Glenn Beck, as even Jon Stewart admitted in his TV interview with Bill O’Reilly, is a talented guy.  A week ago, I reviewed and praised Beck’s first documentary on Communism, although I did note a few shortcomings. I have also given him credit for his role in bringing to light the appointment by the Obama administration of people like Van Jones, who largely because of the exposure Beck gave to Jones’ largely unknown Communist views and belief in a 9/11 conspiracy theory, was forced by the administration to resign from his position as the “green jobs czar.”

But when it comes to history, Beck’s limitations are revealed. He often claims that he will admit to errors when he gets something wrong. I’d like to take him up on it.

On January 21^st, Beck spoke on his radio program about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Until this time, Beck, like most other Americans, considered King a great American hero, and honored him on his birthday. This is not surprising. King, through his leadership of the civil rights movement and his adherence to non-violence, pushed our nation to fulfill its democratic promise to all citizens.  King mobilized thousands of black citizens to peacefully demonstrate, in the face of brutal force employed by racist Southern law enforcement agencies.  TV viewers of the time saw — as did all of Europe as well as those who lived in the Soviet Union and its satellite states — how the movement  faced the violence imposed upon them by the likes of Sheriff Bull Connor, who used dogs and police hoses to try to disperse the non-violent  demonstrators.

The nation also saw the dignity and strength of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that propelled King onto the national stage, and later, the principled opposition King voiced to the extremist radicals on his left, including Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael and other black nationalists and revolutionaries who regularly branded King as a sell-out.

But this past January, Beck heard NAACP Chairman Julian Bond — the leader of SNCC during the period when it expelled white activists from its ranks and ousted moderates like now Congressman John Lewis from its leadership — say on an NPR radio interview that people forget that King was “a critic of capitalism” and favored what Bond said was a “modified form of socialism.”  Beck played this section of Bond’s interview:

“We don’t remember the Martin Luther King who talked ceaselessly about taking care of the masses and not just dealing with the people at the top of the ladder. So we’ve kind of anesthetized him. We’ve made him into a different kind of person than he actually was in life. And it may be that that’s one reason he’s so celebrated today because we celebrate a different kind of man than really existed. But he was a bit more radical. Not terribly, terribly radical but a bit more radical than we make him out to be today.“

Beck, it appears, was aghast and shocked. “Correct me if I’m wrong, America,” he stated. “But I didn’t think it was politically correct…to say that Martin Luther King was a socialist.” He then went on to say, and I put this in highlighted form: “I believe this is the first time I’ve ever heard this from someone, you know, on the side of praising Dr. Martin Luther King. I’ve heard people say, oh, well, you know, he was a communist, he was a socialist.”

We must first digress with a brief history lesson. Actually, what J. Edgar Hoover accused King of was not that he was a communist, but that he was ignoring what he saw as a main danger: that the civil rights movement was a key target for communist subversion. And as the FBI’s historian Richard Gid Powers writes, Hoover was “deaf to calls for racial justice.”  As King rose to leadership of the movement, Hoover learned that one of King’s top advisors was an attorney named Stanley Levison, who had been in the 1950’ the major financial chief of the American Communist Party. It was Levison’s ties with King that became Hoover’s pretext for his now well known persecution and slander of King. Levison, in fact, was no longer a Communist. But the Bureau also learned that King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had hired one Jack O’Dell as head of its New York office. O’Dell was in fact most likely still an active member of the CPUSA.

There have been many comments on The Goldstone Report on this site. Perhaps the single most important article that dealt with its fraudulent and biased conclusion was that in The New Republic by Moshe Halbertal, who argued  that “The Goldstone Report as a whole is a terrible document. It is biased and unfair. It offers no help in sorting out the real issues.” To understand what is wrong with Goldstone, one must read Halbertal’s lengthy article.

There have also been many critiques written by Harvard’s  Alan Dershowitz, who has been regularly in the forefront in defending Israel from unjust attacks. His latest, in Frontpagemag.com, can be found here.  He notes that Israel’s new report on its investigations shows that the accusations made by Goldstone and his associates reveal that “they are unfounded or exaggerated. Of the 150 charges investigated, ‘36 criminal investigations [were] opened thus far.’”

As for Hamas’ so called investigations,  Dershowitz writes, Goldstone points out that Hamas had “already decided that those who fired rockets into Israel had no intention to kill Israeli civilians. Why then did they fire the rockets when children were on the way to school? Why did they fire them in the direction of cities and towns?” These are questions not meant to be answered, but meant to serve as proof of what everyone knows: Hamas seeks to brand Israel as the tyrannical aggressor, and Hamas as the innocent party.  The truth, as Dershowitz writes, is that “Hamas deliberately conducted its terrorist activities against Israel in a manner calculated by Hamas to produce Palestinian civilian deaths from Israeli weapons. Any fair assessment of the evidence also leads to the conclusion that, while Israel loses from the death of every Palestinian civilian, Hamas gains from every such death. As Golda Meir once put it: ‘We can perhaps forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children.’”

