Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia

Nuclear Parity in the Middle East

By Tom A. Milstein

December 13, 2005

On Thursday, Dec. 15, the Iraqi people will once again vote in a free election, this time to choose their next government. This momentous event will empower the formerly disenfranchised and oppressed 60% of the Iraqi people who are Shi’a for the first time in their country’s modern history.

Elections are no less struggles for power than revolutions, coups, and wars. In all such struggles there are winners and losers. This time the losers will be the Sunni Moslems of Iraq, who traditionally have ruled the Shi’a with an iron fist. They will lose no matter whether they participate in the election or not, because either way, their dispossession as the ruling elite of Iraq will be confirmed. Needless to say, the Sunni are unhappy at this turn of events.

To appease them, various concessions and compromises have been made in both the Iraqi constitution and other areas of society, the new army, and the government. The sum total of this appeasement has come close to completely vitiating the representative and democratic character of the new republic, by granting this former ruling class minority privileges and powers normally considered incompatible with democratic principles.

Why have these concessions and compromises been made? The official explanation is to prevent a civil war from tearing Iraqi society apart. We shall see whether this tactic works, in the statistics of insurgent terrorist acts to be compiled in the post-election future. Certainly we can see that it has failed up to now, as 30,000 dead Iraqis mutely testify to, but perhaps the success of the election will usher in a new spirit of peaceful participation. One hopes so.

So far, the Iraqi Insurgency has largely been a Sunni affair, aimed at inflicting as much carnage as possible on the Shi’a population. In truth, the Shi’a have largely replaced the American military as the target of choice for terrorist attacks. Sunni violence against Shi’a, whether carried out by former Ba’athist secular cadres or Al Qaeda Islamofascists, has in fact become “the war within the war” in Iraq. The media likes to publicize the comparatively sparse instances of Shi’a violence against Sunni, whether carried out by militias or by Iraqi government agencies, in order to establish some sort of false equivalency. The fact is that the volume and sheer horror of the Sunni attacks on innocent Shi’a civilians, mosque worshippers, police and army trainees, and shoppers, far outweighs counterpart Shi’a atrocities.

The insurgent focus on blowing up Shi’a appears on the face of it a rather odd tactic, if the objective of the insurgency is to drive American forces out of Iraq. A true “national liberation front” strategy would seek to unite Sunni and Shi’a against the American occupation. Instead, the effect has been to place Iraq’s Shi’a under the somewhat half-hearted protection of the U.S. Army. Most Americans, and that includes American soldiers, sense no vital stake in the Sunni-Shi’a struggle. “Let ‘em go on killing each other off” would be a fair characterization of this attitude, particularly if it means less ordnance being expended against our troops. Nevertheless, given the President’s commitment to establishing a democratic government in Iraq, our Army has been tasked to prevent terror attacks and this means, in the current Iraq reality, protecting Shi’a against Sunni. Indeed, in the larger sense this mission ties in directly with the President’s aim of creating a legitimate, representative government in Baghdad, for the previous Sadaam government was simply the institutionalization of minority Sunni terror against the Shi’a majority.

Shi’a’s humiliating dependence on American protection against the Sunni minority is supposed to end with the creation of a representative government through free elections. The theory – or the hope – is that such a government will make it impossible for a Sadaam-style regime to ever return to Baghdad. But this theory begs the question of how such a government could have arisen in the first place, given the radical disproportion between Sunni and Shi’a numbers in the demography of Iraq. And this question needs to be asked, and answered, not drowned out in “Strategy for Victory” cheerleading rallies, or the President may well find himself returned to the same predicament in which he found himself after he prematurely declared “Mission accomplished” to the sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.

