Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (27 page)

It was during his last televised interview on
60 Minutes
that Eldridge won my final respect. Quiet-spoken, as he had never been in his public life, sober, bespectacled and fully grey, he unburdened himself of what appeared at last to be truly felt convictions, not designed for anyone but himself. He said that when you looked at this country as compared to others, it had been remarkably good to people like himself, and to minorities generally, a fact he had not appreciated when he was young. He said, gravely, "If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country."

The interviewer hardly noticed this last remark, and its significance went unexplored. But I noticed. Here was the beginning of any understanding of what the New Left and its Black Panther vanguard were really about in the 1960s. They were attempting to launch a civil war in America that would have resulted in unimaginable bloodshed. At the same time, they had no sensible idea of how to make things better, as they claimed.

For coming to this understanding, and for having the courage to honestly confront what he did, Eldridge paid a profound price. In a world where it is so difficult to get a handle on the truth, and where so many would prefer that it be buried, we should all be thankful to him for providing us with the one he did.

The truth is otherwise. Kwame Ture was a racist and a lifelong friend of tyrants and oppressors. The world will not miss him. A West Indian immigrant to America, and a child of middle-class privilege, Carmichael hated his adopted country from youth to old age, and never bothered once to acknowledge the immense advantages and personal recognition it undeservedly gave him.

As Stokely Carmichael, his chief claim to fame was to lead young Turks in the civil rights movement in pushing Martin Luther King aside, while denouncing him as an Uncle Tom. In 1966, Carmichael emerged as the chief spokesman for the "black power" movement, which replaced King's goals of nonviolence and integration with agendas of political violence and racial separatism. In 1967, when Israel was attacked by six Arab nations, Carmichael announced that "the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist," and became the first prominent American figure since the Mississippi racist Senator Bilbo held forth in the 1940s, to spew anti-Semitic bile into the public square.

The following year Carmichael began a campaign to promote armed warfare in American cities and was briefly made "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party for his efforts. Ever the racist, Carmichael tried to persuade the Panthers to break off their alliances with whites, but failed. This led to his expulsion from the party and a ritual beating administered by his former comrades. Shortly thereafter, Carmichael left the United States for Africa.

In Africa, he changed his name to Kwame Ture, thereby honoring two dictators (Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure) who caused untold misery to their own peoples. He took up residence as the personal guest of the sadistic Toure, Guinea's paranoid dictator, whose reputation was built on the torture-murders of thousands of his African subjects. Some 250,000 Guineans were driven into exile during Carmichael's stay there, without a protest from this New Left leader.

Returning to the United States in the late 1980s, he took to the lecture circuit as a racial hate-monger, attacking Jews, whites, and America to approving audiences of blacks and leftists on American university campuses, who paid him handsome fees for his efforts. In the end, he found a fitting refuge in the racial sewer of the Nation of Islam, to which he had been introduced at the end of the 1960s by the communist writer Shirley Graham. In his new religious home he proved an apt and loyal protégé of its Jew-baiting, America-hating, racist minister, Louis Farrakhan. Carmichael's parting shot at the country he victimized was to accuse "the forces of American imperialism" of causing the prostate cancer that would have killed him sooner had it not been for the creative medical contributions of scientists who were Jewish, white, and American.

T
HE ARREST IN ENGLAND of Chile's counter-revolutionary General Augusto Pinochet just before the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution brought into focus two celebrated battles of the Cold War in which members of my generation had taken passionate sides. As one who went into these battles on one of those sides and came out on the other, I found myself reacting with mixed but ultimately clear emotions to this history and the events that shaped it.

One source of this ambivalence, undoubtedly, was the residue of feeling retained from my years on the left side of the political struggle. To be on the left imbues one with a sense of righteousness, of having chosen the side of virtue in all such conflicts. Eventually, belonging to the camp of virtue becomes a second nature to every "progressive" and provides compensation for the fact that most of these battles are necessarily lost. As "revolutionaries" in the 1960s, we would console ourselves with the idea that we were destined to lose every battle but the last. We did not join the progressive cause to support history's winners, but to stand up for its losers, the powerless and the victimized, the vulnerable and the oppressed. Our political commitment was to put our weight on the side of social justice. It was a good feeling to have.

For this reason, when it came time to relinquish those political commitments, I found it far easier to identify what was wrong with the left than to move in the direction of the political right. So problematic was even the prospect of such a choice that I withdrew from all politics for nearly ten years before changing course.

When I stepped back from the left, it was because I was repelled by the crimes progressives had committed (and justified) and by the catastrophes they had produced. It turned out that winning the "last" battle could be worse than losing. But, as I made my choice, I had a nagging feeling about certain political events and about specific historical figures who had been associated with the battles I had fought and whose careers I had not yet reexamined. One of those figures was General Pinochet, and the revolution that brought him to power in Chile.

Chile had been rare among Latin American nations in boasting a fairly stable political democracy. Its democracy had produced a historical anomaly — a marxist who had actually been elected to power. We glossed over the fact, naturally, that in accomplishing this feat, Salvador Allende had received only 36 percent of the popular vote in a three-way election. Allende and his supporters seemed to gloss over this fact as well. Pushed by more radical forces on his political left, Allende began a program "to initiate socialism" at once.

A first law of revolutionary theory taught that ruling classes never gave up power without a fight. A first law of democratic theory would have taught that electoral minorities cannot force through revolutionary agendas and hope to survive. Sooner or later, a reaction can be expected. Latin American history taught that this would probably take the form of a military coup. The only question was when.

In thinking about these issues, at the time, we had our eye on our own government in Washington, which was the capital, as we would have put it, of global reaction. In political statements we made at the time, we invoked the cautionary memory of the Bay of Pigs, the failed CIA attempt to topple Fidel Castro during the second year of his revolutionary regime. In our eyes this act had betrayed the true of face of American power, the iron fist in the velvet glove. Policies that appeared to most Americans as democratic we knew to be orchestrated by corporate interests with high-stakes investments in the Third World. It was only a matter of time before these interests asserted themselves in Chile and provoked a civil war.

The coup against Allende came in 19p, when the army generals rose against the regime and toppled it. Allende committed suicide or was killed (as his partisans claim) in the heat of the military battle. The coup was led by Pinochet, who became the nation's new
caudillo
. In the measures imposed to "restore civil order," leftists were rounded up, and five thousand executed. The military dictatorship became the law of the land. Chile's once stable democracy was dead.

Of course, we "knew" the CIA was behind these events. President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, were fighting a counter-revolutionary war in Vietnam and could not tolerate a second revolutionary example in the American hemisphere. The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) had a big investment in Chile, and the charts we drew to show the tentacles of power projected its influence far into the Nixon Administration and the American intelligence community. The entire episode was, in our view, straight out of Lenin.

When I defected from the left, I did not want to be any part of such developments, even in retrospect. It was one thing to reject the left; it was quite another to embrace what appeared to be this kind of right — one that trampled over defenseless people, making their lives even more miserable than they were. Moreover, there was no particular reason for me to do so, even with my new political second thoughts. It was perfectly possible for me to conclude that the schemes of the left were utopian and could result in great social disasters and grotesque crimes, without jumping to the opposite conclusion — that the sadism of right-wing dictators was a proper or even preferable alternative. No one among the conservatives I was familiar with, ever claimed that support for Pinochet was a
sine qua non
of conservative credentials, in the way support for Castro, for example, would have been for anyone on the left. (To be fair, as a leftist, one could be critical of the Castro regime in the 1970s, so long as one was careful to express even greater distaste for Washington and its Cuba policies.)

Another familiar reflex in the thought of progressives, which I retained during the early stages of my transition, was to avert one's eyes from bad news that came from the left. The enemies of promise would use every socialist failing to kill the socialist dream. It was important be on constant guard against these "reactionary" agendas. Every revolutionary enterprise was really a harbinger of human possibility. It was therefore often necessary to bury or repress (what the left regarded as) small or incidental truths, to keep the grand vision alive.

For reasons like this, I found myself paying as little attention as I could to the fate of this other revolution, the one that had actually inspired Allende to dream of a socialist Chile. This was Fidel's revolution in Cuba, whose launching in 1959 had been one of the primary inspirations for the American New Left. For many years now, even we realized that conditions in Cuba — both political and economic — had been degenerating under Castro's rule. Like my comrades, I was not unaware that Cuba was having problems, but I ascribed them — as I did Allende's pre-coup difficulties in Chile — to the machinations of external forces, emanating from two evil empires centered in Washington and Moscow.

At the end of the 1970s, however, I saw a documentary film about Castro's revolution, made by an Academy Award-winning Cuban filmmaker, Nestor Almendros, that changed my perspective. Almendros had left the island in 1963 and gone on to a distinguished career as a cinematographer in Hollywood, where his credits included
Sophie's Choice, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Days of Heaven
. The documentary he had made about Cuba was called
Improper Conduct
and it focused on the Cuban government's brutal treatment of homosexuals as a metaphor for its treatment of all social and political deviants. It was a stunning indictment of what the revolution had become.

One characteristically striking scene in the film was an interview with a black Cuban exile on a street in New York's Harlem. The exile was a flamboyant homosexual, in his early twenties, dressed in a tangerine satin shirt open to the sternum and in white flared trousers. The interviewer asked him whether he liked the freedom he had found in America and in Harlem. Through ivory teeth he answered with a smile that, indeed, he did. The interviewer asked why. He responded: "I am free here. In Cuba I could be arrested just for being dressed like this, and put in jail for six months." The interviewer asked how old he was. "Twenty-three." And then: "How many times were you arrested." The Cuban answered: "Seventeen." This was not a political person. This was one of those ordinary Cubans on whom history (along with the drama created by socialist intellectuals) was inflicted. If this was what the revolution represented to a Cuban like him, what did that say about the ideals to which I had been so devoted? Cuba now had a lower per capita income than it had in 1959, the year Castro took power. The political prisons were full. Hundreds of thousands had fled. Hundreds of thousands more were waiting to flee. Castro had turned his island into a national prison.

Pinochet had always justified his military rule as a temporary measure — in much the same way that Castro had defended his own revolutionary dictatorship. The suspension of liberties was necessary to defend the regime and restore stability to create the economic foundations of a true democracy. Ten years after I saw Almendros's film, the Pinochet dictatorship held an election. Pinochet had decided to end his military rule and restore Chilean democracy. The dictator was holding a national referendum to pronounce judgment on his own regime. Even the left was fielding a candidate under the ground rules that Pinochet had devised.

As it turned out, in Pinochet's Chile the claim of temporary expediency for the harsh measures was valid. Under the fifteen years of Pinochet's rule, Chile had prospered so greatly that it was dubbed the "miracle economy," one of the two or three richest in Latin America.