May 4, 2013
MEANWHILE, SUCH HATERS OF THE wEST ALWAYS HAVE TO AVOID THE COROLLARY QUESTION...:
Secrets & lies through the eyes of spy meister John le Carre (JOHN LE CARRE, 5/04/13, The Australian)
...which is : how much suffering can we tolerate in oppressed countries before we have betrayed our values? At the core of Mr. Le Carre's ouvre lies the despicable notion that it was none of the Anglosphere's concern what happened to the Ukraine, Poland, the Koreas, the Kurds, the Shi'a, etc. And that to resist the evil of Communism is to become as evil as the Communists. By itself this rather juvenile view makes his work morally unserious. Compounding it is that his characters tend to reveal that the real source of his revulsion is that America usurped the leading role in the fight against evil from Britain. Jealousy isn't actually a moral argument, just an emotion.AND the deep background of the novel? The sights, smells and voices that, 15 years after the end of the war, continued to infest every corner of divided Germany? The Berlin in which Leamas had his being was a paradigm of human folly and historical paradox. In the early 60s I had observed it mostly from the confines of the British Embassy in Bonn, and only occasionally in the raw. But I watched the Wall's progress from barbed wire to breeze block; I watched the ramparts of the cold war going up on the still-warm ashes of the hot one. And I had absolutely no sense of transition from the one war to the other, because in the secret world there barely was one. To the hard-liners of east and west the second world war was a distraction. Now it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had been running under different flags and disguises ever since. [...]THE merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then - or its offence, depending where you stood - was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves 50 years later: how far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them along the way?
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2013 9:07 AM
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