Jill linked Ema’s awesome post about why Leslee Unruh and her cadre of crazy anti-choicers are very Communist in their thinking. I’m reading Glenn Greenwald’s newest book, and I have to say that this post really reminds me of his larger points about how right wingers all too often embody the very things they claim to hate. The official right wing reason to hate communism was that it was totalitarian, but the recent embrace of Soviet tactics demonstrates that it wasn’t the totalitarianism that was an issue so much at the lefty economics, as you might suspect.
The bill that Unruh and company are trying to pass into law could potentially ban birth control along with abortion, and it redefines biology in a way that would bring a tear to the eye of Soviets who thought natural selection was politically incorrect and had to go. It gives the government panty-sniffing power that would make the Stasi jealous. It redefines women’s bodies as property of the state in a way that the Chinese are taking notes.
But when red-baiting the anti-choicers, we mustn’t forget to mention the anti-choice communist utopia: Romania. Now there was a state that Leslee Unruh, Phill Kline and the whole cast of panty-sniffing misogynists could really get behind. Modern American anti-choicers make the same argument used in communist Romania to deprive women of basic rights: We aren’t having enough babies to sustain the economy! Under Nicolae Ceausescu, contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state. In a strong echo of our modern anti-choice community’s disconnect between what they actually think and what they say they think, it was widely believed that the contraception and abortion ban of Romania mostly functioned as a way for men in power to get off on controlling women. It certainly didn’t do anything to lower the abortion rate—under this regime, they had one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. Highest maternal mortality, too, which was a direct result of the high illegal abortion rate.
That’s the utopia they’re looking at with their communist-borrowing strategies. A world where a misogynist’s nose is in every panty drawer, and women who run the risk of dying every time they have sex.
35 Responses to “Because it’s funny to red bait the anti-choicers”
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I would like the thank Ema for telling the truth about the anti-choicers. They are just like the Taliban.
It is fun to point out the similarities between conservatives and the ideologies they claim to be opposed to. Dinesh D’Souza really gets into this in The Enemy At Home. His point is basically that the left is responsible for 9-11 because we provoked the terrorists by hedonistically exercising exactly the sort of freedoms that they supposedly hate, and this just drove them so crazy that they selected America as a target. So his solution, I guess, is that we give up all our freedoms and live out the right wing ideology, which is apparently a lot more compatible with fundamentalist Islam.
Ever since the repubs back in Reagan’s time chanted ‘better dead than red’, I started getting worried.
Whatever happened to ‘Fight from the inside’? Is it easier for those cowards to give up?
Socialism is ok for bailing out very large and badly run banks. But stalin and bush seem to have about equal regard for the concepts in the bill of rights.
Whatever else it is, capitalism is not exactly the opposite of communism, its more like economic patriarchy…a way to keep all the resources nature gave in fewer hands.
I’ve talked to some conservative guy a while ago who claimed that the NeoConservative movement closely resembles a Trotskyist philosophy. Every time I try to study up on the different factions of communism it makes my head spin, so I just took his word on it. (Although it would certainly explain Christopher Hitchen’s seamlessly blending in with The Right)
contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state
!!!!!
GAH!!!
I’m sorry, that’s just–scary as hell.
I wonder what it takes to be considered pro-life over in that part of the country…believing that contraception shouldn’t be used until 10 kids?
greensmile:
It’s important, in discussions like this, to note that communism and socialism are not the same thing. Capitalism exists in contrast to the latter, not the former.
Romania also ended up with warehouses full of abandoned, abused and malnourished children. Of course, that would never happen here, because…uh, we’re a Christian Nation, or something.
They made a documentary about this period in Romania called “Children of the decree” .
And didn’t Romania have the highest population of AIDS infect children due to some edict that every child be given a blood transfusion? Seems that I read that somewhere and couldn’t believe the sick bastard that would think that giving children transfusions would help them in any way.
That’s just superstition and nonsense and, wee, to mentally ill people in power it would make sense I guess.
There will end up being pockets of people, perhaps whole states, that will adopt these draconian and fascistic laws to ‘control the population’. Handmaid states anyone?
They just hat eit when others inject themselves into their lives but…
Don’t forget China! The reason the one child policy was needed* was because Mao advocated babies babies babies as his national industrialize everything including the rivers policy.
*…and following their brotherhood for (some) men, screw the women policy, now they are forcing women to have abortions, when it would have been much more sensible to give women FREE contraceptive. + means to get away from pigs who want to use their bodies as baby factories (Fact, as late as the 20th century girls were still kidnapped and sold as brides). When women have a choice, they chose to have less, HK families have long had two children families since birth control was made available.
I was going to point out the Romanian orphanages but Sour Kraut beat me to it. It’s just like those anti-choicers who proclaim that “adoption” is the answer without lifting a finger to improve the adoption process or foster care in this country.
As far as the idiot “babies for the state” mentality, I’m reminded of Henry V. “If the enemy is a fool and an ass and a prating coxcomb, do you think it right that we also should be a fool and an ass and a prating coxcomb.” Assuming that the evil hordes of [insert this week’s enemy] are trying to outbreed us, why does it follow that we need quiver babies to consumer resources faster?
and with any luck, they suffer the same fate as the Ceauescus
Is panty sniffing really an effective way of determining if a woman has had sex, or is pregnant? Surely, in the 21st century, we have more modern methods! Or do they just like the smell of panties?
Don’t discount the significance to the American right of Communism being an “godless” philosophy — that was really the core distinguishing feature between Us and the Pinkos during the whole Cold War. Remember how the Pledge of Allegiance, originally written by a socialist, was edited to include the phrase “under god” during the height of the Cold War?
You and I and any normal person might find little to distinguish theocratic totalitarianism from secular totalitarianism. To the American Right, however, there’s always been a huge difference. To you and me, Ceausescu’s atheism might seem incidental to his many crimes, a rhetorical position he adopted in order to wield power in a Stalinist system; to the American Right, this view is reversed: his atheism is the Original Crime of the regime, to which all the other horrors are incidental.
IOKIYAW: It’s OK If You Are A Worshipper.
Yes! It’s probably a bit late in the political cycle to do much about it but yeah, as a child of the cold war it’s always struck me how many things I was (correctly I think) raised to despise about soviet-style governance turn out to also be what I’ve grown to despise about modern conservatism. It’s like they didn’t hate communism because it’s a soul-sucking, party-benefitting, fear-spreading dictatorship but because they resented the competition!
Anyway, the Gore/Bush election permanently labeled the parties blue and red and gave us a great rhetorical advantage: we’re “True Blue,” they’re “Dirty Reds” or the “Red Menace.”
Ema’s true-blue post makes the case all that much clearer.
There are probably 10,000 old anti-communist posters we could use with little or no modification at all.
figleaf
Quick adendum to my stuck-in-moderation comment: the American Right continues to worry mainly about Communism’s “godlessness” — witness how much the Right Wing complains about religious freedom in China (Falun Gong, Chinese Catholic Church, recently Tibet), and how little they seem to care about workers’ rights there.
The result is that American wingers are kinda impervious to redbaiting. The essential characteristic of a Commie is godless atheism. Since they go to church, they’re not Communists, no matter how much contempt they have for civil liberties.
In Ceausescu’s Romania one person in three (!) worked for the Romanian secret police. Given that statistic, I think a good argument can be made that it is provably impossible to bring down the abortion rate with legislation. What are you going to do, set up a state in which half the population is employed by the government as informants? Or two thirds? Grover Norquist and his “starve the beast” buddies would just love that…
Speaking of Romania and fanatical control over women’s bodies, be sure to check out the latest winner of the Palme d’Or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days about two friends struggling to find an abortion provider in 80’s Romania.
It wasn’t 1 in 3 more like 1 in 10. Not even the Securitate was that efficient. Though they would let women who had abortions bleed to death unless they named who helped them. And any gynecological procedure related to pregnancies was overlooked by an officer literally looking over the doctors shoulder. Not to mention the random obligatory gynecological checkups of factory girls to see if they aren’t pregnant.
ugh…the google ads are all for baby-brokers and crisis pregnancy frauds…
time for the Vegan to go back to bed. [shudder]
And I have to say that it’s a very Communist idea that individuals have to cede their autonomy for the benefit of others. Isn’t that ultimately what right wingers hate about Communism? Yet here they are demanding that women give up our autonomy for the benefit of embryos, fetuses, and religious fundamentalists’ sensibilities.
Not really. Right-wingers hate the idea of autonomy being ceded to a civil authority, because a civil authority has the possibility to be rational and scientific. Righties believe that only religious instititions should be able to demand the autonomy of the citizenry, because “faith” doesn’t have to be rational or scientific to justify its ends.
