Letters of July 13

Salty Anti-communist Novel Full of Historical Lies
In an attempt to discredit the contributions of the Soviet Union during World War II and communism in general, the June 13 New York Times gloriously praised Ruta Sepetys’s inaccurate depiction of the Soviet Union in her novel “Salt to the Sea.”
While the capitalists claim communism is dead, they’re bent on killing it again and again. Once more the bosses’ media are confirming what the first communist collective of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their1848 Manifesto: the spectre of communism haunts the rulers.
In this novel the main characters are trying to flee to Hitler’s Germany to escape the advancing Red Army. The main “heroine,” for example, is “a young Lithuanian nurse fleeing from East Prussia.” The Red Army, however, was about to liberate East Prussia, the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Poland from Nazi occupation.
Ignoring this fact, the Times — the leading U.S. imperialist mouthpiece — declares that the novel’s young heroes’ “only hope of survival is to gain passage on one of the German ships ferrying people across the Baltic Sea.” The implication is clear: the Red Army is going to kill them; the Nazis won’t.
The novel’s heroes eventually board the German military transport ship “Wilhelm Gustloff,” which the Soviet Navy sank on January 30, 1945 — during the war. During the attack more than 9,000 died, including more than a thousand German officers. Sepetys considers the sinking of this ship a war crime because there were thousands of civilians on board. But it wasn’t a war crime:
According to primary source documents at The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, while the ship had been fitted with anti-aircraft guns, the Germans — following the rules of war — gave no indication that it was operating in a hospital capacity. And as it was transporting military personnel, under international accords it did not have any protection as a hospital ship.
Many anticommunist writers repeat the lie that the Soviet Union was the same as Nazi Germany and communism was like Nazism. But Sepetys goes further by implying that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany. She says the Soviets were guilty of “genocide” in the Baltics — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Her assertion is false. The Soviets deported the pro-Nazi elite of these countries. The three Baltic countries and Poland were in fact more viciously anti-Jewish than Nazi Germany. The “nationalists” in these countries raped and massacred Jews without any urging from the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, none of this was mentioned in the novel or the review. The Times’ review even goes as far to say, “The novel’s climactic moments include brutal scenes,” depicting “a young woman being dragged off by Russian soldiers who plan to rape her.”
After World War II the U.S. and its capitalist Allies saved thousands of Eastern European Nazis from getting what they deserved: trial and execution by the Soviets. Now these same people and their followers are running the post-Soviet states. Sepetys has been awarded a medal by the pro-fascist government of today’s Lithuania.
Let’s remember this when reading the New York Times and other capitalist media outlets. Naturally, the capitalists will choose fascism over communism every time.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Hedges: CIA Dupe or Stooge?
The CHALLENGE report on the Left Forum (6/15) correctly called out journalist Chris Hedges as “just another faker posing as a revolutionary.” But the case against Hedges runs deeper than his contention that it is “not our job to take power.”
Hedges was a speechwriter for Ralph Nader’s 2008 presidential run and an active backer of Jill Stein and the pacifist Green Party in 2012 and again this year. While paying lip service to Marxist theory, he promotes “outsider” politicians and the big lie that capitalism can be reformed to serve the international working class.
Hedges showed his true colors toward the end of his 15-year run as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, the number-one mouthpiece for U.S. finance capitalism. He served as Times bureau chief in two inter-imperialist hotspots, the Middle East and the Balkans. On November 8, 2001, the Times published on its front page the first of three Hedges stories based on accounts from Iraqi military defectors. Hedges’ top source, described as a former general and “once one of the most senior officers in the Iraqi intelligence service,” claimed he had trained “Islamic radicals…to attack installations important to the United States”—even to hijack planes without guns! “The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein,” the defector said. “He is at war with the United States.”
Hedges’ reportage enabled George W. Bush and his band of genocidal liars to substantiate the alleged link between Saddam and the 9/11 attackers, helping to pave the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But Hedges’ story was a fraud. The former general was in fact a former sergeant who’d made it all up. He’d been steered to Hedges by the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress and Ahmad Chalabi, the politician-in-exile who’d spent years on the payroll of the CIA and the U.S. State Department (Mother Jones, March/April 2006). Chalabi’s bogus accounts of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, as reported by the Times’ Judith Miller, were also instrumental in the run-up to the U.S. imperialist oil war that has killed more than half a million Iraqis.
