PORTSIDE'S OCTOBER 16 POSTING


[boldface emphasis and sq bracketed comments added by yr editor DC]
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


We also print below material from the discussion of the
Phelps article on the listserve of the 
Historians of American Communism (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

By Bettina Aptheker October 15, 2006

[see link for full text]

===

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?

[it is passing strange that a woman who, despite all, still
loved her father and tried to forgive him, waited to write about
disturbing family matters until her parents were safely dead?
what the hell is so strange about that?  I suppose if she had
published earlier she would be called an unfeeling monster for
*not* waiting until they were dead.]

[this has to be the most scurrilous application of the "self-hating
Jew" meme I have ever yet heard, and the looniest.]

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?

[in other words. Bettina is just making up nasty stories
about her heroic Communist father in order to score ideological
purity points for job security.  Does it get much nastier?
This comment could easily have been written by Camille Paglia,
Ann Coulter or Dave Horowitz...  "feminazis" play the victim
card and accuse innocent men for sake of an ideological agenda.]

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.

[therefore he could not possibly be a child molester,
unlike the millions of uptight respectable rightwing men
world wide who use underage prostitutes for example...]

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. 

[he couldn't possibly have done it 'cos he was prudish,
uptight and sexually repressed;  but if he did do it, it
was only because the poor fellow was so prudish, uptight,
and sexually repressed.  uh huh.]

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.

[Aptheker's whitewashing of sexism under the Soviet regime
is so much more important than whether he himself abused his
power as a man and a father to exploit his own daughter.]

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.

[if incestuous abuse of a child is not paedophilia
then what is it?]

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.

[which makes her a bad, bad, bad daughter.  how dare she
elevate her own suffering or anger or thirst for justice over
the sacred memory of her Father?]

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

[anyone capable of composing this monstrous sentence
ought to be drummed out of the English-speaking literary
world, but anyway, it comes down to "she's either lying
vindictively or she's crazy and needs treatment -- i.e.
drugging to silence her."]

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.

[once again psychologising the woman's articulation of
her experience, now as a social pathology of our times,
or "whiner culture".  how can these old Reds not hear the
echoes of modern neocons in their remarks?  is this loony
masculinism why the nencons so easily evolved out of old 
Trots?  and what exactly is "her cohort"?  do I detect a 
not so subtle bit of lesbian-baiting here?]

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.

[as if the history of the CP or any other human institution
were more or less than an endless story of "he said, he said".
but since it is *he* said, that makes it legitimate history.]

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.

[ain't it grand how men have the right to decide what they
get to call women?  I'd say it was a woman's right to decide
whether she was friendly enough with a man to permit the
informality.]

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.

[hey. we all had issues with our parents but some of us
are mature and cool enough not to make an scene, OK?]

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.

[this may be the nastiest piece of work of the lot,
by its devious faux-tolerance and faux-sympathy.  of course
she is a mere female and a feminist at that, so who expects
her to make any great contrinution?]

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
healthy.

[in other words, domestic violence belongs in the private
sphere and has nothing to do with "real" politics.]

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. [It is hard not to read this as a fairly
open statement that the writer despises Bettina Aptheker.]
 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.

[there is no political context in which to put the 
oppression of women in patriarchal families?  umm, Earth
to Schwartz, it's called feminism ...]

[so she is indeed a bad girl and should be punished, but her 
own actions -- says Schwartz with paternalist magnanimity --
should be punishment enough.  can you believe this guy?
with friend like these...]

Stephen Schwartz