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<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=astridjb@comcast.net href="mailto:astridjb@comcast.net">Astrid Berkson</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=undisclosed-recipients:
href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, November 15, 2010 2:57 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> [CentralILJwJ] from chan davis</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<H1>The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum</H1>
<H6><A
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_origin_of_americas_intellectual_vacuum_20101115/">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_origin_of_americas_intellectual_vacuum_20101115/</A></H6>
<H4 class=date>Posted on Nov 15, 2010</H4><FONT
face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif"></FONT>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">By Chris
Hedges</FONT></P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif"></FONT>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">The blacklisted
mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury
federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and
thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s
intellectual life.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“You must welcome
dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only
the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely
to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you
by outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959 essay “...From an Exile.” “You must welcome
dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can
hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world
from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over
all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand.
You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us
back.”</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">But they did not take
Davis back. Davis, whom I met a few days ago in Toronto, could not find a job
after his prison sentence and left for Canada. He has spent his career teaching
mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of
the professors ousted from universities never taught again. Radical and
left-wing ideas were effectively stamped out. The purges, most carried out
internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the
universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was
killed. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“Political discourse has
been impoverished since then,” Davis said. “In the 1930s it was understood by
anyone who thought about it that sales taxes were regressive. They collected
more proportionately from the poor than from the rich. Regressive taxation was
bad for the economy. If only the rich had money, that decreased economic
activity. The poor had to spend what they had and the rich could sit on it.
Justice demands that we take more from the rich so as to reduce inequality. This
philosophy was not refuted in the 1950s and it was not the target of the purge
of the 1950s. But this idea, along with most ideas concerning economic justice
and people’s control over the economy, was cleansed from the debate. Certain
ideas have since become unthinkable, which is in the interest of corporations
such as Goldman Sachs. The power to exclude certain ideas serves the power of
corporations. It is unfortunate that there is no political party in the United
States to run against Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of elections, but there is no
way I can vote against Goldman Sachs.” </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">The silencing of radicals
such as Davis, who had been a member of the Communist Party, although he had
left it by the time he was investigated by HUAC, has left academics and
intellectuals without the language, vocabulary of class war and analysis to
critique the ideology of globalism, the savagery of unfettered capitalism and
the ascendancy of the corporate state. And while the turmoil of the 1960s saw
discontent sweep through student bodies with some occasional support from
faculty, the focus was largely limited to issues of identity politics—feminism,
anti-racism—and the anti-war movements. The broader calls for socialism, the
detailed Marxist critique of capitalism, the open rejection of the sanctity of
markets, remained muted or unheard. Davis argues that not only did
<I>socialism</I> and <I>communism</I> become outlaw terms, but once these were
tagged as heresies, the right wing tried to make <I>liberal</I>, <I>secular</I>
and <I>pluralist</I> outlaw terms as well. The result is an impoverishment of
ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make
sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem. The
“centrist” liberals manage to retain a voice in mainstream society because they
pay homage to the marvels of corporate capitalism even as it disembowels the
nation and the planet. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“Repression does not
target original thought,” Davis noted. “It targets already established heretical
movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in
punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality. And in the
population, fear of uttering such a taboo word as <I>communism</I> may in the
next stage become general paralysis of social thought.”</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">It is this paralysis he
watches from Toronto. It is a paralysis he predicted. Opinions and questions
regarded as possible in the 1930s are, he mourns, now forgotten and no longer
part of intellectual and political debate. And perhaps even more egregiously the
fight and struggle of radical communists, socialists and anarchists in the 1930s
against lynching, discrimination, segregation and sexism were largely purged
from the history books. It was as if the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. had no antecedents in the battles of the Wobblies as well as the
socialist and communist movements.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“Even the protests that
were organized entirely by Trotskyists were written out of history,” Davis noted
acidly. </FONT></P><FONT
face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif"></FONT>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">Those who remained in
charge of American intellectual thought went on to establish the wider “heresy
of leftism” in the name of academic objectivity. And they have succeeded.
Universities stand as cowardly, mute and silent accomplices of the corporate
state, taking corporate money and doing corporate bidding. And those with a
conscience inside the walls of the university understand that tenure and
promotion require them to remain silent. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“Not only were a number
of us driven out of the American academic scene, our questions were driven out,”
said Davis, who at 84 continues to work as emeritus professor of mathematics at
the University of Toronto. “Ideas which were on the agenda a hundred years ago
and sixty years ago have dropped out of memory because they are too far from the
new center of discourse.”</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">Davis has published
science fiction stories, is the editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and is
an innovator in the theory of operators and matrices. He is a director of
Science for Peace. He also writes poetry. His nimble mind ranges swiftly in our
conversation over numerous disciplines and he speaks with the enthusiasm and
passion of a new undergraduate. His commitment to radical politics remains
fierce and undiminished. And he believes that the loss of his voice and the
voices of thousands like him, many of whom were never members of the Communist
Party but had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy of the Cold War and
corporate capitalism, deadened intellectual and political discourse in the
United States. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">During World War II Davis
joined the Navy and worked on the minesweeping research program. But by the end
of the war, with the saturation bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the
dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he came to regret his
service in the military. He has spent most of his life working in a variety of
anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“In retrospect I am sorry
I didn’t declare myself as a conscientious objector,” he said. “Not at the
beginning of the war, because if you are ever going to use military force for
anything, that was a situation in which I would be happy to do it. I was
wholehearted about that. But once I knew about the destruction of Dresden and
the other massacres of civilian populations by the Allies, I think the ethical
thing to do would have been to declare myself a CO.”</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">He was a “Red diaper
baby.” His father was a professor, union agitator and member of the old
Communist Party who was hauled in front of HUAC shortly before his son. Davis
grew up reading <A href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JmassesN.htm">New
Masses</A> and moved from one city to the next because of his father’s frequent
firings. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“I was raised in the
movement,” he said. “It wasn’t a cinch I would be in the Communist Party, but in
fact I was, starting in 1943 and then resigning soon after on instructions from
the party because I was in the military service. This was part of the
coexistence of the Communist Party with Roosevelt and the military. It would not
disrupt things during the war. When I got out of the Navy I rejoined the
Communist Party, but that lapsed in June of 1953. I never got back in touch with
them. At the time I was subpoenaed I was technically an ex-Communist, but I did
not feel I had left the movement and in some sense I never did.”</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">Davis got his doctorate
from Harvard in mathematics and seemed in the 1950s destined for a life as a
professor. But the witch hunts directed against “Reds” swiftly ended his career
on the University of Michigan faculty. He mounted a challenge to the Committee
on Un-American Activities that went to the Supreme Court. The court, ruling in
1960, three years after Joseph McCarthy was dead, denied Davis’ assertion that
the committee had violated the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech.
He was sent to prison. Davis, while incarcerated, authored a research paper that
had an acknowledgement reading: “Research supported in part by the Federal
Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not
necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons.”</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">Davis, who has lived in
Canada longer than he lived in the United States, said that his experience of
marginalization was “good for the soul and better for the intellect.”
</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“Though you see the
remnants of the former academic left still, though some of us were never fired,
though I return to the United States from my exile frequently, we are gone,” he
said. “We did not survive as we were. Some of us saved our skins without
betraying others or ourselves. But almost all of the targets either did crumble
or were fired and blacklisted. <A href="http://twm.co.nz/Bohm.html">David Bohm
</A>and <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_I._Finley">Moses Finley</A>
and <A href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/movies/01dassin.html">Jules
Dassin</A> and many less celebrated people were forced into exile. Most of the
rest had to leave the academic world. A few suffered suicide or other premature
death. There weren’t the sort of wholesale casualties you saw in Argentina or El
Salvador, but the Red-hunt did succeed in axing a lot of those it went after,
and cowing most of the rest. We were out, and we were kept out.” </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">“I was a scientist four
years past my Ph.D. and the regents’ decision was to extinguish, it seemed, my
professional career,” he said. “What could they do now to restore to me 35 years
of that life? If it could be done, I would refuse. The life I had is my life.
It’s not that I’m all that pleased with what I’ve made of my life, yet I
sincerely rejoice that I lived it, that I don’t have to be Professor X who rode
out the 1950s and 1960s in his academic tenure and his virtuously anti-Communist
centrism.” </FONT></P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif"><IMG
height=232 alt="" src="cid:007a01cb86cf$a50a50a0$6501a8c0@yourze8cxvr8tt"
width=300 border=0> </FONT>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">AP</FONT></P><FONT
face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif"></FONT>
<P><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">Like Chandler Davis,
screenwriters Dalton Trumbo, left, and John Howard Lawson were sent to prison
for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
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