A serious flaw in Kovel - response to W. H. Locke Anderson's review of Joel Kovel's book 'Red Hunting in the Promised Land', May 1994

To disagree with a review in Monthly Review by its Associate Editor of a book that is dedicated to Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff (and to Alger Hiss) is not a task to be taken lightly. But, in as comradely a spirit as I can muster, I would like to take issue with W. H. Locke Anderson's review (MR, May 1994) of Joel Kovel's Red Hunting in the Promised Land.

My main difference with Anderson's review is that he evades the meaning of the data Kovel has put together. The review is largely taken up with a tabulation of the book's contents, with Anderson mainly taking exception to what he calls Kovel's "expositional strategy." Anderson maintains that the author "seems to be saying that America's obsessional anticommunism derived from a mass confusion in the national psyche."

IN my reading of this work Kovel is saying something quite different, namely that the uniquely U.S. brand of anticommunism has enriched and made all-dominant in the governance of this land an elite few; and that the sole objective in the war against Communism was (and is) to save wealth and preserve power. As I understand his overall design (not explored in Anderson's review), Kovel has sought to come to grips with anticommunism's "black hole effect"--the demonization of those people and groups who represent "political opposition to the status quo," and how this has made robust, rational discourse on national affairs all but impossible.

Kovel's book grew out of a 1988 conference at Harvard University, "Anticommunism in the United States: History and Consequences." Although the particular topics of Red Hunting in the Promised Land have already been intensively studied and explored, there has been virtually nothing peviously written on anticommunism as an all-embracing syndrome. However, despite Kovel's keen insights and socialist sympathies, his study is based, admittedly, on no original investigation. This, in my opinion, has seriously flawed his work.

An all-pervading syndrome in the selling of the Cold War has to do with the "communist spy"--the notion that all "communists" are actual or potential spies and traitors. Kovel makes no attempt to deal with, or to understand, the alchemy of newspaper headlines (and radio and television sound bites) as an instrument to poison the public mind. Disinformation has been a vital weapon in the Cold War, and for near half-a-century the U.S. people have been bombarded with, and bamboozled by, fake and distorted and false stories about Communists and atoms and Russian spies. But Kovel seems to concede that the Establishment media's depiction of the famous Cold War "spy" cases is identical with courtroom evidence, for his textual analysis of the Cold War shies completely away from this subject (as does Anderson's review), much as if it were contaminated and dangerous to get close to. Nowhere in the text of Red Hunting in the Promised Land is there any discussion of such Cold War "communist spy" cases as Amerasia, Lieutenant Nicolai Redin, Igor Gouzenko, the Canadian "atom spies," the scores of New Deal officials headlined as part of the Elizabeth Bentley "spy" ring, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, William Remington, Judith Coplon, Jack Soble, and Dr. Robert Soblen, and the trials in New York, Pennsylvania, California, and Hawaii of some 125 leaders of the Communist Party. Reverberating for years in the media and political dialogue, it was these trials that did so much to pollute the political climate, establish in the public mind the J. Edgar Hoover-inspired notion that criminal acts of espionage were the same as communist and left-oriented ideas (thereby finessing the guarantees of the First Amendment), and create so much of the hysteria and anticommunist hatred rooted in the idea that, in a nuclear age, it was possible for one communist-minded traitor to steal and hand over to the "enemy" a "secret" that could blow up the entire Free World.

In Kovel's entire book, there is merely a one-paragraph source note that brushes over this vast subject without scrutiny while conceding that spies did steal valuable atomic secrets for the Soviets. The author found it appropriate to write that one "indisputable" case of espionage "was that of Judith Coplon, a clerk in the Justice Department who admitted passing FBI reports to her Soviet lover." Ms. Coplon never admitted to passing government documents to anyone and was never shown by any evidence to have ever done any such thing. All charges against her have been dropped and to this day she stands in law as an innocent person--simply one of the many Americans falsely pilloried by the FBI and the Establishment media as a "communist spy."

How long, Oh Lord, how long, before we on the left recognize this spy stuff for what it is: 99.9 percent pure bunkum? Kovel is not to be faulted for overlooking this counter-evidence (it is, I suppose, too much to ask of an author of such a vast panoramic work to study original court records and government documents for himself) so much as it is to be an occasion for deep sorrow that we do not have in this country anything like a real opposition press.

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