by Timothy Harrigan

Created on: August 14, 2008

Portrait of a Militant

I recently got a chance to read Jean-Paul Sartre's short essay "The Portrait of an Anti-Semite" and it has wisdom that goes well beyond the subject. Given an unsympathetic, and even repulsive subject, Sartre was able to pull apart pieces of the personality in ways that would otherwise be cruel, but the analysis was tolerable as set out.

What's intriguing is that the blind spots and the attitudes of Sartre's anti-Semite are exemplary of a lot of the attitudes that tend to crop up in a lot of people on both the right and the left in this country. The traits do tend more toward the right lately, due to a custom of orthodoxy, but the same sort of mechanisms have been at work on the left for a long time as well. To make things a little more palatable let's call the people who tend toward these traits militants, as opposed to Sartre's more inflammatory term.

The most common self-image of a lot of militants is that they are opposing and fighting against wrongdoing and evil. In general they are, and there are good reasons to fight the fight. Consider the grist for righteous indignation lately. The twentieth century saw evil acts that could scarcely be believed. Many Americans thoroughly hated Nazis and militarized Japanese, and those that concentrated on it were able to recount, chapter and verse, some of the most horrible acts of the war. There are similarly sensible denouncements of the evils that Slavery, Jim Crow Laws, and a legacy of prejudice wrought on African-Americans. By knowing the evil things that happened, and by remembering them, militants ensure that nobody would forget them, and they make sure that the shame that ought to be brought by those acts will endure. Similarly, the crimes of the Communists and Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, and their plans to expand communism around the world called out for condemnation, and they got it. Patriotic militants loudly condemned communism and they knew the wholesale killings, assassinations, gulags, and invasions that the USSR engaged in to gain and maintain power. Opposition to the regimes in Russia, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba, to name a few, was a unifying force for a lot of American militants.

The opposition, largely, worked. Civil rights have progressed, the USSR changed itself, the militarized Japanese and the Nazis were defeated, Vietnam is now capitalist, and North Korea is contained. Even China is communist in name only it still has a hide-bound one-party government, but it

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