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Double Standards
| Article
# : |
11053 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
895 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The purpose of this magazine is educational. We try to provide a more balanced perspective to our readers than other magazines achieve. Sometimes our articles do not explore important theoretical, factual, or moral/ethical issues from a sufficiently wide perspective to serve the educational purpose of the magazine. That is sometimes a failure of anticipation editorially and sometimes a consequence of seeing things from an alternative, but not a necessarily correct, perspective. In these cases, I discuss the matter in an editorial, sidebar, or article. This provides a wider perspective that may assist some readers--particularly those who are less familiar with the subject--in coming to their own assessments. (I also come from an ethnic tradition in which intellectual argument is valued for its own sake.)
My subjects this month are peripheral, but important, comments in the review of Shatrov's Maybe by Herb Greer, our brilliant contributing editor, and in the distinguished Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier's review of Elena Poniatowska's Tinisima. Tinisima is a fascinating account of the life of a remarkable woman, Tina Modotti, and of the crucial era in which she lived. Gazarian-Gautier points out that Modotti was a militant communist. "Like many intellectuals in the 1920s, Tina Modotti saw in communism a way of salvation. . ." To leave it like that may suggest that Tina's was a reasonable attitude.
However, Tina's communism was not merely a matter of the 1920s. She was part of the secret apparat and lived in Moscow from 1931 to 1934. By then, everyone in Moscow, and many elsewhere, knew of the destruction of the kulaks, of the murder of Kirov, and of Stalin's brutality. Nor apparently--at least no evidence appears in the review--did she recant her attraction to Marxist revolution, even during the phony mass trials of party comrades, let alone of nonparty members from the early twenties. Herb Greer is correct. We suffer from a double standard here, as intellectuals on the whole pass over, noncritically, such monstrous choices.
Many intellectuals refuse to acknowledge that there was a proven conspiracy in academia, the media, the arts, and government in prewar America that was designed to destroy democracy and to replace it with a brutal communist dictatorship. Instead, we are flooded with tendentious accounts of anticommunist hysteria and sympathetic portraits of participants in the conspiracy and of their fellow travelers. (Joe McCarthy was not a genuine anticommunist but a populist politician whose only interest in the subject was to use it for political gain, not to uncover actual conspiracies or communists.)
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