Posted on 02/24/2013 9:28:42 AM PST by Altura Ct.
I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to begin deciphering the mendacious history we "know" as our shining cultural legacy. The results of this unnerving research-odyssey will be published in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal.
That said, I am delighted to post an article written for this week's edition of Dispatch International. My task was to introduce a European audience, in brief, to Evans' work. The piece below is the main article, which is available for free at the DI website. I also wrote accompanying piece assembling a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the sensational revelations Evans and co-writer and Cold War expert Herbert Romerstein discovered in their brand new book, Stalin's Secret Agents. It is behind the online-subscription wall -- so subscribe!
"Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along"
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Most Europeans are unlikely to be familiar with the facts behind the American term “McCarthyism.” They probably know it describes something very bad in American politics – the “Communist witch hunts” of more than half a century ago. They may also know that simply uttering the term, like casting a spell, stops all debate cold by associating someone with the eponymous Joseph McCarthy. As the story goes, he was himself very bad. After all, he conducted those long ago “Communist witch hunts,“ ruining his name in perpetuity. This probably exhausts general knowledge.
But here’s a secret: Most Americans know little more than this same familiar but completely false narrative. In recent years, stunning revelations from archives in Washington and Moscow have confirmed that McCarthy’s investigations – and those conducted by other officials before and after – netted not innocent and imaginary “witches,” but secret cadres of hardened Communist agents determined to bring down the American republic. Surely, this makes Joe McCarthy a great patriot and deserving “the plaudits of a grateful nation.”
So wrote M. Stanton Evans, the consensus-smashing, revisionist biographer of McCarthy in Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). Evans was attempting to convey the significance of just one particular Soviet intelligence operation, circa 1945, that McCarthy was instrumental in bringing to light, circa 1950.
Even a few details about this operation, named initially as the Amerasia affair after a pro-Communist journal of the day, will add a little needed context to modern-day perspective on the so-called McCarthy era.
Amerasia’s editor, Phillip Jaffe, came under FBI surveillance in 1944 after the contents of a confidential OSS memo appeared in his magazine. (The OSS was the precursor to the CIA.) The FBI soon learned Jaffe was in possession of hundreds of stolen, secret US government documents, plus a photographic set-up. The magazine ran no photographs, so the FBI plausibly believed it had come across an active espionage operation. Further surveillance, including wire-taps, determined that Jaffe was in frequent contact with US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, Soviet “diplomats” in New York, a top Chinese Communist envoy of Mao and US diplomat John Stewart Service (home from Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, where, it later emerged, Service roomed with two leading Communist agents, Solomon Adler and Chi Chao-ting).
On June 6, 1945, FBI agents arrested six people, including Jaffe and Service, and seized hundreds of top secret documents, many concerning military matters. An open-and-shut espionage case, it would seem.
An open and quickly shut-down case is more like it. What followed was cover-up, perjury and grand-jury rigging by, among others, high-ranking Washington officials. Some were eager to prevent a national security scandal from engulfing the Truman White House. Others were acting to shield a far wider Communist-led conspiracy mounted by confederates inside the State Department, Treasury, White House and elsewhere in the US government, working not merely to filch secret documents but to ensure, through influence and subversion, the Communist takeover of China. These powerful forces of suppression proved overwhelming. The Amerasia case was scuttled, the scandal was buried, and, within a few years, China was Red.
Five years later, McCarthy’s laser-beam focus on the still-festering case would be instrumental in follow-up investigations launched by both the Senate and the FBI. These massive probes yielded, as Evans notes, some 5,000 pages of Senate hearings, plus 1,000 pages of exhibits and, from the FBI, 24,000 pages of now-declassified records.
They reveal the workings of a vast, complex influence operation, Evans writes, that “assiduously worked to guide official and public thinking, and hence the course of U.S. policy,” in this case regarding the Far East. Other such intricate influence operations, of course, targeted the West. And who was doing this dirty work of Communist-directed subversion from within? Many officials and public figures highlighted by Joseph McCarthy (among others), who, we have since learned from US and Soviet archives, were secret agents and fellow-traveling supporters of Stalin.
