C.L.R. James: still Stalinism’s “Invisible Man”

The following review of Gerald Horne’s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois appeared on Amazon today.

Horne’s ability to amass and organize resources is again on display here — he’s a veritable academic book factory. Also again, but unfortunately, his considerable skills serve the Stalinist narrative. This orientation invites the question of what has been distorted to that end.

Horne refers to C.L.R. James as the “writer” (252), but nowhere as the author of the pioneering Black Jacobins. Horne’s descriptor for James is not the respectful “Trotskyist,” but “veteran Trotskyite,” the slur Stalinists coined for their Leninist rivals. We learn that Stalinist historical researcher Herbert Aptheker was “relieved” when Mrs. Du Bois “terminated” her relationship with James before the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania, but not why Aptheker was relieved or why he “was worried about the James association” or what possible reason she could have had to accuse James—once a denizen of Ellis Island awaiting deportation in 1953—of “unadulterated McCarthyism” (252). That era witnessed, Horne says, the “persecution” of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for “alleged atomic espionage” (146-147). Graham Du Bois made it her business to find someone to adopt the kids whom the spies’ execution orphaned. The right word, of course, is prosecution: the Rosenbergs were convicted by a jury based on evidence that meant nothing to Communists like Graham Du Bois. Since the Venona decrypts settled the matter of the Rosenbergs’ guilt in 1995, no scholar mentioning their case in 2000 should have referred to their espionage as “alleged.”

Should the sympathetic reader share in those concerns? Horne is mute. To have shed light on this, however, might have required him to at least mention James’s published criticisms of Aptheker in his area of specialization, his failure to acknowledge the significance of the aforementioned work by a Black scholar fourteen years his senior, and perhaps defend Aptheker’s passive dissing of James, which is what the Stalinist ethos demanded (and apparently still does).

To acknowledge the horrors of the African slave trade and its consequent evils does not require one to ally with, let alone sing the praises of, perpetrators of equal or greater enormities. That, however, seems to be the bargain the Du Boises were willing to make to advance Pan-Africanism. They were enamored of mass murderers. Yes, Stalin killed millions but, as Horne once encapsulated this attitude, he “was no worse than the Founding Fathers” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2009).

The books by one who believes that need to be scrutinized for other outrages. For example, in his Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963, Horne documents Pan-Africanist George Padmore’s interactions with Du Bois, but Padmore’s friend and fellow Trinidadian James is invisible. (The prolific Du Bois never took literary notice of “Black Jacobins”; Aptheker merely followed suit.)

Race Woman is a work of solid research and serviceable writing. I took off a star because he offended on a point I know something about. Time will tell whether other discoveries would justify deducting another.

The pleasant discovery of a series of posts by Professor Jonathan McIntosh on the site of the Libertarian Christian Institute (LCI) has occasioned my republishing today part of Chapter 10 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (CCL). As that chapter originated as a post written about ten years ago, I’ve edited it, airbrushing references to the polemic. (Those interested in the latter should consult the book. I’ve modified the chapter in other ways.)

With erudition and nuance, Dr. McIntosh locates Thomas Aquinas on the political spectrum as a proto-liberal (my term, not McIntosh’s).

These anti-libertarian sentiments [of Thomas’s, just enumerated by McIntosh] notwithstanding, there are yet many other respects in which Aquinas’s political thought is not only consistent with libertarianism, but arguably provide the latter with an ideal and even necessary, moral and metaphysical framework.

McIntosh’s aim is

to sketch at least the outlines of a distinctly Thomistic, natural law libertarianism, one that coherently combines Aquinas’s account of law’s place within the social and moral dimension of human nature, with libertarianism’s more considered and consistent ethic of law’s inherently coercive nature.

McIntosh is a kindred spirit whose work I’m happy to advertise. (Visit his blogs The Natural Law Libertarian and The Flame Imperishable.) His admiration for Thomas is great, but does not inhibit his criticism. Aquinas’s thought on the subject of liberty is, as I shall show in my own way, a mixed bag, but one whose contents every lover of liberty and reason is better off for having explored.

McIntosh’s series is entitled “The Libertarian Aquinas: Aquinas and Libertarianism,” and here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III. (At least another installment is on the way.) I welcome any criticism of my effort he may see fit to give.

