In his most recent response to me, Brad DeLong has joined the crackpot right in circulating faked or distorted documents supposedly from Soviet archives to further the academic Cold War that never ends. These claims continue the gambit of Pavel Sudoplatov's memoir, Special Tasks, peddled by Robert Conquest, which claimed that J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, George Gamow, and Neils Bohr were spies for the Soviet Union. I suppose Brad's cute use of "Commie" is an intentional insertion to signify that he is a man of the hard right, ruthless in his anticommunism. Isn't this an odd forum for that?
Even supposing that one or more of these unreferenced documents might contain a germ of truth, however distorted, Brad and his right-wing mentors failed to address an essential point of the original evidence. Some of it (germ-laden turkey feathers dispersed by aircraft) was of indisputably North American origin. Further, a quarter century after those allegations, this very method of dispersal was revealed to have been part of the CIA's biological warfare plan. And, to repeat an essential point that Brad continues to dodge, U.S. scholars who investigated the evidence and published their findings were prosecuted for having done so.
Brad's unwillingness to answer any other point -- that the U.S. conspired to prevent victorious leftist resistance movements from taking power after World War II, in Korea as elsewhere, when they enjoyed broad popular support and the democratic will of the masses, had any vote been allowed; that the U.S. installed a ruthless tyranny in South Korea; that the U.S. committed and condoned and covered up massacres of innocent Koreans in support of that tyranny; and that the U.S. even today forbids its citizens to visit North Korea to see for themselves how well or poorly its government serves -- further underscores his lack of interest in truth.
The United States divided both Germany and Korea, and turned the demarcation lines into Cold War frontiers. Given the reality of Stalin's postwar policies, it is unlikely that either country would have become a governmental replica of the USSR, had they been allowed to unify on terms of neutrality as the Soviet Union proposed. They might not have been even nominally socialist, given the example of Austria.
The might-have-beens of the past half century, had resistance governments held power in France, Italy, Greece, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, no matter how venal or corrupt or inept they might have been (and I do not assume any of those faults), surely could not have been responsible for a fraction of the bloodshed and suffering that the United States empire has caused, and whose legacy continues to harm the people of Korea, North and South, to this very day.
Ken Lawrence