Politics – Page 6 – Anthony G. Flood

Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence

The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.

After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).

Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.

In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)

And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose. Continue reading “Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence”

Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker

As I noted in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (and elsewhere on this blog), I can trace my friendship with historian Hugh Murray to the early ‘70s, when we were Aptheker’s research assistants. His review appeared on Amazon last week, a first for the book. Below is the expanded version he posted on his own blog.

I’ve appreciated his criticisms enough to share them with you. I especially want to know what you think of Hugh’s defense of Herbert Aptheker as an historian, an evaluation I questioned in the book. Henry Steele Commager, Hugh’s counterexample, ignored African American intellectuals in his monumental 1950 The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. Consequently, there’s no mention therein of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright or any of the creators of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Does this neglect disqualify Commager as an historian? Can Commager’s works be trusted despite that neglect? The doctoral advisor to Aptheker’s biographer told him to find another topic, for Aptheker’s works could not be trusted; the judge in David Irving’s libel trial adjudged that Irving’s could not. Since we cannot reasonably make knowing everything the precondition of knowing anything, Hugh argues, we have to live with the fact of bias. How much bias, however, and what kind crosses the line?

Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker’s Blindness as Historian—and Blindness Spreads

Hugh Murray

In his short book Mr. Flood has written an essential work for anyone interested in the many volumes of history written by Dr. Herbert Aptheker. The questions Flood raises, however, are not limited to Aptheker, but concern all historians and indeed all intellectuals who were members of the Communist Party USA (CP), and other Communist parties worldwide. The question simply put, “Can they be trusted?” Continue reading “Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker”

July 20, 1969: I was there

Not the Moon, on which the crew of the Apollo 11 spacecraft would land as that Sunday drew to a close (almost 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time). No, Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park four years later) for one very memorable afternoon, part of that summer’s Harlem Cultural Festival.

On my way home from high school a few days before, I saw an ad on the No. 27 Bronx bus that took me from the IRT’s Sound View Avenue Station on Westchester Avenue and dropped me off at the Academy Gardens (at the Randall Avenue stop just before the bus makes a left turn onto Rosedale Avenue).

By Gind2005 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25730097

Around noon the day Neil Armstrong would do the first “Moonwalk,” I took the No. 6 train (of J.Lo’s debut album fame; she was born four days later) from the same station (now Morrison-Sound View Avenues) to 125th Street to enjoy a Soul Music concert of arguably historic proportions. After the Beatles craze, to which I had succumbed as a pre-teen in 1964, my musical tastes migrated, not to Rock, but to Soul. That set me up for my first Jazz concert in 1971.

If there were other white people among the myriads of black folks forming a sea of ebony across the green field, I didn’t see them. When I asked a gentleman for directions back to the 6 after the show, he nearly lost the cigarette that dangled from his lips. That sort of thing. Distributors of The Black Panther—the newspaper of the The Black Panther Party, not the superhero comic book, which actually predates the Party—hawked their wares indiscriminately and therefore to me.

According to blogger kamau [whose blog has since been deleted from the web] in 2009, “producer Hal Tulchin took over 50 hours of footage of the festival, but was unable to get it aired on the American TV networks of the day. Currently that footage lies languishing in vaults; apart from Nina Simone’s performance [on August 17th] that is making the rounds of YouTube . . . most of that footage has not seen the light of day.”

Below is the text of the original press release. (The area code for the whole city then was “212”; “718” for the “outer boroughs” came in 1984.)

The “headliner,” Stevie Wonder, was just 18; Chuck Jackson, now 81, turned 32 two days later.

UPDATE: In 2017, Bryan Greene, General Deputy Assistant Secretary at U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and fellow soul music fan emailed me about my post as it appeared on an old jazz site. We set up a time for a phone interview about my experience; he wrote up the result in an article that captures the time’s politics and culture. It’s in the April-June 2017 issue of his newsletter, Poverty & Race, available online. I hope some of you will take a peek.

