the Republic, from the beginning, has sought to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the state and, in this manner, fulfilling the goal of establishing a totalitarian system: the absolute opposite of the representative democracy established by the Constitution;
6. That to achieve this end, the administration has committed not isolated violations of the Constitution and the laws of the land, rather it has made such violations a permanent system of conduct, to such an extreme that it systematically ignores and breaches the proper role of the other branches of government, habitually violating the Constitutional guarantees of all citizens of the Republic, and allowing and supporting the creation of illegitimate parallel powers that constitute an extremely grave danger to the Nation, by all of which it has destroyed essential elements of institutional legitimacy and the Rule of Law;
7. That the administration has committed the following assaults on the proper role of the National Congress, seat of legislative power:
a) It has usurped Congress’s principle role of legislation through the adoption of various measures of great importance to the country’s social and economic life that are unquestionably matters of legislation through special decrees enacted in an abuse of power, or through simple “administrative resolutions” using legal loopholes. It is noteworthy that all of this has been done with the deliberate and confessed purpose of substituting the country’s institutional structures, as conceived by current legislation, with absolute executive authority and the total elimination of legislative authority;
b) It has consistently mocked the National Congress’s oversight role by effectively removing its power to formally accuse Ministers of State who violate the Constitution or laws of the land, or who commit other offenses specified by the Constitution, and;
c) Lastly, what is most extraordinarily grave, it has utterly swept aside the exalted role of Congress as a duly constituted power by refusing to enact the Constitutional reform of three areas of the economy that were approved in strict compliance with the norms established by the Constitution.
8. That it has committed the following assaults on the judicial branch:
a) With the goal of undermining the authority of the courts and compromising their independence, it has led an infamous campaign of libel and slander against the Supreme Court, and it has sanctioned very serious attacks against judges and their authority;
b) It has made a mockery of justice in cases of delinquents belonging to political parties or groups affiliated with or close to the administration, either through the abusive use of pardons or deliberate noncompliance with detention orders;
c) It has violated express laws and utterly disregarded the principle of separation of powers by not carrying out sentences and judicial resolutions that contravene its objectives and, when so accused by the Supreme Court, the President of the Republic has gone to the unheard of extreme of arrogating to himself a right to judge the merit of judicial sentences and to determine when they are to be complied with;
9. That, as concerns the General Comptroller’s Office—an independent institution essential to administrative legitimacy—the administration has systematically violated decrees and activities that point to the illegality of the actions of the Executive Branch or of entities dependent on it;
10. That among the administration’s constant assaults on the guarantees and fundamental rights established in the Constitution, the following stand out:
a) It has violated the principle of equality before the law through sectarian and hateful discrimination in the protection authorities are required to give to the life, rights, and property of all inhabitants, through activities related to food and subsistence, as well as numerous other instances. It is to note that the President of the Republic himself has made these discriminations part of the normal course of his government by proclaiming from the beginning that he does not consider himself the president of all Chileans;
b) It has grievously attacked freedom of speech, applying all manner of economic pressure against those media organizations that are not unconditional supporters of the government, illegally closing newspapers and radio networks; imposing illegal shackles on the latter; unconstitutionally jailing opposition journalists; resorting to cunning maneuvers to acquire a monopoly on newsprint; and openly violating the legal mandates to which the National Television Network is subject by handing over the post of executive director to a public official not named by the Senate, as is required by law, and by turning the network into an instrument for partisan propaganda and defamation of political adversaries;
c) It has violated the principle of university autonomy and the constitutionally recognized right of universities to establish and maintain television networks, by encouraging the takeover of the University of Chile’s Channel 9, by assaulting that university’s new Channel 6 through violence and illegal detentions, and by obstructing the expansion to the provinces of the channel owned by Catholic University of Chile;
d) It has obstructed, impeded, and sometimes violently suppressed citizens who do not favor the regime in the exercise of their right to freedom of association. Meanwhile, it has constantly allowed groups—frequently armed—to gather and take over streets and highways, in disregard of pertinent regulation, in order to intimidate the populace;
e) It has attacked educational freedom by illegally and surreptitiously implementing the so-called Decree of the Democratization of Learning, an educational plan whose goal is Marxist indoctrination;
f) It has systematically violated the constitutional guarantee of property rights by allowing and supporting more than 1,500 illegal “takings” of farms, and by encouraging the “taking” of hundreds of industrial and commercial establishments in order to later seize them or illegally place them in receivership and thereby, through looting, establish state control over the economy; this has been one of the determining causes of the unprecedented decline in production, the scarcity of goods, the black market and suffocating rise in the cost of living, the bankruptcy of the national treasury, and generally of the economic crisis that is sweeping the country and threatening basic household welfare, and very seriously compromising national security;
g) It has made frequent politically motivated and illegal arrests, in addition to those already mentioned of journalists, and it has tolerated the whipping and torture of the victims;
h) It has ignored the rights of workers and their unions, subjecting them, as in the cases of El Teniente [one of the largest copper mines] and the transportation union, to illegal means of repression;
i) It has broken its commitment to make amends to workers who have been unjustly persecuted, such as those from Sumar, Helvetia, Banco Central, El Teniente and Chuquicamata; it has followed an arbitrary policy in the turning over of state-owned farms to peasants, expressly contravening the Agrarian Reform Law; it has denied workers meaningful participation, as guaranteed them by the Constitution; it has given rise to the end to union freedom by setting up parallel political organizations of workers.
j) It has gravely breached the constitutional guarantee to freely leave the country, establishing requirements to do so not covered by any law.
