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Summary: The Manipulators Exposed
Review: Stephen Koch's largely unheralded 1994 volume Double Lives, subtitled Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, concerns itself with a careful examination of the extensive and intricate secret propaganda campaign of the Lenin and Stalin-era Soviet Union to globalize Communism, and demonstrates how an ambitious German opportunist by the name of Willi Münzenberg successfully manipulated notable Western writers and artists into participation in this propaganda network. Koch's work answers a number of questions which have recently been brought up by conservative commentators, like Michael Medved, in discussing the role of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in so-called "Culture Wars". Double Lives demonstrates how Willie Münzenberg, operating as a legitimate German publisher and politician, oversaw a massive media empire of newspapers, magazines, and film companies, covertly financed by the USSR, that guided Western fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers. The list of notables successfully targeted by Münzenberg and his cohorts reads like a veritable "who is who" of leftist European and American intelligentsia. Ernest Hemingway, Romaine Rolland, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Lincoln Steffens, and Bertolt Brecht were just some of the many intellectual and literary cogs in Münzenberg's propaganda and espionage machine. While some, like Andre Gide, quickly grew disillusioned and broke with the apparatus, most stayed the course preferring to gloss over the more gruesome aspects Stalin's regime in their unfailing reverence for the Communist ideal. Koch skillfully illustrates how Stalin used the anti-Fascist movement as a cover while he and Hitler made arrangements through their respective secret services to dispose of domestic enemies. Likewise, Koch discusses at length how Münzenberg's protégé and right-hand man, a Czech Jew named Otto Katz, created, expanded, and eventually presided over an extensive espionage network that included Bloomsbury's John Strachey, the notorious Cambridge spy ring, and, in America, Whittaker Chambers and his friends Alger Hiss and Noel Field. It would be no great exaggeration to say that the cultural history of the Western world from the 1930's on was profoundly influenced by Münzenberg's and Katz's minions and their intellectual progeny. Koch presents ample evidence that Münzenberg's agents wielded considerable influence with the Los Angeles and Hollywood cultural elites via such fronts as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. While Willie Münzenberg and Otto Katz were both eventually exterminated by the very Stalinist regime that they so faithfully and effectively served, we need not lose sight of the fact that the pro-Communist seeds that they helped sow in America during the first half of the century have by all accounts begun to beat fruit in the latter half. By successfully Stalinizing the already leftish entertainment business, while at the same time using the Hollywood allure to glamorize leftist politics, Stalin's agents prepared the groundwork for a Hollywood-led assault on traditional American `bourgeois' values which began in earnest in the late 1960's and which has achieved critical mass over the last ten years.
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Summary: "Anti Fascists" Exposed
Review: According to conventional history, in the 1930s Stalin became alarmed about Hitler and organized an international anti-fascist movement to oppose him. HA! Now that some of the archives of the ex-Soviet Union have been opened (OH! How I love to type "ex-Soviet Union"!), it turns out the whole thing was a con from begining to end. The reality: Stalin was determined to make a deal with the Nazis from the word go. He organized the "Popular Front" as a cover for this, as a distraction for the Great Purge, and, probably, as a means of getting Hitler in a war with the West. The details Koch presents would be unbelievable if they weren't documented (for instance, Soviet Espionage assigned women to seduce and marry selected non-Soviet writers, as a means of manipulating them in the cause of propoganda!). I can't rave about this carefully researched, beautifully written book enough. FIND A COPY AND READ IT!
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Summary: "Anti Fascists" Exposed
Review: Stephen Koch interviews the wife of master propagandist Willi Muenzenberg, who reveals the facts behind her husband's publishing empire. From Hollywood leftism, to well known writers, to support for Communist spies. This man, who watched Lenin leave the train station and was himself murdered by Stalin's henchmen, started the "perpetual apology" of Communism so prevalent then... and now.
Rating: 
Summary: Messy but interesting
Review: This book is badly edited and loaded with typographical errors; if it were a toaster, I'd call it defective and return it. Yes, it is an interesting addition to the literature of the Soviet revision. But the editing and the typos are horrible. You are left to figure out what word was meant -- does "writing" mean "writing"? is "ind" really "find"? -- and doing so continually interrupts the narrative.
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Summary: An eye opening and very interesting
Review: This is the kind of book that makes you ask yourself every few pages "did you know that?!", "how come I didn't know this!", and "how come nobody talks about this!" It is really a good portrait of those grim times in Europe. It exposes the workings and everyday life of the real spies. It gives the "bad guys" you heard about or saw only in movies a real face. Full of detail that does not bore but expand the palette of colors. Even if you are not interested in history or politics you should read this. I have tried to find other books on Muezenberg and I recently came across "The Red Millionaire" by Sean McMeekin, which I intend to read soon. I think more investigating journalism should be done about other dark myths of our recent history. We have to look more critically at the people who want to mold our minds. This is a very valuable book.
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