How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast, or online publication.
Copyright © 2010 by Paul Kengor
ISBN: 978-1-4976-2085-8
Published by ISI Books
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
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Distributed by Open Road Distribution
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While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.
—Whittaker Chambers, Witness
For the time will come when people … will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.
—2 Timothy 4: 3–4
Dedicated to two human Cold War archives:
Herb Romerstein,
who chose the right side,
and
Arnold Beichman (1913–2010),
the cheerful Cold Warrior
Introduction
The Overlooked Role of the Dupe
Chapter 1
World Revolution, the Comintern, and CPUSA
Chapter 2
Woodrow Wilson: “Utter Simpleton”
Chapter 3
Potemkin Progressives
Chapter 4
John Dewey: The Kremlin's Favorite Educator
Chapter 5
John Dewey's Long, Strange Trip
Chapter 6
The Redemption of Professor Dewey
Chapter 7
Smearing Another Liberal Icon: CPUSA's Assault on “Fascist” FDR and the New Deal
Chapter 8
War Communism: Hating FDR, Loving FDR
Chapter 9
Duping FDR: “Uncle Joe” and “Buddies”
Chapter 10
The Hollywood Front
Chapter 11
October 1947: Hollywood v. “HUAC”
Chapter 12
Trashing Truman: World Communism and the Cold War
Chapter 13
Dreams from Frank Marshall Davis
Chapter 14
Vietnam Dupes: Protests, Riots, and the Chaotic Summer of ’68
Chapter 15
Grown-up Vietnam Dupes: Dr. Spock, Corliss Lamont, and Friends
Chapter 16
Radicals: Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, SDS, and the Weathermen
Chapter 17
John Kerry—and Genghis Khan
Chapter 18
A Kiss for Brezhnev: Jimmy Carter
Chapter 19
Defending the “Evil Empire”: Stopping Ronald Reagan's “Errors” and “Distortions”
Chapter 20
“Star Wars”: The SDI Sabotage
Chapter 21
September 11, 2001
Chapter 22
Still Dupes for the Communists
Chapter 23
2008: A “Progressive” Victory
Postscript
Bogart at the Workers School?
Appendix A
Ted Kennedy's Secret Overture to the Soviet Union
Appendix B
Frank Marshall Davis's FBI File
Notes
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
Index
This is a book about dupes, about those Americans who have unwittingly aided some of the worst opponents of the United States.1 Misled about the true aims of foreign adversaries, many Americans (and other Westerners) have allowed themselves to be manipulated to serve opponents’ interests. Most notably, after the Bolshevik Revolution and throughout the Cold War, Communists took full advantage of Western dupes. Indeed, Communist propagandists in the Soviet Union, around the world, and within America itself conducted this duping on a remarkable, deliberate scale and with remarkable, deliberate craftsmanship—with America's liberals and progressives as the prime target. Yet the story does not stop with the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, dupes have surfaced in the War on Terror—including some of the very same Americans who unknowingly played the role of sucker to the Soviets—occasionally providing fodder for Middle East enemies, although the periods, and the processes, are quite different.
Pointing out this ongoing phenomenon is not a matter of beating up on the gullible. Using the word “dupes” may come across as name calling or sensationalism, but the reality is that it is the best term to describe those who are deceived by, and therefore unknowingly assist, foreign adversaries. The word has, in fact, been widely used throughout American history and up to the present to characterize the tools of foreign influence. President George Washington used the term “dupes” in his historic 1796 Farewell Address, for example.2 And like the associated phrase “useful idiots”—widely attributed to Vladimir Lenin3—“dupes” became especially prominent in the Cold War: many of those misled by the Communists said they regretted having been duped; others spoke openly of fears of being duped.
The plain, undeniable—but historically unappreciated4—fact is that the dupe has played a significant role in the recent history of America and in the nation's ability to deal with destructive opponents. This book aims to shine light on this troubling aspect of our history. Of course, the phenomenon of the dupe is not merely of historical interest. Because it persists today, we must understand how the duping occurs—both how our opponents exploit the American home front and how some Americans allow themselves to be manipulated.
When I began this project, I did not recognize the extent to which duping still occurs, or how duping in the distant Cold War past has emerged as very relevant in today's politics. I initially conceived of the book as strictly a Cold War project. But it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The names included the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, a mentor to the young Obama in Hawaii; the controversial, well-publicized Bill Ayers; and the marquee figures in the 2008 group “Progressives for Obama,” which read like a Who's Who of the ’60s radicals called to testify before the House Committee on Internal Security. It was impossible for me to have foreseen this, given that I decided to pursue this project in 2006, when no one on the planet would have predicted the 2008 presidential election of a young politician named Barack Obama.5 The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama's orbit was chilling. This was the most fascinating, frustrating, and unanticipated aspect of the research for this project.6 Though I had not expected to extend the narrative beyond the Cold War, I concluded that this information could not be ignored. It would be a worse sign of bias to ignore it than include it.
Nor is Obama is the only such contemporary case. Other political leaders today are products of the Vietnam era or the political godchildren of notable Marxist radicals, and they seek to lead America in a new war against a new kind of foreign totalitarianism.7 Here, too, the Cold War past is not entirely disconnected from current threats. In key ways, past is prologue.
Lenin's “Deaf-Mutes”
It would be easy to dismiss dupes as gullible but ultimately harmless. But in fact, they have proven indispensable to America's adversaries. Most significantly, dupes were front and center—even when unaware of their position—in the longest-running ideological battle of the twentieth century, which began in October 1917 and did not end until the period of 1989–91, and which saw the deaths of an unprecedented volume of human beings at the bloody hands of Communism.
The pervasiveness of the dupe, and of Communist efforts to manipulate Americans, has become fully apparent only with the massive declassification of once-closed Cold War archives, from Moscow to Eastern Europe to the United States—the central factor that made this book possible and demanded it be done in the first place.8 These voluminous archives, especially those of the Soviet Communist International (Comintern) on the Communist Party USA, are the primary source for this book, and were its heart and motivation.
From these records we now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow (and “masters” is not too strong a word, as this book will show) were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to advance their goals. Instead they concealed their intentions and found clever ways to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda. The Communists carefully ensured that the coalition was kept unaware of that agenda. The larger coalition was duped—or at least targeted to be duped.
The Communists could not succeed without the dupes. If they flew solo, operating without dupes at their rallies, at their protests, in their petitions and ads in newspapers, then the Communists would reveal themselves to be a tiny minority. They also would be open to immediate exposure.
The dupes lent a presence, an apparent legitimacy, credibility, and generally a helping hand to the pro-Moscow agenda. Without the dupes, the Communists were dead in the water. Thus, they sought out the dupes desperately.
From the outset of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union specialized in this unique form of outreach. Vladimir Lenin himself preached the mode of recruitment: “The so-called cultural element of Western Europe and America,” averred Lenin, speaking of the elite, “are incapable of comprehending the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes [idiots] and treated accordingly.” These so-called useful idiots—the title of a bestselling book on the Cold War by Mona Charen9—were to be major components of the Communists’ campaigns.
The Communists targeted naïve individuals—usually on the left, and nearly always liberals/progressives10—for manipulation. Whittaker Chambers, a longtime Soviet spy who later renounced Communism, wrote in his memoir, Witness, that “Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes.” These liberals were prey, typically made vulnerable by their misplaced trust in the far left. They mistakenly saw American Communists as their friends and as simply another group of citizens practicing civil liberties in a democratic society based on First Amendment freedoms. Most liberals, obviously, were not themselves Communists, but in sharing the left portion of the ideological spectrum, they shared with the Communists many key sympathies: workers’ rights, the redistribution of wealth, an expansive federal government, a favoring of the public sector over the private sector, class-based rhetoric (often demagoguery) toward the wealthy, progressively high tax rates, and a cynicism toward business and capitalism, to name a few. The differences were typically matters of degree rather than principle.
Communists also zeroed in on American liberals with a strong distaste for anti-Communists. As James Burnham, the great convert to anti-Communism, famously remarked, for the Left, “the preferred enemy is always to the right.”11 To this day, much of the Left views anti-Communists as worse than Communists. Professors Richard Pipes of Harvard and Robert Conquest of Stanford's Hoover Institution—deans of contemporary Sovietology, Communism, and the Cold War, and both conservatives—have spoken at length of how liberals, particularly within academia, have tended to be not pro-Communist as much as anti-anti-Communist. This anti-anti-Communism led many liberals to forsake their better judgment and to be taken in by the Communists. The Communists prized the dupes, then, because these Americans helped not only advance a pro-Moscow agenda but also discredit the anti-Communists who opposed that agenda.
