In Search of Apologies

By John Elson

To the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, it is "the Question" that almost never gets asked: What did we know, and when did we know it? In other words, when did members of the American left learn that the idealistic cause so many of them supported -- the international communist movement -- "broke all records for mass slaughter, piling up tens of millions of corpses in less than three-quarters of a century"? Genovese's succinct answer: "We knew everything essential and knew it from the beginning" -- and therefore the left was guilty of abetting unspeakable crimes.

In a trenchant polemic that appears in the summer issue of the leftist quarterly Dissent (est. circ. 10,000), Genovese argues that many American radicals were, in effect, accomplices to mass murder. Many U.S. advocates of a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam, for example, have never accepted that what they considered a radical egalitarian democracy was in fact a cruel totalitarian dictatorship. Until the left is willing to re-examine its ideological premises and admit its past mistakes, argues Genovese, it will have no moral credibility to attack such ongoing societal ills as racism and sexism. "The left will have to clean up its act if it wishes to survive or deserves to survive," he contends. "We will fail if we do not re-examine our long- standing premises."

Coming from, say, a neoconservative, this challenge to the left would be about as surprising as the Pope proclaiming his faith in God. But the Brooklyn-born Genovese, 64, the distinguished scholar-in-residence at Atlanta's University Center, has impeccable leftist credentials. Marxist theory, he readily admits, informed his landmark study of slavery in the American South, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Briefly a Communist Party member, he remained, by his own admission, "a supporter of the international movement and of the Soviet Union until there was nothing left to support." Particularly shocking to Genovese was the ignominious collapse of the East German Communist Party and the disclosures that pervasive corruption had infected its highest echelons. Today, he says, "in some respects I am as much a Marxist as I ever was," but adds, "I consider the communist movement dead and socialism finished."

Genovese's broadside, to some European intellectuals, is merely one new entry in an old and familiar debate that has been particularly vibrant in France. The 1973 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was a critical event for the French left. His searing expose of the vast Soviet prison-camp system, which sold 600,000 copies in France in less than a year, inspired a cadre of ex-radicals eventually known as "The New Philosophers" to issue its own critiques of communism. In Barbarism with a Human Face, for example, Bernard-Henri Levy demanded that French radicals confront the idea that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

Commentators on the right as well as the left have taken note of Genovese's gauntlet. In the New York Post, conservative editorial-page editor Eric Breindel described the essay as a "stunning and lucid document." In the Aug. 15 issue of the right-wing National Review, editor John O'Sullivan writes that the Dissent article and the subsequent responses to it mark "the beginning, not the end, of a debate." But in the same Dissent issue where Genovese's essay appears are six mostly negative reactions from academics. Alice Kessler- Harris of Rutgers University accuses Genovese of being as self-righteous as the radicals he criticizes. Sean Wilentz of Princeton University persuasively argues that Genovese has painted with too broad a brush and fails to credit those leftists -- including Dissent's founding editors -- who early on rejected Bolshevism and all its works. Robin D.G. Kelley of the University of Michigan argues that Genovese has a hidden agenda -- namely, to add the left's silence on Stalinism to the list of ideological crimes committed by "politically correct" radicals on U.S. campuses.

To the latter charge, Genovese would proudly plead guilty. An avowed enemy of p.c. conformity, he says "the situation on the campuses is beneath contempt." Many of the unrepentant leftists he wants to come clean are either tolerant of or else advocates for a "new version of totalitarianism" in academe that seeks to suppress all views other than their own. In Dissent Genovese writes, "We of the left may claim for ourselves no rights that we are not prepared to grant others."

So where does it all end? Possibly in a book. But Genovese plans no lengthy personal confessional, no breast-beating update of The God That Failed (1949), a book of essays by ex-communists that is best remembered for Arthur Koestler's mea culpa. He says he will return to the debate only if the discussion on the left stays alive. For him, the bottom line remains: the Question deserves an Answer.

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York and Tala Skari/Paris