Mick Hartley

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Didn’t want to hear such things

Politics on the left, and how it works.

As a radical journalist, Clifton Ross was a firm believer in the Chavez revolution in Venezuela. Then he went there:

An early supporter of the Revolution, I had traveled to Venezuela in 2013 to cover the April presidential elections. By the time I returned to the US, I was disillusioned and depressed. I decided I needed to start writing and speaking about what I had seen there. In an article I wrote for the radical magazine Counterpunch around that time, I argued that “the so-called ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ is bankrupt: morally, ideologically, and economically,” and I asked what we, as leftist solidarity activists, should do in response. “Should we continue to make excuses for incompetence, corruption, and irresponsibility and thereby make ourselves accomplices?” I asked. “Or should we tell the truth?”

I had resolved to tell the truth. Having been so wrong about something so consequential, I felt it was the least I could do. By then, Venezuela was already in a terrible mess. Many of those I had helped to convince of the possibilities offered by Bolivarian socialism were deeply suspicious of the mainstream media and deserved to hear what was going on from a writer they trusted. But, as it turned out, the people I wanted to reach didn’t want to hear such things. And the people I asked to publish my articles didn’t much want me to write about them either. As a result of my voltafaccia, former comrades and friends contacted my editors and publishers in (occasionally successful) attempts to have my articles spiked. I was denounced and slandered online and in print. Phone calls and emails to people I had thought of as friends now went unanswered. On those occasions when I encountered one of them in public, they looked the other way. Abruptly, I found myself excommunicated, and people I’d known for 30 or 40 years made it clear that they no longer wanted to be part of my life.

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3 responses to “Didn’t want to hear such things”

  1. Joanne Avatar
    Joanne

    This reminds me of the time that the left-wing US magazine Mother Jones refused to publish an article by Paul Berman in the 1980s that was critical of the Sandanistas. See: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/27/us/radical-magazine-removes-editor-setting-off-a-widening-political-debate.html

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  2. Stephen K Avatar
    Stephen K

    When I began to read the extract I thought it must be by some wet-behind-the-ears 20something. Then I got to the ’30 or 40 years’ bit and realised differently. Still at least he was honest.

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  3. TDK Avatar
    TDK

    Max Eastman writing in 1955 about his experience of visiting Russia to witness the revolution and then writing what he found:
    “I had said enough in my two books, however, to ostracize me completely from the official communist movement. When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my old political friends refused to speak to me on the street. I was a traitor, a renegade, a pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned. And as the bitterness mounted, this mood spread to the radical, and even in some degree to the liberal, intelligentsia as a whole. To get rid of my facts, I was of course promptly and indelibly labeled “Trotskyist,” although I neither agreed with Trotsky’s Marxism nor ever shared the delusion that he might become the successful leader of a party.”
    Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
    https://mises.org/library/reflections-failure-socialism

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