The Communists’ “Sneering Contempt” Toward Dupes
Here is how the process of duping typically worked: The Communists would engage in some sort of unpopular, unsavory work that they would be prepared to publicly deny. (I will give plenty of examples in the pages ahead.) Deceit was a deliberate element of a larger, carefully organized campaign. As Lenin said, in a favorite quote of Ronald Reagan, the only morality that Communists recognized was that which furthered their interests.12
At some point as the Communists pursued their intentions, someone or some group—usually moderate to conservative Republicans or conservative Democrats—would catch on and blow the whistle. When the alarm was sounded, the Communists typically lied about whatever they were doing. They claimed not to be guilty of the charges and said they were victims of right-wing, “Red-baiting” paranoia. They relied on non-Communist liberals to join them in attacking their accusers on the right.
Contrary to public perception, this process actually preexisted the McCarthy era, although it was particularly after Senator Joe McCarthy that liberals often came to dismiss, dislike, and even detest the anti-Communists on the right. Despite the fact that the warnings of anti-Communists were borne out in the twentieth-century slaughter otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism, anti-anti-Communism was always a powerful tool for the true Communists who relied on liberals as their dupes.
For instance, liberals were unaware that their harsh criticisms of President Ronald Reagan, who was rightly seeking to counter and undermine the USSR, often were thrust onto the front page of Pravda and cut and pasted into releases from TASS, the official Soviet news agency. This happened all the time. These liberals inadvertently added fodder to the Kremlin's propaganda machine. To be fair, many of them were offering sincere criticisms of the president—legitimate dissent. Only now, however, are we aware of the level to which the enemy exploited such dissent.
The same happened in the 1960s with the Vietnam War. As readers will see, some of the antiwar movement's marches and statements were organized behind the scenes by American Communists. Some of their published work was actually appropriated by the Vietcong prison guards and laid into the hands of American POWs. Some of the worst, most irresponsible antiwar material was used for the attempted indoctrination of American soldiers held in odious places like the Hanoi Hilton.
Sadly, these liberals did not recognize that the Communists, at home and abroad, were privately contemptuous of them, viewing them as comically credulous. As Whittaker Chambers noted, Communists privately treated dupes “with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.” In this sense, the greatest victim in this equation—aside from truth itself—has always been the duped liberals. They failed to recognize that the Communists were not their friends—that, indeed, the Communists often hated what they loved.
More than that, the Communists hated those whom the liberals loved. As this book will make clear, the Communists maligned the Democratic presidents whom liberals adored. Throughout the twentieth century, each and every Democratic leader was a target for Communist vilification, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, whom Lenin called a “shark” and a “simpleton.” The Communists, whether American or Soviet, demonized icons of the Democratic Party. They claimed, for instance, that Franklin Roosevelt was responsible for a “Raw Deal” and that Harry Truman was pursuing “World War III” in the name of an emerging American fascist-racist state. Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis is an unimaginably outrageous case in point—one that must be read to be appreciated. Davis's brutal demonization of, and vile accusations against, Democratic Party heroes like Truman, a man of true courage and character, ought to disgust modern Democrats. His accusations against Truman and his secretary of state, George Marshall—Davis dubbed the Marshall Plan “white imperialism” and “colonial slavery”—make Joe McCarthy's accusations look mild by comparison.
The Communists frequently sought to undermine not only individual Democratic presidents but the Democratic Party en masse. At one point—in an episode either misrepresented or ignored by modern historians and journalists—American Communists targeted the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in part for the purpose of trying to advance their own far-left third party. Bear in mind that they did not target the Republican National Convention that year. It was the Democrats they looked to unravel. In the revolution, it would be their brothers on the left who were put against the wall first.
Then there were the Communist betrayals of the causes dearest to liberals’ hearts. For instance, because of their lockstep subservience to the Soviet Comintern—also illustrated in these pages—American Communists flip-flopped on issues as grave as Nazism and World War II based entirely on whether Hitler was signing a nonaggression pact with Stalin or invading Stalin's Soviet Union. The disgusting about-face by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) on this matter was unforgivable.
Moreover, Communists repeatedly lied to and exploited the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as they sought victory for Communist leader Mao Tse-tung in China. Mao prevailed in 1949, which led to the single greatest concentration of corpses in human history: at least sixty million dead Chinese, and probably many more.13 When Republican congressmen in the 1950s were furious at the Truman State Department for allegedly having “lost” China, those Republicans were—whether they fully understood it or not—really angry over how some good liberal people in the Truman State Department were manipulated by underhanded forces within their midst.
To this day, liberals need to be reminded again and again: the Communists were not your friends. Quite the contrary, American Communists were for the most part a strikingly intolerant, angry bunch—a point well known to anyone who joined, survived, and fled the Communist movement or has studied it closely.14
Nonetheless, the Communists found that they could deflect charge after charge—“Red herring!” “Red-baiter!” “Witch-hunter!” “McCarthyism!”—and immediately count on an echo chamber from liberals who were more suspicious of right-wing anti-Communists than of far-left Communists.
Standing Against Dupery
Fortunately, and importantly, there have always been non-Communist liberals and (more generally) Democrats who refused to be duped. These were shrewd individuals who deserve to be commended for playing a pivotal, positive role during the Cold War. They figured out, some sooner than others, that the Communists often undermined genuine liberal/Democratic Party causes—including workers’ rights and civil rights.
Consequently, this book certainly does not indict the entirety of the Democratic Party. Democrats like Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Nunn, Thomas Dodd, Zbigniew Brzezinski, John F. Kennedy, James Eastland, Francis Walter, Edwin Willis, Richard Russell, and Harry Truman—plus certain union leaders like the AFL-CIO's Lane Kirkland, some key players in the NAACP, and savvy intellectuals like Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling15—were hardly dupes. Rather, they were committed Cold Warriors or chastened anti-Communist liberals who stood apart in their willingness to confront the Kremlin and not be hoodwinked. Some of them led America in intense Cold War showdowns.
Interestingly, some of their inheritors—for example, Senator Ted Kennedy, brother of Senator John F. Kennedy (both Massachusetts Democrats), or Senator Chris Dodd, son of Senator Thomas Dodd (both Connecticut Democrats)—bear little political resemblance.16 It is impossible to picture Ted Kennedy in the 1980s borrowing the words of his late brother, who had alerted America to the perils of its “atheistic foe,” of the “fanaticism and fury” of the “godless” “communist conspiracy,” possessed by an “implacable, insatiable, unceasing … drive for world domination” and “final enslavement.”17 Ted Kennedy instead torched presidents like Ronald Reagan, who sounded more like Ted's brother than Ted did. Likewise, Ted Kennedy's pal and Senate colleague Chris Dodd would have never in the 1980s chastised his fellow liberals as “deluded” “innocents,” as “unwitting” and “muddle-headed” “naïve sentimentalists,” saddled with “confusion” over Communism and “communist political warfare”—as had Dodd's father.18 For these modern liberals, the apple fell far from the tree.
The point, though, is that Democrats should not be painted with a broad brush; the views of the son (or the brother) were not necessarily identical to the father's. The 2008 Democratic senator from the Northeast was not the 1960 Democratic senator from the Northeast. The Democratic Party fifty years ago was more conservative than today. Similarly, the Republican Party then was more liberal than today. Just as Democrats like JFK and Scoop Jackson took hawkish or at least measured stances on Communism, there were liberal to moderate Republicans (like Senator Mark Hatfield) who pushed for accommodation and “freezes” with the Soviets. In fact, détente, which was the essence of Soviet accommodation, was begun by two Republican presidential administrations—those of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—before Democrat Jimmy Carter picked it up. Thus, this book is not a one-sided partisan rant against or in favor of a particular political party. Democrat Harry Truman is defended in these pages as much as, if not more than, Republican Ronald Reagan.
Often, too, prominent Democrats tried to stop other members of their party from being duped by the Soviets. For example, in the 1940s diplomat George Earle, the former governor of Pennsylvania, informed FDR that he was being badly misled by the Soviets on the infamous Katyn Wood massacre. Earle was far from the only Democrat to warn FDR.
In fact, large sections of this book could not have been completed without the digging of the Democrats who headed the House and Senate committees that collected information on certain indigenous threats. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was launched by Democrats in the 1930s, and for almost all of its nearly forty-year history it was chaired by Democrats—from Congressman Martin Dies of Texas in the 1930s, to Congressman Francis Walter of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, to Congressman Richard Ichord of Missouri in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Likewise, Democratic Party champions Senator James Eastland of Mississippi and Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut served as anti-Communist pillars on the Judiciary Committee, and chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Subcommittee on Internal Security, which produced numerous investigative analyses. It is crucial to understand that Democratic stalwarts played an important role in standing against the Soviet threat throughout the Cold War—or at least, until Democrats in Congress took a significant turn to the left after Watergate and Vietnam.
Of course, many liberals today have nothing good to say about the likes of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In fact, many accounts lump together—quite inaccurately—the work of this House committee with the investigations of Senator Joe McCarthy, as M. Stanton Evans ably demonstrates in his 2007 book on McCarthy.19 Frequently, too, the House committee is dismissed as conducting nothing more than “witch hunts.” But in truth, the House Committee on Un-American Activities did much commendable work, from exposing traitors like Alger Hiss to blowing the whistle on insidious Communist-front groups such as the American Peace Mobilization, which unapologetically appeased Nazi Germany simply because Hitler had signed a pact with Stalin—and did so as the Nazis mercilessly pounded Britain. (The American Peace Mobilization will be documented at length in this book.) The House Committee on Un-American Activities—run by Democrats—played an indispensable role in casting light on this and other loathsome Communist fronts.
Further along those lines, some of the best work exposing the crimes and treasonous duplicity of American Communists—and thereby illuminating the dupes—has come from journalists and scholars who are on the left, or who at least are not right-wingers. To give just a few examples cited in the pages ahead: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Allen Weinstein, Sam Tanenhaus, George F. Kennan, Ron Radosh, Anne Applebaum, John Lewis Gaddis, Mark Kramer, Jerry and Leona Schecter, not to mention leftist sources like The New Republic,20 and leading academic publishing houses like Yale University Press and Harvard University Press.21 Remarkably, the longtime editorial director of Yale University Press who launched the invaluable Annals of Communism series, Jonathan Brent, has been the Alger Hiss Professor at Bard College (no kidding).22 This book builds on the foundation laid by these historians, journalists, and publishers.
The book further draws—and heavily so—on Communist literature and even the post–Cold War books and memoirs of Soviet officials as high ranking as Mikhail Gorbachev and his close aide Alexander Yakovlev. This is likewise (and especially) true for memoirs of American Communists, from CPUSA officials in the 1930s to the student radicals of the 1960s—the latter including Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd as well as ex-Communists such as David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and Ron Radosh. I have also drawn on the testimony of a long line of former Communists, from Arthur Koestler to J. B. Matthews to Whittaker Chambers.
The sterling investigative work of certain Democrats and liberals, and the eye-opening testimony of former Communists, should speak to all Americans—conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. In fact, it is my most sincere wish that liberals and Democrats will read this book carefully. It offers a cautionary tale for my friends on the left—the non-Communist left. For the best of my country, I want the dupery to stop. I plead with liberals to consider this book with an open mind, and be ready to be surprised and even occasionally encouraged.
The Duped, the Innocent, and the Redeemed
This book covers a wide cast of Cold War types and characters: Communists and non-Communists, left-wingers and right-wingers, fellow travelers, legitimate dissenters, anti-Communist liberals, duped and unduped liberals, and even full-fledged traitors. Some hopped across various of these categories at different points in their lives: For example, when Roger Baldwin founded the ACLU he was the prototype dupe and seemingly a small “c” communist—though prudent enough not to join CPUSA—but later he cooperated with the FBI in identifying Americans working for the KGB. More famously, Whittaker Chambers sojourned from KGB spy to conservative Republican. Even a wild progressive like educational reformer John Dewey ultimately learned (but only later) not to say the utterly stupid things about Joseph Stalin gushed by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, or by Dewey's student Corliss Lamont—men who forever embarrassed themselves with the most luscious praise for Soviet dictators.
Some folks who were duped on occasion were, on other occasions, sensible in recognizing the latest Soviet sham and bravely denounced Moscow's newest set of lies. Eleanor Roosevelt joined Stalin in blasting Winston Churchill's prophetic, courageous “Iron Curtain” speech, but two years later rightly called Stalin and Molotov liars because of their outrageous claims about America's treatment of Europe's “Displaced Persons.” Others, like diplomat William C. Bullitt and Senator Paul Douglas, were once duped but made a 180-degree turn, emerging as brilliant observers who spoke to the brutal reality of the USSR. A major thrust of this narrative is the possibility of political redemption by former dupes. Indeed, three of the four dupes profiled in this book's early chapters later redeemed themselves, and did so while remaining Democrats and liberals in good standing.
The goal in this book is to be truthful. This means that I have not shied away from exploring how President Franklin Roosevelt was duped by certain aides, possibly including the enigmatic Harry Hopkins. But it also means that I defend FDR against the villainous charges leveled by Communists, not to mention certain inaccurate assertions made by anti-Communists. For instance, this book clarifies the record on FDR's relationship with Comrade Earl Browder, general secretary of CPUSA, a complicated issue subject to longtime, lingering misinterpretation.
In this book I also acknowledge that some people whom I admire were once dupes. In particular I have in mind the president on whom I began my career as an author: Ronald Reagan. Reagan obviously changed, and later acknowledged that he had been duped early in his Hollywood days. Even ex-Communists like Morris Childs and Ben Gitlow changed. Some of the once duped, who remained liberals to their dying day, have had a profound impact on me spiritually, and still do, such as Thomas Merton.
In short, I have tried to write this history as objectively as possible. I am open to the possibility that herein I myself have been duped on occasion: it may later emerge from FBI files and Soviet archives that one or more of the “innocent” characters in this book was not a gullible liberal but in fact a hard-line KGB spy. Time will tell.
Dupes: Defending the “Most Colossal Case of Political Carnage in History”
The compelling reason why this story needs to be told is that the dupes, the fellow travelers, the traitors, and whoever else wittingly or unwittingly aided and abetted the Communist movement in the last century also knowingly or unknowingly contributed to the most destructive ideology in the history of humanity. That is no small malfeasance. Whether they knew it or not, these folks defended or helped defend the indefensible. Some of them expressed regret, while many others did not. Many of the unrepentant instead attacked those who asked questions or shed light on their wrongdoings—and still do to this day.
No form of government or ideology in history killed so many innocents in such a short period as Communism. Stéphane Courtois, editor of the French journal Communisme and also of the seminal volume The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, notes that government-orchestrated crime against its own citizens was a defining characteristic of the Communist system throughout its existence. Communism was responsible for an unfathomable amount of murder—a “multitude of crimes not only against individual human beings but also against world civilization and national cultures,” writes Courtois. “Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.”23
Martin Malia, who wrote the preface to The Black Book of Communism, agrees. “Communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts,” writes Malia, noting that non-Communist states have done likewise, “but they were criminal enterprises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence, and without regard for human life.” Here is a critical point and lesson: Under Communism, totally different national cultures, from all over the globe, sharing only Communism as their common characteristic, all committed mass violence against their populations. This violence was an institutional policy of the new revolutionary order. Its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past of these cultures.24
Malia aptly writes that the Communist record offers the “most colossal case of political carnage in history.”25 The Black Book of Communism tabulates a total Communist death toll in the twentieth century of roughly 100 million.26 And these frightening numbers actually underestimate the total, especially within the USSR.27 The late Alexander Yakovlev, the lifelong Soviet apparatchik who in the 1980s became the chief reformer and close aide to Mikhail Gorbachev, and who, in the post-Soviet 1990s, was tasked with the grisly assignment of trying to total the victims of Soviet repression, estimated that Stalin alone was responsible for the deaths of 60 to 70 million, a stunning number two to three times higher than estimates in The Black Book of Communism.28 Mao Tse-tung, as noted, was responsible for the deaths 60 to 70 million in China.29 And then there were the killing fields of North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Eastern Europe, and more. In fact, the Black Book went to press too early to catch the 2 to 3 million who starved to death in North Korea in the late 1990s.30
A mountain of skulls of at least 100 million blows away Hitler's genocide in sheer bloodshed, and is actually twice the death toll of World War I and II combined.31 It is difficult to identify any ideology or belief system in history that has killed more people, let alone in such a concentrated period of time—a roughly seventy-year period that equates to almost four thousand dead victims per day.32 It boggles the mind to imagine how one ideology could cause so much pain and suffering. The very worst moments of the entirety of the Spanish Inquisition come nowhere near the level of death in Stalin's purges or even Lenin's first year in power.33
To be duped on, say, a poorly written piece of pork-barrel legislation submitted to Congress is one thing, but to be duped on the most horrific slaughter in human history is quite another.
