Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
I just finished reading The Devil in Dover by Lauri Lebo (if you only read one book about the Dover trial, this is the one to read - it's absolutely brilliant in every respect) and she discusses the background of Vic Walczak. Vic is the legal director of the ACLU of Pittsburgh and was one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial. And his entire life puts the lie to this idiotic slur that the ACLU are communists.
Before going to law school, Walczak went to Poland to give aid Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement. He documented police brutality, wiretapping and other human rights violations as he dodged the secret police. He was detained by them and strip searched, but the documentation had been handed over to an American consulate worker who would ship them back to the US in a diplomatic bag. When he returned to the US, he knew that he had to become a human rights attorney.
The communist slur was idiotic from the start, of course. What, after all, is the (entirely accurate) critique of communist governments? That they operate in secret, invade their citizens' lives with spying and wiretapping, practice arbitrary imprisonment, make dissent illegal, destroy due process and generally terrorize the people with a brutal law enforcement system whose job is to maintain the power of the state rather than secure justice.
What are the very things that the ACLU spends nearly all their time and effort fighting against? Each and every one of those practices. The irony is that many of the very same people who scream about the ACLU being communists support many of those items when done by their own government. They defend warrantless wiretapping, the arbitrary suspension of habeas corpus and a weakening of due process protections. All you just have to do is scare them enough, by talk of communists or terrorists, and they instinctively become the very thing they claim to despise.
Comments
Bummer - not available on Kindle.
Posted by: yoshi | May 13, 2008 9:43 AM
I'll have to check out your recommendation.
I would also highly recommend 'Monkey Girl' (by Ed Humes) as a very good account of the Dover trial.
Cheers.
Posted by: FastLane | May 13, 2008 10:06 AM
Duh, Ed. Communists are Leftists(must capitalize, remember). Communists are bad people. Therefore, all Leftists are Communists and bad people. Simple logic. Didn't you learn that in eight grade geometry?
Posted by: AnneS | May 13, 2008 10:23 AM
Only when someone with (R) behind their name is in the Oval Office. Most of the people I know who are defending these things would have decried them if they had been done by Janet Reno and her "jack-booted thugs" a few years ago. And if a Dem is elected this time around, they'll likely change their tune again. Expect "nation building" to go out of vogue as well.
Posted by: Chuck C | May 13, 2008 10:43 AM
And let's not forget Walczak helped Lech Walesa, who founded Solidarity, a union. We all know that unions are just fronts for communists. And because he helped found a communist union in a communist country makes him twice the commie. Add ACLU on top of that and he's triple the commie.
Do you know if he's a Democrat?
Posted by: Algerine | May 13, 2008 12:17 PM
I finished reading Monkey Girl yesterday. It was excellent, informative and compelling. Could Devil in Dover be even better?
Posted by: Paholaisen Asianajaja | May 13, 2008 12:50 PM
"And let's not forget Walczak helped Lech Walesa, who founded Solidarity, a union. We all know that unions are just fronts for communists. And because he helped found a communist union in a communist country makes him twice the commie. Add ACLU on top of that and he's triple the commie."
Don't laugh. Some people probably think that way. About twenty years, during Russia's Glasnost era, the New American(a Bircher magazine) published an article alleging that Andrei Sakharov was not a real dissident, but only a different kind of communist.
Posted by: Bill in NC | May 13, 2008 2:59 PM
>> Only when someone with (R) behind their name is in the Oval Office. Most of the people I know who are defending these things would have decried them if they had been done by Janet Reno and her "jack-booted thugs" a few years ago. And if a Dem is elected this time around, they'll likely change their tune again. Expect "nation building" to go out of vogue as well. >>
I agree with what you say on this. This happens because have more allegiance to party than principle, and it happens on both sides of the aisle. Democrats will happily label Republicans racists where appropriate but will give a pass to the racists in their own midst when convenient, for example. I wish people would begin to be allegiant to America and principle for a change. This very thing you mention is the reason why, despite the fact that I am a conservative, I can't stand the Republican Party and I think GWB has been a dismal president.
Posted by: mroberts | May 13, 2008 3:12 PM
Would someone volunteer to cure my ignorance? Are these things an explicit consequence of communism (e.g. are they designed into the communist philosophy explicitly), or are they merely inevitable consequences of the communist style of government, given human nature? As someone whose higher education came post-Cold War, my knowledge of communism is lacking.
Posted by: Shygetz | May 13, 2008 3:57 PM
Shygetz: I'd say the latter, for the most part. Although Communist ideology, especially as articulated by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, did explicitly justify many of those tactics as means to the end of achieving a perfect Communist society (which, even by their own terms, they never did achieve), the tactics tend to be a feature of most authoritarian governments. It is worth noting that the geographic spaces where modern Communism developped had, by and large, been under authoritarian rule before their "revolutions" and the secret police, etc. were not a new feature of their political culture. It's also worth noting that most of the post-Soviet space has reverted to authoritarian government.
Perhaps more importantly for us, the tactics Ed describes are self-perpetuating within the power structure - while they are originally justified as a temporary measure to destroy , they become permanent and their targets, either implicitly or explicitly, broaden to include an ever greater proportion of the population.
Posted by: AnneS | May 13, 2008 4:20 PM
I'll second the recommendations for Monkey Girl. In spite of a few errors in the hardcover version, it is a very good account of the events leading up to the Kitzmiller case.
I should note that Monkey Girl also profiles Vic Walczak's work in Poland.
Posted by: J. A. Baker | May 13, 2008 5:07 PM
"It's also worth noting that most of the post-Soviet space has reverted to authoritarian government." -AnneS
How about _did revert_. It's been awhile, and with the exception of Belarus and the occasional bit of political hanky-panky *cough*Milosovic*cough*, Eastern Europe's a collection of parliamentary democracies that function like most others.
Posted by: Sivi Volk | May 13, 2008 6:15 PM
That they are atheist.
Fill in the blank for the common US insult: "______ commie"
a) secretive
b) private propertyless
c) due processless
d) law and order obsessive
e) privacy invasive
f) anti-individualist
g) godless
Answer: g, always g.
Be glad Marx and Engels were atheists. Had they been Christians, we would be a Communist nation today.
Posted by: jpf | May 13, 2008 6:34 PM
Shygetz: Communist theory from Marx onwards speaks of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a phase society will pass through on the way to a true state of communism. The idea seems to be that only a people raised free of the trappings of capitalism will be able to do without a government apparatus. Unfortunately, it turns out that the dictatorship of the proletariat, once set up, is self-perpetuating.
Sivi Volk: Eastern Europe, sure. If you read "post-Soviet space" as meaning "the territory of the now-defunct Soviet Union", the picture changes quite a bit. Russia itself seems to be backsliding, Belarus is definitely a dictatorship, and the Caucasus isn't looking too pretty overall. The Ukraine seems to be doing well, however, along with Estonia and Latvia (I haven't heard anything out of Lithauania for ages, for some reason).
Posted by: konrad_arflane | May 13, 2008 7:15 PM
SOrry, Volk. Most of Eastern and Central Europe is doing well, but when I talk about post-Soviet space, I mean former Soviet Union. But even if you take the expanded definition, the size of the former Soviet states that have reverted (includng Russia and most of central Asia) dwarf the functioning democracies.
Posted by: AnneS | May 13, 2008 7:30 PM
The thing the right fear about communism isn't the authority, they love that and are jealous, but the fact that under communisim, people share. If people share things, then capitalists can't sell it.
Basicly, they don't like communism because it would mean they can't make a buck.
Posted by: Dexceus | May 14, 2008 1:40 PM