11. That it powerfully contributes to the breakdown of the Rule of Law by providing government protection and encouragement of the creation and maintenance of a number of organizations which are subversive [to the constitutional order] in the exercise of authority granted to them by neither the Constitution nor the laws of the land, in open violation of article 10, number 16 of the Constitution. These include community commandos, peasant councils, vigilance committees, the JAP, etc.; all designed to create a so-called “popular authority” with the goal of replacing legitimately elected authority and establishing the foundation of a totalitarian dictatorship. These facts have been publicly acknowledged by the President of the Republic in his last State of the Nation address and by all government media and strategists;
12. That especially serious is the breakdown of the Rule of Law by means of the creation and development of government-protected armed groups which, in addition to threatening citizens’ security and rights as well as domestic peace, are headed towards a confrontation with the Armed Forces. Just as serious is that the police are prevented from carrying out their most important responsibilities when dealing with criminal riots perpetrated by violent groups devoted to the government. Given the extreme gravity, one cannot be silent before the public and notorious attempts to use the Armed and Police Forces for partisan ends, destroy their institutional hierarchy, and politically infiltrate their ranks;
13. That the creation of a new ministry, with the participation of high-level officials of the Armed and Police Forces, was characterized by the President of the Republic to be “of national security” and its mandate “the establishment of political order” and “the establishment of economic order,” and that such a mandate can only be conceived within the context of full restoration and validation of the legal and constitutional norms that make up the institutional framework of the Republic;
14. That the Armed and Police Forces are and must be, by their very nature, a guarantee for all Chileans and not just for one sector of the Nation or for a political coalition. Consequently, the government cannot use their backing to cover up a specific minority partisan policy. Rather their presence must be directed toward the full restoration of constitutional rule and of the rule of the laws of democratic coexistence, which is indispensable to guaranteeing Chile’s institutional stability, civil peace, security, and development;
15. Lastly, exercising the role attributed to it by Article 39 of the Constitution,
The Chamber of Deputies agrees:
First: To present the President of the Republic, Ministers of State, and members of the Armed and Police Forces with the grave breakdown of the legal and constitutional order of the Republic, the facts and circumstances of which are detailed in sections 5 to 12 above;
Second: To likewise point out that by virtue of their responsibilities, their pledge of allegiance to the Constitution and to the laws they have served, and in the case of the ministers, by virtue of the nature of the institutions of which they are high-ranking officials and of Him whose name they invoked upon taking office, it is their duty to put an immediate end to all situations herein referred to that breach the Constitution and the laws of the land with the goal of redirecting government activity toward the path of Law and ensuring the constitutional order of our Nation and the essential underpinnings of democratic coexistence among Chileans;
Third: To declare that if so done, the presence of those ministers in the government would render a valuable service to the Republic. To the contrary, they would gravely compromise the national and professional character of the Armed and Police Forces, openly infringing article 22 of the Constitution and seriously damaging the prestige of their institutions; and
Fourth: To communicate this agreement to His Excellency the President of the Republic, and to the Ministers of Economy, National Defense, Public Works and Transportation, and Land and Colonization.
Mike18xxon 29 Jun 2008 at 4:32 pm 128http://www.josepinera.com/pag/pag_tex_nuncamas_en.htm
(The second “expository” link from the post above.)
==//==
HOW ALLENDE DESTROYED DEMOCRACY IN CHILE
José Piñera
” When a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them (the People)under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government.”
The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America
The Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973
At noon on Wednesday, August 22, 1973, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies was convened to consider a Resolution that would change the course of Chile’s history.
The first speaker was a Christian Democrat member of the Chamber, University of Lovaina’s sociologist Claudio Orrego. He stated that the proposed Resolution, jointly introduced by the centrist Christian Democrat Party and the rightist National Party, was necessary because “the country is in a crisis that has no parallel in our national history, in the 163 years of independence”.
With anguish in his strong voice, Orrego pleaded: “the hour has come to tell the truth before the country and before history, because Congress cannot keep silent about the gravity of the situation which Chile is experiencing. There must be an overall judgment about the current state of illegality that includes repeated outrages against the resolutions of Congress, against the Judiciary, against the Comptroller General, against the rights of citizens, and even, in some cases, against personal liberties… In this context there is no room for patchwork solutions. When the country is disintegrating, there is no room for little maneuvers involving superficial politics. Here, we must resolve the problems by going to their roots.” (Claudio Orrego V, For a Stable Peace Among Chileans, 1974).
Orrego also stated that President Salvador Allende had not respected the Statute of Democratic Guarantees that had made his election possible. That listing of individual rights had been incorporated into the Constitution in 1970 by the Christian Democrats as a condition for their support for Allende’s election to the Presidency. Because Allende, the Socialist candidate, had only obtained 36.2 percent of the popular vote, Congress had the power to choose the president from among either of the two relative majorities. Later, Allende would confess to the French revolutionary Regis Debray that he had only signed the Statute as a “tactical” move (Regis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende, 1971).
After Orrego several members took the floor. Hermógenes Pérez de Arce, from the National Party, affirmed that “the Administration has violated the Constitution and the laws, which has given way to the illegitimacy of both the mandate and exercise of the President of the Republic.” Luis Maira, from Unidad Popular (the governing Popular Unity Coalition, hereafter abbreviated to UP in accordance with the usual abbreviation in Chile), did not deny the grave accusations made by the proposed Resolution, but he tried to justify the conduct of the government by maintaining “that the problem in essence is none other than the Rule of Law and its just correlation with indispensable economic transformations.”
