Alfred Eugene Kahn was a journalist and secret member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) during World War II.
Kahn was a graduate of Dartmouth College and winner of the Crawford-Campbell Literary Fellowship, Mr. Kahn in 1939 became Executive Secretary of the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda, of which the late William E. Dodd, Sr., former Ambassador to Germany, was Chairman. Kahn also edited of The Hour, a confidential newsletter devoted to exposing German and Japanese fifth column operations.
In 1946 the San Francisco KGB suggested that Kahn be recruited into Soviet espionage. Kahn requested that Julia Older, who worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), obtain information. Elizabeth Bentley stated in her deposition to the FBI that Kahn had furnished information directly to Jacob Golos and herself in 1942 on immigrant Ukrainians hostile to the Soviet Union. Kahn is referenced as code name “Fighter” in Venona project decypt # 247 San Francisco to Moscow, 14 June 1946.
- The Great Conspiracy Against Russia — Book by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn
The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Russia (1946) was an international bestseller. On the Moscow purge trials, the authors accepted as valid the charges of treason against former Soviet leaders, and the underlying allegation of plots to overthrow the Soviet state, assassinate Lenin, Stalin, Gorky, and others.
Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America – The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Plotting To Destroy the United States became a best seller when published in 1943.
John Roy Carlson (April 9, 1909 – April 23, 1991, New York City) is one of the many pen names of Arthur Derounian, born Avedis Boghos Derounian.
Pro-Soviet propagandist Derounian was a self-appointed investigator of subversive activity, and infiltrated numerous “patriotic” groups, some of which he listed in the opening of his book Under Cover: German American Bund, Christian Front, American Nationalist Party, American Women Against Communism, The Gray Shirts, America First Committee, Christian Mobilizers, The American Defense Society, Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, National Workers League, Yankee Freemen, Flanders Hall, American Patriots among many others.
He was a master at guilt-by-association and smearing individuals opposed to US intervention in World War II. Derounian was also the chief investigator of the British intelligence front, Friends of Democracy, which campaigned for American intervention in WWII,.
“By this time a smear campaign against the America First Committee had begun. The ultra-interventionist pro-New Deal group led by the Reverend Leon M. Birkhead, the “Friends of Democracy,” was in the forefront of this vicious campaign, which sought to equate anti-war sentiment with support for Hitler and Mussolini. Birkhead hired the notorious John Roy Carlson as an agent provocateur. Carlson’s real name was Avedis Derounian; using yet another alias, “George Pagnanelli,” he passed himself off as an Italian and joined the isolationist movement. “Pagnanelli” pretended to be an antiSemite, even going so far as to put out an antiJewish hate sheet, the Defender, the purpose of which was to spread the calumny that the antiwar movement was pro-Nazi. While there undoubtedly was a pro-Nazi fringe, Carlson’s effort to smear all or even most America First supporters with the brush of Hitlerism was a crude lie. In his book Under Cover, he uses the old trick of focusing on the activities of marginal bigots, who are then quoted expressing agreement with the anti-war arguments of AFC members like Flynn and other leading figures. The atmosphere of war hysteria and leader worship that permeated the pre-war years is brought home in Under Cover and its sequel, The Plotters, where Carlson equates all criticism of the New Deal and Roosevelt with treason and support for Hitler. The tragedy of those years is that Carlson’s diatribe was put out by a major publisher and became a bestseller, reviewed in all the mass-circulation journals, while Flynn’s reply, The Smear Terror, was privately published and received only a limited circulation.”
— Justin Raimodo, from “John T. Flynn: Exemplar of the Old Right”
- Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow — Book by S. J. Taylor
Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin’s Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world’s most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known.
Stalin’s Apologist deftly unfolds the story of this accomplished but sordid and tragic life. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers to private letters and journals to interviews with such figures as William Shirer and W. Averell Harriman, Taylor’s vivid narrative unveils a figure driven by ambition, whose early success reporting on Bolshevik Russia–he was foremost in predicting Stalin’s rise to power–established his international reputation, fed his overconfident contempt for his colleagues, and indeed led him to identify with the Soviet dictator. Thus during the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, which Stalin engineered to crush millions of peasants who resisted his policies, Duranty dismissed other correspondents’ reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history’s greatest man-made disasters. Later, he took the rigged show trials of Stalin’s Great Purges at face value, blithely accepting the guilt of the victims. He believed himself the leading expert on the Soviet Union, and his faith in his own insight drew him into a downward spiral of distortions and untruths, typified by his memorable excuse for Stalin’s crimes, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
- Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary — Book by Gerald Horne
Communist Gerald Horne is one of the most prolific academic apologists for Communism and its adherents in American academia. This is his laudatory biography of the internationally celebrated Stalinist Paul Robeson.
A world-famous singer and actor, a trained lawyer, an early star of American professional football and a polyglot who spoke over a dozen languages: these could be the crowning achievements of a life well-lived. Yet for Paul Robeson the higher calling of social justice led him to abandon both the NFL and Hollywood and become one of the most important political activists of his generation, a crusader for freedom and equality who battled both Jim Crow and Joseph McCarthy.
In Paul Robeson, Gerald Horne discovers within Robeson’s remarkable and revolutionary life the story of the twentieth century’s great political struggles: against racism, against colonialism, against poverty—and for international socialism. This critical and searching biography provides an opportunity for readers to comprehend the triumphs and tragedies of the revolutionary progressive movement of which Robeson was not just a part, but perhaps its most resonant symbol.
Gerald Horne serves on the editorial board of the Communist Party USA’s journal, Political Affairs. He holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. His most recent books are: The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA; Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire; Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle and Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation. Dr. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Princeton University. Other books written by Horne include: Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow ; Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii ; W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography ; Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois ; The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten; The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War, Cold War in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies, and The End of Empires: African Americans in India.
Mario Sousa is a member of the Communist Party in Sweden, KPML. This article was published in the Communist newspaper Proletären in April 1998. In the article he attacks the historical integrity and veracity of historians Robert Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in their discussions of the horrific genocidal crimes of mass murder under Joseph Stalin.
- Fellow-Travelers and Useful Idiots: Western Apologists for the Soviet Union Believed They Were in the Vanguard of History –John Gray article
- Stalin’s New American Apologists — Jacob Heilbrunn article
WHEN THE SOVIET UNION went under, Russian historians and citizens’ movements began to confront Communist crimes. Mass graves were unearthed. New documents pointing to Lenin’s culpability were uncovered. In Western Europe, as well, the recent publication of The Black Book of Communism and Francois Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion has marked a major shift, even a revision, in traditionally lenient attitudes toward Stalinism. While these books’ likening of communism to Nazism created a vigorous debate, no one challenged their indictments, let alone sought to defend Stalinism.
- Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba by Paul Hollander
Why have noted Western intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to Jean-Paul Sartre to Susan Sontag embraced the vision of various “revolutionary” societies, often in their most repressive historical phase, while downgrading (and yet enjoying) the benefits of Western liberal pluralistic political cultures? How have the delusions and dreams of many Western observers of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other socialist states contributed to a moral and political double standard? Paul Hollander explores these crucial questions in a remarkable study of travel reports on socialist countries written by Western visitors. Observing that political pilgrims represent a tradition of seeking alternatives to flawed social arrangements at home, Hollander also suggests that underlying these visits is a quest for meaning, purpose, and sense of community that intellectuals feel increasingly deprived of in secular and individualistic societies in the West.
8:15 pm on August 5, 2020