There will be more such comments, as the Goldstone Report becomes the single most current weapon in the worldwide effort to delegitimize Israel. But what led Goldstone, himself a Jew supposedly favorable to Zionism, to chair the commission and to put his name on the blatantly one-sided and propagandist report?

To answer that, I want to reproduce a remarkable letter that has been going around the internet, written by a former friend of Goldstone who resides in Israel. To my knowledge the letter, written in mid-November, has not received wide circulation. If what the author,  Roy Chweidan of Netanya, Israel,  says is the actual truth about Goldstone’s past, it helps explain what led him to end up issuing a report that will do more than anything else to harm Israel in the world. Goldstone, as you will see, comes off as a rank opportunist, a man who went from benefiting from apartheid to switching sides at the exact moment when it would help his career.

The letter, written by someone who went to the same school and had the same education as Goldstone, and who clearly knew him personally, was obviously made public by the writer because he did not get any response. I cannot vouch for the factual data he offers. You can read it yourself and judge whether the charges made by the writer have merit.  

Dear Richard,
As P.W. Botha would have said, “Your report is too dastardly to
contemplate”.  When I met P.W. on the Angolan border on the 27 March 1976,
he told me how much he admired Israel and it’s people (Die Jode in Israel).
Is it not incredible that P.W. Botha being Prime Minister at the height of
apartheid so much admired us and you, a Jew, whom P.W. granted a meteoric
rise to Appellate Judge, so much hates us.  Are you not ashamed?

As an Israeli Jew, and as an Old Edwardian, I am mystified by your
behaviour.  It is unbelievable that you have seen fit to cause us such great
damage and damage extending into the future, but hereunder, I will prove to
you why you have done this.  But first, I will prove to you why your report
is null and void.

The whole free world accepts the following definition of the intelligence
gathering process, which is the collection, collation, interpretation and
dissemination of information (information also includes facts).  The
collation phase demands that the information and facts that will be used are
true, correct and confirmed.  Any information and facts that do not satisfy
this requirement must be disregarded.  Now comes the crux of the whole
matter.  The word truth here is used in the context of the free world
meaning that it bears the integrity, responsibility, morality and
uprightness of the free world.  This is what we learnt at KES.  Everybody
who has had experience in dealing with our Arab Moslem enemies, as I have,
will agree with me that their definition of the truth is the fabrication of
a false truth to conform to what they want to believe.  I, therefore use two
terms from now on, truth meaning free world truth and Arab truth which is in
fact meaningless.  What I am stating here is absolutely correct Richard.

Remember that you and I had the same grounding at KES until the age of 17
and I know your mentality, so if you had the same experience as I do of
getting to know the mind of our Moslem enemies, you would agree with me.  I
know the Moslem mind inside out.  Incidentally, I am three years older than
you so that we had an identical school education.

Your report is based on Arab facts, Arab information and Arab truth.  In
other words, your report does not pass the collation phase of the
intelligence gathering process, and it is therefore meaningless and null and
void.  It is unbelievable how cruel and savage these Hamas people are.  They
lie, deceive, murder and fabricate with no conscience.  For example, because
they want to believe it, they claim that we Jews have no historical right to
this country.  Because they want to believe it, they will move remains of
Israeli ammunition to other places to prove we deliberately fired at
civilians.  As you have already received mountains of criticism and
condemnation regarding operation cast lead, I need not refer further to it.
Now why have you associated yourself with this report in spite of the fact
that you have a brilliant mind?  At university you belonged to NUSAS showing
that you cared about racial discrimination.  In 1978 you accepted an
appointment from Jimmy Kruger, Minister of Justice, to be a temporary judge
to the Transvaal Supreme Court.  Jimmy Kruger was often called the Himler of
apartheid.  You were not forced to accept this appointment which was made
permanent in 1980.  When queried why you accepted to be an apartheid judge,
you replied that you preferred to try and change things from within.  I have
to deduce at this stage:

1.  You are a brilliant man to have been made a judge at such an early age.
2.  You wanted to advance your career.
3.  Perhaps you had changed your mind from NUSAS days.
4.  You did not tell the truth about changing things from within, because
you knew full well that any statement against
     apartheid with people like Jimmy Kruger and P.W. Botha around, would
have led to immediate dismissal.

After 1980 your career advanced extremely rapidly in the apartheid regime.
You were appointed to the Appellate Division of the S.A. Supreme Court which
was a top position in the apartheid hierarchy.  You are known to have mixed
socially with the Afrikaner leaders.  You are known to have assisted P.W.
Botha to cover up what was going on during the state of emergency which made
you an accomplice to apartheid policy.

After Nelson Mandela was released from jail, and De Klerk still had a strong
influence, De Klerk appointed you to head a commission to investigate the
causes of violence in the country.  You helped to protect De Klerk’s image
by a verdict that Sithole committed suicide in spite of evidence to the
contrary.  You also exonerated all the security forces from any guilt during
the violence.  You found no evidence of the operation of a third force.�
Some time before the General Election in 1994, you started to change your
report which ended up confirming the existence of a third force of
government forces committing atrocities against Blacks.  You also refused to
investigate reports of ANC violence against Whites despite evidence of it’s
existence.  You had deserted De Klerk and became an ANC hero.  Mandela was
grateful to you and appointed you to the newly formed Constitutional Court.
Now my deductions will lead to finality:

1.  The above indicates that you have a brilliant ability at twisting and
turning in order to best serve your own personal  interests.  It proved that you could not have supported apartheid in your heart but you certainly convinced the Afrikaans leaders that you did.

