September 1994 - Discover the Networks

Man-Boy Love
I
n the climactic scene of the movie 2001:
A Space Odyssey, the astronaut-hero dis-assembles the computer that has been
trying to kill him. At first the computer
makes logical arguments against its
disassembly, but then, as more circuit boards
are removed, it reverts to the most basic sort
of babbling. It finally ends up singing "A
Bicycle Built for Two."
I got that same feeling when I interviewed a
representative for the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force on the subject of NAMBLA, the North
American Man-Boy Love Association. At first
the woman, who identified herself as Robin
Kane, was quite friendly.
Representatives of gay groups seem to
assume that all journalists are sympathetic. It
was only when I went from the general
subject of age-of-consent laws to me specific
subject of NAMBLA that Ms. Kane began to
suspect I might be deviating from that
canon of modern journalism that states that
gays cannot err when speaking on matters of
faith and morals. Her voice took on a chill.
"We don't support the organizational goals of
NAMBLA," she said. "We don't deal with age-ofconsent laws, period." Then, like the dying
computer, Ms. Kane began to revert to her basic
programming: "We believe that people should not be
denied their civil rights because of the sexual
orientation with which they are born."
"NAMBLA makes that exact same argument," I
pointed out helpfully. "They say pedophiles are born with
their sexual orientation. Why should they be deprived of
their civil rights?"
"I think I'm going to get off the phone now," said
Ms. Kane.
This is what I dislike most about militant gays.
They pose as the wildest, most avant-garde intellectuals
you've ever seen, but the minute you ask them a tough
question they show all the flexibility of a Muslim
fundamentalist. Give me a nice, honest pederast any clay.
They'll speak on any subject, entertain any question, and
give you a well-reasoned, but probably totally loony,
answer.
My
own particular
pederast is a guy named Leland Stevenson. Leland can be
seen starring in Chicken Hawk, a low-budget
documentary directed by Israeli film student Ari Sideman.
The film follows the activities of NAMBLA members at
the big gay march on Washington, D.C.. One of the key
subplots involves the filmmaker accompanying Leland
Stevenson back to the town in West Virginia where he had
been living and being harassed by townsfolk opposed to his
outspoken advocacy of pederasty. In one of the key
moments of the film, Stevenson talked about having sex
with a boy in his early teens: "He positioned himself in such
a way that nature would take its course and he would
experience within himself the body of his friend. This
allegedly was sufficiently shown by the fact that no lubricant
was desired or required. He experienced what he wanted
to experience." Stevenson and other pederasts
thought they were making a positive pitch for the
movement in taking Chicken Hawk mainstream,
but it is fair to say that most people who saw the
film felt it was repulsive rather than inspiring.
I found Leland by leaving a message on
the voice mail of the North American Man-Boy
Love Association listed in Manhattan. The
organization is the most exotic flowering of the
odd fauna that have sprung up as a result of the
gay rights movement. Begun in 1978 with 50
members, it now has over 1,500, a substantial
proportion of whom are in prison. NAMBLA's
main activity is the publishing a newsletter
(given free of charge to prisoners) and taking
part in gay and lesbian marches. It also
publishes GAYME, a kiddie porn fringe
publication which evades the law by
getting models who look like children,
although they are actually legally of age.
In response, Leland called me back.
He was coming to Philadelphia soon, and
since I live in a suburb, we agreed to meet in
the city.
I confess I felt a bit
queasy
about the interview. When I mentioned to
friends that I was going to interview a
pedophile, they said things like, "Eeeew,
gross!" But Leland's an easy guy to get along with.
Quite refined actually. If you met him outside
the NAMBLA context, you'd think of him as an
affable aging preppy who acts perhaps a bit too
boyish for his 50-plus years. But that's about it. My
original plan was to interview him in the restaurant
where we met for lunch, but I quickly abandoned that idea.
The waitress and hostess had taken a liking to him, and I
didn't want to have them overhear a discussion on the
proper legal status of sodomy with kindergartners. So we
walked to nearby Rittenhouse Square. I turned on my
tape recorder and let him go on for an hour or so about the
warm and genuine ties that boy-lovers have for their
subjects: "the spiritual aspect of man-boy love...all these
pieces are connected, everything has one source...the nature
of the game would be for each of us to discover each other' s
authenticity...an infinite variety of intimate celebration..."
Somewhere along the way he deduced that I'm Please
turn to page 10
The Most Controversial Professor in America
STEVEN GOLDBERG, ICONOCLAST
BY WILLIAM HELMREICH
Two weeks earlier, Steven
Goldberg had stopped by the
Barnes and Noble bookstore in
New York and had seen a number of
copies of the new edition of his
book Why Men Rule on the shelves.
Now he had dropped in again and
found an empty space where the
copies had been. Another author
would have had the warm feeling
brought on by thoughts of a future
royalty check. Goldberg, however,
has had 25 years of experience that
told him what he would hear when
he asked how many copies of his
book had been sold.
"None," said the Barnes and
Noble manager, perplexed at the disappearance of Why Men Rule (which was
published originally as The Inevitability of
Patriarchy.) Goldberg, who is chairman
of the sociology department at City
College, CUNY (formerly, CCNY), wasn't
perplexed, surprised, or even particularly
annoyed. He knew that copies of his book
had been dispersed around the store to
sections such as Tasmanian ornithology,
reshelved with jackets out of sight, and
otherwise hidden. For nearly a decade his
work was listed in The Guinness Book of
World Records as "the most rejected
book ultimately published" (sixty-nine
rejections before acceptance), and it is fair
to say that today, with the growing power
of radical feminism, the book, which talks
in antiseptic and scholarly terms about
issues of male dominance, is the most
hated sociological work in America. Why
Men Rule has also been called "the most
important work on sex differences in
decades" by Murray Rothbard, a "classic"
by some of America's and England's
leading social theorists, and "persuasive
and accurate" by Margaret Mead (an
especially important endorsement, given
Mead's
own
autobiography).This
response has, of course, only energized
the efforts of those who dislike what
they think Goldberg says to do their best to
make sure nobody reads his work.
A heavyset man with a quick smile who
has been called a "typical New Yorker,"
perhaps because his words come so rapidly
in an attempt to keep up with his thoughts,
Goldberg appears to count himself rich
by the number of enemies he has and is
willing to take on all comers in debate.
Filled with amused stories of the obloquy
directed at him, he tells of a major figure in
a leading sociological association who
continually harassed an editor who was
planning to devote an edition of her
journal to Goldberg's work. (To the
editor's credit, she refused to be
intimidated.) He has frequently had to
lecture over the shouts of audience
members trying to drown him out, and he
has had an astonishing number of accepted
articles ultimately "unaccepted" by
embarrassed editors who claim, obviously
Please turn to page 12
SEPTEMBER 1994
PAGE
C
Considering the Gay Conservative
Kudos for your effort, your periodical, and your neverending railing against the stultifying and de-individualizing
cancer of political correctness and the radicalization of the
universities.
My comment here is on the cover story in your
May/June issue, "The Conscience of a Gay Conservative."
I am sympathetic to virtually everything the author says in
the monograph, though I would hope that such an obviously
introspective and thinking person would be less eager to
embrace the simplistic "it's my nature, period" cause for
his sexuality. I would like to see more analysis on the
subject of how euthenics and eugenics mix together to
make a person gay; it seems that there is a continuum
distribution of sexual orientations, with some persons
more inclined, others less so, and psychological factors
that tip the balance. If it is all "nature," how can men be
married, father children, then abandon the straight life—or
abandon homosexuality to return to a traditional family, as
Whittaker Chambers did?
My reasons for intellectually being very tolerant are: 1) classical libertarianism: It is no one else's
business what you do and with whom, provided that
he or she is of age and consents, and this should be where
the law stands. 2) Let everyone who is without sin cast
the first stone; I have no right to condemn someone
based on what dust God may see in his eye compared to the
log in my own.
Where I have trouble is in our friend's view
of what "reforms" the Church. He appears to believe
that, as is the case with other temporal institutions, all
one must do is issue some type of authoritative pronouncement or by-law, and the Christian Church will
reform itself by eliminating the sexually restrictive
rules by which it has lived for 2,000 years. The issue is
where the rules came from. The author seems to equate
singing in the choir, setting up a dinner, helping to
babysit, reading the liturgy, and helping with spring cleaning to the fundamental identification of right and
wrong in accordance with specific instructions spelled
out in the Bible. I disagree with the fundamental premise
that we mortals have license to pass rules that are more
liberalized about our behaviors. There is an awful lot that
isn't "fair," and one of liberalism's most egregious errors
is to try to fix them. If you buy the religion, you buy the
whole rulebook, or you are kidding yourself that you are
really a believer.
Duane Oyen Maple
Grove, MN
I've read "The Conscience of a Gay Conservative" three
times and I still can't decide the central focus of the
author's anger. Is this a case of bad editing on your part; a
case of an aging mind on my part; or a case of hysteria on
his part?
He seems to be embarrassed by those kooks who
parade half-naked through the streets camping it up and
"letting it all hang out." Okay, so am I, but as a conservative
I'll give them the right to do so as long as they are within
the law.
He seems to feel the "liberals" have restrained us
in many, many ways. Okay, but as a conservative I want the
government out of my wallet and out of my bedroom. It
wasn' t a liberal group that ruled against the Georgia couple
in their "private" bedroom.
He seems to feel that the gay left is intolerant and
demanding. Okay, but as a conservative I don't want my
life dictated by the Christian right any more than by the gay
left. Both impinge upon my freedom.
I left this issue of Heterodoxy feeling that you as
editor and I as reader have been flimflammed. I don't think
the author of the article is gay. I don't think Joseph ever
existed. And I doubt that the author is conservative.
June Morgan
Editors
Peter Collier
David Horowitz
O
M
M
U
N
Q U E S
I read with interest your lead article, "The Conscience of a
Gay Conservative." Notwithstanding the wild mischaracterizations of "liberals" and "leftists" that are typical of
conservative disingenuity, the author quite effectively puts
the lie to claims that homosexuality is by itself a condition
of disrepute that warrants condemnation and punitive
statutory sanction.
My broader disagreements with the anonymous writer aside, as a genuine liberal I am delighted
with the existence of Log Cabin Republicans, just as I am
with the presence of black conservatives. These people
represent a manifestation of Martin Luther King's dream:
that they be judged by their philosophical character and not
by the color of their skin or their sexual identity. I may
argue strenuously with them about many things, but I do
not hold irrelevant factors against them.
I am obliged, however, to point out that it is political conservatives who remain at odds with your writer's
goal of equality under the law. You can bash ACT-Up all
you want, but the truth is that Republicans across the
spectrum and conservative Dixiecrats like Sam Nunn are
the ones who have persevered in maintaining antagonism
against homosexuals. If Bob Dole is such a proud supporter
of this unidentified individual, why is he a foremost advocate
of statutory discrimination against homosexual persons? It
is not liberals who need to be convinced that homosexuality
is irrelevant to a person's character.
If Republicans adopted the goal of dealing
with homosexual persons, on the terms espoused by your
writer, ACT-UP would have no further reason to exist.
More to the point, ACT-UP has no legislative authority.
Bob Dole does. If Republicans represent the ideological
view your author prefers, why don't his so-called friends
quit promoting unwarranted prejudicial practice?
Brian Zick Los
Angeles, CA
Feminist Furor
I had no sooner finished reading Christina Hoff Sommers'
Who Stole Feminism when I received my May/June issue
of Heterodoxy containing Barbara Rhoades Ellis' fine
review of Sommers' research on those two educational
charlatans, Myra and David Sadker. Certainly Sommers
(and Ellis) have performed a valuable service in exposing
and deconstructing the shoddy and ideologically driven
"scholarship" in which many in the gender feminist crowd
have been engaged.
Revealingly, Sommers exposes the great difficulty
she experienced in trying to track down the Sadkers' data
upon which the so-called Wellesley Report bases its claim
that girls' self-esteem is being undermined by inequitable
treatment in the classroom. In fact, Sommers was unable to
find any peer-reviewed, scholarly articles by the Sadkers
upon which their claims of gender bias are based. And we
certainly cannot expect peer review when their data is
unavailable to the community of scholars, a community
that overwhelmingly dismisses such claims. The fact that
the media accepted the Wellesley Report's claims without
demanding evidence or going to the original sources is a
strong indication of how easy it can be manipulated by
advocacy groups. Even more disconcerting is the fact that
these flawed studies provide the basis for the $360 million
Gender Equity in Education Act now before Congress.
This is a classic example of what happens when ideologically
driven "scholarship" is accepted by a gullible media and
jumped upon by such blatantly opportunistic politicians as
Teddy Kennedy and Paul Simon who cynically grovel for
the womens' vote.
You probably noted that Sommers' book received
dismissive treatment in the June 12 New York Times Book
Review by Nina Auerbach, who was either unable or
unwilling to challenge any of Sommers' findings. The
Literary
Editor
John Ellis
Staff
Writer
K.L. Billingsley
selection of Auerbach as reviewer merely confirms John
Ellis' well-documented evaluation of the politically correct
leaning of that publication under the editorship of Becky
Sinkler ("The Takeover of the New York Times Book
Review," Heterodoxy, November 1993).
Even more amusing, however, was a letter from
Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the American
Association of University Women, in the July 17 Book
Review in which she praises Auerbach for "an intelligent
review that reveals this latest backlash for what it really is."
What Bryant doesn't reveal, however, is that she is the one
who responded to Sommers' request for data from the
Greenberg Lake/AAUW self-esteem survey by requesting
a statement outlining how she planned to use it and stating
that the use of the data in a possible publication or
presentation "must receive advance written approval from
AAUW." Bryant was obviously uncomfortable about
releasing the study unless the AAUW could control its use.