The morning session ended with a fiery discourse by Juan Luis Ossa, President of the National Party youth caucus. Serious incidents had happened the day before near the Congress building. Ossa, attacked by armed groups, had been obliged to use a firearm. He had told the press that he had been shot at by automatic fire and the police had not acted to defend the young people in his party. Exasperated by this incident, he rebuked the Communist deputies: “Because of that, you people-you band of traitors, band of cowards, band of sellouts, band of lying hypocrites-you are disqualified from complaining about civil war.” Such was the political climate in Chile on that day in August.
At 2:13 p.m. the debate was interrupted. In the Hispanic world, not even such grave matters warrant missing lunch.
The afternoon session, convened in order to vote on the proposed Resolution, began at 8:00 p.m. But there was a surprise. After a brief debate, the Chamber called for a secret session at the urgent petition of Jorge Insunza from the Communist Party. The onlookers in the gallery therefore had to leave the building. According to witnesses, Insunza stated that if the Chamber approved the Resolution, foreign forces would immediately invade the country.
When the public session resumed, the members immediately proceeded to vote. Once the count had been made, the President of the Chamber declared the Resolution approved by 81 votes to 47. At 9:49 p.m. the session ended.
The following day, August 23, the page-wide headline of El Mercurio read:
“Resolution by Chamber of Deputies THE ADMINISTRATION HAS SERIOUSLY VIOLATED THE CONSTITUTION.”
The Resolution, approved by almost two-thirds of the members (63.3 percent), accused President Allende’s administration of 20 concrete violations of the Constitution and national laws. These violations included: support of armed groups, illegal arrests, torture, muzzling the press, manipulating education, not allowing people to leave the country, confiscating private property, forming seditious organizations, and usurping powers belonging to the Judiciary, Congress, and the Treasury. The Resolution held that such acts were committed in a systematic manner, with the aim of installing in Chile “a totalitarian system,” that is, a Communist dictatorship.
It is an extraordinary fact that the Chamber’s Resolution had been approved by all of the members from the Christian Democratic Party, the majority party whose undisputed leader was Senate President and former President of the Republic Eduardo Frei Montalva. Only three years earlier, on October 24, 1970, that same party had given all of its votes in order to elect Salvador Allende president in the Congress.
For John Locke, the great English political thinker, tyranny is “the exercise of power beyond the bounds of law.” When such a tyrant appears, it is he who places the country in a state of war by exceeding the limits of his power. That is to say, he has “rebelled,” in the strict Latin sense of the word (”re-bellare” comes from “bellum,”-”war”).
The essence of the Chamber Resolution, therefore, was the accusation made against President Allende that, in spite of his having been elected democratically, he had rebelled against the Constitution and thereby become a tyrant.
Twenty violations and a desperate plea
The Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies has 15 Articles and can be broken down conceptually into the following four concepts:
a) a Preamble contained in Articles 1 through 4, which describe the known conditions essential for the existence of the Rule of Law. It contains a warning charged with significance: “a government that assumes powers not granted to it by the people engages in sedition.” It also contains a reminder that President Allende was not elected by a majority of the popular vote, but by the Congress, “subject to a statute of democratic guarantees incorporated into the Constitution.”
b) twenty Accusations of violations of the Constitution and the laws: one general accusation (Articles 5 and 6); seven accusations of violations of the separation of powers (Articles, 7, 8 and 9); ten accusations of actual violations of specified human rights (Article 10); and, finally, two accusations of seditious acts (Articles 11 and 12). This listing has a structure similar to the chain of accusations against King George III made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
c) a Clarification regarding the role of the military ministers that President Allende had nominated to key cabinet posts (Articles 13 and 14). It should be pointed out that a year earlier Allende himself opened the doors of politics to the military by placing various generals and admirals in key ministries. For several months, he had even appointed Army Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats to the Ministry of the Interior, a highly controversial and important political office. In August 1973, an admiral was made Minister of Finance, an office that was key to the economic management of the country.
d) a Plea to the President of the Republic and to the military ministers (Article 15) to put “an immediate end” to these serious constitutional violations.
On August 23 a messenger from the Chamber of Deputies brought an envelope to “La Moneda”, the traditional presidential palace. Addressed to the President, it contained the text of the Resolution approved the night before.
The next day, President Allende released a letter directed to the nation stating: “To ask that the Armed Forces and National Police carry out key functions of the government, without the authority and political direction of the President of the Republic, is to ask for a coup d’etat.” Undoubtedly, Allende knew how to read a political text.
The President went on to accuse the majority in the Chamber of Deputies of trying to remove him from office without a formal constitutional accusation. In this he was correct. The Chamber had resorted to a “plea for intervention” to the military ministers, and through them, to the Armed Forces, because the strictly juridical method of removing the President from office was unavailable.
According to Article 42 of the Constitution of 1925, removal of the President required a vote of two-thirds of sitting senators. But because Senate elections were staggered, it was virtually impossible for a President, no matter how unpopular, to find himself without the support of at least a third of the senators during his term. As it was, the opposition to President Allende won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections of March 1973, winning almost two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies. But the opposition had no such majority in the Senate. In effect, the Constitution of 1925 allowed an administration to violate it-even systematically, as a wide majority of deputies maintained-as long as that administration maintained a third of the senators in its corner.
It is revealing to note the confusion about the meaning of “Rule of Law” reflected in Allende’s response, since he declared that he would insist upon his illegal route since, “by means of the expression ‘Rule of Law’ is hidden a situation of economic and social injustice among Chileans that our people have rejected. They are trying to ignore that the Rule of Law can only fully exist in such measure as we can overcome the inequalities of a capitalist society.”
