The revealing case of a disappearing letter
By
Frank Brenner
First
a few facts:
On
Nov. 8,
the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) ran four letters to the editor about
its recent series, “The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism: The Political and
Intellectual Odyssey of Alex Steiner”. One of those letters was as
follows:
Good job! Steiner and Co. will soon enough be
urging on the fascistic buffoons at the Sarah Palin rallies, all in the
name of irrationality and "sexuality."
TM
Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA
22 October 2008
On Nov.
9, Alex Steiner and I wrote to the WSWS
protesting the publication of this letter. After quoting the text of the
letter, we stated:
This is a vile and inflammatory slander. The
WSWS editorial board bears a direct responsibility here: it controls which
letters are posted and which aren’t. The decision to post this letter
means either that the editorial board condones this slander or at the very
least considers it reasonable commentary. To broadcast slanders like this
is to besmirch the name of Trotskyism. We demand that the editorial board
publicly dissociate itself from this slander.
Alex Steiner
Frank Brenner
On Nov. 11, we discovered that the letter we had protested
against was gone. If you now go to the posting – “Letters on ‘The
Frankfurt School vs. Marxism’”
– this letter is no longer there. But there is no indication from the
editorial board that the posting has changed in any way. The letter was
simply there on Nov. 8 and not there on Nov. 11. End of
story.
What does this little
incident reveal?
First and foremost, it
confirms what Steiner and I said – that this letter was slander. The only
possible reason the WSWS editorial board removed it was because they
recognized that we were right – and that they couldn’t defend themselves
against the charge of broadcasting slander.
But we also demanded that
the editorial board “publicly dissociate itself from this slander.” This
they did not do, even though that would have been the principled way to
behave. Nor did they post our letter of protest or in any way inform us of
the decision to remove the slander. They also didn’t bother letting their
own readers know that the posting had been changed. They simply got rid of
what had become an embarrassment for them, as if they were removing a
typo.
Behind this bit of pragmatic
expediency lies an obvious aversion to admitting mistakes. (The
pretensions to be defending Marxist science, which are much ballyhooed in
the WSWS series against Steiner, wear a little thin given this aversion.
After all, the touchstone of genuine science is admitting mistakes and
learning from them, not sweeping them under the
rug.)
In this regard there is an
apt quote from Hegel: “What calls itself fear of error reveals itself
rather as fear of the truth.”
The truth in this case was that this slanderous letter was not an accident
or based on some misunderstanding. It was very much the mindset that the
WSWS series against Steiner was designed to produce because that series
was a smear campaign. The whole purpose was to vilify Steiner and
thereby poison the atmosphere so that it would be impossible to have an
honest discussion about our criticisms of the party’s political and
philosophical positions.
But of course to admit that
openly would have been to discredit the series entirely. That was the real
problem with the slanderous letter – it exposed the editorial board’s own
position too nakedly. Once they realized that (after receiving our
protest) they erased the inconvenient evidence. But what they couldn’t do
was explain their actions – either why they had posted this letter
initially or why they had removed it. In other words, they dealt with this
matter in a thoroughly cynical way – the same cynicism that is behind
their vilifying of Steiner.