Denialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2023

“Trump did nothing wrong.”

It’s a sentiment that’s become a chant, an incantation from Republicans—from their base to on high—that summarily dismisses Trump’s two impeachments and ninety-one criminal charges. And no one says it louder and stronger than Trump who proclaims in the third person that “Trump Won” at every opportunity.

“Trump did nothing wrong” is part of a long line of right-wing apologetics that started with the anti-semitic canard “Hitler was right” shortly after the second World War which evolved into the 4chan meme “Hitler did nothing wrong” by 2011. Proud Boy Tusitala “Tiny” Toese wore a “Pinochet did nothing wrong” t-shirt to a Portland, Oregon, far-right rally in 2018. Proud Boys at the December 12, 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally wore “Enrique Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirts to counter the revelation that Tarrio worked repeatedly as an FBI informant after his fraud arrest in 2012. And Proud Boy Tarrio himself wore a “Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirt after his indictment for seditious conspiracy and his sentencing to 22 years in prison for orchestrating the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 election.

My friend recently did a faux meme that made me laugh; a scruffy man wears a t-shirt captioned “Stalin did nothing wrong” from a sham company called “Tankie—Mind.” There’s been an uptick of declarations that “Stalin did nothing wrong” since 2014 as part of the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie idiocy that began after February, 1956. That’s when Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power in the Politburo with his secret speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and its consequences for the Soviet Union. The changes he instigated in the USSR—his liberalizing domestic reforms and easing of Cold War tensions (the khrushchovskaya ottepel)—were opposed by increasing ranks of anti-revisionists, Mao being the “Stalin was right” OG. There were unrepentant Stalinists, then pro-Stalin Maoists and Hoxhaists, and now execrable Marcyists; all of whom continue to peddle their falsehoods on the Left that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

Clearly, pro-Stalin polemicists have often been orthodox, even vulgar Leninists like Ludo Martens, Domenico Losurdo and Michael Parenti, and Soviet fellow travelers like Paul Robeson, Joseph E. Davies and Grover Furr. But there are a number of far right apologists like conspiratorial Synarchist Annie Lacroix-Riz, neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton and mystic Eurasianist Aleksander Dugin who admired Stalin for fascistic reasons. There was even an occasional all-purpose appeaser of bloody dictators like E. H. Carr who praised not just Stalin and Mao but Hitler as well. That “Stalin did nothing wrong” or “Mao did nothing wrong” is more and more conflated with “Hitler did nothing wrong.” In this time of growing red/brown crossover politics it is captured in the congruity of the tropes used to defend their respective historical dictatorships. The pattern of argumentation used by Stalin apologists versus Hitler apologists is virtually identical.

I’ve concluded this column with two appendices listing historical crimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union respectively. To play the game of “they did nothing wrong” it’s not important whether the crimes were Fascist or Communist, nor what particular offense is singled out so much as the kneejerk defense that’s universally applied to them. The most infamous comeback is denialism, the claim that said crimes never happened. That for instance the Holocaust murder of six million Jews by the Nazis or the Holodomor starvation of five million Ukrainians by the Soviets never happened. There are concocted nuances to denialism; for instance that Hitler actually protected German Jews or that Stalin was desperately dealing with a countrywide famine caused entirely by climate. But the point of denialism is not to counter facts with facts, documents with documents, or experts with experts. Denialists make up facts to spec, construct documents to order, and recruit experts for hire. They outright lie, cherrypick or misrepresent evidence, and engage in false equivalencies, half truths or other disingenuous argumentation (by “moving the goalposts” and other debating tricks).

Closely related to denialism is trutherism, the idea that Hitler’s or Stalin’s crimes were deliberately faked or fabricated. Trutherism raises the claim more directly than denialism that someone or something is behind this falsification as an intentional hoax. And here’s where distinctions between Left and Right arise. For Stalin apologists it’s Nazis, Trotskyists, Khrushchevites, anarchists, Western liberals, the ruling bourgeoisie, the CIA and Zionists. For Hitler apologists it’s primarily the Jews and secondarily Marxists, Western race mixing liberals, the Freemasons, Illuminati, the New World Order, George Soros and our Lizard Overlords. The Stalin and Hitler trutherist apologists insist that their opponents engage in propaganda and subterfuge as part of dangerous conspiracies or as secret cabals bent on world domination. Without contradicting that their crimes never happened or that they were faked these apologists imply that the victims deserved what they got or brought their fate on themselves; for instance the Ukrainians for being class enemy kulaks and the Jews just for being Jews.[1]