Furthermore, when Sommers criticized the AAUW
survey on ABC's Lifetime Magazine, on which show the
two appeared jointly, Bryant said to her: "Christina, stop it!
Do you want to know something? This is the last time
you'll criticize the incredibly prestigious and well-run
organization—the American Association of University
Women." Reading those words, I am reminded of Jonathan
Rauch's empirical rule in Kindly Inquisitors, which states
that "no one gets special say simply on the basis of who he
happens to be. A statement is established as knowledge
only if the method used to check it gives the same result
regardless of the source of the statement Who you are
doesn't count; the rules apply to all, regardless of identity."
These are wise words for those gender feminists who
believe they are above scholarly criticism. True equality
demands that the same rules apply to all, regardless of race,
color, or gender. If the radical crowd now calling the shots
at the AAUW keeps this up, their organization won't have
any reputation left for them to hide behind.
Clearly, what Christina Hoff Sommers reveals in Who
Stole Feminism is merely the tip of the gender feminist
iceberg, which, when exposed to the light of reasoned and
critical scholarship, quickly melts down to its hollow
ideological core. No wonder she makes them uncomfortable.
Kendall F. Svengalis
State Law Librarian and Adjunct Professor of
Library and Information Studies
University of Rhode Island
Providence, RI
Dictators and the Grinning Idiots
First, I must tell you that I adore your magazine. It is the
only I get in which I read all the articles. Being a graduate
student at a major university, I often think I am the only
person alive who is appalled by the intolerance exhibited at
the institutions of higher education.
Second, I want to add a thought to Paul Mulshine's
article on Cuba. I think much of the reason for the "grinning
idiots" is abject fear—fear that if you don't smile, someone
will realize you are unhappy with the party and will drag
you off to be interrogated. I will never forget the spectacle
in Romania about six months before Ceausescu was shot
when cheering fans lined up by the thousands to applaud
their dictator who was re-elected unanimously. If you
didn't show up to such a rally, everybody knew and you
placed yourself and your family in danger. I want to
suggest that the idiotic smiles seen in communist countries
are the symptom of something far more sinister than soviet
kitch. It may be true that, like cattle, the communist peoples
could be kept in line after the electrified fences had been
turned off, but that isn't because they've forgotten, but
because fear has become a way of life.
Janet Townsley-Fuchs
Beverly Hills, CA
Production
Editor
Elizabeth Larson
Circulation
Manager
Lisa Maguire
HETERODOXY (ISSN: 1069-7268) is published by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The Center is a California 501 (c)3. Editorial: (916)265-9306. Fax: (916)265-3119.
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REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Dissident feminist
Christina Hoff Sommers, whose book Who Stole Feminism? has raised the hackles of the radical sisterhood,
appeared on Connie Chung's Eye to Eye last month and
found herself once again the object of disinformation
and dirty tricks. Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, and
other members of the feminist nomenklatura refused to be
on the show with Sommers. (Steinem piously claimed
that Sommers was wrong in charging that radical
feminists had propagated false and misleading
statistics about women's victim^ hood, although
Steinem herself had removed the claim about
bulimia from the second printing of
her own book, presumably as a result of
Sommers' exposure of the statistic as
an absurdity.) Not satisfied
merely to boycott the show,
feminists also lobbied intensively to
kill the program before it was aired,
engaging in a concerted action of
character
assassination
that
astounded
CBS
correspondent
Bernard Goldberg, who interviewed
Sommers for the show, and others
involved in the production of Eye to
Eye. The attack was so obviously
concerted and so vitriolic that one
producer involved in the program
commented sub voce, "Well, maybe
they are feminazis!"
ever having made an acknowledgment of the moral
imbecility of her former life—is testimony that we live in
a system which is even more forgetful than it is forgiving.
BLACK PANTHER DEMENTIA: In Indianapolis, a
man calling himself Mmaja Ajabu, head of an
organization called the Black Panther Militia, has
threatened to unleash his "soldiers" on an "offensive"
that will destroy the city if his demands are not met by
January 1. Ajabu's demands include control over
LUNA BEACH By Carl
Moore
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE THEN AND NOW: Last
month, the American Bar Association released a report
claiming that the nation's legal system routinely fails to
protect women and children. In the fine print of the
Washington Post story trumpeting this report, there was a
notation that it had been partially written by Bernadine
Dohrn. Identified only as "a Chicago lawyer," Dorhn is, of
course, no stranger to domestic violence, having toyed
with guns and bombs in the late Sixties when she was one
of the leaders of the Weatherman terrorist sect attempting
to touch off a revolution in America. That she could now
function as an "expert" in any branch of the law—without
RALPHIE BOY GOES PC: A script is being written for
a big-screen adaptation of Jackie Gleason's classic TV
series The Honeymooners, but reports are circulating that
in this updated version, Ralph Cramden won't be allowed
to threaten his wife with spousal abuse, as he did in the bad
old days of the '50s. No blustering cries of "To the
moon, Alice!" or "One of these days...Pow! Right in
the kisser!" And perhaps Ralph will be forced to explore
the homoerotic nature of his relationship with Norton
too.
HOLIDAYS FOR HOOLIGANS: Britain is in an uproar
over a government program
that critics are calling "Crooks'
Tours." Apparently, hard-core
juvenile criminals are being
sent abroad with social
workers, at taxpayers' expense, for rehabilitation in the
form of such adventures as a
boat ride on the Nile,
swimming with the dolphins
off Ireland, skiing in the
Pyrenees, hiking in Portugal,
and bungee-jumping in
Australia. Home Secretary
Michael Howard has denounced the bureaucrats who
conceived the program as
"having more money than
sense." Perhaps they didn't
know about midnight basketball leagues.
GUN PEOPLE: In the debate over
gun control, one canard goes largely
unchallenged: that people who buy
guns for self defense are inefficient
and quixotic individuals who are
often victimized by their own purchases. According to data gathered by
Florida State University socio-logist
Gary Kleck, however, armed citizens
defend their lives or property about 1
million times a year. In 98 percent of
these cases, the citizen merely
brandishes his weapon or, at most, fires
a warning shot. But armed citizens do
kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each
year. Cost effectiveness is rarely
mentioned in the gun-control debate,
but this figure is roughly three times
the number of criminals killed by the
police a year.
REPARATIONS: According to the
Internal Revenue Service, more than
1,000
African
Americans
nationwide have filed amended
federal tax returns claiming some
$43,000 as tax credits for reparations
for slavery. IRS officials say that the
flood of filings could be the result of a
recent essay in Essence magazine
that said blacks were owed
reparations as well as "a tax rebate
for the 60 years of segregation and Jim crow laws that
followed slavery." The author of that article, L.G.
Sherrod, estimated that the "delinquent tax rebate" is
now valued at $43,209 per household and encouraged
readers to include that amount as "other payments" on
their tax returns. Sherrod needs a stiff dose of Thomas
Sowell, whose view of this question is that American
blacks should pay the United States reparations out of
gratitude that they were not born in places like Rwanda.
embraced." Which all goes to show you that life is
like a box of chocolates: Bite into what some people
say and you'll get a toothache. Or: Be careful of what
you put on your tongue because it might stick there.
FIRST AIDS AND NOW
ROCK: Jim Ladd, the Los
Angeles disk jockey and host
of the nationally syndicated
rock show Headset whose
pioneering role in FM rock
will be the subject of a movie,
slipped to seventh place in his
time slot in the latest Arbitron
ratings. Ladd blames his
decline on—who else?—
Ronald Reagan. "Reagan
deregulated radio and turned
KMET from the voice of the
rock culture," Ladd told the
Los Angeles Daily News.
"Radio became just another
junk bond to be bought and
sold by people who couldn't
care less about what it stood
for or what it represented to
people."
education for black people, contributions from black
businesses for social programs, and a significant
decrease in the black infant mortality rate. Ajabu claims
that violence will "escalate and escalate" right after the
holidays if the BPM ultimatum is not met Does this
mean that Kwanza is being called off this year?
HUMPING GUMP: Forrest Gump has become a
political metaphor. Shortly after Pat Buchanan wrote about
him as the average American—durable and sweettempered in the face of the aggression of a malicious
counterculture—Tikkun's Michael Lerner made the
film character an advertisement for his "politics of
meaning," which is so loony a concept that even Hillary
has distanced herself from it. To Lerner, Forrest Gump
typifies those Americans "who have gone through the
experience of the 20th century without ever
comprehending how their good fortune was connected
to the oppression of others....They never knew or
understood the world in the first place in any other
terms besides the naive terms and vacuous categories
supplied them by the dominant culture which they
cheerfully and frenetically
A PATEL BY ANY OTHER
NAME: When students at Piscataway High School lined
up to receive their diplomas at graduation earlier this year,
school officials prohibited them from standing in
alphabetical order, as they previously had. Instead, the
administration decided to line the students up in a random
order selected by computer because of the large numbers
of Asian-Indian students at the school with the last name
"Patel." In past years, administrators claimed, the audience
frequently snickered or made loud remarks as graduate
after graduate with the same surname was called to the
stage. "As he got up, some people would yell 'Patel
number one,' then 'Patel number two,' and so on," the
school's principal told a local paper. "The district found
that to be insensitive at best. Something has to be done."
The clustering of Patels at Piscataway extended to the
homerooms as well, where assignments were also made
alphabetically, inadvertently placing many Asian-Indians
in the same rooms, dubbed "Patel rooms," according to one
school administrator and leading other students, it was
claimed, to joke about the smell of curry floating out into
the hallways.
PAGE
SEPTEMBER 1994
Writing About
Black Panthers and
Black People
T
he scene is a bookstore at the corner of 6th
Avenue and 22nd Street in New York City.
The time is 7:20 p.m. I'm about to give a
reading from my new book, The Shadow of the
Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black
Power in America. About 30 seats have been set
up. By the time I start, all of them are tilled. Most
of the people in them are white and female, but in
the first row in the right-hand corner, a black man
dressed in Afrocentric clothing is sitting with his
arms crossed resting on his chest. As I walk to the
podium I nod to him and to the rest of the audience.
Unlike everyone else, he stares at me with a look
of belligerence. Obviously, he is trying to
intimidate me. I decide that it won't work. I also
decide that he is probably an ex-Black Panther
come to do his best to tear me apart.
As the reading proceeds, more and more people
show up. Barnes and Noble staffers add more chairs. But
soon there are not enough chairs to go around and latecomers have to stand. Most of the latecomers are black,
confirming an old adage jokingly told in the black
community: There's standard time, and there's "colored
people" time. "Colored people" time arrivals cluster in
the background., this brings the turnout, I'm later told
by someone on the Barnes and Noble staff, to approximately
80 people. I read passages from the book. The first one
tells of Huey Newton's actual murder. Next, I read a
passage that takes readers back to the most harrowing
period of the civil rights movement, the early 1960s. The
passage is about a guy named Joe Blum and how he came
to the movement; it is designed to demonstrate mat a
disproportionately high percentage of non-blacks
involved in the movement were young Jews. But first I tell
the audience of my dissatisfaction with Michael Kazin,
a left-wing academic who reviewed my book and took me
to task for not taking a more empirical approach to
such a controversial subject as the legacy of the Black
Panther Party. In the book I admit that The Shadow of the
Panther is not meant to be a comprehensive history of
the entire Party. It is designed to tell of how the stage
was set to establish the Party's legitimacy, when and
how it was founded, what happened to select rank and
file members within the party, how the Panthers turned
into gang of thugs, and what happened to the Founder
of the Party that led to his death one early morning in
August 1989.
So, I ask the audience rhetorically, why am I being
taken to task for not doing what this academic, one of those
nostalgia artists who calls himself a sixties historian, wishes
I had done? I'll leave it to people such as him to write the
kind of book he suggests. (In a desperate attempt to
discredit my book, young Kazin also took me to task for
being off a page number or two in two books I cited in 52
pages of footnotes!)
And then question and answer period begins. The
first question comes from the belligerent looking black guy
who has been sitting in the front row. And, as happened at
a forum on my book at my alma mater, Brown University,
this first comment is not a question. It is a minispeech
given by a Survivor of the era. He tells everyone that he is a
Black Panther veteran who was an officer in one of the East
Coast branches. His minispeech ignores the fact that
during the course of my reading, (at which he has been
present from beginning to end), I stated that my book is
about the West
By Hugh Pearson
Coast Panthers. He makes it clear that it doesn't matter of my book I also talk about Williams's afterlife as a
that I spoke of the major rift which developed between the neighborhood development planner. Despite all of this,
East Coast branches and the Oakland headquarters over Williams is so dissatisfied with my book' s conclusions that
the West Coast's mismanagement of money, or the he has denounced it wherever he goes.
fascist tactics used by West Coast Panthers left in charge
I called him in June after sending him five
of the Party while Huey Newton was in jail from 1967 to complimentary copies of the book. During the call Williams
1970 (or tactics that eventually would pale next to those gave me his theory about why I wrote the book and who put
used by Huey himself after he emerged from prison). me up to it "You were hired by the right wing to put a black
Neither does it matter to him that I made it quite clear face on what they've been saying about us all along. You
there were well-meaning members of the party who tried to took advantage of us for your own selfish gain."
I reminded him that I had explained to him what
do good for the black community. He is angry because I
spoke of anything negative at all in the party and did not I wanted to do three years ago, that the only difference was
that as my research progressed; my opinion of the Party had
contact him for his take on the era.
changed as I had come to see the extent to which earlier
ideals had been a cover for criminal intention among
his guy's attitude demonstrates why it is so difficult Newton and his comrades. Williams then gave a telling
to write an objective history of any aspect of life in response: "If your opinion of the party was changing then
black America. There is an anti-intellectual strain you should have called me and gotten my permission to still
running rampant through the black community. It is use everything I told you."