2.  Your maneuvering to support and then deceive De Klerk is mesmerizing.
Your feat in becoming an ANC hero after a past of being an apartheid judge is more than mesmerizing. �
At last I have reached my conclusions.  You have proved without a shadow of
a doubt that:

1.  You are a brilliant man in all spheres of activity.
2.  You are only interested in your own advancement irrespective of right or
wrong, and irrespective of morality or common decency.�
3.  You will only support anybody, any group or anything provided it leads
to your own advancement.

You can see, Richard that I have done my analysis without any preconceived
malice.  My deductions and conclusions have been made according to the
principles of making a military appreciation.  Having said this, I now
declare that I am totally ashamed of you.

From Conclusion 3 above, it is obvious that you are only using your report
for the purpose of Hamas and all the Arab block and their supporters, to
nominate you for Secretary General of the United Nations as this is the only
worthwhile advancement for a man like you already in such a high position.
With all their support, you will have an automatic majority to vote you in
as the new Secretary General of the United Nations.

I maintain that you are betraying the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
You have already disgraced the name of your family.  You are the only Old
Edwardian I know of who fights or has fought for evil against good.  During
World War 2, there were 178 Old Edwardians who were killed fighting for good
against evil.

My final conclusions are indeed very sad ones.  From all of the above, it is
logically obvious that because of all your brilliant qualities, attention to
detail, shrewdness etc:

1.  You know and understand that your report is null and void.2.  You know exactly that I am right about the Arab truth, Arab facts and
Arab information.
3.  You know that the I.D.F. is the most moral army in the world.
4.  You know that we did our best to avoid civilian casualties.
5.  You know that our Israeli cause is just.
6.  You know that everything that so many people have emailed to you is
correct.
7.  You know that your desire to become Secretary General of the U.N. is so
over-powering that you do not care about  Israel or her survival.
8.  In other words, you are the instigator, architect and the driving force
about everything in your report ie: the facts have  become Goldstone facts
the same as Arab facts, the information has become Goldstone information the
same as  Arab information, the truth has become Goldstone truth the same as
Arab truth.
9.  You have created in your name a Hamas report that they cannot do.�
10. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, YOUR THOROUGH PREPARATION WAS SUCH THAT YOU KNEW ALL OF THE ABOVE EVEN BEFORE YOU STARTED ON THIS WHOLE PROJECT.

It is not too late to repent, Richard.  Declare your report null and void
and cleanse your conscience. Your – by now infamous report has done no good,
it may well cost lives. It was grossly unjust and you know that
ultimately,justice will be served.  One day when Hamas & Co do not need you
anymore, you will be left ostracized and alone.  But first, in order to
achieve justice, you have to be punished for your sins.  I leave that to the
Israeli Foreign Ministry or powers above them.

Understand my definition of Arab truth, Richard.  It is Israel’s
understanding of the “Arab truth that plays no small part in the ongoing
battle for Israel’s survival. As your future now has become inextricably
linked to those who applauded you and with some encouragement from you,
continue to threaten Israel, your understanding of Arab truth – as it serves
Israel, could play a similar role in your future well being.

ROY CHWEIDAN
NETANYA
 

Send this around to all those who think Goldstone is credible. It will be yet another notch in the important effort to discredit the authenticity and accuracy of the report to which Goldstone gave his name.

This week, an amazing and unprecedented interview will appear in the Egyptian newspaper, Almasry Alyoum. It is one of the leading Cairo newspapers, and has an average readership of 200,000 people. What the paper features is an interview with Jeffrey Herf, the University of Maryland historian, about his new and important book, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, published by Yale University Press.

The interview has already appeared online in English. Given the almost constant barrage of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda throughout the Arab world, the Herf interview comes as a fresh antidote that will undoubtedly shock many Egyptians and cause great consternation. As the interviewer says to Herf, “Most Arab historians agree that the Nazis did not contribute great ideas that grew in the region, but you posit the opposite.” Herf tells him:

The absurd and false notion that an international Jewish conspiracy existed and was a major force in world politics was a key theme of Nazism’s wartime propaganda. Conspiratorial thinking focused on the supposed power of the Jews persisted after the war in the Middle East. The pejorative and hateful depictions of Jews in Nazi propaganda, the belief that they were inherently evil and that they should be punished as a result found echoes in the postwar publications of the Muslim Brotherhood, the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the postwar activities of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Egyptian government’s propaganda under Nasser and in the Hamas Covenant of 1988.

Remember, these words by Herf will hopefully be read throughout the Arab world. Contrast it, for example, with the sermon about Jews broadcast recently on the official Palestinian Authority TV station, approved by Mahmoud Abbas. The speaker said the following: “The Jews, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger, the enemies of Allah and of His Messenger! Enemies of humanity in general, and of Palestinians in particular – they wage war against us using all kinds of crimes.” These words are akin to those regularly broadcast to the Arab world during World War II by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine, from his radio studio in Nazi Berlin. Keep in mind that Husseini was given asylum in Egypt after the war, and for years, the Nasser regime spread similar words of anti-Semitic hate.

Herf also makes the following point, which must come as dynamite to many Arab readers:

Nazi officials dealing with propaganda aimed at Arabs and Muslims concluded that a selective reading of the Quran and the commentaries about it was their most effective means of reaching this audience. In so doing they drew out the already existing anti-Jewish themes. They presented Islam — not radical, fundamentalist, political or jihadist Islam, but Islam in general –as a religion infused with and inseparable from hatred for the Jews. In their view, from the time that the Jews rejected Prophet Mohammed’s demands that they convert to Islam, the Jews became an “enemy” of Islam. In so doing, Nazism’s Arabic-language propaganda placed the events of the mid-20th century into the far longer context of a supposed, but actually false, Jewish antagonism to Islam as a religion.

Last week, radical “historian” Howard Zinn suffered a fatal heart attack while on vacation. I was asked by John Leo, director of The Manhattan Institute’s “Minding the Campus” website, to write a critical obituary of him. You can read it here, or in a slightly different version at The New York Post yesterday.

One of the points I make in my analysis is that while it is easy to show how poor a historian Zinn was; indeed, I argue that it is dubious to even honor him with that title, since he was in reality little more than a leftist propagandist. Yet, I argued that Zinn was important because of the vast influence he had, and how many people took him seriously.

Little did I realize how true this was until I opened up yesterday’s New York Times, and read the incredible fatuous column by one of their regulars, Bob Herbert.  Because the paper’s editors think they are publishing an objective and centrist newspaper, they have obviously hired Herbert as their left-wing columnist. Paul Krugman, obviously, is not sufficient for that job.  Reading Herbert, if anyone does and even takes him seriously, is an arduous chore.

But in yesterday’s column, Herbert outdid himself. Calling Howard Zinn “A Radical Treasure,” Herbert writes that “His death this week at the age of 87 was a loss that should have drawn much more attention from a press corps that spends an inordinate amount of its time obsessing idiotically over the likes of Tiger Woods and John Edwards.”  Leaving aside the truth that at one moment, John Edwards was as much the darling of the Left as Zinn, (indeed, many on the Left saw the first exposes of Edwards’s  affairs as cheap right-wing smears orchestrated by The National Enquirer) Herbert’s argument rests on what he considers to have been Zinn’s great importance to America.

Ironically, Herbert’s column proves my main point about Zinn’s influence, one that in fact was  entirely spurious and in fact harmful to those who still have some hope that reading good history can serve to inform the American public at large. Herbert, of course, is enamored at the TV and film documentary Zinn and Anthony Arnove had undertaken, “The People Speak.” Like Zinn, Herbert believes whatever change came to America came only from “below,” from the dissent and protest of the poor and the oppressed.

In fact, as Frederick Douglass acknowledged before his death, change came from a combination of what abolitionists had put on the nation’s agenda, and the political system created by the Founding Fathers that led great men like Lincoln to function within the existing system and help create democratic politics that could enact legislation that led to a fairer and more just nation.

In his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama skirted gingerly and quickly over the vital issue of national security policy, and how our country will address it. He gave boilerplate attention to the overriding issue of whether the United States and its European allies will do anything meaningful to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, aside from once again saying that Iran must be stopped. While the President said all Americans stand united in protection of our national security, he said nothing about the growing debate over whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other 9/11 terrorists should be tried in civilian court in New York City, and on the scandal brewing over the failure to adequately interrogate Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab after his failed attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day.

Let us reflect for one moment on what we have learned the past few days about what appears to be a short 50 minute interrogation before Mutallab was read his Miranda rights, and hence became silent as he prepared to lawyer up. While the administration claims the FBI learned whatever he knew about beforehand, others have received reports that in fact, the severely burned and incoherent Mutallab was unable to provide much information. Moreover, in the recent Senate hearings, it was made clear that none of our nation’s top national security personnel, including National Intelligence chief  Dennis Blair, Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano and Counterrrorism Center director Michael Leiter, were consulted about how to proceed. Nor were orders given to have Mutallab interrogated by a new agency created for just such events, the HIG- or High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Now, Newsweek’s top intelligence correspondent, Michael Isikoff,  has challenged their testimony. Iskioff says that in fact, Leiter and Obama’s counterrorism advisor, John Brennan, held a telephone conference call and a Justice Department lawyer briefed them and told them that Mutallab would be indicted on criminal charges the next day. Iskikoff writes:

Neither Leiter nor any of the other participants, including representatives from the FBI and the CIA, raised any questions about the Justice Department’s plans to charge the suspect in federal court, the officials said.  “If you participate in a conference call and you don’t raise any objections, that suggests you were consulted,” said one senior law-enforcement official. Another added that “nobody at any point” raised any objections, either during the meeting or during a four-hour period afterward when Abdul Mutallab was informed of his Miranda rights to be represented by a lawyer.