I’m taking this opportunity to thank again LCI’s Chief Executive Officer Doug Stuart for interviewing me about Christ, Capital & Liberty in late 2019 and making our discussion available on their site since last March.

Note: The “Austrians” referred to in today’s post are writers who subscribe to the Austrian School of Economics (ASE), whose “dean” was Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). “Anarcho-Catholics” are Roman Catholics who find a “profound philosophical commonality” between the ASE and Catholic teaching (but not “Catholic Social Teaching”). I would include among them James A. Sadowsky, S.J. (1923-2012), Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), Thomas E. Woods, and Gerard N. Casey, although none of them uses (or used) that term to describe his political philosophy. I have defended that compatibility; as a dispensationalist, however, I no longer use the descriptor for myself.

Continue reading “Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns”

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

Haiti's revolution inspired revolutionary abolitionist John Brown - YouTube — Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), late 1990s.

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.

Right to left: Paul Robeson, his son Paul, Jr, daughter-in-law Marilyn, unidentified woman. Soviet Embassy, Washington, DC, 1951

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]

Du Bois and (on his right) wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Nikita Khrushchev in 1951. Khrushchev was then one of Stalin’s advisors, not yet First Secretary.

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.

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

Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission

Shortly after my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness was published in 2019, Lloyd Billingsley reviewed it for Frontpage Magazine. John Hamelin commented on his review at the time, but somehow I missed it, and comments are closed. It attempts to defend Aptheker’s scholarly credibility; it warrants an answer.

Hamelin starts off with:

While The Black Jacobins [hereafter, TBJ] is certainly a significant work in its own right and Aptheker’s avoidance in citing it can be considered an example of petty political rivalries, the idea that it somehow demolishes Aptheker’s writings on Black American history is absurd.

It would be absurd, but that’s not what I wrote. It’s not even in the review. The reviewer got it right: “Flood aims to modify the received opinion that Herbert Aptheker was a historian.”

I sure do.

What I argued for in the book, which Hamelin gives no evidence of having read, is that Aptheker’s work cannot be trusted. That doesn’t mean everything Aptheker wrote is a lie. It means that nothing he has written can be taken at face value.

Continue reading “Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission”

The quickest way to get up to speed on Diana West

Welcome to my shortest blog post to date.

Video interview (February 22, 2021; UK) with Diana West.* In less than an hour, she traces the genesis of her research into Communist subversion via her interest in Islam immediately post-9/11.

Diana West : The Secret Assault on our Nations Character

SPOILER ALERT: There was no “victory over Communism”!

Share the link while you can.

* American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character; The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization; The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy

American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character: West, Diana: 9780312630782: Amazon.com: Books The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West | Macmillan The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy: West, Diana: 9781796761276: Amazon.com: Books

If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state.

Trump supporters, who vastly outnumbered security, could have “stormed” the Capitol building, but didn’t. They had the means and opportunity, but no motive. January 6, 2021

President Trump brushed aside the notion of running again in four years. If the theft of the 2020 general election stands, why wouldn’t the thieves do it again?

In Georgia, the crooked machines that shifted votes away from him eight weeks ago shifted them yesterday to give Democrats control of the Senate. Right under our noses. Should we expect different effects from similar causes four years from now?

Trade Secretary Peter Navarro summarized with great clarity evidence that widespread, results-altering electoral and voter fraud occurred. It’s enough to show probable cause to investigate apparent interstate criminal conspiracy (if there’s ever been such a thing). Navarro’s case remains as unrefuted as it is unexamined.

Trump said “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” And when theft is proven, shouldn’t something analogous to asset forfeiture apply? Traces of performance-enhancing drugs cost athletes who ingest them their medals. Drug kingpins lose their homes and cars.

Should political actors who rip off 74 million voters occupy their ill-gotten offices?

Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani tirelessly marshaled the evidence before cameras, at risk to his stellar reputation, but it’s been systematically ignored.

Not only by scores of jurists, who are simply not interested in it and who concoct one erudite rationale after another to evade its force.

Not only by a militant leftist media who for years fantasized about a non-existent Russia-Trump conspiracy, while ignoring massive evidence of Chinese Communist Party-Biden Family collusion .

But some of Trump’s so-called friends have outdone jurists and pundits by stabbing him in the back.

Martin Luther King memorably lamented the silence of friends, but the fair-weather variety that bedevil Trump are profiles in cowardice.

Jeff Sessions’s pathetic recusal led the way. It was followed by Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote and Brian Kemp’s refusal to call the Georgia legislature into session to weigh evidence of fraud there.

State legislatures certified electors chosen in violation of their own state laws, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution. They’re complicit in the theft.

Some of them, however, realizing and regretting their error, petitioned VP Mike Pence, President of the Senate, whose office it is to open the envelope and accept or object to the votes, to send the matter back to them for ten days. That’s all Pence had to do. He didn’t have to assume the role of One-man Decider of the Election.

Instead, he waxed sanctimoniously, and irrelevantly, about his alleged inability to object to electors chosen unconstitutionally. His blather about counting all, but only, legal votes turned out to be just that.

And now Pence is being courted to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump with all deliberate speed.

The selective concern about “the sanctity of the American democratic process,”—in short supply the past two months but violated as though on cue by Antifa’s agents provocateurs posing as Trump supporters—would be laughable for its hypocrisy were it not also so insidious.

The half million peaceable assemblers at the Ellipse on January 6th represented Trump’s 74 million voters. They’re now being smeared as “insurrectionists” by the moral equivalent of Der Stürmer, a Nazi rag that didn’t merely lie—as Pravda and Izvestia did daily under Stalin—but also slandered and defamed millions of innocent people.

What is to be done?, Lenin famously asked. Should workers fight only to improve their economic well-being? Or also to rid the country of Czarist tyranny? (Yes, he replaced it with another.)

Should we naively continue run candidates in electoral systems that have no integrity ? How has that worked out?

Yes, we prefer deliberation to violence. But the other side is interested in vengeance—state-directed or otherwise—not deliberation over regular order.

And vengeance not only against Trump, but also his supporters who are being slandered indiscriminately and collectively in the public mind for the misdeeds of a few.

Regarding election integrity, there’s a case to be made for 100% paper ballots. Nothing online. I suggest the same goes for what is to be done about the coup.

In the wake of the Secure the Steal movement’s success, ought we not conclude that the Constitution is a dead letter, a tissue of instructions for ceremonies which the mendacious and vindictive perform to lend their crimes an air of legitimacy?

And people ask me why I ever called myself an anarchocapitalist.

As the Deep State decides on their course of violence against the people who voted for Trump, its corporate, media, and congressional puppets decry violence (which they call “mostly peaceful” when BLM and Antifa perpetrate it).

Patriotic Americans outnumber their enemies, but are not yet strategically positioned to crush the latter. How might they get there?

Again, ask yourself, family members, and friends what is to be done, but before you answer, keep the conversation offline.

Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in front of a painting of George Washington during a Pledge to America’s Workers event in the East Room of the White House on July 19, 2018.

Murray Rothbard’s libertarian reflections on “The Negro Revolution” (1963)

“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).

Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.

Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.

Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).

Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)

“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher; its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy. Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver, and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).

On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution.

—Anthony Flood

The Negro Revolution

Murray N. Rothbard

In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.

DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sit around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.

Continue reading “Murray Rothbard’s libertarian reflections on “The Negro Revolution” (1963)”

The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored

In a previous post I disclosed my interest in George Novack, the Trotskyist philosopher who, but for the accident of geography, might have taken the place of ideological influencer that Stalinist historian Herbert Aptheker held when I began to study philosophy. Today I republish Novack’s review of The Black Jacobins, a magisterial study of modern history’s only successful slave revolt.

That its author, C. L. R. James (1901-1989), was a Fourth International Trotskyist explains not only Novack’s appreciation of this work, but also Aptheker’s lack thereof—even though slave revolts formed his area of scholarly specialization. In my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I explore in detail the scotosis suffered not only by Aptheker but also, apparently, by many of James and Aptheker’s academic fans.

In this review Novack also refers to A History of Negro Revolt, a booklet of James’s that Aptheker merely lists in the bibliography of American Negro Slave Revolts (his 1943 Columbia University dissertation) without mentioning Black Jacobins. As I showed in another post, the second page of that booklet sports a full page ad for Black Jacobins, virtually eliminating the possibility that Aptheker was unaware of the book.

