The Cause That Failed Quotes

“Until the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s, in order to extend its political influence the Communist party had to establish front organizations or infiltrate and take over established political groups. Today such tactics are much less necessary, for Communists are welcome in the radical movement and can freely participate in its activities. More important, the goals of Old and New Left groups are largely identical. Both work for an end to American “interventionism” in the Third World and for dismantling of what they call the “national security state.”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“From early on, important segments of the movement against the American involvement in Southeast Asia were not so much antiwar as they were partisans of Hanoi, whose victory they sought to hasten through achieving an America withdrawal from Vietnam. Given the fragility of the Saigon government and the dependence of the South Vietnamese armed forces on American assistance, none could have any illusion about the effects of this policy. The New Left, too, soon came to favor a victory of Hanoi.”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“It was also not until many years later, Baldwin related, that he discovered that the Communists used these fronts as recruiting grounds for the Party. If the treasurer happened to be a party member, funds would be siphoned off for party purposes. Eventually Baldwin recognized the futility of working with the Communists. “I recognized the lesson many others—but, unfortunately, not all liberals—learned: that no movement in which communists participate can successfully resist”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“The wave of anticommunism sweeping the Communist bloc has not had much effect on some diehard anti-anticommunists in this country. In the fall of 1989, just a few weeks before the people of Eastern Europe toppled their Communist governments, the Church Council of Greater Seattle adopted a statement of “Affirmations and Confessions” which it recommended for use as litanies in worship. The people of the “free world” were said to be infected with racism and militarism as well as with the “cancerous disease of ‘anti-communism.’” Americans were urged to liberate themselves “from the ever-growing disease of anti-communism.”82 Surely, one is tempted to remark, few ecclesiastical pronouncements have been issued in less appropriate circumstances.”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“The author, Joel Kovel, a political scientist at the University of California, argued that anticommunism was the same kind of phenomenon as racism and “works hand-in-glove with racism, and, as a philosophy of killing, has generated corpses beyond imagination.” Among recent “episodes of anticommunist slaughter” Kovel included two million dead in Vietnam and “100,000 in Nicaragua (adding the body counts attributable to Somoza and Reagan).” This was, of course, a typical instance of blaming the victim, for it completely ignored who started the hostilities in question.”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“In this one-eyed picture of the country’s recent history there is little room for Communist espionage. The U.S. never faced any kind of internal security threat—in the eyes of most of these authors, the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss are seen as innocent victims of an FBI frame-up. The meticulous examination of these cases by Ronald Radosh and Allen Weinstein, who started out as critics and doubters of the government’s case only to be overwhelmed by the massiveness of condemnatory evidence discovered by them, is dismissed an unconvincing. Books and film documentaries that argue for the innocence of Hiss and the Rosenbergs are praised no matter how flimsy their factual base.24”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“Support for this view came from the most unexpected quarters. In a book published in 1966, Senator James W. Fulbright argued that America had become involved in the fighting in Vietnam because we had come to regard “communism as a kind of absolute evil, as a totally pernicious doctrine which deprives the people subjected to it of freedom, dignity, happiness, and the hope of ever acquiring them.… This view of communism as an evil philosophy is a distorting prism through which we see projections of our own minds rather than what is actually there.” Little more than ten years before the mass exodus of the boat people who were desperately seeking to escape their Communist liberators, Fulbright suggested that “some countries are probably better off under communist rule than they were under preceding regimes; … some people may even want to live under communism.”10”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“Many of these ex-Communists came to agree with the British editor of The God That Failed that “no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy and Communists as political opponents can really understand the value of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.”98 This self-image helps to explain the sense of mission and self-righteousness exhibited by so many ex-Communists.”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life

“How did academic freedom fare during the 1950s? Schrecker speaks of a “witch-hunt” during which more than a hundred professors were dismissed or threatened with dismissal for political reasons.85 Whatever one may think of the wisdom of and the procedures used for getting rid of Communist professors, the use of the term “witch-hunt” is surely inappropriate. There is no evidence for the existence of witches, but there could be no doubt about the presence of Communists in the educational system. It is also unfair to put the major blame for these dismissals upon the “moderate and respectable professors,” for many of these professors opposed McCarthyism.”
― Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life