That bad old-time religion

It’s official. The anti-war movement is a Communist
front.

No, I’m not kidding — go read the story. Investigative reporter
David Corn digs into last Saturday’s D.C. antiwar rally and finds it
was covertly masterminded by a Communist Party splinter originally
founded in support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. For good
later, he further digs up the fact that one if the principal
organizers of the inane “Mot In Our Name” petion is a revolutionary
Maoist.

Words almost fail me. There are just too many levels of delicious,
deadly irony here.

For starters, the U.S. revolutionary Communist movement has been
reduced to organizing demonstrations in support of a fascist dictator
with a history of brutally suppressing and murdering Communists in
Iraq. OK, so there’s precedent for this; the CPUSA organized
anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. during the Nazi-Soviet
nonaggression pact of 1939-41. It’s still bleakly funny.

More generally the American Left seems bent on fulfilling every
red-meat right-winger’s most perfervid fantasies about it. All those
earnest anti-war demonstrators were actual communist dupes! Oh,
mama. Somewhere. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy is smiling. Who was it who
said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the
second as farce?

Farce because, of course, Communism as an ideology capable of
motivating mass revolutions is stone-dead. (Well, everywhere outside
of Pyongyang and the humanities departments of U.S. universities,
anyway.) At this point one can contemplate vestigial organs of
Stalinism like the Revolutionary Communist Party with a sort of
revolted pity, like portions of a vampire corpse still twitching
because they haven’t yet gotten the message about that stake through
the heart.

If I were a conservative, I’d go into a roaring, vein-popping rant
at this point. And, secretly I’d be damn glad for them Commies. They
simplify things so much. Because there will be more stories like this
one. All the Communists can accomplish by organizing the anti-war
movement is to thoroughly discredit it — a fact our reporter
(quite typical of U.S. journalists in that he both leans left and
is too ignorant to notice how much of his world-view is Communism with
the serial numbers filed off) notes with poorly-veiled regret.

So, by supporting a militarist fascist in Iraq, them commies are
very likely to wind up increasing the influence of precisely the
`reactionary’ element in U.S. politics that they most abominate.
Congratulations, comrades! Welcome to the International
Capitalist Conspiracy!

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