Red Aussie

...His Western supporters and sympathizers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Linus Pauling, Melina Mercouri, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Harrison Salisbury, and Ben Kiernan...

...About the POW camps in North Korea, for example, Burchett wrote: I visited every camp in which United Nations prisoners were held...

...One of the contributors, Gavan McCormack, saw him as the Australian Dreyfus...

...His critics, such as an Australian army offi cer who spent a year in Chinese captivity, saw him, not without reason, as “a man who threw in his lot with the Chinese Communist forces . . . [and] an important fi gure in obtaining the so-called confessions of U.S...

...In Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World 1939-1983, published in Australia in 1986, he was characterized as a “heroic” journalist with “an uncommon moral passion...

...The camp resembled nothing but a summer camp of youth...

...Views of Wilfred Burchett have been extremely polarized...

...less surprisingly, Noam Chomsky, David Dellinger, Corliss Lamont, and William Kunstler were admirers as well...

...Food conditions were excellent...

...M?ray decided to write, in part, to clear the name of his old friend Mikl?s Gimes, who was executed in 1958 for his participation in the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the subject of scurrilous fabrications and characterizations in one of Burchett’s books...

...Burchett’s public behavior has demonstrated how profoundly political beliefs and commitments can disfi gure and deform a human being when his idealism becomes subordinated to unscrupulous political forces...

...BY PAUL HOLLANDER Neither the subject nor the author of this book is likely to be familiar to many American readers, but there are good reasons to learn about both...

...To work as an informer and gobetween,” he writes, “Burchett did not necessarily have to be on the payroll of the KGB...

...It was a perfect summary of Burchett’s worldview: Whatever a Communist (or in his words, socialist) system did wrong was morally neutralized and sanitized by the greater axiomatic evil of its archenemy, American imperialism...

...Many believed, especially in Australia, that he was a KGB agent and traitor...

...It is unlikely that he received separate payments for these activities, which were more probably part of a ‘package deal.’ His remunerations took the form of various privileges” such as excellent housing in Moscow...

...Rajk trial in Hungary, for example, Burchett wrote that “one may be sure that the police had a watertight case against them, a case which no amount of denying could disapprove...

...But Burchett rarely noted or commented upon injustices in Communist societies— except when Communist authorities themselves granted posthumous compassion to their victims...

...Perhaps the most unusual aspect of his character was the seamless unity of deeply held beliefs and a cynical manipulativeness...

...Elsewhere he compared one of these camps to “a holiday resort in Switzerland,” and in a 1962 book he praised “the humanism of Soviet prisons...

...His actions and attitudes also suggest the possibility of a selective affi nity between mendacious, deceptive human beings and political systems of a similar character...

...He was a member of the Australian Communist party, as he disclosed to M?ray on the day they met, but otherwise fi rmly denied this throughout his life...

...One can only describe the atmosphere as that of a holiday resort...

...fl yers as evidence on which the ‘germ warfare’ allegations were based...

...These individuals, like the political systems and movements they are attracted to, are initially motivated by lofty goals but end up using (or sanctioning) sordid means at odds with glorious ends...

...Then, after a little pause, he added: “But one thing should not be forgotten: the main enemy is American imperialism...

...The excellent reputation he enjoyed among Western intellectuals is among the many illustrations of the gullibility, double standards, and ignorance that used to prevail in these circles...

...Rajk and other Tito-style (or national) Communists in Eastern Europe...

...M?ray and Burchett met and became friends during the Korean war they were covering from the North Korean side, both geographically and ideologically...

...Notwithstanding his easy access to Communist authorities, and his privileged treatment, his eight years spent in the Soviet Union, and his helping the Chinese to interrogate American prisoners and screen Western journalists in Korea, M?ray does not think that Burchett was a KGB agent...

...He regained his Australian passport in 1972...

...Of the L?szl...

...Tibor M?ray is a Hungarian writer and journalist who escaped from Hungary after the 1956 revolution and lives in France...

...M?ray, a committed Communist at the time, was correspondent for the Hungarian Communist party’s daily newspaper...

...He subsequently traveled on a North Vietnamese travel document and, later on, a Cuban passport he was given in 1967, courtesy of Fidel Castro...

...As M?ray observes, “Burchett simply and humbly followed the altered line...

...Much of On Burchett is devoted to a meticulous and painstaking documentation of the astonishing number of misrepresentations and plain lies Burchett concocted and peddled over his long journalistic career—and M?ray was in a good position to expose...

...Burchett was equally unstinting in his praise of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution in China, Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam, and even Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s...

...The denial lent greater credibility to his pro-Communist views, coming from an allegedly “independent” or “maverick” Western journalist...

...A New York Times reviewer once regarded him as “a man of uncommon honesty” who “responded with an almost childlike directness whenever he saw something that smacked of injustice...

...M?ray also takes the opportunity to review and refute other falsehoods and misrepresentations Burchett perpetrated, most notoriously about the post-World War II show trials in Eastern Europe and the myth of the American use of “germ warfare” in Korea...

...He said: “It is terrifying that all this could happen in a socialist system...

...He considered Cambodia’s Pol Pot a “progressive intellectual...

...By the time Burchett admitted that these were show trials, that was the offi cial line...

...Burchett was reporting for non-Communist papers in the West...

...E]very time he gave up following a line . . . he immediately took up a new line also to be followed with blind loyalty...

...Burchett was, without doubt, a “true believer” with the infl ated self-conception of being an important actor in history, combining cheery self-presentation, unhesitating mendaciousness, and the kind of ruthless idealism that enabled him to overlook the fate of the victims of the cause that was central to his life...

...Paul Hollander is the author of the forthcoming The Only Super Power: Refl ections on Strength, Weakness and Anti-Americanism...

...He also presented with unfl inching self-assurance the offi cial versions of the show trials of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria...

...Thirty years after the show trials he contrived to accept a bizarre theory of a conspiracy between Lavrenty Beria of the KGB and Allen Dulles of the CIA, designed to discredit L?szl...

...Contrary to the assertion of admirers such as the Australian journalist John Pilger—currently enamored of Hugo Ch?vez—Burchett never admitted error, or had second thoughts...

...Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983) was an Australian journalist who spent much of his life living in and reporting from various Communist countries he championed and served with unfl agging zeal...

...His was a case of mistaken identity, as he reminded (for example) Harrison Salisbury, who wrote a fawning introduction for his At the Barricades: “Of the old fashioned pre-1917 radicals . . . a Lincoln Steffens with an Australian accent...

...After he lost his passport in 1955 the Australian government refused to replace it, but no legal proceedings were ever initiated against him...

...The personality and life of Wilfred Burchett prompts some renewed refl ection on the connections between the personal and political realms...

...When, in the wake of the post-Stalin revelations, Burchett discussed these trials with M?ray during a 1956 visit to Budapest...