From: dean@vexcel.com (Dean Alaska)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d
Subject: Re: American communists and the Soviet Union
Date: 18 Nov 92 21:33:50 GMT
Organization: VEXCEL Corporation, Boulder CO

In article <1992Nov18.205021.25244@mont.cs.missouri.edu> jmc@sail.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) writes:
>The opening of the archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
>has revealed many interesting facts about the connections between the
>American Communist Party, the Comintern (Communist International) and
>the Soviet espionage agencies.  An article by Harvey Klehr and John Haynes
>in the 1992 December American Spectator gives some preliminary information.
>They are editing a three volume collection of documents from the Russian
>archives to be published by the Yale University Press.
>
>1. Several of the top leaders of the Party, including Eugene Dennis
>and Earl Browder, spent years abroad in different countries as agents
>of the Comintern.  The Comintern had the practice of supervising
>communist parties using foreign communists, called "CI reps", sort
>of like Papal Nuncios.
>
>2. There really was a communist apparatus among New Deal bureaucrats
>who supplied information to Soviet intelligence in the 1930s.  There
>is no fresh information about Alger Hiss yet.
>
>3. Milton Wolff, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
>in Spain, confirmed in 1992 much of the information about these
>connections.
>
>4. U.S. Communist Party leaders helped General Donovan recruit agents
>for work in Europe until the Soviets told them to stop.
>
>5. The party maintained an illegal apparatus for some years, for fear
>of being outlawed.
>
>6. Harry Bridges, leader of the International Longshoreman's and
>Warehouseman's Union, whom the Government unsuccesfully attempted
>to prove was a communist subject to deportation, was not only a
>communist but a member of the Central Committee.
>
>Much of what the anti-communists and reformed communists of the 30s,
>40s and 50s said about communist involvement in espionage and about
>Soviet control of American communism is now confirmed in detail by
>Soviet Communist Party records.  The people who said it was *all* a
>witchhunt are refuted.  Some of Senator Joseph McCarthy's more
>ambitious charges are not supported.  There is no evidence as yet that
>any major American politicians were under communist control.
>
>--
>John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
>*
>He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
>
>

This record is actually quite mixed.  You gloss over the persecution of
Alger Hiss by saying there is no info yet when a top commumist said
there is no information, period (I'd like to here what Nixon has to say
about this).  The information about Bridges (at
least what I saw in the paper) is ambiguous and indicates he _might_
have been involved.  I don't doubt that some were involved, but there
were many who weren't involved who were persecuted.  This does not add
up to "Much ... is confirmed."  Considering that the US is supposed to
permit unpopular dissent, many people who _were_ communists should
have had the opportunity to say so and be proponents of this position
without persection.  Only those who advocated _and_ practiced or
assisted violent overthrow could justifiably be persecuted under the law.
-- 

		dingo in boulder	(dean@vexcel.com)