Owen Lattimore Proves The Birther’s Cause!


The Chinese Roots Of A Kenyan Anti-Colonial Worldview

Barack Obama Birthers continue to seethe and churn,  and now their obsessions have reached a moment which comes to every crackpot crusade:  their enemies’ sneering mockery has become further proof of the righteous cause.   Birthers now embrace random assertions linking them to McCarthyism, because McCarthy Was Right too!

Elitist contempt only makes them stronger, and getting called out on facts only spurs them to greater feats of makebelieve history.

Owen Lattimore has now been joined to the Birther defense in the dusty corners of America’s internet, if only indirectly.

The commentariat argument is that Birthers and McCarthy have both been called fact-challenged, but Joe was right and so are they.

One “BarryObam” takes to the pages of the Glen Burnie Forum, claiming Lattimore and others named by McCarthy were found out by subsequent historians, ergo, nanny nanny boo.

As your correspondent has reported, endlessly replicated assertion does not make fact, and the case against Lattimore remains a vague hash of McCarthy/McCarran charges sprinkled with claims unnamed historians or Soviet documents vindicate the cause.

Lattimore’s previous afterlife brush with presidential greatness came when he took some of the blame for turning a boyish Bill Clinton into the Soviet’s willing servent.

Bill Clinton’s “Road To Moscow” is one of the highlights of recent crackpot history, with the ’88 campaign’s dark muttering about Bill’s student travels taken to insane levels.  The glancing reference to Lattimore shows how the deed is done.

As a Georgetown junior, Clinton inherited his antiwar orientation from his part-time employer, Senator J. William Fulbright. Fulbright’s views on Vietnam had in turn been influenced by scholar Bernard Fall. Fall had an academic background at institutions linked to Chinese Communist apologist Owen Lattimore.

Well, sort of.  Starting in 1952 Fall was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.  Up in Baltimore,  Lattimore was on leave fighting McCarthy and McCarran’s charges.  And in 1953 Hopkins abolished Lattimore’s Walter Hines Page School of International Relations in an effort to get rid of him altogether.   But other than that he and Fall worked in lockstep for America’s downfall.

Now With New McCarthyism!

No Sense Of Reality: Reason‘s Why 

Those libertarian kids at Reason magazine are rightly concerned the with the endless reuse of McCarthyism, the term losing all bite and meaning as it slops around political commentary.

Not that they don’t dabble in it themselves, as a tool to attack opponents of a beloved climate change denier, or when pulling the grand switcheroo:   discovering the dread  McCarthyism Of The Left.

Even after September 11, left-wing McCarthyism persists on American campuses.

But the magazine is really more concerned with minimizing McCarthy, salvaging the kernels of truth they like to imagine he built his career around.

Because after all, the Reds had it coming.

Reason‘s Cathy Young just can’t stop rediscovering the left in all the wrong places, and she won’t let those stalinoid liberals paint themselves as victims:

There is a reason the Hollywood Left clings to what the Radoshes call the “fable of innocence destroyed by malice.” This fable props up its moral authority to this day. From the height of this authority, today’s celebrity radicals blast American policies while ignoring the evil of a Saddam Hussein.

Evil ignoring was more in this  Donald rumsfeld meeting saddam on 19 december – 20 december 1983. rumsfeld visited again on 24 march 1984; the same day the un released a report that iraq had used mustard gas and tabun nerve agent against iranian troops. the ny times reported from baghdad on 29 march 1984, that "american diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with iraq and the u.s., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name."  the image above is proposed for deletion. see images and media for deletion to help reach a consensus on what to do. fellow’s line of work,  and the authority of today’s celebrity radicals no doubt explains why everybody remembers when they first gave a sawbuck to Ed Asner’s Medical Aid To El Salvador.

Reason‘s writers spend inordinate amounts of time trying to salvage real facts they like to imagine the Red Scare exposed.