The Sunni have a ready answer to this question. They regard, and treat, the Shi’a as an effeminate nation of slaves, lacking in the manly Islamic virtues, and therefore easy to oppress because they can’t or won’t defend themselves. This characterization is of course propaganda, designed like most such propaganda to hide the real dynamics of Sunni dominion over Iraq. Sunni Moslems were able to dominate the Shi’a of Iraq notwithstanding the latter’s numerical preponderance not because Shi’a are girly-boys, but because exterior factors came into play: Sadaam’s Sunni thugs were clients of Saudi Arabia, which provided the indispensable financial and political clout he needed to compensate for Sunni inferior numbers in Iraq. This relationship became quite clear during the Iraq-Iran War, when with America’s help, Iraq was essentially converted into a buffer state for Saudi Arabia to gas the Shi’a Revolution launched by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

Things change. Sadaam decided that if he was destined to play Praetorian Guard for the Saudi Oil Patch, he might as well assume the landlord role as well, and, following his idol Hitler’s time-tested strategy, tried to bite off Kuwait as a dress rehearsal for later adventures against the Saudi degenerates whose bossy dominion he resented. George Bush Senior was not about to exchange the House of Saud, with whom he and his friends had maintained cozy and lucrative relations for generations, for the unknown of a hypothetical House of Sadaam. “Soddum” was duly expelled from Kuwait – but left in place in Baghdad to continue his buffer role against the Shi’a of Iraq and Iran. Better he than us, reasoned Bush 41.

Bush Sr.’s pusillanimity was duly noted by the Saudis, so things changed again – on 9/11/01. After all, if Sadaam could survive defeat in Kuwait, could not the cowardly Americans be relied upon to forgive and forget a direct strike on their homeland by the Saudis themselves? Would not the second-rate son show even more of the family appeasing spirit than the supposedly granite-like father (“This shall not stand!”), particularly if the attack were audacious, giving Americans a taste of their own “Shock and Awe” medicine? It was time for the Saudis to accomplish what Sadaam had tried and failed to achieve – a great turning of the tables. Saudi Arabia had hitherto managed the Oil Cartel as a client of America. Now America would have to learn how to become a junior partner of the Oil Cartel and its Islamic masters.

This is the inner meaning of 9/11. It was a daring adventure, but not a terribly risky one. Even if it failed – and it did, for George W. Bush turned out to be made of different stuff than his father – the example of Sadaam demonstrated that America would never bite the hand that fed it. The Saudis and their Cartel might have to undergo some difficult moments, but when the dust of 9/11 settled, America would try to restore the status quo ante World Trade Center. America’s economic stake in the Cartel could be trusted to outweigh all other considerations, and the House of Saud would emerge unscathed.

And this gets us back to Iraq. The “status quo ante World Trade Center” will never be restored, because it cannot be. If America leaves the Saudi Oil Cartel intact, there will be future 9/11’s. This is the diplomatic circle that cannot be squared. The enemy is not terror. The enemy is not Islam. The enemy is the financial and economic foundation of Islamic terror, the Saudi Oil Cartel. No one point of this triad can be defeated unless all three are attacked. This is the lesson Lincoln had to learn during our own Civil War, as he fought his way forward toward an understanding that it was the institution of Slavery, not the abstraction of “disunion,” or the geographic region of “the South,” that he had to defeat. It is the same type of understanding that awaits our President too, in Iraq. Merely establishing a representative government in Baghdad will not insure against its subversion by a return of Sunni domination, a new Sadaam, and a resulting rebirth of Arab-Islamic triumphalism absolutely guaranteed to produce more 9/11’s, unless something is done to permanently neutralize the Saudi role in Iraq.

Shall America then permanently occupy Iraq to prevent Saudi influence from bringing about this counterrevolution? Awkward and untenable. Instead, America needs to find a countervailing regional force able to balance Saudi influence in Iraq and provide the Shi’a with an exterior base of support equivalent to that provided by the Saudis to the Iraqi Sunnis. Such a force can only be supplied by Iran. And Iran would be more than willing to play this role, were it not for one inconvenient power reality in the Middle East: the Shi’a have no nuclear deterrent, while the Sunni do. Pakistan now possesses scores of nuclear bombs, and delivery systems capable of placing them in Teheran and all other Iran cities. And not just Pakistan. According to a little-noticed but highly credible report from Arnaud de Borchgrave, writing in the Oct. 22, 2003 Washington Times, “Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on ‘nuclear cooperation’ that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.” (http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031021-112804-8451r.htm )

It is this nuclear imbalance that explains Iran’s drive for nuclear parity, not any disinformational ambition to erase Israel from the map. And the worldwide uproar over Iran’s ambition seems designed more to preserve the Sunni nuclear monopoly rather than to deter Iranian extremism. How else to explain the awkward silence that envelopes the issue of Pakistan-Saudi nuclear weaponry? The Sunni Bomb effectively inhibits Iran from playing a balancing role in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq, against Saudi Arabia. And in the absence of such a role, America willy-nilly ends up having to perform it instead.

No demand that Iran drop its quest for nuclear weapons is credible unless it is accompanied by the regional quid pro quo of disarming Pakistan and Saudi Arabia of similar weapons. In the absence of such an arrangement, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is a prerequisite to the success of George W. Bush’s Strategy for Victory in Iraq. For unless Iran is freed from the Pakistani-Saudi nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over Teheran, it cannot rescue the Neoconservative program of a democratic self-government from the same humiliating debacle that overtook their identical program in South Vietnam over 30 years ago.

For these and other reasons, Israel will not attack Iran, American will not attack Iran, and Iran will someday announce to the world that it possesses a nuclear deterrent. The Bush Administration will outwardly denounce and inwardly exult. So will Israel. So should we all.

Iraq Exit Strategy

Goodbye, Vietnam Iraq

By Tom Milstein

11/20/05

To get out of Iraq, first we must first know why we are in Iraq.

We did not invade Iraq to find Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

We did not invade Iraq to establish democracy in the Middle East.

We invaded Iraq to deter Saudi Arabia and its client, Islamic Fascism, from staging more 9/11
attacks on the United States.

We invaded Iraq because Iraq shares a border with Saudi Arabia, and has a history of military
antagonism to the United States. We are in Iraq for much the same reason we remained in West
Germany during the Cold War: to establish a base of operations for the maintenance of
deterrence against a perceived threat to the security of the United States. The scope and scale of
the Saudi threat are of a different order than that of the Soviet. But the strategic principle is the
same.

Of course deterrence only works when it can be sustained. We sustained deterrence against the
Soviets not just by declaring the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” but also by maintaining a
stable and supportive base of operations in Western Europe. The Germans – as well as the
French, the British, and the rest of Western Europe – might detest their subordinate status to
the American superpower, but the prospect of Soviet domination was a sobering antidote to all
such “Yankee go home” emotions.

We have no such stable base of support in Iraq. The Middle East is not about to flower into civil
society, Enlightenment, and free enterprise – not even with a NeoCon Marshall Plan. The Middle
East is not Europe, and democracy is not a charismatic idea in the Middle East. Jihad is.

The invasion of Iraq has deterred further 9/11’s, but it has not succeeded in institutionalizing
itself the way America’s presence in Europe institutionalized itself through NATO, as a
permanent and legitimate form of deterrence called “containment.” We have for the time being
deterred Islamic Fascism from launching another attack on the U.S., by threatening the Saudi
border, but we have not truly contained the Saudi menace the way we successfully contained
Soviet menace to Europe in the Cold War, and the whole world can see why – we cannot
“NATO-ize” our mission.

Our achievement in Iraq therefore lacks credibility, durability, and legitimacy. Nor is it ever
likely to attain these things. The gap between what America represents and Islamic political
culture is too great.
America has a wolf by the ears in Iraq. We cannot let go without risking future 9/11’s, and we
cannot hold on in the face of declining support both domestically and internationally.
So a different means of sustaining deterrence must be found – a model not based on the
Eurocentric Cold War against the Soviets, but rather on the Sino-American rapprochement,
which split the Communist bloc and led the way forward from deterrence, through and beyond
containment, to eventual victory over Communist totalitarianism.

The Sino-American rapprochement also grew out of a failed war – the war in Vietnam. That war
too was rooted in noble, but contradictory, objectives. On the one hand, we wished to promote a
Western-oriented, democratic South Vietnam against the totalitarian depredations of the
Communist North. On the other, we sought to extend the deterrence and containment model
from Europe to Southeast Asia, establishing a balance of power against the threat of Communist
expansion into and throughout the region. Based on our European NATO model, we thought
that each of these aims depended on the other. But we found to our dismay that we could not
establish a regime in South Vietnam with enough democratic vitality to win effective support
either from its own people or the American people.

We therefore could not sustain our Vietnam intervention (just as we cannot sustain our current
deterrence mission in Iraq). And because it could not be sustained, our Vietnam-era policymakers
were led to consider what the consequences might be, both regionally and globally, of a
North Vietnamese Communist victory in the South.

Out of this consideration came the decision to realign international politics by pursuing
rapprochement with China, a policy which had been verboten for American policy-makers since
the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. Maoist China was conventionally perceived to
be the more ideologically radical and dangerous of the two rival Communist states, the more
anti-American and internally the more totalitarian. But it was also much the weaker of the two,
and our diplomatists calculated that China’s extremism was actually rooted in its isolated and
disadvantaged position internationally relative to its Soviet rival.

The truth of this calculation yielded a diplomacy whose success shocked the world and
effectively neutralized the negative geopolitical consequences of defeat in the Vietnamese War.
Indeed, the new US-China relationship brought real peace to Southeast Asia and ushered in an
amazing burst of economic and social development. On the political front, the end of the Cold
War and the downfall of the Soviet Union can be traced directly to this courageous initiative by
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

The Middle Eastern equivalent to Nixon and Kissinger’s master stroke may already be underway.
American policy seems to be reaching out to the Shi’a branch of Islam in order to create a
majority government in Iraq that has real popular support. Such a government will by the force
of circumstance have strong ties to Iran, the world center of Shi’a Islam. So empowered, Iraq’s
new government will need correspondingly less support from the U.S. Further attempts by the Saudi-sponsored Al Qaeda-based insurgency to disrupt Iraq will become Iran’s problem, not
America’s.

America’s role in the Middle East can then recede from active military engagement to one of
managing the balance between Islam’s two great branches, just as in an earlier era it did
between the Chinese and Russian Communist states. The threat of future 9/11’s from the
Saudis can be countered by the deterrent prospect of a Shiite conquest of Mecca and Medina,
instead of requiring the U.S. Army on the Saudi border.

Wahabi-dominated Sunni Islam, instead of enjoying the luxury of being able to single-mindedly
indulge its passion against America and modernity, will find more pressing problems to occupy
its attention. Who knows? Perhaps out of this stalemate within Islam can come the Middle East
equivalent of Europe’s great compromise between the formerly warring Protestant and Catholic
princes – a second Treaty of Westphalia.

America’s exit strategy from Iraq needs to rooted in America’s exit strategy from Vietnam: pingpong
diplomacy leading to rapprochement with Mao’s China. Perhaps it already is.

Tony Siani, 10 Years After His Death

Why Did Tony Siani Die?
By Tom A. Milstein
New York City
Jan. 30, 2005

All of us who loved Tony know that his death was preceded by a long period of intense discouragement, verging on despair. During this time he became more and more bitter and hostile toward the world around him. And while it is true that he never allowed this bitterness to spill over onto his friends and associates and family, it is also true that he did become much more private and reclusive than he ever was before. Tony had always been an immensely gregarious and sociable individual; he maintained an incredibly wide circle of friends and acquaintances from very diverse backgrounds. He could as easily mingle with millionaires as with the proprietor of the corner hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon. But during this last period he withdrew, and sometimes it seemed that his last real connection to the outside world had been reduced to his TV set, where he loathed most of what he viewed.

