With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Gabriel Kolko's History: "Inspired by an obsessive hatred of America"

Anders G. Lewis, in Frontpagemag.com (July 8 2004):

Among the A-list of self-declared enemies of the American state, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are the gold standard. But the historian Gabriel Kolko, though less popular than either, has been almost as influential. In the 1960s, Kolko introduced a strident and ideological form of history into the academic world. Writing from a Marxist perspective, he helped construct the intellectual edifice of modern academic anti-Americanism, reflexively exculpating America’s adversaries while portraying America’s past and present in such dark tones as to make the nation repellent and - absent a socialist revolution - beyond redeeming. In Kolko’s nuanced prose, America is a nation “intellectually and culturally undeveloped,” “blind to itself - its past, its present, and its future” - an “evil society.”[1]

A graduate of Harvard University, Kolko spent most of his career on the faculty of York University in Toronto, where he has authored over ten books on American history, including two books on the origins of the Cold War, a synthesis of American history after 1865, and an overview of the Vietnam War.[2] These books have influenced a school of radical historians, including Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Robert Buzzanco, and Bruce Cumings. In keeping with the leftward shift of university culture, Kolko’s fellow academics have lavished his radical texts with intemperate praise. In the New York Review of Books, Hans Morgenthau wrote that The Politics of War “is a book of major importance” because it represents “the first revisionist book concerned with the origins of the Cold War which is also a work of first-rate scholarship.” The idea that a book blaming the United States for the Cold War using an analytic framework almost identical to that employed by the Kremlin’s propagandists – and by a distinguished Harvard political scientist -- would have been inconceivable in the pre-Sixties university culture. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Professor Gaddis Smith called the same book “the most important and stimulating discussion of American policy during World War II to appear in more than a decade.” Fellow radical and anti-American extremist Noam Chomsky is also thrilled with Kolko’s work. According to Chomsky, The Limits of Power is “the most important analytic study of evolving U.S. policy in this period….” Kolko reciprocates the adulation. In a blurb for Chomsky’s extended diatribe, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Kolko called The Limits of Power a “brilliant, shattering, and convincing account of United States-backed suppression of political and human rights in the Third World.” According to Kolko, Chomsky should be “obligatory reading for any American seeking to comprehend the role of the United States in the world since 1946.”[3]

Like other radical academics, Kolko prides himself on being a political activist, not to say revolutionary. Throughout the Vietnam War, he traveled numerous times to France and to North and South Vietnam, meeting with Communist officials and advising them on how best they could defeat the United States.[4] He also organized aid shipments to the Communists, called upon fellow leftists to wage war against American imperialism, and backed the Communist cause around the world. In May, 1971, he pleaded with Americans to send money to a group called “Canadian Aid for Vietnam Civilians.” Kolko noted that the organization “allocates 45 percent of its income each to the NLF and North Vietnam” and will help alleviate “the suffering the war has inflicted on all the people of Vietnam.”[5] How it would help to alleviate the suffering of all the people of Vietnam with 90% of its money earmarked for the Communist aggressors and oppressors, Kolko failed to explain.

The starting point for Kolko’s work is the preposterous idea that America is a totalitarian nation, where the rich rule and the poor obey. The “ruling class,” according to Kolko “defines the essential preconditions and functions of the larger American social order, with its security and continuity as an institution being the political order’s central goal in the post-Civil War historical experience.” The ruling class dominates both the Republican and Democratic parties, which have no significant differences between them that Kolko is able to detect. Obviously, this theoretical framework lacks any originality and is merely a crib of Marx’s discredited attack on “bourgeois democracy,” in which the state is just “the executive committee of the ruling class.” Republicans and Democrats, Kolko explains (as though this is in fact an explanation) are “inalterably wedded to the desirability of capitalism as a general economic framework.” (And why not if one compares capitalism to the totalitarian states that Kolko appears to endorse?) In Kolko’s presentation reform movements like Progressivism and New Deal liberalism for example amount to nothing more than efforts to promote “efficiency” in preserving America’s totalitarian system.[6] Stalinist apparatchiks would not disagree.

America’s unjust political order produces vast riches for a few and poverty and inequality for the majority, while ensuring that the ruling class controls foreign policy. The ruling class, Kolko summarizes, is “the final arbiter and beneficiary of the existing structure of American society and politics at home and of United States power in the world”[7]

From this untenable ideological premise, Kolko concludes that the Cold War was not about Soviet expansionism but an American attempt to promote free trade and corporate profits.[8] In Kolko’s writing’s the Kremlin’s actions play no role in determining American policy. In fact the opposite is the case. The Truman Doctrine and other American policies were not about defending relatively free societies from the fate of the Kremlin’s East European satellites but were the expression of America’s own bid for world economic hegemony. Or, as Kolko puts it – following in a long line of Soviet apologists -- the United States set out (during and after World War II) to “restructure the world so that American business could trade, operate, and profit without restrictions everywhere.” Fears that American leaders expressed over Communist expansion in Eastern Europe were merely a cover for this agenda. Concern over the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and other Kremlin aggressions were so much Western fantasy and Cold War paranoia. For America’s ruling class, the central foreign policy concern “was not the containment of Communism, but rather more directly the extension and expansion of American capitalism according to its new economic power and needs.”[9] Not surprisingly, Cold War Soviet leaders said exactly the same thing....