Apparently, Michael Moynihan and I beat up on Brad DeLong so badly for his lame attempt to defend I.F. Stone’s soviet espionage, he’s issued this snipe that ignores our arguments and completely moves the goal posts. Instead of addressing whether or not it was OK for Stone to be on the Soviet payroll, he bizarrely asserts that we “wish that the Nazis had conquered Moscow in 1941,” under the rather naive premise that Stone only spied as an anti-Nazi agent for the Reds. Moynihan has responded on DeLong’s blog, but since I know from personal experience DeLong has a habit of disappearing comments, I’ll reprint it here:
This is really scurrilous stuff, Brad. (I am pro-Nazi garbage????? Really???). Besides not addressing any of my criticisms, you willfully (or lazily) misread me. The “helping” the Soviets defeat fascism refers NOT–I repeat NOT–to the United States, but to I.F. Stone and 1) the presumption that this is what motivated his espionage work and 2) that anti-Nazism justifies espionage. Obviously, I reject the idea that Izzy was motivated simply by a desire to defeat Hitlerism. Besides, Stone’s work for Moscow began, according to Klehr and Haynes, in 1936–five years before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Either way, I addressed most of this in the original post and if your readers decide to click the link, rather than relying on your amazingly disingenuous summary of my point, I suspect they will see what I mean.
DeLong then singles me out further and, as a matter of guilt by association, tries to undermine my credibility by weakly attacking WFB and National Review. Regardless, it’s obvious who’s on the right side of history here. It’s not DeLong, who in the year 2009 is still making excuses for an American who spied for the Soviets at the height of Stalin’s purges and, when confronted about it, responds in a disingenuous manner.