The festival is also Greene’s point of departure for a recent Smithsonian article about the Moon anding and the alternative uses that he and others wish NASA’s funds would be put. As you might guess, I’m against governmental boondoggles on principle, but at least the $24 billion mulcted from taxpayers led to a Moon landing; $15 trillion later, U.S. poverty rates are about what they were when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.”

And the beat goes on. (Yeah, that was from ten years later.)

The above modifies and expands a 2009 post on another site.

City of New York
Administration of Parks,
Recreation and
Cultural Affairs
Arsenal, Central Park 10021

For Release

UPON RECEIPT

For Further Information:

Janice Brophy – 360-8141

SOUL FESTIVAL IN HARLEM

Harlem will host the sounds of soul this Sunday, July 20th, at 2:00 p.m. at Mount Morris Park, 124th Street and Fifth Avenue. The concert climaxes “Soul Music Festival Week.” proclaimed by Mayor Lindsay for July 15th to July 20th.

Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Chuck Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Lou Parks Dancers are featured at the Soul Festival, the third concert in the Harlem Cultural Festival 1969, sponsored by the New York City’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration and Maxwell House Coffee, and produced and directed by Tony Lawrence. Admission is free.

The Harlem Cultural Festival 1969 will continue through the summer with three more concerts at Mount Morris Park, all at 2:00 p.m. A Caribbean Festival on July 27th, featuring Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, and the Harlem Festival Calypso Band; a Blues & Jazz Festival on August 17 with Nina Simone, B. B. King, Hugh Masakela, and the Harlem Festival Jazz Band; on August 24th, a Miss Harlem Beauty Pageant & Local Talent Festival, featuring La Rocque Bey & Co., and Listen My Brothers & Co.

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic is out today in paperback; xx + 331 pages, 42 chapters, four appendices. A Kindle edition is in the works. The following paragraphs should answer basic questions like, “What’s this about?”

From my Introduction:

From March 8, 2011 to September 10, 2012, nineteen months in all, I blogged my criticism of The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara’s slanderous and ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics. He argued that no faithful Catholic could be a sincere libertarian of the ASE persuasion. One day I had promised Mr. Ferrara that if he published a book to that effect, I’d answer it. Across almost ninety posts I fulfilled that promise, and this book reincarnates them.

After a year and a half, however, I decided that life was too short to sacrifice other projects on the altar of this polemic. The issues were (and are) important, and I found researching and writing about them congenial, but I could no longer sustain the effort. . . .

This book is the record of an effort in pro-market apologetics (in the classic sense of “defense against intellectual attack”). All interference in market exchange, not only outright state control of the “means of production,” but also violent robbery, involves a degree of “socialization” of the costs of acquiring a good or service. To impose costs on individuals who have not chosen to bear them, be they contemporaries or later generations, is to “socialize” those costs. Calculating these (usually hidden) costs falls to the economist. “Socialism” and “communism” are but frank labels for the systematic, territory-wide state interference with the market exchanges of individuals. That is, it differs in degree, not of kind, from the predations of garden-variety gangsters.

From Gerard Casey’s Foreword:

Anthony Flood’s Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . .

Flood is critical not only of Ferrara’s conclusion, but also of the argumentative methods that Ferrara employs. “Several thorough readings,” writes Flood, “have convinced me that it is such a bad book, morally as well as stylistically, that it arguably ought to be ignored rather than critically reviewed. Its tone is continuously inflammatory, its arrangement of material lopsided . . . and his use of sources tendentious. The last-mentioned trait includes either unawareness or evasion of evidence relevant to his topic but inconvenient to his purpose.” Flood is especially critical of Ferrara’s epistemically uncharitable failure to employ responsible internal criticism of his opponents’ positions and also of his inadequate grasp of various historical controversies. . . .