When administration officials were queried about this by Iskikoff, administration spokesman meekly replied that they were “informed” about the decision but not “consulted” about it. In other words, they indeed knew what the administration’s course of action would be, and said nothing at all to indicate any opposition. Rather than admit this before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the responsible officials preferred to obfuscate by engaging in semantic wordplay.

All indication is, in fact, that the decision to proceed with a criminal indictment, as well as that of trying the five Al Qaeda prisoners in a criminal court in NYC, rather than before a military tribunal, came from Attorney General Eric Holder. All of this raises an important question. Congressional Republicans, and some Democrats, are making it clear that they will urge Congress not to vote funds to hold a trial in New York, and yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg changed his mind and officially stated that the trial, if held, should take place elsewhere and not in the city he presides over as its chief executive.

Although Bloomberg said he hoped that Holder and the President would change their minds, little indication exists that they will. This raises two important political and constitutional questions: Is the decision to try them as criminals rather than as prisoners of war legal, and are those who made this decision to be held accountable? If it is not legal, and if it was indeed Eric Holder’s decision, is this an impeachable offense?

The case for impeachment of Eric Holder has been made boldly and forcefully by a friend and colleague, the distinguished economic historian of recent America, Martin J. Sklar.  He has done so in a Memo on the issue of War and the Law that he has been privately circulating.  He has given me permission to summarize and quote from what I consider to be a compelling case.

Written in mid and late November, Sklar’s argument holds up even more so given recent developments. His premise is that POWs are subject to the laws of war, and not to the civil or criminal law of the detaining country or government.  If they are put on trial, they may not be tried in civilian courts, but only in military tribunals in accordance with the laws of war. As we know, this is indeed the course followed by FDR during World War II. As Morris Davis, chief US Military Commission prosecutor at Guantanamo, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in November of 2009,  the classification of defendants as POWs rather than criminal defendants is consistent with Geneva Convention requirements.  As he explained, “Military commissions satisfy the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, which are the source of the detainees’ rights. The rights in federal courts surpass the Geneva Conventions requirements and give detainees more than their status and the law demand.”

First, Sklar argues that neither the President nor the Attorney General has given any adequate reason why the five Al Qaeda defendants are any different than those who are going to be tried in tribunals.  Moreover, the claim of both that civilian juries will find them guilty, so there is nothing to worry about, is of course prejudicial in itself and makes a mockery of any civilian trial, in which defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty. Of course, we already know in advance that they were guilty. As Sklar concludes on this issue, the statements of both Holder and President Obama “compromise the integrity of the judicial procedure, and may place it in a disruptive jeopardy.”

Last Friday, along with millions of others, I watched Glenn Beck’s first TV documentary, “The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die,”  his attempt, as he puts it on his website, “to examine the roots of socialism and communism and the evil that followed.”  As one of the most controversial and one might say hated contemporary media figures on the Right, it was to be expected that his entrée into the documentary field would meet instant harsh criticism.

The first round of attacks came from some academics interviewed by Michael Calderone for Politico. Calderone saw it not as an attempt to educate viewers about the totalitarian monsters of the previous century, but as a mechanism for using “imagery pulled from the 20th century’s totalitarian past to make a point about citizens needing to be wary of government overreach in the present.”   He quoted Beck as having previously promoted the program by saying that “‘progressives’ don’t want the public to know about this history and that it’s  ‘not being taught in classrooms in America.’”

Next Calderone queried academics, including Clemson University Professor Steven Marks and Boston College noted political scientist and author Alan Wolfe, both of whom found little of merit, if anything, in the documentary. Marks thought Beck was trying to hint at a resemblance of contemporary liberals to figures like Hitler and Stalin. Moreover, Marks argued that “no one in their right mind is going to defend Stalin or Mao or Che Guevara.” Evidently Prof. Marks has not seen or heard about Steven Soderbergh’s recent lengthy film on Che, or the scores of pro-Che and pro Castro documentaries broadcast over the years on PBS, or anyone wearing a T-shirt heralding Che as a great liberator.

I don’t know what planet Professor Marks is living on, but if he wants to get in touch with me, I’ll bore him to death with scores of examples from prominent figures in both the academy and the political Left who in fact regularly engage in precisely just such glorification. If they do not glorify them, they will come up with scores of reasons to explain why their mechanisms of political control were forced on them by the opposition of American imperialism to their valiant attempt to establish socialism. This used to be par for course to explain Stalinism; now it is more often used by many to account for and to excuse Castro’s transformation of Cuba into a totalitarian state.

So, I suspect that although I did not learn anything new from Beck’s program (I am hardly, however, the average viewer), his footage and interviews on Communism were excellent. On Cuba, the two talking heads were Cuban scholar Humberto Fontova, author of numerous books and two exposing Che Guevara in particular; and Reason magazine’s former editor in chief and now head of Reason TV, Nick Gillespie. Both did a yeoman job of putting Castroism in context, and in revealing the reality of Castro’s prison island.  Gillespie essentially said on camera much the same thing as appears now on his magazine’s website. Beck also included a tear-wrenching interview with a Cuban widow and her daughter who witnessed the execution of their husband and father by firing squad on Cuban TV after Castro took power.

