I’ll start by saying that I love Wikipedia. It’s a great resource for general information. For the most part it is objective, but there are definitely some biased articles. President Obama’s page glosses over his mentor Jeremiah Wright and doesn’t even mention William Ayers, despite the fact they were both newsworthy events during the last campaign. Contrast that to President Bush’s National Guard Service coverage on his Wikipedia page. These are nit-picking examples to be sure, but I’ve been monitoring I.F. Stone’s page since it was confirmed he was a traitorous spy for comparison.
It’s been funny watching the leftists defend this scumbag. The defense for years from the left has been he wasn’t a communist. The new defense is that he was trying to defeat the fascist Nazis. Common sense and logic would ask how an American journalist writing for the New York Post would help the Soviets fight the Nazis, but I digress. Another defense can be witnessed on Wikipedia. The editors simply dismiss this whole thing as “alleged espionage” because the source is a “conservative magazine.” I guess an acceptable source would be The Nation? It’s humorous that the Wikipedia article never says that The Nation is a liberal publication. In fact, The Nation is basically a communist publication. How many “alleged traitors” have worked for Commentary Magazine?
Mark Hemingway wrote an article last week about the left’s inability to deal with the revelations that their hero was a traitor.
Profs. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes — scholars who’ve previously done extensive work on Soviet espionage — examine the Stone case in their new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. The book is also co-authored with Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB agent turned journalist. Vassilev is in possession of detailed records from now-closed Soviet archives that convincingly demonstrate that from 1936 to 1939 Stone was on the Soviet payroll. (The relevant excerpt from the book has been published by Commentary.) Stone was a spy, case closed.
Except it’s not. Rather than deal with the facts at hand, the American Left once again appears to be stricken with willful blindness. The fact that a beloved godfather of the left-wing press was in reality a traitor, in league with an enemy that represented an existential threat to America, simply does not jibe with the purported purity of the Left’s political motives. Therefore, Stone must not have been a traitor.
Hemingway goes on to talk about The Nation’s Eric Alterman and his problem with the definition of the word “spy.” The left loves to revel in the history of the civil rights movement and the “southern strategy.” These historical moments mean that they are intellectually and morally superior. It’s for this reason the left is unable to deal with the extremism of the New Left and the ties to the evils of communism.
The Left can’t claim to uphold the values of I. F. Stone as they envision him — a crusading defender-of-democracy — without reckoning with the Communist spy he was in reality. Political sympathies shouldn’t prevent anyone from seeing the truth about a man even 20 years after his death and 70 years after his misdeeds. If you can’t admit the truth when it’s inconsequential, it hardly seems surprising you would justify doing something terrible when it serves your interests.
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