Tony’s book will be of interest to many people, but perhaps especially (but not only) to those who are Catholic and who are also attracted to the intellectual coherence of Austro-Libertarianism, but are concerned that the two systems of thought may be irreconcilable. Polemical writing is not everybody’s favourite form of reading, but the multiple, mostly short, chapters of Christ, Capital and Liberty provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began.

Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt.
Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin
Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama
Fellow, Mises UK

And finally, at least for this post, the table of contents:

Part One: Setting the Table

Chapter 1 A Question of Tone

Chapter 2 In Few Things, Charity?

Chapter 3 A Question of Competency

Chapter 4 Sound Bites, Panic Buttons, Scare Quotes

Chapter 5 An Inconvenient Jesuit

Chapter 6 An Overview of an Overview

Chapter 7 Demonize and Delete the Austrians

Chapter 8 Value-Laden and Value-Free

Chapter 9 Adventures in Meta-Ethics

Chapter 10 Aquinas’s Proto-Liberal Concerns

Chapter 11 An Inconvenient Anarcho-Catholic

Chapter 12 Doctorates, “Dummies,” and Defamation

Chapter 13 On Not Seeing the Forest for the Woods

Part Two: Main Course

Chapter 14 Capitalism: a Post-Christian Structure?

Chapter 15 Conflating Science and Ethics

Chapter 16 Disparaging Imaginary Constructions as Illusions

Chapter 17 “Statism” versus “Greed”

Chapter 18 Confusion or Calumny?

Chapter 19 The Kevin Carson (Side-)Show

Chapter 20 What Do We Mean by “The Free Market”?

Chapter 21 If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool-Ownership

Chapter 22 Rothbard on Enclosure

Chapter 23 The Hammonds, T. S. Ashton, and Emily Litella

Chapter 24 Grand Theft Monastery

Chapter 25 Dismissive of the New, Evasive of the Old

Chapter 26 Lie, Rinse, Repeat

Chapter 27 Sudha Shenoy on Enclosures

Chapter 28 The Gnat of Enclosure, the Camel of Slavery

Chapter 29 Lock(e), Stock, and Jesuit

Chapter 30 Slavery, Real and Bogus

Chapter 31 If This Is Infallibility . . . .

Part Three: Dessert and Leftovers

Chapter 32 Save Money, Live Better, Just Do It

Chapter 33 Corporations as “Psychopaths”

Chapter 34 Enclosing Debate

Chapter 35 Rothbard Shaves Ferrara’s Quasi-Marxist “Beard”

Chapter 36 Shall We Prefer Government by Naked Coercion?

Chapter 37 Slavery for the Corporation?

Chapter 38 The Corporation as “Sociopath”

Chapter 39 Railroading the Free Market

Chapter 40 (Fan)Fanning the Embers of Fascism

Chapter 41 Scrooge on Externalization

Chapter 42 Ferrara’s Reserve of False Notes

Appendices

Appendix A Murray Rothbard on Abortion

Appendix B A Profound Philosophical Commonality

Appendix C Lord Acton: Libertarian Hero

Appendix D Is Anarchy a Cause of War?

Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography

I may be fairly described as (among other things) road-kill along the way to the definitive biography of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). In 1997 I sought and gained the cooperation of his widow, Joann, and Lew Rockwell, then president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to begin that project.

All I managed to do, however, was fulfill the prediction that this effort would overwhelm me. My enthusiasm for the idea of telling Murray’s story and expounding his ideas blinded me to the fact, obvious to everyone but me (and perhaps my mother), that I was not up to the task. The life of Rothbard, an intellectual giant, awaits its Hülsmann. And if the interval between the death of Ludwig von Mises and the production of Guido Hülsmann’s Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism is any guide, the wait is far from over.

On display below is barely refined ore mined from not only from secondary sources but, more importantly, from interviews conducted with people who knew Murray: in the first place JoAnn Rothbard, but also Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, George Resch, John McCarthy, and James Sadowsky. Readers who have profited from Justin Raimondo’s An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement as well as Murray’s own monograph, The Betrayal of the American Right will discover a fact or two not related in those works, which I highly recommend.