An apologist ploy contends that even though Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators and while the crimes of their regimes were real enough they weren’t really in control of their governments or subordinates.  It has been argued that the NKVD acted alone in Stalin’s Soviet Union and that the Gestapo actually ran the Third Reich. To argue that Hitler and Stalin weren’t really responsible is revisionism lite. Regular revisionism contends that neither Stalin’s nor Hitler’s crimes were really all that bad, that the body counts of both regimes are exaggerated, that any evidence for genocide is hyperbole. Furthermore, the impact of each is minimized by comparing one to the other in a fallacy of totalitarian relativism and whataboutism. Stalin killed more people in the Holodomor than Hitler murdered in the Holocaust and visa versa.

An interesting footnote to revisionist Stalin apologetics is that it was championed by the arch anti-revisionist Mao Zedong. Mao argued that Stalin’s crimes were merely “mistakes” because he didn’t really understand contradictions and dialectics very well. Clever how the Great Helmsman managed to simultaneously minimize Stalin’s crimes while demoting his Marxist-Leninist credentials. That Mao’s bloody reign was historically less murderous than Stalin’s and that Mao’s legacy remains potent in China to this day attests to the shrewdness of those who promote “Mao did nothing wrong.”

I’m not talking here about the relative body counts of Nazism versus Stalinism. I’ve detailed that in past columns Piling up the corpses: “What’s Left?”, July 2015, MRR #386 and Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022. I’m also not averse to refuting apologists for genocide with history and fact. I have taken on Holocaust denialism in Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”,  June 2023 for example. But neither Stalin apologists nor Hitler apologists are really interested in facts, truth, history or reality. They are delusional at best or lying sacks of night soil at worst and debating them has only limited value. What’s more, I consider the merits of free speech in the “public square” and “marketplace of ideas” in countering threats to individual and collective freedoms highly overrated. Apologists for murder and genocide are not quite the same as advocates for totalitarianism although they are siblings frequently working hand-in-glove. Yes, information, education and debate are necessary but by no means sufficient. Organizing and taking action are absolutely crucial. That intra-Left and red/brown alliances have made Left/Right political distinctions dubious at best. Formulating plans against apologists is also problematic. For instance, activists have long advocated deplatforming Nazis from social media. Whether deplatforming Stalinists would even be possible for Leftists to conceive of let alone carry out makes the difficulty of acting against Stalin apologists obvious.

The Left considers itself one grand solidarity, one extended family. Yet from 1918 to 1953, Stalin presided over—in one capacity or another—the mass arrest, imprisonment, reeducation, and murder of Mensheviks, anarchists, syndicalists, Social Revolutionaries, renegade Bolsheviks, Left Communists, Trotskyists, Left Oppositionists, Bukharinists, et al. Fellow Leftists all, and part of the Soviet Union’s bloodstained body count under Stalinism. As a libertarian socialist, I’ve often felt like I’m in an abusive relationship with the Left. We must not kowtow to our would-be executioners, the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left. Nor must we accept their epitaph for us that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

FOOTNOTES:
[1] There are also those who are proud of their legacy of mass murder. There are Nazis who contend that all Jews are the spawn of Satan, and Stalinists who blame everything on “counterrevolutionaries” and “social fascist Trotskyites.” For them, genocide was too good for their victims.

APPENDIX ONE: HITLER’S CRIMES:

• Holocaust-6 million Jews killed
• Soviet POWs-3.3 to 5 million killed
• Polish/Slavic ethnic cleansing-3 to 5 million killed
• Le Paradis massacre
• Wormhoudt massacre
• Lidice massacre
• Normandy Massacres
• Ardenne Abbey massacre
• Graignes massacre
• Malmedy massacre
• Wereth massacre
• Wahlhausen massacre
• Gardelegen war crime
• Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
• Massacre of Kalavryta
• Medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners
• Liquidation of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Vilna Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Bialystok Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Slonim, Łachwa, Mizoch, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Częstochowa, Będzin, Kraków, Łódź, Lwów, Lutsk, Marcinkonys, Minsk, Pińsk, Riga, Sosnowiec Ghetto uprisings
• Unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping.
• The intentional destruction of major medieval churches of Novgorod, of monasteries in the Moscow region (e.g., of New Jerusalem Monastery) and of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg.
• Commando Order
• Commissar Order
• Nacht und Nebel decree

