September 24, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Professor Eugene Genovese’s Query to the
Left: “What did you know, and when did you know it?” Should be Asked Again; Confederaphobia Volume is Published
==============================================
Friends,
For
over twenty years I was associated with the old Southern Partisan magazine, writing for it beginning in 1983 and
actually serving as a contributing editor/advisor for over a decade. The Partisan, based in Columbia, South
Carolina, featured some truly remarkable writing by some truly remarkable
writers. The late Russell Kirk, the actual founder of the old American
Conservative Movement back in the 1950s; Andrew Lytle, the famous and prolific author
and last of the noted Southern Regionalist writers; Reid Buckley, the novelist
brother of William F. Buckley; Mel Bradford, the brilliant defender of the
South and acute observer of constitutional history; and Eugene Genovese,
perhaps the finest historian of the South in recent years—these and many others
published their labors in the SP. It
was, without doubt, a very significant voice for not only what is called
“Southern Conservatism,” but for a tradition of American constitutionalism and
history, explained and written about on the highest level.
The
Southern Partisan finally came to an
end about ten years ago. Like other such journals, internal disagreements and
turmoil, and competition from the electronic media, were too much for it. Yet,
during its more than two decades of scholarly but always accessible publishing,
its collective output represented a legacy and inheritance of thought and
culture that remain unsurpassed.
Other
than a couple of early reviews, my first major assignment was a big interview I
conducted with the late historian Eugene Genovese in 1985. “Gene” Genovese, the
author of more than a dozen important books and hundreds of articles, was so
significant in the study of Southern and American history and his views so
non-conformist (by “modern” standards)—and so opposed to the current imposed
multiculturalism that reigns supreme in most college faculties—that he was even
attacked in an editorial in the Raleigh, NC, News & Observer. He had dared criticize the cultural Marxist
(pro-Stalinist) historian, the iconic Eric Foner, in print. He had zeroed in on
Foner’s defense—and the defense by other historians like him—of the barbarities
and persecution inflicted by Communism on millions of peoples around the world.
You
see, during his early professional life, Gene, like many other academics, had
been a militating Communist and a member of the Communist Party. But he eventually
broke with them and found his way back to the Christianity of his youth. In his famous and strikingly disruptive essay,
“The Question,” he demanded of Foner and others who not only did not break, but doubled down in defense
of Communism: “What did you know, and when did you know it?” For Gene had
learned of, knew of, and had seen what Communism had wrought—he knew of the
more than 100 million dead and piled up bodies, the wrecked societies, the
uprooted traditions, the bitter illusions and dashed hopes, the Gulags and
concentration camps, the subversion and destruction of a myriad of institutions
not just behind the Iron Curtain, but in Europe and America. Gene had witnessed
the false god that failed and the gruesome harvest that followed in its wake.
And Foner and the other philo-Communists knew too… but turned resolutely away
from the light of truth, and, instead, sought solace in the lies of Marxist Revolution—a
revolution against both God AND man.
And
as Soviet Communism disintegrated in Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall came
down with the defenestration of the doddering old oligarchs of Red Square, Gene
also viewed the rapid growth of Marxism’s (or, better stated, Leon Trotsky’s) infectious
modern bastard child, cultural Marxism, and the ravages it was inflicting on
the supposedly “victorious” West. He witnessed first-hand the increasing
devastation of our universities and system of education; the ideological rot
festering in Hollywood and in our entertainment industry; and, most
egregiously, the seemingly unstoppable decay of our culture. As he wrote to me a
few years before his death in 2012: “Soviet Communism died a miserable death in Russia and Eastern
Europe, revealed there as a brutal failure, but its bastard step-son survives
and thrives here in the United States. How ironic to see this!”
Through
his very close friendship with the late Professor Mel Bradford, Genovese, who
was fascinated by the South, also came to love it profoundly. He was not afraid
to appear in pages of the Southern
Partisan or to be associated with its writers, always attempting to set the
historical record straight. In many ways, his legacy has been carried forward
by historians and writers like Clyde Wilson, Marshall De Rosa, Brion
McClanahan, Paul C. Graham, and James Kibler, who continue to battle against the
giant and imposing ideological windmills of our dominant culture and the new
take-no-prisoners totalitarianism of Leftist academia.
The
question I would add to Gene’s set of magnificent queries is this: When will
our intellectually bankrupt politicians and propagandists, when will a Governor
Roy Cooper or a former Governor Nikki Haley, or a Senator Tim Kaine, of this
world understand what a brilliant once-diehard Communist finally saw and
understood? Or is their intellectual blindness to the fatal corruption and
contagion so strong that that they will die, equally miserably, in a pit of putrid moral vomit?
Today,
then, I reproduce portions of Gene’s famous and provocative essay, “The
Question,” which first appeared in the leftist journal, Dissent, back in 1994, addressed to his erstwhile “comrades” on the
Left. Much of his brilliant written text
and many of his questions chillingly apply with burning urgency to the
“all-consuming fire” of the militant and seemingly successful cultural Marxism
of 2017, a Marxism which bids fair to devastate entirely what is left of our
historic Western Christian culture—a culture, indeed, that Gene Genovese came
back to love and treasure after years in a secularized Progressivist wasteland.
And,
secondly, I append information on a newly-published and highly recommended book
by our friend, Paul C. Graham. Its title is: Confederaphobia: An American Epidemic, and it explores in
revelatory detail what seems to be the last “acceptable prejudice and hatred”
that Americans are permitted, even encouraged, to have: against the South, and
especially against the “burden” of Southern history. Paul Graham is a capable scholar and a fine
writer. More details about his book, and how to order it are included. I warmly
recommend it!
