…by papering over CPUSA treachery.
How has New York University celebrating its acquisition of the archives of the U.S. Communist Party? As the New York Post editors say, by “celebrating the Communist Party itself” with a series of one-sided, sugarcoated public events. For example, panels
will “examine” the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg cases with a presumption of their innocence and celebrate the lives of Paul Robeson, communist historian Morris U. Schappes and the American communists who fought in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Almost without exception, speakers at these events will be those who believe the CPUSA was a noble organization that fell victim to hard-right propaganda and McCarthyite repression.
No matter that it’s been well documented for years that the CPUSA was one of the most staunch, pro-Soviet bodies in the world; that its leadership regularly received Soviet directives and funding; and that it worked covertly to mobilize educators and other influential Americans on issues crucial to our national security, such as arms control, a nuclear freeze, disarmament and the peace movement. (See Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy, by Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, 1984, pp. 116-119.)
More recently, Harvey Klehr and his co-authors, in The Soviet World of American Communism, chronicle the perfidious, joined-at-the-hip relationship between the Soviets and the subservient CPUSA, showing the party to be an appendage of Soviet clandestine operations and consistently willing to crush dissent within its ranks.
NYU’s whitewashed celebration of the CPUSA is a scandalous act of silence. The various Communist regimes have slaughtered scores of millions of innocents – more than any other political system in all of history. That the university’s leadership should sanction such a monstrous avoidance of truth is unforgivable.