EU Referendum

Showing posts with label obituaries. Show all posts

Lantos+01[i-Lantos+01]Who can fail to be moved by these lines?

At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will remember them

I appreciate our readers' puzzlement. Why is she quoting Laurence Binyon's words? This is not Remembrance Day.

No, indeed, but those are the words that come to mind whenever I hear of the death of some very fine person, especially of that generation that fought the twin evils of the twentieth century.

No it is not Roy Scheider of whom I speak but of Congressman Tom Lantos, whose death has just been announced.

Tom Lantos was born in Hungary 80 years ago and, as a Jew, was a predestined victim when the Hungarian Holocaust was unleashed in March 1944. He escaped from Nazi labour camps twice and, it seems, joined the anti-Nazi underground. Information like that always bothers me a little because so little is known about that underground. Still, Mr Lantos says that he was part of it and part of an anti-Communist student organization.

Lantos was one of those protected by the great hero of the Second World War, Raoul Wallenberg and went to the United States on an academic scholarship in 1947. He remained in the country, becoming Representative from northern California in 1981.

Unlike some other escapees from Nazis, Lantos did not become a Communist or a pacifist. He had understood that evil had to be fought. He showed gratitude to his saviour, Wallenberg, to whom the United States granted honorary posthumous citizenship as a result of legislation introduced by Rep. Lantos.

He showed gratitude to the country that had welcomed him after the war. When announcing his forthcoming resignation from Congress at the beginning of this year he said:

It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress.

He remained committed to the real notion of human rights and was one of the co-sponsors of the legislation that finally resulted in a memorial to the victims of Communism in Washington DC. It was unveiled by President Bush on June 12, last year, anniversary of President Reagan's famous speech in which he called on President Gorbachev to "tear down this wall".

A great man and one we shall miss. In particular, the Democrats will miss him - there are not many of his kind left on that side of the political spectrum.

Viktor+Grayevsky[i-Viktor+Grayevsky]Some years in history have been so significant that their very mention leads to people snapping to mental attention. Not all of the people and not all of the time but enough. In the twentieth century we have had a number of these years: 1914, of course, when it all started; 1917, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik coup, the outcome of which has not yet been decided fully; 1945, the end of Nazism and Fascism; in Russia there is also 1937, the year that symbolizes the Great Terror; 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s speech, of the Hungarian Revolution and of the Suez debacle; 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

In my posting on Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU I wrote:

It is said that the speech produced an unprecedented effect. People fainted in the hall.

Supposedly secret, the speech was passed on to some Soviet and East European organizations. It was also smuggled out by one or two of the foreign Communist leaders who had been present. (One, the leader of the Polish party had a heart attack and died.)

The Poles passed the speech on to the Israelis, who passed it on to other western countries. Very swiftly, the so-called secret speech was known all over the world, though in the Soviet Union its existence was denied till the late eighties when it was finally published.

The news a few days ago of the death of Viktor Grayevsky allowed some to bring some clarity to the events. It was not widely noted, not even in Britain, despite Michael Ledeen’s flattering comment in his column on Pajamas Media.

In fact, so far as I can make it out, only the Daily Telegraph published an obituary.

There are one or two problems with both pieces. One is that they describe Mr Grayevsky as a double agent, who worked for the Soviet Union and Israel. The truth is that there is no such thing as a double agent. There are, of course, people who will work for anyone for money and have no loyalty to anybody. They do not really count.

Then there are people who pretend to be working for one side while really they are working for the other and that pretence is part of their work. Thus, Kim Philby was not a double agent. He was a Soviet agent who used his position in various branches of the British security services to further his work.

In the same way, Mr Grayevsky was not a double agent, for all that the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Medal (which he prudently did not collect in Moscow). He was an Israeli agent who supplied the Soviets with dubious information.

For many years after coming to Israel Grayevsky also worked as a double agent, posing as a Soviet spy but in fact serving the Israelis by feeding disinformation to Soviet intelligence officers. His Soviet handlers in Israel were KGB officers working under diplomatic cover or posing as clergy from the so-called Russian Orthodox Red Church in Israel.

Given that all the priests in the “Red” Church were KGB agents, inside and outside the country, I do not quite see why anybody had to “pose”.

However, Mr Grayevsky’s greatest achievement came earlier. He it was, who first managed to get a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the West. Later there were others who managed to pass it on to certain East Europeans.

Grayevsky became a convinced Communist in Poland after the war, not least because of the Nazi extermination of the Jews (though he did have to change his name from Spielman because even in the People’s Republic he was not going to get far with an obviously Jewish surname). However, in 1955 he visited his sick father in Israel and what he saw there made him a Zionist.
It is possibly the tension between those two ideologies as well as journalistic instincts that made him play that crucial role in twentieth century, as the Telegraph obituary describes it:

Grayevsky had been able to obtain a copy with the help of his lover, Lucia Baranowski, wife of Poland's deputy prime minister.

He had come to see Lucia at the headquarters of the Communist Party, where she worked as secretary to Edward Ochab, the party leader.

Grayevsky recalled: "I noticed a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: 'The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev' written on it." The booklet was one of the few top-secret copies sent from Moscow to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries. Lucia allowed Grayevsky to remove the booklet for a couple of hours, and he took it to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, where it was photocopied.

The document provided a unique insight into the workings of the Soviet leadership. It was also the first official Soviet admission of the horrors perpetrated under Stalin. At the time Grayevsky was not employed as a spy, and he was not paid for his action, which arose from his Zionist convictions.

As there was no mention of the fact that Stalin’s second purge just before his death was largely anti-Semitic, Zionist convictions do not seem to me to be a good enough reason for Grayevsky’s actions. An understanding of the document’s importance need not have relied on any political conviction though, obviously, he had slipped far enough away from Communism not to react the way most East European leaders did and that is suppress all knowledge of the speech.

Michael Ledeen describes some of the outcome in the West. Neither he nor the Telegraph mention the effects on Eastern Europe for some reason.

The speech made headlines around the world, and Khrushchev’s revelations were vigorously exploited by the United States, shocking the Communist faithful. But even more importantly, the speech provided a clear window into the world of Soviet Communism for American analysts both in and outside the government. Until then, it was possible for intelligence analysts and foreign service officers to believe that the Soviet system wasn’t all that horrible. The speech put paid to that delusion.

In keeping with the general rule that the most important information about the Soviet Union invariably came from “walk-ins,” and not from “agents” recruited by CIA, Grayevsky performed his world-changing act solely out of personal conviction. He had recently visited Israel to be with his dying father, and he had become a Zionist, secretly determined to emigrate to Israel as soon as he could manage it. But he was not working for the Israeli Government, or indeed any Western country.

Makes one wonder about those intelligence analysts and foreign service officers. After all, it is not as if there had been no information about the Soviet Union before. Had they not read Alexander Orlov, Walter Krivitsky or Viktor Kravchenko? Clearly not.

What mattered to the faithful, on the other hand, was that very swiftly other sources from Eastern Europe confirmed the fact that this was, indeed, the speech the CPSU’s First Secretary made at the Congress. Once made, it could never be unmade. Once Viktor Grayevsky got the speech out into the open it could never be made secret again, except in its own homeland, where it took another 30 years for the “secret” speech to become open.

COMMENT THREAD

Ford+family[i-Ford+family]As my colleague abandons his Christmas cheer and wallows in toy stories – past and, above all, present – I shall turn attention very quickly to the man, whose death was announced yesterday, Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States.

Until now there were two things one always remembered about Ford; one is that he was the only President who had not been elected either to the presidency or the vice-presidency and the other is LBJ's comment about him. There are two versions of the latter, both indicating LBJ's low opinion of Ford's intelligence. Either he said that Ford was so dumb he could not walk and chew gum at the same time or, and this is much more likely, that he could not fart and chew gum at the same time.

Now we have a third piece of information: as of last month he was the longest living American President.

All of which is a little unfair on a decent, upright, reasonably able man who did the best he could in difficult circumstances. Becoming Vice-President after Spiro Agnew's resignation in October 1973, he took over as President when Nixon decided not to face probable impeachment and resigned in August 1974.

Taking over after Watergate, Ford did a creditable job of moving the country back more or less onto a steady course, though the hysteria generated by Nixon has survived and poisoned American politics to this day.

And that is about all one can say in Ford’s favour. While I can grasp that Gerald Ford is still remembered with a good deal of personal respect, I cannot understand the mawkishness of the blog entry on Hot Air and the comments on it. A good man does not a good president make.

His appointment of the ultra left Nelson Rockefeller as Vice-President was a disaster. The economy under him continued to lurch between inflation and recession with the government trying to counter the problems caused by OPEC-raised oil prices by ever more taxes and controls.

When it came to foreign policy, Ford was definitely of the "let us be nice to the Soviets and maybe they will be nice to us" persuasion (though one could never doubt his patriotism). Of course, neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had the slightest intention of tickling the West's tummy if it rolled over. A swift kick where it hurts most was the usual response.

SALT talks resulted in the Soviets constructing SS20s in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the Helsinki Accords, intended to be another surrender to the Communist world view, unexpectedly proved to be a useful weapon against oppression in that world and, consequently, aided its destabilization.

Helsinki Watch strengthened the dissident movement in the oppressed countries by making the plight of individuals who had courageously stood up for basic rights and liberties public in the West and giving politicians like Reagan and Thatcher weapons in their fight. Its successor, Human Rights Watch, is a considerably less useful organization.

Above all, however, Ford’s presidency is linked to the most appalling event in the West’s fight against Communism: the betrayal of South Vietnam and Cambodia. In 1974 the American troops began evacuating from South-East Asia. The Thieu regime was given strong promises of military aid if it continued the fight. The aid did not materialize.

SaigonFall[i-SaigonFall]North Vietnam, having effectively lost the war previously, now overran South Vietnam and at the end of April, 1975 Saigon fell. The "realists" and the media, which had induced the "Vietnam war" hysteria, had triumphed. Vietnam and Cambodia entered years of totalitarian oppression and genocide, while in the rest of the world the West and its ideas of freedom and democracy seemed in retreat.

To be fair to Ford, his narrow defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976 turned out to be an even bigger disaster. Now there is a man about whom one might say many things but one will suffice: the worst and least successful president in the history of the United States.

Furthermore, unlike Carter, Ford retreated into private life and did not spend his time pretending to re-fight old battles, this time being victorious. In other words, he did not spend his time passing ignorant judgement about his successors' policies. Carter's obituaries are unlikely to be as respectful as Ford's.

COMMENT THREAD