I was pleasantly surprised when, in 2010, Gerard N. Casey, Professor (Emeritus), School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin, and Associate Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute cited my unfinished essay (first published on my old site in 2008) in his fine monograph Murray Rothbard, a sure milestone on the road to the “definitive biography” project.¹

Murray Newton Rothbard was born in the Bronx on March 2, 1926. His father, David Rothbard, a shoemaker’s son, was raised in Vishigorod, Ukraine, 40 miles north of Warsaw on the Vistula. David, who had attended Hebrew school as a child, abandoned Judaism because its scriptures told of a God who had instigated the violent behavior of the Israelites, and that horrified him. Continue reading “Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography”

Book Launch: “Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness”

My first book went live on Amazon today. Its introduction and first chapter were originally blog posts, but the rest the book consists of essays published over the past five years. If you can help spread the word, please do. I’ll prepare a paperback version. I now append the book description.—Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), a pioneering researcher in African-American slave revolts, was also an American Communist theoretician. Anthony Flood, who attended Aptheker’s lectures a half-century ago, became his research assistant, friend and comrade. Decades after Flood repudiated the comradeship, it dawned on him that Aptheker’s politics had blocked his research in his area of specialization: he failed to recognize The Black Jacobins, the work of C. L. R. James (1901-1989) that chronicled the only successful slave revolt in modern times. The failure was ideological.

In the course of investigating this silence, Flood discovered scholars who admired both writers, but never at the same time. Doing so would have forced them to address the uncomfortable truth that one of their heroes ignored the other. That is, the white radical scholar ignored the black radical scholar who was 14 years his senior. The only explanation, Flood contends, is that Aptheker, the Stalinist, could not bring himself to acknowledge the work of James, the Trotskyist.

There are other problems with Aptheker’s legacy, of course, such as his uncovering the truth about slavery in the Americas while covering it up in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The “dissing” of James, however, undermines his “anti-racism” reputation as well as his argument that “partisanship with the oppressed” makes objectivity in history writing possible. He was a partisan of too many oppressors. He eventually admitted his own “willful blindness” (his words), yet that didn’t stop him from defending, as late as 2000, The Truth about Hungary, his book-length apologia for the Soviet Union’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness includes not only Flood’s essay on Aptheker and James, but also vignettes of his coming into Aptheker’s life as a high school student and that of Sidney Hook (Aptheker’s nemesis and Flood’s philosophy professor). Also included are a review of the first biography of Aptheker and an inquiry into Aptheker’s status as an historian. Appendices include Aptheker’s first essay (in The American Hebrew) and Flood’s first letter on Aptheker (in The Journal of American History).

Herbert Aptheker expressed the ethos of the American Communist Party in its heyday, an atmosphere that pervades “progressive” American politics today. If you want to look at his role in that “progression,” this monograph is a good place to start.

Once more on Romans 13: James Redford’s “Jesus Is an Anarchist”

As I have an interest in dislodging the sediment of encrusted theological opinion, today I post an excerpt from James Redford’s 2001 essay “Jesus Is an Anarchist,” the text of which is here: anti-state.com and revised and expanded in 2011. It complements Otis Q. Sellers’s situating of Romans 13:1-7 in the Acts dispensation, posted recently.—Anthony Flood

It is often claimed that Christians are required to submit to government, as this is supposedly what Paul commanded that we are supposed to do in Romans 13. Thus:

Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Romans 13:1-7

But in actual fact Paul never does tell us in above excerpt from Romans 13 to submit to government!—at least certainly not as they have existed on Earth and are operated by men.

In fact, Paul would be an outright, boldfaced hypocrite were he to command anyone to do such a thing: for Paul himself did not submit to government, and if he had then he would not even have been alive to be able to write Romans 13.

