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Victim of McCarthyism
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 The Wall Street
Journal has just run a moving story about Arturo Sandoval,
a distinguished musician and Cuban refugee who has been denied U.S.
citizenship by the infamous Immigration and Naturalization
Service.  The
reason? Mr. Sandoval is technically a Communist.
The author of the article calls this decision “a
McCarthyite outrage,” because Mr. Sandoval, as a subject of Fidel
Castro, had to join the Communist Party in order to get permission to travel
abroad. But he hated Communism, and when he got the chance, he fled to
this country — only to find his constrained membership in the party
used against him.
I sympathize. I would have sympathized anyway, but I have
special reason to sympathize. For last month, after having been vociferously
anti-Communist all my life, I too became a victim of McCarthyism.
In a review of my new book about who wrote the plays and
poems traditionally ascribed to Shakespeare, Professor Paul Cantor of the
University of Virginia accuses me of holding “a Marxist view of
literature.”
Marxist? Moi?
I trust that my faithful readers will realize that Professor
Cantor, in his disagreement with my chief thesis, has gone a little overboard.
I’ve been called many things, but never a Marxist.
As a matter of fact, anti-Communism was my first political
passion. For most of my adult life I was a Cold Warrior. I’ve written
countless columns and articles denouncing the Soviet Union and Red China.
But all for nought. The damage is done. My reputation has
been blackened, my career blighted, my future darkened. From now on my
name will be indelibly associated with the word Marxist. Old friends will
drop me. My children will be shunned, my grandchildren shamed.
![[Breaker quote for Victim of McCarthyism: My besmirched reputation]](2006breakers/060905.gif) In
short, it’s time to write my memoirs. That’s how we victims of
McCarthyism have always made ends meet. When you’re exposed as a
Communist, your next move, if you have any sense, is to exploit the
opportunity by going to a big publisher and writing about how you’ve
been persecuted for your ideas. You can hold out for a lot of money.
And don’t forget the movie rights! Hollywood loves
stories about people who have been picked on just because their ideals led
them to work secretly for Stalin. I want to be played by Robert De Niro or
Robert Redford, with Vanessa Redgrave as my mother.
I never actually finished grad school (I just hung around for
several years, like most grad students), but as a known Marxist I should be
able to land a good job teaching in a major university. I can’t wait to
see the look on Professor Cantor’s face when I turn up as his
colleague in the English Department at the University of Virginia! I’ll be
the darling of the faculty.
And then, woe to Professor Cantor! I’ll have him
hounded out of the university for having led the witch-hunt that left me a
broken man. And that’s not all he’s done. He also accuses me
of holding “Romantic notions of poetry” and places me in
“the camp of today’s multiculturalists.” I didn’t
even realize you could hold Romantic and Marxist views at the same time.
But this man will stop at nothing. He says I believe that
“authors are the captives of the class into which they are born, and
their works are merely the ideological superstructure of their class
interest.” Well, yes. Does anyone disagree with that? It’s just
common sense. Marx said it, I believe it, that settles it.
My experience has given me a new sympathy not only for my
fellow accused Marxists, but for the underdog, the minority, the dissenter,
the Other — in short, for all who are oppressed or marginalized by
bourgeois society. I try to keep my chin up, but it isn’t easy, as people
like Mikhail Gorbachev, the Chinese leadership, the Clintons, and now Tony
Blair co-opt the working classes and betray the revolution.
My only hope lies in the internal contradictions of capitalism.
That, and the fact that progressive-minded people still control the
universities. Plus, my agent thinks we can get a decent book and movie
package.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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