On the Soviet Union, the documentary concentrated on the Ukraine, and included an interview with the outgoing current President as well as the comments of  Rutgers University Professor Taras Hunczak, who told the story of the state induced famine and the horrendous consequences for the people of the Soviet Union who lived under the regime of terror created by Lenin, Stalin and their successors. Also presenting material was a Latvian prize winning documentary filmmaker, Edvins Snore, whose own film, “The Soviet Story,” reveals  how the current generation of young Russians remain ignorant of their own past history and now, as a consequence, often mindlessly defend Stalin as a great leader of his people.

On Mao and China, Beck brought to his camera the noted Chinese exile author, Jung Chang, whose magisterial biography of Mao, co-authored with her husband Jon Halliday, has been justly praised as definitive. Her own family memoir, Wild Swans, is one of the most powerful and impressive works of literary biography, in which Chang weaves her family’s stories through three different eras of Chinese history. It is clear from the caliber of the people Beck used to tell the story of Communism that the documentary has to be taken as a serious effort, and not dismissed as easily as did the academics who spoke to Calderone.

I suspect what most irked the academics was Beck’s choice of the general commentator on the roots of fascism, National Review contributing editor Jonah Goldberg, author of the best-selling book Liberal Fascism, which received the disdain of not only most academics, but that of liberal journalists and writers, who trashed it in various venues. This is not the time or place to discuss his thesis, but those interested in seeing how professional historians loathe it can immediately go to the fierce round of attacks up this week on the website of the  History News Network.

The special election in Massachusetts has highlighted the vast disconnect between commentators on the right and the left about what President Barack Obama stands for. To libertarians like Glenn Beck and conservatives like Sean Hannity, Obama is either a Marxist or confirmed radical, who has sought to put over an overt socialist or even communist agenda. But to proud leftists like the editors and writers for the Nation, he is, as Gary Younge puts it, a candidate “who never claimed he was a radical,” but who offered the left only “hope and inspiration.” He was a progressive candidate, which Younge argues “is not the same as his actually being progressive.” Take that, Glenn Beck!

The same refrain comes from Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel and left-wing activist leader Robert L. Borosage.  Obama in his first year, they write, did not create the “transformational presidency” some thought he promised; instead, he gave in to the big banks, big pharmaceuticals and the corporate world as a whole. Indeed, their side learned a hard lesson: “Obama is not the Messiah.” Some of us might have told them that a year ago, when to all indications, the entire left viewed Obama the candidate in just such a fashion. But Vanden Heuvel and Borosage, like their colleague Younge, note that Obama  “has never been a movement progressive the way Reagan was a movement conservative.”  Thus he has ceded the “terrain to the legions of the old order that are mobilized to fend off real reform.”

Their editorial statement, written before the election, indicates that they were probably not too surprised at the election results, although their compatriots immediately would join in spinning it in a way that allows them to try and save face. Seeing Obama as a failure who raised hopes only to smash them when president, their argument essentially is that it was their fault not to create the mass movement that might have pushed Obama to really enact their socialist (i.e., “progressive”) agenda, and to let the right-wing populists of the tea party movement usurp the frustration of the people.

So what are these self-proclaimed “progressives” saying about the meaning of Scott Brown’s victory? Are they going to learn the lesson that Bill Clinton learned early in his administration? Clinton learned that to get something done he had to listen to the electorate and move to the center/right. Rather than forge ahead with a highly unpopular attempt to create universal health care, he had to stand for programs that had bi-partisan support and that were opposed by the left. As we know, it was with Republican backing that Clinton got NAFTA through and initiated welfare reform, much to the consternation of that era’s leftists.

If the president listens to his supporters, he will not, and will surge forward in the same car that is about ready to go over the cliff in next November’s election. Take the advice of E.J. Dionne, who at one time was the most sensible and nuanced of liberal commentators. Now, Dionne argues that the failure was not Obama’s, but that of the Republicans who refused to support programs they had valid reasons to oppose. If Obama engaged in secret “inside deal-making,” Dionne says, it was the opposition’s fault.  The administration’s secret measures alienated Obama’s own base, who “believed in his promises of transformation” as well as the center that liked the president’s “conciliatory” style.

If only the Republicans  backed a bill that would have greatly increased the deficit, resulted in new high premiums for insurance and higher taxes, then all would have been well. But they didn’t, and hence, Obama had to make deals for no lower priced drugs and create a program that was a windfall for the insurance companies. So, Dionne says, moderates “saw expanding deficits and high unemployment,” which opened the electorate to accept  a “Republican story that linked the two and blamed the Democrats.” Does Dionne really think there is no connection?

I did not intend to blog today, since all the pundits you could check out have made their own analysis of what led to the gigantic Scott Brown victory last night. But having read many articles and analysis, I want to point the way for PJM readers to a few of what I consider the very best and the most insightful.

