Red Aussie

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. Tibor Méray is a Hungarian writer and journalist who escaped from Hungary after the 1956 revolution and lives in France. 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 unflagging zeal.

Méray and Burchett met and became friends during the Korean war they were covering from the North Korean side, both geographically and ideologically. Méray, a committed Communist at the time, was correspondent for the Hungarian Communist party’s daily newspaper; Burchett was reporting for non-Communist papers in the West. He was a member of the Australian Communist party, as he disclosed to Méray on the day they met, but otherwise firmly denied this throughout his life. The denial lent greater credibility to his pro-Communist views, coming from an allegedly “independent” or “maverick” Western journalist.

Views of Wilfred Burchett have been extremely polarized. Many believed, especially in Australia, that he was a KGB agent and traitor. After he lost his passport in 1955 the Australian government refused to replace it, but no legal proceedings were ever initiated against him. He subsequently traveled on a North Vietnamese travel document and, later on, a Cuban passport he was given in 1967, courtesy of Fidel Castro. He regained his Australian passport in 1972. His critics, such as an Australian army officer 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 figure in obtaining the so-called confessions of U.S. flyers as evidence on which the ‘germ warfare’ allegations were based.”

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.” One of the contributors, Gavan McCormack, saw him as the Australian Dreyfus. 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; less surprisingly, Noam Chomsky, David Dellinger, Corliss Lamont, and William Kunstler were admirers as well. 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.” But Burchett rarely noted or commented upon injustices in Communist societies-except when Communist authorities themselves granted posthumous compassion to their victims.

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. 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.”

The personality and life of Wilfred Burchett prompts some renewed reflection on the connections between the personal and political realms. Burchett’s public behavior has demonstrated how profoundly political beliefs and commitments can disfigure and deform a human being when his idealism becomes subordinated to unscrupulous political forces. His actions and attitudes also suggest the possibility of a selective affinity between mendacious, deceptive human beings and political systems of a similar character. 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.

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 Méray was in a good position to expose. Méray decided to write, in part, to clear the name of his old friend Miklós 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.

Méray 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. Of the László 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.” He also presented with unflinching self-assurance the official versions of the show trials of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria.

When, in the wake of the post-Stalin revelations, Burchett discussed these trials with Méray during a 1956 visit to Budapest. He said:

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. By the time Burchett admitted that these were show trials, that was the official line. As Méray observes, “Burchett simply and humbly followed the altered line. .  .  . [E]very time he gave up following a line .  .  . he immediately took up a new line also to be followed with blind loyalty.”

Contrary to the assertion of admirers such as the Australian journalist John Pilger-currently enamored of Hugo Chávez-Burchett never admitted error, or had second thoughts. 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 László Rajk and other Tito-style (or national) Communists in Eastern Europe.

About the POW camps in North Korea, for example, Burchett wrote:

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

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, Méray does not think that Burchett was a KGB agent.

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

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of his character was the seamless unity of deeply held beliefs and a cynical manipulativeness. Burchett was, without doubt, a “true believer” with the inflated 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: Reflections on Strength, Weakness and Anti-Americanism.