Normally when a creative person undergoes this kind of an experience, it manifests itself in a sharp drop in artistic productivity. Not so with Tony. His artistic output remained prodigious, as it had always been, notwithstanding his “hermitage.” The content of his output changed rather markedly, that is true. The characteristic Siani style did evolve – in fact I would argue it did more than evolve, it dissolved and recrystallized – but it never flagged.

It was almost as though the two Sianis – man and artist – could no longer coexist. The artist was willing to go on, and knew how to go on, but the man simply couldn’t continue. Something happened to cause them to part company. And that something is what killed him – long before he was finished with his business as an artist, which is what makes his death so disheartening and poignant.

Today, on the 10th anniversary of Tony’s death, I want to offer some thoughts about what that “something” was. These are things I wanted to say at his funeral, but could not find the words – or rather, the words I did find seemed somehow inappropriate to that occasion. I hope that today, after so many days and even years have passed, I have found better words, and better circumstances in which to utter them.

I begin with a consideration of the forces that molded Tony as a young man. I can’t really consider his preceding life as a boy, because I didn’t know him then, even though we grew up in the same town and even went to the same high school, in Denver, Colorado. But we were separated by 4 years and so never met until college at the University of Colorado, where he had already established himself as a husband and father, as well as a working artist, when I met him. He had met and married Hatsie, and they had already had one child, Nora, and were expecting another, who became Jennie.

I doubt I ever would have met Tony had it not been for a curious campus organization known as the Young People’s Socialist League, or YPSL. Tony was an active member of this group, which was inspired by a campus sociology professor named Alex Garber, and had about 20 active members. I had arrived on campus as a freshmen, together with a high school friend of mine, both of us bearing a tentative commitment to another, rival left-wing organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, or YSA. The YSA was Trotskyist; the YPSL was democratic socialist.

YPSL was the youth organization of the Socialist Party USA. This venerable group, which had been around from the turn of the century, was at that time a coalition of two groups: the Norman Thomas socialists, who represented the Christian Social Gospel/Settlement House tradition in American Socialism, and the Schachtmanites, who were followers of Max Schachtman, who had split away from Leon Trotsky just before World War II, on the grounds that the Soviet Union under Stalinism had ceased to be a “worker’s state,” and had in fact become a new form of class society, every bit as evil as capitalism, which Shachtman called “bureaucratic collectivism.” Most but not all of the members of the YPSL chapter at Boulder were “Shachtmanites.” What held the two factions together was a shared commitment to the replacement of capitalism with socialism and a shared rejection of Communist totalitarianism.

It didn’t take my friend and I long to move from the YSA to the YPSL – about 4 months, as I recall. One of the major motivating factors, at least for me, was the difference in character between the members of the YSA and that of the YPSL. The former group had all the charm of the seedy underworld milieu depicted in certain David Mamet movies, or by Dostoievsky in Notes from the Underground or The Possessed. But the YPSLs, especially as typified by Tony Siani and his two close YPSL comrades, Penn Kemble and John Maxwell, were altogether fresher and more appealing, especially to an impressionable undergraduate looking for role models and life-choices.

Siani, Kemble and Maxwell were as different from each other as three people could be. They constantly fought over ideas. Each of them came from totally different backgrounds. Tony was a Staten Island Italo-American transplanted to Denver. Penn Kemble was the son of an old New England family whose father happened to be campus psychiatrist at a 7 Sisters Ivy League Women’s College (I can’t remember which one, but I think it was Vassar). John Maxwell was the son of New York gangster Dutch Schultz, but after his father was gunned down by the Mafia to prevent him from assassinating DA Tom Dewey, his mother sent him to be raised in a Roman Catholic monastery-orphanage in Canyon City, Colorado.