That declaration was consistent with the one made by his Minister of Justice on July 1, 1972: “The revolution will remain within the law as long as the law does not try to stop the revolution.”
The origin of the text of the Resolution has been explained by Claudio Orrego, in this way: “The President of the Christian Democratic Party, Senator Patricio Aylwin, charged me with the task of preparing the draft resolution… The morning of the same day, August 22, we revised the definitive text with Patricio Aylwin and I addressed Congress to present it” (Letter to La Segunda, March 26, 1980).
The Left opts for political violence
How is it that a President who came to power through a democratic election would then use his power against the very Constitution and the very laws that allowed him to attain that office?
The answer is that a Marxist revolution, which seeks to establish what its own doctrine calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” by definition cannot occur within the Constitution and within the law of a democratic republic.
It is one thing for a Marxist leader as Allende to become president of a democratic country by obtaining 36 percent of the vote, and being approved by the legislature in a run-off decision, but it is quite another to acquire the amount of power necessary to abolish democracy and establish a totalitarian system. For that, it would require an overwhelming majority to make the necessary changes to the Constitution and the national law. This has never happened in the history of humanity, and all such regimes have risen to total power by means of violence.
The keys to understanding the origin of the democratic breakdown were two official resolutions of the Socialist Party of Chile, adopted unanimously in its annual Congresses of 1965 and 1967.
Already in its Congress of Linares (July 1965), the Socialist Party of Chile, which defined itself as Marxist-Leninist, had maintained the following: “Our strategy in fact rejects the electoral route as a way to achieve our goal of seizing power… The party has one objective: in order to obtain power, the party must use all the methods and means that the revolutionary struggle requires.”
But it was in its Congress of Chillán that the seditious posture reached its highest expression. That took place between November 24 and 26, 1967. There were 115 delegates attending, as well as “brother delegates” from the Communist governments of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania and Yugoslavia, and from the Baath Socialist Party of Syria and the Socialist Party of Uruguay.
The resolution adopted stated that, “revolutionary violence is inevitable and legitimate… It constitutes the only route to political and economic power, and its only defense and strength. Only by destroying the democratic-military apparatus of the bourgeois State can the socialist revolution take root… The peaceful and legal expressions of struggle do not, in themselves, lead to power. The Socialist Party considers them to be instruments of limited action, part of a political process that leads us to armed struggle. The politics of the workers’ front is carried on and is contained within the policy of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity (OLAS), which reflects the new, continent-wide armed dimension of the Latin American process of revolution” (Julio César Jobet, History of the Socialist Party of Chile, 1997).
Socialist Party ideologue Clodomiro Almeyda, who would be Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Allende, speculated about the manner in which that process would end: “It is impossible to say in absolute terms what fundamental form the final phase of political struggle will assume in a country like Chile, when the current process gives way and the order of the day is the problem of power. I am inclined to believe that it will most probably take the form of a revolutionary civil war, Spanish-style, with foreign intervention, but much more rapidly and decisively”(Revista Punto Final, November 22, 1967).
It should be pointed out that the Socialist Party was the second-largest party in the country, that it would be the principal party in the UP coalition that governed Chile from 1970 to 1973, and that Salvador Allende was its most noteworthy militant. Its allied party, the Communist Party of Chile, was the largest and best-organized of all the communist parties in Latin America, and the third largest in the Western world, after those of France and Italy.
All of these events happened, of course, in the context of the Cold War, in which the Allende administration had allied itself with the Soviet Union against the United States and democratic Europe.
Possibly without ever having read George Orwell, Allende called the Communist superpower the “Big Brother” of Chile, in a speech in the Kremlin on December 7, 1972. Having met with supreme Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, Allende said in his speech that he held an “identical point of view” to that of the Communist leaders.
But this support for the communist regimes was nothing new. In March of 1953, a week after the death of Joseph Stalin, Socialist Salvador Allende was one of the principal speakers at a ceremony in honor of the Soviet dictator.
It is also illustrative to recall the incredible homage to Stalin made by the important Chilean Communist leader Volodia Teitelboim: “Today the eternal glory of Comrade Joseph Stalin sleeps in the radiant chamber of the Hall of Columns in Moscow. It has scarcely been one day and a few hours since the beloved leader of the world’s workers passed away - the greatest, most profound, and most noble friend of humanity… The father and leader of all progressive mankind has died. As Mayakovsky said of Lenin, he was the most human of all men… He gave abundance and a existence to his people. Beneath the eternal flag of mourning for Stalin, the nations of the earth march down the shortest road to sure victory, toward the world of human happiness” (El Siglo, March 1953).
During the decade of the 1960s, Allende agreed to serve as president of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity, a pro-Castro organization designed to export Communist revolution to the continent, The organisation had publicly declared that “armed revolution is the only solution for the social and economic ills of Latin America.”
Claudio Véliz, a historian and personal friend of Allende, maintained that Allende’s trips to Cuba had “a fundamental impact on his plans for Chile. After seeing Cuba, Allende thought that he could take a short cut. But the truth is that he went against Chilean tradition… There is no doubt that the UP government was a disaster and one which led us into civil war” (El Mercurio, November 28, 1999).
As president of the Senate in the 1960s, Allende on various occasions expressed his support for the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR), the group that initiated guerrilla violence in Chile. Of course, violence had been idealized for a long time by the Leftist leaders of Chile and the rest of the continent.
In the end, Chile’s Marxist leaders were unable to resist the example of the Cuban Communist Revolution. Caribbean tyrant Fidel Castro became the model, and Chilean Leftist leaders were intoxicated, like teenagers, by the actions and rhetoric of Che Guevara, who was calling for the creation of “multiple Vietnams” in Latin America.