First, at TNR.com (Jennifer Rubin also links to this on Commentary’s Contentions website) is John B. Judis’ absolutely brilliant and essential analysis. Judis makes this point about the still important white working-class vote:

 Since the 1960s, when the Democratic Party split over race, and later over cultural issues as well, the white working class has been a key vote in elections. Their departure from the Democrats in the South helped account for the transformation of the Deep South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. And in the Northern states, and particularly in Midwestern states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, they have been the swing vote in state and presidential elections. It’s a fair measure to say that if a Democrat can get about 45 percent of the white working-class vote, he or she can carry Ohio–Obama got about 44 percent in 2008. But if he gets only 40 percent or less in these states, he will lose those states and lose national elections. The white working-class vote may not be as important in five or ten years, as the demography of America shifts, but it remains so now—an enduring legacy of the politics of the late ’60s.

He then makes the following point:

These two groups of voters have not viewed Obama’s presidency in a fundamentally different way from many other voters, but they, and particularly working-class whites, have been the prime source of a populist anger against the Obama administration. They have perceived Obama as robbing Peter to pay Paul–or more concretely, taking benefits from and imposing higher taxes on them in order to provide greater income and benefits to others. And we are talking here about perceptions.

He notes that what Obama has created is almost the impossible: his policies have united both right-wing and left-wing populists, because, as he writes,  the opposition to health-care “derived in part from the plan to tax ‘Cadillac’ health care plans (which are sometimes held by unionized middle class workers), penalize workers who don’t buy insurance,  and cut future Medicare spending, while providing new subscribers and profits for the insurance companies.”

Also at TNR.com is the analysis of Thomas B. Edsall, who throughout his career, has been always cognizant of the intersecting ways in which race and class effect the electorate.  Noting the anxiety of voters who fear that the health-care reform is based on the fear that “many voters consider the health care bill a multibillion-dollar transfer of taxpayer money to the uninsured, a population disproportionately, although by no means exclusively, made up of the poor, African Americans, Latinos, single parents, and the long-term unemployed,” Edsall writes that the white working-class “view themselves as only marginally better off than those they perceive as the recipients of new government benefits. They look at health care reform and worry that they have little or nothing to gain and much to lose. In the end, Democrats failed to tailor their salesmanship of health care reform to allay the qualms of these voters, of the white working class.”

Do any of PJM’s readers recall or know about Ramparts Magazine? A writer for @Issue,  an Online Magazine of Business and Design, writes that “today Ramparts is little known, except by those over 55 and serious magazine history buffs, but in its day it rocked the editorial world with its explosive investigative reporting, entertaining style and sophisticated design. More than a fringe periodical put out by young radicals, it was a political force to be reckoned with and a launchpad for some of the top journalists working today.” Well said, but why the sudden attention and the sudden new hype?

The reason is the recent publication of a book by Peter Richardson, A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. The title alone gives the magazine perhaps more clout than it really had. Despite the new attention paid to it, and the reviewer in The New York Times Book Review arguing that it was “a slick, muckraking magazine that was the most freewheeling thing on most American newsstands during the second half of the 1960s ,” the book does not appear to be on any best seller lists, it is not easily found in bookstores, and its number is quite high on Amazon, which indicates it probably is not selling that well.

Yet, it is certainly true that Ramparts was the only left-wing magazine of its day, and perhaps the only one to ever achieve such heights, that had a circulation in 1968 of 250,000. Reading about Vietnam on its pages, Martin Luther King Jr. was so upset that against the advice of his own advisors in the civil rights movement, he began to speak out publicly in opposition to the Vietnam War. That act alone was proof enough of the magazine’s reach and influence. 

Its other major scoop was the revelation that the CIA had, as Sol Stern recalls, secretly penetrated and financed the National Student Association. His story soon led to a virtual avalanche of mainstream reporting when Tom Wicker, the New York Times Washington DC bureau chief, assigned a team of top notch reporters who had both access and unlimited funds, to flesh out the story with how the Agency was funding scores of other front groups, labor unions, cultural journals and book publishers.

In San Francisco, the cheerleading crowd is doing its best to remember the magazine that was published in that city, and whose top resident journalist today, Robert Scheer, was once its co-editor. They have held forums and celebrations, remembering vividly those good old days when they dominated the mainstream culture and pushed others in their direction.

But the two most important articles about the real and very negative influence on our politics and culture that the magazine had comes from former editors. The first is the one by Stern,who took an editorial job with Ramparts in 1965, and along with Scheer and the San Franciso whirlwind character Warren Hinckle, became the triumverate that put the magazine on the map. The second is by Peter Collier, who along with David Horowitz, pulled off a palace coup that led to Scheer’s ouster in 1969-70 that put Collier and Horowitz on the top rung in place of Scheer and the already departed  Hinckle, who had left in1969.

