It occurs to me that leftists have to be a lot more psychologically complicated that conservatives. They write glowing biographies of Fidel Castro, a man who, after all, imprisoned homosexuals and made them wear funny clothes. Surely that requires some skilled compartmentalizing.
This by Ruth Price from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Agnes Smedley was one of the most significant American women of the 20th century, a flamboyant journalist, feminist, and political activist who made historic contributions to letters and politics on three continents. . . .If Smedley is remembered at all, she is recalled by a circle of conservative scholars and journalists who passionately declaim that during her years in China in the 1930s, she was active in the Moscow-based Comintern, which provided leadership for the world revolution that she and many of her colleagues on the left believed would occur in their lifetime. Her conservative critics maintain that she also worked for Soviet military intelligence. With equal fervor, some leftists argue that Smedley, like other figures accused of Soviet espionage over the past 50 years, was a tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear.
Guess what? The conservatives were right.
The opening of the Comintern files in Moscow in the early 1990s, along with my own work with Project Mask Decriptions, a newly released set of declassified Comintern messages, has confirmed what I began unearthing in Year Seven of my research using less politically charged German, American, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese sources. Over 25 years and on three continents, Smedley not only worked for the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence, but circa World War I she also was in the employ of the German imperial government while aiding the Indian independence movement.
Now here is something new. An American communist who cut her teeth working for the Kaiser! But that shouldn't blacken the reputation of this "extraordinary" woman.
Unlike most of the other Americans whose lives warrant further scrutiny in light of the documentary evidence now available, Smedley worked for the Soviet Union, but her activities were not directed against the United States. She was a spy, but not a traitor, although Smedley herself would not have cared for such distinctions. The work she was doing, she believed, ultimately transcended the boundaries of nationalism and ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles [my emphasis].
I suppose people who spied for their country's enemies probably do think they are above such vulgar distinctions as "spy" and "traitor." But what about that spy for the Imperial German Government bit? Was that transcending "the boundaries of nationalism and ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles"?
You have to hand it to Ms. Price. She has a complicated world view.
Postscript: I was being somewhat unfair to Ms. Price. However strange her attempts to salvage Ms. Smedley's reputation, she was scrupulously honest about the record. That is something to admire in any political writing.
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