So I didn’t actually finish this book, but it sat on the bookshelf for too long after checking it out from the library and now it has to go back tomorrow.
The bottom line of the book is that communists — both actual KGB spies and just communist sympathizers — penetrated the highest reaches of the US government, especially during FDR’s presidency. What’s more, American politicians and American media ridiculed those who tried to expose them. Basically, McCarthy was right — there were communists under every bed. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the degree of communist penetration of the American government has been made ever-more clear by the opening of Soviet archives, but McCarthy and other anti-communists are still treated as a joke, or as persecutorial witch-hunters.
Flipping through, in the immediate WWII and post-war period, she attributes the extraordinary degree of American support of the USSR through lend-lease (astonishing quantities of material sent there), and the American willingness to allow the Soviets to take over Eastern Europe, as well as sending back 2 million Russian labor conscripts to the USSR (when we knew they were headed straight to the Gulag and probable death), to this communist influence. Of course, this is where everything gets a bit speculative.
Then she ties this all to the current situation with Islam — deeming the “denialist” attitude that Islam is the Religion of Peace and ignoring Koranic commands to fight for domination as equivalent to the denial of the danger of communism and communists, and, in the introduction to the book, she says that the latter caused the former. I haven’t gotten far enough to see how she develops this argument, and if she’s credible.
But here are some bits and pieces that are startling:
She says that Soviet Lend-Lease had top priority, superseding not just the supplies to the British but also American military needs (p. 44). 200 fighter planes were diverted from Singapore to the Soviet Union, “sealing the fate of Singapore” which fell on February 15, 1942.
After the Soviet Union fell, Vladimir Bukovsky writes, a “Nuremburg trial” exposing the crimes of the communist regime, should have occured to truly move Russia to being a free and democratic country — but the West pressured Yeltsin not to have such trials or open archives:
The reason he had to say no was the enormouse pressure he felt from the West not to have such a trial. I’ve seen the cables he received from all over the world, mostly from Russian embassies, explaining that local politicians and governments were against any trials or disclosures of crimes of opening of archives . . . Because of the documents I recovered [in Soviet archives], we now understand why the West was so against putting the communist system on trial. It is not only that the West was infiltrated by the Soviets much deeper than we ever thought, but also that there was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and Soviet Union. (p. 53)
On Whittaker Chambers: “Officialdom was enraged not by the dnager posed by Hiss, a Soviet military intelligence agent ‘continuously since 1935,’ but by Chambers for testifying to the danger” (p. 63).
She mentions another book, rehabilitiating McCarthy: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007), by M. Stanton Evans. During the course of his research, he found that “on many occasions he discovered that some person or persons unknown had preceded him on this document hunt to delete the record” (p. 69) — in other words, falsifying history to protect individuals or protect the idea that anti-Communists were loonies.
Anyone read this book all the way through? What do you make of it? If you take her research at face value, what do you do with it? How, if at all, does it change the way you view the situation in the year 2013?
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