[WikiEN-l] Category:Soviet spies

[Fastfission]

On 11/8/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Attack on Venona sources again". I can't help but note the scent of
> having stumbled into a pre-existing content war...

On 11/8/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> It seems strange to me that any category which could be defamatory would
> be subject to the whims of the voting process.  This is not just a
> question of "Soviet spies".  Any category suggesting a criminal activity
> of any kind should be viewed as POV.

Well, these are really one and the same issue: the "content war" is
not limited to these authors but is an ongoing dialogue about the
history of the Cold War and the value of the VENONA decrypts in
general, one which has its origins and most of its battles outside of
Wikipedia.

VENONA, for those who are not aware and don't feel like reading the
entry on it, was a series of intercepted and decrypted Soviet
communications during the 1940s and 1950s. They were not released
until the 1990s, however.

People who would have sided with the Anti-Communists in the 1950s saw
them as a vindication of Anti-Communism and even McCarthyism, and saw
them as confirming that a number of people (Alger Hiss, Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, etc.) who had had nasty loyalty trials in those days
were actually Soviet agents. In this view, the liberals have/had it
all wrong in thinking that McCarthyism was a witch hunt or an instance
of political persecution.

People who would be inclined to oppose these opinions politically or
for other reasons would sympathize with the accused took one of two
tacks. One interpreted the data differently: VENONA showed not that
McCarthy was right, but that he was wrong; instead of massive
insidious spying, they depict a limited and loose network of misc. and
somewhat incompetent agents (Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan espoused this
point of view in his book _Secrecy: The American Experience_). The
other approach was to doubt the sources themselves -- emphasizing that
they were less clean-cut than they appeared: on top of multiple levels
of "translation", including decryption, translation from Russian, and
figuring out who all of the code names were supposed to be, the
scattered phrases released are often as sensible as a Nostradamus
translation, and to base strong legal and moral statements on such
sketchy evidence should be done with caution at best. VENONA in many
ways in not an idea source to rely on by itself, and requires much
interpretation to make any sense of. So the argument goes.

Anyway.. that's the debate. It's larger than Wikipedia -- it's about
the history of Anti-Communism -- who was right and who was wrong in
the 1950s, which is a large part of the mythos of American political
culture *at the present moment* as well (there are those who compare
the current concerns with terrorism with Cold War fears of communist
infiltration, as I'm sure most of us have seen).

In the spirit of complete openness, I should probably note that 1. I
do some research in this area, and 2. personally I fall somewhere
between the Moynihan approach and the skeptical approach -- I think
there's evidence that the Soviets did have a number of agents of some
sort or another at various times, but that VENONA is a very
problematic source for a number of methodological and practical
reasons. Of course on Wikipedia I think a NPOV approach should be
taken at all times.

Hope that clears up the latent issue here. In any event, I think
categories which label people as having committed a crime should be
done in a very careful way. Though this is an appeal to the extreme, I
would be just as cautious about having a category called [[Child
molesters]].

FF