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In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage

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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 setting execution quotas for the secret police.

Furr, an English professor at Montclair State University, praised the blood-drenched Communist revolutions in Russia and China: "The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China." (pg 27) Anyone who has read about Lenin's "Red Terror" and Mao's "campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries" knows these weren't "great historical events," but bloodbaths of horror.

Can one honestly say that these examples don't compare to Holocaust revisionists and their whitewashing of Hitler? These apologists for tyranny and deniers of genocide should be just as reviled as David Irving and his ilk, and should not be accepted in American higher education.

I addition to this book I'd recommend A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander Yakovlev, an excellent work of history that tells the truth about the criminal nature of Lenin, Stalin and the USSR and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al, which exposes the bloody legacy of Communism from around the world.

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.

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!

This book is a great follow on to their work on the Venona project. As someone who has seen my kids suffer in many classes at their universities by challenging the nonsense that is spouted by tenured leftists, this book would be a wonderful gift to any student who is going to be subjected to the propaganda called "higher education" at many of our leading schools. "In Denial" is more than an expose' however, since it shows that taxpayers are wasting billions of dollars in tax-supported schools where students are not educated about the evils of Communism, but just the reverse, where academic revisionists now try to rewrite history to their liking instead of dealing with the facts of Communist infiltration into American and Western society while Stalin put more people to death than Hitler.
This book will be totally ignored by the media who have been trained well to speak nothing but good about the true evils of Communism and its followers in academia today.

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.

This book connects the dots between the files in the Soviet archives and the history of the American Communist subversion of the political and economic systems of the United States. The title of this book begs the question as to why the continuum of the state of denial, the one espoused by adherents of Communism - that cruel and inhumane system of repression - still exists in America today?

A part of the answer can be found in that segment of the human condition requiring refusal to acknowledge new facts into an old theory. The reason? - Man's reluctance to change his worldview and the way he fits within it. Seeing yourself differently spells crisis at any age. The re-arranging of ones' assumption model, the one which issues forth expectations based upon a set of assumptions that one adheres to, dubious or otherwise, creates a crisis which often leads to a series of agonizing self reappraisals; a daunting prospect. Thus, it's much easier to cling to an old theory, particularly when it leads to the euphoria of self rightiousness, a condition of unbounded virtue; and, this is one of the essential lures that makes the Communist "faith" so seductive. So, they care for the oppressed, and if you're not with them, then you don't.

Communism differs from religion only in the sense that it promises a utopia here on earth as opposed to one in the after-life. Eric Hoffer's, "the true Believer" speaks to this message rather well.

In the final analysis it matters not what one scored on his SAT's or whether he made the Dean's list, it's only his capacity for self deception which governs the extent to which he will blinker himself. This also holds true for women, perhaps even more so. I believe the geneticists will uncover a lobe in the brain for judgement, the ability to make proportionate, balanced decisions all day long without emotional overlap. I also believe that fewer than 15% of people have this inborne capability. Anecdotally, that's roughly the same number who are the swing votes in political elections. They can change their minds without shortcircuiting emotionally. The other 85% have more difficulty.

Just as technlogy has always changed the balance of power throughout the course of human history, the micro chip, by fueling the telecommunications boom, has allowed more people to get more information, more quickly, than at any time in human history. "Information" helped implode the Soviet Union and it will in like form expose the Communist, academic revisionists in America for all to see. It's happening now in video media, in Hollywood, in book publishing, in universities, and in the labor movement. It's happening to the radical Leftist leaders of N.O.W. and to those who use the environmental movement to mask their Leftist intentions. Society is changing all around us. To see it requires a knowledge of history and some helicopter perspective. It's a beautiful thing for those of us who continue the quest for human freedom and individual liberty for all.

This book is just one more piece of evidence which bit by bit exposes the Pharassic scandals of those on the Left who continue "in denial". It should be recommended reading for all, particularly college age students, it's that important!

"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 interesting factoids brought out by Haynes & Klehr is that many of the people who are historically ignorant about American communism, the CPUSA, and the Cold War are not even historians by training. Many are professionals in other fields who for political and cultural reasons believe they are qualified to comment on subjects outside their normal teaching disciplines. These are the people who are most likely to refuse to believe the evidence tying the CPUSA to Moscow domination, subversion, and espionage. Professional historians like Isserman and Schrecker are less likely to deny the voluminous evidence released since the fall of the Berlin Wall; instead, they attempt to justify the actions of treason and espionage by saying the Soviet Union was a wartime ally, the United States was spying on the U.S.S.R, the documents stolen weren't that important, the CPUSA wasn't that big a deal, etc. Imagine some right-wing apologist excusing the Final Solution and Nazi Germany atrocities because Hitler supported national health insurance and you get a feel for the strained and convoluted arguments put out by supporters and apologists of the CPUSA and detractors of America during the Cold War.

