The reason upper-class traitors are still of such interest is that we want to understand why they did it. They were never blackballed (afgewezen. svh), after all. So why did these men who were valued, if sometimes eccentric, members of the club, betray their fellows?
Hij schrijft dit in een bespreking van ondermeer het boek The Happy Traitor. Spies, lies and exile in Russia: The extraordinary story of George Blake (2021). Over dit boek bericht Amazon:
George Blake was the last remaining Cold War spy. As a Senior Officer in the British Intelligence Service who was double agent for the Soviet Union, his actions had devastating consequences for Britain. Yet he was also one of the least known double agents, and remained unrepentant.
In 1961, Blake was sentenced to forty-two years imprisonment for betraying to the KGB all of the Western operations in which he was involved, and the names of hundreds of British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. This was the longest sentence for espionage ever to have been handed down by a British court.
On the surface, Blake was a charming, intelligent and engaging man, and most importantly, a seemingly committed patriot. Underneath, a ruthlessly efficient mole and key player in the infamous 'Berlin Tunnel' operation. This illuminating biography tracks Blake from humble beginnings as a teenage courier for the Dutch underground during the Second World War, to the sensational prison-break from Wormwood Scrubs that inspired Hitchcock to write screenplay.
https://www.amazon.nl/Happy-Traitor-Russia-Extraordinary-English-ebook/dp/B07G5KSXCR
Wikipedia meldt ondermeer het volgende over hem:
George Blake was born George Behar in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 1922. He was the son of a Protestant Dutch mother, Catherine (nee Beijderwellen), and an Egyptian father of Sephardi Jewish origin who was a naturalized British subject. He was named George after George V of the United Kingdom. His father, Albert Behar, served in the British Army during the First World War. While Albert received the Meritorious Service Medal, he embellished his war service when recounting it to his wife and children, and concealed his Jewish background until his death. The Behars lived a comfortable existence in the Netherlands until Albert's death in 1936. The thirteen-year-old Behar was sent to live with a wealthy aunt in Egypt, where he continued his education at the English School in Cairo. He later attended Downing College, Cambridge, to study Russian.
While in Cairo, he was close to his cousin Henri Curiel, who was later to become a leader of the Communist Democratic Movement for National Liberation in Egypt. In 1991, Blake said that his encounter with Curiel, who was a decade older and already a Marxist, shaped his views in later life.
When the Second World War broke out, Behar was back in the Netherlands. In 1940, Germany invaded and quickly defeated the Dutch military. Behar was interned but released because he was only 17, and joined the Dutch resistance as a courier. In 1942, he escaped from the Netherlands and travelled to Britain via Spain and Gibraltar, reaching London in January 1943. There, he was reunited with his mother and his sisters, who had fled at the start of the war. In 1943, his mother decided to change the family name from Behar to Blake. After he reached Britain, Blake joined the Royal Navy as a sub-lieutenant before being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in 1944. For the rest of the war, Blake was employed in the Dutch Section. He intended to marry an MI6 secretary, Iris Peake, but her family prevented the marriage because of Blake's Jewish background and the relationship ended.
Het wijd verspreide anti-semitisme onder de Britse middle- en upper-class, dat net als hun even virulente racisme hebben de walging en het wereldbeeld van Blake beïnvloed. Een ander element dat zijn denken sterk heeft bepaald waren zijn ervaringen tijdens de Korea Oorlog. Wikipedia:
He was posted thereafter to the British legation in Seoul, South Korea, arriving on 6 November 1948. Under cover as a vice-consul, Blake's mission was to gather intelligence on Communist North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Far East.
The Korean War broke out on 25 June 1950, and Seoul was quickly captured by the advancing Korean People's Army of the North. After British forces joined the United Nations Command defending the South, Blake and the other British diplomats were taken prisoner. As the tide of the war turned, Blake and the others were taken north, first to Pyongyang and then to the Yalu River. After seeing the bombing of North Korea, and after reading the works of Karl Marx and others during his three-year detention, he became a communist.
Wat in het Westen nauwelijks tot niet bekend blijft, is de totale verwoesting van Noord-Korea door Amerikaanse bombardementen. Onder de kop ‘The long-suppressed official report on US biowarfare in North Korea’ berichtte op 20 februari 2018 ‘INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform for people and planet’ het volgende:
Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this official report, containing hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of US biological weapons during the Korean War, was effectively suppressed upon its original release in 1952.
Courtesy of researcher Jeffrey Kaye, INSURGE now publishes the report in text-searchable format for the first time for the general public, with an exclusive, in-depth analysis of its damning findings and implications.
The report provides compelling evidence of systematic violation of the laws of war against North Korea through the deployment of biological weapons — a critical context that is essential for anyone to understand the dynamics of current regional tensions, and what might be done about them.
De Amerikaanse psycholoog Jeffrey Kaye wijst erop dat:
Most controversially, both North Korea and China alleged that by early 1952, the U.S. was using biological or germ warfare weapons against both North Korea and China. The U.S. government has strenuously denied this.
Nevertheless, captured U.S. flyers told their North Korean and Chinese captors about the use of such weapons. Later, after the prisoners were returned to U.S. custody, counterintelligence experts and psychiatrists interrogated them. They were told under the threat of court martial to renounce their confessions about germ warfare. They all did so.
The Army Criminal Investigative Division officer in charge of interrogating returning prisoners, including airmen who confessed to use of biological weaponry on North Korea and China, was Army counter-intelligence specialist, Col. Boris Pash. Pash had previously been in charge of security for the most sensitive classified operations of the U.S. government in World War II. He was in charge of security at the Manhattan Project’s Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. (The Manhattan Project was the U.S. crash program to develop the atomic bomb.)
