Chapter 6
.
Endless Lying
.
Toffler had other friends, of course, but few were as close as Betty
Friedan.
This became obvious during the three occasions when I talked with her,
each time in the presence of Mr. Toffler. There was a natural rapport
between them even if Betty was closer still, to Alvin's wife, Heidi.
.
The interesting thing about Mrs. Friedan was that she definitely was a
Communist even if in 1975 this was not clear to anyone who was not
a close friend of hers, which I was not. We did talk, and once after a
meeting we washed the dishes together (washing dishes with Betty Friedan,
it must be said, blew my mind at the time), but several minutes of
conversation
during just a few encounters was hardly sufficient for development of
warmly
shared sentiments. The result was that what I finally learned about
Betty's
past politics came when it did for everyone else, in 1999, with the
publication of Daniel Horowitz's book, Betty Friedan and the Making
of the Feminine Mystique, or to be more accurate, reading reviews of
the volume and learning the salient facts about her younger years that way.
.
One such review was written by David Horowitz, no relation to Daniel,
featured at Salon in its January 18, 1999 edition. That review, "Betty
Friedan's
secret Communist past," wasn't available to me at a time before I had a
computer, but its disclosures are similar to what I did read more than a
decade ago and can serve as an introduction to the topic.
.
David Horowitz began by asking a question about people of the hard Left:
"Why do they feel the need to lie so relentlessly about who they are?"
.
This issue is one that he discussed several times in various articles in
his
2003 book, Left Illusions. For there is no question about it, Communists
lie.
They lie frequently, whenever they think it serves their purposes, and
without
a trace of conscience. Which he knows from experience, having been a
Communist himself for more than 25 years. This was one reason why he quit
the party and turned his back on Marxist-Leninism. He could not stand
the duplicity, the hypocrisy that went with it, and what this was doing to
his sense of integrity.
.
Here is how David Horowitz puts it, in his own words:
.
Speaking about how Watergate author Carl Bernstein -who of anyone
should know about the perils of lying- essentially lied about his father's
Communist past, Horowitz said: "The Communists lied to everyone then,
and the new keepers of the faith are still lying today."
.
The premise is that, back then, the McCarthy hearings were a "witch hunt"
that were injuring a lot of people, it was a political holocaust, etc. As
Bernstein's
father told his famous son, there is no good reason to dredge up Stalin.
And, so, Carl Bernstein, crusader for truth, caved in to his father's
dishonest
self-serving argument. The actual truth, which is doubted by no-one any
more,
that the State Department of the 1950s included a good number
of CPUSA members, is ignored to protect the guilty."
.
Read this again if you missed it the first time: "ignored to protect the
guilty."
Not: "ignored to protect the innocent."
.
Which is anything but an endorsement of everything that Joe McCarthy said
or did in that bygone era. He was, by common consent, a total ass.
Yet in point of fact, McCarthy was right. He had no idea about how
to carry out rigorous research, he was incapable of developing his
case in a logically irrefutable manner, and -to use idiom- he swung
wildly for the fences. Regardless, he was correct. This being the case
what are we supposed to do? Pretend the truth does not matter?
.
Hence, Carl Bernstein published a dishonest book about his father .
.
Here is the father's justification, in David Horowitz's words,
which persuaded the son:
.
"In Al Bernstein's view, even though McCarthy was right about the presence
of Communists posing as liberals, and even though virtually all of
McCarthy's
victims were Communists, the fact that they were Communists (and lied about
being Communists) had nothing to do with their being singled out: "Was I
'oppressed' because I was a Communist? ...No, it was incidental.
I was 'oppressed' because I was affiliated with a left-wing union."
.
"No one should be misled by the disingenuousness of this paternal
catechism,
The sacrament the father rams down the throat of the son is brutal as well
as
tasteless. In point of fact, Al Bernstein was a communist; he was not
merely
"affiliated with" the United Pubic Workers of America, he was a leader of
the union. The UWPA was not merely a "left-wing union," but a union
under Communist control..."
.
Horowitz, was after all, honest about his own parents even if it meant
admitting some unpleasant truths about them. The attitude of Leftists like
"my parents," he said, "toward historical truth was ruthless. Nothing
should
be told that might hurt the cause. Like thousands of others they had left
the Party, but they could never leave the faith."
.
"Neo-communists survive on bad faith. In the past, communists believed in
what they did; today, neo-communists justify their deeds by invoking the
excuse of good intentions.... If you believe in a future that will redeem
mankind,
what lies will you not tell, and what crime will you not commit, to make
the
future happen? This is why [so-called] progressives have committed every
[imaginable] crime in the last half century and lied to all, especially
themselves."
Page 438.
.
And what of the fourth estate? Bernstein's book, Loyalties, was widely
reviewed.
Three examples make the point, The Sunday edition of the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. In each case, as Horowitz
characterized the reviews, 'Left-wing Democrats criticized Bernstein -not
for
his unwillingness to face the truth, but because he had not defended his
father's
Communist background enough to exonerate the man from any hint of
unethical conduct!'
.
.
There is also David Horowitz's defence of Christopher Hitchens, another
man of the Left who became fed up with the ceaseless lying of other
Leftists.
The break came with the exposure of William Clinton as a first class liar
in
1998 - 1999. Hitchens had become a Leftist to begin with because, for him
as for many others, the Left represented integrity, repudiation of the
habitual
dishonesty of establishment politicians, and valorization of truth as a
condition
for democratic politics.
.
With one disclosure after another that Clinton was untruthful, with his
disregard
for the women he had sexual affairs with as if Paula Jones, Kathleen
Willey, and
Monica Lewinsky (to name a few) were disposable 'trailer trash,' Hitchens
had enough. He didn't care if Clinton was a Democrat; the fact was, "Slick
Willie" was a liar who had disgraced the office of the presidency. For
his trouble, however, Hitchens was disowned by nearly all of the Left.
.
As Horowitz observed, "in blurting out the truth, Hitchens slammed
the left up against its hypocrisies and threatened to unmask their
sanctimonious
pretensions." All of which was seen as unforgivable -in contrast to
Clinton's
many lies, all of which were forgiven on the spot.
.
Worse, one-time friends of "Hitch," like Alexander Cockburn, turned
against him.
Indeed, Cockburn resorted to slander to put maximum distance between
himself
and Christopher. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Hitchens supposedly was an
"aggressive closet homosexual," plus a drunk, a boor, and otherwise a
pervert.
Never mind that Hitchens was married, had no interest in homosexuality
whatsoever, and, in terms of deportment, was as much of a gentleman
as can be found on this planet.
.
As Horowitz noted: "Not a single member of Hitchens' former community,
which includes people who have known Hitchens as a comrade for thirty
years,
has stepped forward to defend him from the ugly slander." But, added
Horowitz, so it has been on the Left as far back as he can remember,
with the list of Communist liars long and impressive, everyone
from Paul Robeson to Sidney Blumenthal.
.
Communists, when they aren't airbrushing history, resort to smears of their
opponents as second nature. Since the Communists -and, by the way, this
includes today's Cultural Marxists- are the ones most guilty of lying,
for them "lying is good politics."
.
As page 254 says, Communists and their fellow-travelers in the Democratic
Party, not to mention a certain class of Republicans who aspire to elite
social
status that the Left is known for, do not care who they smear, who is
libeled,
and who is black-listed. For them, lying is how to get things done.
.
.
All of which relates directly to the story of Betty Friedan.
.
.
.
---------------------------------------
Chapter 7
.
The Story of Betty Friedan
.
.
.
Daniel Horowitz's book about how The Feminine Mystique came to be written
is an attempted whitewash of Mrs. Friedan's subversive past -in the guise
of service to nothing but the truth, of course.
.
Not that Daniel didn't expose a great deal of embarrassing information
that
Friedan did not want known to the public. Indeed, she smeared Daniel
Horowitz
unmercifully to try and discredit him, but there were too many verifiable
facts
for her to be successful. Besides, what Daniel mostly did in his biography
of
Betty was to protect himself As far as Friedan went, mostly he "let the
chips
fall where they may." And there she was in 1999, politically naked, and
the sight was not pretty.
.
As David Horowitz said in his review of Daniel's tome, Betty Goldstein
(her maiden name) was "a political activist and professional propagandist
for the Communist left for a quarter of a century before the publication
of "The Feminine Mystique" launched the modern women's movement."
She was, a "Stalinist Marxist" -as was, we might add, Alvin Toffler and
his wife Heidi, during pretty much the same years.
.
As David continued, Friedan's "famous description of America's suburban
family household as "a comfortable concentration camp" in "The Feminine
Mystique" therefore had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America
than with any of her actual experience as a housewife or mother." The
whole
thing was a sham, in other words, despite the lesser truths scattered
throughout Friedan's best seller. The premises of the book are Marxist.
.
"It is fascinating," said David, "that Friedan not only felt the need to
lie
about her real views and life experience then, but still feels the need to
lie
about them now." But it was, and is, par for the course. Betty is in
good company, with a list of "Let's pretend I'm not a Communist"
Communists as evidence for this statement:
.
"Folk singer Pete Seeger, who has been a party puppet his entire life..."
Eric Foner, a favorite of NPR, is another, along with his father, and
let us not forget Angela Davis, at one time the the Communist Party's
candidate for vice president but today better known as a 'distinguished
professor' or 'socially conscious activist' or some other phony euphemism.
.
Why all the lies?" asked David Horowitz. "The reason is this: The truth
is
too embarrassing." Things are a little different from person to person, but
for Betty Friedan the truth is that "well into her 30s she thought Stalin
was
the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States was an evil empire,
and that her interest in women's liberation was just a subtext of her
real desire to create a Soviet America."
.
What we cannot expect is that this truth will ever be explained to
"unsuspecting young women," speaking of college co-eds, "whose only
understanding of this past will come from their tenured leftist
professors."
Maybe this short shrifts many young women but the point cannot be
argued with. One of the prime motivations for the rise of feminism
in the 1960s was Communist ideology.
.
Feminism is not what it was back then, of course. But contemporary Leftists
do much to keep alive a movement that might otherwise collapse from its
many internal contradictions, its disdain for the lessons of evolutionary
biology,
and its sometimes rabid reverse-sexist hatred of the opposite gender.
.
.
For an excellent analysis of the issue of Betty Friedan see Joanne
Boucher's
essay, "Betty Friedan and the Radical Past of Liberal Feminism," published
in
the Summer 2003 issue of New Politics, more-or-less a Democratic
Socialist journal that has been around for more than half a century.
Not that I still think of myself as a Democratic Socialist, that is not
the case, but as you can tell there still are sympathies of this kind
within me. So, here is a critique from the "Left" that is anything but
Communist. And it rakes Friedan over the coals.
/
There is no mistake about exactly this in Joanne Boucher's article.
.
What is most interesting about her essay-review is that at the very
beginning
she said this: "Friedan is notorious for her initial vociferous opposition
to the introduction of lesbianism in particular and sexuality in general
as legitimate topics of political discussion in NOW" -of which she was
one of the original founders.
.
The subject of homosexuality is one that deserves special attention. The
next
chapter will discuss this issue in some detail, and there are other
chapters
about the topic further on, in the text. But for now let us look closely at
Betty Friedan's Communist history.
.
.
As Joanne Boucher observed, in The Feminine Mystique and more
generally at that time and for some years afterward, Friedan " pushed a
brand
of respectability which was anathema to many of the radicals in the early
days
of the women's movement. Friedan was adamant that the women's movement
present itself as reasonable, moderate, heterosexual, family-loving not
family-destroying, man- loving not man-hating in its approach." She wanted
to create an image for herself as a "paradigmatic liberal feminist."
.
The strategy worked. Friedan became quite successful. As people in
advertising might say, she knew her market and played to it. And her market
was the "white, privileged middle class woman who was unaware of the
lives
of women outside the confines of safe and prosperous suburbs." Which is
perfectly all right if the purpose of your work is nothing but book sales
or well remunerated speaking engagements. But for people on the political
Left, selling a million books or earning a million dollars lecturing to
audiences in thirty states, can only be a means to an end.
.
There is another dimension to Betty Friedan to think about as well. How
true
was Friedan's image to the real person who projected that image? The answer
turns out to be "not very." This is because the disclosures in "Daniel
Horowitz's
book Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique are intensely
dramatic and disorienting. For Horowitz meticulously details the
voluminous
evidence of Betty Friedan's entirely un-bourgeois and un-liberal political
commitments prior to the publication of The Feminine Mystique."
.
To put this in simple English, Friedan's image was a lie.
.
It seems that a major part of women's movement is built on a foundation of
lies
.
The reader should be referred to Joanne Boucher's lengthy article itself
for
all of the sordid details, but here are some highlights of Betty Friedan's
Communist life before she remade herself into a middle class housewife
who could appeal to multitudes of other middle class housewives:
.
At Smith College in during 1938-1942 Betty was editor of the campus
weekly newspaper and the political arguments she published followed the
Communist party-line right up to December 7, 1941 when, of course,
the CPUSA needed to readjust its views
While Friedan was a grad student at UC Berkeley in 1942-1943,
-still known as Betty Goldstein- she associated almost exclusively with
students
who were members of the Communist Party. Her boyfriend of the time,
David Bohm, a party member, "was a physicist at work on the Manhattan
Project, developing the atomic bomb." He was called to testify before HUAC,
the House Un-American Activities Committee, but was acquitted of charges.
He then did what any 'innocent' person would do, he fled the country.
During 1946 - 1952 Betty was a staff reporter for UE News, "the newsletter
of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. This union
was among the most radical in the country and was in the orbit of the CP."
Not that this was all bad, to reaffirm the fact, in those years the
Communists
were almost alone in addressing the problems of black people in America;
Betty's special interest was the situation faced by black working-class
women in an era of widespread racial discrimination.
.
.
Regardless, it was only in the mid 1950s that Friedan actually lived the
life
of a suburban housewife, but, at that, a very upscale one who could afford
a maid and other advantages one would otherwise associate with the British.
.
As Daniel Horowitz was to find out as he was doing research for his book,
Betty Friedan was very unhappy with his work. Although Daniel had published
various entirely truthful findings in an article in the altogether
reputable
American Quarterly, in 1996 (two years before his book), instead of being
relieved to have an opportunity to explain her Leftist past, to "come
clean"
as it were, she did the opposite. Joanne Boucher quoted Daniel Horowitz
as saying: "In public, with a few exceptions, Friedan has avoided, denied,
minimized or obscured her progressive political convictions of the 1940s
and 1950s, especially on women's issues."
.
She repeatedly lied, in other words.
.
There is even more to report. As Horowitz discovered, the original draft of
Betty's best seller included all kinds of references to such well known
Communists as Marx, Engels, and Simone de Beauvoir. All of these
were expunged before Feminine Mystique went to press. Worse, she
ostracized Daniel Horowitz as much as she could. He was denied any
permission to quote from he unpublished writings, she would not grant
him any interviews, and in the end she vilified him during some of her
public talks.
.
To her great credit, Joanne Boucher also noted that Daniel Horowitz' book
has a self protective agenda; he wasn't completely honest either. Daniel
is also a Marxist-Leninist and someone else who feels the need to stretch
and shape history to suit private purposes. Hence, in his book about
Friedan
he interprets her life in terms of the great fear on the far Left of the
effects
of the McCarthy hearings.
.
McCarthy, certainly someone who deserves criticism, nonetheless is viewed
as an utter monster, which he wasn't, in order to justify Communist
sympathies
of that era -including those of Daniel Horowitz. Not only that, with
posthumous permission from Khrushchev, Daniel reinterpreted Stalin and,
monster
that
he actually was, paints him as even more evil than he was, in the process
arguing that Friedan was not a dogmatic Communist because she didn't
go that far, she didn't approve of Uncle Joe's really bad excesses -which,
it seems, are part fiction for the occasion. As Boucher put it regarding
Horowitz' portrait of Stalin:
.
"This, of course, proves absolutely nothing. Joseph Stalin himself would
not
fit this absurd definition of a Stalinist -he never advertised his mass
murders
and, of course, spies were operating clandestinely in the United
States.........
Moreover, he consistently downplays the extent to which it does indeed
appear, the political views espoused by Friedan were entirely consonant
with those of official CPUSA party line."
.
But not only that:
.
..."time and again Horowitz obscures or downplays the extent to which
[Friedan] is surrounded by CP members, espousing CP positions and
promoting CP-related institutions and organizations in her writing."
.
Maybe worst of all, however, is the story of Betty Friedan's willingness
to accede in the anti-Semitic policies of the Soviet Union.
.
On this subject I am aware that the map of Europe is complicated.
The history of anti-Semitism under Communism is not so clear cut as
would be convenient for political thinkers. The situation in the Baltic
states
was not that of other parts of the Soviet empire, let alone the Balkans or
the autonomous 'republics' including that special anomaly, Birobidzhan.
However. there should be no question that, at times, Stalin was capable
of extreme anti-Semitism and state policy could become hostile to
millions of Jews with dire results.
.
About Betty Friedan, we need to talk about the time, during the 1950s, when
she wrote for the newspaper, Jewish Life. This monthly publication was
under control of the Communist Party until 1956 when, possibly because
of the horrors of the Hungarian uprising that year, or because of the
Khrushchev speech, it ceased to be a puppet of the party.
.
Jewish Life until then, however, was overtly pro-Communist up and down
the line. The main difference between it and other CPUSA dominated
journals was that it focused on Jewish concerns. As well, it frequently
published articles that were highly critical of anti-Semitism.
.
Nonetheless, it also turned a blind eye to anti-Semitic events in Russia.
For example, in 1948, Stalin ordered the closure of all Jewish cultural
and social institutions. This was the start of an anti-Semitic campaign
that
was to last until 1953. While not at the scale of what the Nazis did
the decade before, and the death toll was minor in comparison, it was
real enough and hearkened back to the Czarist pogroms of the 19th
century. Things became very bad for Soviet Jews.
.
What did Jewish Life say about all of this?
.
When the periodical is examined, said Boucher, what one finds are
transparent
excuses for Communist anti-Semitism, evasions, and falsehoods. Why were
Jewish institutions shut down? Because this "reflected a natural process
of
assimilation of Jews into the general Soviet population and thereby should
be seen as being a progressive development and a direct result of the
building
of a new socialist society in the USSR."
.
Anyone who believed that would have to have had an IQ below 72 points-
or to have been a Communist. Indeed, as reports of these events began to
reach the West, the response of Jewish Life was that it was all
"a myth fed by Cold War lies."
.
There is more in this vein on the issue of Soviet ant-Semitism but the
important
question is this: "Why did Friedan write for a journal which idealized
the
Soviet Union to the point of condoning its anti-Semitism?"
.
Does anyone have a good answer? Is a good answer even possible?
.
It is against all of these considerations that we need to evaluate the
goals
of the Women's Liberation movement that Betty Friedan helped to launch.
As Joanne Boucher said, when that movement and its leaders made public
statements about such issues as "male chauvinism," "women's equality,"
"ending sex discrimination," and so forth, what was the hidden agenda
behind all the rhetoric? What was it really all about? In fact, we can ask
if any of the ideals of feminism as it was understood by Betty Friedan
and those allied with her "were separable from the long-term goal
of establishing a society akin to the Soviet Union in the United States."?
.
Is this all a big surprise to you? We can concede that some of the
objectives
of the original women's movement emerged independently of Mrs. Friedan
or her colleagues; Christina Hoff Sommers makes a persuasive case for
the value of many 'first phase' feminist principles. And one early
president
of NOW, Wilma Scott Heidi, was no Betty Friedan, but the question
should be answered even if, in doing so, it turns out that a lot of
people,
especially smart educated women of the era, all acted as useful idiots
and internalized values that destroyed lives including their own.
And for what?
.
And what are we stuck with now as a result of Communist influence
on American society? Is anyone who reads this happy with having been
a useful idiot for the Communist cause?.
.
As for Christians and other naifs, it is way past time that people stopped
believing in fairly tales. "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" may have been
a well received movie in its time, but as a model of what is needed
to change the America political system it was the worst imaginable
sop to the uninformed. We don't need a children's crusade led by
various Mr. Smiths, we need genuinely informed people who can think
critically and who know history, -thoroughly- especially
intellectual history, the history of ideas.
.
American education as it has become is a complete shambles.
.
.
.
-----------------------------------------------
Chapter 8
.
Incriminating Evidence
Now we are in a position to make the most of the evidence that Alvin
Toffler
was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
There is additional information to discuss but you now have what is most
crucial in order to understand Mr. Toffler's lying and the motivation
behind it.
.
For some years Alvin Toffler's cover story that he was a youthful Marxist
much like many other collegians went unchallenged. After all, in those
years
being Marxist was "cool," it was more-or-less expected of anyone with
intellectual pretensions, and, when all was said, it was thought-provoking.
.
The hundreds of thousands of young Marxists of the 1950s era sobered up
soon enough and became not-quite-so-young Capitalist wannabes. They had
gotten their flirtation with Marx out of their systems and were ready to
take
their place in normal society wiser than otherwise would have been the
case.
It was sort of like the Amish with their custom of Rumspringa whereby
young men and women leave their idyllic existence for a spell, live in the
big city, learn some lessons the hard way, and return to the farm
with the snares and lures of outside society behind them.
.
A good example of this approach to Toffler can be found in the
December 1980 edition of Design Magazine under the heading :
"Woudhuysen -Thinking about the future;
Alvin Toffler: Exiled to Malibu."
.
The essay, a review of The Third Wave, starts out like this, anyway:
"Alvin Toffler used to be a Marxist..."
.
But the sentence continues with this incredible statement:
" he and his wife were for five years Communist Party (USA)
trade union organisers at a car factory and steel foundry – and,
despite his long-established disenchantment with Marxism, it shows."
.
My best guess is that when Toffler read these words he turned white
as a sheet. But any fears of the moment proved to be unfounded. By then,
of course, my exposé of Toffler's past as a Communist was in wide
circulation,
as wide as possible in that pre-computer era, anyway; what the article
said
had confirmed my testimony. However, who reads Design Magazine?
.
Not many Americans, that's for sure. It is a British publication and is
intended
for commercial product designers. Professor James Woudhuysen, sometimes
known as James Woods, is a futurist who specializes in such things as
business innovations and product development. Design Magazine provided
a natural forum for his writing; it is eclectic in its approach and
non-doctrinaire.
Essentially the publication is all about new ideas for the marketplace. And
Toffler's views can be seen as a contribution to such themes.
.
Woudhuysen, as much as I have learned, is on the faculty of De Montfort
University of Leicester. Much of his work is, by American standards, as
mainstream as anything gets. But he is British and as a consequence his
views of politics are not the same as those of most US capitalists. For
Americans of the Wall Street persuasion anything to do with the far Left
is strictly anathema, verboten, outside the Pale. This is not how
Woudhuysen
sees the world, hence he not only acts as a consultant to free enterprise
businesses he also has a professional relationship with Novo, described
as "the German sister publication of Living Marxism."
.
What this says is that the professor, through his various Leftist contacts,
could well have had inside information about Alvin Toffler's past.
Otherwise where did the information come from that "he and his wife
were for five years Communist Party (USA) trade union organisers"?
Given Woudhuysen's reputation as a conscientious academic he had
no motivation to lie, after all. And there never seems to have been
a rebuttal or any complaints about his identification of Toffler
as a member of the Communist Party.
.
Woudhuysen's review discussed Toffler's continued (as of 1980)
Marxist interests. Speaking of other former Communists who developed
new theories of the relationship of technology to society, Woudhuysen
said that: "Like his predecessors, Toffler has rejected Marx’s method;
but like them, too, he has tried to match Marx in his ambitious scope."
.
There is much more in Woudhysen's thoughtful article but the important
point here is the fact that his undisguised assertion that Toffler had been
an active member of the Communist Party never had any impact in
the United States, certainly none that I ever heard of. For that matter
I had never heard of Design Magazine until May 2015 and only
then as one result of an exhaustive Google search that took me
on a tour through well over a thousand Web entries.
.
.
The next bombshell exploded in the October 9, 1995, issue of
The New Republic. What I was doing that October I do not recall
but that was one issue of the magazine that I never saw. My reading
of the publication has always been spotty and 1995 was no exception.
This, it has now become clear, was a huge mistake.
.
While the information that Toffler was a Communist was lost in 1980
because of a review in a journal that American politicos never look at
is easy enough to explain, New Republic is an altogether different matter.
In the 1990s my periodical reading focused on Utne Reader and such
magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, but, then, I was living in Arizona
with Summers in the state of Washington and insider East Coast politics
was not at the center of my life.
.
By that time I had circulated as much as I knew about Toffler's Communist
past to a great many people but there was no sign that the effort had made
any difference. Still, a lot of people who do take insider politics
seriously surely
were reading the New Republic and some percentage of them knew about
my allegations. Did all of them completely miss the significance
of the article? That is hard to believe.
.
This is in reference to John B. Judis' essay, "Newts' Not-So-Weird Gurus."
.
The reason for Judis' lengthy article is best explained in his own words in
the
first paragraph of the piece:
.
"Before last November, once-bestselling authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler
had fallen into relative obscurity. They were interviewed regularly by
publications like Information Week and The New Perspectives Quarterly
but not by The Washington Post or U.S. News and World Report......
But all that changed when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House."
.
Gingrich, of course, went on public record as a follower of Toffler's ideas
and promoted his books to his colleagues and to fellow Republicans. In no
time at all papers like the New York Times and the Boston Globe were
printing stories about Mr. Toffler and his star suddenly burned brightly in
the political firmament..
.
Not everyone was impressed, to be sure. As the article noted, "former
Secretary of Education William Bennett told The New York Times...
"If futurists are really futurists, why do they bother writing books?
Why don't they play the market?" Which is so much nonsense worthy
of a simpleton, viz, an establishment Republican who worships money
before all else. By that same logic whydidn't Milton Friedman play the
market, or David Stockman? Yet most Republicans, even if they had
reservations about Toffler's views, at least looked into them and
did some reading to make up their own minds.
.
This was also the time when the first commentaries surfaced about
a connection between Toffler and Communism through a process
of deduction after analyzing the contents of Alvin's books. There was
no new information, just a process of comparison with Marx and Lenin,
but it was enough to, so to speak, raise some red flags. These warnings
seemed necessary because Newt was evangelizing on behalf of
The Third Wave and other texts. But such doubts were swept aside
with Gingrich's political successes that gave the GOP its first legislative
triumphs in many years. Besides, what kind of Communist is on retainer
to Capitalist giants like IBM, Xerox and AT&T?
.
However, as Judis' article made clear, there is no way to pigeonhole
the Tofflers all that neatly, nor for that matter, to pigeonhole Newt.
And there is sense to be made of Gingrich's borrowings from Toffler
-and it is useful to do so. Or was useful; 2015 is not 1995, it isn't
even 2012, and the political world has changed, but for now
this is about establishing historical facts
.
A few paragraphs into the story you might think that Judis was going to
be true to the Toffler cover myth about his underage Marxism.
Hence this quotation:
.
"Alvin and Heidi Toffler began as Marxists and spent five years
during the 1950s organizing workers in Ohio factories. They are
no longer either Marxists or socialists, but like Marx they see history
as consisting of progressive stages, propelled forward by underlying
changes in the way people produce goods, services and ideas.....
The Tofflers have tried to go beyond, rather than simply repudiate,
Marx and the Enlightenment."
.
Even this much is revealing if you know how to read Leftist language
-which Right-wingers seldom are capable of in their childlike naïveté.
What it says is that -as understood by someone like Judis who cut his
teeth on Das Kapital: socialism = communism, which was Marx's
usage of the terms, that is, socialism is preparatory for the advent of
communism, hence, since pure communism is still in the future, current
communists often prefer to call themselves "socialists."
.
I have employed the style used by people like David Horowitz here,
lower case for socialism, communism, etc.,. My own preference is for
capital letters for proper nouns, as these words are. And it goes
without saying that I reject Marx's definitions. Be that as it may...
.
Toffler is no longer a socialist = Toffler is no longer a communist.
.
But it gets better, a great deal better.
.
First, Judis gives a nod and a wink to Toffler's disavowals of Marx and
Marxism. And speaking of the Democrats and Republicans, Toffler said:
"One side still dreams of River Rouge, the other dreams of Ozzie and
Harriet."
It all sounds so American. But then we get to substance.
.
There is, for openers, some biographical information:
.
"Alvin Toffler is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He met Heidi...
the daughter of Dutch Jewish immigrants, just before his senior year
at New York University, in the summer of 1948." Which, by itself, might
cause suspicion about political leanings; many Jews from Europe in those
years were hard core Marxists. But let us gloss over this information
and move on to the next quote.
.
"After college, where both had worked for Henry Wallace's Progressive
Party..."
.
Needless to say, while far from all Wallace voters were Communists, many
were exactly that. To continue-
..."the Tofflers set out for a factory in Cleveland that made window fans.
In those days, college students didn't just go off by themselves to
organize,
but Alvin Toffler repeatedly dodged my questions about what political group
he was working for, asking finally, "Are you from the FBI?"
.
This, and the next quotes you will read, nails it as definitively as
anything can do
short of a signed confession by Alvin that he was party member # 54321
of the New York branch of the CPUSA.
.
After all, why would anyone be evasive about what their political
loyalties
were years ago? I was a registered Democrat in the past along with
belonging
to YPSL. But now and then I voted for Republicans if they seemed like
the better choice, as I did for Ben Adamowski for mayor of Chicago
in 1963. So what? There is nothing to hide.
.
"When I asked him if he studied at NYU with the socialist -but militantly
anti-Communist- philosopher Sidney Hook, he said he thought then of Hook
as a "terrible reactionary." When I asked him if he had been a Trotskyist,
he said Trotskyists were the "bad guys." He also said he would have quit
the factory after two years but that during the McCarthy witch-hunts he
felt
obliged to stick by his organizing friends: "It was one thing to change
your
ideology; it was another thing to change your friends and rat on them."
.
Could this be any clearer? It also happens to be completely congruent
with my account of Toffler's remarks of January of 1975. As Judis then
said:
.
"I concluded from what he said, and from coy hints, that he either belonged
to
or worked very closely with the Communist Party."
.
Toffler told me that he had been a member.
.
What did the East Coast cognoscenti do with this information?
Precisely nothing.
.
Why did they do precisely nothing? You tell me.
.
The rest of the article is well worth reading but it would be best to
return
to it in another context. There is more hard evidence that should be
discussed before anything else.
.
.
I did not own a computer until 2004. Other people for whom these facts
do matter were computer users long before that. Here is a google entry
that should be of interest to some of these people:
.
.
_WIRED Magazine and the English Ideology - Culture Wars_
(http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/cw_recent/Wired
.html&rct=j&frm=1&q=&esrc=s&sa=U&ei=WFtYVYTTMo6PyATzxIGwDQ&ved=0CBQQFjAA&usg
=AFQjCNFKBFRRrQ4G_XmOEs7e1l5JwIs-2A)
_www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/cw.../Wired.html_
(http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/cw.../Wired.html)
.
The article that this refers to was written by Mark Stahlman and bears
a copyright date of 1997. Here is how Stahlman ended his article about how
various well known thinkers of previous times had unusual professional
relationships, like Hayek, who was a colleague of John Maynard Keynes
at the London School of Economics -a school with a Socialist heritage:
"This should be no more confusing than watching Alvin Toffler, and
his wife Heidi, move from active Communist Party membership
and factory floor colonization to becoming chief advisors
to Newt Gingrich."
.
Did you catch the part about Alvin Toffler and his
"active Communist Party membership" ?
..
Wired magazine; have you heard of it?
.
.
Far less well known is a website that uses the domain _www.marxmail.org_
(http://www.marxmail.org/)
It would be understandable that some people, including some Leftists,
might not know about it. But for your information, on August 10, 2002,
it, too, identified Toffler with Communism. This can be found under the
heading "Revolution in the Air."
.
It seems that, in this story about the early 1980s, a certain Jerry Tung,
someone associated with CISPES -Committee in Solidarity with the People
of El Salvador- and a leader in the Maoist Communist Workers Party, had
abandoned the CWP ship and had found a new political home which was more
congenial to those who were not that far to the Left. He may also have
been
seeking a more normal American life. In any case, he began promoting
Toffler
because, from every indication, Alvin was perceived as a kindred spirit.
.
.
On November 27, 2011, as Newt Gingrich's campaign for the Republican
nomination for president was gaining traction, a blogger at Free Republic
posted a story entitled, "_Alvin Toffler: Newt Gingrich's Reverend Wright_
(http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2813320/posts) ."
.
The author, one "Captain Krunch," made the statement that "Newt Gingrich
is not loyal to America folks, make no mistake about it. This man is a
one world communist advocate...despite all the "conservative"
publicity stunts..." because his mentor, Alvin Toffler, is a Communist.
.
For sure, Mr. Krunch is / was pretty much a Rightist looney bird, but his
argument is filled with keen observations, such as the fact that Toffler's
social values come right out of Gramsci's playbook, namely, "his view
that in the future abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, and divorce
are perfectly normal, even virtuous."
.
Krunch goes on to say that "Gramsci-Marxism desires societal
transformation
by infiltrating culture and government to transform society slowly by the
rule of law with people not realizing what is happening to them."
(Italics added)
.
Mr. Krunch also cited a book review in which its author (who this is
cannot
be determined except to say that the unnamed book is in German) had what
seems to be quite well informed opinions about Alvin. His exact words:
.
"This reviewer calls Toffler a “former Marxist.” Not so much because
Toffler
has abandoned the Marxist dream of a socio-political utopia, but because
Toffler believes the Information Revolution (The Third Wave) will render
class conflict irrelevant because the fruit of production – knowledge –
will be shared across the class spectrum..."
.
Hopefully this is close to the sense of the post by Mr. Krunch, but even if
it is somewhat mistaken it should be close enough to make the point that,
whenever Newt becomes newsworthy, there are people in the political
world who will notice the resemblance between Toffler and Marxist-Leninism
and draw the inference that, since Newt is a follower of Toffler, he must
share Alvin's neo-Communist politics.
.
This sort of entry appears now and then when web searching; I came across
several examples. Each says about the same thing. Here is what John R. Houk
wrote for Slant Right for December 9, 2011: Newt is a "closet Communist"
indebted to Alvin Toffler. And "Toffler’s beliefs are rooted solidly in
communism, but dressed up thoroughly in neo-con speak..."
.
Obviously, this is guesswork but it is good guessing.
.
.
This is what I was able to locate during about 48 hours of searching,
primarily thanks to Google. What else may lurk at various websites
I have no way of knowing, but it would seem to be another good guess
that there is even more.
.
The belief that no-one will learn about Alvin Toffler's membership in
the Communist Party is untenable. You are under advisement
to act accordingly.
.
I realize that you did not believe that I was telling the truth in 1977 or
1978.
You were lied to. You accepted false testimony and possibly were duped
by manufactured evidence. However, I not only told the truth in the late
seventies, I have told the truth every year since, now including 2015. When
not discussing Toffler and his deceits I raised as much hell as possible
so that a forum might become available to me to tell the truth; this
motivation,
not whatever lies you may have been told, is what explains the past
more-than-three decades.
.
You had better believe that the minute that I do have a public forum to
tell
my story that I will seek revenge upon everyone who has denied my rights
as a loyal American to free speech and due process. I will seek the utter
ruin
of my enemies, be assured of that: Completely, irrevocably, including
people
at the very apex of the political establishment.
.
If you guessed wrong about how this would turn out, gee, that's too bad.
.
.
.
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