Plus ça change ...

One of the books I an reading at the moment is The Secret World, a collection of writings, published and unpublished by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, an eminent historian with one or two lapses of judgement (well, one in particular) on the subject of the Secret Service in which he served during the Second World War and in which he remained interested ever after.

The articles, letters and book on Philby, reprinted here in full, are wonderfully well written. Professor Trevor-Roper was a stylist that few could rival. Much of it is of enormous interest but he also shows a good deal of closed mindedness of the kind he accuses his own wartime superiors and colleagues. On the whole, I'd say he never came to terms with the extent to which Communists agents of espionage and influence, penetrated various British and American institutions, displaying a certain amount of censoriousness towards anyone who tried to unravel this. (And I find it particularly infuriating that he and, I am sorry to say, his editor, Edward Harrison, refer to Russia when they mean the Soviet Union.)

The review of Andrew Boyle's The Climate of Treason, a crucial publication in the history of that unravelling is dismissive: no real need for it, nothing important in it and, in any case, the three rather sordid traitors (how right Trevor-Roper is on that adjective), Burgess, Maclean and Philby, did very little real harm.

Just as one despairs at such willful misreading one comes across this paragraph. Having analyzed why so many young people joined or supported the Communist Party in the thirties for what seemed like very good reasons at the time, he adds:

There was also another reason, less reputable, but not, I think, less real. Intellectuals often pretend that, as a class, they are advocates of liberty. This is seldom true. Intellectuals like the beauty of mathematical order. They like tidiness, symmetry. Liberty is untidy, asymmetrical. Consequently young intellectuals, even when they speak of liberty, really worship power. they generally grow out of this when they realise that they are less likely to exercise power themselves than to be the victims of it. But for a time they think that they respect it. Communism, as intellectually justified system of total power, has a fatal fascination for young intellectuals seeking short cuts to total solution.

One could point to other displays of total power that intellectuals or those who think themselves to be intellectuals, support. But, when it comes to Communism and its one manifestation in the thirties, the Soviet Union (not Russia), though the same would apply to the supporters of Mao in the fifties and sixties, there is another consideration.

Even more than fascism or Nazism, Communism is a political system that purports to be constructed on an intellectually coherent base. It is not anything of the kind, as it happens, but that is what a good many people, more intelligent and intellectual than the Cambridge five and others of that ilk have believed. Even Albert Camus differentiated between the "irrational terror" of fascism and the "rational terror" of Communism. In actual fact, Stalin was often considerably less rational than Hitler and the terror introduced in Bolshevik Russia and the Soviet Union was no more rational than that introduced in Nazi Germany, though often considerably more bloody.

On top of this, it seemed that the Soviet Union really valued and cherished its intellectuals while the higgledy-piggledy Western systems did not. Somehow, it did not appear to be important to many that those intellectuals, so cherished at first, often found themselves, as was well known even in the thirties, in prisons, in torture chambers, in labour camps and execution chambers. Other intellectuals appeared to take their place and the life of the intellect was still, apparently, cherished.

Naturally, the Soviet Union's propaganda machine played on the Western intellectuals' sense of grievance and treated them as highly honoured guests as well as highly honoured agents. The easiest person to fool is the man (or the woman but more often the man) who thinks he is the only one to know the real truth but nobody appreciates it. Too much has been written about various fellow travellers for me to have to reiterate any of it (though I may well do another time) but the intricate relationship between intellectuals and absolute power or what they see as absolute power needs to be studied now just as it was by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper.

More on Jagland

In my previous posting I mentioned that the Chairman of the Norwegian Peace Prize Committee had an interesting political career. I was then accused of being coy by a regular reader of this blog who also sent me some more information about the man. Now, up with that sort of accusation I will not put. Here is the information sent to me in full:

Apart from a history of general incompetence and sloth, including started but never finished studies in economics, Jagland was a "confidential KGB source" (or as Lenin would have called him, a useful idiot). Internally in KGB he went under the call name "Juri" and was a useful source for political information. According to reports he had also been used as a "channel for active measures", including the question of nuclear free zones in the Nordic countries. These contacts were brought to light by the Soviet defector Mikhail Butkov.

