Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America

Kovel, Joel, Red Hunting In The Promised Land: Anticommunism And The Making Of

A flawed and sometimes fantastic effort to link American anti- Communism to the ``demons of the American soul,'' by Marxist psychiatrist Kovel (Social Studies/Bard; The Age of Desire, 1981, etc.). Here, in a work dedicated to Alger Hiss, Kovel contends that ``millions of innocents lie dead, whole societies have been laid waste...and the political culture of the United States has been frozen in a retrograde position--all for the sake of overcoming Communism.'' Having described the Soviet Union as ``a colossal failure'' and the Stalinist era as ``a period of criminality on a scale scarcely ever seen in human history,'' the author proceeds to deal with every American reaction to Soviet policy as a kind of psychiatric disorder. Kovel analyzes George Kennan's ``Communism- hating'' as a ``burning desire to be different,'' without considering that the horrors Kennan was exposed to while at the Moscow embassy may have influenced his conclusions about Stalin's expansionist policies. The prime villain here is J. Edgar Hoover, who--on the basis of one dubious source--is accused of having ``a secret life of sexual license, including cross-dressing and engaging in homosexual orgies.'' Kovel compares the activities of Joseph McCarthy to ``the fiendish inquisition set up by Stalin in the 1930's, when the flower of Bolshevism was cut down, along with the Soviet military general staff and millions of innocent victims,'' even though McCarthy's persecutions led only to a condemnable but far less grievous 2,700 civilian dismissals and 12,500 resignations. The author compares Americans in ``late capitalist society'' to the pod people in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and contends that we're heading for a ``dispersed, inconsistent, even incoherent, media-driven post-Communist anticommunism.'' He concludes by noting that there's nothing to be ashamed of even in ``the dead-end variety of socialism that went under the name of Soviet Communism.'' This is Hamlet not only without the prince, but without the king as well: a singularly absurd study. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kovel, a psychiatrist and professor of social studies at Bard College, traces the evolution of anticommunism in this country from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the collapse of the "evil empire" in the age of Reagan and Bush. How, Kovel wonders, did the United States, "of all the capitalist powers the least threatened by Communism," come to be "the most floridly anticommunist"? He offers psychoportraits of such leading ideologues as Father Charles Coughlin, George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joe McCarthy to demonstrate "how Communist-hating is used opportunistically as an instrument to secure power and wealth." The author concludes with Nietzsche that "he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster." Though aspects of this thesis have been previously advanced, this provocative and stimulating book is certain to be controversial. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Thomas Appleton Jr., Kentucky Historical Soc., Frankfort
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