Sister Young again:

“… in the case of McCarthyism, the stubborn blindness of leftists and many liberals both to the brutality of the Soviet regime and to the extent of Soviet espionage during the Cold War undoubtedly helped create fertile ground for Coulter-style polemics.

First, stop channeling David Horowitz.  Second, in what parallel universe was Ann Coulter ever concerned with facts? And third, remember  NATO, federal worker loyalty boards and the Attorney General’s list?  Proud Truman achievements.

In Stan Evans’ McCarthy-Was-Right book Blacklisted by History,  highly charitable Reason-ette Michael Moynihan found the hidden pony about Owen Lattimore, and a role model.  Because after all, “A book can be radically wrong in its conclusions and devilishly selective in its presentation of evidence yet still be useful.

What Moynihan finds useful is imagining Evans provides “a much needed corrective to the widely held view, successfully advanced by  [Owen] Lattimore himself, that he was in fact a generic New Deal liberal and an anti-communist.”

Both in defending Evans [with an asterisk] and praising David Aaronovitch‘s Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in the Shaping of Modern History, Moynihan turns to the same would-be damning Lattimore quote on Soviet collective farms.

Moynihan’s version has Lattimore writing that they were:

a kind of ownership more valuable to [the Soviet peasantry] than the old private ownership under which they were unable to own or even hire machines.”

A reproduction of the poster "Hired hand, join the collective farm" issued during the collectivization period (RIA Novosti)

No doubt Lattimore wrote unfortunate things about the Soviet Union, but the quote above is only part of a paragraph in language you might not expect from a straight Soviet apologist.

“The identification between loyalty to the government and devotion to one’s own kind of property is a political law that is valid even in Soviet Russia. Divided loyalties weakened Russia most in the terrible and bloody struggle over collectivization, a thinly disguised civil war in which land was taken from the rich peasants and given to poor peasants, not individually but as members of collective farms. Since then, a new kind of loyalty has gradually solidified as more and more Soviet peasants in the Ukraine, Russia, Siberia, and Soviet Asia have come to feel that their individual shares in collective farms represent a kind of ownership more valuable to them than the old private ownership under which they were unable to own or even hire machines.”

I’m not certain what Lattimore meant by all this, but Kulak blood doesn’t go unacknowledged.

Aaronovitch brings out the true Lattimore obsessive in Moynihan when he points to the difficulty in squaring Lattimore as apologist with the steady stream of Lattimore denunciations and critiques in the Communist press.  Somehow Moynihan thinks this is refuted by Communist attacks elsewhere on left deviationists.

“It was, Aaronovitch writes, absurd that “someone as nonrevolutionary” as Lattimore, who “had been attacked” in the communist press, could be denounced as a Red agent. But attacks from communist writers or newspapers mean nothing (as the Spanish Civil War demonstrated, communists were more interested in attacking so-called left deviationists than members of the fascist ruling class)…”

I think he is implying that Lattimore was both a Stalinist and a POUM-ist.

Moynihan has become almost manic about force-feeding Lattimore into political consciousness, roping him with Alger Hiss to make a point about Scott Brown’s base:

“…Tea Party crowd, people who previously thought of Massachusetts as a state that would vote an Alger Hiss/Owen Lattimore ticket if given the chance.”

….sparking a reader commentery war over whether anyone recalled who Lattimore was.

Reason-ettes live in a magical place, where demagogues require facts to bolster their power building crusades.

This is a willfully naive view of the world, on a par with their touching faith in the market solving any question society ever struggled over, without all that sweaty politics.

Chicago once enjoyed the comic stylings of mayoral spouse Jay McMullen, Mr. Jayne Byrne, who did his best to be a hard drinking parody of a city hall cynic.  But he once stumbled onto the truth, when he observed that “the trouble with reformers is that they think everything is on the square.”

McCarthy Denial-ists: The Front Is Everywhere!