APPENDIX TWO: STALIN’S CRIMES:

• Forced collectivization of agriculture
• Forced industrialization
• Dekulakization of Ukraine-800,000 to 5 million killed
• Holodomor/Ukraine famine-3.5 to 10 million killed
• Kazakhstan famine-1.5 to 2.3 million killed
• Political purges
• The Great Purge
• Moscow Show Trials
• Gulag prison camp system
• Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
• Katyn massacre
• Murder/deportation of Crimean Tatars
• Murder/deportation of Chechens
• Murder/deportation of Ingush
• Murder/deportation of Germans
• Murder/deportation of Balkars
• Murder/deportation of Kalmyks
• NKVD Polish Operation
• NKVD German Operation
• NKVD Greek Operation
• NKVD Latvian Operation
• NKVD Korean Operation
• NKVD Chinese Operation
• NKVD Estonian Operation
• NKVD Finnish Operation 

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Apocalypse: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2023

I’ve lived through my share of apocalypses starting with the ur-apocalypse of nuclear war. We did duck-and-cover drills in elementary school and my parents converted a windowless back room into a slapdash fallout shelter. I remember at ten seeing the cover of the National Enquirer at a grocery checkout stand with “psychic” Jeane Dixon predicting that a planetary alignment would herald the end of the Earth. From 1962 on, predictions of the end of the world from fringe Christian religious types happened regularly—George Williams, Herbert Armstrong, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses among them. Combine these religious charlatans with the countercultural/New Age/new religious movement apocalyptarian grandstanding of murderous cultists—Jim Jones, Charles Manson—and you cover the first 20 odd years of my life. Comets have played prominently in apocalyptic dramas—Halley’s, Kohoutek and Hale-Bopp for instance. More recently, there’s the coincidental apocalypse of Y2K and how all the world’s computer systems might have ceased functioning along with the planet when the date changed from 1999 to 2000.

All of these “end of the world” scares occurred in a country that until recently was profoundly optimistic. America proclaimed itself the greatest country in the world, a land of freedom and opportunity bar none. Even my involvements in the counterculture and the New Left were from optimism, a sense of this country’s driving potential and its people’s boundless ingenuity. Yet I also witnessed the collapse of American New Deal liberalism and the rise of the Right, beginning with Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state under the slogan “Morning again in America. Prouder, stronger, better.” (Note: Nixon was America’s last “liberal” president.) What followed was an inexorable slide to the right through the second New Right, right-wing populism, neo-Nazism, the “countercultural” fascism of skinheads and the Abraxas group, ultimately reaching Trump and the third New Right. This was well after George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and George Wallace’s segregationist populism.

Let’s return to Y2K for a moment.

The Year 2000 Problem was an issue of coding potentially interacting with hardware, and of people praying that the double-ought two-digit date switchover would not confound and crash modern technological civilization as the fear at the time claimed. It piggybacked on a more esoteric chronological issue of the twentieth century (the 1900s) transitioning into the twenty-first century (the 2000s) as well the transition from the second to third millennium. Such century/millennium changes have always inspired millennial apocalyptic scares and movements so Y2K was just one more drama among scores of others, including Nostradamus, Jerry Falwell, the Nuwaubian Nation, Sun Myung Moon, and Edgar Casey. Except that for as long as millennial apocalyptic predictions have been around there’s been the common idiocy that they’ve been somehow triggered chronologically.

When we started categorizing things into BC and AD, or BCE and CE, we started dating things from the year 1. There was no year 0. The first century thus ran from year 1 to year 100, with the turn of the century occurring from the year 100 to the year 101. The same holds true for the first millennium, which started in the year 1 and ended in the year 1000, transitioning to the next millennium from the year 1000 to the year 1001. So the twentieth century and second millennium did not end on the last day of 1999 but on the last day of 2000, meaning the actual esoteric apocalypse should have occurred a year after Y2K. But of course, neither the apocalyptic predictions of faux spiritual/religious idiots nor Y2K hackers materialized.

Similar end-of-the-world sensibilities prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Called the fin de siècle (French for the end of the century), this turn of the century was understood to have been the end of one era and the beginning of another. Starting in the 1880’s the old era of Enlightenment liberalism, individualism, democracy and the Rights of Man gave way to a time of anxiety, malaise, distrust, pessimism, and decadence. Civilization was considered in crisis, requiring a total overhaul by a generation imbued with emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism in revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. This “fin de siècle, fin du monde” sentiment gave rise to Fascism which Roger Griffin summarized as “a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence. (“The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology,” 9-10-2008)

Sui generis during the fin de siècle, Fascism has become the terror of subsequent centuries.

