EVER NOTICE THERE ARE NO ANTI-ANTI-NAZIS?

Spying for Stalin was bad, right? (John Weissenberger and George Koch, July 04, 2003, National Post)

The communists' accusers, meanwhile, are portrayed as narrow-minded persecutors, boors and probably bigots. This has become almost axiomatic in the popular imagination, standard fare in Hollywood flicks and spy thrillers. Novelist Joseph Kanon took this tack in The Prodigal Spy, about the son of an accused American communist spy who flees to Czechoslovakia. In Kanon's world, the anti-communists are the villains, lacking the humanity of their culturally sophisticated and emotionally sensitive quarry.

In real life, Meeropol has actively sought to discredit the Rosenbergs' judge, and in his book reserves his harshest words for his uncle, David Greenglass, who co-operated with the prosecution. Similarly, Tony Hiss' memoir paints a warm, personal picture of his father, while vilifying
Chambers. (Interestingly, not a drop from the left's deep well of sensitivity was reserved for Radosh and Weinstein. The reward for their courageous scholarship was to be treated as apostates.)

On a personal (though superficial) level, one can sympathize. What son wouldn't instinctively defend his parents, however strong the evidence? But did Meeropol learn anything from their misadventure? That, say, spying for Stalin was bad? Far from it: "My parents' experience taught me that it was dangerous to be at war with the most powerful forces of your society." So it wasn't wrong to spy, just inconvenient.

In Meeropol's mind, as in Kanon's, being an anti-communist appears worse than working for Stalin. Today Meeropol runs an institute dedicated to helping the wrongfully accused, eloquent testimony to what he thinks of the U.S. judicial system.

It's important that history doesn't view the era of America's communist spies through the apologists' lens of narcissism and self-pity. The spies may have been well-educated and intelligent, sensitive and esthetic, plus erudite dinner companions. Some of their accusers may have been louts or opportunists. But this wasn't all about the perpetrators' personalities. It was about what they did.

The central fact is that the "integrity" of the Rosenbergs, Hiss and the many other American communists who became traitors led them to betray a great, if flawed, democracy. Their "righteous ideals" materially aided history's worst mass-murderer, who racked up a body count of 20 million, according to the definitive Black Book of Communism. When you think about it, this also says a lot about what kind of people they were.

Apparently all of Mr. Kanon's fiction is communist apology. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 4, 2003 11:42 AM