Thursday, October 2, 2014

Reich And The Communists

I have read the correspondence between Reich and Trotsky. And I agree that Reich almost certainly was concerned after Trotsky's murder that he might be  next on the KGB's hit list. That was almost certainly the origin of his fears that he was a target of KGB activities. 

But there is no evidence that he really WAS a target of the KGB. His identification with Trotsky may have led him to think so, but the allegations are not strongly supported by any credible evidence. And, yes, I have read the material by Dr. DeMeo, but that must be read with due regard for DeMeo's strong connection to the American Far Right. He and most of his close associates cannot be considered an unbiased source where anything to do with Communism is concerned. 

Ms. Brady was a comsumer advocate, and it was most likely in that capacity, not as a vengence-seekling, order-following member of the Communist Party, that she acted in denouncing the orgone accumulator, a device that certainly SOUNDS implausable to anyone with the standard training in medical science. Doctors and scientists steeped in the current mechanistic biochemical theories will automatically regard the orgone theory as quackery without needing any political motivation. 

Brady may or may not have still been ideologically a Marxist at the time she wrote the articles on Reich in the late 40s, but her affiliuation with Consumer Reports, an excellent magazine that served a much-needed purpose and, like any publication that helps the public protect themselves from commercial exploitation, was frequently called "Communist" by the business interests it criticized, is the most likely connection that explains her antipathy to Reich, not Soviet instructions as Reich thought, and as DeMeo and other right-wingers like to claim. 

Reich's fears of Soviet asassination attempts were unrealistic, though not irrational. He simply failed to recognize that he was not as important to Stalin as was Trotsky and nobody in Russia cared enough to bother to kill him. But his paranoid-sounding writings that the KGB was spying on him and wanted to kill him set the stage for the paranoid conspiracy-theorists of today, who fantasize about Reich having been "silenced" by some secret cabal, while in fact, he fell victim to the much more dangerous and insideous normal workings of the ordinary bureaucracy, the courts, and law enforcement which still threaten us all today.

No comments:

Post a Comment