There is an historical argument that the American revolution of 1776, far from being a “conservative revolution,” was actually a class war between a radical democratic majority and a conservative “republican” elite. The radical democratic majority won the first round and formed the Articles of Confederation of thirteen independent states that championed decentralization, a bill of rights, paper money, etc. The conservative “republican” elite of large landowners, merchants and slave holders staged a counterrevolution through the Constitution that centralized power in a Federal government and Alexander Hamilton’s financial regime favoring gold and a national bank. Everyone from Charles A. Beard to Robert Ovetz pushes this overly simplistic analysis.

A similar argument holds that FDR’s New Deal, far from being a stopgap attempt to prevent the United States from turning either Fascist or Communist during the Great Depression, was a genuine effort to form a welfare state just shy of European social democracy. I buy neither the “America’s original democratic revolution” nor the “New Deal social democracy” arguments. That one faction of American capitalists triumphed over another does not make American socialism an historical possibility. Let me repeat my above contention that with the steady demise of Democratic Party liberalism and the New Deal welfare state the United States has been moving relentlessly to the Right. What has changed is America’s unerring optimism.

The Penn Schoen Berland Poll of June 8-19, 2015 revealed Americans to be personally optimistic yet nationally pessimistic. If anything, this trend has broadened with a number of recent polls (PEW, Gallup, AP-NORC, etc) indicating that no matter their age, race, economic status or politics, Americans think most things are worse than they actually are. Spencer Sunshine recently analyzed a new wave of neo-Nazism that he argues is “a result of the robust state of the U.S. far right as a whole, which has been able to outlive the Trump presidency, continue to dominate the Republican Party, and keep energized and active.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns have been its most popular issues, and far right activists have taken over school boards, banned books from libraries and disrupted Drag Queen Story Hours. There is no doubt that the far right will only pick up steam as the election approaches, and especially if Trump is convicted. Within that movement there is always a militant edge, partly underground and partly on the street. Neo-Nazis have always positioned themselves as the hardest of the white supremacists, and their stress on hating Jews is in tune with the antisemitic propaganda that has flooded social media. (“A New Wave of Neo-Nazism Has Become Visible in Wake of Jacksonville Shooting” by Spencer Sunshine, Truthout, 9-9-2023)

Whether pessimism contributes to the demise of democracy or the rise of Fascism is debatable. I’ve certainly gotten more pessimistic as I’ve grown older. I don’t have high hopes that the rightward trend in American politics will be halted let alone reversed, nor do I consider a democratic socialism or a libertarian one on the horizon anytime soon. I’ve had a fascination with apocalypse most of my life but even the threat of that has wimped out. I coined the phrase “slow-motion apocalypse” well before the Grotus album of the same name. T.S. Eliot’s last lines of “The Hollow Men” have never felt more relevant: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

 

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Diversity of tactics: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, December 2022

It was November 8, 1960.

My parents and their friends were arrayed around our black-and-white RCA Victor TV in our tiny San Bernardino living room. It was election evening, with John F. Kennedy duking it out against Richard Nixon. My parents were lifelong Democrats but some of the friends present had voted Republican. In a testament to the times, everybody was drinking, smoking, eating European deli foods, joking, laughing, and playfully arguing. It was quite congenial, with no mention of a “second civil war.”

My parents allowed me to stay up way past my bedtime so I wandered around in the background. I carried a glass jar filled with dry soup beans and every time Walter Cronkite announced a victory for Kennedy I shook the jar and said: “Kennedy wins!”

That was my first memory of an American election. I would become a “don’t vote, it only encourages them” anarchist in 1968 and burned my draft card in 1970. When the voting age was lowered to 18 in March of 1971, I ran with a group of New American Movement-inspired youngsters for city council and school board in Ventura, California. That same year I registered with the Peace and Freedom Party. I’ve had a complicated, some might say contradictory relationship with American politics ever since.

Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022

I sometimes view humanity’s sordid past as one long, interminable tale chronicling organized bands of murderous thugs trying to exterminate each other. Much as I admire the sentiment of pacifism and humanism, I’m neither a pacifist nor a humanist. Homicide seems to be part of our species, with genocide often its inevitable conclusion.

