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History through red-tinted glasses.(Book Review)
In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr Encounter Books, 280 pages, $25.95
The Left suffered an agonizing defeat when the U.S. won the Cold War in 1991 and the Soviet regime crumbled onto the ash heap of history.
Leftist academics scurried out of the public light to lick their wounds and formulate a strategy to rehabilitate their communist creed. They ultimately decided to go with their favorite tactics: historical amnesia and gulag denial.
In their new book, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr examine this phenomenon, providing a meticulous account of the academic Left's desperate attempt to rewrite history. In their previous two works, The Secret World of American Communism and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Haynes and Klehr used declassified Soviet documents to examine the history of American communism, revealing it to be a pernicious and treacherous force that served the directives of an evil overseas empire.
Now they show how and why the academic establishment has ignored, denied, and distorted the meaning of the evidence they found.
For half a century, leftist academics steadfastly nurtured a mythology of American communism as a noble and progressive movement that could have redeemed America, had it not been for an anti-communist "witch-hunt."
They consistently painted anti-communists who pushed the American Communist Party to the periphery of American politics in the 1950s as villains, and American communist spies as "victims," often even "heroes." Soviet communism and espionage, meanwhile, were portrayed as benign.
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Source: HighBeam Research, History through red-tinted glasses.(Book Review)