The fascist implications of such a way of
composed of those who believe that stepping back and
looking at aspects of black America — the bad as well as thinking—part and parcel of what the Black Panther Party
the good — is treasonous. Such people truly believe that were all about— appear to be lost today, decades after the
the worst blight on human history is what white America fact, on someone like Williams who has been at pains to
did to blacks. Most of them haven't read a single book distance himself from some of the insanity of the Party.
about the history of the rest of the world that would Given such an attitude, can there be any question of why the
indicate, for instance, mat Jews and other so-called white Black Panther Party was doomed to self-destruct?
ethnic groups have suffered such atrocities at the hands of
others deemed white by groups such as the Panthers,
I began researching The Shadow of the Panther I
atrocities every bit as horrible and in some cases worse than
what black Americans have suffered. These narrow-minded was convinced that the Black Panthers were heroes. My
initial
interest in the subject dates back to childhood and
arbiters of black history promote romantic visions of black
Africa, ignoring the history of interethnic rivalries that the fact that my birth name is Huey. I wasn't named
caused most of the slaves taken from the continent to be after Newton, as the editor at Addisori-Wesley
captured and sold to Europeans by other black Africans. responsible for getting me to write the book initially
They blame what's happening today in Rwanda on colonial thought. I was named after my father at my birth ten
history as though Hunis are so mindless that they cannot years before Huey Newton became a god of the left.
themselves be held accountable for brazenly pulling the Actually, I always hated the name Huey and for many
trigger on and applying machetes to Tutsis. "The legacy years I felt an undercurrent of anger and resent-ment
left by the French made them do it," state black romantics towards my father, who was a physician, both for giving
who insist on turning all of black history into fairy tales of me a name I was constantly picked on about (other
glorious kings and queens who lived blissful lives until the children constantly compared me to the cartoon duck,
Baby Huey) and for raising me and my two sisters in a
white man arrived on their territory.
The roundabout manner in which such attitudes insult the black neighborhood where the other kids resented us because
intelligence and potential of all black people is lost on their fathers worked in factories. The kids, encouraged by
those like my "questioner" and so many voices in the their parents, were convinced we thought we were better
media who observe blacks. Before I interrupt him than them. It was all part of the built-in nihilism which
telling him to save his speech for if and when he writes his keeps so many black people from achieving anything
own book, my "questioner" calls me a traitor to black constructive. Such thinking holds that anyone black who
people. He implies that my fate shall be the same as all achieves something out of the ordinary has separated
other "traitors" who accuse the Black Panthers of having himself from other blacks and allowed himself to become
been thugs. I am amazed how it is lost on him and his late "less black."
The Black Power/Black Panther era which caught
arriving supporters gathered in the back (who egg him on)
that they are dramatizing everything about the party that I on in the late 1960s reinforced these ideas and taught that
true
blacks—"the
brothers on the block"—are those at the
criticized in my reading and make clear in my book —
especially its intolerance of dissent. I am amazed that he is bottom. Anyone not at the bottom or who doesn't use their
demonstrating the very reason that black Africa has the talents to take care of those at the bottom is trying to act
problems it has: dissenters are dealt with by being silenced. white or bourgeois. Such 60's thinking holds that
But I realize that this man is really no different than individualism is wrong, capitalist rather than socialist by
some of the people I interviewed for my book. In its very nature. It taught that blacks have been wronged and
Shadow of the Panther, for instance, Party veteran Landon atonement for the wrongs committed against us can only be
Williams comes out looking very good. I discuss him as a collective in nature. (A distinction must be drawn between
person who at one time genuinely believed in violent the cultural nationalists of the era who taught outright
revolution. I make a distinction between him and those in hatred of whites, and the Black Panthers who didn't teach
the Party—the greater part of the Panthers—who were hatred of whites, but taught hatred of capitalism and those
merely thugs looking for an excuse to pick up a gun and whites who upheld it.)
Such "pro-masses" thinking seemed very chic
engage in mayhem. I tell readers how Williams left the
Party, disgusted by the behavior of Huey Newton and back in the 60's and, for some, still does now. But it is
rooted not only in trendy Marxism, but also in the way the
others who turned to outright criminal brutality. At the end
T
HETERODOXY
Author Hugh Pearson
slaves were taught to accept their lot. Any slave who didn't
accept it was a danger to the system. And even though
many slaves were not convinced of their inferiority, most
were conditioned to always feel connected to even the
worst-off slave. Thus any gain achieved that raised your lot
even a little bit, was shared with the rest. Hold on to nothing
(was the motto), including any individual ambitions. And
one final aspect of this mindset endemic to so much of
black America has to do with excusing failure. Any black
who advances her or himself gives the lie to the notion that
you can't improve yourself because you are a victim of a
racist society. Such achievers must be summarily dealt
with, brought back to the bottom with the rest of the blacks,
where we all "belong."
While growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I
experienced all these aspects of a mindset which works to
keep African Americans in a kind of bondage. I myself
bought into it for a while, feeling somewhat guilty and "less
black" because my father had raised himself up to the
position of a professional. In 1968, Huey Newton was the
first Huey I was exposed to who was looked up to by masses
of blacks at the bottom. So at the age of 11 I read everything
about him and his Black Panther Party for Self-Defense I
could get my hands on. My reading of the situation,
beginning in 1966 when Black Power was first advanced
philosophically by members of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), taught me that doing
my school work was acting white. So I got bad grades from
the 3rd to the 6th grade. The first thing that saved me from
permanent scholastic failure was potential embarrassment
at entering the junior high school the following year at the
bottom of the tracking system.
But even as my grades improved, I kept reading
positive things about Huey Newton and the Black Panthers
up to 1973 when they began to fade out of the national
limelight. I forgot all about the Party until August 1989. In
the intervening years I had academic success at my
predominantly white high school thanks largely to writer
David Halberstam's book, The Best and the Brightest. The
book, which was about how the U.S. became involved in
Vietnam, absorbed me primarily because most of the key
characters, except for Lyndon Johnson, attended elite
universities. Halberstam's stress on the personalities
involved in the making of history convinced me that in
order to achieve, a person needed to go to such a school. I
set my sights on Brown University which I attended from
1975 to 1979, graduating with a bachelor's degree in
Biomedical Ethics.
I attended medical school at my father's alma
mater—predominantly black Meharry Medical College in
Nashville, Tennessee. I grew less and less interested in my
medical studies. In 1982 I dropped out and began graduate
school in Urban Planning at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Then I became a project manager
at the Harlem Urban Development Corporation (HUDC).
In May 1986 I quit HUDC out of frustration with its bureaucracy and set out to become a writer of some kind. Over
a two year period I worked a variety of odd jobs to make
ends meet—taxi driver, paralegal, messenger, etc. By May
1988 I saw my first story published in a major newspaper
an opinion editorial in New York Newsday. The following
year I began shopping my Newsday op-ed clips to
newspapers nationally, in search of a full-time position as
an editorial writer. Then in August 1989, I received a
letter from Robert C. Maynard, publisher of the Oakland
PAGE
cooperate.
Despite all of this, there were
key Panthers like Landon Williams who
did agree to interviews. In addition, my
archival research was going quite well at
UC Berkeley's Bancroft library, the Library of Congress in
Washington D.C, and the library at the San Francisco
Chronicle. But still, I felt that something was wrong. I was
turning up far too much negative information. As I kept
finding things that disproved all the good supposedly done
by the Party, I looked for something that would restore the
organization in my eyes. That something I decided was the
Black Panther free school in East Oakland known as the
Oakland Community Learning Center. I was, convinced
that when all was said about Black Panther fratricide, drug
use, infiltration by the government, etc. the one aspect of
the party's operations that could have worked up to this
very day as a key element of the "survival program" was
the school, although the institution had been closed in 1982
when Huey Newton embezzled money-from it and got
caught in the act.
I decided I had to tell what the teachers had done,
what the young graduates of the school were doing today
to leave my readers with the impression that something
good was salvageable from the Black Panther legacy. But
the leads I was given to anyone who taught in the school,
or administered it, ended up nowhere. Everyone having
anything to do with the school refused to talk about it,
including Erica Huggins, a past principal. In December
1992, I came close to getting someone who worked there to
go into detail about it. But after a deal I was trying to work
out with Panther veteran Flores Forbes fell through, this
person refused to talk to me.
So with my deadline approaching and my patience
with Party veterans worn thin, on New Years day 1993 I sat
down and began to write. Other than eating and sleeping,
I didn't do anything but write that manuscript until I was
finished. When published, it got good reviews pretty much
everywhere and made the front page of the New York Times
Book Review. This was a good review too, except a peculiar
one that tells something about the hold the mythology of
the 60s continues to have on its true believers.
The reviewer selected by the Times was Robert
Blauner, a professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He
praised my book for going to the heart of the matter about
the evil in the Panthers, but he could not keep a tone of
outraged romanticism out of his review, particularly when
it came to black thuggery. At one point he wrote,
"...[Pearson] too easily divides black men into solid citizens
capable of principled politics and less respectable types
who remain criminals even after they achieve revolutionary
Tribune, inviting me to join his staff when he could
open the appropriate position. That same month Huey
Newton was shot and killed. It shocked me to learn
that Newton's death was drug-related. In November,
with nothing more than May-nard's invitation (which
never materialized into a definite job offer, due to the
Tribune's poor financial heath), I headed west. I was
determined both to secure a full-time writing position in
the San Francisco
Bay Area and to find out what led to my childhood hero's
ignoble end.
Within months of moving to San Francisco I
became an associate editor at San Francisco-based Pacific
News Service. The Newton story continued to fascinate
me and I began to research a book. Then in March 1992 I
signed a contract with Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company for a work on the fate of the Black Panthers
Party. I heard about an organization party veteran David
Hilliard—once Newton's Field Marshall—and others
including Bobby Seale were talking of starting to be called
the People's Organized Response (POR) which would
"help people at the bottom." For a variety of reasons, not
the least of which involved tremendous factionalism
between former Black Panthers, POR never got off the
ground, but the story I filed about it implied that it would
become a reality. This piece referred to the old Black
Panther Party in the standard leftist terms
and pointed to the federal government's
counterintelligence programs as being
solely responsible for destroying the
party.
Two years later, however,
after I began deep
research into the Party, something strange
began to happen. Despite the leftist
credentials I had established, which
former Panthers like Landon Williams
cited as the reason he talked to me, at
least half the people I contacted, including
David Hilliard, refused to say anything
about the party. Many of the veterans
asked me for money as a condition for an
interview. Others cited the belief that no
one who hadn't been in the party had any
business writing about it. In other words,
an objective disinterested analysis of the
party was out of the question.
Over and over again I was told
by veterans that they were writing their
own books. After I called her to see if
she'd agree to an interview, one key
female veteran started the process of
trying to get a contract to publish her
memoirs. Another said she would only
talk if I agreed to have my contract
rewritten to include her and a black
female journalist she had been working
with. A close personal friend of Huey's
agreed to cooperate when I met with him
at the home of Huey's brother Melvin.
Melvin Newton himself told me he only
agreed to meet with me because I was
associated with Pacific News Service.
consciousness. He fails to appreciate how easy it was—and
Huey's close personal friend had been
under the impression that I had yet to
Black Panther Huey Newton
obtain a book contract. When I traveled
is—for young black men to acquire police records, and
to Washington D.C. to meet with him
how numerous talented blacks find themselves in the
and informed him that I actually already
criminal subculture."
had the contract in hand, he refused to
PAGE
Here is our problem—and his—in a nutshell. I've
been black now for almost 37 years, attended school with
a variety of fellow blacks, and know quite a bit about black
history. I know for a fact that it is not necessary for blacks
to become criminals to prosper. It is precisely Blauner's
patronizing romanticism that allowed the Panthers to get
away with murder and allows black criminality to flourish
today. Although perhaps unconsciously, Blauner expresses
perfectly the viewpoint of the fellow traveling radical of
the '60s. Acknowledging that he was part of the "Free
Huey" movement after Newton killed police officer John
Frey, Blauner says that despite the fact that my book shows
how several people were murdered by the Panthers while
others were sexually abused and beaten within an inch of
their lives, he does "not regret his involvement" although
he now wishes his support had been "more critical." That
says it all.
The reviews in the Bay Area were not as good
as they were elsewhere in the country, and I wasn't surprised. While writing in San Francisco I had made plenty
of enemies in the media community because I refused to
be politically correct. I riled them in particular during
the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill fiasco when in my first
column for the San Francisco Weekly, I asked why Hill
continued to work for Thomas if she was so offended by
him, and when I accused white feminists as a whole of
often engaging in racism. From that point on I was persona non grata. I predicted to myself that they would be
waiting to savage my book if for no better reason than to
get me back for past "transgressions." My suspicions were
confirmed when the San Francisco Bay Guardian
commissioned Reginald W. Major, a personal friend of
many of the Panther veterans criticized in my book, to
write a review, and further confirmed when the San
Francisco Chronicle Book Review commissioned the
same man to review the book for them too. Major was
SEPTEMBER 1994
the only reviewer in the entire country to savage
the book.
It had been a different story a year earlier when
Pantherveterans Elaine Brown and David Hilliard
published their books. San Francisco Chronicle book editor
Pat Holt had written the front page reviews of their books
herself, and didn't say one negative thing about either one
of them, despite the fact that all she had to do was research
her own newspaper to discover where many of the lies
were, particularly in Elaine Brown's memoir. Keeping
the faith exacts a stiff price, especially on those who are
not quite sure what faith they're keeping.
