Despite the uncovering of the Venona Intercepts, Joseph McCarthy was a fink, argues Pallo Jordan
During the late 1950s, as a high-school student drawn into the milieu of the left, I was given a book by an older comrade, who confided that it would set me straight on the “Trots” and other left-wing critics of the Soviet Union. The book was The Great Conspiracy against the Soviet Union, by two Americans, Sayers and Kahn.
For the uninitiated, the conclusion of the two authors should suffice to convey the flavour of what they wrote. According to Sayers and Kahn, in every country, other than the Soviet Union, that Nazi Germany invaded, the aggressors were assisted by an active fifth column who had softened up the population with acts of sabotage and by spreading political demoralisation by discrediting the government in office. The Soviet Union, according to the authors, had been spared this terrible fate by Stalin’s vigilance, exemplified by the purges of the 1930s, that had contained the cancer before it infected the whole society.
Apart from the patent lie that the Nazis had no helpers among the Soviet’s population, what Sayers and Kahn contrived to do was to slander literally thousands of honest communists and working-class militants who had opposed Stalin. Their device to achieve this was the rather banal truth that the Western powers, including the Nazis, did have agents and sympathisers who ran anti-communist networks in the Soviet Union before and after World War II.
As a then callow youth, I might have been forgiven for buying into some of Sayers and Kahn’s arguments. However, it was not long before Kruschev’s 20th Congress speech and the Hungarian workers’ uprising of the same year taught me that their threadbare thesis was the rankest apologism for gross criminality. What’s more, Stalin was shown to have been a paranoid individual who refused to accept high-grade intelligence from every conceivable source the Soviet authorities had in the Axis warning of the impending invasion of June 1941.
In other words, while he had accepted the preposterous allegations of a “conspiracy against the Soviet Union” in 1937, he was unable to recognise the real conspiracy hatched by Hitler, even as it unfolded in 1941.
I was consequently deeply dismayed and angered when I read “McCarthy came close to the truth” (Mail & Guardian June 21 to 27). Except that it is from the opposite side of the great divide, it sounds uncomfortably similar to the Sayers and Kahn theses.
Dismayed because, like Sayers and Kahn, your journalist, echoing many others who have preceded him along this road,(the Sunday Times headlined its story, “American Communists’ record of treachery”; Business Day’s headline read “McCarthyites right to see red”) begins from the obvious and well- established fact that the Soviet Union had agents, spies, networks and other helpers in all the countries of the West. He offers as concrete proof hitherto secret intercepted communications between Soviet controllers and their headquarters in Moscow — the Venona Intercepts. These, says your journalist, establish that United States’ society was indeed honeycombed with “unAmericans” engaged in activities, which were either treasonous, or if they were not, came pretty close to treason, as the junior senator from Wisconsin alleged. In other words, Joe McCarthy was indeed right.
The logical inference is that the witch-hunts of the 1950s were justified and that opponents to McCarthy were exactly what he called them, “Commie-symp- dupes”.
The proof of the McCarthyite pudding surely should be in its eating.
It is instructive to recall that the persecution of the left did not initially target supporters of the Soviet Union, but rather its critics in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), whose leaders were imprisoned during World War II. In the context of the alliance with the Soviets, the SWP, rather than the communists, whose popularity peaked as the Red army tore the guts out of Hitler’s war machine, were the vulnerable dissident minority.
Even more revealing was the Amerasia spy scandal. In what must surely count as the clearest indication of the mutual reinforcement of inquisitionists from opposing sides, when the Chinese communists defeated Chiang kai-Shek’s armies, the McCarthyites in the US instigated the persecution of Owen Lattimore, O Edmund Clubb and other US sinologists on the pretext that they were communist agents who had plotted America’s “loss of China”. It was alleged that the journal Amerasia, with which they were associated, and which had carried articles on China by the likes of Anna Louise Strong and Agnes Smedley, was at the centre of this conspiracy.
At the same time in Moscow, the Stalinist equivalents of McCarthy were instituting the persecution of Anna Louise Strong, Mikhail Borodin and others who had been associated with the Chinese communists, on the pretext that they had contrived the Soviet Union’s “loss of China”. Amerasia was allegedly the site of that conspiracy as well.
Borodin and Strong were saved from the Gulag by the intervention of the Chinese Communists, and kept their jobs and reputations. Lattimore and his colleagues in the US ,were not as lucky. They were hounded out of their jobs, and in his case, out of the country. The impact on US sinology can well be imagined.
For a witch-hunt reputedly targeted at spies, it is amazing that the real spies — Straight, Blunt, Blake, the Krogers and others — were able to operate under the noses of the witch-hunters. And in the instance of the Cambridge ring, in close collaboration with them. As in the case of Stalin and his henchmen, it would appear that the real spies got away, while guiltless individuals were persecuted.
The victims of McCarthyism (like those of Stalinism) were not the real spies and saboteurs. They were overwhelmingly ordinary citizens pursuing sincerely held political beliefs — such as racial equality, social justice, gender equality, world peace and human solidarity. The people hounded out of their jobs, their professions, their neighbourhoods and sometimes even their families had never sent or received a secret communication from anyone. They were teachers, writers, trade unionists, workers, journalists, actors and actresses. Hollywood’s most talented producers and directors have received undue prominence among them, as have the scientists and academics.
It would be a grave error to imagine that McCarthyism had anything to do with espionage. McCarthyism was something akin to the Inquisition, an instrument for political repression and social control employed to silence dissidents and suppress uncomfortable truths about the existing order.
Nor is it accidental that it reared its head after a world war that recast the geopolitics of Europe and the world, and apparently laid to rest some of the more poisonous dogmas, such as racial superiority, from which that political order had drawn sustenance.
Let us agree that rival states have, since time immemorial, sought competitive advantage through the use of secret agents. There was therefore nothing unduly sinister about the Soviet Union, like its rivals in the West, employing such time-tested methods.
It is, however, another matter to use that reality to justify the political persecution of a dissident minority just because it shared the same beliefs as the leaders of a rival state.
The Inquisitionists also claimed that their victims were agents of evil who sought the destruction of human values. History has demonstrated that those so accused were in the main advocates of a more just political system, pioneers in the sciences and the arts, and, all too often, merely people who held political or religious views that were considered unpopular.
Whatever else the Venona files may demonstrate, I remain firmly convinced that the era of McCarthyism was a blight on US society that elevated the Judas and the fink to the status of a hero. In the words of Lillian Hellman, it was “Scoundrel Time”, and the ringleader of the scoundrels was Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Pallo Jordan is the minister of tourism and environmental affairs