It’s downright fitting that it’s Commentary Magazine (or what’s left of it), that Cold War CIA warhorse, that’s started the latest round of retroactive redbaiting, with the claim that I. F. Stone was a Soviet agent. Despite the end of the Cold War being almost twenty years behind us, redbaiting s still alive and well in America, with claims like this still having the potential to ruin reputations.
Few people my age or younger will have more than a vague idea who I. F. Stone was, but many of the people he annoyed in his lifetime are still around and more than willing to take their revenge posthumously. As you can see from the Wikipedia article linked above, already the allegations of espionage take up most of the space. Just another little rewrite of history in which an independent leftwing critic of America is turned into a two dimensional Soviet stooge. It may not look important in the great scheme of things, but its all part of the continuing marginalisation of critics of American foreign policy. Smear the man and you smear his reporting; obviously you can’t trust what a commie spy wrote about America’s motives for fighting the Korean War. Stone’s reputation needs to be defended, and I’m glad to see Brad Delong and other liberals do so, even if their defence can be as wrong as the original redbaiting, as it operates on the same flawed assumptions that anybody who was supportive of the USSR was ignorant, wrong or a traitor, but that there are special circumstances that can excuse this support.
Now I called Commentary a CIA warhorse because while it may be a liberal or even leftist magazine, many of its more influential writers and editors (e.g. Irving Kristol and Sidney Hook) have been deeply involved in the CIA’s Cold War Kulturkamp, as documented in Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper and elsewhere. As part of the socalled “anticommunist left” Commentary was as much an agent of the CIA as Stone is accused of being of the KGB.
The real crime I. F. Stone committed therefore was not that he may or may not have supported a brutal and ruthless regime that oppressed millions of its citizens and brutally subjugated its neighbours, but that he may have supported the wrong one. It doesn’t matter whether or not Stone was a supporter of the USSR, as his influence on that country was nihil: what mattered was that he was critical of his own country and its rulers.
Socalled respectable journalists meanwhile can always be found cheerleading the latest US invasion of a third world country, the latest dictator installed by the CIA to “fight communism” (or “terrorism”) or the latest interference in a supposedly sovereign country’s elections for the sake of “democracy”, happily excusing murder, rape, torture or worse, but since they’re on the right side they’re rarely held to account. A journalist like Judith Miller could lie and lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for years before she finally “retired”.
For anybody who doesn’t operate on the principle of “my country, right or wrong”, it’s obvious that the behaviour of Miller and generations of journalists like her, enabling and supporting American imperialism is much worse than what somebody like Stone could ever do. We shouldn’t excuse Stone for his allegiance as pillorate his critics for supporting a country that has been and still is a far greater menace.