Emma Goldman: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities (2019)

“Emma Goldman was no friend to American liberals or liberalism, as she experienced them. Imprisoned in 1917 for helping poor men resist the draft for what she saw, not without reason, as a crazy imperialist war, on her release in 1919 she and Berkman were deported, through the shameful Immigration Act and particularly at the behest of a young and already vicious J. Edgar Hoover. The decision was met with minimal liberal protest. Liberal Americans, she decided, were the weakest and the most easily panicked and stampeded people in the world. The Great War was a moment not unlike the aftermath of 9/11: fear easily got the better of liberal principle, so quickly and completely that it was easy to see the principles of liberalism as no more than shiny gift-wrap, all torn off in a moment. . . .

Exiled to the newly Bolshevik Russia, she expected, if not utopia, then at least a step toward it. But, and this was one of her acts of greatest moral courage, she immediately recognized—long before it was fashionable, not to say acceptable—that the new-made world in Russia was a nightmare, not merely misguided in its excesses but evil from the start. Bakunin had been right in 1867 when he predicted that ‘liberty without socialism is injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.’ Lenin, whom Emma met, was obviously a brutal tyrant and the Communist system under him a betrayal of the workers, with bloodlust as its first principle. She said this loudly and often and presciently and courageously. Half a century later, most of her friends on the left were still reluctant even to whisper the same truths.”—Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019)