S
the Eldridge Cleaver faction—with the murder of a
Panther named Sam Napier who was loyal to the Newton
faction in the street war between the two Panther
branches.) Yet here is a group Moore is allegedly connected to, passing out leaflets claiming that the FBI hired
me to write my book.
Most of the Barnes and Noble audience is
supportive of my strong responses to the taunts. At one
point I ask, "Who elected the Black Panthers to speak for
all of black America?" The hecklers have no answer. After
answering the last question and getting a round of applause
from most of the audience, I sign about 10 copies of my
book for those purchasing it. The following day the store
manager tells me they sold many more copies to people
who just didn't want to buy while the hecklers stood around
trying to intimidate them.
In the last sentence of my book I call the Black
Panther Party "the quintessential intersection of all the
confusion inherent in what it has meant to be African
American for the past thirty years." Collectively, we are a
confused people — not just African Americans, but the
country as a whole. African Americans, I believe, have
been left as the most confused of all. Because of our myriad
racial strains we are perhaps the most quintessentially
American of all. Yet we stand on the outside—not only
because so many people refuse to see us anywhere else, but
also because so many of us refuse to move forward. Too
many African-Americans are running in place waiting for
some external force to provide salvation. Perhaps The
Shadow of the Panther, which traces the crackup of one of
the most gradiose and dangerous of black delusions, sheds
some light on how and why we reached such a situation.
For our sake, I hope so.
o now it is August 5th, a little over one and a half
months after my book came out and I am answering
the taunts of the loud minority of troublemakers
here at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in New York
City. Most of the audience has enjoyed the reading. But
Mr. Ex-Black Panther and a couple of his friends
continue to act out calling me an Uncle Tom, sellout, etc.
Officially, they're part of a group which has
resurrected the Black Panther newspaper, though its
circulation is quite low. According to Mae Jackson,
one of my interviewees and a former member of SNCC
whom I later told of the bookstore incident, they were
sent by Richard "Dhruba" Moore, a Black Panther
veteran who went to jail, and is now free traveling the
nation referring to himself as a former "political
prisoner." Moore is one of the veterans I tried to
contact while writing my book, who never returned my
phone calls. He's briefly mentioned in The Shadow of the
Panther as a leader of one of the New York City
chapters which fell out with Huey, but I say nothing more
negative than that. (My focus wasn't on the East Coast Hugh Pearson is the author of The Shadow of
Panthers. If it had been I would have discussed the the Panther.
connection of "Dhruba" Moore—part of
PAGE
HETERODOXY
Clinton's Dr. Demento
I
n mid-summer, the country was stunned by
images of Kevin Elders, 28, son of Surgeon
General Joycelyn Elders, being escorted from
a Little Rock courthouse after having been
convicted of selling cocaine to a police informant.
The usually outspoken surgeon general defended
her son by claiming that his offense was minor
(though still a felony) and, in any case, that Kevin
had been entrapped by her own political opponents.
But ten days later, even as Elders' critics were
murmuring that this physician ought to heal herself,
Little Rock police discovered the body of the
informant, Calvin R. Walraven, 24, dead from a
shotgun blast to the head. Police ruled it a suicide
and immediately closed the case.
Suicide or retribution? Walraven's death is
consistent with what has become the public perception
of "Little Rock Justice": swift, often violent, sometimes
lethal, and almost always murky and ambiguous. Of course,
while the conspiracy theorists have already associated the
informants death with either Kevin's thuggish friends or
the powerful politicos who brokered the president's rise to
power, both the police and the mainstream media have
ignored the Walraven case totally. Even when Kevin Elders
made news again in late August by being sentenced to 10
years for his offense, the press, which reported his mother's
"stunned" reaction in the courtroom, did not mention the
fate of Calvin Walraven.
That the bizarre death of a man whose testimony
almost single-handedly convicted the surgeon general's
son received no scrutiny is consistent with the kid-gloves
treatment that the media have generally adopted toward
Joycelyn Elders. An uncritical, sometimes giddy, "lookwhat-she-said-now" approach, mixed with a sort of awe for
what is sometimes interpreted as plain speaking,
characterizes the way Elders' often bludgeoning statements
about gays, sex, unwed mothers, and Catholics have been
characterized. And though Elders' brash style has branded
her Clinton's loose cannon, it could be argued that she is
actually the vanguard of the current administration's assault
on middle American values.
The surgeon general' s pronouncements on religion
are a case in point. It is clear now that a key element of
Clinton's reelection strategy is to portray his Republican
opponents in the grips of an "intolerant fanaticism" of the
so-called Religious Right. Point man in the 1994 election
cycle, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
chair Rep. Vic Fazio described religious conservatives as
"the fire-breathing Christian Radical Right" Trying to
explain a recent congressional seat loss, Clinton blamed
"fanatics" emboldened by a message of "hate and fear."
But Elders has been far out ahead of anyone else
in the administration on this issue. Addressing the Lesbian
and Gay Health Conference as its keynote speaker in late
June, Elders blamed the spread of the AIDS epidemic not
on the sexual practices of the conference's attendees, but
on the "un-Christian religious Right," which she charges
with "selling our children out in the name of religion."
The reasoning was typical of Elders' sometimes
bizarre public pronouncements. The previous month,
she had told a congressional committee that AIDS re-,
search should receive more funding than either heart
disease or cancer because "most of me people who die with
heart disease and cancer are our elderly population, and
we all will probably die with something sooner or later."
There was no comment on this policy suggestion from the
American Association of Retired Persons, and the spin
doctors in the White House have learned that benign
silence is the best medicine when the nation's physician-inchief makes such comments. As first reported in the Los
Angeles Times, even Elders' theoretical boss, Health and
Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, has discovered
that she cannot discipline, much less control, the surgeon
general. Elders has four things going that place her beyond
reproach: She is black, female, an Arkansas crony up from
almost insurmountable poverty, and a Friend of Hillary.
Elders truly believes she answers only to the president, a
unique agreement for an official who, despite her highsounding title, ranks rather low on the administration
totem pole.
Clinton must have known what he was getting
into when he nominated Elders to be the nation's chief
By Cameron Humphries
LITTLE ROCK
JUSTICE:Kevin
Elders, pictured
here, was arrested
and convicted
on drug
charges. The
chief witness
against him
was killed with
a shotgun blast
to the head.
Local police
ruled it a
suicide and
the national
media followed
their cue.
physician last year. After all,
Elders served at Clinton's behest as Arkansas' public
health director from 1987 until 1993, pursuing a
controversial policy promoting birth control, condoms
in schools, and abortion on demand. Teenage
pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and abortions
all increased under her watch, after having decreased
during the tenure of her predecessor. The White House had
to push hard to ensure her confirmation last year because of
a nearly successful, eleventh-hour effort by conservative
Republican senators to scuttle the nomination.
And Elders did not offer her saviors much help.
Told by Clinton staffers not to talk to the press during the
confirmation period, she insolently granted CNBC an
interview in which she said, "I would hope that we would
provide them [drug-abusing prostitutes] Norplant, so they
could still use sex if they must to buy their drugs."
This would be the last of the so-called "Joycelyn
eruptions" until the bumbling and largely incoherent
statement at the National Press Club last December in
which she suggested that drug legalizaton might have a
salubrious effect on the nation's crime epidemic.
Emboldened by the controversy that comment provoked,
the surgeon general granted a series of interviews on a
variety of social issues, most of which were only tangential
to the nation's health. In January, she told the New York
Times Magazine, "We really need to get over this love
affair with the fetus and start worrying about children."
Two months later in an interview with The Advocate, a
magazine for homosexuals, she said that Americans need
to know that sex is "a normal and healthy part of our being,
whether it is homosexual or heterosexual." She further
endorsed homosexual adoptions, called the Boy Scouts'
proscription against active and acknowledged homosexuals
"unfair," and once again chided the religious: "I think the
religious right at times thinks that the only reason for sex is
procreation," And finally she shed additional light on her
drug-legalization policy in a USA Weekend interview:
"When we say legalize, I'm really talking about control.
That we'd have doctors or clinics set up where addicts can
get their drugs free, or pay $1."
But it is Elders' remarks about the Roman Catholic
church and Christianity in general that have posed questions
about the religious bigotry beginning to emerge from the
Clinton administration's closet. The surgeon general's
advocacy of abortion and birth control naturally pits her
against the Church, but it doesn't explain the venomous
nature of her attacks. "We attempted to eradicate a whole
race of people through the Holocaust," Elders said before
a gathering of the Arkansas Coalition for Choice, "and the
Church was silent....The first 400 years black people had
their freedom aborted, and the Church said nothing...Look
at who's fighting the pro-choice movement: a celibate,
male-dominated Church."
A year later, Elders referred to people who oppose
abortion as "non-Christians with slave-master mentalities."
She also has dismissed pro-lifers as people who "love little
babies so long as they are in someone else's uterus."
Elders' assault on religion has been compounded
by her own zealotry in condemning those who disagree
with her. She cannot simply regard her opponents as taking
another position. She must attack them as self-serving and
hypocritical; they must be seen as immoral. This extremism
is not a characteristic most people expect from the surgeon
general, a figure theoretically committed to healing the
nation's wounds. But Elders has worked tirelessly not to be
the kind of doctor most people associate with the position.
And in this effort, at least, she has succeeded.
I
f C. Everett Koop injected the surgeon general's office
into politics, Joycelyn Elders has made it into a cockpit
of partisanship. Her views are so extreme that unless
Clinton and the Democratic Party renounce their chief
doctor and her anti-clerical opinions, she will have to be
seen as speaking for them as well. Christians—particularly
Roman Catholics and fundamentalists—will have no
alternative than to equate Clinton's position on church and
family with Elders'. For the Fundamentalists, many of
whom haven't voted for the Democratic party at the national
level in a generation, the ramifications may be minor. But
Roman Catholics constitute the largest religious
denomination in America, with some 40 million of them
eligible to vote. Though polls show that American Roman
Catholics often disagree with the church's position on
abortion and birth control, and though they have split their
vote over the past several presidential elections between
Democrats and Republican, Elders' views on the Church
are so inflammatory that she could single-handedly help
alienate Catholics from the Democrats.
Why does the president take this risk? And what
happens if "mainstream" Christians begin to consider that
Democratic diatribes against religious conservatives include
them? There can only be two reasons why Clinton allows
Elders to rail against Christianity and the Roman Catholic
church in terms that, charitably, can be described as
intolerant. Either he is too weak to oppose such a strongwilled, out-spoken, and potentially explosive figure—or
he agrees with her.
Monsignor William Lori (speaking for Cardinal
James Hickey, the Archbishop of Washington, who has
twice written Clinton asking him to disavow Elders'
statements on the family and homosexuality without
receiving a response) says, "One can only really conclude
that Dr. Elders is truly speaking for the administration." And Elders said essentially the same thing when
she told USA Weekend that Clinton had told her, "I keep
up with you everywhere you go and what you've been
doing. I love it."
Clinton may say that he loves it, but Elders
threatens to unravel the thin trappings of his so-called
"moderation" in the eyes of middle America. Her extremism
has made her the id of an administration whose psyche
has become progressively more disorganized.
Cameron Humphries is part of the Investigative
Journalism Project
PAGE
SEPTEMBER 1994
Affirmative Action Foreign Policy
By Peter Schweizer
T
he U.S. forces training for the
invasion of Haiti might well be
called the Randall Robinson
Brigade. For it is Robinson, director of
Transafrica, along with a kindred group
of erstwhile black antiwar activists and
radicals, who has beat the drums for
intervention in Haiti to a point where
the noise has frightened and disoriented
the Clinton administration. While
Robinson was on his hunger strike last
spring to protest U.S. "inaction" in Haiti,
the president fired his Haiti advisor,
Lawrence Pezzullo,and began to engage
in the harsh rhetoric that is about to
culminate in an invasion. Beneath the
moral posturing was a political
calculation. Randall Robinson and his
allies in the black caucus had convinced
Bill Clinton that it was time to practice a
little affirmative action in foreign
policy.
to find a high level of maturity in terms of
how we live and deal with each other. That's
marching backward—that's killing and
dying and suffering and broken bodies and
broken homes.") Of course, Dellums, who
had played footsie with Fidel Castro all through
the '80s, has changed his tune on the issue of
Haiti, believing that we should consider using
force to oust the dictatorial regime of Port au
Prince.
Many of Dellums' colleagues in
the Congressional Black Caucus, including
Maxine Waters, Major Owens, and Kweisi
Mfume, have followed his example. The
places where they opposed using U.S. force
overseas included the Gulf War, Grenada, and
Panama. At the same time they advocate
tight sanctions and military intervention to
deal with the crisis in Haiti, many of them
encouraging the lifting of trade restrictions
and "moderation" in dealing with the brutal
regime of Fidel Castro.
The hypocrisy apparent in the Black
Caucus is also obvious in the positions of
some of its allies, white as well as black. Sen.
John Kerry, one of the earliest and loudest
The pictures coming out of Haiti are
voices pushing President Clinton to seek
sad, but so too are those coming from
U.N. approval for the use of force in Haiti,
Rwanda, Bosnia, the republic of Georgia, and
was not quite so hawkish during the Gulf
elsewhere. Haiti is inconsequential to U.S.
