Prophets With Honor

...The habit of referring to human beings as unclean animals or insects was typical of those who, at a pinch, had an emotional preference for communism rather than anti-communism...

...Such terms as "cold warrior" and "anti-Communist" are still terms of abuse for many, especially in academia...

...Mailer called the Congress liberals "cockroaches in a slum sink...

...Yet the temptation must be resisted...

...Not Without Honor sets the record straight on all these matters and is a notable addition to the historiography of our times...

...This, Spender believed, was behind her notorious attack on Orwell as "proto-fascist...

...I know exactly what he means...

...The act of opposing communism, perhaps the most evil ideology ever to menace the world- worse than Nazism because more cautious and durable-was a meritorious, and sometimes a heroic one...

...McCarthy without qualification...

...At various times during her long career as a professional intellectual, she fought against the Stalinists and the witch hunters and cold warriors...

...True, Ronald Reagan never lost his exhilaration at decapitating the beast, and Margaret Thatcher will treat listeners to a triumphant paean on how it was done at the drop of a hat...

...Most of the rest are weary of the topic...

...The CIA, though run on the whole by old-fashioned WASPs who simply wanted to preserve American institutions and frustrate the schemes of America's totalitarian enemies, was judged to be the moral equivalent of the KGB-worse, in fact, because nearer...

...Such wavering and emotionally swayed intellectuals were driven almost frantic with rage by the revelation that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the organization that sponsored liberal anti-Communist conferences and the Anglo-American magazine Encounter, had been secretly subsidized by the CIA...

...Richard Gid Powers has now done exactly that...

...The poet and critic Stephen Spender told me that when he repeated to her George Orwell's description of his first wife as "not a bad old stick" (a term of endearment among tight-lipped English public schoolboys of Orwell's generation), she was so outraged on feminist grounds that she said, "I might have guessed that an anti-Communist of his kind would say something like that...

...Jason Epstein wrote in the New York Review of Books that, if the relationship between the Popular Front and Stalinism had been bad, the Congress's ties with the CIA were worse...

...His history of American anti-communism, Not Without Honor (Free Press, 554 pages, $30), is full, detailed, dispassionate, fair-minded, and-all things considered-remarkably accurate...

...Almost without exception, they were horrible people, and their creed a dismal mixture of unreason, hatred, lies, and hypocrisy...

...A typical proponent of the tortured logic and highly emotional ratiocination intellectuals brought to the battle between the Reds and anti-Reds was Mary McCarthy...

...Mary McCarthy also demonstrated the propensity of American intellectuals to bring total irrele-vancies to the battle of the anti's and the anti-anti's...

...It is a fascinating tale, well told, and I will not attempt to recapitulate its main points...

...When all is said and done, the rabid anti-Communists like Joe McCarthy were marginal figures, mere historical footnotes...

...The more one examines the Communist pantheon, from Marx himself to fallen idols like Bertolt Brecht, the more repellent they all appear...

...I once asked her, "Which do you consider more dangerous, the Communists or anti-Communists...

...The book will probably be less well read than it deserves because of "ideology fatigue...

...Paul Johnson is the author of Modern Times, The Birth of the Modern, A History of the Jews, Intellectuals, and other books...

...they judged the occasional excesses of anti-communism as a greater menace to the freedom of the world than communism itself-and considered Palmer, Coughlin, and McCarthy, who lost people their jobs or got them chucked out of the country, more evil than Stalin, who killed at least 20 million...

...The feeling that anyone who opposed communism vigorously, especially those who had once been on the left, were "ratting" on the workers, was very strong, right up to the 1980s...

...He tells the story from the age of Lenin and Wilson, through the Red Scare of Wilson's attorney general Mitchell Palmer, to the fierce ideological battles of the 30s, the wartime ban on criticism of Russia, the postwar and Cold War witch hunts, the rise and fall of McCarthyism, "containment" and its erosion, the disastrous 70s, and the final triumph of the 80s...

...Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish political philosopher whose three-volume history of Marxism is one of the great demolition jobs of all time-and who, in his day, did mighty labors in the anti-Communist vineyard-told me he never wanted to hear the word "Marxism" or "communism" ever again...

...But as Powers says, "The disproportionate number of Jews in the first generation of American Communists meant that there was also a disproportionate number of Jews among the embittered ex-Communists and fellow travelers who began to fight communism from the 1930s on...

...Partisan Review ran a noisy manifesto against the link, signed not merely by the malodorous Lillian Hellman, as one would expect, but by such well-meaning muddlers as Hannah Arendt, Dwight Mac-Donald, and Norman Mailer...

...But they are rare anti-Communist birds...

...Of course Jews played a notable part in launching communism both in Russia and on the world stage, and that is why anti-Communist extremists such as Father Coughlin linked communism to "world Jewry...

...Now that the Soviet Empire is no more, and communism, insofar as it exists at all, is either a toothless old monster or has transmuted merely into power-grabbing sects of political criminals, there is a certain feeling of exhaustion among those who helped to destroy both...

...But it should be read, not least because it contains many important historical lessons and tells us much about the frailties of human nature, particularly of intellectuals...

...Here again, the disproportion factor took over...

...The intellectual war against communism had to take account of the extraordinary sense of disproportion among American intellectuals and opinion-formers...

...Later Sartre wrote his way back into favor and came out with his classic dictum: "Any anti-Communist is a rat...

...In the roll of honor of those who fought communism with reason and good faith, who never in the process abandoned their commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and due process, and who continued to fight also for a better, fairer, and freer world, Jews occupy prominent places: Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Louis Marshall, Abraham Cahan, Eugene Lyons-the list is a long one...

...Sober and thoughtful anti-Communists, who for the most part were committed liberals and Democrats, were hampered throughout by the antics of the zealots (like Palmer) or the far Right (like Father Charles Coughlin) or the mere opportunists (like Joseph McCarthy...

...Yet it is a fact, and Powers's book provides plenty of evidence, that communism was eventually destroyed as much by former adherents and leftists who had seen the light as by its traditional or natural enemies on the right...

...At the notorious Congress of Intellectuals held in Wroklau in 1948, Fadaev (for a time Stalin's favorite intellectual) roundly denounced Jean-Paul Sartre, then out of favor with the Kremlin, as a "hyena and running dog of capitalism...

...She thought for a bit and said: "The doctrinaire anti-Communists...

...One stands amazed that anyone-even intellectuals, with their limitless capacity for self-deception-could have been taken in for a second...

...In fact, the Cold War was a war for freedom and justice, which the West eventually won overwhelmingly, thanks to such warriors...

...She termed them "anti-anti-McCarthyites," the worst term of abuse in her vocabulary...

...At any rate, up to 1945, anti-communism had an anti-Semitic element at its extreme...

...There is an almost irresistible urge to close this depressing chapter of human history and turn to better things...

...Powers has much to say about the role of Jewish intellectuals in this counterattack...

...Such abuse characterized the mode of discourse practiced by the Politburo at home and the Communist International abroad...

...Though in theory sympathetic to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, she accused some of its members, such as James Burnham and George Schuyler, of a trahison des clercs because they refused to condemn the efforts of Sen...

...We need to understand why so many were taken in for so long, and one way to get the answer is to examine the story of those who, from 1917 to the end of the 1980s, tried to expose the myth of communism and warn of its dangers...