Tea at Trianon: Stalin's Secret Agents

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 8, 2013

Stalin's Secret Agents

The subversion of Roosevelt's government.

What we learn from Evans and Romerstein is that the Soviet war and post-war gains at the West’s expense were hardly an accident. They had ample assistance from a Roosevelt administration that was thoroughly laced with Stalin’s agents. The agents were sufficiently numerous and highly placed that almost any theft of secrets they might have accomplished was small potatoes compared to their influence upon policy. A central message of the book – never explicitly stated – is that there was an international conspiracy to, in effect, overthrow Western civilization....Not only was the U.S. government penetrated at the highest level, but this organized Communist network also apparently controlled key positions in the U.S. opinion-molding business.

Nowhere was the subversive influence more important than at the pivotal Yalta Conference. It was there that Roosevelt made the major concessions that put the Red imprint on post-war Europe and opened the door for them in East Asia. One of the reasons we were so conciliatory to Stalin was supposedly that we needed the Soviet quid pro quo of their entry into the war against Japan 90 days after the defeat of Germany. But, according to Evans and Romerstein, Soviet agents of influence within the Roosevelt government played a key role in keeping intelligence estimates away from FDR that the Japanese were already so badly beaten that the Soviet assistance would not be needed. Perhaps no agent was more important than the notorious Alger Hiss. Here we pick up the Evans-Romerstein narrative early in Chapter 3 entitled “See Alger Hiss about this.” Bear in mind that FDR’s new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., was newly appointed and had very little experience in foreign affairs. (Read entire article.)