I post this partly for its historical interest, partly as a personal reflection on my intellectual path. I trust no one thinks I do so to promote the “revolutionary internationalism” of Novack or James. Were they alive, I’m sure that Novack, James, and Aptheker, each in his own way (qualified, of course, by the strictures of “scientific socialism”), would side with the woke mob, which I abominate, and that the mobsters, at least the literate among them, are steeped in their writings. Novack, James, and Aptheker would, if they could, put down their pens and pick up a gun.—Anthony Flood

Revolution, Black and White

George E. Novack

***New International*, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155**

The Black Jacobins, 316 pp. Illus. New York, Dial Press. [1938] $3.75

A History of Negro Revolt, Fact Monograph, No.18. [UK, [1938] ] 6s[hillings]

The Black Jacobins tells the story of one of the major episodes in the great French Revolution: the struggles in the West Indian island of San Domingo which culminated in the only successful slave uprising in history and the establishment of the free Negro republic of Haiti.

Historians have done little to remove prevailing ignorance concerning these significant events. Even such authorities on the French revolution as Mathiez systematically belittle the importance of the colonies and slight their influence upon revolutionary developments in France. Historians of Haiti commit the opposite error of treating its early history without proper regard for its profound connections with Europe.

One of the singular merits of James’ work is that he avoids both forms of narrow-mindedness. Throughout his book he views the class struggles in San Domingo and France as two sides of a unified historical process unfolding in indissoluble interaction with each other. With a wealth of precise and picturesque detail he traces the parallel and inter-penetrating phases of the revolution in the colony and mother country. Continue reading “The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored”

Free markets: real or imaginary?

Anticapitalist propaganda—a subset of the Communist propaganda now increasingly in vogue—often takes the form of denying the reality of free markets and mocking those who affirm it. “So-called” usually precedes the reference. The mockers deem market-realists as being in need of therapy, not argument.

Given the platforms that anticapitalist forces have, I decided to use mine to lay out a pro-market argument, one that presupposes that human flourishing is a good thing. It’s a slightly modified excerpt of chapter 20 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. The “polemic” was my apologia for the free-market Austrian School of Economics against a critic, but you won’t need to know that spat’s background to follow this theoretical portion.

Yes, theoretical: you’ve been warned! Unless philosophy is your meat and drink, you might be skip it (or save it as a substitute for Sominex for your next sleepless night). I have little doubt, however, that you’re dealing with the malign consequences of anticapitalist error. What follows might help you think about ways to engage its purveyors.

—Anthony Flood

What are “Free Markets”?

Defining terms

By “real” we mean the logical contrast of the illusory, the delusional, the fictional, the artificial, etc. When we know or suspect that we are in the presence of the latter, we appeal to some notion of the real to negotiate our encounter with it. A good analogy is found in the contrast between the true and the false: the notion of truth emerges only through the experience of falsehood. (If we could never experience being in error, or being deceived or lied to, we’d have no use for a notion of truth.)

Whatever is a function of real entities is also real. A market is a network of exchanges that persons, according to their human nature, spontaneously form. (That is, they do not engage in exchange because they read in some book that that’s what they must do.) Markets are functions of persons, and persons are real. (Persons are entities with causal efficacy, however, markets are not.)

The market is an order—specifically, a network of exchanges—that persons naturally create in pursuit of their flourishing (which exceeds in value their mere biological sustenance and continuance).

Since persons generate that order by acting in accordance with their nature, it is a natural order, one level, aspect, or dimension of several that make up the universal natural order. Violations of that order, which tend toward human self-destruction, is not to be put on the same ontological level as that which contributes to human flourishing.

Continue reading “Free markets: real or imaginary?”

The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit

Before the New York Times became the ultraleft rag it is today, one could at least count on its reporting a story’s basic facts. Or an obituary’s. And so in 2003, when I read the paper’s notice of the passing of Herbert Aptheker, whom I knew, I was surprised to see how many easily discoverable facts the Times’s esteemed book review editor, the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, got wrong. To its credit, it published a correction (three weeks later). The New York Times didn’t publish this letter, and neither did I in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. I do so hereunder, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also in shameless promotion of the book.

—Anthony Flood

March 22, 2003

To the Editor:

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s March 20 obituary of Herbert Aptheker contains several errors of commission and omission.

Aptheker’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States runs to seven volumes, not three. He edited and annotated three volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois’ correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography.

The obituary fails to mention that Aptheker’s 1937 Master’s thesis was about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt and written on the basis of primary source research. This should be considered when weighing William Styron’s accusation that only politics motivated Aptheker’s criticism of his novel.

Continue reading “The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit”