re: #152 Dark_Falcon

Given their use of “shaming sessions” and their dogmatic refusal to see Stalin as he was, said American communists were still part of a very evil historical force. That they did some good should not be doubted, but I content it was outweighed by the harm they inflicted by their support of the USSR. That does not, however mean that most of them were evil. Only those who actually betrayed the United States merit that description (though some may well have been wicked in non-political ways, but I don’t know enough about that to comment). So Dalton Trumbo and Paul Robeson were not evil men, but Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were indeed evil.

The support of Stalin also was not limited to Communists. “Fellow traveler” useful idiots - left-wing intellectuals all around the world, like Leon Feuchtwanger, Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Corliss Lamont (one of ACLU directors) had a love affair with Stalin. That’s a shameful fact. However it would also be wrong to look at it from modern perspective, living in liberal democracies.

E.g. to take the aspect of race (one among many), the US was the country of racial segregation and oppression - i.e. a partially (and I will stress the word “partially”) fascist state. For an average left-winger who lived in the US then and had only partial information about the Soviet Union, the land of alleged internationalism, allegedly free from any forms of racial oppression, and with minimal credible information about the actual repressions that were going on there, the sympathies both towards the USSR and Stalin can be understandable - just as someone living in certain parts of USSR in 1941 might be partially excused if they greeted Hitler’s army as an army of “liberators” in the first days of the invasion. Of course, looking back now and having more information we have a bigger picture and can judge even segregation as it was practiced as a lesser evil than Stalin’s crimes.

All that said, while I would excuse an average leftist, the prominent ones, who had more access to information, are harder to excuse. Corliss Lamont was penning defences of Stalin’s staged trials, not taking into account even the Dewey commission findings. Paul Robeson knew first-hand from a meeting with Fefer what happened to his friends from the Jewish Antifascist Committee, yet when Stalin died, he stilled penned an ode to him. Such people cannot be excused.