Moscow gold: how a journalist defended treason
Gerard Jackson
The New York Times’ treason demonstrates not just its moral depravity but the dismal fact that the leftwing media have learnt nothing from history. Their cultish addiction to a dystopian doctrine has drained them of all moral sense and left them bereft of any loyalty to basic humanitarian values.
Unfortunately this process of moral desiccation has been successfully gaining momentum for many years. For example, when the Soviet empire collapsed and Russia’s elected government freely admitted to the horrors of the old regime the malevolent remnants of the loyalty that the Soviet regime once enjoyed among so many Western intellectuals and journalists could still be found festering in our so-called humanities faculties and newsrooms.
The extent of Soviet influence can by gauged by the degree to which it stills warps journalistic ‘thinking’. One example was a report in The Australian (10 January 1998) by the late Brian Woodley on Soviet funding of the Communist Party of Australia. Documents released at the time from Soviet archives confirmed what we all knew anyway and that is that Moscow funded foreign communist parties, which of course made their leaders traitors.
Woodley, true to form (for left-wing Australian journalists, that is), tried to soften the case against the late Lance Sharkey, former general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia, by stating he “may have perjured himself” when he gave evidence to the 1954-55 Royal Commission into the Petrov affair when he denied the Party or he personally had received Soviet funding, going on to accuse Petrov of slandering him and the Party.
Forget about the “may”, there is absolutely no doubt that Sharkey not only perjured himself but that he was also a traitor. Not being able to help himself, Woodley repeated the left-wing canard (probably imbibed at university) that information provided by Petrov “was used by Menzies to secure reelection”, as if that somehow invalidated it.
It was Petrov’s claim, now confirmed beyond doubt, that acting on instructions from Moscow he helped arrange for the delivery of $25,000 to the CPA in October 1953. Payment was personally made to Lance Sharkey by Victor Antonov, a Soviet agent acting as a Tass ‘journalist’. Woodley tried to lend support to Sharkey’s denial by claiming that on the date of the meeting with the Soviet agent Sharkey was elsewhere in Sydney.
Trying to cast further doubts on Petrov’s story, Woodley pointed out that there are no $25 notes though Petrov said that part of the payment consisted of such notes. Obviously hoping to cast further doubt on the case against Sharkey, Wooodley deferred to Dr Wells, a left-wing academic and Professor Stuart MacIntyre (a self-professed Marxist-Leninist) who questioned the veracity of the Soviet documents.
The documents that Woodley was so keen to discredit were actually found in the archives of Moscow’s Centre for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation which also contains the archives of the Commintern or Communist International. This would explain the presence of the documents.
(The Commintern was set up with the sole purpose of destroying the democracies. It was supposed to have been disbanded in 1943 but was actually changed into the International Department without a change in basic functions).
Soviet payments to Sharkey were revealed not by the archives but by Australian intelligence. Moreover, Robert Manne showed that Moscow approved payment in the first half of the year and that payment was then made in the second half. And that, Woodley, makes Sharkey a traitor.
Woodley virtually finished his sympathetic piece with a reference to the “anti-red hysteria of the 1950s”. This is just left-wing nonsense. There was no hysteria and public concern with the actions of the Soviet empire and its foreign agents did not start with the Korean war, as Woodley misleadingly — or should I say mischievously — stated but with Soviet actions in Eastern Europe shortly after the Nazi defeat. It started with arrests, kidnappings, firing squads, hangings, the Berlin Blockade, the Slansky show trials and others, the attempted takeover of Greece, the unprovoked communist attack on South Korea, and was carried on into 1950s with the Berlin uprising, the Hungarian revolution, the Polish riots.
And let us not forget the role communist controlled Australian unions played in sabotaging the Australian war effort — that is until the Soviet Union was attacked. A role they reprised during the Korean War. It’s a pity that Woodley chose not to recall communist unions’ efforts to sabotage our post-war recovery, forcing a Labour government to use troops on the docks and in the coal fields.
The Australian Communist Party ruthlessly and relentlessly betrayed this country to Moscow. It used all the malevolent influence it could marshal to try and impose a Soviet style tyranny on its fellow Australians, complete with death camps, firing squads, secret police and torture chambers. Yet none these Australian journalists are prepared to point this out.
On the contrary, The Australian has now acquired a reputation for whitewashing treason. When she was the paper's London-based correspondent Helen Trinca wrote an article (17 December 1994) whitewashing Richard Gott, a London journalist' with the left-wing Guardian and a paid KGB agent. In her degenerate opinion “Pol Pot” Gott (as his Guardian colleagues scornfully called him) was no different from anticommunist intellectuals who wrote for the CIA funded anti-totalitarian magazine Encounter.
Excuse me? A man who wanted to impose a communist dictatorship on Britain was the moral equal of those who dedicated a good part of their lives to fighting totalitarianism in all its forms? Yes, according to Trinca.
The Weekend Australian published an article by Elizabeth Wynhausen portraying former members of the defunct Australian Communist Party as nothing more than dedicated idealists who were misunderstood and persecuted by conservative governments (25 January 1997) . They were neither persecuted or misunderstood. They were a pack of active true-believing Stalinists who dedicated themselves to the destruction of Australia’s democratic state. A fact that seems to have completely eluded the left-wing, socially aware Ms Wynhausen. Can you imagine the outrage of the likes of Wynhausen if these people had been on the Nazi payroll?
But what can one expect from journalists who acquired their political views and moral values from left-wing academics.
Note: Readers ask me why our conservatives allow leftwing journalists to get away with their brazen lying. Frank Devine provides a clue. A retired journalist and so-called conservative who sometimes writes for the self-opinionated Quadrant made his admiration for Brian Woodley very clear (That Pest, the Editor, December 2002). Truth be told, Woodley was nothing but a leftwing slimebag.
Then there was a whiney email written by another so-called conservative that was forwarded to me saying that if they dared criticise leftist journalists they would never get their articles published again. No wonder I cannot stand being in the same with this cowardly bunch of egotists. And it’s because of them, including the likes of Frank Devine, that things are not getting any better.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 July 2006