Colin Kaepernick’s back in the news (assuming he ever left). Known more for his anti-police protests than gridiron prowess, he’s aligned himself with history’s worst police states (and never notices the irony). On October 11, 2018, he was the recipient of the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, about which I blogged at the time. (I’ve appended the post below.) Once in power, the type of political creature he admires would demand absolute submission to their agenda on pain of incarceration or execution. Until then, they’ll find him useful. (I’m charitably assuming, until there’s contrary evidence, that he’d be a victim rather than victimizer.) Given the totalitarian urge inspiring so much political activism today, I thought my old post worth dusting off. For a study of a major instance of communist hypocrisy on race, see my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. —Anthony Flood
Kaepernick’s Du Bois Medal: How Fitting
(First published October 11, 2018)
I don’t know whether any recipients of this year’s W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, to be awarded tonight at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, care to qualify their admiration of the medal’s namesake. Probably not. And that’s understandable, given his many notable accomplishments over the course of 95 years.
The least likely to demur, I’ll bet, is “athlete and activist” Colin Kaepernick. A man who has a tee shirt adorned with photos of Fidel Castro chatting with Malcolm (“By any means necessary”) X probably has no reservations about getting a Du Bois Medal, certainly not any more than that “Un-American” scholar and civil rights activist had about his 1959 International Lenin Prize.
The Castro regime may have been responsible for murdering anywhere from 35,000 to 141,000 souls (with a median of 73,000), but the enormity of Joseph Stalin’s reign exceeded Fidel’s by orders of magnitude: its unit of measure is “tens of millions.”
The breadth of Stalin’s mass murder, rivaled in the last century only by Hitler’s and Mao’s, could have been ascertained in 1953 by any competent researcher like Du Bois. Yet that was the year Du Bois penned a defense of Stalinism in the form of a eulogy upon the passing of Koba the Dread.
“Joseph Stalin,” Du Bois wrote, “was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.”
“Stalin was not a man of conventional learning; he was much more than that: he was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly and listened to wisdom, no matter whence it came. He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance; nor did he let attack drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct. As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality.”
Yes, that’s what comes to mind when one thinks of Uncle Joe. I suppose mass deportation of national minorities is one way to fight race prejudice.
Deportation of Crimean Tatars, May 1944
“His judgment of men was profound. He early saw through the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the world, and especially America.”
So wrote Du Bois of the man who complemented that penetrating gaze by having Trotsky murdered in Mexico.
The student of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage must have forgotten whatever he knew about the Ukrainian Great Famine when he wrote:
“The poor Russian peasant was the lowest victim of tsarism, capitalism and the Orthodox Church. He surrendered the Little White Father easily; he turned less readily but perceptibly from his ikons; but his kulaks clung tenaciously to capitalism and were near wrecking the revolution when Stalin risked a second revolution and drove out the rural bloodsuckers.”
The “bloodsuckers” weren’t “driven out.” They were, with malice aforethought, starved to death. By the millions.
Du Bois sang Stalin’s praises eight years before he joined the Communist Party U.S.A. The whole paean should be required reading.
Not thirty years later the United States Postal Service honored Du Bois with a stamp . . .
and followed up with another six years later.
Perhaps reproductions of those stamps will soon find their way onto another tee shirt.
How many at the Sanders Theater tonight have even heard of this scandalous document? Indeed, how many of them, after reading it, would regard it as a scandal?