As I have said, these three men were quite different from one another, not only in background, but by upbringing and temperament. An ethnic American, deeply cherished by his mother and basking in the warmth and pathos of a typical Italo-American family; a cold but brilliant New England WASP, and an orphanage semi-sociopath who was the smartest man I’ve ever known (notwithstanding his proudly-boasted of IQ of 106): I don’t doubt that were it not for the message which Alex Garber brought to them, they would never have dreamed of befriending one another or of making common cause in an obscure political organization.

Maxwell had the most penetrating sociological mind I ever encountered. The socialist movement had a strong pacifist wing in those days, and it manifested itself in an anti-American, unilateral disarmament mentality that was always apologizing for Soviet motives in the Cold War. Since peace movements weren’t tolerated in Iron Curtain countries, the “objective” effect of the peace movement was to favor Communist world policy aims, and we made no bones about saying so. But John Maxwell went further – he did an original historical analysis of the roots of pacifism in Christian otherwordliness that extended the theories of Max Weber. It was devastating, far more than our political polemics, because it demonstrated that pacifism’s “counterproductive” consequences were in fact exactly what the pacifists intended.

Penn Kemble had been dubbed by Garber “our prince of pamphleteers,” a reference to George Bernard Shaw’s admiring characterization of Leon Trotsky. A masterful writer, Penn dreamed of a literary or cinema career and certainly had the talent for it. I’ll never forget a demolition he did on Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s nauseating prep-school narcissist, in those days very much in vogue on campuses.

But of the three, it was Tony who made the strongest impression on me, who influenced me in the deepest and most personal way. This impact came from two things. He was an incredibly warm and affectionate man who had a way of reaching out to people that both put them at ease – included them in the family, so to speak – and also inspired them to think outside the bounds of the “family,” to think in terms always of huge questions and cosmic issues. Of the three young men I’ve described to you, only Tony conveyed this sense of a common endeavor to ascend to the heights of cultural and political greatness. With Maxwell, one always had the rather chilling feeling that the issue was always power. Kemble fairly radiated the Yankee curse of invidious competitiveness. But Tony let you know that his train had plenty of spare seats in it and that it was all aboard who wanted to come aboard.

And where was this train going? That was the really odd thing! Tony wanted to take art back to the Renaissance. He wanted to make this journey not because he was a cultural reactionary – such attitudes would not have been tolerated in the YPSL – but because, after a brief fling with abstraction, he became convinced that the history of Western Art since the Renaissance had been a history of downward decline. He said over and over that artists since the Renaissance, no matter how great and profound their achievements, were all haunted by a huge inferiority complex, and rightfully so: that none of their work measured up to the incredible masterpieces of European Renaissance painting.

Now Tony Siani was not one to cohabit with an inferiority complex, cultural or any other kind. So for him the solution to this problem was to rejoin the figurative and narrative traditions in Western art and shepherd them back to the Renaissance – not as if post-Renaissance art had never happened, but as part of a grand project to capture the Renaissance tradition and transcend it. In other words, he wanted to create a new grand synthesis of Renaissance figure painting and the Modernist revolution into which the Renaissance tradition had brilliantly, but destructively, devolved, and launch painting anew.

Over 40 years ago, when I was a young and callow Gascon, that seemed like a good enough agenda to me. Coupled with the politics and intellectualism and radical glamour of my other two Musketeers, Maxwell and Kemble, I had no problems at all signing on as the D’Artignan – actually one of many – of the group.
But here I want to depersonalize this account and introduce some theory. These three diverse characters would never have been able to collaborate, nor would I have ever gravitated to them, had it not been for the role of Alex Garber and the particular doctrine of socialism and socialist strategy that he brought to Boulder. It was Garber’s teaching of the lore of socialism, the values of democratic socialism , and the lessons of 20th Century world and American politics for socialism, that made it possible for the entire phenomenon I have described above to exist. Garber presented us with a movement, a movement that had a history and even more important, as he presented it, a future. This future he called Realignment.