I’ve been on the left of the Left for most of my life; from being a left anarchist in my youth to a half-assed libertarian Marxist today. That means embracing a vision of stateless, classless global communism even as I abhor the terrors perpetrated by Leninist movements and regimes. I consider all forms of Fascism an abomination, and I dismiss the red-brown sophistry of Third Positionism as fascist sleight-of-hand. In the wake of the precipitous 1989-91 collapse of the Communist bloc, there’s been an upsurge of tankyism/campism on the Left that sees world conflict in terms of US-led imperialism versus any and all opposition to imperialism. That anti-imperialist “camp” is considered socialist by default, even when it’s in defense of patently capitalist, authoritarian, totalitarian, even outright fascist regimes. Then there’s the steady rehabilitation of overtly Fascist/Nazi politics. Last column I commented that, when I was growing up I only saw Nazis as fictional TV characters. Now I see them unashamedly flaunting their fascism in the Republican Party and in demonstrations I’ve recently organized against.

So why do I identify with the Left, despise the Right, and consistently choose socialism over barbarism every time?

By any other name: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, August 2021

I picked up an archaic paper flyer pinned to an obsolete cork board in the now-defunct Market Street branch of FLAX Art Supplies. The handbill advertised a web designer and mobile app developer—Daniel Goodwyn—who offered to teach virtually any platform or software. I wanted to learn social media to prepare for self-publishing my novel 1% Free, so I called. He was cheap. We arranged to meet at Philz Coffee on 24th Street.

“I only drink Philz coffee,” Daniel said.

We met six or seven times at the end of 2015, beginning of 2016. Daniel was an evangelical Christian favorable to fundamentalism, but he wore his religious beliefs close to the vest. He didn’t proselytize. Instead, he would produce his worn King James Bible from his backpack before starting each lesson. I pulled out my Handbook of Denominations by Mead, Hill and Atwood our third meeting and we were off discussing Christianity between social media tutoring. We talked dispensationalism, cessationism, and biblical inerrancy. He’d attended 24/7 worship and prayer events, and would soon do web design for the messianic Jews for Jesus organization.

Trump’s workers’ party debunked: “What’s Left?” January 2021

It pisses me off.

In 2015 Breitbart ran a story by Lisa De Pasquale entitled “Political Punks” that détourned the famous 1976 Ramones record cover by superimposing the heads of rightwingers Greg Gutfeld, Clint Eastwood, Ann Coulter and Gavin McInnes over the four original band members.

Blasphemy!

The libertarian fantasy: “What’s Left?” January 2020 (MRR #440)

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey — Ephemera, blog post, 3-19-09

The idea of expanding the traditional one-dimensional Left-Right political spectrum into a two-dimensional political map is an old one. Beginning in the 1950s, several double-axis models were proposed: Authoritarian-Democratic/Radical-Conservative (Eysenck), Left-Right/Ideological Rigidity (Greenberg & Jonas), Traditionalist-Secular/Self Expressionist-Survivalist (Inglehart), Liberty-Control/Irrationalism-Rationalism (Pournelle), and Kratos-Akrateia/Archy-Anarchy (Mitchell). The American libertarian David Nolan proposed his two axis diamond-shaped Nolan Chart in 1969 based on economic freedom and political freedom, which everybody knows about but nobody uses outside of libertarian circles. Which brings is to the problem of libertarianism.

Rightward and downward: “What’s Left?” December 2018, MRR #427

My wife, my friends, everybody I know is pissed that I’m not more pissed off about that horrible, horrible man Donald Trump. That I seem pretty sanguine about the hurricane of political, social, and human destruction Trump and the GOP have wrought in such a short period of time or the damage they will continue to inflict for decades to come through, for instance, the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. So, why am I not more freaked out about Trump?

The answer is that, in my lifetime, I’ve seen this nation’s relatively liberal politics go consistently downhill and rightward to the present. I first became aware of American politics writ large when I was 8 years old, when John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960. My parents had been Democrats and Adlai Stevenson supporters, so my frame of reference started from a liberal “Golden Age,” the “one brief shining moment” that was the myth of JFK and Camelot. But unlike many people who believe the fifty-eight years that followed have witnessed ups and downs, good times and bad, pendulum swings left and right, and are therefore upset, desperate, and obsessed with the rise of Trump, I see those years all of a piece, a steady right wing devolution as we go straight to hell in a handbasket.