Jagland defended himself that he did not do anything but his normal duties, and though he never reported his contacts to the Norwegian security services, he did report to the people in charge of the Norwegian Labour party. (Hoops!) In the same program on Norwegian television that Butkov and Jagland were discussed, Jens Stoltenberg also was mentioned - another Labour party luminary. Those who follow Norwegian politics may recognise him as the present Norwegian PM.

Quote (my transl): "Jens Stoltenberg's contact with the KGB officer Boris Kirillov led to KGB in 1989 giving him the cover/file name "Steklov". A dossier on Stoltenberg was put together at the Centre in Moscow containing personal and political information. The dossier was of the form DOR (Delo operativnoj razrabotki). These kind of files were usually restricted to people in an advanced state of cultivation, or persons already counted as confidential sources.

Looks like Arne Treholt was not alone - he was just unlucky to get caught.

I am grateful for that information and for being reminded that I should not write lazily.

Perhaps one day even China's history will become known

Back in the days when Communist fellow traveller Owen Lattimore (here is a link to the FBI file and here is Wikipedia, which tries to put him in the best possible light) was professor then professor-emeritus of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds with many people horrified by the fact that he had had to leave his American position because of ... shock, horror ... McCarthyism, there were many people who repeated his ecstatic descriptions of the glories of Chinese Communism and the wonderful benefits that accrued to the people of that country.

It was easy to work out that Lattimore was talking poisonous rubbish - he had been just as guilty about the Soviet Union during and after his notorious trip to some of the worst camps in the Gulag at Magadan and Kolyma. He had defended the horrors of Stalinism and was, in the sixties and seventies, defending the horrors of Maoism.

Other supporters of Mao were newcomers to the field. But even to my young ears they sounded utterly wrong. The fact that the language and arguments they used about China, of which I knew little, were the same they had used about the Soviet Union, made them very suspect.

Time has moved on and many people have accepted, more or less, that Mao was the greatest mass murderer in a century that was replete with them. Not everyone has done so. Notoriously, one of President Obama's short-lived aides, Anita Dunn, told not so long ago an assembled audience that Mao Tse-tung was one of her favourite political thinkers (along with Mother Theresa).

Above all, the people of China are still being denied the truth about their own history. It is slowly coming out, at least in the West. Ronald Radosh writes on Pajamas Media about a book that ought to become as well known as all the ones about the Holocaust: Frank Dikötter's Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962.

Interestingly enough, the Independent has written about the book and its author.

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Mr Dikötter's next book will be on the Communist Party's bloody take-over of China after World War II.

Another one

Another "innocent" victim of the McCarthyite "witch-hunt" appears to have been a purveyor of sensitive information to the Chinese communists. In the Wall Street Journal Jonathan Mirsky reviews Lynne Joiner's Honourable Survivor, the life of John S. "Jack" Service, one of the best known China hands in the State Department, a man much admired for his allegedly superb knowledge of that country, whose career was destroyed by accusations of espionage and treason.

Although he was eventually cleared of charges by some federal judge who clearly did not bother to look at the case in any detail, both the cloud and the halo of the martyr remained with him.

Service, who died in 1999, was eventually judged innocent of disloyalty to the U.S. and abetting Chinese communism. But for years he was accused of being one of the State Department China hands who had "lost China" to the Communists in the 1940s. "Honorable Survivor," by journalist Lynne Joiner, who was also his close friend, makes it clear—and this is Ms. Joiner's chief contribution—that at a minimum Service was "recklessly indiscreet" in his contacts with Communist sympathizers in the U.S. to whom he gave documents or disclosed details of U.S. policy.

That's quite bad enough. After all, a man who has risen high in the State Department should not find it so easy to be "recklessly indiscreet". But what Mr Mirsky tells us makes the story worse:

In two phone interviews with me shortly before he died a decade ago, Service admitted that in the 1940s he had given Jaffe a top-secret document revealing the Nationalist Order of Battle, which showed the exact disposition of the forces facing Mao's troops. When I observed that some might regard this as treason (I made no accusation), Service said he knew it. "I want to get this off my chest," he said, explaining: "I was gullible, and trusting, and foolish." He also told me that he had purposely ignored Mao's persecution, including executions, of his perceived enemies at Yan'an. Why cover for the supposedly moderate Communist leader? "I wanted them to win. I thought they were better than the Nationalists and that if we always opposed them we would have no access to the next Chinese government."

Service pressed me to publish our conversation, but friends of his said that it would be very painful. I agreed and after some time forgot the whole episode, until Ms. Joiner's book came my way. His stunning admission that he did supply classified intelligence to Jaffe, whom he must have assumed would pass it on, puts his later career—and Ms. Joiner's book—in a different light. If what Service told me near the end of his life is true, he can no longer be viewed as an innocent victim.

One cannot help wondering at Mr Mirsky's naivete and readiness to go along with half-truths.

An explanation of sorts

One of the great mysteries of modern history is the difference between the ways Nazism and Communism are viewed in the West (not in Eastern Europe where they have suffered from both) not only in terms of their record in issues of human rights but also as enemies of western democracy. People who denounced Nazi spies and supporters are applauded as heroes; those who denounced Communist spies and agents are seen as rather difficult, distasteful and treacherous towards their friends.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the ever present issue of “McCarthyism” and its progenitor the crucial Hiss case. In The Conservative Turn Michael Kimmage traces the growth of modern conservatism in the United States through the careers of Whittaker Chambers, who deliberately set out to create anti-Communist conservatism, and Lionel Trilling, who tried to lead liberalism away from supporting Communism. Of the two, I’d say, Chambers was more successful.

As he launches into his discussion of the Hiss case, Professor Kimmage writes (pp. 204 – 205):

Chambers won the Hiss case in court. His adversary, Alger Hiss, was convicted of perjury, sent to jail, and then to a kind of professional purgatory. The Ware circle that Chambers had helped to assemble in Washington, D.C. was devastated by the Hiss case. After World War II, American communism broke up for good, not just as a party but as a political movement.

A strenuous anti-communism advanced in tandem with the careers of senators Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, both of whom Chambers knew personally. The Hiss case lent domestic or internal immediacy to the Cold War, distinguishing it from World War II, which could easily be construed in nationalist terms, as us versus them, whether “they” were the Germans or the Japanese.

The Hiss case revolved around the figure of Alger Hiss, who was not simply an American citizen accused of treason but a prince of the American meritocracy. The list of those who believed in his innocence was awesome: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and many other luminaries. Even as resolute an anti-communist as Richard Nixon was, according to his own description, inclined to believe Hiss because he knew so many people who were friends with both Hiss and Hiss’s brother Donald.

Chambers was a wilfully marginal figure with his low voice, his potentially foreign accent, his suits – invariably described as rumpled – and his memorably bad teeth. To Triumph in the Hiss case, Chambers had to upend the established symbolism of success and failure, insider and outsider. To banish Hiss from political life, which the Hiss case effectively did, was potentially to banish anyone from public life.

Unfortunately, this is only partially true. Hiss may have been banished from political life and a few other people disappeared as well but “public opinion”, that is the media and academia as well as political hangers on has refused to accept the upending of the established symbolism. Hiss is still seen as a martyr, Chambers as a psychopath and McCarthyism the greatest evil in the world. All of that despite the overwhelming evidence we now have that even McCarthy’s accusations were largely correct, though his scattershot attacks did him or his cause no favours.

Chambers told the truth as did Elizabeth Bentley but that cannot be accepted by those who prefer to see the social structure the right way up. That is what we are still fighting against.

The dishonesty is outrageous

I have just finished re-reading an excellent book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, called In Denial. The subtitle explains the subject well: “Historians, Communism and Espionage”.

Dealing with the dishonesty, refusal to accept evidence and sheer thuggishness of the historical establishment in the United States (and is it any different here?) when it comes to Communism and the activity of the CPUSA as well as that of various spies, the authors point out on a number of occasions the difference between the way Nazism and its agents are discussed from the positive spin that is consistently given both to Communism and its agents.

Their theory is that this is the outcome of the New Left “colonizing” academia in the seventies and wishing to use the subject to bring up new generations of radicals who want to continue the failed work of the likes of Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Whether this works outside academia, the media and, always, Hollywood is questionable but those are important parts of American life.

In the concluding chapter they refer to the eminent historian of Russia, Martin Malia, who wrote, referring to the victory of revisionism in academia and the consequent refusal to face up to the truth about Communism that “bluntness is presently a therapeutic necessity”.

Haynes and Klehr summed up in two longish paragraphs that are, nevertheless, worth quoting in full:

Far too much academic writing about communism, anticommunism and espionage is marked by dishonesty, evasion, special pleading and moral squalor. Like Holocaust deniers, some historians of American communism have evaded and avoided facing a pre-eminent evil – in this case the evil of Stalinism. Too many revisionists present a view of history in which they wrong side won the Cold War and in which American Communists and the CPUSA represent the forces of good and right in American history. Most new dissertations written in the field still reflect a benign view of communism, a loathing for anticommunism, and hostility toward America’s actions in the Cold War. Many American historians hold America to a moral standard from which they exempt the Soviet Union and practice a crude form of moral equivalence.

Like Holocaust deniers, too many revisionists deny the plain meaning of documents, invent fanciful benign explanations for damning evidence, and ignore witnesses and testimony that is inconvenient. In the face of clear and compelling evidence of Soviet espionage, they see nothing. When the bodies of more than a hundred former American Communists murdered by Stalin’s police are discovered in a mass grave in Karelia, they will not look. Confronted with documents and trails of evidence leading where they do not wish to go, they mutter darkly about conspiracies and forgeries and invent incidents for which there is not documentation. Some brazenly offer confident exegeses of documents they admit they have not seen or condemn books they admit they have not read. They confidently propose chronological impossibilities as probabilities and brazenly situate people in places they could not have been at times they could not have been there. It is not entirely clear how to classify such intellectual activity. But it is certainly not history.

Professors Klehr and Harvey are too kind. Such intellectual activity is to be classified as lies and propaganda.

Does this change anything?

In the last few months I have read a good deal about the much more frightening period of the international terrorist movement of the seventies. It all started with my seeing "The Baader-Meinhof Complex", an interesting but somewhat inadequate film, and writing about it for The Salisbury Review [full article in print only].

I re-read Jillian Becker's "Hitler's Children" and read Stephan Aust's account on which the film was based. At present I am reading Michael Burleigh's ground-breaking study of terrorism and culture, "Blood and Rage". Indeed, I am beginning to feel as if my life were filled with words about terrorists, terrorism and those who support both.

Going back to the German Red Army Faction, all those who remember anything about it will know that the violent protests, which eventually developed into the RAF were started by the shooting of a student, Benno Ohnesorg in West Berlin in 1967. He was demonstrating against the visit of the Shah of Iran (how that takes one back); there were serious clashes between demonstrators and supporters of the Shah; the police tried to control events and a police officer fired his gun as Ohnesorg rolled up on the ground trying to protect himself.

Karl-Heinz Kurras was tried for reckless manslaughter and acquitted for lack of evidence. To the overwrought students this proved that the state was out to get them. Among the most overwrought ones was Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader's girl-friend and one of the real organizers of the Red Army Faction.

The most likely explanation, it always seemed, was that Herr Kurras lost his head in the violent chaos that was going on. That may still be true.

However, there is some new evidence that adds an interesting twist to the story. It seems that Karl-Heinz Kurras was a Stasi agent, tasked with spying on the West German police. There is no evidence that he was ordered to kill Benno Ohnesorg or that he was ordered to kill anyone. But the outcome of his action was many years of fear and instability in West Germany and widespread sympathy for the enemy of the West, in this case East Germany. We are sill not rid of that incubus.

Would it have been any different if this information had been available at the time, asks Deutsche Welle. By definition, something like this cannot be known. More interestingly, will this piece of information change anything in our perception of what happened then?

More on the whole story and the unlikelihood of Kurras making a mistake at the time here.