Adam Kirsch: Why Don't We Take the Russian Spies Seriously?
[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor of The New Republic.]
The...reason why we can’t take Russian espionage too seriously is that it has been shorn of exactly the element that made Soviet espionage so serious: ideology. Americans who became Soviet spies were not just betraying their country, they were endorsing an ideological critique of their country. In the most dramatic sense, they were “voting with their feet” for Communism; and as long as Communism had the power to win such dedicated converts, it could not be dismissed as a philosophical rival to liberal democracy. When Alger Hiss was exposed as a Soviet spy, it forced a whole generation of left-liberals to examine their own consciences, since they had professed sympathy with the same principles that led Hiss to become a traitor. “Certainly, a generation was on trial with Hiss,” Leslie Fiedler wrote in his essay “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence”: “the half-deliberate blindness of so many decent people … is a vital part of the total Hiss case.”
When Russia spies on America in 2010, however, none of us are implicated. We are not even especially outraged. Isn’t it an acknowledged rule of international relations that countries try to gain an advantage over one another? Don’t we all want America to do the same kind of thing to Russia that Russia has been doing to us—though, we hope, more smartly and effectively? There is no moral issue raised here, only the old game of power politics, from which there seems to be no escape....
Read entire article at The New Republic
The...reason why we can’t take Russian espionage too seriously is that it has been shorn of exactly the element that made Soviet espionage so serious: ideology. Americans who became Soviet spies were not just betraying their country, they were endorsing an ideological critique of their country. In the most dramatic sense, they were “voting with their feet” for Communism; and as long as Communism had the power to win such dedicated converts, it could not be dismissed as a philosophical rival to liberal democracy. When Alger Hiss was exposed as a Soviet spy, it forced a whole generation of left-liberals to examine their own consciences, since they had professed sympathy with the same principles that led Hiss to become a traitor. “Certainly, a generation was on trial with Hiss,” Leslie Fiedler wrote in his essay “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence”: “the half-deliberate blindness of so many decent people … is a vital part of the total Hiss case.”
When Russia spies on America in 2010, however, none of us are implicated. We are not even especially outraged. Isn’t it an acknowledged rule of international relations that countries try to gain an advantage over one another? Don’t we all want America to do the same kind of thing to Russia that Russia has been doing to us—though, we hope, more smartly and effectively? There is no moral issue raised here, only the old game of power politics, from which there seems to be no escape....