WHO YA GONNA BELIEVE? JOE STALIN OR YOUR LYIN' EYES?:

Frontpage Interview: In Denial: Professors John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr discuss their new book In Denial -- and why academic elites are desperately suppressing post-Cold War revelations. (Jamie Glazov, FrontPage)

Klehr: [...]

Among historians of the Soviet Union there was a small but influential group of revisionists who attempted to "normalize" the Soviet regime. This involved a number of different tacks- some of them minimized the number of victims of Stalinism and Leninism or denied that there was any mass terror. Others deflected responsibility for terror away from Stalin and onto a bureaucratic process that spun out of control. And others apologized for the mass murders by claiming that they were necessary accompaniments to a process of modernization.

While we discuss this trend in our book, our major focus is on historians of American communism who have attempted to rehabilitate the CPUSA as an admirable and heroic band of democrats unjustly persecuted by a reactionary American state and society. Lots of these historians are veterans of the New Left, people who were active in attempting to transform American society in a radical direction in the 1960s and 1970s. Their effort having failed, they have attempted to rehabilitate an earlier American radical movement. Some of them are themselves red-diaper babies- they are the children or grandchildren of people who were in the CPUSA, so in some way they are writing not only history but their family history as well.

Why does it all matter? Why should people care about arguments among historians about American communists or whether spies like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie and Harry White were innocent or guilty? Because this concerns the history that gets taught in the high schools and colleges and the view that American students have of their country's past. Take Joe McCarthy. He's the poster boy for the view that anticommunism led to horrible persecution in post WWII America. A few years ago the proposed National History Standards for High School mentioned him more times than any other American in that era. He was a demagogue. But how many students understand that hundreds of American communists did spy for the Soviet Union? That there was a serious problem of subversion?

And these issues are not "merely" historical. Many of the historians we discuss in our book make very clear that their goal is to indoctrinate a new generation of students in order to build a new radical movement.

Look at the denunciations of the war on terror as some kind of McCarthyite plot. Historical analogies can be weapons in a contemporary ideological battle.

All that being said, I think you are right, Jamie, when you bring up psychiatry. For some of the historians we discuss there is a disconnect with reality. They are unwilling to deal with evidence; they are unwilling to employ logic. Instead they retreat into a fantasy world.

The real world is too unpleasant- after all, the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, the political system they admired collapsed, documents proving some of their heroes were spies and so they pretend that the documents must be forgeries. It's like that old line about a defender of Alger Hiss being asked what evidence it would take to convince him that Hiss was guilty. He answered, "If Alger Hiss himself told me he was a spy, I wouldn't believe him."

It was Tony Lake who conclusively proved this point, while demonstrating that for all their Third Way rhetoric, the Clintonistas were fundamentally creatures of the Second Way.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2003 9:17 PM