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 obituary in the New York Times, it wasn’t the communists who turned him.
“The relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses” killing “women and children and old people” horrified him [Blake], he said. “It made me feel ashamed” he added. “I felt I was committed to the wrong side.”
Well, I guess that’s “believable”, but I wonder if Blake actually witnessed such events, since he spent three years in North Korean prisons. Furthermore, it reminded me of Howard Zinn’s meticulous study of the “truth” behind World War II bombing raids that he participated in as a bombardier. Zinn’s arguments regarding the inhumanity of such raids are spelled out in his pamphlet, Hiroshima; Breaking the Silence, though the litany of atrocities that he mentions—“Auschwitz or My Lai or Chechnya, or Waco, Texas or the firebombing of the MOVE people in Philadelphia”—somehow fails to mention any sponsored by communist governments. Well, I guess you can’t expect a historian to know everything.
Afterwords
It is very often the case with Howard that the problem with Howard is not what he says so much as what he doesn’t say: he points out the frequent hypocrisy and inhumanity of American policies while conscientiously ignoring the moral monstrosities of the communists. He was, I believe, a very deliberate hypocrite in denying the fact that he was a communist, despite turning a very blind eye to their crimes. I took him to task in a long, meandering post, with the long, meandering title Howard Zinn, apologist with nothing to apologize for, meets Ronald Radosh, former commie with no place to go.
As for Blake, well, he was sorry about the people whom he got killed, but, well, you know what they say about omelets: you can’t make them without killing people.