In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (Hardcover)

by John Earl Haynes (Author) "Studying historians and their methods is, for the most part, the stuff of boring graduate seminars..." (more)
Key Phrases: duplicated pads, premature antifascist, revisionist consensus, United States, Soviet Union, American Communists (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Left-wing historians' sympathy for American communism is an example of ideological bias and self-deception comparable to Holocaust denial, according to this uncompromising manifesto. Haynes and Klehr, historians and authors of The Secret World of American Communism, rehash major Cold War controversies-including Moscow's financial subsidies to the American Communist Party, the espionage cases against the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and American communists' support for the Hitler-Stalin pact-in light of material from recently opened Soviet archives. But their focus is on the response of what they see as a left-wing "revisionist" academic establishment to new revelations about Stalin's crimes and American communists' subservience to Moscow. Taking on leading history journals and prominent scholars like Ellen Schrecker, Eric Foner and Victor Navasky, the authors accuse revisionists of ignoring, downplaying and distorting the mounting evidence of communist espionage and subversion in the United States. Instead of facing facts, they argue, revisionists have propagated a mythology of American communism as a benign, idealistic, home-grown progressive movement destroyed by McCarthyite persecution, a caricature that "resembles more the chaotic New Left of the late 1960s than the rigid Leninist party it was." The authors champion a liberal, anticommunist "traditionalist" historiography, asserting that America's post-war campaign against communist subversion (McCarthy's excesses aside) was "a rational and understandable response to a real danger to American democracy." While their confrontational tone and penchant for academic score-settling will inflame rather than settle these rancorous debates, their incisive analysis and meticulous attention to evidence make this a formidable rejoinder to left-wing orthodoxies.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description
Beginning in the late 1960s, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr say, the study of communism in America was taken over by "revisionists" who have attempted to portray the U.S. as the aggressor in the Cold War and saw suspicion about the American Communist Party (CPUSA) as baseless "paranoia." In this intriguing book, they show how, years after the death of communism, the leading historical journals and many prominent historians continue to teach that America's rejection of the Party was a tragic error, that American Communists were actually unsung heroes working for democratic ideals, and that those anti-Communist liberals and conservatives who drove the CPUSA to the margins of American politics in the 1950s were malicious figures deserving condemnation.

The focus of "In Denial" is what the authors call "lying about spying." Haynes and Klehr examine the ways in which revisionist scholars have ignored or distorted new evidence from recently-opened Russian archives about espionage links between Moscow and the CPUSA. They analyze the mythology that continues to suggest, against all evidence, that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and others who betrayed the United States were more sinned against than sinning. They set the record straight about the spies among us.

Haynes and Klehr were the first U.S. historians who used the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union to examine the history of American communism. "In Denial" is the record of what they discovered there. They show that while the international communist movement may be dead, conflict over the meaning of the communist experience in America is still very much with us.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 299 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (September 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554724
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554726
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #277,822 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

199 of 218 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stalin's apologists in academia exposed, January 12, 2004

By	C.J. Griffin (Little River, SC United States) - See all my reviews

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.

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Eye-Opening Book, April 19, 2004

By	Dwayne A. Day (Vienna, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

50 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous debunking of liberal nonsense, October 6, 2004

By	Newsman78 "newsman78" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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!