===================================================================
From “The
Question,” Dissent, Summer, 1994:
Am
I crazy to think that if we do not understand why and how we [Marxists]did what
we did, we shall certainly end by doing it again—and again? Crazy I may be, but
I try not to be a fool. And only a fool
would trust those who are now playing possum with even a modicum of political
power.
What did we
know, and when did we know it? We knew everything essential and knew it from the beginning. This short
answer will doubtless be hotly contested by the substantial number of
leftwingers now ensconced in the academic establishment. I can hear them
now: "Where does Genovese get off speaking for us? Yes, he himself always
knew. He never even had the decency to pretend not to know. He thereby proved
himself the cad we have always known him to be. But we ourselves never even
imagined that we were hearing anything more than the usual stories circulated
by imperialists and reactionaries. Honest." I am prepared to accept those
pleas of innocence, and I hope that everyone else exercises Christian charity
and accepts them too. But I do worry about where pleas of innocence will land
those who offer them.
It occurs to
me that it would be much safer to admit complicity. For
Americans who honor the spirit and content of the Constitution would feel
compelled to defend our academic freedom, including our right to have borne
with equanimity the blood purges and mass executions. If, however, our
innocents insist upon pleading ignorance rather than a complicity permitted by
the Constitution, they ruin themselves. Especially the historians among them. For they thereby admit to a willful refusal
to examine the evidence that had been piled high from the beginning. Thus they confess to professional
incompetence. I counsel against such a plea, for it would constitute
grounds for revocation of tenure. Safer to plead nolo contendere. When someone gets around to asking me The Question
I shall answer frankly, explaining as best I can my reasons for having gone
along. But I shall insist upon doing so in a forum in which "democratic socialists," "radical
democrats," and liberals are called upon to answer too.
For
it is our collective dirty linen that has to be washed. And besides, our
right-wing adversaries already know the answer, even if they have no few hard
questions to answer themselves.
For
the moment I shall settle for a few topic sentences. The horrors did not arise from perversions of radical ideology but
from the ideology itself. We were led into complicity with mass murder
and the desecration of our professed ideals not by Stalinist or other
corruptions of high ideals, much less by unfortunate twists in some presumably
objective course of historical development, but by a deep flaw in our very
understanding of human nature—its frailty and its possibilities—and by our
inability to replace the moral and ethical baseline long provided by the
religion we have dismissed with indifference, not to say contempt[….]
Our
whole project of "human liberation" has rested on a series of
gigantic illusions. The catastrophic consequences of our failure during this
century—not merely the body count but the monotonous recurrence of despotism
and wanton cruelty—cannot be dismissed as aberrations. Slimmed down to a
technologically appropriate scale, they have followed in the wake of victories
by radical egalitarian movements throughout history. We have yet to answer our
right-wing critics' claims, which are regrettably well documented, that
throughout history, from ancient times to the peasant wars of the sixteenth
century to the Reign of Terror and beyond, social
movements that have espoused radical egalitarianism and participatory democracy
have begun with mass murder and ended in despotism.
[…]The allegedly high ideals we placed at the
center of our ideology and politics are precisely what need to be reexamined,
but they can no longer even be made a subject for discussion in the mass media
and our universities, to say nothing of the left itself. They are givens: an
unattainable equality of condition; a radical democracy that has always ended
in the tyranny it is supposed to overcome; a celebration of human goodness or
malleability, accompanied by the daily announcement of newly discovered "inalienable
rights" to personal self-expression; destruction of all hierarchy and
elites, as if ideological repudiation has ever prevented or ever could prevent
the formation and reformation of hierarchies and elites; condemnation of
"illegitimate" authority in the absence of any notion of what might
constitute legitimate authority; and, at the root of all, a thorough
secularization of society, bolstered by the monstrous lie that the
constitutional separation of church and state was meant to separate religion from
society.
And
we have yet to reassess the anti-Americanism—the self-hatred implicit in the
attitude we have generally affected toward our country—that has led us into
countless stupidities and worse. Let us give ourselves some credit: through it
all we have preserved a rich sense of humor. The destruction of hierarchies,
elites, and authority is to be effected through the concentration of power in a
Leviathan state miraculously free of all such reactionary encumbrances.
No
wonder liberals are ready to absolve us from our sins without first hearing our
confession. No wonder we are witnessing
the virtual fusion of left-liberalism and revolutionary radicalism in the wake
of the collapse of the socialist countries. For most left-wing liberals share
with radicals much the same ideology of personal liberation.
Radicals and
conservatives alike have always charged liberals with bad faith in refusing to
carry out the logic of their own egalitarian and radical-democratic premises.
They have been right about the refusal but not necessarily about the bad faith.
There are more charitable explanations, including a healthy gut revulsion by
humane liberals against the substitution of logical consistency for common
decency and common sense.
I have been piling
up assertions and may be wrong on all counts. But am I wrong in believing that unless the left reopens these
fundamental questions it will have no future and deserve none? The deepest
trouble with "political correctness" arises from its thinly disguised
invitation to an endless repetition of crimes, atrocities, and, worst of all,
failures. Yes, worst of all the failures. For the deepening horror that Black
America faces, to speak of no other impending horror, cannot be arrested by a
morally bankrupt movement with an appalling record of political and economic
failure, no matter how many pyrrhic victories it piles up on deranged and
degraded college campuses….
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