Who Was Antony Sutton?
The serpentine scholar who ate his own tale
Yesterday Covert Action Magazine did me the honor of publishing my article “Who Was Antony Sutton?” Whether you know his name or not, the late Antony C. Sutton was one of the most influential writers in the modern populist world. If you’ve heard the claim that virtually all revolutionary movements are fraudulent and part of a design by elite global societies, that is the work of Antony Sutton. If you’ve ever heard the claim that one secret force controls both large-scale capitalism and large-scale communism all over the world—but that conspiratorial force is not the Jews—that too is the work of Antony Sutton.
Unfortunately, Sutton often strategically suppressed and distorted history in constructing his arguments. In a case study of his popular work Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, I show that Sutton exploited the arcane complexity of World War I, and the sectarianism of the Russian left, to confuse and mislead American readers. He misrepresented leading backers of the White Russians as being backers of the Bolsheviks, Woodrow Wilson as the personal sponsor of Trotsky, official communist papers as non-communist, anti-monopolists as being pro-monopolist, and other scholar’s previously published research as being original revelation.
From 1974 onward, he seems to have totally misrepresented his relationship with the Hoover Institution, a neoconservative think tank where he’d maintained an office and a research grant. He used his contrived reputation as a maverick and martyr to promote an essentially Cold War agenda (while purporting to be a critic of it).
In the early 1970s, events like the Vietnam War, the economic crisis, and the congressional investigations of the CIA spurred contempt for the establishment among the American people, including conservatives. To undercut revolt, it was no longer effective to call for loyalty to the elite; The most that could be achieved would be to promote cynicism about revolution. Employing pseudo-scholarship to paint revolutionaries as agents of the establishment would be extremely useful to the ruling class. Whether or not Antony Sutton consciously worked for that goal isn’t known, but it is clear that he weaponized ignorance when his duty as a scholar should have been to combat it.
Read the article here.
Excellent article. A small corrective: the notion of “socialism in one country” was not a Leninist formation, it was used by Stalin after Lenin’s death to justify a host of counter revolutionary activities. I am not aware that Lenin ever used the phrase but I might be wrong about that.
The Bolsheviks were well aware that without an extension of the revolution beyond Russia, the revolution would eventually fail and Capitalism would triumph.
Which is exactly what occurred in 1989.