Continue reading “Once more on Romans 13: James Redford’s “Jesus Is an Anarchist””

Romans 13: another contrarian interpretation

Last week I posted Eric Voegelin’s “Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13,” which exposes the weaponization of the Apostle Paul’s words in the service of the state, even Hitler’s, making every scoundrel with executive authority an ordained minister. After reading it, libertarian scholar Gerard N. Casey brought to my attention other alternative interpretations of Romans 13:1-7, readings that regard the “powers that be” to be, not “civil,” but rather ecclesial or spiritual. Those views pass in review in Casey’s magisterial Freedom’s Progress?: A History of Political Thought, which I unreservedly recommend to my visitors, especially (for its relevance to our topic) pages 198-209.

Today I share with you yet another view, one I discovered forty years ago, but only now am willing to own. It’s from the pen of the late Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), whose life I’m researching for a biography. Today happens to be his birthday.—Anthony G. Flood

The Powers That Be

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” This is Paul’s positive declaration recorded in Romans 13:1, and there is no verse in Scripture that has been misapplied more than this one. In all church theology “the higher powers” are made to be the civil authorities, whoever they may be in any country and at any time. And it needs to be said that of all the absurd interpretations ever made by theologians, this one takes first prize. It is unworkable and unbelievable, and it cannot be followed out through the additional statements that follow this declaration.

Continue reading “Romans 13: another contrarian interpretation”

Eric Voegelin on Romans 13

The following “Theoretical Inquiry into Romans 13” has been taken from Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, translated and edited by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell, University of Missouri Press, 2003, 178-183. This is from a lecture Voegelin gave at the University of Munich in the summer of 1964. I have taken the liberty of breaking up long paragraphs. I’ll share another contrarian interpretation of Romans 13 next week.—Anthony G. Flood

Theoretical Inquiry into Romans

Image result for Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans And now, in concluding this investigation on the Evangelical side, a theoretical inquiry into Romans 13 for the Evangelical part, and then for the Catholic part an inquiry into the theological idea of the corpus mysticum Christi, so that the decadence I have repeatedly spoken of will come to light.

In all the documents, Evangelical and Catholic, with which those belonging to the communities were enjoined to obey Hitler, there are two texts from the Bible invoked by the clergy in order to command obedience to the authorities. Among the two, on the Catholic side, in the documents I will present to you next time, the fourth commandment is preferred. That commandment is “Honor your father and your mother.” This father and mother is now interpretatively expanded as “Honor the state, carry out its laws, obey the authorities!”

Please note that. Not a word of all that is in the fourth commandment—for the good historical reason that precisely in the covenant of Sinai, within which the Decalogue was announced, the people existed under God and not under authorities. There was no occasion for speaking about having to obey any kind of authorities at all. So it is unhistoric and anachronistic, and if such an alteration of an interpretative kind were made to a text in a secular context by a scholar, one would say: Absolutely barefaced falsification of the text! When theologians do it, then it is the church.

Continue reading “Eric Voegelin on Romans 13”

“We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan

On August 13, 1920 Marcus Garvey presided at the convention of the United Negro Improvement Association held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Its 54 points comprise the farthest thing from a fascist manifesto.

And yet, as my friend Hugh Murray noted a quarter-century ago, Garvey “admired . . . leading anti-communists, such as Mussolini. Indeed, in 1937 Garvey proudly proclaimed of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, ‘We were the first fascists.’[1]

Here’s the full quote:

We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]

He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.

While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]

A few years after Hugh wrote those words, King’s College Professor of American and English Literature Paul Gilroy came out with “Black Fascism” (Transition, Indiana UPress, 2000, 70-91), a scholarly monograph on Garvey’s boast, the first instance of Black public advocacy of fascism. I recommend it to students of this overlooked chapter of Black American history.

On June 25, 1961 American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell sat in the Uline Arena, Washington, DC (where the Beatles would give their first US concert a few years later). He was there at the invitation of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad. Thousands were in attendance. During the collection, Rockwell shouted:

George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!

Continue reading ““We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan”