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.

The Hill and Bill show is back

Well it might be back. Hard to tell what Bill Clinton's visit to Kim Jong-il was all about. According to the official Korean Central News Agency, former President Clinton took a verbal message of some kind from President Obama. According to the White House that is bunkum.

Associated Press, on the other hand, sees Machiavellian manoeuvres on the part of the Hill and Bill partnership. It is worth noting that no matter what the personal relationship between those two might be the political partnership remains unbreakable. I was going to say that the only marriage of that kind I can think of in recent history is that of Duff and Lady Diana Cooper but that is not an accurate parallel as Lady Diana never showed any open political ambition but was content to manipulate events or try to do so behind the scenes like Evelyn Waugh's Mrs Julia Stitch. (Keep up there at the back.)

Then we get the next piece of news. It appears that Bill Clinton travelled to North Korea not just to dine with the Dear Leader (not Obama, the other one) but to secure the release of the two American journalists who have been sentenced for espionage in true Communist style.

According to this the trip was arranged by the Administration with former Vice-President and Chief Global Warmist Al Gore the designated legate. The North Koreans, showing an acumen one hardly expected, refused to host Mr Gore. So, off went Mr Clinton and, seemingly, came back with the goods.

What are we to make of it? Is this another attempt on the part of the Obama Administration to shore up that plummeting popularity without which the man is nothing or, rather, he is seen to be a power-mad socialist who is desperate to take control of many parts of American life as Day by Day has so graphically expressed?

Or are we witnessing the first stirrings of the HillandBillbeast? After all, Madam Secretary of State's performance so far has been far from stellar and this may well push her into the limelight.

Another question that needs to be asked rather urgently is what has Kim Jong-il been given in return for the two journalists?

Interesting things one finds in West London

Like this fungus on a tree in Upper Addison Gardens, near Holland Park.

The things that go on

In the blogosphere, that is. Ann Althouse is one of the most interesting, wacky and, frankly, infuriating bloggers (well, she does not infuriate me but sometimes I think I am in a minority) on the other side of the Pond. But she obviously attracts a rather superior kind of commenters. Well, not all, as one realizes trawling through some of the threads.

One of them is Laurence Mead and to the idiotic snickering of the left-wing commentariat the two have decided to tie the knot. Indeed, they have now done the deed. Well, well. Congratulations, of course. I suspect they will be a good deal happier than many other couples. They know the worst about each other already.

People should learn history

First of all, apologies for the silence. There were reasons to do with the BBC Russian Service, friends and family, and, finally, a rather unpleasant though not serious accident that has left me a little exhausted and looking the worse for wear.

Back to the main theme: what would it take for people in the media to realize that the twentieth century, which was probably the most horrific century of this millennium, had many other things in it apart from the growth and existence of Nazism? That’s the first question.

The second question is how long will it be before at least some of the commentators on history and politics in the media grasp that Nazism was National Socialism and fascism in general was a left-wing movement, parallel to the other heinous system that was based on International Socialism?

Thanks to Instapundit we get a story from Berlin in The Age, an Australian publication. It deals with a rather peculiar development in Berlin where car-burning seems to be done in a more organized fashion than it is in France. (Can one say Germanic and get away with it?

During the past six months, more than 170 cars have been destroyed by fire in Berlin and police confirm conservatively that 93 were politically motivated attacks.

A mysterious, single page website, brennende-autos.de (Burning Cars of Berlin), shows the number of cars set alight and where the crimes occurred, revealing clusters in ‘‘richer’’ areas, or in suburbs where gentrification and redevelopment are changing the demographic of local neighbourhoods.

The story itself is not particularly new and has been written up by various blogs for some months. Boing-boing calls it anti-gentrification (which is, let’s face it, the real politics of envy); the New York Times blog reported it in March, basing the story on Bloomberg; Monsters and Critics wrote about it in June.

Paolo Totaro’s article in The Age goes further: there has been a rise in left-wing extremism and violent activity directed at the police “and the property of businesses perceived to be involved in military or ‘‘imperialist’’ activities”. In other words, according to this, the arsonists and intermittent rioters have moved or, maybe, moving beyond a simple dislike of gentrification, a hatred of people progressing in life without referring to their intellectual socialist betters.
This is not, as it happens, activity entirely unknown in Germany, particularly in Berlin, though the author of the article seems unaware of certain historical events in the past.

In a city haunted more by its extreme right-wing past, Berlin is in the throes of a renaissance of extremist, left-wing political activism. And torching cars, particularly expensive ones, has become the crime de rigueur.

I would have said that Berlin is more haunted by the more recent events of the 1960s and 1970s that turned into the extremely violent and impeccably left-wing campaign associated with the names Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof as well as their various cohorts. That movement, too, started with apparently small events and “understandable” unhappiness with certain changes in society.

One to watch, I think, but with a better understanding of history shown so far.

Sixty-five years ago

Warsaw, August 1, 1944

Start of the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising

Yet more graves, yet more bodies

Gazeta Wyborcza reports that

Remnants of murdered Poles have been discovered in an Orthodox cathedral in Hlybokaye in Belarus. The local prosecutor's office has refused to launch an investigation and blames the Nazis. But historians say it's an NKVD crime.

As one historian pointed out if it had been a Nazi crime an immediate investigation would have been ordered.

The likelihood is that theser are the remains (hardly bodies after all these years) of Polish officials, possibly some officers, and professionals who were arrested in eastern Poland after the Red Army's invasion.

The most mysterious chapter of that massacre was the death of at least 7,315 (according to other sources, over 8,600) Poles who were arrested by the NKVD in Poland's then-eastern territories. Some of them are certainly buried in Bykovnia near Kyiv (where remnants of Polish officers were recently discovered) and in Kurapaty near Minsk. The places were thousands more Poles are buried remain unknown.

The Poles were executed by special NKVD units sent directly from Moscow. Five such units operated in what is now Belarus. One of them, led by Lt Nikolai Kozhevnikov, operated in Vileyka near Hlybokaye.

There is, however, a problem. It is not that President Lukashenka denies that these arrests and executions had been carried out; it is simply that he does not see that there was anything wrong with that. The Great Leader, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was right.

Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenka is known to be an admirer of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the creator of NKVD, who was born in what is now Belarus, and of Joseph Stalin. Belarus is preparing today for grand celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland, which is to be a great display of the country's unity. In Brest, where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army held a joint parade in September 1939, a monument commemorating the 'bright day of 17 September' is to be unveiled.

Sounds like a great idea. They can invite all those Western academics. journalists and politicians who still refuse to acknowledge what really happened in Eastern Europe during the war. I can provide them with a list.