McCarthy, as Evans has pointed out, threatened to blow the lid off the official cover-ups and other acts of treason. Thus, he had to be isolated, demonized and destroyed, and so he was. History would be written by the isolators, the demonizers and the destroyers, and repeated by rote for the next half century.
Then along came the declassification of FBI records and releases of intelligence documents, and scholars such as M. Stanton Evans to sift through them. But the far-reaching implications of such research – that anti-Communist “witch-hunters” were right all along – have done shockingly little to change the way Americans regard their history. Such hidebound attitudes extend also to American conservatives, who, it would seem, are the modern-day heirs of the anti-Communist legacy. What Evans calls “court history” is that deeply entrenched as national lore.
Will this ever change? “There’s no concise answer to that,” Evans replied in a recent interview with Dispatch International. “There is a mindset, a narrative, a template that has been out there for a long time.” The reflex reaction, to date, is to preserve that template rather than assess the new evidence.
Thus, it is minimized or denied. Evans mimics the usual reaction to the specter of historical Communist penetration: “ `Well, this thing was overblown, there wasn’t a big problem, these people were persecuted.’ The new evidence, he continues, “challenges this so they dismiss it. We’re dealing with an establishment mindset that is impervious to refutation – to fact. It’s like throwing popcorn at a battleship.”
This hasn’t stopped Evans, 78 – once the youngest metropolitan newspaper editor in the USA (Indianapolis News), and formerly a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and commentator for CBS News and Voice of America – from reloading and firing again. In fact, following his McCarthy book, which corroborates many McCarthy cases and documents the Washington Establishment’s craven efforts to destroy the maverick senator rather than address subversion and cover-up, Evans embarked on a new project. With so much evidence now available attesting to the presence of Soviet agents watching over wartime Washington, Evans set out to write a concise history of what it was these agents of the Kremlin actually accomplished.
The new book, published in November 2012, is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, co-written with Herbert Romerstein, a leading Cold War expert and longtime congressional investigator. Assessing the achievements of agents of influence, is very different, Evans emphasizes, from standard histories of spying as defined by stealing secrets.
The series of history-changing events Evans and Romerstein identify as having been subverted by Soviet agents is itself history-changing, demanding a rewrite of much of the history of World War II. Despite the familiarity with which we regard the era, in many ways, Evans and Romerstein are pioneering a new field of study. The best way to approach it with what Evans himself calls his Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “No matter how bad you think something is,” he says, “when you look into it, it's always worse."
It’s the same as the ignorance of true RACISM practiced by the Democrats...
Ditto that
The kicker is that the Leftists are the first to scream McCarthyism, yet that have absolutely NO QUALMS about applying the McCarthyist tactics (which they supposedly abhor) against those who disagree with them. If a Leftist does it, it can’t be McCarthyism. [/s]
Bump.
The sure-fire method of communists. That is precisely why Whittaker Chambers wrote "Witness." He knew if he didn't get the full and completed unvarnished story out there, the communists would write the narrative and destroy him. It's a shame that McCarthy was unable to write a similar book.
Sen. Joe McCarthy was a true American patriot. He, without much help, exposed the communist menace throughout the government. Of course it was the liberal, commie press which eventually detroyed him
Add Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel for their life-long pursuit of the truth. Romerstein is the coauthor of "Stalin's Secret Agents." He is also the coauthor of "The Venona Secrets" with Breindel for their seminal research after the Venona papers were declassified and Russian espionage documents were briefly declassified. I've really got to hand it to these people for exposing the truth, a truth you will never hear once in the education establishment.
The more I read in this area (Witness, The Communist, The Venona Secrets, Communism: A History, Blacklisted by History -- next up "Stalin's Secret Agents"), the more flabbergasted I become about our country willfully turning a blind-eye to the enemies who infiltrated the government to the highest levels and seek to destroy us. And now they are out in the open in the White House.
