Views in brief
Lives ripped apart by McCarthyism
IN RESPONSE to "A witch-hunt victim's revenge": No matter how great the effort, we cannot check our politics in the theater lobby. They follow us to our seats as surely as that box of overpriced popcorn.
Total objectivity? Not likely. I've tried. I've failed. Case in point, The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher bio-pic. I wanted nothing less than Meryl Streep to play Thatcher wearing horns and reeking of sulfur--admittedly, a hard special effect to pull off. I was determined to hate the movie, and I did.
A movie like Trumbo attracts three kind of negative reviewers:
1) The unforgiving right-wing shill, whose only problem with McCarthyism is that it ended. The Ann Coulter review cited in SocialistWorker.org is a good example.
2) The sectarian left review. I think of these people as the "Gotcha-Gang." Such critics are only satisfied when every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed, when every possible permutation is included and when a detailed critique of Stalinism is woven into the plot line. Needless to say, their audience is miniscule. Fortunately, Elizabeth Schulte's review does not fall into this trap.
3) By far the most common variety of negative reviewers of Trumbo are the smug liberals of the mainstream media. Often, these writers are dismissive of the far left from the start and have zero class understanding of history as a point of reference.
Manhola Dargis of the New York Times falls into the category of smug liberal. In her review of Trumbo, she faults the movie for spending too much screen time on Trumbo's family. I disagree. The story needed to be told in human terms, for it was, after all, humans and their families who were the victims of the decade plus terror unleashed during this shameful--though by no means, unique--chapter of American history.
Five years ago, my wife Linda and I spent several days researching her uncle Michael Loew's life on Monhegan Island, located off the coast of Maine. Michael was a successful painter and a lifelong Communist Party member.
The section of the island he lived in was known as "Red Hill." We had a chance to interview a half dozen surviving friends of Michael's, then in their 80s and 90s. I was struck by just how circumspect they still were in discussing events now 60 yeas in the past. They used euphemisms like, "we were very liberal," even though their membership in the Communist Party was a publicly known fact.
There was still palpable fear in their voices. Every one of them had stories of lives destroyed, jobs lost and families ripped apart. It is these kind of stories that Trumbo tells so well.
Guy Miller, Chicago
The risk in not supporting Sanders
IN RESPONSE to "Is Sanders making a political revolution?": The value of the Bernie Sanders campaign is not its complete ideological purity, but the amount of promotion, interest and excitement that Sanders' critiques of U.S. capitalism are generating.
Sanders is effectively using the Democratic Party nomination process as a promotional vehicle to put his anti-Wall Street rhetoric at the center of mainstream U.S. political dialogue. If Sanders were to be running as an independent or on a third-party presidential ticket, his candidacy would be sidelined and his ideas would be suppressed by the corporate media.
The main argument put forward by some on the left against supporting the Sanders campaign seems to be that since Sanders will end up endorsing Clinton if he loses the primary, supporting him and/or helping to organize around him will destroy all future prospects for building a third-party alternative to the Democrats.
While this argument is right to point to historical examples of cooption by the Democrats of left challengers, it makes fairly large logical leaps, assuming somewhat prematurely and without much evidence that every person who supports Sanders in the primary will automatically become a Clinton supporter overnight, and will remain a lifelong Democrat thereafter.
This line of reasoning is belied by the fact that Clinton is herself subject to criticism amongst many progressives for her corporate priorities and widely known support for disastrous policies such as the Iraq war. A Sanders endorsement of Clinton could likely alienate many of his supporters regardless of whether the left takes a stance on the matter.
It is obviously futile to try and take over and remake a party that is so firmly structured around corporate money and used to advance corporate interests. But the risk for the left in going all-out against Sanders at this stage is that we shoot ourselves in the foot by focusing our limited energies more on demonizing Sanders, who holds many views that are worth supporting, than on criticizing Clinton, the presumptive nominee of U.S. neoliberalism, and therefore the embodiment of everything the left should oppose.
