There were reds under the bed

In a “Times” weekend supplement article, Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University, wrote a review of the book “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America” written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev.

Professor Andrew tells us that the book

proves with no reasonable doubt that during the Second World War the Soviet Union conducted in the United States, with the active assistance of the US Communist party, the largest and most productive intelligence offensive ever mounted by any power against a wartime ally.

When I was a lecturer in a College of Further education, I used to spend my lunch breaks in heated debate with my left-wing colleagues. As a result, I used to return to the classroom totally unable to remember what I had eaten.

A weapon that I used to dread being used against me was the derisory laugh. This is the blanket bomb of human debate and does more to destroy a case than volumes of rational argument. On TV it is seen, for example, deployed by sections of the audience invited to “Question Time” by David Dimbleby.

The derisory laugh had often a cliché attached to it. One such example to shut up further discussion was “Reds under the bed”. We were living through a time when some very sinister figures dominated industrial relations. A time when the left and the BBC had established strikes as part of the normal, desirable way of life in this country.

The reds were never under the bed, they were there for all to see. However to be told now that there were also reds under the bed plotting things that were too harmful to reveal publicly does not surprise me