Switchovers and crossovers: “What’s Left?” July 2018, MRR #422

Every elementary schoolchild knows that, after 1492, two food staples common to the “New World” were introduced into the “Old World” via the trans-Atlantic exchange inaugurated by Columbus. I’m talking about potatoes and corn, or maize. What’s not so well known is that maize was substantially undigestible, that potatoes contained low level toxins, and that native Americans processed both heavily in order to make them palatable. Plant breeding and hybridization techniques since 1492 have resulted in far more edible varieties of both maize and potatoes, at the cost of the diversity of the original plant populations.

Both maize and potatoes are considered species complex (superspecies, species aggregate) which, biologically, means a group of closely related species that are so similar in appearance to the point that the boundaries between them are frequently unclear. In fact, the original maize and potato superspecies each contained hundreds, if not thousands of related individual species that could potentially hybridize. One species of maize or potato might not be able to easily cross breed with another species of maize or potato at the far range of their respective genetic spectrums, but that spectrum did allow for gradual, continuous hybridization along the way.

How Sweet It Isn’t: “What’s Left?” November 2017, MRR #414

It’s called “sweetening.”

It’s a certain type of background music and ambient sound for films and TV shows meant to enhance mood and emotion. It’s also called juicing, but it’s intended to be subtle, behind the scenes, muted. Sweetening is not supposed to be too obvious. For instance, when a live audience is recorded anywhere, a laugh track/canned heat track is frequently blended into the live audience track to amplify its effect, whether of laughter, clapping, booing, whatever.

The term has its origin in old-time radio, when sound effects like horses galloping, doors opening and closing, characters walking, gunshots, etc. were used to paint visual detail in a non-visual medium. Again, it’s not all dramatic sound effects. In films and TV shows, it’s not the sound of violent explosions or roaring monsters. The sweetening is in the sense of foreboding portended in the background music, or in the subsonic infrasound used to generate apprehension in the audience prior to some climactic scene. So while “sweetening” comes off good and positive, it might as well be called “shadowing” or “darkening,” depending on what effect the sound is intended to enhance.

As for political sweetening, two recent examples come to mind. The Tea Party ended up sweetening the Republican Party from the right, as did Bernie Sander’s “political revolution” the Democratic Party from the left. Both movements started as popular revolts against their respective party establishments and their mainstream politics, both helped rewrite their respective party platforms, and both moved the politics of those parties respectively to the right and left. Both threatened to break away to form independent third party efforts, both were blamed for the potential demise of their respective political parties, but both ultimately succumbed to political opportunism, cooptation, and marginalization. Or at least the Tea Party succumbed and wound up faking a hard-times protest movement, spawning affiliated get-rich-quick cottage industries, and successfully rebranding the GOP. Bernie’s “political revolution” has blended nicely into the much broader anti-Trump protest movement, so it remains vibrant and very much in the streets. Ideally, this popular resistance needs to avoid opportunism, cooptation, and marginalization, but that’s very difficult to do if the Tea Party is any indication.

What doesn’t count as political sweetening was Occupy Wall Street. OWS doesn’t count for much at all now, despite initially being praised by authors, artists, celebrities, politicians, and pundits as the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’ve never hidden my disdain for OWS. It may have personally changed lives like the bad brown acid circulating at a mediocre rock concert, but it was just a flash in the pan that changed little politically. So unless the inane consensus hand signals and annoying human microphone are included, no innovation of any consequence arose from OWS. That also covers the communizing “occupy everything, demand nothing” campus activism that emerged among protesting California students in 2011.

OWS ran with the franchise activism common nowadays, where an indistinct idea was widely disseminated and then taken up by local activists who made it their own through locally flavored community actions. The movement’s core idea, embodied in its name, was so nebulous in fact that it produced both the anarcho/ultraleft, black bloc, streetfighting Occupy Oakland, California, and the virulently antisemitic, conspiracy-theorist, ultraright Occupy Tallinn, Estonia, with every political combination in between. So while the majority of OWS-affiliated actions tended leftwing, liberal, and even anarchist, there was considerable involvement by rightwing, conservative, and even fascist elements. In this way, OWS displayed troubling Left/Right crossover politics similar to the anti-globalization movement which preceded it. This was not by chance but by design, given the decentralized, all-are-welcome nature of the movement’s organizing message. This was complemented by the ambiguous categories employed by OWS, most prominent being “the 99%” versus “the 1%.” This promoted an uncritical populism that studiously avoided any class-based analysis, but it denied any identity-based analysis as well, instead encouraging an amorphous, dumbed-down, Hardt/Negri-style notion of “the multitude.”