For the left to let Clinton off the hook and focus its main attacks on her only left challenger would actually do more to facilitate an exodus of Sanders supporters to Clinton, rather than the opposite.
The most constructive position for the left to take on the current election would be to at least offer nominal support to Sanders, and to focus the main energies on attacking Clinton, in order to expose the hypocrisy a Sanders endorsement of her. This will help reduce the negative prospect of a mass exodus of Sanders supporters to the Clinton campaign, and could help to win many of his supporters, especially young activists, to the work of organizing outside the two-party system. Exposing the hypocrisy and contrived nature of the two-party selection process in this manner will make it easier to argue to Sanders supporters why it is necessary to build a third party alternative.
If Sanders were to win the primary, it would likely set off a crisis among the Democrats' corporate backers and policymakers. This crisis at the specter of a Sanders presidency would likely do more to show the concrete limitations of the current political system and the need for an alternative to prospective leftists than any all-out political argument against Sanders at this premature time in the election campaign. The left should be at least encouraging people to disrupt the Democratic selection process by supporting Sanders in the primary (after all, Clinton's nomination is not an 100% secure prospect, and the Democratic primary is not the final election).
It's right to critique Sanders' positions and his record, but coming flat-out against him right when so many people are starting to think positively about socialism and are becoming enthusiastic about ideas like universal health care is more likely to alienate those people. Many of them are going to need to witness the two-party system decapitate the ideas that Sanders stands for before they become convinced of the need for a political alternative. The best way to do that is to support Sanders and bear witness as his campaign proposals and his candidacy are snuffed by the Democrats.
Ryan de Laureal, from the Internet
Focus on Israel's crimes today
IN RESPONSE to "You can't erase the IDF's crimes": Although I agree with the thrust of this article, there is one point it gets wrong, and this point is rather important since it is simply historically false: The Haganah never collaborated with the Nazis. One representative of the group met with Adolph Eichmann once to discuss the deportation of Jews from Europe to Palestine and the meeting went awry.
Other Zionists however, on the right, like the Stern Gang (which split from the Irgun), did collaborate or at least attempt to do so with the Nazis, as did Rudolf Kastner, whose sick crimes are documented in the work Perfidy by Ben Hecht.
Frankly, this article misses the point of criticizing Israel. It's not about saying that they collaborated with Nazis, as many anti-Semites contend, or even presenting them as Nazis, as virulent anti-Semites do, for in the end, this falls into Stalinist and far-right propaganda.
Focus on Israel's crimes as a state today and criticize them for that, not for alleged association with the Nazis--which was in fact far from comprehensive and only implicated a small minority of Zionists. To criticize Israel, you do not have to fall into anti-Semitic territory by representing the origins of this state as being defined by Nazi collaboration. Just focus on the settler-colonialist oppression and the Nakba, and that should sufficiently make your case without making you sound ignorant and anti-Semitic.
Mandy, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Sanders has a chance to win
IN RESPONSE to "Life of the wrong party": I guess if the left won't get behind Sanders, we should just admit we don't actually want a seat at the table, but rather want only to be outside ideological agitators.
The statement that Sanders didn't go after Clinton for her ridiculous statement about telling Wall Street to "Cut it out" is just inaccurate. Sanders responded by calling her out by saying she was "naïve." You might not like that Sanders is trying to avoid personal attacks and sticking to the issues, but I, for one, do.
You may not like that Sanders spoke truth to the ridiculous media frenzy over Clinton's e-mails but that's who he is, someone that will speak truth to power. I think it's unfortunate that the e-mail comment is the one that gets the most attention but that is of course because it plays into the Democratic Clinton machine's talking points. Just because one of their talking points is true doesn't mean that anyone that says it is part of that machine.
I wish that Sanders was one of several genuinely progressive candidates debating real policies, but he's the only one. He's the closest thing I've ever seen to a presidential candidate that had a chance to actually win that is willing to stick up for the working class and speaking truth to power.
I guess you're right--let's just hold out for the perfect candidate and watch our society slip further into the grips of the donor class's brutal capitalistic reality.
Matthew Kesner, Mesa, Arizona
