By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, December 1, 1999

The New York Times has a long piece on the recent books written based on the declassified Venona cables as well as new documents from the archives of the Soviet Union.

The disturbing part of the results of the new scholarship are those on the more extreme edge. On the one hand are the nuts who want to say Sen. McCarthy was a standup guy. McCarthy was a dangerous ideologue who severely damaged anti-Communism and gave the pro-Communist Left sympathy it otherwise would never have earned.

On the other side are people such as The Nation publisher Victor Navasky, a classic example of the Left's inability to come to grips with its own intellectual failures. Navasky once waged war on Allen Weinstein's excellent book, Perjury, for daring to skewer the Left's myths and misinformation about Alger Hiss. Now that even Leftist scholars are forced to admit that Hiss was a Soviet spy who lied under oath, Navasky lamely claims that what Hiss did wasn't espionage at all. Ellen Schrecker takes that one step further and argues that spying for the Soviet Union wasn't really that bad of a thing to do after all.

The author of the article, Jacob Weisberg, ends up intimating the whole debate is pointless since it is history now -- the Soviet Union collapsed and everyone should move on. This seems to me to make about as much sense as someone wondering why people working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center just doesn't put the Holocaust in the past and get on with their lives. Resolving the historical questions about the Soviet Union and how the American Right and Left responded to the Soviet Union (both get low marks in my book) is not some trivial matter.

Discuss (0 Replies) | Printer Friendly