Chile’s leftists failed to make the fundamental distinction between the noble objective of changing the world for the better and the use of violence. In Chile at the beginning of the 1970s there was too much poverty and underdevelopment, as well as monopolies and diverse injustices. Many idealistic people, especially the young, were searching for a revolution.
The great tragedy is that so many of Chile’s Communist and Socialist leaders, who should have been more mature and politically responsible, pushed thousands of these young people-first with incendiary rhetoric, and later by government action - into the abyss of political violence.
In this context, it is shocking to read the honest confession of a former Argentine guerrilla: “Today I can tell you how lucky we are that we were not victorious. Given our formation and our heavy dependence on Cuba, we would have sunk the continent in general barbarism. One of our watchwords was to turn the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of Latin America. First we would have shot the soldiers, then the opposition, and then any of our comrades who opposed our authoritarianism” (Jorge Masetti, El Furor y el Delirio, 1999).
On the brink of civil war
Allende’s response to the Resolution was not the only one in which he showed his confusion about the meaning of the Rule of Law in a democracy. The Allende administration had developed a most unusual juridical theory of “legal loopholes,” by means of which it had embarked upon the nationalization of a large number of private businesses of all sizes. In 1973 the Supreme Court reproached him for assuming powers belonging to that body, which resulted in an acrimonious exchange of letters. Thus, on May 26, 1973, in protesting at the administration’s refusal to comply with a judicial decision, the Supreme Court addressed the President in a unanimous decision: “This Supreme Court is obliged to express to Your Excellency, once again, the illicit attitude of the administrative authority in its illegal interference in judicial matters, such as putting obstacles in the way of police compliance with court orders in criminal cases; orders which, under the existing law of the country, should be carried out by the police without obstacles of any kind. All of this implies an open and willful disregard for judicial verdicts, with complete ignorance of the confusion produced in the legal order by such attitudes and omissions; as the court expressed to Your Excellency in a previous dispatch, these attitudes also imply not just a crisis in the rule of law, but also the imminent rupture of legality in the Nation.”
Allende, in a public speech a few days later, responded in this way: “In a time of revolution, political power has the right to decide, at the end of the day, whether or not judicial decisions correspond with the higher goals and historical necessities of social transformation, which should take absolute precedence over any other consideration; consequently, the Executive has the right to decide whether or not to carry out the verdicts of the Judicial Branch.”
Thus, by the middle of 1973, the anti-democratic exercise of power by President Allende and his ministers had led not only to an open constitutional conflict between the Administration and the Legislative Power as evidenced by the Chamber Resolution, but also to a serious collision between the Administration and the Supreme Court.
At this point, it is important to make clear that although the growing economic crisis was producing general misery and malaise-annualized inflation above 300 percent, rationing, a balance-of-payments crisis, growing unemployment, hopelessness-and although the crisis created an amplifying effect for these institutional conflicts, that was not the argument used for removing the Administration.
The trigger was provided by the fact that the country had becomed “an armed camp” and Chile was slouching towards a civil war. (Two important and complementary books that confirm that reality are those of Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, and James Whelan, Out from the Ashes.)
Oscar Waiss, director of the government gazette (the “Diario Oficial”) and an intimate friend of Allende, reflects in this statement the level of extremism reached by some of the UP leaders during the winter of 1973: “The moment had come to throw away all legalistic fetishism, to sack the military conspirators, to remove the Comptroller General, to intervene the Supreme Court and the Judiciary, to confiscate the El Mercurio newspaper and the whole pack of counterrevolutionary journalistic hounds. We must hit first, since he who hits first hits twice.” (”Internacional Politics,” No. 600, Belgrade, April 1975).
Despite his clear responsibility for introducing political violence in Chile, it seems highly improbable that Presidente Allende would have been capable of acting with the extreme immorality of the Bolshevik leaders who carried out the bloody October Revolution in Russia.
But, thanks God, the country never had to find out which of the UP leaders would have become the Chilean Lenin.
Frei against Allende
Salvador Allende became President of Chile after the failed administrations of Jorge Alessandri (1958-1964) and Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970). Both governments were incapable of changing Chile’s strategy of development, which had generated such mediocre economic growth that it was impossible to defeat misery and to create a horizon of prosperity for all Chileans. And both governments cleared the way for the violation of property rights, which are an essential foundation of a free society.
Oscar Godoy, Director of the Institute of Political Science at Chile’s Universidad Católica, argues that “the responsibility of the parties of the Right in the rise to power of the UP is that they did not know how to defend the institutions of the liberal State in a timely and vigorous way. For example, the defense of property rights was minimal, because those rights were being systematically surrendered. When the Right had the chance to recover, with Jorge Alessandri, it proved itself impotent against the novelty of the Christian Democratic movement and against socialism and it took its weakness to extremes. Lamentably, there was a dearth of public men on the Right who were ready to defend their plans with the same vigor that the socialists defended theirs. The campaign of Jorge Alessandri made multiple concessions to hide the true nature of the liberal project. At the time, there was much fear in expressing the words market, competition, individualism, etc. This was a capitulation which made it weaker still.” (La Epoca, September 4, 1995).
