A little over a month ago, I was immersed in a project that now strikes me as an exercise in navel-gazing. It’s one I might salvage, but only if I can recast it in the shadow of the pogrom that Hamas inflicted on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023.
The project in question, set out here, is my attempt to understand what motivated those who responded to injustice (what any ethical person would regard as injustice) in order establish justice (in matters of, say, labor conditions, race relations, war and peace, etc.), but adopted a worldview and a politics through which they either acted unjustly themselves or supported people, ideas, and movements that did.
That is, they joined a Marxist movement in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to protest company violence against striking workers or the lynching of African Americans, but wound up supporting, and rationalizing support of, regimes whose crimes were far worse than those that first offended their moral sensibilities.
It has sadly come home to me that Alan Wald, the prolific historian of such individuals, whose writings I very much enjoy and who came out of the Trotskyist movement in the 1960s and 1970s is, from my perspective, on the wrong side of the Israel-“Palestine” conflict. The rationalization and even glorification of unspeakable terror has left its mark on every major academic institution, including UMichigan, from which Wald retired in 2014 after almost 40 years. From that stance no nuanced dissent is socially permitted. To my knowledge he has expressed none.
I will see if Wald has expressed or will express condemnation of October 7, but his biography gives me no reason to be sanguine about that possibility. I don’t think he’s ever put distance between himself and the genocidal maniacs who “martyr” themselves for “Palestine” (who would incinerate him without a second thought if it suited them). Today’s Israel-negationists, with their “Jews for Palestine” contingent (“Turkeys for Thanksgiving,” anyone?), have given today’s left their sacramental “antiwar movement,” a platform on which to socialize, propagandize, and organize.
Those who chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” are morally not one whit better than the Stalinists whose support for Stalin’s regime earned Wald’s condemnation. Wald is representative of a generation of professors responsible for the miseducation of today’s moral blockheads who hurl “genocide” and “apartheid” at Israel with ignorant abandon.
In March of 1931, the Communist Party USA put on the Yokinen show trial, which foreshadowed today’s “microaggression” industry on campus and in the workplace. Forty-four years later in 1975 a comrade of mine and I were tried, convicted, and then expelled from the Young Workers Liberation League—effectively the Stalinist Young Communist League (formerly the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs)—for “anti-leadership” activity. You see, we had the crazy idea that we should be organizing young workers, not students, and we acted accordingly. Since the leadership was largely non-white, we were guilty of “white chauvinism,” a.k.a., “racism.” (My working on Herbert Aptheker‘s Du Bois project counted for absolutely nothing.)[1]
The “genocide” charge of the global Hamas fan club is in the tradition of Communists like William Patterson, a supporter of the Soviet Union and its genocidal Holodomor. In 1951 Patterson petitioned the United Nations (UN) to charge the United States (US) with “genocide” against “the Negro People” in a document entitled We Charge Genocide. Its histrionic absurdity was too much even for US UN delegate Eleanor Roosevelt to whom the petition was presented by W.E.B. Du Bois, its most notable and notorious signatory. The mainline civil rights movement would have none of this Communist propaganda. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” could not support the petition, given the steady increase in the population size of the allegedly genocided AfrAms. That didn’t stop the Black Panther Party a decade-and-a-half later from picking up where Patterson left off.
The rationale for the 2020 George Floyd riots can be made out in the title of Stalinist operative Claude Lightfoot‘s 1968 book, From Ghetto Rebellion to Black Liberation, another example of the verbal engineering that paves the way for social engineering. They weren’t “riots,” you see, any more than rioters were “thugs” and “hooligans.” No, those events were rebellions led by social justice warriors. See how easy that was?
So, to answer my lingering question: no, I don’t think the well-intentioned, idealistic radicals of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s (apart from perhaps a few noble exceptions) would morally distinguish themselves from the Alan Walds of today’s professoriate. The kids of yestercentury, let alone yesteryear, were not all right. Today’s “millennials” are the progeny of ’60s radicals as the latter were of the Reds of the ’30s. They double down on their solidarity with barbarians as did their great-grandparents. I will continue to meditate on history, but trying to understand what these people were and are—what I was and am—I’ll leave to God.
“Man’s goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way?” Proverbs 20:24
Note
[1] 
For more on the racial ethos of the Communist Party see Hugh Murray, “From Communism to Affirmative Action,” a review of Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990, in Telos, No. Number 108, Summer 1996, 179-188. The review’s complete text may be read on my old site. Here’s a salient excerpt:
The CP was clearly pc long before today’s universities. Hutchinson provides an insightful account of the Party’s predicament. In the early 1970s, the Party considered another internal crusade against racism. . . . [I]n 1975 A. F. and G. W. were members of the Young Workers Liberation League [YWLL], another incarnation of the Young Communist League. When these two young white males criticized the leadership of their YWLL, they were quickly charged with “anti-leadership tendencies.” As almost all the leaders in the organization were minorities, at their trial the cry of “racism” was frequently hurled. They were expelled later in 1975.
I’m the “A.F.” in Murray’s account. In a note he appended a long excerpt from Hutchinson’s book highlighting the absurd lengths to which the Party took fighting “race hatred” in its ranks:
Clearly, to remain in the CP [Murray writes], one had to be pc. After WWII the Party began another internal campaign against racism.
During the summer of 1952 [Hutchinson writes], the grumbles from black and white Party members began to grow louder. The campaign against racism and [black] nationalism was fast sinking into a quagmire of pettiness. At one meeting, Eslanda Robeson [wife of Paul Robeson] saw two young black women chattering noisily. A white woman, who was a long-term Party stalwart, turned and told the women to shut up. The meeting broke up in a pandemonium when the young blacks accused her of being a white chauvinist. Siding with the two women, the chairman severely reprimanded the woman for her alleged racist act and kicked her out of the meeting. Robeson could not believe it. ‘Now I submit, this was carrying things too far.’ The floodgates were opening. In every district, Party members told tales of woe about being harassed for saying or even thinking something that was contrary to the Party’s view. [Dorothy] Healey recalls the damaging impact a minor incident had on one Party member: ‘This one white comrade served coffee to a black member in a cracked cup. Next thing she knew she was being brought up on charges of being a racist. She was censured. Now how can anybody defend themselves against that?’ Harry Haywood [a black Communist] asked what it was all accomplishing. It smacked to him of an intramural match where victory was determined by how many members were disciplined or expelled. . . . The Party needed to stop ‘psychoanalyzing’ itself, Haywood said, and get on with the serious business of building mass struggle around these issues. His anger may have been due less to ideology than the way in which the Party had treated his wife. Belle, who was white, was a cashier at the Party’s Jefferson School. During one lunchtime, she mistakenly gave a black student the wrong change. When the student questioned her she casually pointed to his hand and asked him to show her the change. A minor mishap that might have passed unnoticed suddenly became a major act of racism. Belle was summoned before the district and charged. . . . It took eight months before she was finally ‘cleared.’ Years later Haywood, after he quit the Party, bitterly called the campaign the ‘Party’s phony war against white chauyinism.’ More Party leaders agreed with him. Scapegoating the Belles of the Party was self-defeating and stupid. . . . By 1953 [communist leader William Z.] Foster was ready to call a halt. . . . Foster ridiculed the way whites were required to talk. White members, he said, were forbidden to say ‘boy,’ ‘girl,’ ‘black,’ ‘dark,’ or even ‘blackmail’ (pp. 231-32).