In the immediate aftermath of the war, military intelligence officer Pash led the Alsos Mission, which searched for Nazi and Italian nuclear scientists and fissionable materials, as well as gathering ‘intelligence about any enemy scientific research applicable to his military effort,’ including biological and chemical weapons. Later, Pash worked for the CIA, and in the 1970s was called before Congressional investigators concerning his alleged participation in Agency assassinations.
To convince the world of the truth of their claim the U.S. had dropped biological weapons on their countries, and after turning down the suggestion that the International Red Cross look into the charges, the North Koreans and Chinese sponsored an investigating commission. Using the auspices of the World Peace Council, they gathered together a number of scientists from around the world, most of whom were sympathetic to either the Left or the peace movement. Most surprisingly, this commission, which came to be known as the International Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Joseph Needham.
The ISC included scientists from a number of countries, including Sweden, France, Italy, and Brazil. The Soviet Union representative, Dr. N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov had been the chief medical expert at the Khabarovsk Trial of the Unit 731 Japanese officers accused of participating in bacteriological (aka biological, or germ) warfare before and during World War II, as well as conducting hideous experiments on prisoners to further that aim. Zhukov-Verezhnikov went on to write scientific articles through the 1970s.
Needham himself, though pilloried (gecriminaliseerd. svh) in the Western press for his opinions on the controversy of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War, remained a highly lauded scientist for years after the ISC report. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour.
Ter verduidelijking: 'The Order of the Companions of Honour is an honour given to people in the Commonwealth realms who have made a significant contribution to the arts, science, medicine or the government over a long period of time.'
https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/103513
At a secret meeting arranged with his guards, he volunteered to work for the Soviet Union's spy service, the MGB. In an interview, Blake was once asked: ‘Is there one incident that triggered your decision to effectively change sides?’ Blake responded:
‘It was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American Flying Fortresses. Women and children and old people, because the young men were in the army. We might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenseless people. I felt I was on the wrong side... that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war.’
Interessant is tevens dat:
George Blake appears as a character in Ian McKewan’s novel The Innocent,
en dat:
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times praised The Innocent as ‘powerful and disturbing,’ and called it ‘bone tight: every detail of every event works as a time bomb, waiting to go off, while every image seems to pay off in terms of plot, atmosphere or theme.’ Kakutani argued that ‘while these Grand Guignol (amorele verschrikkingen. svh) events are hardly plausible by everyday standards of reality [...] Mr. McEwan's cool, perfectly controlled account of the macabre events lends [hardly plausible events] a kind of inexorable logic.’
Kortom, hoewel de ‘amorele verschrikkingen, gemeten naar de alledaagse realiteit’ slaagt de Britse auteur Ian McEwan erin ‘een soort onverbiddelijke logica’ te verlenen aan 'horror.' Het feit dat een literator de lezer kan overtuigen dat achter ‘nauwelijks aannemelijke gebeurtenissen’ wel degelijk ‘een soort onverbiddelijke logica’ schuilgaat, is van belang om Buruma’s mentaliteit in te schatten wanneer hij beweert dat ‘The reason upper-class traitors are still of such interest is that we want to understand why they did it. They were never blackballed, after all.’ Wat bedoelt mijn oude vriend precies? Hij stelt dat de ‘reden’ waarom ‘verraders uit de upper class nog steeds zo interessant zijn’ voor zijn hoog geschoold publiek het feit is dat ‘zij immers nooit waren afgewezen’ door het eigen milieu waarin zij verkeerden. Zonder het te beseffen verraadt Ian Buruma hier zichzelf. Hij gaat er namelijk onbewust vanuit dat alleen het ‘afgewezen’ worden, een plausibele reden kan zijn om anderen te verraden! Alleen bittere rancune is voor hem een begrijpelijk motief, en dit is een veel betekenend gegeven, want de voor de hand liggende vraag is: waarom denkt hij dit? Ikzelf kan mij een heel ander plausibel motief voorstellen, namelijk: de weigering zichzelf te verraden, dat wil zeggen: de weigering om de eigen normen en waarden te verraden louter en alleen om onderdeel te kunnen blijven van het weerzinwekkende milieu dat bijvoorbeeld de Noord-Koreaanse boerenbevolking massaal met biologische waspens liet bestoken. Het feit dat hij zich deze houding niet kan voorstellen, zegt veel, zo niet alles over Ian Buruma, maar niets over George Blake, wiens vader door het westerse anti-semitisme ‘tot zijn dood zijn joodse achtergrond geheim hield.’ Sterker nog: Buruma’s mentaliteit verhult het onderhuids racisme van de witte man, voor wie oorlogsmisdaden en misdaden tegen de menselijkheid geen enkele rol spelen zodra de ontelbare slachtoffers gewone boeren zijn van een ander ras. Dan geldt voor de westerse mainstream-opiniemakers doorgaans het begrip ‘collateral damage.’ Buruma’s wereldbeeld verraadt tevens het chronisch autisme van de ‘vrije pers,’ zodra zij de westerse terreur tracht te legitimeren. En dit alles terwijl bekend is dat ‘In times of armed conflict, despite numerous advancements in technology, the European Union's European Security Strategy, adopted by the European Council in Brussels in December 2003, stated that since 1990, almost 4 million people have died in wars, 90% of them civilians,’ en 'Armed conflict kills and maims more children than soldiers,' notes an United Nations report by Graça Machel, the UN Secretary-General's Expert on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children.’
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