Weakening of property rights in Chile began, in effect, with the constitutional reform instigated by the Alessandri administration with the goal of initiating the Agrarian Reform. The warnings of Recaredo Ossa, former president of the National Agricultural Society, were prophetic, though ignored: “The rupture of constitutional guarantees with respect to agriculture is only the beginning of the breakdown of our democratic system. What is done today to this branch of production will be done tomorrow to urban property, mining companies of all sizes, trade, and all household goods. And furthermore the Constitutional Reform is the pilot project on the way to the abolition of property rights. Some people show no concern at the introduction of this wedge, but the crack will soon become an immense crevice, through which property itself will disappear.” (Radio broadcast, reproduced by El Mercurio, January 6, 1962)
The Frei administration took the country a long way in that direction, committing two other serious errors of public policy. In the first place, the administration responded weakly to the rise of political violence, and it was especially unfortunate that it did not react vigorously to defend democracy and the rule of law when the Socialist Party declared itself to be a partisan of armed struggle in its Congress of Chillán in 1967. And secondly, the administration’s Agrarian Reform multiplied violations of property rights by expropriating thousands of agricultural properties without paying fair compensation. Furthermore, the Frei administration allowed the proliferation of de facto expropriations (”tomas”) of other people’s properties by groups of agitators. Such “tomas” under the Frei government included universities, municipalities, hundreds of agricultural properties, real estate, highways, industries, a military barracks, and even the Cathedral of Santiago. In this climate, it was not surprising that some parties on the Left sensed that taking total power was also feasible.
With the failure of Alessandri’s “right-wing” administration, and the failure of Frei’s “centrist” one, and in the absence of a democratic left, the result was predictable. In August of 1965, Frei himself had said, “If my administration fails, we will have a government of the extreme left.” (Leonard Gross, The Last, Best Hope, 1967).
What was as unpredictable as it was extraordinary was Frei´s performance after he left the presidency. A man who had been very fearful of appearing to be “anti-communist,” Frei decided on the crossroads of history to risk everything to save Chile from falling into the hands of a Marxist dictatorship. It should be noted that he lived under the weight of the very heavy accusation that was made against him at the end of the 1960s, namely, that if he turned the government over to Allende, he would go down in history as the “Chilean Kerensky.”
Frei chose to remain in Chile after stepping down. By remaining he put his life in great danger, a fact made clear when Leftist terrorists assassinated his ex minister and political heir, Edmundo Pérez Zujovic. Frei´s action can be contrasted with the attitude of Alexander Kerensky, who escaped from St. Petersburg and died in New York (in 1970, the year Frei handed power over to Allende), writing books about how he was unable to stop a band of daring Bolsheviks from seizing Russia by force.
The former president must have known that his posture would be criticized not only by his adversaries, but even by many of his friends, as was effectively done by his former Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, who would attribute Frei´s attitude to “a true burden of conscience about the triumph of the UP government”(Letter to Frei, June 26, 1975).
Frei returned to the political arena, running in the Senate elections of March 1973 as senate candidate for Santiago. Once elected, he accepted the presidency of the Senate, and therefore transformed himself into Allende’s principal adversary.
Senator Patricio Aylwin, a very close collaborator of Frei, had on May 12, 1973, presented a successful motion in the Christian Democratic Party General Assembly, accusing the Allende administration of trying to establish a “Communist tyranny” in Chile. Later, on August 22, Aylwin would revise the proposed Resolution, wrote its conclusions, and without doubt after obtaining the agreement of Frei (the undisputed leader of the Christian Democrats), sent the final version for approval to Orrego. Furthermore, it was Aylwin who made the public reply after Allende had responded to the Resolution.
The leaders of the National Party, headed by its valiant and combative president, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, had very early on denounced the Allende administration’s growing disregard for the Rule of Law. Nevertheless, it was the posture assumed by Eduardo Frei, with rare strength, that tipped the balance among the military commanders in those crucial months of 1973. As President of the Senate, he was the leader with the greatest ability to call the opposition together, and he was also the Chilean leader with the most international prestige. Indeed, the London Times judged him to be “the most important political personality in Latin America.”
Testimony exists showing that Frei had arrived at the conviction that only the Armed Forces could keep Chile from becoming a second Cuba. The highly significant “Rivera Memorandum” describes a meeting on July 6, 1973 between Frei and the leadership of the Chilean Industrialists Association (Sofofa), the largest trade association of Chilean manufacturers.
In that meeting, Sofofa’s leaders stated that “the country was disintegrating and that if urgent measures were not taken, Chile would fall under a bloody Cuban-style Marxist dictatorship.”
The response of Eduardo Frei is revealing: “There is nothing that can be done by myself, by the Congress, or by any civilian. Unfortunately, this problem can only be solved with guns… I fully share your apprehensions, and I advise you to express them plainly to the commanders-in-chief of the Armed Forces, hopefully today.”
Frei’s most extensive testimony on these matters is his letter of November 8, 1973 to the President of the International Christian Democrat Party, the Italian politician Mariano Rumor. There Frei reiterated the accusations of the Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies: “They were implacable in their efforts to impose a social model clearly inspired in Marxism-Leninism. In order to achieve their ends they twisted the laws or openly trampled over them, ignoring the Judicial Branch. In their attempt at domination, they even tried to substitute a Popular Assembly in the place of the Congress as well as trying to create a system of Popular Tribunals, some of which actually began to operate. This was denounced publicly. They also attempted to transform the entire educational system, based on a process of Marxist indoctrination. These attempts were vigorously rejected, not only by the democratic political parties, but by unions and organizations of every kind, and with regard to education that meant the protests of the Catholic Church and of all of the Protestant faiths, who all made their opposition public. Faced with these realities the Christian Democrat Party could not remain silent. It was its duty—which it fulfilled—to denounce a totalitarian plot which was always disguised behind a democratic mask in order to buy time and to cover up its true objectives.”