When finance capital comes to the fore, capitalism itself is in decline. Capitalism has abandoned industrial production for financial circulation, meaning that its profit-making comes not from surplus value transformed into capital but from mere exchange. For OWS then to focus its vague critique of capitalism on Wall Street and finance capital was to target a decaying economic system as if it were still robust, misinterpreting capitalism’s retreat as a faux advance. To see the enemy as attacking rather than as withdrawing was a delusion that badly skewed the tactics and strategy required to take on and defeat that enemy. If nothing else, this falsely portrayed finance capital as stronger and more powerful than it actually is, reinforcing the rightwing trope that “international bankers” rule the world. Excuse me, “banksters.” From this, it’s a half-step to the “international Jewish conspiracy for world domination” that is the ultra-right’s favorite meme.

Spencer Sunshine has written a detailed survey called “20 On The Right In Occupy” through the Political Research Associates think tank which provides thumbnail summaries of anti-Federal Reserve, antisemitic, white nationalist, fascist, and neo-Nazi individuals and groups involved in OWS. These strange right and left bedfellows in OWS are not so odd once we realize that antisemitism is also on the rise on the Left. Case in point, the post-Situ Adbusters Magazine from which the original OWS call came. From Kalle Lasn’s Adbuster article discussing fifty influential neoconservatives under the title “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” to Adbuster tweets that took up the alt.right’s outing of twitter users as Jewish by surrounding their names with parentheses, Left/Right crossover politics abound. Not that Adbuster’s leftist politics aren’t sketchy in so many other ways, what with their support of Israeli antisemite Gilad Atzmon and Italian conspiracy theorist Beppe Grillo. They do act as a political transition to the hard Left’s anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist ideologies, which too easily and too often become outright Left antisemitism.

Back to my point earlier, there are people who are not at all happy that Bernie’s “political revolution” has blended nicely into the much broader anti-Trump protest movement. These folks are the mainstream Democratic Party establishment liberals who blame Sanders and his “BernieBros” for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir had a wonderfully sarcastic takedown of their status quo recalcitrance awhile back:

But another running theme in Democratic Party apologetics informs all that, which is the ingrained desire to blame the left-wing resistance for anything that goes wrong — and to insist that it isn’t actually the left at all but sort of, kind of, the right. Hence Wolcott’s argument that the DudeBros and ‘purity progressives’ of the ‘alt-left’ are in some undisclosed manner closely related to the rebranded white supremacists of the alt-right. Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t like either of them.

To return to our central premise: The DudeBros ruined everything. Their workings are malicious, and marvelous. They are simultaneously clueless, puritanical and all-powerful. In between Ultimate Frisbee tournaments and Vampire Weekend marathons, they elected Donald Trump, wiped out the Democratic Party between the coasts, rioted against Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley and/or defected to the alt-right en masse. They develop apps whose functions remain mysterious, and that most of us don’t know how to use. Unforgivably, they made the Phish reunion possible, and now it will never stop.

Hence, conflating “terrorist” James Hodgkinson with “crazy” Jeremy Christian, or antifa “alt-left” with fascist alt-right.

The Democratic Party establishment wants the anti-Trump resistance to be a leftwing Tea Party, the energy, individuals, and organizations of which the party can exploit to win future elections, while ultimately domesticating, coopting, and marginalizing that resistance. They want the Left’s resistance to be the Democratic Party’s sweetening. This is exactly what we don’t want to happen if we want the anti-Trump resistance not to suffer the same fate as the Tea Party.

Of course, it’s much more complicated than “Bernie or Bust” versus the Democratic Party. Politics to the left of the Democratic Party also includes progressives, democratic socialists and social democrats, Leninists, and the black bloc anarcho/ultraleft. But it’s never been an equal playing field with the Democratic Party vis-à-vis the rest of the American Left. The Democrats are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Even decimated, at their lowest point in fifty years, the Democrats continue to wield vast power and influence. Which is why we need to prevent the vilification of the black bloc or the BernieBros or Jill Stein’s Greens or anyone else as a convenient scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s mistakes and woes. I’m not so naïve as to think what we need is a united or popular front; some mystical kumbaya circle jerk of leftist unity. But we don’t need the Democratic Party and its liberals running the show either.