War. During the debate over a Senate
interests, and the human rights picture is not
resolution authorizing the use of force, Kerry
glaring. The Inter-American Human Rights
said: "In my heart and in my gut and in my
Commission reports it has evidence of 133
mind I do not believe in sending people to war
killings and 55 disappearances in the last
unless it is imperative." Randall Robinyear—an unsavory picture, but hardly near
son likewise apparently believes force
the scale of violence, suffering, and oppression
should only be used to bring black left-wing
that haunts the former Yugoslavia. And few
leaders to power, not when American interests
countries have received as generous a
are at stake. Not only did the Transafrica
political refugee allotment as Haiti. In 1993, for Jean Bertrand Aristide, dictatorial democrat, seen by director oppose U.S. intervention in the Persian
example, more Haitians received that status than all of
the Congressional Black Caucus as the George Gulf, Panama, and Grenada, but he denounced the
Eastern Europe combined, an area which includes
latter as another example of America's "long,
Washington of Haiti.
the carnage of Yugoslavia and the repression in
record of big-stick intervention—putting in
Romania.
governments we like, taking out ones we don't."
with words similar to those uttered by black leaders during
But facts do not stand up against hunger
Politically correct foreign policy not
the L.A. riots of a couple of years ago. "We are upset, we
strikes, and for the Left and quite possibly Bill
only spawns hypocrisy in answering the question
are indignant, and we are declaring war on a racist policy,"
Clinton, Haiti offers a unique opportunity to favor
of whether and when U.S. military power should be
he declared, calling for civil disobedience and protests by
the use of force because it meets the politically
used, it also fuels a selective view of human
blacks to demonstrate their "anger." In a letter signed this
correct foreign policy criteria. First, it is a
rights and democracy. Multicultural thugs are
spring by Congressmen Ron Dellums and Pat Schroeder,
multicultural event, involving a poor, Frenchgranted more leeway than Eurocentric thugs. If it
Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, as well as movie stars (and
speaking black nation. Second, the goal is to bring a
were Belgian colonialists who were today
foreign-policy experts) Julia Roberts, Robin Williams,
leftist to power. Third, and perhaps most
slaughtering Rwanda's Tutsis instead of the Hutus,
Danny Glover, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward,
importantly, no fundamental U.S. interests are at
it is doubtful that the Left would allow the White
among others, it was claimed that America's "indifference"
stake, so military success will not mean much of a
House to get away with its current "terribly tragic
to the situation in Haiti was "driven by considerations of
victory for the American "imperialism" the
but not our problem" approach?
race."
advocates of intervention in Haiti otherwise are
The choice of Jean Bertrand Aristide as
These charges have created a climate in foreign
wont to condemn.
George Washington of Haiti (a member of the
policy similar to that on major U.S. college campuses,
These advocates started out, of course, by
Congressional Black Caucus actually called, him
where the commissars of correctness immediately elevate
trying to persuade people that American security
that) indicates how desperate the Left has become
whatever goal they have by claiming that those who opinterests justified action. Randall Robinson and
for an icon. Although he was fairly elected in
pose it are racist Race is a major consideration in Haiti
others argue that toppling the military dictatorship
September 1991, Aristide hardly deserves
debate precisely because advocates of intervention have
of Cedras would stop the flow of Haitian refugees
canonization as a saint of democracy. Aristide has
made it so. And it is to their advantage to make sure that it
as well as help America deal with its drug problem.
endorsed necklacing, telling crowds at one rally,
remains a core issue when discussing Haiti. As Washing(Haiti is reportedly a transshipment point for the
"You will have to use it when you must." As
ton Post columnist Jim Hoagland put it, "If race is a factor
drag barons of South America.) Robin-son ally Sen.
president, he called on his supporters to steal from
in his Haiti policy, it is one that keeps Clinton more
John Kerry said American "credibility" was at stake
the wealthy and took dictatorial actions without the
involved, and more sympathetic to Aristide, than he would
because Haiti's military rulers were thumbing their
approval of parliament. Even activists such as
otherwise be."
noses at the last superpower. But these efforts to
Walter Fauntroy, the former chairman of a
justify an invasion were at best hollow and at worst
congressional task force on Haiti, conceded recently that
downright silly, never managing to establish the reality of
Aristide had "resorted to the pattern of behavior of dictators
a "crisis" that was worth risking a single American life. The Race (and ideology) are the defining determinants in in the past" during his tenure.
situation in nearby Cuba, for example, looks much worse constructing a politically correct foreign policy, and
But Aristide's left-wing credentials are firmly
in both human-rights and security terms, but the Haiti they reveal the hypocrisy of the Haiti hawks. established, which gives him cover in the game of
Consider
the
case
of
Ron
Dellums,
a
long-time
"antihawks, virtuosi of the double standard, did not cry out for
war" activist now pushing for military action in Haiti. politically correct foreign policy. An ordained priest,
action there.
Aristide was expelled from the Salesian order by Rome
As the vacuous arguments that U.S. policy interests The Berkeley representative not only opposed war in the in 1988 for preaching class violence. Aristide has praised
were involved in Haiti failed, advocates of intervention Persian Gulf, he actually opposed the deployment of Marxism, and in his book In the Paris of the Poor, he
changed their tactics by falling back to charges of racism. troops! ("I have a profound respect for human life," he wrote of "the deadly economic infection called capitalIt was ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who explained his position during Desert Storm. "I think that ism." He calls U.S. Coast Guard ships intercepting refufired the first volley when he called American's reluctance war is anachronistic. I think war is archaic. I think war is gees part of "a floating Berlin Wall," apparently unable
to return him to power by force an example of "a racist not an appropriate vehicle for a civilized world trying
or unwilling to see the difference between the opprespolicy." Democratic Congressman Major Owens, head of
sive East German government, which had to keep
the Congressional Black Caucus Haiti Task Force, followed
HETERODOXY
people in, and a democracy that must at times
restrict immigration. It is true that Aristide won
an election. But that has never been the sole
criteria for evaluating the human-rights credentials or legitimacy of a leader. Most recently
Zviad Gamsakhurdia won internationally
observed and certified elections in the Republic
of Georgia by a greater margin man Aristide. Yet
when Gamsakhurdia displayed despotic
tendencies, the United States was quick to support
Georgia leader Eduard Shevardnadze against
forces loyal to the deposed president.
H aiti has merely dramatized the double H
standards that have always animated the black
and white Left when it comes to foreign policy.
The fact is that left-wing African despots have
always enjoyed greater freedom from criticism
than less politically correct regimes. In Ethiopia,
1.2 million people died in the early 1980s
because of the brutal collectivization policies
of the Marxist government. It took four years
for even a peep of criticism from the likes of
Robinson's Transafrica and the Congressional
Black Caucus. In February 1983, Robert
Mugabe of Zimbabwe massacred 3,000
Ndebeles, but he remained an icon of the Left,
and an example of what the Congressional
Black Caucus called "effective African
leadership." When the Nigerian government in
1983 forcibly and violently expelled two
million foreign workers—during which several
thousand were killed—there was only silence.
(In fact Transafrica gladly took grants from
that government.) When Tanzania's occupation
of Uganda in an effort to oust Idi Amin turned into
a frenzy of rape, pillage, and slaughter, the voices
on the Left were again silent. And the same
response followed the slaughtering of
hundreds of rioting students in socialist Algeria
in October 1988.
Not only does the Left tend to ignore
these human-rights atrocities, many advocates
of politically correct foreign policy actually
work to secure U.S. government aid for these
abusive regimes. Black liberal leaders, including former Congressman William Grey and
Rep. Mervyn Dymally, attended an April 1991
summit in the Ivory Coast with officials from
across Africa. The American delegation
promised to work to cancel Black Africa's $ 1,000
billion debt, as well as to fight for more aid to the
region from American taxpayers. There was
little mention of a concrete human rights criteria
for the repressive regimes of Africa, many of
which had delegates in attendance.
It is not fashionable to say so, but in
terms of the levels of slaughter and oppression,
the situation in South Africa during the '80s
does not compare with the records compiled by
black African regimes. But the international
denunciation of South Africa, to the exclusion
of these countries, led French writer Jean-Francis
Revel to conclude: "The tendency that prevails
in our age is to regard human rights as being
serious only when they include some racist
component."
Haiti marks a watershed: the first
foreign-policy issue where the Left is calling for
the Marines. Military power, it seems, suddenly
has a purpose—enforcing affirmative action
goals in foreign policy. The next thing you know
we'll be sending another task force to the Gulf,
this time to punish Islamic regimes that are mean
to women.
Rep. Kweisi Mfume and others who advocate tight
sanctions and military intervention when it comes to
Haiti nonetheless call for "moderation" when
handling the brutal regime of Fidel Castro.
Peter Schweizer is the author of Victory, a book
about the how the United States defeated
the Soviet Union in the Cold War,
PAGE
SEPTEMBER 1994
Continued from page 1 not
sexual abuse of children,
the sort of touchy-feely
pre-adolescents,
those
liberal who might fall for
below the age of perhaps 10 or
this crap, and we got down
11. Pederasty, on the other
to the real questions.
hand, in the classic Greek
"But how can you
sense, refers to sexual
say that a five-year-old can
relations with adolescent
consent to sex?"
boys. The ideal here, in the
"People are always
minds of both Socrates and
asking that question about
most NAMBLA members, is
the five-year-olds!" said an
a boy of about 12 or 13. The
indignant Leland. "Why do
thinking among these guys,
they always focus on that?"
as I understand it, is that
"Well, it is a rather
males simply don't improve
obvious question."
as sex objects after that age.
"I suppose," he
They just get hairier.
said.
Women, on the other hand,
Leland did not
tend to peak around
seem to particularly like
whatever
age
Cindy
having to defend the idea of
Crawford is right now.
sex with kindergarteners. As a
The
Gaystream
pederast, he prefers to
organizations
are
all
follow the ancient Greek
opposed to true child
model. Like Socrates, he
molestation. I gather even
sees the adolescent boy as
most members of NAMBLA
the ideal love object. Most
admit that this is a bit
NAMBLA members share
weird. But the Gaystream's
his tastes; the average age of a
position on pederasty differs
NAMBLA member's love
from a guy like Leland's
interest is 13, he said.
only in a small degree.
We proceeded to
The Canadian chapter of
debate the nature of the
NAMBLA, for example, was
NAMBLA
argument.
dissolved after the age of
Stevenson must have had this debate a
consent there was lowered to 14. President
thousand times, yet I was amazed at how Leland Stevenson in the promotional still from Chicken Hawk. Clinton's
easy it was to think up questions for which
former AIDS czar, Kristine Gebbie, stated that
he had no answers, not even stupid ones. For example, the examples that are pointed to that justify this kind of she saw it as the role of government to recognize
NAMBLA maintains that society should throw out age relationship are pederastic. They're man-boy relation- homosexuality among the nation's high schoolers.
as a legal criterion for judging sexual relationships.
ships. The gays talk about ancient Greece, Japan, or China Gaystream organizations also maintain that teenaged
"Absent some harm that can be shown, there and, lo and behold, this is an adult male with some kind of gays should come out sexually. "We think gay teens
shouldn't be a crime of statutory rape," said Leland, who a boy."
should be supported in coming out," was how Ms. Kane
once spent three years in prison for circulating kiddie porn.
Sex among adult males has always been somewhat of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force put it to me.
"The idea of locking me up merely because I did something looked down upon, even by the ancient Greeks, Leland
But come out with whom? Clearly not their
that was beneficial to the boy and that the boy initiated and points out. Homosexuality and pederasty have historically fellow 15-year-olds, who are presumably just as conthat the boy wanted to have happen—that, to me, is the been inseparable. He believes that the gay mainstream (the fused on the issue as they are. No, the guidance, and the
antithesis of good social function."
"Gaystream" in current jargon) has no right to condemn sex, tends to come from adult gays who bring the teens out
"OK, I'll accept that for the sake of argument," NAMBLA for simply doing what homdsexuals have always A study published in .the Journal of Pediatrics showed
I replied. "But suppose a 40-year-old man gets a 12- done: chase adolescent boys. Leland doesn't buy the that of a sample of gay teenagers who had steady sexual
year-old girl pregnant? Suppose a 50-year-old man Gaystream's argument that homosexuals are no more likely partners, the mean age of the partners was 25 years. A study
gives a 10-year-old boy HIV? Then what? Should he go to desire sex with the young than are heterosexuals. "There's a in San Francisco, published in the Journal of the American
to jail?"
circular argument the gays are making here. They say that an Medical Association, showed that nearly 10 percent of a
"I can't answer that in ten seconds," said Leland. adult homosexual interested in adult homosexuals will not sample of male homosexuals aged 17 to 22 were inhave sex with boys. OK, but if you start off with the fected with HIV. These two pieces of data go together.
premise that someone who is an adult and is only interested Obviously, the infected 17-22 year olds didn't get it from
It was at this point in the interview that I began to realize I in adults is not interested in boys, what have you established? their fellow teenagers.
why mainstream gays are so nervous about NAMBLA. All black cats are black. What have you said? Not very
Once you throw out the idea of age of consent, some much."
really tough questions surface about the entire gay lifestyle.
[he most amazing thing about this whole debate is
On this, my personal experience finds me in
I'm a sort of libertarian at heart, so I largely buy the agreement with Leland. When I was a teenager and didn't
that no one in the media seems to be noticing the real
consenting-adults argument. But the essence of the have a car I used to hitchhike a lot. My friends and I
pederasty problem in America. The sexual abuse
libertarian argument is that those who wish to have certain used to warn each other about being picked up by what we of pre-adolescent children has been in the headlines a
rights have to take on corresponding responsibilities. The termed "queers." (Having used this word once made me lot recently. Much is written about the survivors of
question of just what those responsibilities might be is a feel retroactively guilty until gay radicals made it p.c.) The sexual abuse, but no one notices that they are just that:
tough one for gays.
queers would give us rides and offer to blow us. We'd say survivors. The most serious victims of pederasty in
I pointed this out to Leland. "You can't very well no. That seemed to be the way this thing worked. The America today are those who won't survive, those
argue that adults have the right to sodomize children, but no queers of my adolescence were adults of all ages, and in kids like the young gays in San Francisco who've
responsibility to be punished if they give the child a fatal the years before I had a car I must have met several hun- contracted HIV before they've even had a chance to
disease," I said. He conceded that I might have a point. We dred of them. My friends and I figured that homosexuality understand the implications of gay sex. Through
talked political philosophy for a while. I asked whether and pederasty went together like...well, like love and December 1993, 7,015 gay males below the age of
NAMBLA, and for that matter Leland, was making a marriage.
24 had contracted AIDS. Given the latency period of
socialist or a libertarian argument. Leland hadn't really
Then gay lib came along. It became politi- AIDS, all but a handful of these boys must have been
thought about these questions, but he seemed genuinely cally useful for militant gays to say that gays were no infected while they were still below the age of
interested. He asked if I knew of any good books on the more likely to pursue sex with underaged subjects than consent, almost certainly by adult gays who were helpsubject. "Jeez, Leland, I don't know," I said, as I pondered were heterosexuals. Mainstream journalists accepted ing them find their identity as homosexuals. Note the
the ethics of helping NAMBLA refine its philosophy by this without question. But I thought I'd wait for proof. clear media bias here: Hundreds of newspapers and
getting him in touch with something like John Stuart Mill's This is the way journalism is supposed to work. "If your magazines have run articles on teenage AIDS, but few if
On Liberty.
mother tells you she loves you, check it out," is a pop- any have ever explored the pederasty angle despite the
A few days later, Leland called me back and ular saying among newspaper types. If Allen Ginsberg fact that, according to the figures I just cited, it appears
said he'd been giving the matter some thought We talked tells you he doesn't like young boys, check it out. (Actually, to account for about 80 percent of the cases of sexual
for a couple of hours. He's a well-educated guy who Allen Ginsberg would never say that In Chicken Hawk, transmission among teens.
grew up in a Washington suburb, and attended St Alban's, Ginsberg, who is a living icon both of American
This apparent tendency of adult gays to engage
the prep school Al Gore attended. He knows his Greek homosexuality and American leftist politics, is shown routinely in pederasty was documented in a recent article in
philosophy, which is not surprising since Plato and reading a poem at a NAMBLA gathering: "Let me kiss Out Magazine that was, ironically, meant to be an attack on
the boys were into man-boy love in a big way. He's got your face, lick your neck, touch your lips...ever slept with man-boy love. Out writer Jesse Green concluded that
some interesting observations on that subject. Leland and a man before?")
mainstream gay culture should reject NAMBLA's adother pedophiles maintain that, when it comes to the
In short, it may well be that pederasty is a sub- vocacy of pederasty. But within the article was evidence
religion of homosexuality, they're the keepers of me ject about which the mass of America's militant gays are that much of what NAMBLA advocates is simply
True Faith. "There's no historical culture in which you still in the closet. Here, it's important to define some mainstream gay culture in different words. For instance,
can point to the kind of sexual culture which adult terms. The terms "child molestation" and "pederasty" Green described the teen years of Steve Ashkinazy, a
homosexuals are experiencing here," he insists. "All of are often used interchangeably, but there's a key dif- 44-year-old gay who runs a shelter for gay youth in
ference. Child molestation applies more properly to the
T
PAGE
HETERODOXY
Manhattan. Ashkinazy described how when he was 14 he
began going to Times Square to be picked up by adult gays.
"In the next two years I probably had sex with a thousand
people, most of them much older than myself," Ashkinazy
is quoted as saying.
A thousand pederasts can't be wrong. The oftstated claim by militant gays that they are statistically no
more likely to engage in pederasty than heterosexuals has
no empirical basis. A 1985 study of arrests in 12 U.S.
jurisdictions showed that, on average, about 40 percent of
arrests for pederastic homosexuals. Another recent study,
touted by gays as evidence to support their claim of being
no more likely than heteros to engage in such behavior
actually proved the exact opposite. The study was done by
a team of researchers from the University of Colorado who,
according to the leader, Dr. Carole Jenny, set out to prove
that homosexuals were not more likely to molest children.
(Results first, study second: This is Alice-in-Wonderland
science.)
In any case, the researchers looked at 269 cases at
a child-molestation clinic and found that 50 cases, or 18.5
percent, were male-on-male molestation. Since homosexuals make up probably less than 5 percent of the
population, this would seem to indicate a disproportionate molestation rate. So the investigators engaged
in what is known in the scientific community as "data
torture." Without interviewing the molesters, the
interviewers decided that most of those offenders who
engaged in homosexual sex weren't really homosexuals.
Only one of the 50 actually qualified as gay once the data
had gotten the full S&M treatment. The study was then
touted as evidence that gays don't molest children. It may
not be "scientific" in the sense of this study, but Leland
Stevenson's comment seems appropriate here: All black
cats are black.
But such studies can only approximate the real
rates of pederasty. Sex happens in private, and anyone who
pretends to measure it precisely is a fool. A far better
indication of the effects of pederasty is in the real harm it
accomplishes. Gay activists insist that AIDS is an equal
opportunity disease. Heterosexuals can spread it as
easily as gays, they maintain. It stands to reason, then,
that if heterosexuals are more prone to pederasty than
homosexuals, as gay activists often say, there will be
more cases of AIDS among young heterosexuals than
among homosexuals. But Center for Disease Control
figures show that cases of homosexual transmission
outnumber cases of heterosexual transmission by a factor
of about four to one. Since heteros outnumber gays in the
population by about twenty to one, it follows that for
every heterosexual act of pederasty there must be at least
eighty homosexual acts, if you accept the gay activists'
logic at face value.
I
n truth, gay activists and logic are strangers. Anal sex
among males is by far the most efficient means of
spreading AIDS, which makes homosexual pederasty
much more dangerous than the heterosexual version,
regardless of exactly how many people engage in each. The
7,015 AIDS victims in the most recent CDC report represent
just the tip of the iceberg, to use a cliché favored by the
AIDS lobby. For each victim in the final stages of AIDS,
there are no doubt many more whose AIDS will surface in
the coming years. In short, there are probably 25,000 or so
AIDS cases that will eventually be attributable to gay
pederasty in the United States.
Gays maintain they have a right to engage in
the sort of behavior that spreads AIDS while also
maintaining that society has a responsibility to find a
cure whatever the cost. This is certainly a new variation
on the old rights/responsibilities argument, but hardly a
logical one. The "consenting adults" argument only
works when the adults are consenting to an activity that
does not harm society. It does not work when the activity kills people by the hundreds of thousands, and it
does not work when a good number of the people involved are not adults.
The Clinton administration and Leland Stevenson both are on record in favor of recognizing homosexuality in high schoolers; Leland just has a slightly better
eye for it. The members of the Gaystream are less
enthusiastic about NAMBLA's aims than the administration
is. They would like nothing more than for NAMBLA to
disappear. Their second choice would be what they're
getting: Media coverage that portrays NAMBLA members
as people so bizarre and abhorrent that they have nothing
in common with the great mass of gays. The Gaystream's
nightmare is that people will see the future of gay
liberation as Leland Stevenson sees it: First you win the
right to have sex with adults, then you win the right to
have sex with kids.
Even though I found Leland to be a likable guy, I
still was disgusted at the idea of a grown man having sex
with a teenager. As I talked with him in the park that day,
I wondered what it must be like to be a teenager without a
car in 1994. When I was a kid, it was simple to say no to the
guys who picked me up hitchhiking, even when they
offered $50 for what was then called a "blowjob" and now
is called "finding one's sexual orientation." But now a kid
has people from the President of the United States down to
the lowliest rock star telling him that there's nothing wrong
with that nice man behind the steering wheel. He just has a
different lifestyle.
When I said goodbye to Leland that day, I
mentioned that I had to get home to pick up my little girls
at the babysitter's.
"How old are they?" Leland asked.
"Two and six," I said.
"They must be absolute delights!" he said.
"They are," I replied. For some reason a tune
popped into my head. It was the old Maurice Chevalier
classic: "Thank heaven for little girls."
At least they're safe from NAMBLA and the
Gaystream.
—Paul Mulshine
PAGE
SEPTEMBER 1994
Continued from page 1
Goldberg found variation in degree:
Male-female roles differ among the pygmies,
in response to pressure from the anti-Goldberg
the 12th-century French, the Saudi, and the
network, that they've "decided to go in another
people of the United States. Such variation, he
direction." It is not only Goldberg himself who
believed, was in all likelihood not explicable in
has been affected. Other scholars who have
physiological terms. It must be explained in
merely quoted his work have been stigmatized.
social terms. His work made no attempt to
One specialist on the study of the family, and an
explain the variation but only the limits within
author of one of the bestselling texts in the field,
which all the variation falls. His theory of
was told by his editor that the mere mention of
male-female roles was analogous to a theory of
Goldberg's name would cost 25 percent of
why people eat in every society that does not
classroom sales. Goldberg routinely encounters
attempt to explain why Americans eat one type
situations in which an editor to whom he has
of food and Chinese another.
submitted a paper will self-protectively send the
"I found a lack of specificity about
piece to a radical feminist for review, with the
precisely what cultural anthropologists meant
result that it will often take submission to 10 or 12
by terms like 'patriarchy' and 'male rule.' One
journals before a manuscript is accepted.
anthropologist meant one thing by these terms
Goldberg finds this all best summarized by an
and another meant something else. Perhaps
encounter he had with a feminist in an audience at a
the obvious presence of a general male rule
lecture he gave soon after his book was first
made specificity seem unnecessary. But this had
published. She asked whether Goldberg would be
the effect of introducing a certain incoherence
willing to read a book called The Inevitability of
and an impossibility of generalization
Matriarchy, her clear implication being that he
because the terms used by the anthropologists
was so blinded by sexism that he would find such
were incommensurate. Thus, I had to ignore the
a title ludicrous. "Would I read it," Goldberg
terms and ascertain precisely which realities were
says. "I told her I'd be waiting for the bookstore to
universal and which were not. Only then could
open on the day the book was delivered. The
I name the universal institutions."
minimum requirement of the serious person is
Goldberg found three relevant
the willingness—indeed, eagerness—to confront
universals, three institutions found in every
a possibly contradictory view and, if the view
society without exception:
proves correct, to change one's own view."
First, hierarchies are always filled
Far from being antagonistic toward
primarily by men (patriarchy). A Golda Meir is
women and their aspirations, as his enemies
always surrounded by a government of men,
reflexively suppose, Goldberg has a long-term
and there is no queen with any real power
relationship with a woman who edits a magazine. He
anywhere rules when an equivalent male is
chairs a department where half the faculty is
available.
female. Yet he does speak out on subjects that
Second, the highest-status (nonmost white male academics consider taboo.
maternal) roles are male (male attainment).
simply describes it sounds paranoid. The logical
There are societies in which the women do all
and evidential inadequacy of most feminist
of the important economic work (e.g., growing all the
works is so great that anyone who has not read
these works would think that I must be
food) while the men seem mostly to hang
misrepresenting them. While the hard sciences Given the ferocity of the reaction to his work, one loose. But, in such societies, hanging loose is
who
has
not
read
Why
Men
Rule
might
assume
that
are to a great extent immunized against this sort
given highest status. Goldberg believes mat it is
of sloppy thought, sociology has deteriorated into Goldberg opposes an Equal Rights Amendment, urges not primarily that whatever males do is given
something not much more than rationalization for
high status (ditch-digging is male and low
what people want to believe. Truth is declared to women back to the kitchen, or, at the least, defends status), but rather that males are more strongly
be nothing more than opinion invoked for political male dominance as a social good. Not so. drawn to whatever is given high status. By and large,
purposes and is assessed in terms of its imagined social neither is entailed in anything I write."
Somewhat of a Leftist when he was a young man, society determines what is given high status. This can
consequences and its ability to soothe anxiety."
vary considerably, hereditary position is given high status
Yet surprisingly, given such a view, Goldberg is Goldberg drew back from such views as a result of the in one society, hunting ability in another, etc. Whatever
not pessimistic. He says: "I've always believed, (and I excesses of the Sixties. He began to focus on his own it is that is given high status (for whatever culturallythink that my experience justifies this belief), that truth discipline of sociology, which was undergoing a significant determined reason in whichever particular society), it is
wins in the long run. It may be no match for runaway radicalization, and to reconsider questions that he, and always men who are more willing to give up other needs
emotion, but the issues to which people attach strong practically all his colleagues, had considered answered. and satisfactions—love, family, health, relaxation, etc.—
passions change over time and the inadequacy of a bad Eventually, he came to be particularly interested in issues to do what is required to attain the high status.
analysis becomes apparent. After all, I have seen hundreds that would become hot-button topics in the years ahead,
Third, dominance in male-female relationships is
of feminist works come into, and go out of, print over the whether nature was stronger than nurture and whether always associated with males. "Male dominance" refers to
past two decades and my book is still here. It was the biology was destiny.
the
feeling,
of both men and women, that the woman must
A turning point came in 1970 when he wrote an
character Linc, I believe, in an old Mod Squad episode,
"get around" the male to attain power. In most societies
article
for
the
Yale
Review
that
contained
a
footnote
repeating
who said, 'it doesn't matter how long it takes, as long as it
the standard sociological claim that biology is unimportant male dominance is reflected in the formal authority system.
takes."
to human behavior except in the most obvious of ways But even when it is not (as in the United States), the
(males are physically larger than women, women give birth expectation is still one of male dominance. (This is attested
to in the United States by, for example, the feminists'
iven the ferocity of the reaction to his work, someone to offspring, etc.). As he recalls the incident, "I wrote dislike of male dominance and their attempt to explain it in
who has yet to read Why Men Rule might assume something to the effect that, while societies will rationalize purely social terms.) Social attitudes might support or
that Goldberg argues against an Equal Rights sex difference in biological terms, biology is unimportant detest male dominance. (In our own society there was a
Amendment, urges women back to the kitchen, or, and this is shown by the fact that there are matriarchies. time when the man's taking the lead was positively valued
at the least, defends male dominance as a social good. Fortunately, when the piece reached the galley stage, I by nearly every woman, although today such a view is
Not so. Goldberg believes merely in letting the decided to find out whether I knew what the hell I was detested.) But attitudes are causally unimportant to the
intellectual chips fall where they may. Increasingly talking about. I asked a number of anthropologists for an reality they judge. They are not much more likely, according
embattled over the years, he is still nearly obsessive in his example of a matriarchy—or at least an 'equiarchy'—and to Goldberg, to eliminate the reality than would a social
insistence—as he was when he first began his research on was met with a lot of hemming and hawing. This sparked dislike of men's being taller eliminate the fact of that
sex roles—-that is can't generate ought. And it is probably my interest and I began to track down every claim of an matter.
this conviction, more than anything else, that sets him exceptional society [i.e., one that is not patriarchal]. I
"Cultural anthropology has given the world a
apart from his detractors. "Science must not be concerned found that such claims were never made by the ethnographer priceless treasure," he says, "the ethnographic descriptions
with what should be, only with what is," he says. What who actually studied the society, but always by a sociologist of many hundreds—or thousands, if one counts less formal
should be done about what is, when there is anything that in an introductory textbook or a politically tendentious works—of societies and the incredible variation they have
can be done, is the question that must be answered. In a work pretending to be serious scholarship.
"I found a great many such claims and in every demonstrated. In the future, when the homogenization of
democratic society the question should be answered by
the world has made all societies more alike than different,
the people. Thus, for example, one may accept case consulted the ethnographic work said to support the only these ethnographies will stand against the human
everything I say about male dominance and conclude that claim. The ethnographic work never even begins to support ethnocentric tendency to think things had to be the way
an equal rights amendment is needed on the grounds that the claim. Usually the 'exceptional society' did differ in they are."
the innate male tendency to attain dominance has little to some irrelevant way having to do with male and female
do with me ability to perform well. On the other hand, one roles. For example, the society might have women as the
But, Goldberg argues, when the crosscultural evidence of
may conclude that, in a time of weak role models, nominal 'property owners,' men as the secretaries (as ours
thousands of such varied societies demonstrates that
socialization should reflect and magnify the innately once did) and the like. But, no matter how primitive or
every one of these societies conforms an institution to
different tendencies of males and females. Both views modern a society, no matter what its religious or economic universal limits, this would be sufficient to force us to
system, etc., certain things are always present in every one
are concordant with all I write and
of the thousands of societies for which we have any posit a determinative physiological difference
evidence from ethnographic studies and less-rigorous
reports of travelers, missionaries, etc."
G
HETERODOXY
between males and females even if we had no idea
of the nature of that physiological
mechanism—a physiological difference that
generates different hierarchies of desires and
different behavior. He finds that cultural
explanations fail on grounds of illogic and
discordance with the cross-cultural evidence.
"Moreover, we need not posit this
physiological difference as if there were no
direct neuroendocrinological evidence just because
so many sociologists don't know anything about
the neuroendocrinological evidence," he says.
"There is an enormous, sixty-year literature,
attesting
to
the
importance
of
neuroenddcrinblogical development to malefemale differences in behavior, evidence from the
study of normal human beings, human
hermaphrodites, and experimental animals
hormonally altered, with male physiology
being associated with a lower threshold for the
release of dominance behavior. Whether one sees
this difference as 'a more-easily released male
tendency tor react to hierarchies with dominance
behavior, or 'a greater male need of dominance'; as
'a stronger male ego that asserts itself' or 'a weaker
male ego that needs shoring up by attainment of
dominance' is unimportant. What is important is
that there is the male-female difference and any
model that is to reflect human reality must
acknowledge this difference. Males and
females, as a result of their respective physical make-ups,
have differing tendencies to react to differing
environments (hierarchy, status, member of the other sex,
infant-in-distress, etc.).
"No serious researcher in the biological sciences
doubts this. What the biological researchers do often do is
refuse to say what this implies on the social level. This is
precisely what the researcher should say; he doesn't
know anything about the crosscultural evidence that is
relevant to the question. He would have to generalize from
the individual to the social and he is too good a scientist
to do this without the relevant social evidence. However,
when you present him with the crosscultural evidence, the
biologist will grant the strong likelihood that the universal social realities are a function of the neuroendocrinological realities. Being a good scientist, with a
strong impulse for as great a parsimony as can be
legitimately obtained for explanations, he sees that all of
the social scientists' attempts to obfuscate [the true
explanation solution by invoking the social mediators of
institutions are superfluous. For a sufficient and
parsimonious explanation of the social universalities there
is no case requiring mention of the social, [except] if one
wants to understand the variation that falls within the
limits set by physiology. If, for example, one wishes to
understand the differences between Saudi and American
patriarchy, then, of course, social factors become of
determinative causal importance."
More than a decade ago, Goldberg had a letter
published in Contemporary Sociology, the book review
journal of the American Sociological Association read by
virtually every sociologist likely to write an introductory
textbook. In his letter, Goldberg quoted the acknowledgment of Margaret Mead, the social scientist most identified
with female dominance, that his anthropological evidence
on universality was accurate. He also quoted a letter she
had written to American Anthropologist denying that any
of her field studies had found a society that reversed sex
roles, and he gave sources of evidence demonstrating that
she had not found an exception.
Years later, Goldberg surveyed nearly 40
introductory texts in sociology and found that over 30 still
began their chapters on sex roles with reference to Mead's
study of the Tchambuli and a claim that this study
demonstrates the possibility of a society lacking the
universals Goldberg discovered. (All but two of the other
ten texts took the same position, although they did not
mention Mead.)
"Is there not," Goldberg asks, "something a bit
bizarre about sociology's presenting as fact dubious little
studies whose logical incoherence is obvious at a glance,
while ignoring a constraint on the very nature of society?
In Why Men Rule I have a chapter identifying and analyzing
25 common fallacies that often arise in discussions of the
social implications of sex differences. It might be worth
mentioning here the two most common and most obvious.
"First, forgetting that whenever we discuss sex
differences we are speaking in statistical terms. The model
to keep in mind is height. When we say that men are taller
PAGE
political arguments, the Left feels constrained to
invoke illogic and to make up facts in order to
camouflage the inevitably subjective nature of all
moral and political arguments and to confuse the
ought with the is.
An example of Goldberg's approach can
be seen in his essay on the death penalty. He
points out that the Right usually argues for death
penalty in terms of justice, retribution, and the like,
regardless of whether the death penalty deters
other criminals. To Goldberg, such arguments
are as totally defensible as they are incapable of
persuading those who don't already agree with
them. The Left, sharing Goldberg's empiricist
leanings and feeling that the value-based
argument is unpersuasive, feels constrained to
make the factual claim that the death penalty
does not deter criminals. Goldberg's essay is
devoted to shredding the logic of the argument on which
this claim rests. A taste of his approach can be seen in his
response to the oft-heard argument that most murderers kill for emotional reasons. Goldberg points out
that mere are two flaws in this attempt to deny the
deterrent ability of the death penalty. First, it
demonstrates the wrong thing in that the issue is not what
deters the murderer (obviously nothing does, that's why
he's a murderer), but what deters those who do not
murder. And second, the Left's argument assumes that
the effect of the death penalty must be conscious
calculation of costs and not the strength of the
unconscious internalized resistance even to
emotionally-motivated acts, an assumption Goldberg
than women, we don't mean that every man is taller than does away with.
every woman. On an individual level, there are obviously
men who would rank high among women in shortness or,
imilarly, Goldberg analyzes commonly proposed
say, in nurturance, and women who would rank high
positions on racial stereotypes, black athletic
among men in height and dominance. But a population's
superiority, the varying scores on SATs, Freudian
observations and the institutions that reflect them are
theory/abortion, and homosexuality. It is a measure
based on the statistical reality. No society could have
of
the
rigor of these essays that one cannot predict his
expectations of greater female height or dominance
behavior or expect the best basketball teams to be composed conclusions (something that cannot be said for the
of females. Without an understanding of the statistical arguments he analyzes). Thus, for example, he
nature of sex differences, any discussion of the subject is demonstrates the accuracy of stereotypes (though not
necessarily the causal explanations attributed to them or
doomed to incoherence.
"Secondly, socialization can never explain the uses to which they are put), the undeniable inherent
universal sex differences, but can merely force us to superiority of black athletes, and the accuracy of the
rephrase the question. (Why is one behavior associated Scholastic Aptitude Tests. In an essay guaranteed to
with females and another with males?) To say that men annoy nearly everyone, Goldberg argues that one's
tend to more strongly exhibit dominance behavior because position on abortion must be determined by one's
little girls are told not to fight is like saying men can grow definition of the fetus as "person" or "nonperson" and that
mustaches because little girls are told that facial hair is all other argument is superfluous.
Hi|s dissection of commonly accepted claims
unfeminine. Often the socialization is far more a reflection
concerning homosexuality demonstrates his ability to see
of, rather than a cause, of a sex difference."
the fallacy within the truism. He grants that someone
willing to declare that no behavior can reasonably be called
hile he is hated by many, Steven Goldberg is "abnormal" can exploit the fact that an assessment of
admired by some. He constantly gets letters "normality" and "abnormality" (in the psychological sense
from other academics who praise him for his of the words) concerns an overlap of the empirical and
"courage." It is a compliment he is grateful for but subjective. But he also points out that no homosexual
rejects: "It was Freud, I think, who once pointed out when spokesman is willing to go so far as to argue that
someone called him courageous, all one has to lose by "homosexuality is normal and so is necrophilia." That is,
unpopular arguments is contact with people one would such a spokesman would wish to argue that homosexnot be terribly attracted to anyway. Now, five hundred uality is normal while some other behaviors are not. But to
years ago when you said something unpopular they do so he must surrender the argument that exploits the
BOILED YOU IN OIL. That took courage. Courage is partially subjective nature of assessments of normality and
required of that majority of professors whose work only declare that no behavior can reasonably be termed
occasionally touches on sex differences and who abhor "abnormal."
Goldberg is aware that his approach raises issues
conflict. For such people to support work like mine
requires real courage and I cherish those who have it. of deep social significance. He acknowledges the possibility
There are not many. Far more common is the scientist who that, while analyzing answers to social questions is one of
only privately acknowledges that the neuroendo- the purposes of education, too much objectification of
crinological evidence overwhelmingly supports my values may be unhealthy for society. Such values, he and
many other social theorists suggest, are inculcated not by
analysis."
Despite the hard knocks, Steven Goldberg is logic or argument but by socialization and practice and are
having a good time. That he enjoys arguments that occur accepted without critical thought. He even goes so far as to
when the empirical comes in conflict with the ideological write that, while the best thing about truth is that it is true,
is clear from the questions he addresses in his new collection the second best thing about truth is that it is, whatever the
authority system, subversive. In this sense he continues to
of essays, When Wish Replaces thought.
In his introduction to this work, Goldberg represent the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s while
gives us an insight into his own intellectual develop- abjuring the substitution of one authority system for another
ment by picking out certain timely intellectual tenden- that enticed so many other children of the 1960s.
cies and subjecting them to an iconoclastic analysis that
shows he is not of any one party. The Right freely
acknowledges that many of its arguments are rooted not in William Helmreich teaches at City College of New York.
the scientific world of objective fact but in values. To Hard to find in bookstores and libraries, Steven GoldGoldberg, such arguments, once they are logically berg's books can be obtained from their
consistent, become matters of opinion and are not amenable publishers: When Wish Replaces Thought
to settlement by logic or fact. The Left on the other (Prometheus Books) and Why Men Rule (Open Court
hand, feels the same impulses that Goldberg does. But, Books).
where Goldberg simply refrains from making moral and
S
W
HETERODOXY
PAGE
FRAUD IN SPAIN
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, by Peter N. Carroll, Stanford
University Press, 1994
REVIEWED BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
One of the most egregious features of
America's Stalinist "liberals" is their
attachment to myths about themselves, their
alleged virtue and purported nobility. Their
seemingly limitless appetite for self-aggrandizement translates into a worship of their own perverse
reading of the past, in which they paint themselves
as simultaneously naive and knowing, humble
and heroic in their dedication to and sacrifice for
ideals. In reality, their record, almost without
exception, is one of slavish obedience to
orders from their Soviet masters, and is a
testament totalitarian deception, abusiveness,
and cowardice.
There is no more despicable
example of this conduct—and no more
hypertrophied
example
of
the
obfuscating self-hype that goes along
with it—than that of the Spanish Civil War
and the involvement in it of the American
members of the so-called Abraham Lincoln
Brigade. This band of 3,000 militarily inept
victims—comprised of a smattering of decent
individuals overshadowed by a majority of Communist Party
waterfront hacks, college boys, denizens of the Young
Communist League from the outer boroughs of New
York City, adventuring ne'er-do-wells, and otherwise
nondescript members of the lumpening masses— has been
transformed by the passage of time and the gullibility of
American intellectuals into a legion of far-sighted and
self-sacrificing antifascist warriors.
It's all based on a lie, which, like so many others
perpetrated by the Left, has been so successfully propagated
that its perpetuators have become lazy. Benefiting from
nostalgia and the unrelieved approbation of those who
have swallowed the myth, they end up saying things that
are gross and revealing without realizing it. This is what
makes a recent book, Peter Carroll's The Odyssey of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil
War, a sort of diary of deceit. It would be difficult to find
a book more thoroughly saturated with lies than Carroll's.
Even its title is a doubly dishonest one. To begin with, there,
was no "brigade." The Spanish army counted four battalions
to each brigade, and the strength of the U.S. (and Canadian)
volunteers never exceeded that of, at the very most (utilizing a generous classification), two battalions. But the title
includes yet another lie. This is not the story of Americans
who went to Spain to support the republic in the 1936-39
Civil War; Carroll never mentions a number of important
participants and memoirists.
This is not the work of a naive young academic,
burdened with the prejudices of the 1960s and feeling his
way through the 1930s, as may be said about many
Stalinophilic works by "new historians." It is a sentimental
exercise in "official" history, a pastiche of the writing
style of the Hollywood Communist Party hack Alvah
Bessie and the meanderings of Milton Wolff, another
specimen of extraordinary dishonesty and self-delusion.
HP he true story of the Abraham Lincoln volunteers has
X been thoroughly established in unchallengeable
published sources. The Americans who went to Spain
under the auspices of the Communist Party were overwhelmingly inexperienced in war, in contrast with the French,
Belgians, Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans in the
International Brigades, who frequently were veterans of
trench fighting in World War I,
Their departures from the United States were
inadequately documented so that in some cases their families never learned of their fates. They were undertrained
and killed in enormous numbers—an 80-percent casualty
rate at the beginning. Their commanders, such as one
Robert Merriman, nicknamed "Murderman" by the troops
under him, were incompetent, and the rank-and-file
assassinated at least one commander, a man named Oliver
Law, on the field of battle—a "fragging" avant la lettre.
Many responded to the demoralizing situation in
which they found themselves by ceaseless attempts to
desert after having been prevented from returning home in
violation of the promises made to them when recruited.
They were politically spied upon, and some were executed
by their own officers; even Carroll admits that they were all
threatened with assassination for breaches of discipline.
Some of them were used for police duty against
Spanish leftist dissidents. They had no serious contact with
the Spanish people they had allegedly gone to help, except
when they were so used for tasks Spanish workers refused,
such as executions. The Americans, while militarily useless,
treated their Spanish co-combatants, who fought valiantly
for three years, with contempt. An English veteran, Ralph
Bates, said the Americans fought "in a vacuum," separated
from Spanish reality. Indeed, it was as if they had left the
United States but never arrived in Spain itself, instead
landing in a little extension of the Soviet Gulag, under the
surveillance of spy-hunting Stalinist police commissars at
the same time they were under fire from Franco's forces.
This bizarre situation is unconsciously reflected
in the repeated use by Carroll, a writer who clearly never
met a Stalinist cliche he didn't like, of the phrase "the home
front" when referring to the United States. The United
States was NOT the home front in the Spanish Civil War,
the United States was not involved in the war. The home
front in the Spanish Civil War was in Spain, and it was
populated by anarchists and other Spanish revolutionaries
who rescued the republic at the beginning of the war and
whom the American Stalinists, once they returned to the
United States, spent the rest of their lives defaming as
cowardly and undisciplined.
This book contains a photograph that speaks
volumes. It is of the author, with a flash-bulb grin, sitting
with his knee being groped by the American-born Russian
spy Morris Cohen, a creepy type now living in retirement
in Moscow. It also includes a disclosure that speaks volumes, although Carroll doesn't seem to know it. This disclosure involves William Bailey, a garrulous old CP union
bureaucrat and apparatchik in the Bay Area. Bailey claims
responsibility for the apprehension in Spain of an alleged
American deserter, Paul White, who was subsequently
liquidated—one of two volunteers identified by name
whose executions are admitted by the Stalinist old guard.
As if that weren't enough, Carroll admits that
Lincoln Brigade veteran Milton Wolff, who later served
with the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and
never lets anybody forget it, deliberately abandoned a
"reactionary" group of 30 fellow OSS officers who were
then captured by the Germans. In wartime such infractions
15
(real desertion in Wolff's case, not a heresy-hunting
pretext as with the purged and executed Lincoln volunteers),
ate typically punished by court-martial or even a capital
sentence.
Carroll himself proves no less devious than the
subjects of his hero worship. Although he went to Moscow
after the recent opening of archives and examined the files
on the International Brigades, nowhere in his book has he
used or even described the bulk of materials available
therein. These include documents due for publication next
year in a Yale University Press book edited by the historians
Harvey Klehr and John E. Hayne. The book will show the
frightful and incessant hunt for alleged spies and deserters
in the Lincoln Brigade's ranks, the recruitment by the
Russian secret police of American volunteers (in addition
to Cohen, whom Carroll treats as a hero) for espionage
elsewhere in the world, and the poor conduct of the American
volunteers when compared with that of leftist militants
from various European countries.
Carroll' s entire network of prevarications rests on two
fundamental lies that have yet to be discussed by most leftist
American historians. The first is the supposition that the
involvement of U.S. volunteers was particularly relevant to
the war effort mounted by the Spanish Republic. In
reality, they played no significant role. This basic truth
is reflected in the absence of substantive attention paid
them by historians, including those of the
Left, in Spain. The second, more
fundamental lie, is the claim, repeated to the
point of nausea, that the issue in Spain
was "fascism vs. antifascism," that the Civil
War was nothing more than an invasion by
Germany and Italy, and that the Leftist
regime was simply an elected democratic
government, whose fight was a "premature"
version of, say, the action of the Allies
against the Nazis.
This is a thesis supported by no
reputable Spanish historian of either the
Left or the Right. The Spanish Civil War
was the outcome of a social revolutionary
movement that began in 1931 with the fall of the
monarchy and that had to do with problems of Iberian
society: land tenure, education, the nationalism of the
peripheral ethnic communities (Catalonia and the
Basque country). While the intervention of the Germans
and Italians was brutal, and certainly as evil as that of
Stalin and his mercenaries in the International Brigades,
both these external phenomena were secondary in the
overall conflict, which had gestated in the peninsula since
the early 1900s.
Stalin and his minions did not become involved
in Spain to confront fascism or to save an embattled
democracy but to destroy an indigenous revolutionary
movement that threatened the increasing Soviet influence
over the worldwide Left. In the historic Spanish labor
movement the Communist Party was a tiny minority until
its prestige was temporarily boosted by Soviet arms. The
majority of those who struggled and died to resist the
rightist forces under Franco were precisely those nonStalinist socialists and anarchists that the American
Stalinists have assiduously slandered since the war.
T his is, of course, the analysis presented by George X
Orwell in Homage to Catalonia and elsewhere. Further, it is
accepted today by every serious Spanish historian of the
Left. In the more than 400 pages of his dreadful
assemblage, however, Carroll never addresses Spanish
views of the war. And the blurb on the back of the book
refers to an "Orwell question" as if, after more than 50
years of proof, Stalin's betrayal of the Spanish Republic—
with the assistance, however inept, of the armed radical
tourists of the Lincoln Brigades—was no more than a
theory put forward by a single contentious individual.
Stalin, the International Brigades, and the Abraham Lincoln
volunteers played exactly the role of saboteurs and internal
enemies of the Spanish Republic that they, and Carroll, still
seek to assign to "Trotskyites"—actually the POUM, a
mass party that was not Trotskyist and that was supported
by the workers of Catalonia long after the war was over.
Many years ago Ernest Hemingway wrote to Carroll' s
hero Milton Wolff, declaring that the Communists were
"pricks" in the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway was right.
If Carroll had started from this simple precept he might
have approached the reality of Spain. The fact that he started
with something approaching the opposite assumption makes
his book not reality but rather socialist realism.
Stephen Schwartz is the co-author, with Victor Alba,
of Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A
History of the POUM, published in 1988 by
Transaction Books.
Student Expelled Because of
Diversity Problems
E
BY JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER
ddie "Duke" Whitman, a 21-yearold junior at Northern New Jersey
State College, today became the first
student to be expelled for violating the
college's recently enacted Student Behavior
Guidelines.
Whitman was charged with Racial
Harassment last spring following a complaint by
Ouisshal Ov'rcom, an African-American co-ed.
Whitman, who is white, asked Ov'rcom for a date.
When she refused, citing a preference for dating
men of her own race, he knelt before her and recited
the 130th sonnet of Shakespeare ("My mistress"
eyes are nothing like the sun"), which he prefaced
with a remark to the effect that this was the most
eloquent way he could think of to sway her.
Seeking immediate redress of this "insult,"
Ms. Ov'rcom contacted Northern New Jersey's
Office of Racial Harassment. In her complaint, she
asked the school to force Whitman to attend racial
sensitivity training because he obviously did not
understand why reciting an ambiguous poem by a
patriarchal white author like Shakespeare would not
only not have the desired effect on her, but also
would be, as she phrased it, "a giga turn-off."
Summoned before the Racial Harassment
Officer, young Whitman explained that he had
actually asked Ms. Ov 'rcom for a date to satisfy the
school's Student Life Diversity Requirement. (This
provision requires each student to have at least
three dates with a member of another race and two with a
member of the same sex each year. If the requirement is
not met, the student will not receive credit for the year's
academic work.) He explained that he had recently
received a warning from his advisor informing him that
his dating of Asian women had only partially qualified
him, and that he must have at least one date with a student
of African extraction in order to remain in good academic
standing. Since it was just three weeks before the end of the
year when he invited Ms. Ov'rcom to the theater, the
possibility of a refusal was a matter of some concern to
him. Whitman admitted that he had perhaps shown poor
judgment in choosing this particular sonnet, which does
have elements of "lookism," but explained that since his
major was Elizabethan literature, it was the first thing that
had come to mind.
The Racial Harassment Officer castigated
Whitman, saying that his offense went far beyond poor
judgment and ordered him to rewrite Shakespeare's
Othello so that the play conformed to the school's Racial
Harmony Guidelines and to produce it at Northern New
Jersey's Huey P. Newton Memorial Theater before the
end of the term. Distressed by the proximity of the
deadline, Whitman appealed the verdict to the Board of
Sensitivity Oversight and managed to convince the board
to allow a substitute punishment that would be more easily
accomplished: memorizing the entire output of Maya
Angelou and reciting it at noontime in the Quad.
When Ms. Ov'rcom learned that the oversight
board had mitigated Whitman's original sentence, she
Eddie D. Whitman
demanded transcripts of both hearings. It was at this point
that she discovered that, despite the ostensibly romantic nature of his invitation, Whitman had actually issued
his invitation only as a means of fulfilling a diversity
requirement. Ms. Ov'rcom immediately sought assistance from the Sexual Harassment Board in raising Mr.
Whitman's consciousness.
Hauled before the Sexual Harassment Board,
Whitman testified that while he had thought Ms. Ov'rcom
physically attractive, he had actually been drawn to her by
her intelligence and the obvious strength of her character.
Her physical attractiveness had seemed a nice bonus that
would have made fulfilling his interracial dating requirement
even more enjoyable. Then he caught himself and admitted
that he had been mistaken to refer to her looks and reiterated
his admiration for her personality and intelligence. He
apologized for any distress he might have caused her and
assured the board that not only had he not intended any
disrespect, but, on the contrary, he had planned to take her
to an expensive French restaurant prior to attending a
Broadway premiere.
After all testimony had been presented, the Sexual
Harassment Board issued a ruling finding Whitman in
contempt of women. He was ordered to join the Campus
Rape Crisis Group and attend fourteen hours of sensitivity
training. Additionally, the board recommended a review
of his efforts toward the fulfillment of the Like Gender part
of his diversity requirement.
Then Whitman was called before the
Office of Homosexual Affairs about the Like
Gender Dating Requirement. He claimed that he
had more than fulfilled this requirement and
produced 12 male witnesses who swore that on
countless occasions they had accompanied him to
various sporting events and social affairs on and
off campus. Following a brief consultation with
the president of the local chapter of ACT-UP, the
office ruled that two guys going to a football game
together did not constitute a date with a member of
the same sex. Whitman was ordered to attend the
Gay Spring Prom where he must remain for a
period of not less than four hours unless he was
invited to leave for an assignation by a member of
the same sex.
Whitman attended the Gay Spring Prom
and remained there for two hours and twenty
minutes, at which time he left in the company of a
young man who had been similarly sentenced
(although the Office of Homosexual Affairs did
not discover this fact). Then, after completing his
public recitation of the works of Maya Angelou, he
joined the Rape Crisis Group and attended fourteen
fours of sensitivity training. Finally, he applied to
the Campus Diversity Office for his Certificate of
Diversity Approval. This was granted.
However, Ms. Ov'rcom, still mulling over
the testimony given at Whitman's hearing before
the Sexual Harassment Board, realized to her
chagrin that she had allowed an important fact to
slip by unremarked. Returning to the Office of
Racial Harassment, she cited Whitman's choice of a
French restaurant as the venue for their abortive date and
noted that the French had long been a colonial power in
Africa. She received permission to amend her original
complaint to include the insensitivity of the dining
arrangements. Whitman's Certificate of Diversity
Approval was temporarily rescinded pending another
hearing before the Racial Harassment Officer.
Granted an immediate hearing due to the fact that
it was now May 3, Whitman explained that he had chosen
the restaurant not because it was French, but because it was
expensive. He said he had thought that was the least he
could do to show his appreciation for Ms. Ov'rcom's
willingness to help him meet his diversity requirement.
Asked whether she would accept this explanation, Ms.
Ov'rcom refused. "It seems to me he was hoping to play on
what he perceived was my background. He undoubtedly
thought I came from a poor family and that I would be
impressed if he threw a lot of money around. I think this
assumption shows remarkable obtuseness."
Late this afternoon, as reporters from the North
Jersey Journal mobbed the steps of the Campus Diversity
Building, the Chairperson of the Office of Student Behavior
pronounced the office's judgment "Given the gravity of
Ms. Ov'rcom's complaint, this Office has no choice but to
remove Mr. Whitman from the Northern New Jersey
State College community. It is our sincere hope that he
will be able to find another institution that will allow him to
complete his studies."