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 The
Lying Left, Then and Now
The playbook never seems to change...
[Chuck DeVore] 12/27/05
Why is it that liberals, progressives, leftists, humanists and
the like seeking a brave new world for the rest of us often resort
to lying or cheating to turn their vision into reality?
Upton Sinclair
was the socialist author of The Jungle in 1906. He meant his
book
as an attack on what he and other socialists
termed “wage-slavery” but the book’s main claim
to fame was as an exposé of unsanitary practices in the
meat processing industry. It was Sinclair’s sort of writing
that President Theodore Roosevelt termed as “muckraking.”
Contributors
Chuck DeVore- Contributor
Assemblyman Chuck
DeVore represents 450,000 residents of Orange County
California’s
70th Assembly District.. He served as a Reagan White House
appointee in the Pentagon from 1986 to 1988 and was Senior
Assistant to Cong. Chris Cox. He is a lieutenant colonel in the Army
National Guard. Chuck’s novel, CHINA
ATTACKS, sells internationally and has been translated
into Chinese for sales in Taiwan. [go to DeVore index] |
Sinclair
also wrote The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction book that
attacked organized
religion, as well as almost 90 other
books, novels, pamphlets and tracts. Literary critic Alfred Kazin,
himself a left-winger, described Sinclair as having “…a
talent for facts, a really prodigious capacity for social research.”
Of interest
to Californians was that Sinclair had run for Governor of California
as a Socialist
in 1926. He ran again as a radical
Democrat in 1934 but lost badly in a highly contentious general
election. He didn’t even earn the endorsement of President
Franklin Roosevelt as the Democrat Party and the Socialist Party
were distinct, but not quite yet without a difference as is the
case today.
Upton Sinclair
was, in many ways, the prototype for many leftist social activists
to follow. Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) in
all of his left-wing, hyper-commercial, self-promoting excess
could be considered the ultimate evolutionary output of the line
that began with Upton Sinclair (in Sinclair’s defense,
he, at least, eventually disavowed Stalin).
Michael Moore
is now widely known to consider facts as irrelevant to the
case that
needs to be made when attacking anything American
and good. Thankfully, lies are more easily combated in today’s
world of Internet communications than they were 50 or 100 years
ago, which brings us back to Upton Sinclair.
Courtesy
of a December 24 Los Angeles Times piece by Jean O. Pasco entitled, “Sinclair
Letter Turns Out to Be Another Exposé” we see a more ancient example of the sort
of ends-justify-the-means rationalization we’ve come to
expect from the left.
In the piece, Pasco reveals a shocker: Sinclair withheld the
truth about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two leftists
who murdered two men while stealing money to finance their revolutionary
activities.
The historical importance of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and
its aftermath to the American left and their war on American
institutions cannot be overstated.
Prominent
left-wing attorney Fred Moore defended Sacco and Vanzetti during
the
widely covered 1921 trial. Moore politicized the trial,
claiming that his clients’ leftist political convictions
were the real reason for their arrest amidst the beginning of
the Red Scare era. Despite this, the trail ended in a conviction
for the pair.
Later, Fred Moore lost his enthusiasm after learning that his
clients were truly guilty. The Italian murderers fired him.
Still, the
American left continued to agitate over the lack of justice
for Sacco
and Vanzetti. Enter Stalin’s secret
propagandist, Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg took up
the cause in 1925 and raised over half a million dollars in the
U.S. alone for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. Curiously,
the committee only saw $6,000 as the remainder of the money went
to bolster Soviet Communism by attacking American exceptionalism.
To weaken
America in its fight against communism, Münzenberg
knew he had to destroy one of America’s strongest weapons,
the worldwide view of America as the land of opportunity. Münzenberg’s
use of the Sacco-Vanzetti legal controversy was cast as an example
of American right-wing imperialist persecution of the working
class and it, and other cases like it, led to the disaffection
of many American intellectuals. This, in turn, allowed the recruitment
of Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss and others. Interestingly,
Münzenberg underling Otto Katz was able, especially after
the start of the Great Depression, to co-opt Hollywood resources
for Stalin too.
By the time
Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed in 1927 – a
long six years by the standards of the day – the uproar
over the perceived political nature of their conviction would
lead 25,000 people to march in protest in Boston with additional
demonstrations in the U.S., Europe and Latin America.
The conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was condemned
by the ACLU. In 1977 then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis
(the Democrat nominee for President in 1988) issued a proclamation
asserting that Vanzetti and Sacco had been treated unjustly.
The aftermath of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair made it difficult
to oppose Communist activity in America as liberals, backed by
the ACLU, used the case as an example of American tyranny over
the politically non-conforming and the poor. Thus, anyone registering
genuine concern over treasonous left-wing activity would himself
be attacked by the ACLU and its allies.
Known by
historically-minded conservatives as “anti-anticommunism,” this
crusading mindset by the left in America made the Cold War all
the more dangerous by disarming a large segment of the American
population to the notion that the Soviet Union and communism
was a deadly enemy to be resisted. Instead, the theory of “moral
equivalency” took hold, largely due to the efforts of people
such as Upton Sinclair whose influential writings portrayed the
United States as a bad nation with no standing to criticize the
U.S.S.R., a socialist workers’ paradise.
Pasco’s piece lays bare Sinclair’s true role in
promoting left-wing myths in America through his lying about
Sacco and Vanzetti. In a recently uncovered 1929 letter from
Sinclair to his attorney he wrote that Sacco and Vanzetti attorney
Fred Moore “…told me that the men were guilty, and
he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis
for them.” Sinclair continued, “I faced the most
difficult ethical problem of my life at that point. I had come
to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the
truth about the case.”
A later Sinclair
letter comes into its full meaning in light of the newly discovered
correspondence, “My wife is absolutely
certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor
to the movement and may not live to finish the book,” Sinclair
wrote to a friend who worked at the Socialist Daily Worker newspaper.
The
book Sinclair was referring to was Boston, his
fictional attack on the American system for how it treated
Sacco and Vanzetti.
As the son
of one of the group of Boston revolutionaries told Pasco, “They
all lied. They did it for the cause.”
They all lied for the Cause.
Remember that the next time you see the heirs to this shameful
legacy with their banners and bumper stickers trying to break
our resolve in the face of evil. Their forefathers did their
best to weaken America. They succeeded to a certain extent and
we are still struggling with their shameful legacy. But, thankfully,
the American ideal is strong and resilient and most Americans
see these self-loathing fools for what they are: liars for an
unworthy cause. -one-
copyright
2005 Chuck DeVore
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