Useful Tools

I admit this is a generalization, but it has been confirmed by my own experience with a Fundamentalist Feminist: “We Think the Left is Wrong; They Think We are Evil.”

That goes back to my earlier suggestion that we’re involved in a Holy War. You only get into Holy Wars with the forces of Evil.

To be sure, there are people who are nominally on the conservative side who are equally whacked out, but the majority of the venom seems to be over among the Liberals. Weird.

Anyway, the point of today’s discussion: Useful Tools.

During the Korean War, back in 1952, the North Koreans claimed they’d been subjected to American Biological Warfare. The Chinese Government, newly communist, created a commission to investigate. They needed someone with scientific credibility to chair the commission. They selected Joseph Needham.

Needham was a world famous biologist before WWII, and had become a diplomat to China during the War. He began a journey of scientific and history discovery about China’s past (“Science and Civilization in China”, now up to about Volume 21) that continues to this day.

He was, however, an ardent socialist and friendly to the stated goals of the Chinese Communist party. He accepted the commission, and after about a year of investigation, interviews, and visits to “attack” sites, published a report that essentially concluded the US had launched biological attacks against the North Koreans.

The United States government rejected the report’s conclusions as false. Needham’s reputation suffered in the West, while the emerging communist countries hailed him for his bravery.

In 1998, secret documents from the Soviet Union were published in Japan, “and academics studying those papers…noticed something quite remarkable: that the sites to which Needham and his colleagues were taken during their investigations had all been created artificially by, or with the help of, intelligence agents from the Soviet Union.”
(The Man Who Loved China, by Simon Winchester, page 212)

Needham had been duped and used by the Communists. Who would have thought?

I find myself wondering…in 50 years or so, will it come out that other well-meaning critics of our government and culture have been similarly duped? Michael Moore and Oliver Stone hanging out with Fidel Castro. Sean Penn in Iraq and Venezuela.

The communists had a term for people like Needham. “Useful Idiots.”