Compounding the tragedy is that this murderous ideology was expansionary and dedicated to global revolution. While the commitment to that mission varied from Communist country to country, it had been a central tenet in the writings of Marx and Lenin and was the basis for the formation of the Soviet Comintern—the Communist International—which directed Communist parties worldwide from a central headquarters in Moscow. CPUSA was not merely another political party; its founding members considered themselves loyal Soviet patriots committed to this goal.
This fact—laid out in Chapter 1—is of enormous significance in understanding why fears over domestic Communism in the United States were not unduly obsessive but completely legitimate. And the dupes obliviously helped to advance the savage interests of Soviet Communism.
A debate still rages to this day: would American Communists have fought for the Soviets in a war between the United States and the USSR? The answer is not black-and-white, and ranged from individual to individual; many American Communists were torn on the matter. An easier question would be whether they would refuse to fight against the USSR. Their loyalties were with Moscow—certainly that was true for formal Communist Party members. They were blindly loyal patriots and parrots for the Soviet cause. As George F. Kennan put it, Communists faithfully obeyed only “the master's voice.”34 As will be seen in the pages ahead, this sentiment is especially pervasive in Comintern archives on CPUSA, declassified by the Russian government in the early 1990s.
In short, American Communists were defending a barbarous machine of genocidal class warfare, committed to the overarching goal of spreading itself all over the world, with the ultimate intention of a single Communist state directed from Moscow. Their naïve accomplices—the dupes—were sadly, dangerously unaware of how they were helping to advance that horrid system and its interests. That is why all of this still matters. And that is why the role of the dupe should never be laughably dismissed from our history or from discussions of where America, as a nation, goes from here.
The Dupe Today
Finally, that brings us from history—the past—to the present and future. America today finds itself fighting another form of totalitarianism in another global battle: radical Islamic fundamentalism, which brews the hate that the United States confronts in the War on Terror. In the twentieth century, the malignant force America confronted was militant, atheistic, murderous, expansionary communism; in the twenty-first century, it seems to be the scourge of suicidal/homicidal Islamism.
President George W. Bush, the 9/11 president, described the ten-year period after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the “hiatus” before the “day of fire” that exploded on September 11, 2001. In the mid-1990s, the emergent players on the world's stage were not clear to the United States. These were “years of repose, years of sabbatical,” said Bush in his second inaugural address. What would come next? The answer came abruptly and violently, compliments of Osama bin Laden's suicide bombers, with three thousand Americans blown to pieces in the process.
The dupes of the War on Terror are not precisely the same as the dupes of the Cold War. That is especially so because the dupers are not nearly as adept at duping, or even at trying to dupe; the modern-day Islamist does not focus on honing the crass art of propaganda at which the twentieth-century Communist excelled. Moreover, it would never be right to assert that, say, a liberal critic of Bush policy in Iraq in 2006 was a dupe simply because that criticism pleased the enemy. That would be extremely unfair. Legitimate, proper dissent, especially at time of war, is a hallmark of American democracy. I had my own criticisms of Bush policy in Iraq, which I do not think made me a liberal dupe; no doubt, President Bush too often hurt himself—his own worst enemy in making himself the most unpopular president in modern times.35
Furthermore, in contrast to the Cold War, there is no centrally headquartered Comintern—such as, say, a “Khomeintern” in Iran—or al-Qaeda equivalent to CPUSA, cooking up propaganda to feed to the field workers, in careful coordination with ringmasters in Tehran.
In the War on Terror, then, the examples of dupery can be much more difficult to define. Nonetheless, clear cases of dupery have emerged since September 11, 2001, and especially since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. What's more, in plenty of situations certain Americans—including leading politicians—have said and done some really dumb things that were not legitimate, had no basis in fact, and no doubt elated the enemy.
Remarkably, some of those voices said things in the 2000s nearly identical to what they had said as much younger war protesters in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the same figures who accused U.S. soldiers of war crimes and burning down villages in the Middle East in 2005 made the same irresponsible, incorrect, and deleterious allegations against U.S. soldiers in Southeast Asia thirty years earlier. Their transition from “Cold War dupe” to “War on Terror dupe” appears to have been almost seamless. Moreover, many of the radicals and war protesters of the ’60s have suddenly reemerged as politicians, tenured professors, and even associates of the current president of the United States.
Those details will be provided in the pages ahead. What it means is that the dupe has not gone the way of the Cold War. The role of the dupe continues to be profoundly important, dangerous, and unappreciated. This book endeavors to show how and why.