{"id":57065,"date":"2017-10-30T17:05:52","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T15:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=57065"},"modified":"2017-10-29T16:44:56","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T14:44:56","slug":"04-05-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=57065","title":{"rendered":"The Communist Party\u2019s Human Gramophones, and the Liberal Who Opposed Them"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Communist Party\u2019s Human Gramophones, and the Liberal Who Opposed Them<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ron Capshaw<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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\"Header\"<\/p>\n

When George Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46, the literary critic Edmund Wilson found it symbolically appropriate. For in the new postwar age of play-acting Stalinists, Wilson saw Orwell as the last prophet of commonsense independent-minded thought on the left.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But there was one who took up the baton. Robert Warshow, born 100 years ago, approached film, literature, and politics, with uncompromising honesty and complexity in a difficult time. Like Orwell, he did not follow any \u201cline,\u201d be it Communist or McCarthyist. Dead at 37, he left behind very little work\u2014enough to be collected in one slim book. Nevertheless, his output is exceedingly relevant for our times.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike many of the \u201cNew York Intellectuals,\u201d that postwar brand of liberal but anti-Stalinist writers\u2014peopled by such literary heavyweights as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight MacDonald\u2014who dominated the opinion journals for a generation, and were then lionized by a generation of academics, Warshow never went through the obligatory Communist phase. While in college, he submitted articles to The New Leader, a social-democratic but fiercely anti-Communist magazine. After graduation, he worked for Commentary, then a liberal publication, as a managing editor. Hence, he could approach Communist politics without a sense of guilt or a need to overcompensate in his attacks on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Warshow\u2019s particular m\u00e9tier was analyzing the Communist sloganeers that Orwell typified as \u201chuman gramophones,\u201d and the damage they did to cultural and intellectual life. For him, the horrors of Stalinism weren\u2019t limited to the purges, gulags, and mass executions and the American followers who defended them. It was the how it cut party members off from having any ideas connected to reality. He lamented that for his generation coming up in the 1930s the Communist Party\u2019s influence was so great that it \u201cdetermined what you think about and on what terms\u201d well into the \u201950s.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Orwell sought to save socialism from Soviet influence, Warshow tried to save high culture from Stalinism. Because of Communist domination of culture, one could no longer have \u201cfree judgments,\u201d he wrote. One could no longer connect literature to one\u2019s own actual experiences. Instead, culture was boiled down to politically correct individual \u201cresponses\u201d promulgated in the most vulgar terms by literary commissars.<\/span><\/p>\n

In an astute analysis of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg\u2019s prison letters, Warshow noted that the supposedly \u201cconfidential\u201d letters\u2014later published\u2014between the two accused atomic spies and Communist Party members were not actually intimate personal documents\u2014rather, they were tailored for the public consumption of the party faithful. Hence, they constantly avowed their innocence, all the while knowing they did give atomic secrets to the Soviets. Julius, with one eye on giving those who protested for him ammunition, peppered his letters with \u201cframe-ups\u201d and \u201cAmerican fascism\u201d against \u201cprogressive\u201d Jews like himself. (Communism was never mentioned, except in distancing quotation marks.) Even without the censorship of prison officials, Warshow saw that for them \u201cthe truth could not be told.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What Warshow found most revealing about Julius was the place in one prison letter where he told his wife about cutting out a copy of the Declaration of Independence from The New York Times and taping it to his prison wall. He reported reading from it the rights of \u201cfreedom of speech, freedom of the press, and of religion.\u201d Warshow pointed out that the declaration does not mention any of these concepts, and hence Julius could never have \u201cread\u201d about them. From this, Warshow concluded that the couple \u201chad no internal sense of their own being but could only see themselves from the outside, in whatever postures their cases demanded\u201d\u2014in this case, a phony Americanism that in fact contradicted Rosenberg and the party\u2019s actual beliefs and doctrines.<\/span><\/p>\n

Warshow\u2019s key target were \u201canti-anti-Communists,\u201d who saw attempts \u201cto expose the Communist menace\u201d as more of a threat to American democracy than Stalin. Warshow denounced this \u201cequation\u201d as \u201cclearly absurd and too often conceals a desire to remain \u2018neutral\u2019 in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But Warshow had no radical past to lead him into the far right, either. In a review of My Son John (1953), an anti-Communist film so extreme that even some anti-Communists were embarrassed by it, he noted that the son, a thinly veiled Communist, and the father, a Bible-thumping American Legionnaire, were mirror images of each other in their fanaticism.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Orwell sought to save socialism from Soviet influence, Warshow tried to save high culture from Stalinism.<\/span><\/h3>\n

With its Our Town setting, the film took the familiar and \u201ctrue\u201d theme of a father laboring to send his son to college only to have the son, after graduation, if not before, rebuke the father\u2019s values. But Warshow found \u201cthe hero\u201d father no less \u201cmonstrous\u201d than his Communist spy son. The father in frustration hits his son with the Bible and drunkenly roars patriotic platitudes. The pious mother, caught in the middle, sides with the father at film\u2019s end, admiring his wisdom because he \u201cbelieves what is in his heart.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Warshow found the film repulsive not because it denounced communism but because it made anti-Communism one-dimensional and stupid. He did not quarrel with the film\u2019s depiction of communists being part of a conspiracy, nor did he doubt the possibility that Communists would murder their own, as happened at the climax of the film. But he reminded audiences, based on his and their experiences, that Communists were \u201ccomplex and their lives much duller.\u201d What was needed, he asserted, was a film that exposed \u201cthe melodrama\u201d of Communist fanaticism masquerading as dull government servants.<\/span><\/p>\n

Warshow lived and died in age different from ours. As of yet, Russia hasn\u2019t assumed the menacing dimensions of Stalin, nor is PC culture as oppressive as Stalinism proved to be for writers like Orwell or Ralph Ellison. But the problem of liberalism that Warshow analyzed and lamented in relation to radical politics remains. As in his time, some liberals today also view radicals as admirable because they are idealistic; even if radicals are proven misguided later and the liberals realize that they were duped (rightists do this as well, especially the social conservative faction). The very act of having ideals, even with no relation to reality, is still to be admired if one\u2019s \u201cheart is in the right place.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Stalin is dead. But Warshow may have been correct in his analysis that the damage that communists did to liberalism continues on.<\/span><\/p>\n

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This article is part of a week-long Tablet series analyzing the 100th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Communist Party\u2019s Human Gramophones, and the Liberal Who Opposed Them Ron Capshaw When George Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46, the literary critic Edmund Wilson found it symbolically appropriate. For in the new postwar age of play-acting Stalinists, Wilson saw Orwell as the last prophet of commonsense independent-minded thought on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57065"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57090,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57065\/revisions\/57090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}