On campus, the costs of rewriting communism

IN DENIAL: HISTORIANS, COMMUNISM AND ESPIONAGE

By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

Encounter, $25.95, 300 pages

REVIEWED BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN

For parents who are spending tens of thousands of dollars in annual tuition fees, for those concerned with intellectual honesty in the academic profession, for college students enrolled in American history courses, and for members of Congress who appropriate taxpayer money to support the American university, the report in this book is a startling, even explosive expose of where the money and their trust are going.

The authors of “In Denial,” (John Earl Haynes is the Library of Congress expert on American radical history and Harvey Klehr, a professor at Emory University, is the leading historian on American communism) have described the outrageous rewriting of communism and communist espionage history by major American historians in these words:

“[A] sizeable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life.”

I have been studying and writing about the Communist movement for years. Nothing I have read over that time prepared me for the growing shock as I turned the pages of this heavily footnoted book. What is depicted in these pages is a scandal of epic proportions in the American university. I have asked myself: If our history faculties were loaded with Holocaust-revisionists as they are loaded with Gulag-revisionists how long would they last, tenured or not?

This rewriting of history by leading American historians is intended, say the authors, to create a new set of moral standards which by legitimizing Marxism-Leninism, the defeated Soviet Union and espionage by Americans against their own country in favor of Moscow would then justify civil war, treason and conspiracy against the democratic capitalist system.

This twisting of historical fact is intended, first, to transform the defunct American Communist Party from what it probably was for seven decades, a Soviet-financed lackey and espionage recruiting agency, into a once mythical organization of independent, free-wheeling idealists; second, to transform American traitors like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Lauchlin Currie, Theodore Hall and many others into saintly seekers after world peace.

Such lies are purveyed in leading academic journals even now despite the fact that a vast number of documents from Soviet archives have been made public, archives which confirm what was already known thanks to Venona, the code-breaking program which proved the existence of Soviet spy rings within the U.S. government and at Los Alamos. The final blow is that such revisionist cant seeks to destroy capitalism and resurrect Marxism-Leninism from the dead by creating as a chosen instrument the college generations they teach. From Day One of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin’s totalitarian system, to quote Robert Conquest, “had as one of its main characteristics falsification on an enormous scale.”

One can today amplify Mr. Conquest’s grim finding to include mainstream research and writing by the revisionist American historians of communism. And these historians, the authors point out, are tenured professors at some of our leading institutions of higher learning. Two beliefs are common to these revisionists: first, a profound grief at the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union and, second, America got what it deserved on September 11.

Unbelievable? Professor Gerald Horne of the University of North Carolina wrote gloatingly that America was to blame for the terrorist act and, “the bill has come due, the time of easy credit is up. It is time to pay.” Professor Robin Kelley’s reaction to September 11 was: “We need a civil war, class war, whatever to put an end to U.S. policies that endanger all of us.” Call for civil war against America and you are hired away by Columbia University from New York University.

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