Jesse Lemisch: Charges that Portside Is Like Soviet Journalism
By way of rebuttal to Aptheker's criticisms of the Communist Party and account of her sexual molestation by her late father (CP theoretician Herbert Aptheker), Portside selects from a debate that took place on the Historians of American Communism list. I kicked off the debate there with what later became my History News Network posting, "Shhh! Don't Talk about Herbert Aptheker," October 8, 2006: www.hnn.us/articles/30522.html (this followed up my October 4 HNN piece, "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations" : www.hnn.us/articles/30519.html.) After my posting on HOAC, I was the central participant in the ensuing debate, fielding numerous, bunts, hits and foul balls that were sent my way by adversaries. But as far as Portside is concerned, my piece and role in the debate don't exist. Every one of the people they post from HOAC was writing in response to me and (except for Stephen Schwartz), each was writing to attack my position; further, in all these cases I replied: Portside takes no notice of any of this. In other words, I have been erased from a debate in which I was the central participant. Portside sends curious readers around Robin Hood's barn - literally, to an archive -- to get to "other contributions to the HOAC discussion" -- in other words, me. The net effect and clear intent of Portside's incredibly tendentious selection is to provide a rebuttal to Bettina Aptheker. Schwartz's passing mention of me by name has to be mysterious to Portside readers, since they have no idea from Portside of my participation in the debate. Portside must have worked hard to come up with such a corrupt sampling. (Portside just doesn't want people to read any parts of the debate that don't fit their line. It should also be noted that for Chris Phelps's October 6 Chronicle of Higher Education review, which started the discussion of Aptheker's book, Portside sends readers to a kind of a memory hole, the Chronicle's subscribers-only site, when it is available to all on HNN, where it is linked to my "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations."
Portside's erasure of me might also have something to do with my direct criticism of the group in my October 8 HNN piece: "The reeling first reactions to the revelations seem almost a mini-version of the first reactions to Khruschev's 1956 Secret Speech on the crimes of Stalin... " It should be reported that somebody (not I) sent a copy of Chris Phelps's article on Bettina's memoir to Portside around Sunday or Monday October 3-4. Portside, which manages in any case to do a good job of finding things on its own, is the normally fairly catholic and inclusive "discussion and debate" list of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the sane wing of the former CP. As of this writing, nothing about this matter has been posted there, although Portside has posted various items about what we might call merely bourgeois molestation scandals. Famous Red Diaper types have been strangely silent about the important issues raised by Bettina, presumably dismissing it as a merely private matter. It sounds like a case of keeping dirty linen out of the laundromat. A friend who is an ex-CPer sees Portside's silence as tending "to confirm my sense that the habits of hypocrisy, and the refusal to deal with women's experience, have survived intact from the CP itself."
It may shed some additional light on Portside's action - or non-action - to note that Bettina's parents and others urged her to join the Committees of Correspondence - which Herbert had named, in imitation of the Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution -- but that, as she writes, "I had no inclination to do so... I was through with Communist politics..." (p. 495). (One friend, formerly in the Party, speculates that Bettina may have little sympathy among former CPers because she left the Party, as they see it, "too soon" - although it was 1981; p. 406ff.)"
I have no ego wrapped up in my erasure by Portside. Indeed it is a badge of honor. But it's like reading Pravda in America.
Jesse Lemisch
BELOW IS PORTSIDE'S OCTOBER 16 POSTING
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Cc:
Subject: My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester
Date: Mon, October 16, 2006, 22:16:00
My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester
Daughter of Communist leader Herbert Aptheker recalls the pain and reconciliation that led to writing about her childhood abuse.
By Bettina Aptheker October 15, 2006 <http://www.latimes.com
[The oped below by Bettina Aptheker is based on her recent memoir, Intimate Politics. A discussion/review of this book by Chris Phelps appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the edition dated October 6. The Chronicle objects to the reprinting of material that appears in CHE, but the article is available to subscribers of CHE at http://chronicle.com/.
We also print below material from the discussion of the Phelps article on the listserve of the Historians of American Communism (HOAC) <http://www.h-net.org/~hoac/>. Other contributions to the HOAC discussion can be found by typing in the keyword "aptheker" in the list archives. -- moderator]
Comments from: Bettina Aptheker, Clare Spark, Melvyn Dubofsky, Mark Rosenzweig, Stephen Schwartz
===
My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester
Daughter of Communist leader Herbert Aptheker recalls the pain and reconciliation that led to writing about her childhood abuse.
By Bettina Aptheker October 15, 2006 <http://www.latimes.com/
It is a little disconcerting and somewhat chilling to read reviews of my recently published memoir and see my own words quoted back to me. It is not because I don't like what I wrote, or feel shame about it. It is because I was the holder of so many family secrets, and the injunction to silence was so strong. In writing my story, I broke all of the family rules.
Growing up, I held tight to the illusion that everything would by OK if I too could project the image of the perfect family, even though my inner life was so fraught with tension. In seeing recent reviews of my book, although favorable, sometimes the child part of my mind shrinks in horror: "What have you done?" And then the calm, adult part of my mind says: "You have told the truth to the best of your ability." Any of us who has experienced childhood sexual abuse or other forms of abuse, even as adults, knows something of these conflicted feelings.
[The remainder of this article had been deleted by the H-Net editor -- the full article is available online, as was posted on H-HOAC recently.]
===
From: Clare Spark
Subject: Phelps on Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Thursday, October 05
I have been thinking, with some agitation, about Bettina Aptheker's astonishing revelation of incest, as reported by Chris Phelps' review in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ ever since it was posted yesterday. I find it even more astonishing that the review accepts this and her other claims against her father (low pay for black help, criticism of Jewish passivity in the Holocaust) at face value. Moreover, as some other commentators have noted, it is passing strange that she waited until her parents' death to tell the world. But what I find most shocking is the review's credulity. Nor did the review see the revelation as vindictive, or possibly antisemitic. (The anti-Semitic stereotype includes Jews as excessively carnal, cheap, and cowardly.) Where is scholarly skepticism? Where is common sense?
The putative child abuse was not the only trial the heroic Bettina Aptheker has endured. Here is how Professor of Women's Studies Aptheker described her educational background for Out In The Redwoods (easily located through Google):
"[Aptheker:] I arrived in Santa Cruz in the fall of 1979 to begin my graduate studies in the History of Consciousness Program. I had two young children, and I was finalizing a divorce from my husband of thirteen years. I was also struggling to claim my lesbian identity. Brutalized by the police and FBI because of my Communist affiliation and radical activism in the 1960s and 1970s, 'coming out' for me was at once traumatic and exhilarating."
Recall that the review describes her sudden recollection, previously repressed, as having come to her while writing her memoir. Does this seem plausible to anyone here? Let us assume that father committed incest with young Bettina for years, yet she had no memory of what had to be traumatic. The cynic in me wonders if she is not beefing up her history to demonstrate that she has overcome yet another assault by authority, undeserved and extreme, of course. Why would she do that? Nothing like a famous and controversial father to expose as a way of getting attention from reviewers for her book, published by Seal Press, described on the internet as a small feminist press. The historian in me recalls that the feminist theory informing women's studies requires that patriarchy be viewed as the primary social contradiction, and indeed there was a job posting for teaching Women's Studies at UC San Diego while I was in graduate school, stating that adherence to feminist theory was a prerequisite for hiring. What could be more dramatic proof that the male desire to control women trumps class and other forms of illegitimate domination?
Clare Spark, Independent Scholar
===
From: Melvyn Dubofsky
Subject: Phelps on Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006
In my youthful days as an historian at Northern Illinois U. back in the early 1960s, when that department was an outlier of sorts in the national historical guild, we invited such lefties and reds as Gurley Flynn and Aptheker to campus. Even in her old age and in his no longer youthful years, no two people could have been more dissimilar as personalities and social types. Flynn was gregarious, a smoker and a drinker, for whom no topic, including, sex, was beyond he bounds; Aptheker by way of contrast was stolid, uptight, the proper and prudish communist. No tobacco entered his lungs, nor did alcohol pass his lips; dressed in a conservative business suit, with a starched dress shirt, and tightly tied tie, he spoke only about matters political and ideological, flirted with none of the young women at his post-talk social, and, indeed, conversed almost solely with the men. Unlike Flynn who led and wrote about her unconventional sexual life and experiences, Aptheker seemed almost an asexual individual, more like a communist monk. Perhaps Bettina Aptheker's recovered memories expose the real Aptheker, a man so repressed sexually that he had to satisfy his urges through a form of masturbation with his daughter as the object and stimulant. Yet, as historians, we all are familiar with the tricks that mind and memory play. Without corroboration, Bettina's recovered memories are less than convincing evidence and certainly would not suffice in a court of law. And with her father unable to offer rebuttal and her mother or other close relatives corroboration, we are left simply with a "she said" allegation. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Herbert Aptheker whom I met 40 odd years ago was a pedophile, let alone an incestuous one. Instead of discussing the unknowable and unprovable, people on this list should focus on Aptheker's role and meaning for communism in the US, and also why a man who should have know better and who visited the Soviet Union numerous times insisted well after Stalin's death and K's exposure of the former's crimes that women enjoyed equality in the USSR and that Jews as well enjoyed complete equality and freedom.
Mel Dubofsky
===
From: Mark Rosenzweig
Subject: RE: Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006
For once I find myself somewhat in agreement with Mr. Schwartz. The search for a secret connection between the claims of abuse by the daughter and H. Aptheker's work on Hungary (about the character of which Schwartz and I would disagree) are, unlike matters of the Hungarian uprising itself, inadjudicable and unnecessary. They are also outside the purview of historians and people in related disciplines , and likely to be fueled, given his controversial character as a Communist/Stalinist outsider in academia, by his detractors' desire to seize an opportunity to attempt to portray Aptheker as what we call today "a sexual predator", a moral monster and sociopath, as already evidenced by the unseemly attempt to conflate being an accused incestuous parent with being a pedophile or a rapist, in order to attack not just his work or his beliefs but his person as a means of nullifying his human credibility altogether in all spheres.
Further, I believe that if Bettina Aptheker raises such egregious, conspicuously posthumous claims against her father, it is in full knowledge and disregard of the fact that the matter cannot be properly adjudicated but nonetheless will be taken, by those many with all kinds of reasons (of which she is well aware) to do so, as firm basis for a fundamental assault on the integrity of everything her father did and was associated with.
While the implications of these belated revelations for her father's reputation are-- as she well knows -- politically and academically damaging in the extreme, the motives for unleashing this hitherto unspoken personal history (which we are led to believe she repressed entirely from consciousness for more than 50 years only to retrieve it conveniently after her father's death and in the process of writing her memoirs. whole and undistorted, without confabulations or phantastic elaborations of the sort we know are common in the recollection of long past emotionally- charged events, whether or not they happened in actuality or only in fantasy, never mind allegedly fully repressed ones) , intact, with apparent full memory of all kinds of detail, seems to be a claim which has motives which are more the subject for psychoanalytic study and treatment than for the historical disciplines
Those who seize with alacrity upon this non-evidentiary, highly dubious personal material, suggesting it is somehow (they don't know exactly how or why) the "key" to not just the mind of Herbert Aptheker and therefore to the mind of a political intellectual who supported the repression of the Hungarian revolt, but to the proverbial "Communist mind" itself are, in doing this, not only unlikely to produce any connections but in the meantime are really reveling in the misfortune of a person, Ms. Aptheker, who felt, as is typical in her cohort, that she had, of necessity, to not only "recover" this kind of material , which always seems to be there for recovery-- one way or the other --but make it available to the public, in print, in what I can only call a sad ritual of our times, of compulsory public self-revelation, emotional exhibitionism and conspicuous displays of the "healing" of the wounds of life.
The credibility of the claims she makes about her memories of, not a "traumatic event" -- of the sort which sometimes is fully or partially repressed but which can also and more often become, a quite conscious, repeatedly re-lived, fixation with serious unconscious ramifications -- but of an entire "life situation", of events, by her own account, spanning whole phases of her early life, across several stages of biological, emotional, intellectual, cognitive and moral development -- fully ten years from the age of 3 to 13 - seem to me, to be prima facie problematic rather than something we should feel obliged, if we wish to approach it at all (which I believe to be worthless) to lend the benefit of the doubt. As for confirmation/disconfirmation, they are impossible and therefore a red herring to raise.
By all means let's discuss "The Truth About Hungary": the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us.
Mark Rosenzweig Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, PRC
===
From: Stephen Schwartz
Subject: Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006
Regarding the continued discussion over the recollections of Bettina Aptheker and the allegation that her father habitually molested her:
I first would repeat my earlier statement that regardless whether Bettina (whom I have a right to call by her first name since I knew her) has made a truthful statement, it is absurd to debate why she did not do so while her parents were alive. Lemisch's point about Jewish CPers and Israel is well taken -- but more important is the very solid legal fact that no publisher would put such a statement in print while the person accused was alive, for risk of a libel suit. I made this point before.
To extend this point, there are those who enjoy attacking their parents and those who do not. Some of us had parents that were extremely intolerant, hateful, hurtful, and damaging Stalinists, but they were still our parents, and we hesitate to denounce them publically. To stray into religion, the prophet Muhammad said that those who come into Islam from the other religions should not attack their parents for holding to the earlier religion, because to become Muslim is good but your mother is your mother.
Believe it or not, I don't insist on personalizing these issues. I have tried to make this point about Aptheker and Hungary. To have supported the purges, Hitler pact, persecution of Trotskyists, postwar purges, trials of the Jewish writers, and suppression of the Budapest uprising would seem to me quite damaging as a basis for criticism of Herbert Aptheker or anyone else. It is shocking and sad to now learn that he allegedly broke the rules of normal society to the degree that he would reportedly molest his daughter. I am not sure what it says about the history of Stalinism, or the adulation of Aptheker in American academia. I can say that it appears Aptheker's early work on slave revolts and so forth remains quite valid. I can think of many CP intellectuals whose work I have criticized because it was poor in quality, and because I believe the CP inflated them into something they were not, i.e. major creative figures, only because of their political affiliation. I don't think Aptheker's work on slave revolts was inflated. I think he filled a very real void in American historiography. That does not excuse the rest of his life or behavior.
I also observe in the discussion here -- following on what seems to me a wilful confusion of paedophilia with incest -- a similar, apparently-deliberate confusion about recovered memory. Recovered memories as a corpus of psychiatric evidence have been discredited in many cases where it could be shown that the "memories" in CHILDREN, NOT ADULTS, were elicited through suggestion. The same is true in adults where "recovered memory" about UFOs involves both suggestion and an absence of physical evidence.
No reputable psychiatrist ever suggested that the recovery of memory in adults was or is generally suspect. If recovery of memory in adults was not a very real phenomenon, psychiatry would not exist as it does today. Recovered memory in adults has been a feature of psychiatric study and therapy since the late 19th century. Analysis of false memory or distorted memory is something every historian and literary critic does when they write or review a biography.
One should not have to point out, at this late date, that the mind is mysterious and plays tricks. People remember things that didn't happen. People don't remember things that did happen. The unconscious sometimes interferes with the process of memory. These issues -- remembering meetings and so forth -- get discussed in national political debates every day but it is seldom that the national media discussion ranges into freelance psychiatry.
I would like to also restate something I have argued before on this list: the great majority of historians make poor amateur lawyers or psychiatrists, although many seem tempted into it. I myself may be said to have deviated on this issue here, having offered opinions on recovered memory. I should therefore state, I suppose, that for several years I followed a course of intensive, orthodox Freudian therapy having specifically to do with false and recovered memories, so I am not simply improvising here. I realize that excessive dependence on personal experience is frowned on at H-HUAC, but am attempting to make a point.
Again, if there is something to be gained from this discussion it seems to me more philosophical than historical, but I am uncertain as to what it is. American Communists have been glorified and exalted in scholarship. A revelation like that about the Aptheker family undermines the status of a famous American Communist. It shows that American Communists may have been grossly imperfect human beings. There are many more such examples. The California Pilipino Communist Carlos Bulosan was found to have committed plagiarism. The Hollywood 10 produced movies like OBJECTIVE BURMA! and BLOOD ON THE SUN that were based on historical falsehoods. To cite a fictional but, I think, relevant example, the protagonist of Henry Roth's CALL IT SLEEP has an incestuous relationship with a female relative, and it is now widely believed that Roth himself was consumed with guilt for having engaged in such behavior. Do we now expel Roth from the canon?
Let us not make the mistake of thinking that because Communists had bad politics, and were often bad people, but are viewed by many as great people, that anti- Communists were or are, by opposition, perfect paragons of morality, especially those who are anti-Communist today when there are few real risks involved in taking such a position. Shia Muslims believe that bad actions can produce good results. Other believers do not. One thing is sure: human beings are flawed in every regard. Great intellects were horrible in politics. Great political figures had stupid and even evil opinions in other areas. Great creative personalities were and are often completely incompetent and even harmful in their personal relationships.
I don't see any particular point in questioning Bettina Aptheker's motivations in publicizing her memories of her father. Is it self-serving? What piece of published writing is not? After all, as Milton said, "fame is the spur," and few people write and publish out of purely charitable reasons. Do we demand from Bettina Aptheker vast powers of self-examination, reflection, or the capacity to make some great contribution to the understanding of human existence? I don't.
I was and remain hesitant to encourage anybody in the historical field to engage with the Aptheker incest issue. This is certainly not because I am a male or am anxious to protect the CP! It is only because human tragedy is what it is, and I believe the proper and worthy approach to it is to treat it with a certain distance. It seems to me that the concept of privacy no longer exists. Everyone is subject to criticism on anything, and completely unconnected issues are used to make political points. I don't consider this very hralthy.
Finally, a Communist intellectual all of us know and some of us love once commented that politics, psychology, physics, and art all operate by different rules and that a Marxist category cannot be forced on all of them. There is no Marxist or anti-Marxist context in which to place the tormented feelings of Bettina Aptheker, except to say, as in the case of any person in pain, that alleviation of suffering is better than aggravating it. It is a deeply human characteristic to recognize and empathize with pain even when it is experienced by those who have inflicted pain upon us. It is often difficult to accept such feelings. To cite one example, German Jewish exiles in the U.S. would not assist in the targeting of Hamburg for allied bombing because of their sympathy with their former neighbors. One need not be a saint to feel horror at the infliction of pain on someone that one despises. Rather, it is somewhat inhuman and alienated to refuse such empathy and to insist that further pain be inflicted. That is why all religions recognize repentance and counsel compassion. That is also why Sadism is considered a form of psychiatric illness. I do not suggest we dwell on the Aptheker revelations; nor do I suggest that we use them as a pretext to further torment Bettina Aptheker. The experience of publishing what she has published must have been and be enough of a punishment.
Stephen Schwartz