By laying the groundwork for orchestrating the diverse personalities described above (and many others besides) into a common cause, Garber made it rational for people with great talent, big egos, and giant aspirations to collaborate and cooperate. In other words, it wasn’t the charisma of Maxwell, Kemble, or even Siani that ultimately attracted me and others to this little group, it was the charisma of Socialism. Socialism made it possible for Maxwell, Kemble and Siani to fuse their appeal into one appeal. Thus one could join them without becoming their acolytes, their lackeys or their flunkies. What we all belonged to was bigger than any of us. The Socialist tradition had been doing that for young intellectuals for many years. But socialism as a tradition was winding down, sputtering out, by the 1960’s. Garber’s doctrine of Realignment made it possible to envision a rejuvenated socialism that might actually claw its way into the mainstream of American life.

What was this Realignment idea? It was simply a way of adjusting the traditional socialist program of radical economic and social transformation to the unique realities of American politics, or what socialists have traditionally referred to as “American exceptionalism,” the features peculiar to American history and American society, that had hitherto rendered the country remarkably immune to socialist politics.
Realignment abandoned the old doomed socialist endeavor to set up a third, labor-based political party in America, and instead called for activity in the more leftist of the two major parties, the Democrats, aimed at pushing it further to the left and thereby to polarize politics into a struggle between a GOP based on the rich and their allies, and a Democratic party composed of labor, liberals, and minorities. To bring this about, it capitalized on the catalytic role of the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. The victory of the Civil Rights Movement would drive the Southern Dixiecrats out of the Democratic party and thus shatter the Dixiecrat-GOP alliance that had been the real ruler of American politics since the Great Compromise of 1877. That in turn would have the effect of turning the Democratic Party into a replica of the great Social-Democratic parties of Europe. This Realignment idea came pretty close to succeeding. Schachtmanite socialists played key roles in the most critical areas of the Civil Rights Movement, helping to push the movement into an alliance with Labor and Minorities, counseling Martin Luther King away from the more unhealthy influences on him, steering organized labor into a strongly supportive role, and joining with the Democratic Party liberals to advance civil rights legislation aimed at overthrowing the remnants of Jim Crow, insuring voter rights, and marginalizing the Dixiecrat racists. It all culminated in the glorious March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1962, a historic event we basically organized under the auspices of Max Schachtman’s close ally, Bayard Rustin.

Then it all fell apart. The Vietnam War erupted as a divisive issue and suddenly a chasm opened up within the coalition upon whose cohesiveness we had pinned our socialist hopes. I am not going to conduct a postmortem on the disastrous effects of this foreign policy issue on our domestic strategy. What’s important to realize is that the Realignment strategy disintegrated as a result, and with it went our hopes for socialism. This was the end of a great historic cause. The horrific series of defeats that began in the trenches of World War I, and then stumbled on into the Bolshevik adventure in Russia, the Hitlerite reaction in Germany, the apocalypse of World War II, and finally the East-West superpower conflict known as the Cold War, presented its final bill to a movement that was by this time without reserves of any kind. It is a testament to the intrinsic vitality of that movement that it took such a tremendous series of smashing blows to dispatch it. But dispatch it they did; the disintegration of the liberal-labor-minorities coalition in American politics may have been small potatoes compared to these mighty European events, but nevertheless it was the straw that broke a very wounded camel’s back.

