The Terrors of the Dark

In: Monthly review: an independent socialist magazine, Band 46, Heft 1, S. 54-60

Abstract

A review essay on a book by Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994 [see listing in IRPS No. 81]). Kovel's work traces the rise of anticommunism in the US, examining the anticommunists Father Charles Coughlin, George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther, Arthur Koestler, & James Jesus Angleton. Kovel provides portraits of these figures & the paranoid fervor that surrounded anticommunism, particularly in the postwar period. It is suggested that Kovel's work would be more forceful if it grounded its analysis in terms of capitalist development & historical materialism, noting how the branding of communists as antithetical to the US was a legitimation process to support the capitalist enterprise. D. Karjanen