Frei also understood that a communist Chile would have been pointed, like a long sword, at the heart of a vulnerable Latin America. Frei told Rumor that “the fall of Allende has been a setback for world communism. The combination of Cuba with Chile, with its 4,500 kilometers of Pacific coast, and its intellectual and political influence in Latin America, was to have been a decisive step in the attempt to control the hemisphere. This ambition explains the violent and exaggerated reaction to its demise. Chile was going to be a base of operations for the whole continent.”
This view is confirmed by Brian Crozier, founder of London’s Institute for the Study of Conflict: “During his three years in power, Allende transformed his country into a de facto Cuban satellite, and therefore into an incipient addition to the Soviet Empire… at that point Chile could frankly be described, in ideological and economic terms, as a Marxist state… from a strategic point of view, it had been transformed into an important base of subversive operations for the Soviets and the Cubans, including terrorism in all of Latin America… the Soviet KGB was recruiting members for terrorist training… specialists from North Korea had been teaching young members of Allende’s Socialist Party” (The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1999).
In a conversation with a journalist from the Spanish newspaper ABC, published October 10, 1973, Frei had already made severe judgements against the UP and had fully justified the military intervention: “The country has no way out other than a military government”; “The world does not know that Chilean Marxism had at its disposal arms superior in number and quality to that of the Chilean Army “; “The Armed Forces were called, and they complied with a legal obligation, because the executive and judiciary, the Congress and the Supreme Court, had all publicly denounced the presidency and its regime for destroying the Constitution”; “Civil War had been prepared by the Marxists “; “It is alarming that in Europe no one understands the reality: Allende left this nation destroyed.”
Later Frei made a public declaration, in which he admitted to having spoken with journalist Luis Calvo of ABC, but in which he pointed out that the published interview did not reflect his exact words—without clarifying what parts of the interview were inaccurate. Later still, in the above-mentioned letter to Leighton, Frei denied specifically that he had made the harsh judgement of Allende that was attributed to him in the interview (for that reason, those words have not been reproduced in this essay). But Frei did not disavow the rest of the wording. Leighton accepted the retraction about Allende, but said that the other judgements were of the same kind that he had heard Frei make for years.
A third key text from Frei is the prologue he wrote to the book by Christian Democrat political scientist Genaro Arriagada, with its eloquent title: “From the Chilean Way to the Way of Insurrection” (1974). There Frei made similar declarations to those contained in the letter to Rumor, and as an epigraph for his prologue, Frei chose this warning from Pindaro: “Even the weakest person can destroy a city to its foundations; but it is a very difficult business to raise it up again.”
The year 1973 not only saw the death of many noble dreams for Frei´s Christian Democratic Party, but also the death of French political philosopher Jacques Maritain. Frei had been a great admirer of Maritain and had even visited him on his sickbed during his presidential visit to Europe in 1965.
The inevitable outcome
Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard University has written that with the Resolution, “the Chamber had requested that the Armed Forces restore the laws of the country. Obeying that mandate, 18 days later the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, removed Allende from office by force” (Communism: A Brief History, 2001).
Two days after the removal of Allende on September 11, 1973, the influential British magazine, The Economist, published an editorial titled, “The End of Allende,” the content of which is so revealing that it merits full analysis.
The magazine was very clear in assigning responsibility for the rupture that occurred two days earlier: “The temporary death of democracy in Chile will be regrettable, but the blame lies clearly with Dr. Allende and those of his followers who persistently overrode the Constitution.”
The editorial goes even further and assigns to Allende the responsibility for the ensuing violence: “The fighting may have barely begun. With most of Chile’s links with the outside world still severed, it was difficult to take the full measure of the apparently continuing violence. But if a bloody civil war does ensue, or if the generals who have now seized power decide not to hold new elections, there must be no confusion about where the responsibility for Chile’s tragedy lies. It lies with Dr. Allende and those in the marxist parties who pursued a strategy for the seizure of total power to the point at which the opposition despaired of being able to restrain them by constitutional means.”
The description of the situation in Chile given by the British publication could have been written by any of the deputies who approved the Resolution: “What happened in Santiago is not an everyday Latin American coup. The armed forces had tolerated Dr. Allende for nearly three years. In that time, he managed to plunge the country into the worst social and economic crisis in its modern history. The confiscation of private farms and factories caused an alarming slump in production, and the losses in state-run industries were officially admitted to have exceeded $1 billion last year. Inflation rose to 350 per cent over the past twelve months. Small businessmen were bankrupted; civil servants and skilled workers saw their salaries whittled away by inflation; housewives had to queue endlessly for basic foods, when they were available at all. The mounting desperation caused the major strike movement that the truck-drivers started six weeks ago. But the Allende government did more than wreck the economy. It violated both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. The way it rode roughshod over Congress and the courts eroded faith in the country’s democratic institutions.”
At the time, The Economist was one of the very few foreign media that mentioned the crucial Resolution of August 22: “A resolution passed by the opposition majority in Congress last month declared that ‘the government is not merely responsible for isolated violations of the law and the Constitution; it has made them into a permanent system of conduct.’”
For the British magazine, “the trigger for the coup was provided by the efforts of left-wing extremists to promote subversion within the armed forces. Two leaders of Dr. Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, Sr. Carlos Altamirano, the former Socialist Party Secretary-General, and Sr. Oscar Garreton of the Movement of United Popular Action, were named by the navy as the ‘intellectual authors’ of plans for mutiny among the sailors in Valparaiso… The feeling that parliament had been made irrelevant was increased by violence in the streets (almost on a Belfast scale) and by the way the government tolerated the growth of armed groups on the far left that were openly preparing for civil war.”
