It is interesting that the neocons, who have nurtured such twisted and dark policy initiatives as we have recently seen, took as their original guiding moral light Arthur Koestler, a key figure in the European Popular Front, who later rejected Communism. The Popular Front was made up of Communists and sympathizers in Europe called fellow travelers, who sought to insinuate influence throughout France and Germany shortly after the Russian Revolution. Much as writers like Charles Krauthammer insinuate for their specific cause today in The Washington Post and a variety of others on the pages of the LA Times and now, even to the embarrassment of William F. Buckley, Jr., at The National Review. The "soft" side of propaganda today seems entirely inspired by the Popular Front of the early Stalinists in Europe and its sterling operative, Arthur Koestler. The fledgling neocons were perhaps the only political group to recall and honor Koestler's death, or even remember who he was in 1983.
Koestler wrote two books on interrogation and torture. In "Darkness at Noon" he asked how a man like himself could be seduced into the Personality Cult of Stalin and a movement that advocated and practiced torture, as the Stalinists did with such proficiency. Koestler, who bears an astonishing resemblance to Paul Wolfowitz, at one time suggested names in France and Germany which were sent up to Stalin for torture and execution. Later, he denounced Stalin and offered a different point of view from the torture advocates of today, referring to them as "the scum of the earth" in a second book on torture.
There is nothing wrong with being a fellow traveler on an issue. Indeed, it can be good citizenship. But what brings the movement to power is the fact that the country is too frightened, timid or stupid to respond to its intimidating initiatives. The mainstream allows itself to be intimidated: The Popular Front relies for its effect on the poor citizenship and weakness on the part of everybody else not part of its group.
We saw attempts at intimidation in the style of the Popular Front working twice this week. First when The Jerusalem Post posted an ad calling Wesley Clark an anti-Semite because he said in a passing conversation to Arianna Huffington that "New York money people" were pushing war with Iran. The Jerusalem Post ad declared that this associated money with Jews and was thus anti-Semitic. The mainstream press shuffled and submitted, tugging on its forelock, and the story echoed cross the wires. I was reminded of an another news article years back about a black man who said black people didn’t like gardening because it reminded them of slavery (working the land, get it?). An article like this in a healthy citizenship would normally provoke choked laughter, but this was reprinted in the major newspapers.
Wesley Clark opposes the invasion of Iran, which Israeli strategists have since publicly proposed Israel do by itself. Clark, whose father was a Jew, refused to capitulate.
But it is this willingness to submit; It is this kind of moral cowardice, that seeps the life force from the press and from the Congress. It is this weakness of character which forms a Congress which appeases and accommodates neocon agenda, advances egregious torture strategies unknown since the Enlightenment and repeals habeas corpus.
The tool of the Popular Front and its fellow travelers was called agitational propaganda; it was the use of language and the media to deceive, confuse and disturb the moral base of the middle class and debase its most honored citizens as symbools of opposiiton. Apparently in Stalin’s day people would come to believe anything. Today again, perhaps: Go to The Washington Post and read Deborah Lipstadt’s essay, "Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem."
Lipstadt presents President Carter, a Noble Peace Prize laureate, as an anti-Semite, comparing him with David Duke. The essence of her argument is that when Carter writes about the situation in Palestine and the Middle East in his recent book, "Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid" he doesn’t take the Holocaust fully into consideration (although, she concedes, "nitpickers" might say that the Holocaust did no happen in the region.)
This is the kind of thing one might expect from the Chinese Communist Party which learned its strategies from the likes of Arthur Koestler and his colleague Michael Borodin – indeed it is quite similar to the Chinese government’s consistent attacks on the Dalai Lama: His Holiness never considers the Rape of Nanking, the Japanese invasion and China’s inherent sensitivity and discomfort with neighbors of any kind.
Koestler wrote that fascism came to Europe because the Europeans allowed themselves to be intentionally deceived by both fascists and communists. We are seeing it again in a propaganda storm against our most honorable and courageous people.
