Details of History

Marc Cooper mourns for Dorothy Healey, a long-time California communist, who died at 91. Apparently she was a friend of his. I have sympathy for anyone mourning a friend, but also some questions.

She left the party in 1968, meaning her loyalty survived the purges, the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, to name a few things. And she didn't leave the left, or the cause of socialism, just the Communist Party.

If Dorothy Healey had been a Nazi sympathizer, who left her party but not the fascist milieu in 1968, would we cut her as much slack as Marc Cooper does?

As Jean Marie Le Pen might put it, just a "detail of history"?