On 11/8/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@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@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