Both former editors, who are now important conservative intellectuals, make a similar analysis about the very negative effects on our culture and polity that Ramparts had. The first is that the magazine tred a thin line between journalism and a vehicle for radical activism. One of the first Collier-Horowitz issues featured a front page photo of a Bank of America branch burning to the ground, after radical students in California had torched it. Their cover logo stated its destruction “may have done more for saving the environment than all the teach-ins put together.” Another cover featured four hands- those of the magazine’s editors-burning their draft cards. Both were a clear call for radical action and not reportage.  As Stern writes, “I don’t know if burning our draft cards advanced the antiwar cause, but it surely added to Ramparts’ media luster.”

It was quite early that the magazine’s cache in the radical movement got to the editors’ heads. Hinckle sent ten top writers and other friends to Chicago to cover the planned action at the 1968 Democratic convention. But instead of staying in Grant Park and the streets with the movement, they ensconsed themselves at the posh Ambassador East Hotel and held court in the expensive Pump Room restaurant, more fun than fleeing tear gas and billy clubs. When it came time to write their story, they moved to the equally famous Algonquin in New York. As Stern notes, they had no special inside scoops. The one they could have run with they chose to ignore. That was their inside knowledge that Tom Hayden, the guru of the New Left, planned in advance for a “violent confrontation with the ‘war machine,’” in order to in their eyes expose the fascist core of the supposed democratic American political structure.

Before Stern left, Scheer and Hinckle, and later  Collier and Horowitz,  devoted many issues to praise of the Black Panthers and Huey Newton, running a Hayden article in which he extolled the Panthers as America’s “internal Viet Cong,” and his now famous call for creation by white youth of “liberated zones” from which the Revolution would spread, “liberated” areas similar to Ann Arbor,Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; Berkeley,California and New York City’s Upper West Side.

In his article, Peter Collier vividly portrays the magazine’s accomplishments in one paragraph:

 The magazine had stumbled into a historical sweet spot. Vietnam had pried the lid off of America’s long postwar consensus and Ramparts, often confusing wish fulfillment with for fact-checking, was there to publish what came out of Pandora’s Box. Conspiracy theories? We had the assassination franchise and made the country drink the witches’ brew Jim Garrison had whipped up down in New Orleans. Black liberation? The magazine made the Black Panthers into a national phenomenon, a locked and loaded makeover of the civil rights movement. The romance of Third Worldism? Ramparts was an open mic for Castroism and helped author the myth of Saint Che by secretly obtaining and publishing the Guevara diaries. The war itself? In one of those pictures that actually is worth a thousand words, Ramparts made a stipulation when it produced one of its classic covers showing Ho Chi Minh in a sampan posed as George Washington crossing the Delaware.

It is clear enough, thinking about this, that what the magazine did is in fact to popularize so many of the destructive myths that now many who never saw the magazine or even heard of it assume is pure factual truth. Was Ho Chi Minh Vietnam’s  George Washington, rather than its Mao and Stalin? Of course not. But today, Ramparts’ claims are Oliver Stone’s  and Howard Zinn’s true history of the 1960’s. Was Cuba and Fidel the island’s liberator rather than its Lenin? No, but it is the truth if you ask Danny Glover or Harry Belafonte or Steven Speilberg, etc etc. Scheer, Hinckle, Stern, Collier and Horowitz made these views commonplace. 

Tomorrow is the Democrat’s D-Day, and the entire nation will be watching. At present, depending on which poll you prefer, Scott Brown is anywhere from 5 points to 10 points ahead of the Democratic incumbent in the Massachusetts Senate seat, Martha Coakley. From all accounts, the momentum is with Brown. Indeed, as Mike Barnicle said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, Brown was even ahead in working-class Democratic Marlboro. Brown has been out driving his truck throughout the state, shaking hands, standing in the cold and missing no beat. The clueless Coakley, on the other hand, when asked why she left the state to attend a fundraiser for DC lobbyists, retorted  “what do you want me to do, stand in the cold at Fenway Park and shake hands?”  Well…..

The result might well be the once unthinkable-a win for the mainstream conservative candidate, Scott Brown. As Boston TV political analyst Jon Keller points out in an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal  “after Kennedy’s death in August, few imagined there would be any problem replacing him with another Democrat in the U.S. Senate. It’s been 16 years since Massachusetts elected a Republican to a congressional seat, 31 years since the last Republican senator left office. Gov. Patrick appointed a former Kennedy aide as the interim senator, and Democratic primary voters chose the well-regarded state Attorney General Martha Coakley as their nominee for the special election.”

But as Keller points out, independents- who outnumber Democrats in Massachusetts by a large percentage of over 51% of voters- are breaking for Brown by a three to one margin. Coakley is out of touch with the views of the electorate on issues of national security, taxation, as well as on the big one- health care reform. With nation-wide revulsion over the payoff to big Labor, who get an exemption for the Cadillac tax on high cost insurance premiums until 2018, while regular workers start paying in 2013, it is not surprising that so many voters in the Bay State are willing to give up Ted Kennedy’s old seat to a Republican.

And as everyone knows, the campaign is above all a referendum on the Obama administration’s health care bill. The American public does not like it, does not trust the Democrats’ assurances that it can pass without an increase in the deficit, without having to pay higher premiums for their insurance, while getting less secure medical care in exchange.  This is especially true in MASS, where the state already has an expensive state-wide health insurance plan.