Reds

PowerLine pointed to this column by Katherine Kersten on historian John Earl Haynes...

...Haynes took his interest in American communism with him. In 1992, he and fellow historian Harvey Klehr gained access to formerly top-secret Soviet archives, with the help of Yale University Press. They discovered more than 430,000 microfilmed pages, which detailed the American party's activities and relations with Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930s and '40s. "The dust was still on them," Haynes says. "No one had touched them in 50 years."

The documents revealed that the Soviets had infiltrated most major American government agencies, as well as the White House. Haynes' and Klehr's 1995 book, "The Secret World of American Communism," generated headlines around the world.

Their revelations created pressure on the U.S. government to open its own secret records. In 1995, the National Security Agency opened the files of the Venona project, a World War II-era code-breaking effort to identify Soviet spies and their American sources. Haynes' and Klehr's book, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America," included "a virtual king's ransom of top-secret bombshells," wrote Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report.

"It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of John Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's work," says Jonathan Brent, editorial director of Yale University Press.

Haynes' research has played havoc with much conventional academic wisdom...

That "conventional wisdom" is that American anti-Communism was just McCarthyist hysteria. Well, we know now that that isn't true. We KNOW, we have the FACTS. But the lies live on.

Not to mention the sick double standard, where having some past connection with Nazism renders one forever radioactive (remember the world-wide scandal when Reagan merely visited a cemetery where some Nazis were buried) whereas having in the past aided Stalin or Mao or Castro means that one was a "youthful idealist." What crap. Along with popes and presidents visiting Auschwitz there ought to be a gazillion or so leftists visiting the camps of the Gulag and abjectly apologizing for aiding and encouraging mass-murder and genocide. Instead they are still helping the commies, by minimizing their crimes, and by betraying our country in time of war.