It must be very difficult to believe a certain point of view for many years or decades, only to be suddenly thrust with information that shows you were wrong. How would one react if their religious faith were to be factually debunked, or if a wife found out that after decades of what she believed to be a loyal and happy marriage that her husband has led a secret life with another woman? Certainly many academicians have adjusted their political views in the face of new evidence: old-line neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, and Norman Podhoretz, and of course, Whittaker Chambers in his seminal biography "Witness" details his conversion away from the lies of the Left.

"In Denial" is written by John Early Hanes and Harvey Klehr. They are two of American's foremost historians specializing in American communism, espionage, the Venona transcripts, etc. Politically, I believe they would describe themselves as anti-communist liberals, perhaps neoconservatives (understand that most neoconservatives are former liberals who found that their former allies drifted Leftward rendering them without a home except for modern conservatism). Haynes and Klehr -- like Allen Weinstein of NYU (a liberal) in "The Haunted Wood" -- simply allow the facts to speak for themselves in a non-partisan, objective manner. They focus mostly on historians and somewhat obscure academic journals -- many of which are now accessible on the internet -- and are not as interested in politicians, newspaper editorial writers, broadcasters and reporters, etc (for these individuals' blind spots, check out Mona Charen's "Useful Idiot").

Haynes & Klehr have once again written a powerful expose on facets of American communism, espionage, and the Cold War. As important as those concepts are, the fundamental question asked and lurking below the surface of "In Denial" -- namely, how can people refuse to accept the truth in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary? -- is itself a potent question that this book will cause readers to think about on many important questions of the day.

Surprise, surprise. The release of the Venona decryptions--showing that Alger Hiss was indeed a Soviet agent, the American Communist Party was indeed a tool of Stalin, and the martyrs of McCarthyism were indeed traitors to America and Western civilization--seems to have been received with less than open arms in academia. No one should be shocked. The revisionist mindset in history departments these days is set in concrete, and it'll take more than mere proof to disabuse these progressive fossils of their sentimental attachment to the Vanguard Generation of the 1930s-1950s. Or, more charitably, such revelations as Venona should be expected to signal the beginning of a debate, not the end.

This book isn't really for the lay reader. The authors minutely examine scholarly arguments against Venona, or arguments that attempt to "of course" it aside. The refutations they deploy sound convincing to me. The authors don't fight entirely fair. They excoriate one revisionist author for mixing up the principals in one case, but confess to a similar error of their own in an endnote. Throughout, the psychic indigestion of the revisionists is on display, as they try to salvage the reputations of their heroes. They do so either by rejecting or distorting the evidence, or falling back into the "higher truth" position, in which spying for Stalin against America was just another form of action for social justice.

One bit of Venona controversy that seems to have fallen silent is the case of leftist gadfly journalist I. F. Stone, who does not appear in this book. Apparently no case from the Venona decrypts can be made to back up Herbert Romerstein's accusation that Stone was a Soviet agent of influence for a while. Instead, Stone appears to have rejected monetary offers from his would-be handlers, so far as Venona reveals. To be fair, Haynes and Klehr weren't the ones who made that accusation in the first place.

The retired NKVD assassin Pavel Sudoplatov makes a cameo appearance. The authors really should have put a caution flag next to his name, as the most explosive allegations from his book have never been proven. But there he is, invoked to bolster the case against the Rosenbergs (which didn't really need bolstering, at this late date).

A sad bit of history is presented in an appendix. It is a list of names of mostly Baltic immigrants to America, who moved to the Soviet Union, were arrested and executed, and buried by the KGB. Their names and bodies were recovered by Memorial, the Russian organization that searches for secret mass graves in Russia. The bitter consequences of deluded idealism...

The fraudulent aura of progressivism that Stalinism had for so many Americans is still a mystery. How a dream of a better world led these people to betray the most just country in history to the most oppressive country in history defies easy explanation. Ignorance is no excuse, as the bloody nature of Soviet communism was well reported in the West almost from the Soviet Union's inception. (If they couldn't believe Stalin's own ex-secretary, Boris Bazhanov, who would they have believed?) Although leftist compilers of standard reference works are reported here to be distorting the Venona evidence, one can only hope for its lessons to start seeping into the curriculum, as well as the broader culture. It can't happen a decade too soon.

