Against Suicidalism from Down Under
<p>Keith Windschuttle gets it.  In <a href='http://www.sydneyline.com/Adversary%20Culture.htm'>The Adversary<br />
Culture</a> he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that<br />
Mark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about<br />
recently.</p>
<p>Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and<br />
cultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the<br />
disease. I wonder if he&#8217;s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or Haynes<br />
&amp; Klehr&#8217;s <cite>Denial</cite> and gets how thoroughly these<br />
people were piping to a tune that Stalin&#8217;s espionage apparat wrote?</p>
<p>For anyone still tempted to believe blaming the Soviets for the<br />
flakiness of academia is just conspiratorial raving, get a load of <a href='http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3214'>this</a><br />
and <a href='http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Nov/09-262154.html'>this</a>:<br />
it seems that during the Korean War the Soviets and North Koreans<br />
thought anti-U.S. dezinformatsiya so important that they gassed their<br />
own people in order to fabricate evidence for a legend that<br />
U.S. troops had used chemical weapons in Korea.  They did this with<br />
the clear intention of damaging U.S. prestige, of breaking our will to<br />
oppose Soviet expansionism by making us doubt and loathe ourselves.<br />
We have statements from the people who planned and executed the<br />
operation.</p>
<p>They got the result they were after.  Left-wing historians like<br />
Gabriel Kolko dutifully repeated legends of U.S. chemical warfare,<br />
terrorism and atrocities in Korea for forty years afterwards. In fact,<br />
Kolko continued to repeat the chemical-warfare legend even after the<br />
Soviets themselves repudiated it in a published 1953 letter to Mao<br />
Tse-Tung!</p>
<p>Whether Kolko himself (or any other individual leftie) was taking<br />
orders from Moscow or was an &#8216;honest&#8217; dupe fed the legend by Soviet<br />
propaganda organs is not really very significant.  What matters is<br />
that Kolko, and all the the rest of the Marxist intelligentsia who<br />
became cogs in Stalin&#8217;s memetic war machine, willingly did their part<br />
to injure &#8216;the main enemy&#8217;.  They retailed the lies of a tyrant who<br />
murdered more people than Hitler, and they have not yet been called to<br />
account for it.</p>
<p>Say what you will about conservative historians and conservatives<br />
in general (I can find plenty of nasty things to say of them, and<br />
frequently have); at least they never sunk quite so low as to repeat<br />
totalitarian propaganda after the totalitarians themselves had<br />
disowned it.</p>