It all boils down to having more latitude to arbitrarily change the rules of the game if you’re in an influential position in a religious organization. That’s why righties get all lubed up over the idea of a Christian theocracy and disdain other organizational forms. After, even communists have to explain a rational basis for their policies, but Right-wingers only have to say, “Because God says so,” in order to justify theirs.
It say says a lot to me that all totalitarian systems, whether right or left wing, seem to be obsessed with either turning women into baby machines for the state, or forcibly sterilizing/forcing them to have abortions for the state.
I actually suspect that neocons are, in a sense, Marxist–a lot of their programs and the franker versions of their ideals are consisten with someone who has read Marx’s economics but rejected his allegience with the working class. If Marxist ec is valid–and I for one think it is–than it follows that it can be as good a tool for someone intending to keep capitalists in power as for someone who wants to overthrow it. Its only drawback from a pro-capitalist point oview is ideological–it demolishes all pretensions of capitalists to view themselves as natural, inevitable, eternally necessary, and morally justified.
But, as a pro-working-class Marxist, even I can give good reasons why capitalism is justified in particular stages of history. As long as the working class is better off under capitalism that they would be under some other system, it is justified IMHO. I just happen to agree with Marx that his anaylysis shows why capitalists will inevitablty undermine that justification in practice, and that the history of the attempt to check and regulate capitalism in the public interest since the Great Depression demonstrates that tendency amply. We _could_ have a socially just capitalism, it is just ridiculously unlikely given that capitalism gives unchecked power to the wealthy–it would depend on that class becoming and remaining enlightened and benign enough to tolerate and indeed sponsor regulation that would tend to be against their immediate interest–and competition between capitalists tends to eliminate from power and influence any capitalists who don’t go with the trend of grabbing all the power and benefits they can at every opportunity.
So I think at least some neocons have read their Marx and understand him better than the average “Marxist” university professor. They just are using it against Marx’s purpose. Which is morally undermining, and they tend to lie about it.
Dan..Foster:
I never took a class on comparative political econ so many voids may exist in my knowledge, to be compounded by my undisciplined writing habits.
I do have my own awareness that communism and socialism are quite distinct. Its the communists who seem to get two confused. In their dreams, communism is a pure and orthodox form of socialism. In the real world socialism can be found in varying degrees in most governments and countries while communism is mostly remembered as a form of orthodoxy for its own sake.
Mark–
Its interesting that you would say that, because many of the top neoconservatives are former Marxists of the Trotskyite variety. Ex., Bill Kristol. So you’re pretty spot on.
Gee Ben,
You hijacked my train of thought,
Actually, it wasn’t Bill it was his father Irving, but that is the case, all of the founding members of the neocon philosophy started out as strident commies, they advocated armed revolution to bring about a worker’s paradise, seeing that they were on the wrong side of history, they revised their philosophy to advocate wars of democratic liberation to bring about a citizens paradise, the operative notion here is war, as long as someone else is fighting it. ‘cause you know their asses are to valuable to get involved n the nitty-gritty.
I recall this debate where Fukuyama said of himself and Kristol, (paraphrased) “I’m a Marxist and Bill’s a Leninist.” He seemed to offer it as a joke, but Kristol got visibly pissed and protested too much.
It kind of confirmed for me the idea I’d been toying with, which Mark Foxwell articulates above: these fuckers know that Marx was right, and they intend to use that knowledge against us.
Romania was also a hotbed of underage prostitutes. We investigated a man who pimped his wife, female children and some other relatives. I recall my disgust when the ages were revealed to the relevant agencies. Up until his imprisonment, he felt the had done nothing wrong. Oh, he of course did not labor.
I don’t think they’ve really fully dropped their Marxist sentiments.
Think about it: supporting a large military-industrial establishment that undermines our economy, supressing dissent, torturing people, suspending civil rights, invading other countries in the name of a “revolution”. Very….”Soviet” of them isn’t it?
Its like we’re becoming what we were opposed to in the Cold War.
Eh…I guess I should say “Lenninist-Stalinist” sentiments since not all Marxists were USSR supporters.
Still, even though Marx gave some good analysis for his time I’m suspicious of any line of thought that claims it gives a “total” vision of human history and society, right or left wing.
Incredible though it may seem, I made a mistake. up at comment #4 I pasted the url for the thread I was trying to macramé on some other blog.
As a result, my comment makes even less sense than usual.
The intended link to my elevator speech about capitalism is here.