Whenever I hear the phrase "Communist Party Front Group" I think of another term: "Premature Anti-Fascist".
I'm reminded of this wonderful essay by Bernard Knox.
www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/scw/knox.htm
In this striking account of his service in the Second World War, Knox talks about how his having fought against Franco in Spain was sometimes considered something to be ashamed of, it made him a "premature anti-fascist".
Whenever I hear the phrase "Communist Party Front Group" I think of another term: "Premature Anti-Fascist".
I'm reminded of this wonderful essay by Bernard Knox.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/...
In this striking account of his service in the Second World War, Knox talks about how his having fought against Franco in Spain was sometimes considered something to be ashamed of, it made him a "premature anti-fascist".
I had submitted a copy of my certificate of the BA I had received from St. Johns College, Cambridge in 1936. I did not make any mention of the fact that I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better than Auden, who got a third, and Housman, who failed completely). To jazz my application up a bit, I had included my record in the US Army, private to captain 1942-45. The Professor, who had himself served in the US Army in 1917-18, was very interested, and remarked on the fact that, in addition to the usual battle-stars for service in the European Theatre, I had been awarded a Croix de Guerre a l'Ordre de l'Armée, the highest category for that decoration. Asked how I got it, I explained that, in July 1944, I had parachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance. "Why were you selected for that operation?" he asked, and I told him that I was one of the few people in the US Army who could speak fluent, idiomatic, and (if necessary) pungently coarse French. When he asked me where I had learned it, I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XIth International Brigade. "Oh," he said, "You were a premature anti-Fascist."
Fast forward to 2002. October 11th, 2002 was a terrible day for the Iraqi and the American people. On October 11th, 2002 the Senate voted 29 to 21 and the House voted 296-133 go to pass HJ RES. 114, to give George W. Bush the power to war in Iraq.
Three years later, after the deaths of 2000 Americans and anywhere between 25,000 and 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the Democratic Party is as ambivalent about the war in Iraq as they were in 2002. They allowed Cindy Sheehan to be baited by the right-wing media with barely a whimper of protest. No major Democratic Party leader showed up on September 24th in Washington, perhaps the largest single anti-war demonstration since the Vietnam War. Even John Murtha, the conservative Democrat from Pennsylvania who courageously stepped forward to open the debate on the continued presence of American troops in Iraq, was largely hung out to dry by his own party.
If Klaatu, the cultivated alien diplomat from the old science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still", returned to earth in 2005, he would probably scratch his head in wonder over the phrase "Communist Party Front Group". While Communists of every variety are indeed involved in anti-war coalitions like Not in Our Name, International Answer, and United for Peace and Justice, he would find it curious that these people are condemned for their (good) works opposing George Bush's plan to remake the Middle-East in his image. Any fair minded observer would conclude that since the majority of the American people (let alone the majority of people in the Middle-East) are opposed to American military intervention in Iraq that these communists better represent the interests of the American people than the Democrats or the Republicans. Yet Joe McCarthy still casts a long shadow over American politics. Like the "premature anti-fascists" who were targeted by the red scare in the 1950s for daring to have opposed the regime of Francisco Franco before it was considered socially acceptable, the communists who work with the anti-Iraq-war movement are often condemned precisely because they were right about George Bush from the very beginning.
By contrast, you will never hear the phrase "Christian Fascist Front Organization", even on a left-wing site like the Daily Kos. While no progressive Democrat dared show up to speak on September 24th to protest the war in Iraq and risk any connection at all to International Answer or to Ramsey Clark, Hillary Clinton regularly holds joint press conferences with the likes of Sam Brownback, the extremist right-wing Senator from Kansas who was converted to Catholicism by Father C. John McCloskey, a prominent member of the group Opus Dei, a shadowy cult within the Catholic Church that has its origins in Franco's Spain.
Opus Dei is so secretive that many of its key documents have not been translated into English. Core members are required to live in group houses, stay celibate, and wear something called a "cilce" for over 2 hours a day, a metal, spiked harness that gives its wearer a jolt of excruciating pain if he forgets he has it on and sits down or makes any sudden movements. They are required to turn all of their money over to Opus Dei at the end of the month. And Opus Dei's members hold ideas about abortion, women's' and gay rights, and the political process that would shock most Americans. They're quite literally "Christian Fascists" and, shockingly, the media never draws our attention to the fact that they have as their supporters people like Rick Santorum, Clarence Thomas, Robert Novak, and Atonin Scalia. Indeed, perhaps Opus Dei's most famous core member was Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who sold state secrets to the Soviet Union. This is remarkable considering Robert Novak's involvement in the Valerie Plame scandal. Try to imagine how the media would react if you exchanged the names "Robert Novak" and "Ramsey Clark". Do you still think that Hillary Clinton would hold joint press conferences with its supporters?
World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime is a broad coalition of intellectuals and political activists who have signed a statement that ran as a full page ad in the New York Times on December 12th advocating a very simple idea. George Bush is too dangerous to be allowed to remain in office until the end of his term in 2008. He must be driven out of office before he's able to finish packing the courts with exotic right-wing freaks like Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, global warming is a reality. George Bush's inability to put aside his religious beliefs and work with the rest of the world to implement the Kyoto accords puts us all at risk. We've already lost a major American city. How many more do we have to lose before we realize how dangerous it is to have a Christian fundamentalist in charge of the most powerful country the world has ever seen? The current revelations about the NSA have shown us that the Bush Regime is a danger to the Fourth Amendment itself. Anti-immigrant radicals like Tom Tancredo have proposed doing away with the Fourteenth Amendment, advocating a repeal of the law that confers American citizenship to anybody born on American soil. Shockingly, 70 members of Congress signed on.