One of the most fundamental misconceptions people have about Soviet spies is that they were people who furtively photographed military bases, defense plants etc. to acquire information about our weapons, strategies and so forth. While this certainly did happen, far and away the greatest effort of theirs was in the promulgation of propaganda and misinformation into the organs of the American public with the intent of manipulating public opinion and corrupting our culture. There was a man named Willi Munzenberg, who was a part of Lenin's inner circle (the only non-Russian I believe) who became something of a propaganda czar, who, working through the COMINTERN established what he called "innocents clubs" (front groups comprised of the same people Lenin called "useful idiots") in non-communist counties. He himself worked primarily in Europe, but he had a huge budget from the Kremlin (laundered through the COMINTERN), and was very successful in establishing his "innocents clubs" in this country. His right-hand man in America was a guy named Otto Katz, and he was very good at hob-nobbing with Hollywood and New York glitterati at the time...seducing many of them, wittingly and unwittingly into various "anti-facist" front groups. Munzenberg understood that while a military domination of this country wasn't possible then, our media, education establishment and popular culture, what he called "The transmission belts of our society" were easy prey. His effectiveness at infiltration, and manipulation of powerful and influential members of American society is nothing short of breathtaking. Frustratingly, few people in our country have even heard his name. There is a book by Stephen Koch titled Double Lives that I was unable to put down. It describes the "Munzenberg Trust" and the ways that Soviet Intelligence manipulated American culture. The more I've learned about this aspect of Soviet espionage, the more I believe that our 'economic victory' over the Soviet empire was a Phyrric victory, because of what they did very much by design to our culture and society. I see Munzenburg's ghost standing at the shoulders of modern American talking heads in our media, modern celebrity leftists and modern American educators.
“VENONA” vindicated Joe McCarthy.
I will indeed. I've read and greatly benefited from their work. I'll even throw in Ronald Radosh and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. All of them contributed greatly to telling the truth about something so many in our country have little knowledge (or interest unfortunately). You might want to look at my post (#28) regarding a remarkable book by Stephen Koch.
...commies are winning; t’aint over.
They are masters at projection. Soviet tactic.
Unfortunately, so do many "low information" members of the so-called Right.
Thanks for the recommendation for “Double Lives.” I just purchased it on Amazon. I love having FR for recommendations combined with global bookseller Amazon so I can find and purchase any book I want within a few moments. This was impossible a short time ago.
I have very mixed feelings about Nixon. But his career-building role in catching and prosecuting Communist agent Alger Hiss is "why" it happened to him. The outing of Hiss was something American Communist bigwigs would not allow to go un-avenged.
The fact that Senator McCarthy was right is common knowledge to most freepers, many conservatives talk show hosts, and conservative authors. The only question that remains is, so now what do we do about it, besides pat ourselves on the back for being right?
I have the book but haven’t had time to read it yet
If you wish to learn how it came to pass via historical revisionism, read "In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage" by John Earl Haynes and Harey Klehr.
These truths are disheartening to me after 40-years of being scoffed at and called paranoid by friends and relatives when I tried to make them see what was happening. The greatest victories won by the "progressives" were their takeover of academia and the media (including "popular culture.")
Evans' Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “No matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it, it's always worse."
Brilliantly, brilliantly brilliant comment about one of the Biggest of the Big Lies that have become enshrined in the socialist takeover of the U.S.
Even though Ann Coulter was the first to try to break this news (ten years ago, in Treason), all of us who care, who blog, who can influence the speech or writing of Republicans, who have connections to prominent conservatives, who can contact journalists, bloggers and broadcasters and demand that this story be covered, should do so again and again.
The parallels to our present-day infiltration by islamists to consolidate the caliphate in the middle east, just as the infiltrators of the 50s gave cover for the consolidation of communism in China, are striking. Please give this article, and your contribution to getting the news out, some serious thought and action.
Also read: “The Haunted Wood” by Allen Winstein and Alexander Vassiliev; “Joseph McCarthy” by Arthur Hermann (fairly brief and concise biography and still sympathetic to McCarthy); “Clever Girl” by Laruen Kessler; “Mortal Crimes” by Nigel West.....and “Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism” by Richard Gid Powers.
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