Saturday, June 26, 2021

cold war: the war without a real history

 

During the Cold War, anti-communist historians were unanimous on one topic: the Communists were liars. Their statistics were lies, their trials were lies, the bones of millions in the Gulag testified to their lies

In the period after the Cold War, the anti-communist historians made an exception to the rule. Ex KGB men and archives recording the opinion and testimonies of NKVD and KGB men were solid truths. Not a single exaggeration, not a story made up for social promotion, not a taint from lives otherwise dedicated to lying. Here, here was the truth. Here was the proof that lefties and softies in the West were in contact with, or on the payroll of, or otherwise spying for the Soviets.

This went along with the blackmail by archive that helped Eastern European nationalists and conservatives sweep away the tainted socialists and their ilk.

At the same time that the NKVD files were being studied, pilfered, and marketed to the highest bidder, the files in the West were being…. Well, redacted and released if the FOIA requester had guessed the right classification. Basically, we know very little about such matters as the strategy of tension in Europe – which happened in Italy, Belgium and to an extent in Germany – from the point of view of the Western intelligence agencies because they don’t want any snoopers looking at who hired who to do what, and at what price.

This gives us a dissymmetric history of twentieth century Europe – as well as all the other continents.

Alas, the motivated gullibility of historians and the enormous gaps in the political history of, for instance, all the countries of Europe has persisted even now, thirty years after the end of the Cold War.  

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...