With the collapse of realignment came the collapse of rationality on the Left in American politics. Out of the bowels of Ivy League there spewed forth the pseudo-leftism of the draft-dodging elite, hiding behind a Counterculture whose putrid effects are with us today. Into the vacuum left by the dissolution of New Deal and Social-Democratic values came the only other ethical system viable in the modern world, the ethics of commercial capitalism. It was this environment of crass commercialism “counterbalanced” by crass Counterculturalism that became our atmosphere. We breathe this toxic stew to this day, God help us.
The collapse of realignment meant the collapse of socialism. But the hope and dream of socialism was what fueled Tony Siani’s great enterprise! The socialist engine is what powered Siani’s neo-Renaissance locomotive. If socialism collapsed, then so also did Tony’s entire artistic program.

Socialism was a movement that rooted itself in materialism, not idealism. That means, among other things, that its own principal criteria of validity was success. If it could not be successful in America, and if it had been defeated in Europe, then it was a movement based on false premises and deserved its fate. This is a harsh judgment but one to which all socialists of integrity would subscribe. Therefore, enough! It’s over.

No one drew this fearful conclusion with more austere intensity than Tony Siani. He not only drew it in the political realm, he drew it in the artistic realm as well. I would like to prove these two contentions with two observations, and then conclude with a third.

When I was struggling with the implications of our defeat, and trying to come to theoretical grips with those implications, I hit upon an idea. The idea was so radical that at first I hesitated to share it with anyone. I knew that to do so would render me even more of a pariah than I already was. It was simply that Karl Marx’s anti-Semitism is what doomed his movement. I was not the first to take note of Marx’s anti-Semitism, and I was certainly not the first to blame socialism’s failure on Marx’s ideas. But I was the first to relate the two, and to show that Marx’s failure to anticipate the rise of Communist totalitarianism was a direct effect of his denigration of the Jewish people and of his own Jewish roots, that his inability to appreciate the role of Oriental Despotism in the world was part and parcel of his suppression of the Jewish world-historical role in his theory of socialism. When I did gain the courage to utter these ideas to a few friends and comrades, all I got in response was scorn and derision. Only my beloved Emily offered support. Emily and one other person – Tony Siani. I’ll never forget Tony’s response to my tentative exposition of this concept: “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.” I can’t tell you how much I need that encouragement. I owe this idea to the spiritual and intellectual influence of my wife. But I owe the courage it took to write it down and publicize it to the support of Tony Siani.

The other observation has to do with a radical change in Tony’s artistic style, a kind of explosive decomposition and recrystallization already referred to. It was during this period that Tony’s work began to lose its close affinity to Renaissance style and began to exhibit a much more austere, “Hebraic” flavor. I’m not speaking of his use of the Biblical narrative only. This was a trend that had already started in his work. I’m referring more to the painterly style he adopted to convey Biblical themes. Although his death deprived us of a chance to see where he would have taken this trend, how he would have cultivated it and what it would have flowered into, I do think it is fair to say that much of the grandeur and beauty we can now perceive in our friend John Bradford’s work can be glimpsed in embryo in Tony’s last works.

In other words, Tony Siani had grasped in artistic terms, and before I grasped it in political terms, that the train of art could not be rejuvenated in Renaissance Station. The true rejuvenation was pre-Christian and hence post-Christian. That’s as radical and shattering an idea for artists as Marx’s anti-Semitism is for socialists. But they are really the same idea working in parallel worlds.

Now I come to my third and last observation. It is a somber but noble one. I have already noted that whereas Tony the comrade and Tony the artist could draw the necessary conclusions from the fall of socialism, Tony the man could not. As a man, he was so invested in the beauty of the Renaissance, so dependent on the sensual and tactile pleasures of its shapes and forms, so thrilled by its sheer mastery of formal problems, and his personality was so shaped by the pride of Renaissance values and vitality, that he simply could not remake himself the way he remade his art. When he realized that this mighty city-state – the city-state of Renaissance art – would have to be abandoned, the way socialism itself would have to be abandoned, it broke his human heart. Not his artistic heart, mind you, and not his comradely heart, but his human heart.

And so he lost his life to art. Perhaps it will be vouchsafed to us to win it back for him.