And yet many people, including many liberal Democrats, will look at World Can't Wait -Drive Out the Bush Regime and dismiss it out of hand simply because some of its key supporters are also members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. They'll conjure up demons from the 1960s, images of Hubert Humphry losing a close race to Richard Nixon because the left decided to sit out the election. But they won't talk about the murder of Fred Hampton or the wiretapping of Martin Luther King. They'll warn us about the lack of civil liberties in North Korea or Cuba but they won't go into detail about Cointelpro and the FBI's targeting of anti-war protesters in the 1960s or, indeed, about the recent revelations about the Pentagon's monitoring of the anti-war movement in 2005. They will talk about how Stalin created an artificial famine in the Ukraine in the 1920s. They won't talk about how George Bush intentionally set up the conditions for a murderous civil war in Iraq. They will spend a few moments on Google and sound the alarm that there are people involved in World Can't Wait who are outside of the Republican and Democratic parties. They won't answer the points of The Call itself.
But the situation in history is too dangerous to think like this. "Communist" is a word. George Bush is the president of the most powerful country the world has ever seen. Ramsey Clark is a leader of in a marginalized leftist movement in a country that has no real left. Bush has his finger on the nuclear button. On Tuesday, January 31st, George Bush will give his State of the Union Speech. He will not strike a conciliatory tone. He will not announce that he's moving to the center, appointing Tom Kean to replace Dick Cheney as Vice President or put Joe Biden in Donald Rumsfeld's place at the Pentagon. No, on January 31st, George Bush will start the push to consolidate what he's already accomplished in the last 5 years. He will throw down the gauntlet over Samuel Alito and begin the push to get this frightening right-wing extremist on the Supreme Court. He will continue to defend his disastrous occupation of Iraq. He will not suddenly announce his intentions to follow the Kyoto accords or make friendly advances to our estranged allies in Western Europe. He will speak to his Christian fascist supporters in biblical code. He will also stroke the Rush Limbaugh crowd into a frenzy with words like "Islamofascist" and phrases like "stay the course" and "don't cut and run". In other words, he will continue the dangerous right-wing course he's made no secret about following since he stole the election in 2000. Who in Germany in 1933, if, presented with a call to drive Hitler from power before it was too late would have refused to sign on because there was the chance he would have been involved with Communists? Does comparing Bush to Hitler offend you? I wonder if it would offend the Iraqi civilians who have died since the Bush Regime intentionally threw their country into a deadly civil war.
Join your own generation's "Premature Anti-Fascists".
On Tuesday, 1/31, on the night of Bush's State of the Union address, in large cities and small towns all across the country - join us in rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step Down" the news & message of the day. At 9pm EST - just as Bush starts to speak we will bring on the noise and drown out his address - bring your voice, and make a commitment to the world that not another year will be lived under this criminal regime.
On Saturday, February 4 we will demonstrate, in Washington DC to deliver the people's verdict on Bush's criminal regime - "Bush Step down and take your program with you!"
I'll give Bernard Knox the last word.
How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti- Fascist? Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-Fascist were you supposed to be? A punctual anti-Fascist? A timely one? In fact, in the '30s, as the European situation moved inexorably toward war, the British and French governments (the French often under pressure from the British) passed up one timely opportunity after another to become anti-Fascist. They did nothing when Adolf Hitler took Germany out of the League of Nations and began a massive rearmament program (except that the British government negotiated an Anglo-German Naval Treaty that gave Hitler the right to build the U- boats that, in the early '40s, came close to starving Britain into surrender). No action was taken when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, demolishing the buffer against an invasion of France created by the Versailles Treaty. They allowed Hitler and Mussolini to supply Franco with planes, tanks, guns and troops, while enforcing a so-called Non-Intervention Agreement that cut off supplies to the Government. They remained silent while Mussolini conquered Abyssinia and Hitler annexed Austria. And in 1938, they sold down the river for a ludicrous illusion of Peace in Our Time the only strong, democratic state in Eastern Europe that might have been a deterrent to Hitler's plans for expansion, the Czechoslovak Republic. You couldn't call Chamberlain, Daladier and Laval 'timely anti-Fascists'. They declared war on Hitler in 1939 as he invaded Poland, a declaration that gave no help to the Poles, who were crushed between the armies of Hitler from one side and Stalin from the other. So what kind of anti-Fascists were they? My French maquisards had a phrase for the Frenchmen who, in 1944, as the Allied armies broke out of the Normandy pocket and raced across France in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht, finally tried to join the Resistance. Resistants de la dernière heure was their contemptuous name for them - 'last- minute anti-Fascists'. It is a perfect description of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.
But in 1939, last-minute was too late. Too late to save the millions who died in the death camps; too late to save the soldiers and sailors who died in the campaigns in Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, at Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa and many other places Americans had never heard of; too late to save the civilians who, like the inhabitants of Guernica, died under the bombs in Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Hiroshima. It would have been better to be premature.