In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage

I hate to say it, but the liberals got it wrong AGAIN. (OK, maybe I don't hate it that much, really...) Despite the complete victory of the U.S. and its capitalistic, free allies in the Cold War, these far-left academics refuse to acknowledge that they were wrong. They still cling to the radical notion that Americans who joined the Communist Party did it just because they believed in "social justice" or "progressive politics" -- instead of the truth, which is, as Haynes & Klehr have shown in their research, that many American Communists were spies for the Soviet Union and wanted the U.S. to be defeated in the Cold War. Reading someone like Ellen Schrecker (one of Haynes and Klehr's primary villians) makes you realize just how out of touch these people are with reality. She lives in a fantasy world where, somehow, believing that the good guys won the Cold War is a form of "triumphalism," to quote from the title of her latest offering. Haynes and Klehr have, admittedly, written a polemic, though a well-researched one. Other works of theirs have already systematically demolished the airy suppositions of those who argue American Communists weren't so bad. I can't say enough good things about this. Buy it now!

"In Denial" is one of the seminal books written in our lifetime. While the book's main topic concerns communism and the right and wrong sides in the Cold War, the questions asked in this book can nonetheless be extended to many important questions facing our country today. For example, we potentially face a more lethal and dangerous adversary than international communism, namely Third World and Islamicist terrorism -- yet many refuse to acknowledge this fact. It is not surprising that one of the historians most "in denial" about communism and the Cold War, Eric Foner, was also a leading apologist for the 9/11 terrorists immediately after the event and the subsequent strikes against them in Afghanistan. This leads to the larger question raised by "In Denial" that applies to any economic, political, geostrategic, or other important current topic: how do we determine truth, what do we do when certain people refuse to admit truth, and what do we do when those people who refuse to admit truth are disproportionately involved in the inculcating of values and teaching of history to current and future generations? At one point in our existence, we believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth and that the Earth was flat. Once upon a time, Leftist elites in American society and the Western world -- predominantly newspaper editors and reporters, historians, college and university professors, broadcasters -- all believed that socialism and communism were inevitable and superior to American-style capitalism. This dream died in 1989 with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. But dreams die hard, and the Left has been busy engaging in intellectual skullduggery, distortions, and lies against any non-Leftist personalities or institutions: HUAC (controlled by Democrats during virtually all of it's 40-year run), Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, and that small but courageous band of anti-communist liberals led by Hubert Humphrey and Harry Truman. This book concerns the inability of Leftist academics and elites to admit they were wrong on The Big Picture of Soviet communist penetration of American institutions through the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Haynes and Klehr meticulously research many of the dominant Cold War issues that dominated from 1945-1990: the Alger Hiss Case, Elizabeth Bentley and Judith Coplon, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade's Spanish activities, etc. The subservience of the CPUSA to Moscow domination on all matters ranging from Leon Trotsky and the Nazi-Soviet Pact is clearly documented. Contrary to some detractors, any errors in the book are minor typographical errors or non-material name or date errors that do not change the substantive arguments. Indeed, one of the individuals whose support for New Deal fellow travelers is dissected in "In Denial" has written a review here and despite some disagreements with Haynes & Klehr, still gives the book an overall favorable rating and review. One of the i

