When Herbert echoed Hillary: Aptheker on the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that threatened “fascism” in 1998

Some of you may remember when Hillary Clinton told Today’s Matt Lauer about a “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband [Bill Clinton] since the day he announced for president.”[1] That was on January 27, 1998.

 

 

Nineteen days later, on February 15th, the San Francisco Public Library marked the centennial of Paul Robeson (1898-1976), the American singer and actor, Stalinism’s first global superstar. Among the panelists was Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), Stalinism’s chief American propagandist, also revered by the Left as an historian, who reminisced about Robeson.

Near the end of his remarks at the podium Aptheker—W. E. B. Du Bois’s comrade and literary executor—expressed his hope that the U.S. Postal Service would one day honor Robeson with a postage stamp as, two weeks earlier, it had Du Bois—for the second time.[2]

In 1997 Hillary’s husband established by executive order (13050) the “One America Initiative on Race,” headed by John Hope Franklin.[3] “I have great confidence in him and his committee,” Aptheker predicted. “Nothing but good can come of it.” Actually, nothing at all came out of it except another “report.” It was, however, another step on the road to the South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” being planned for us in the Age of Critical Race Theory.

In the panel discussion, Aptheker returned to a staple of his and the American Left’s perennial go-to: fascism is right around the corner. I transcribed some of his remarks.[4]

There is in my opinion a serious, right-wing conspiracy against the Clinton Administration. I am convinced that this has been carefully prepared, it is very well financed, it has unlimited funds. Most of the press is corrupt, or corrupted. Most of the means of communication, television, is corrupt. Clinton is in a very difficult position, and so is Mrs. Clinton.

I am myself persuaded that this is an orchestrated, serious, right-wing, fascist-inclined effort to overturn the results of the recent [1996] presidential election and to prepare the next election with an extreme right-wing candidate in power. I think this is a very serious matter.

I don’t think I have illusions about the President. But he is fundamentally in my opinion—and so is she—a liberal Democrat. And this is infinitely preferable to the Speaker of the House [Newt Gingrich] and those who finance the extreme right. They have unlimited funds. They have dangerous backgrounds in our country. Religious hatred, racial hatreds, all sorts of possibilities are moving towards an American version of fascism. This is growing. This is serious. And we should react to it. [My emphasis.—AGF]

For this veteran Communist conspiracy theorist, liberal Democrats were useful idiots. (“Look at how ecumenical the Communist intellectual is! Surely we liberal Democrats can work with such a martyr for academic freedom!”) Aptheker then commended to his audience a recent issue of The Nation that allegedly compiled

. . . the facts, the history, the campaign against the Clinton Administration, financed by tens of millions of dollars, which has begun for the past several years. It is now at a high point. Do examine the current Nation and those two pages. Be aware that we are facing a most serious danger, and that we must resist it. And for heaven’s sakes, we must be back of the creation of some Left organization, some Left voice, some Left media, some Left propaganda outfit, something that will call this reality, this serious reality, to as many people as we can. I believe that this country faces a pro-fascist coup. . . . financed by hundreds of millions of dollars. [My emphasis.—AGF]

Thanks to the sleuthing of Dave Lull, for which I am once again grateful, I can confidently identify that issue of The Nation as the February 23, 1998 issue. It features Karen Rothmyer’s “Unindicted co-conspirator?” on pages 19-24. Later, in the panel discussion, Aptheker counsels his audience:

It is important that we have [in Bill Clinton] a president we can force. This is not Ronald Reagan! And it is our duty to force him in the direction we want him to move. [My emphasis.—AGF]

I do not doubt that Sandy Cortez (D-NY) considers it her duty to force Biden in the direction Communists want him to move. Unlike Aptheker, however, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1966 and Senate a decade later, Ms. Cortez and the “Squad” wield power that Aptheker could only dream of.[5]

We should not lose sight of the tactical distinction Communists make between a Reagan and a Clinton, which goes back 90 years. The specter of “fascism” is always said to be haunting America, calling for a faux “antifa” response that walks, talks, and lies like every fascist duck that’s ever waddled.[6]

The moral equivalent of Communism has come to America: universal diktats affecting millions of citizens, state-subsidized and -enforced ideological conformity, the criminalization of the expression of traditional beliefs (especially about gender and the family), the replacement by public shaming and virtue signaling rational debate (in the name of “critical theory”), increasing state control over the economy in the name of healthcare, to name a few predations.

We’ll probably never know, or at least not for a long time, exactly how the meme of a “right-wing conspiracy” floated in the late ’90s among Democratic and Communist conspirators against the Republic. Let’s say it was “in the air” and that the current attack on America’s foundation is not a matter of yesterday’s labors. The meme has morphed into a rigidly enforced party line that deems verboten public discussion of:

(1) the suspension of ballot counting in key Democratic counties in five states (sometimes with Republican Party collusion at the highest levels of state government) on the evening of November 3, 2020, resulting in the wholly implausible reversal of Donald Trump’s commanding lead and the victory of a fascist-inclined Leftist coup with a mentally impaired figurehead at the helm[7]; and

(2) the Reichstag Fire-type event on January 6 that deflected public attention away from the crime referenced in (1), which deflection was criminally aided and abetted by FBI Director Christopher Wray.[8] His claim that Antifa was not involved in the planned attack on the Capitol is about as credible as former AG William Barr’s that there was “no evidence” of election fraud. What there was no evidence of is any investigation into the claims of fraud and their basis.

The Left’s coup, which disenfranchised 74 million, is a boil. Who among them will lance it?

Notes

[1] Vast right-wing conspiracy (Wikipedia)

[2] For images of these stamps from 1992 and 1998, scroll to the end of my “Kaepernick’s Du Bois Medal: How Fitting,” October 11, 2018. Aptheker didn’t note the double honor, the first having been bestowed during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the second during Clinton’s.

Robeson never joined the Communist Party; Du Bois did just that in 1961, while in Ghana, to which he expatriated after regaining his passport from the government. Aptheker thought it outrageous that, having failed to convict Du Bois of being an “unregistered foreign agent” under the McCarran Act in 1951, the government revoked his passport for eight years.

About that: Du Bois had been a member of the Peace Information Center, a Communist front that promoted the Stockholm Appeal, brainchild of Nobelist physicist, and French Communist, Frédéric Joliot-Curie. During the panel session of the Robeson tribute, Aptheker bragged about how in 1965 he broke the law by traveling to Hanoi with Staunton Lynd and Tom Hayden, arguably as an unregistered agent of the Democratic Republic of [i.e., North] Vietnam and, by extension, the Soviet Union. Aptheker’s 1966 Mission to Hanoi (which competes for historical reliability with Joseph E. Davies’s 1945 Mission to Moscow, and for similar reasons) displays the propaganda.

[3] One America in the 21st Century: The Report of President Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race, Yale UP, 2008. To help situate this committee’s leader, hear the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin’s eulogy of Aptheker:

We never gave up, Fay until her end, and Herbert until his later end. I am as resolved as they were to carry on this fight for justice and equality until my own end, sooner or later, and in every step of the way I shall affectionately remember Fay and Herbert, not only for their commitment and dedication but also for their warm and unselfish humanity, their marvelous wit, and sense of humor. Quoted in Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, University of Massachusetts Press, 2015, 353. (Of which volume, see my review.)

Hoover’s FBI opened a file on Franklin, due to his professional as well as personal regard for Aptheker and his having signed an American Civil Liberties Union-inspired petition to abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities which took seriously the threat from Aptheker and his comrades. Liberal Democrats reasoned that investigating non-occurrent activities was a waste of tax dollars. Now that they’re in power, we can be sure there’ll no more such wastage.

[4] 1998 Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration at the San Francisco Public Library. Clicking the link takes one to a video that runs under two hours.

[5] For statistics on the Senate race, see 1976 United States Senate election in New York. Aptheker once joked that the FBI was still looking for the 25,000 people who voted for him.

[6] The Communist Party’s People’s World (February 3, 2021) recently provided a platform for her histrionics: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tells why we can’t just ‘forgive and forget’

[7] See the scholarly The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularity. by Peter Navarro, Ph.D., President Trump’s Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy as well as the Absolute Proof website of the ever-“debunked” but never debated Mike Lindell.

[8] “We do know at least three such agents [i.e., agents provacateurs] were present. One, unidentified, wears a black helmet with a Trump sticker. In the video, he breaks a window with a staff. He’s wrestled down with shouts of ‘He’s Antifa!’ Two others were John Sullivan, ‘Jayden X,’ a left-wing activist who urged the crowd forward, exhorting them to ‘burn it down,’ and Jade Sacker, accompanying Sullivan and filming. Both appeared on CNN under misleading premises. They were paid an extraordinary $35,000 for the film by two network news sites. We’ve seen additional video from Sullivan’s phone. He congratulates Sacker: ‘We did it!’ and ‘Is that the greatest film you’ve ever shot?’ She’s concerned when she realizes their exchange is being recorded.” Charles Turot, “What We Know and What We Don’t about the Events of January 6,” American Thinker, March 4, 2021. So Wray’s incompetent or a liar.  See also (while you still can) Rudy Giuliani’s January 13, 2021 podcast, “January 6: Another Frame-up” on Rumble.com.

Related posts

• Sidney Hook: a halfway house for a recovering Stalinist
• G. Edward Griffin: Prophet with Honor
• The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored
• 1949: What were my influencers doing?
• Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager
• Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker
• Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence
• The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit
• Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission
• If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state.

Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness