Black Socrates and the Red Scare

Thursday, 8 October 2009 by bbbeard.

First, a cautionary tale. Some time ago I read a critique of multiculturalism, the central parable of which went as follows: it seems that there was once a classics professor, tasked with teaching a sophomore course in Plato’s Apology. As the professor explains:

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato’s Apology, his account of Socrates’ trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates’ origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

The professor is Mary Lefkowitz, of Wellesley College. The student is fortunate to remain nameless. But I recall this story from time to time, because it is a reminder that even very intelligent people can be enticed, perhaps by cultish isolation, into a worldview that is not only counterfactual, but antisocial in its effect.

Now, the truth is that for a long time I have been privy to a set of facts regarding the period known as “the Red Scare”. I use the word “privy” advisedly, because these facts are readily available to anyone willing to look into the matter — but these facts are nonetheless not only widely disbelieved, but sharply discouraged by the larger culture. For instance, I am painfully aware that people are profoundly uncomfortable with any voicing of the fact that, in the 1930’s and ’40’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of agents operating in many areas of American culture and government, ranging from Hollywood to the Executive Office of the President. I have friends who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Alger Hiss was framed. I know there are many people who continue to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, unpersuaded even by the recent confession of Morton Sobell. And of course, to the extent that they think of it at all, most people are content to fall back on the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Blacklist was our equivalent of Stalin’s Gulag, and that the Red Scare was based on a false premise.

And so I am left with the same feeling that Professor Lefkowitz’s student must have had: why does no one mention this? Are they all deluded? Or am I? But all my investigations lead to the same conclusion. The more I learn about the extent of Soviet infiltration, the more it is apparent that the indictment is true. Alger Hiss was a spy. Rosenberg and Sobell were traitors. Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. Elia Kazan told the truth. I.F. Stone was a paid agent of Stalin. And the more I learn, the less the official reaction makes sense. Why did half of Hollywood’s elite sit on their hands when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award? How can Ivy Meeropol make a film about her grandparents (the Rosenbergs) that remains resolutely ambiguous about their guilt? And why do people treat these facts about Communism — and the Left’s defense of it — as disconnected from the flow of American history?

So I am led to ask the question that Orwell left implicit in the climax of 1984: can facts be defeated by simple fiat of the guardians of the culture?  Winston Smith is finally stripped of all his humanity and forced to accept O’Brien’s demand that 2+2=5 (as the Wikipedia author remarks, “a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact”). As the previous blog post remarks, we live in an age in which — in accordance with the ascendant ideology — the facts of the past are dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to the problems of the present. Is this the fate of those who oppose the cult of personality, to suffer the ‘jackboot stamping on a human face, forever’?

Or is this just another Black Socrates moment?

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