Half Ass-ed At Full Contact Full  Contact Poker Your Online Poker Community


Plucky McCarthy-Was-Rightists just can’t help themselves: no online forum is safe from marauding bands of make believe historians.

The latest eruption comes to us at “Full Contact Poker,” where “Balloon Guy” drills down on this Owen Lattimore fellow, and comes up with a gusher:

There was only one problem in all of this for Lattimore: Hoover had given Lattimore’s FBI file to McCarthy and McCarthy had Louis Budenz as a witness, a former Communist, who’d worked with Lattimore. McCarthy carried the day but was forever stuck with the sobriquet “McCarthyism

Anticipating the introduction of actual facts, Baloon Guy provides a handy checklist …”Venona” (Yale University Press); “The Secret World Of American Communism” (Yale University Press); “The Haunted Wood” (Random House); “The Venona Secrets” (Regnery); “The Secret History Of the KGB” (Basic Books); “Whittaker Chambers: A Biography” (Modern Library); and “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the life and legacy of America’s most hated Senator” (Free Press). If at first you haven’t read the above, then you are coming unarmed for a battle of wits.

Sadly, actual reading of the above would reveal that Lattimore is unmentioned in the Venona files, Soviet espionage reports decrypted by the National Security Agency, and that Budenz testified he had never met Lattimore.

Other than that it’s smooth sailing!

Now Your Source For Crackpot History!

YELP, traditionally your go-to source for the musings of your fellow unemployed about salad bars,  now wanders occasionally into political discussions.

What does the Common Man think of the issues of the day, and can they type?

YELP fans recently enjoyed the musings of McCarthy Denial-ist “Nick “Curmudgeon” B., who rose to the bait in an Arizona/immigration thread. Unspecified “Soviet archives” are cited  proving “how spot on Tailgunner Joe was, alcoholic megalomania notwithstanding.”

YELP’s special correspondent for fanciful history reports  “Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore, #1 and #2 in the State Department? Soviet spies.

He may be referring to the Venona files, which the FBI say finger White as a Soviet source.  But as endlessly repeated here and elsewhere, Lattimore is nowhere mentioned in the Venona files.

And neither of them  was Number Anything at State.

Glenn Beck’s McCarthy-Was-Rightists: Dead Horses Can’t Be Broken

Glenn Beck, America’s proven reserve of comic delight, drills once more into the buried treasure which is McCarthyism.

Thursday Beck launched a spirited defense of the late Senator’s good works, in the midst of an insane roundup of the history of the Roosevelt administration.

Attention to detail suffered in Glenn’s thrilling tale, as he recalled [at 3:30] Hitler’s 1939 pact with the Nazis.

Stalin For Time

Perhaps he meant the better known Hitler-Stalin pact of that year?

Beck also gets Alger Hiss’s conviction date off by a year, and somehow wanders into American intervention in Vietnam without mentioning the name, substituting trite facts about the dead-on-arrival South East Asia Treaty Organization. http://kcm.kr/dic_image/985689aa1930506b816f96034cd7ff22.jpg

Suddenly the long dead Solon and his vivid imagination were all the rage. Salon posted the Beck video, Steve Benen commented,  Balloon Juice linked to that, and it’s commentariat sprang into action, rushing once again to assure the nation that something somewhere someday nailed Owen Lattimore.

The FBI had a source claiming that Lattimore was indeed feeding information to the Soviets. I would hope that you could concede the difficulty of providing evidence which could compromise intelligence sources, which given the FBI report I provide you seems to be case.

Which of the ninety-one pages this clown links to substantiates the bold claim is unclear, or why the entire FBI file [which Lattimore himself FOIA’d] isn’t linked to.

McCarthy had a source who confidently told the Senate he’d been informed as early as 1937 that Owen J. Lattimore was a secret Communist.  Confidence by some in Louis Budenz is undiminished despite Lattimore’s tragic lack of any middle name.


Tune in Monday night, when Becky threatens to roust the Reds creepin’ round Obama.Threat or menace?