How did Chris Hedges—a seasoned, savvy journalist—get hoodwinked by the notoriously unreliable Chalabi? We can only speculate, but it seems pertinent to note that the Times was a charter participant in the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird,” a secret Cold War campaign to plant and recruit CIA operatives in top U.S. media outlets, from the Associated Press to ABC News. In the 1950s and 1960s, according to investigative reporter Carl Bernstein (Rolling Stone, 10/20/77), the Times allowed “about 10 CIA employees” to pose as clerks or part-time reporters in the newspaper’s overseas bureaus. In addition, high-profile journalists like C.L. Sulzberger, the Times’ foreign affairs columnist, regularly shared information with the CIA. While these people generally rendered their services free of charge, the bosses considered them CIA operatives nonetheless.
In February 1976, CIA Director (and future U.S. president) George H.W. Bush announced that the CIA would no longer contract with accredited news correspondents. Bush added, however, that the Agency would still “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists (Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation, Mary Louise, 10/17/05).
Where Hedges is concerned, there are only two possibilities. Either he was an unwitting dupe of the CIA and the imperialist rulers he now lucratively scorns, or he was an active collaborator with the most deadly war criminals of our time.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Dispute: Anti-Fascist or Anti-Capitalist?
The June 1 article “Fascism: Define it to defeat it” continued CHALLENGE’s misleading explanation of fascism and its growth in the U.S. Our literature should not emphasize “the coming of fascism.” Capitalism uses different forms of rule and oppresses segments of the working class differently depending on its internal contradictions and external pressures. All these forms of government, capitalist “democracy,” state socialism and fascist dictatorship are relative. What is absolute is capitalism, which puts profit ahead of working-class lives. Capitalism must be destroyed, not fascism.
We often imply that fascism means untold destruction and suffering. Let’s not forget the bloody history of U.S. capitalism, which was built on the enslavement of Black workers and genocide of indigenous workers. For centuries, Black workers have been lynched and terrorized, whether by the KKK or the kkkops. U.S. imperialism has plundered the world for decades, causing unspeakable suffering, poverty, disease and death. It was U.S. imperialism that dropped the atomic bombs. Will “coming fascism” be worse than that?
Fascism developed in the last century in Germany, Italy and Spain in response to the threat of communism in the Soviet Union. This situation, unfortunately, doesn’t exist today. What we frequently refer to as “fascistic” is just everyday capitalism. For example, Ferguson was not fascism; it was plain old U.S. capitalism — bloody, murderous, racist.
The mistake that life under capitalism was better is a reformist trap: “Let’s take the rough edges off of capitalism and go back to when life was better.” Life for the international working class was never “better” under capitalism. Certain segments of the working class may have had relative prosperity and peace for a short period of time, but always at the expense of another segment of the working class.
We need to express our ideology clearly. We fight for communist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism. In this statement, there is little need for the word fascism. PLP should not build an anti-fascist movement that obscures what we all fundamentally oppose—capitalism. We should not forget that the communist-built anti-fascist movement during World War II contributed to the demise of the worldwide communist movement. CHALLENGE would express our line more clearly if the word fascism is minimized.
CHALLENGE Response:
Fascism is not the same as every-day capitalism—true! The brutality of slavery and genocide of the indigenous people was at a different phase of capitalism. That was capitalism on the up and up. Now what exists is capitalism in crisis: the defining element of fascism.
We cannot let our fear of reformism stop us from understanding different phases of capitalism. It’s true that capitalism is always brutal, racist and sexist. However, in capitalist “democracy,” illusion is primary over violent repression. This is not to say that the police do not violently attack workers. Fascism arises when the bosses can no longer rule in their old ways, and must discipline both themselves and our class for a system in perpetual crisis.
The response to the racist murder in Ferguson was a fascistic practice — a moment where repression became primary over ideology. It was a training session for both the rulers and the workers on how to respond to the fractures of this intrinsically brutal system. There was some disciplining of the local bosses through the main ruing-class wing, and some disciplining of the working class to accept the bosses’ response as normal. But Ferguson was a flash, not a change in the era.
To think that by saying we fight fascism will deter workers and the Party from defeating capitalism is essentially an anti-working-class idea. Communists fight and defeat fascists and turn imperialist wars into class war; that’s our proud history! Workers are capable of understanding what fascism is and how to defeat it. That’s part of our job of winning workers to this analysis.
The old communist movement failed not because it fought fascism, but because it didn’t fight directly for communism as the solution. Its internal weaknesses led to its defeat. Yes, let’s not confuse everyday capitalism for fascism, but we all need more confidence in the working class’s ability to understand and fight for these complex ideas.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★