Customer Reviews

Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism

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This book is a history of American anti-communism from 1917 to 1991. It covers the good (Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz, William F. Buckley) and the bad (Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover). Mr. Powers conclusion is the bad does not stain the good and that American anti-communism was a positive force in the world, helping to free millions from the communist nightmare.

Many myths about communism died when the USSR fell into the ash heap of history. The opening of Soviet archives revealed the extent of many of the myths. We know now that Moscow financed and controlled the Communist Party USA. The idea that Americans who joined that party could be independent is a lie. They did what Stalin wanted done. Most of the American communists who betrayed the US were members of the CPUSA and revered Stalin. The Rosenbergs, who stole US atom bomb secrets for delivery to Moscow, were members of the CPUSA. The A bomb that Stalin tested was an exact copy of the one the US developed- no accident. The possession of the bomb gave Stalin the confidence to approve the invasion of South Korea by the communist North, a war that cost the US 50,000 lives. Many Americans fought communism but too often US liberals characterized them as the real enemy instead of the Communists. Not Without Honor is highly recommended reading for anyone who can accept the truth. I also recommended Venona, messages Moscow sent its US agents in the late 1940's and The Black Book of Communism, a detailed history of what Communism gave the world- 100 million murders of innocent people. Today many liberals act the way they did with respect to communism. They downplay the threat of terrorism and play up the "threat" to our civil liberties by those who fight terror. Some people never learn. One man who did learn was Ronald Reagan, who started out as a liberal Democrat and then learned to think accurately. To my regret I never voted for him- I was then a liberal Democrat and half-blind.

I bought this book in the mistaken belief that the author might have something to add to the debate. Boy, was I wrong. I gave him one star for excellence in pagination.

Powers attempts to sort out the good anti-communists from the lunatic fringe (Hoover, McCarthy, Martin Dies, the Hearst Press etc.) and thus demonstrate that the anti-communist effort of the 40s and 50s was actually a positive good discredited only by the excesses of the fringe. The problem is that he himself can't sort them out, or even maintain his own premise. By the end of the book he's lamenting the demise of the very extremists he attacked in the beginning of the book as giving anti-communism a bad name!

He then goes on to claim, most strangely, that the fall of McCarthy (which effectively happened in 1954) silenced anti-communism in America, and that Eisenhower discouraged such for fear of reawakening McCarthyism -- as if it ever had been asleep, as if Eisenhower himself was not responsible for some of the worst excesses, including the tightening of Truman's infamous Loyalty and Security program, and the mass arrests of party leaders on grounds that were tossed out by the supreme court(but no doubt the court was a bunch of commies anyway).

What becomes evident (certainly in the last of the book) is that Powers himself suffers from the very malaise he is attempting to save anticommunism from. He condemns Kennedy for abandoning the struggle as a "holy war" and rationally viewing it as power struggle; Carter and Nixon become "appeasers"; and anti-anti-communists are responsible for the debacle of Vietnam. He then extolls Norman Podhoretz, a rabid extremist if there ever was one, in terms befitting a demi-god:"the one man with the will, the strength, the imagination to commence the giant task of rebuilding the anticommunist coalition," (for a moment I thought I was reading a love scene by Ayn Rand). He even, most bizarrely, gives partial credit to Podhoretz for winning the Cold War, and condemns George F. Kennan, the author of our containment policy and a most honorable anti-communist, as an appeaser and villain.

I'd return this book if I could, but in my disgust I've thrown it against the wall too many times. There were honorable opponents of Communism in those days -- those who believed in the marketplace of ideas and not repression -- but it remains unclear if this author could recognize one.