I read most of this important book in the course of a weekend, and it's hard to overstate how disturbing and infuriating it truly is. Haynes and Klehr have assembled a shocking catalog of the ways in which members of the American historical profession have systematically lied -- there's no other word for it -- about the fact of Soviet espionage in the United States and the complicity of American communists in that spying.

Based on their pioneering work in declassified Soviet intelligence archives, as well as their familiarity with the other relevant sources, the authors show how so much of the received wisdom about this topic is fraudulent, tendentious, or worse. Even more objectionable is the length to which many of these historians are willing to go to gloss over, explain away, misinterpret, or just plain ignore the new evidence. With telling excerpts and full documentation, Haynes and Klehr take us through incidents both well known and obscure, from the Rosenbergs, Hiss, and Harry Dexter White, to the mysterious (and apparently fabricated) origins of the phrase "premature anti-fascists" and the silence over the murder of dozens of Finnish-American emigrants to Russia in the 1930s.

The great libertarian historian Lord Acton (of "Power corrupts..." fame) wrote that the muse of historians should not be Clio, but rather Rhadamanthus, the son of Zeus and avenger of innocent blood. By this standard, the "revisionist" historians described here stand condemned. Perhaps the most infuriating portion of this volume consist of quotes from historians like Gabriel Kolko (p. 21) and Theodore Von Laue (pp. 24-5), who justify Stalin and his murders on the grounds of his "remarkable human achievement" (Von Laue's words) and alleged devotion to building a better future for the Soviet peoples. Here truly is Isabel Paterson's "humanitarian with a guillotine"!

This book is an essential tool for understanding the rot at the center of the American historical profession, the American academy, and indeed much of American intellectualism generally. Fortunately, we can take some comfort that, as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn noted, the judgment of *history* and the judgment of *historians* is not the same thing. The crimes of Soviet communism are being better understood, in spite of the historians mentioned here. With that understanding will come understanding, too, of the moral guilt of many Americans, past and present, who aligned themselves with the Soviet "experiment." Haynes and Klehr have done a tremendous service in exposing the depravity of those who (in the words of Tony Judt, quoted on pages 138-9) "thought they could save the essence of the communist 'dream' by separating it from its rotted Soviet penumbra[. They] were, I suppose, useful idiots, if only to that rotted penumbra itself. Today they are just idiots."

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's In Denial is a detailed analysis of the publications and techniques of America's Stalin worshippers. While millions of Americans believe that communism died by 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of many of the archives in Russia, the authors revealed that American Communists remain active in the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, in the recommendations of content for children's textbooks, and in many other influential positions. While Nazism and Communism are both totalitarian ideologies, why do American universities employ worshippers of Stalin but not of Hitler?

The Communist revisionist historians can be detected easily, regardless of the labels they use to conceal their Communist beliefs. For example, what did a historian write about the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 22, 1939 and of the role of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)? Stalin supported Hitler's rise to power in Germany. American Communist true believers were too stupid to understand what Stalin was doing. The CPUSA took an anti-Nazism position and cheered the Polish resistance to Hitler until the Soviet Union revealed that it would invade and annex half of Poland.

Initially, American Communists supported a third term for President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat. In 1940, Roosevelt mandated the choice of Henry Wallace as his vice president. When the Soviet Union changed policies, the CPUSA reversed its position and attacked Roosevelt. Wallace won the endorsement of the American Communists when he ran for president in 1944.

Throughout the book, the authors stressed the anti-communist efforts of American liberals, Democrats, socialists, neoconservatives, and of former CPUSA members. Both Lenin and American conservatives shared negative views of left-of-center politicians in Western democracies. American Communists are still attempting to brand all anti-communists as McCarthyites. American Communists claim that Senator Joseph McCarthy's congressional investigations were terrible witch hunts while ignoring or minimizing the tens of millions who were murdered or terrorized in Communist countries.

American Communists have claimed that neoconservatives (neo-Trotskyites) are anti-communist. In fact, neoconservatives are only anti-Stalin.

American Communists continue to hold important positions in American universities and in other important organizations. Neoconservatives have been able to be elected even as Republicans to Congress. Neoconservatives support the MEK (or MKO or Rajavi cult), a Marxist terrorist organization responsible for the murders of American military officers, Rockwell International employees, and large numbers of innocent persons in the Middle East.

With researchers able to study some of the Russian archives, it is now possible to prove that many Americans lied when they claimed that they were not Communists or Communist spies. Unlike the Salem witch trials and the killings of innocent persons, the House Committee on Un-American Activities identified correctly many Americans as being Communists.

Clearly, nearly all Americans need to read In Denial. Truly, ignorance is a weapon of mass destruction.

Professor Paul Sheldon Foote

California State University, Fullerton