The Economist fully justifies the military intervention when it argues that, “the armed forces moved only when it had long been clear that there was a popular mandate for military intervention. They had to move in the end because all constitutional means had failed to restrain a government that was behaving unconstitutionally.” And it made an important clarification: “General Pinochet and his fellow officers are no one’s pawns. Their coup was home-grown, and attempts to make out that the Americans were involved are absurd to those who know how wary they have been in their recent dealings with Chile.”
The Economist also predicted that the work of reconstruction would be difficult and that there would be excesses and injustices: “Whatever government emerges from the coup cannot expect an easy time. There will also be a temptation now for those who have suffered from the Allende government to settle their accounts with the defeated side. Few people believe that Chile can now return to its old way of doing things.” Secondly, it forecast the military’s cooperation with civil economists in going forward: “The military-technocratic government that is apparently emerging will try to knit together the social fabric that the Allende government tore apart.” And it concluded with a lament and a truth: “It will mean the temporary death of democracy in Chile, and that is to be deplored. But it must not be forgotten who made it inevitable.”
Alexander Solzhenytsin once stated that “Communism only stops when it hits a wall of resolution.”
As the Allende administration was restricting economic, social, and political liberties with the aim of achieving a Marxist revolution, there arose among the most diverse elements of Chilean society a strong civil resistance that soon became an avalanche of protests, demonstrations, strikes, and denunciations.
In the end, it was this civilian pressure that pushed the opposition political parties into approving the Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, and then pushed the Armed Forces to obey the plea of the Resolution and remove by force the President who had been systematically violating the Constitution of the Republic.
The generalized civil resistance that concluded with the Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies was the “wall of resolution” that Communism hit in Chile. That Resolution, therefore, constituted the death certificate of President Allende’s government.
As was affirmed by one of the key men behind the Resolution and then-President of the Christian Democrat Party, Patricio Aylwin: “The Allende government had exhausted, with the greatest failure, the Chilean road to socialism and it was rushing towards an “auto-coup” in order to install a Communist dictatorship by force. Chile had been on the edge of experiencing a “Prague Coup,” which would have been tremendously bloody, and the Armed Forces did nothing other than head off that imminent risk ” (El Mercurio, September 17, 1973).
That was not an isolated declaration by the future President of Chile (1990-1994). One month later, Aylwin confirmed his thinking: “The truth is that the actions of the Armed Forces and the National Police were no more than a preventative measure which preempted a coup d’etat which, with the aid of armed militias and the enormous military power at the government’s disposal and with the collaboration of no less than 10,000 foreigners in the country, would have established a Communist dictatorship” (La Prensa, October 19, 1973).
It is impossible, in the light of all those antecedents, not to conclude that the military intervention to remove President Allende was the result of a civil rebellion against tyranny. It was legitimate and inevitable, since, in the words of Vaclav Havel, a man whose country suffered under a Communist dictatorship for decades, “evil must be confronted in its cradle, and if there is no other means of doing it, then it must be done with the use of force” (New Yorker, January 6, 2003).
The facts therefore demonstrate that:
a) President Salvador Allende was primarily responsible for his own fall from power, having committed political suicide by declaring himself to be in rebellion against the Constitution of the Republic.
b) Eduardo Frei Montalva, then President of the Senate, was the preeminent leader of a civil resistence movement which concluded with the plea for the intervention of the Armed Forces.
c) The Armed Forces, in removing the Socialist-Communist government, obeyed a moral and political mandate given by the Chamber of Deputies, a chamber of the same Congress that in 1970 had elected Salvador Allende President of Chile.
A glimmer of hope
A surprising thing happened on that cold night of August 22, 1973, immediately after the members of the Chamber of Deputies had finished voting on the Resolution.
Several of the Christian Democrat and National Party members began singing the National Anthem. And they were joined by others until the entire Chamber was on its feet, singing the anthem.
Somewhere in that love for Chile, shared by all, a glimmer of hope survived.
Pamela Troyon 29 Jun 2008 at 4:47 pm 129And this novel of yours justifies the murders Pinochet committed…how?
Mike18xxon 29 Jun 2008 at 9:15 pm 130What the fuck is wrong with you?
Where did I ever imply I thought that?
Do you think the Chilean legislature was happy that Pinochet decided to exceed the authority granted him?
Stop being such a stupid, obstinate cow.
Alternatively, stop being such a duplicitous weasel who in actuality couldn’t give a runny shit (despite making noises to the effect) about the murders of anyone standing in the way of socialist utopias.
Pamela Troyon 29 Jun 2008 at 11:13 pm 131So now you’re reduced to spewing abuse.
You can post all the historical revisionism you want. The fact remains that the overthrow of Allende on September 11th was and is to this day considered a military coup, and no, not just by die-hard Marxists. And are you denying that the wholesale slaughter of Allende supporters started the day Allende died, September 11th, 1973?
Mike18xxon 30 Jun 2008 at 12:54 am 132> The fact remains that the overthrow of Allende on September 11th was
> and is to this day considered a military coup.
No, that’s just your leftist bullshit. Latin historians who aren’t leftists (such as Jose Pinera) don’t buy your bullshit.
The coup was two days after Allende’s removal, when Pinochet refrained from returning power to the Chilean legislature.
I’ve posted the Chamber of Deputies’ Resolution authorizing military force to remove Allende for you to, apparently, ignore.
> So now you’re reduced to spewing abuse.
If you insist upon spewing disproven bullshit, then it’s all you rate, at this point.
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