I write about the history of American space policy and strategic reconnaissance and one of the things I strive to do is dig into archives and find newly available sources to further our understanding of events. So I was interested in this book because one of the themes is how some historians of American communism and labor are actually _not_ interested in newly available information because it threatens their worldview. I find it amazing that historians are not trying to get as much of this information as possible.But there were other amazing aspects of this book. I was aware of people who long denied the brutality of communism. There are certainly many people in academia right now who still write glowing commentaries on Fidel Castro, for instance. But I was not aware that there are current tenured professors of history who write glowingly of Joseph Stalin. Some of the quotes in this book from these people are jaw-dropping (some of them have been reproduced in other reviews on this website). I think that Haynes and Klehr are right to note that it is amazing not only that these people exist, but that some of them hold (or held) prominent positions in academia. They are correct in noting that Holocaust-deniers and Nazi-sympathizers are rare and regularly suppressed by the historian community whereas people who hold equally repugnant views about communism are often held in high esteem by their colleagues.I attended the Venona conference that they mention, and have read some of their previous works. I am also somewhat familiar with the academic study of the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, where some individuals insisted for decades of their absolute innocence, but are now shown to be massively wrong. As recently as a few months ago the New York Times printed a mopey article that complained that the real travesty was not that the Rosenbergs ran a spy ring that provided the Soviet Union with vital secrets, but that they were executed in a show trial.But I must fault Haynes and Klehr somewhat on their misuse of the terms "traditionalists" and "revisionists." They admittedly create these terms as shorthand for the groups they are discussing, but this introduces problems to the discussion, because these terms already have their own meanings within the historical community. And they aren't really accurate anyway. History that is properly done is by definition revisionist, for it attempts to revise our understanding of events. And Haynes and Klehr in many ways are seeking to revise the previously popular view of subjects such as the Communist Party of the USA with new sources and sophisticated interpretation. So doesn't that make them "revisionists" as well?But this is only a small criticism. This is a fascinating book.

As a person studying to be an historian this book was a breath of fresh air. It was also very disturbing, that so many historians have defended, explicitly, Stalin, Lenin, and so on. Their point is well taken, historians who apologized for Hitler would be laughed out of the profession, but those who apologize and downplay the crimes of the Soviet Union and the murderous and amoral ideology of communism (which any objective review will tell you is hardly distinguishable from fascism) are hailed as respectable historians. Hopefully, this work and others will help towards laughing those "historians" who ignore the facts to promote communism and all of its watered down welfare statism variants out of the field.

The statement made in the Publisher's Weekly review that "this uncompromising manifesto" compares Left-wing historians' sympathy for American Communism to Holocaust denial is not entirely accurate. While much of the book does focus on the blindness of academia to facts about the American Communist Party being a subversive tool of the Kremlin and revelations from the Soviet archives about the extent of Soviet espionage in America (Leftists often attempt to deflect the issue with red herrings about "McCarthyism." Just check out the negative reviews), what Haynes and Klehr do compare to Holocaust denial is the continued whitewashing of Stalinism by radical left-wing revisionists such as J. Arch Getty, Robert W. Thurston, Gabriel Kolko, Theodore Von Laue, Fredric Jameson, Eric Foner, Barbara Foley, Grover Furr and others. Actually, they are probably worse than holocaust deniers because their defense and/or denial of Stalinist mass murder largely goes unchallenged, unlike Holocaust revisionism. And, as the book says: "The number of apologists for the former Soviet Union and its mass murders dwarfs the handful of aberrant pro-Nazi academics in America." (pg 13) Von Laue defends Lenin, Stalin and the totalitarian murder machine they created: "How then are we to judge Stalin? Viewed in the full historical context Stalin appears as one of the most impressive figures of the twentieth century." "Regard for individual life was a necessary sacrifice in Lenin's ambition to enhance life in the future." "The specific design of Soviet totalitarianism has perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated. However brutal, it was a remarkable human achievement despite its flaws." (pg 24-26) This apologist for mass murder is a "professor" and one of the authors of a much used history book. Kolko, another revisionist whose books were widely assigned as college texts, justifies the cold and calculated murder of 21,857 Polish reserve officers and intellectuals stating "Whoever destroyed the officers at Katyn had taken a step toward implementing a social revolution in Poland." He also states that "Katyn was the exception" in Soviet behavior and "its relative importance....must be downgraded very considerably." (pg 21) Exception? Apparently Mr. Kolko has conveniently forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens deported to the gulag during the Nazi-Soviet pact and the 110,000 ethnic Poles residing in the USSR who were executed during the Great Terror. Thurston, a professor at Miami University of Ohio, claims that Stalin "was not guilty of mass first degree murder from 1934-1941 and did not plan or carry out a systematic campaign to crush the nation." (pg 24) The aforementioned Katyn massacre (1940) is a perfect example of mass first-degree murder. The order to execute the Poles came from the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party and was signed by Stalin himself. Historians have also found orders from Stalin approving the murder of old Bolshevik comrades and