George Blake, a British spy for the Soviet Union whose information apparently led to the deaths of many operatives for British and American espionage agencies, is dead at 98. Blake, who was employed by the British as a spy, was turned by the Soviets after being captured during the Korean War. But, according to his…
Tag: communism
The Cold War: A Tale of Two Joes
I’ve been reading Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s vastly ambitious and very largely successful The Cold War A World History.1 One of the great advantages of reading a European’s take is that he has a much more nuanced understanding of what was happening in Europe during the Cold War than an American historian would. He’s…
Communism still sucks, Chait explains
Well, it does, and it always did. Not only Stalin but Lenin and Trotsky were hungry for absolute power from the get-go. Trotsky bragged about the murder of the Romanov family, when the Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and five children and a handful of servants were shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by a…
Freeman Dyson and the continuing myth of the international freemasonry of science
Freeman Dyson has an interesting—alas, far too interesting—review of Frank Close’s new book, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy, which I guess should be titled “Physicist and Spy,” although Dyson pretends he isn’t sure if Pontecorvo, a brilliant experimental physicist who worked with the legendary Enrico Fermi, actually was a spy,…
Don’t Know Much About Communist Spies
Several months ago, in a posting at the American Conservative, bearing the snappy title “Our American Pravda,” Ron Unz bemoaned the many failings of the American media, claiming that, among other things, the media had conspired to conceal the fact that communist penetration of the federal government was rife during the Roosevelt Administration, “Over the…