3-28-07, 8:55 am

Editor’s Note: This is the text of a speech delivered at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University.

First of all, I would like to thank both the CPUSA and NYU for this marriage – it is one, perhaps not made in heaven but no less celestial and lofty for that. The thrust of my brief remarks is to suggest that the history of the CPUSA and, indeed, the global movement of which it is a part, has been distorted grievously by the infestation of anti-Sovietism and anticommunism and the opening of these wonderful archives should not only lead to a reassessment of the party but help to push back the right-wing which has profited so handsomely from anti-Sovietism and anticommunism – forces which have brought this nation to the brink of catastrophe, not only in Iraq and the Middle East generally but vis-à-vis China as well. I suggest in these remarks that future generations will not necessarily be as seized as this one apparently is with how and why the former USSR was a supposed “Evil Empire” and how and why some in the US – e.g. the CPUSA – could support this state; I think future generations in the US will take note of the fact that the presumed primary victims of the so-called ‘Evil Empire – in Soviet Russia, for example – tend to agree with President Putin, whose popularity ratings are about double those of the current US President, in his assertion that the fall of the USSR was the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century. I think future generations in the US-as my remarks suggest will wonder instead how and why the US aligned with so-called Islamic fundamentalism against the former USSR – an appropriate question, I think, as we sit in the shadow of the former World Trade Center – particularly given that the period from 1941-1945 demonstrated decisively that these two nations could collaborate for mutual advantage.

Let me begin by quoting the fortunately retired NY Times right-wing hack columnist William Safire: “Before Nixon died,” he said, “I asked him – on the record – if perhaps we had gone a bit overboard on selling the American public on the political benefits of increased trade with China. That old realist,” continued Safire, “who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness, that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: “We may have created a Frankenstein [monster],” said Nixon.

Nixon, the hard-boiled realist was on to something for although contemporary analysts have managed to convince the chattering classes in this nation that the former Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight and that China’s role in the encirclement of Russia had little or nothing to do with the retreat of socialism, that China’s waging war on socialist Vietnam or backing genocide in Cambodia or collaborating with US imperialism and apartheid South Africa in Angola thereby causing over-stretching of resources in Moscow – none of this had anything to do with the tumultuous events of 1989-1991.

Yet, once again, history has proven to be a cruel teacher and taskmaster for because of Nixon’s decision to “exploit the split in the Communist world,” U.S. imperialism just exchanged one Communist antagonist in Moscow for a far larger, far stronger Communist antagonist in Beijing. Future dictionaries may well illustrate the definition of the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” with a picture of Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972. In fact a future project for a comparative diplomatic historian is to analyze how long French elites thought they had pulled a fast one on Britain by backing the rebellious colonists in North America at the end of the 18th century and compare when did it dawn that they may have outsmarted themselves with how long it took US elites to realize that they were in an analogous position to French elites when it comes to China or how long did it take British elites to recognize that they had erred grievously when approximately 100 years ago they began to build up Imperial Japan as their watchdog in Asia – certainly London was aware of their blunder by December 7, 1941.

Read The Rest Of The Speech Here: