IN HIS REVIEW of Ronald Radosh’s important new book, Commies, Roger Clegg raises a provocative question: Are conservatives too forgiving of the crimes committed by the left against America, specifically the crime of treason? Here are some ways to think about an answer.
It is certainly the case that the "progressive" left, which has never really looked back with second thoughts about its radical commitments, which is still dedicated to its small "c" communist agendas, which still defends its old subversive heroes, is an anti-American left that is ready to aid and abet virtually any enemy of the United States, including apparently Saddam Hussein. It is a near certainty that thousands of so-called new leftists actively worked with the intelligence agencies of Communist governments whose objectives were to weaken, injure and if possible destroy the United States. The most obvious cases of this kind of treason were the radio broadcasts from Hanoi of Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and others accusing America of war crimes and urging American troops to defect during the Vietnam conflict, and the collusion with Cuban intelligence operatives during the 1980s in the setting up of "solidarity committees" as part of Castro’s plan to destabilize and overthrow central American governments. At one point, a Salvadoran operative working for Cuban intelligence actually set up shop in the congressional offices of Ron Dellums, with the conniving of the Congressman himself.
Roger Clegg is right that these and other crimes should not be regarded lightly, and that a double-standard governs attitudes towards former Nazis and neo-Nazis on the one hand and former Communists and neo-Communists – among whom I would include Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and Carlottia Scott, the current political issues director of the Democratic Party. This nation’s democracy would be in much healthier shape (and I would probably retire from political activity) if there was no such double standard and if all Americans, and conservatives in particular, took the assaults on this nation’s institutions and ideals more seriously than they do.
Where I differ with Clegg is that his interrogation of this question is directed almost exclusively at the left. He notes that conservatives are forgiving, and properly so since it is a conservative insight that we are all sinners, and it is pragmatically wise to "encourage people to break with a wrong-headed past." The conservative movement, for its part, has benefited tremendously from its generosity to ex-Communists and ex-radicals. The shaping intellectual forces of the magazine in which Clegg makes his observations were recruited from the ranks of the Communist movement by its founder William. F. Buckley. I, myself, am deeply grateful to the conservative movement for the warmth with which they have accepted an ex-radical like myself, and for the generosity of their support – despite what I did – for my attempts to repay my country for the damage I was responsible for.
That said, the problem that Clegg overlooks, and the problem that has continued to puzzle me, has been the failure of nerve by those who love this country, and who should be leading the efforts to defend it, in fighting the left. If leftists do not take seriously their acts of treason, it is partly because nobody else does either. When is the last time the United States government executed a spy? Aldrich Ames – to name only one convicted traitor among many – not only worked for the enemy, he caused the death of Americans the government has identified. If the United States Government doesn’t regard spying and murder as such a big deal, why should anyone else?
Turning to the Fonda problem, we encounter the same message. Fonda committed treason during the Nixon and Ford Administrations but was never prosecuted. Perhaps that is because the United States never declared itself at war. The decision of Lyndon Johnson to put Americans in harm’s way without a formal declaration of war – and the fact that this provoked no great congressional revolt – probably tells us more about the nature of the problem that Roger Clegg has raised than anything else. It is just part of a syndrome.
Why weren’t the student radicals who occupied university buildings in the 1960s (and who then went on to run the universities themselves) expelled or jailed? Why was Bernadine Dohrn, a terrorist in the Seventies and now a prominent and unrepentant figure high up in the American Bar Association – never prosecuted for her crimes? Why did Republicans not protest (or even notice) the appointment of Carlottia Scott, mistress of the Marxist dictator of Grenada and colluder in his anti-American schemes? How was Defense Secretary William Cohen able to give Ron Dellums the highest medal the Pentagon can bestow on a civilian without a peep of protest from the right? How come the present Republican Justice Department has not launched an investigation of the collusion between the Clinton Administration, the Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist dictatorship in transferring previously protected military technologies to America’s number one potential adversary?
These are the questions that conservatives should be asking.
I would like to end this note with a personal request to my conservative comrades-in-arms. When you go into your next battle with our opponents, would you please stop referring to leftists who despise America, who have waged a forty-year war against its foundations, whose agendas are a socialist and even fascist utopia (redistribution by racial preferences) as "liberals." These are not liberals. They are leftists. The only thing they are liberal about is hard drugs and sex. In every other respect, they want to control your lives. Their traditions are of the left, their ideas are of the left, their agendas are of the left. You can’t really complain about the double standards for the past, if you continue to apply those double standards to the present.