THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN Jill Lepore

THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN
JILL LEPORE
Knopf, 2014, 410 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Wonder Woman can’t marry, according to Amazon law, but she doesn’t want to, either, especially if it would mean that she, the comic book superhero, disguised as a secretary, would be stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner for her would-be domesticator, Captain Steve Trevor, the US pilot she fell in love with after rescuing him from his plane crash on her woman-only, feminist island utopia.

As the Harvard history professor, Jill Lepore, writes, Wonder Woman, who became the most popular superhero in the 1940s after only Superman and Batman, had her origins in the struggle for women’s equality.

William Marston, a psychology professor, created Wonder Woman to, as he said, ‘combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement’ in fields ‘monopolised by men’.  First stirred by the women’s suffrage movement, Marston, better known for inventing the lie detector test, created a strong, politically-charged, feminist superhero for DC Comics.

Wherever women were given a raw deal by men, Wonder Woman would be there to right the injustice.  She led women’s rallies and boycotts against milk-pricing rackets and intervened with her magic lasso in a strike by female department store clerks, doubling their wages.  Despite her non-violent principles, Wonder Woman physically taught husbands who maltreated their wives a lesson by socking them on the jaw. 

Marston was also influenced by the free love philosophy of the feminists who all lived together with him under the one roof - his wife (Elizabeth Holloway), his younger mistress (Olive Byrne) and sometimes a third lover (Marjorie Huntley).  Holloway rejected domesticity to work as a book editor and Byrne, a child psychologist, raised all the household’s children.  For half of humanity, combining employment and motherhood was a two-woman job.

Unlike the mythical Amazon society of Ancient Greece which was the backstory to Wonder Woman, however, the Marston household was no matriarchy (his women brought in the real money, did the childcare and typed his books) and there were other contradictions in Marston’s feminist comic-book creation.

The long-legged, slender, pin-up-girl-quality Wonder Woman (and the former Miss America beauty pageant winner who starred in the 1960s TV series) reinforced the stereotype that, to achieve recognition or success, women had to conform to conventional male criteria of female beauty.  When Wonder Woman was used by Gloria Steinem to launch the corporate-funded, feminist magazine, Ms., in 1972, radical feminists derided the exercise for its failure to break from the importance placed on women’s physical appearance and for its middle class individualism in which only the few, well-resourced super-women can succeed.

Women as sexual objects also coloured the Wonder Woman comics.  In every episode, Wonder Woman is either “chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered or manacled” and, whilst it is true that this borrowed from earlier suffragist and Abolitionist iconography which featured chains as an allegorical representation of voteless women and slaves’ lack of liberty, there is, says Lepore, more to it than that – it is “feminism as fetish”.  Marston excused it as ‘harmless erotic fantasy’ but bondage fetishists got another message about dominance and women.

Wonder Woman was also kitted out, in what little clothing she wore, in patriotic red, white and blue because Marston saw America as the home of freedom and democracy and not just because there was a war on against fascism at the time.  There was little American freedom for Wonder Woman, however, when the White House pressured the comics industry into self-censorship in the 1950s.

Their moral code now outlawed anything under-dressed, ‘deviant’ (Wonder Woman’s latent lesbianism) or unconventional (any ‘love interest shall emphasise the value of the home and sanctity of marriage’, it declared).  The supplement on biographies of famous women which had been part of Wonder Woman’s early comic book days under Marston was now replaced by a series on weddings.  Wonder Woman continued on after Marston’s death in 1947 but she was no longer recognisable as a feminist fighter.

Although Lepore claims that Wonder Woman is the missing link between the ‘first wave’ feminism of the early suffrage campaigns  and the ‘second wave’ feminism of 1960s women’s liberation, Wonder Woman was a phenomenon and not a movement, and too ideologically conflicted, to bear such an historical crux.  Wonder Woman’s shortage of feminist clarity and political substance may explain why Lepore overpopulates her narrative history with auxiliary figures and events but her book remains a valuable addition to feminist scholarship.

THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS, Leonardo Padura

THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS
LEONARDO PADURA
Bitter Lemon Press, 2014, 576 pages, $27.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Leon Trotsky refused to let paranoia about his all-but-inevitable assassination cramp his political life in his Mexican refuge, even receiving Jacques Mornard, the suspicious Belgian businessman and partner of a trusted New York Trotskyist bearing his poorly-written political article in one hand and a mountaineer’s ice-pick concealed beneath his coat in the other.

In The Man Who Loved Dogs, the Cuban novelist, Leonardo Padura, artistically reconstructs Trotsky’s assassination by the Spanish Communist, Ramón Mercader, who infiltrated Trotsky’s compound in that disguise and committed the murder on one terrible August day in 1940.

Mercader, a heroic communist fighting Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War, had been tapped for darker deeds against the non-Communist left by the Stalin’s secret police.  Stalin, the ‘gravedigger of the revolution’ as Trotsky called him, feared his sole remaining Old Bolshevik rival who was the Marxist symbol of opposition to the “bureaucratic minority protecting its material interests” in Soviet Russia through brutal purges, farcical show trials and other “horrifying crimes against humanity, dignity and intelligence”.

After killing Trotsky, Mercader served twenty years in jail before returning to Moscow to a mixed reception as a Hero of the Soviet Union but also “one of the more annoying proofs of Stalinism” for a neo-Stalinist regime modernising its tools of repression.  A terminally-ill Mercader spent his last years in Cuba.

In Padura’s novel, Mercader, now remorsefully realising that he was the “puppet of a dark and miserable plan” based on cynical lies told by Stalin about Trotsky, feels compelled to tell his story which he does to Iván Cárdenas, a once-promising but now disgraced Cuban writer.  Cárdenas sits on the sensational story fearing “complications of all kinds” from writing about contraband history - in Cuba, there was “programmed ignorance” about Trotsky because of Cuba’s economic dependence on the Soviet Union.

With the downfall of Mercader’s Soviet world, however, Cárdenas picks up his pen again only to discover, against all his instincts, some compassion for Mercader as a victim of Stalin, summonsing Trotsky as witness to “the degree of perversion that Stalin’s influence had injected into the souls of men”, including once-idealistic communists who instead entered history as reviled murderers.

Mercader, however, may be just a grotesque extreme of an inevitable corruption of the socialist utopia, suggests Padura.  He has Trotsky, the iconic anti-Stalinist revolutionary, ruminate guiltily on how much responsibility he shares for Stalinist despotism, for the “excesses he himself had committed in order to defend the revolution” when, under desperate duress, Trotsky (and Lenin) forcefully ate away at democracy in the working class and the Bolshevik Party.

Are all great utopian dreams condemned to failure, ponders Cárdenas, with the authentic biographical ring of Padura himself.  Padura’s fictional alter-ego had, in his youth, cut sugarcane with “militant enthusiasm and invincible faith” in the Cuban revolution but after living through years of “sexual, religious, ideological and cultural intransigence”, and the material poverty of the post-Soviet, pre-Venezuelan 1990s, has now drifted into “skepticism and sadness”.

“My capacity to believe had been ruined forever”, laments Cárdenas, reflecting on “the great disenchantment” of failed communist dreams in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and elsewhere, all doomed by Stalin’s toxic legacy. 

Despite his loss of faith, however, Padura has not left Cuba where official cultural caution (The Man Who Loved Dogs was initially given only a limited distribution) is buffeted by the winds of political change.  Padura has recently won a national literary prize even as his detective novels, on which his international fame is based, continue to tackle government corruption and social inequality.

In his finely-wrought, if overly-long, novel, Padura’s political pessimism vies with his admiration for Trotsky, imperfect and capable of error but whose revolutionary spirit survived the assassin’s ice-pick and continues to challenge the jaded cynicism of the corrupted and disillusioned.

SOPHIA: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, ANITA ANAND

SOPHIA: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary
ANITA ANAND
Bloomsbury, 2015, 416 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

Sophia Singh boycotted the 1911 Census in Britain, writing on her form, in protest at the denial of the vote for women, that ‘as women do not count, they refuse to be counted’.  She also risked fines and imprisonment through refusal to pay taxes to a government she had no voice in.  This was no way for an Indian Princess in Britain to behave, swapping her VIP seats in the spectators’ gallery in the House of Lords for anti-government street protest with militant suffragettes.

As Anita Anand writes in her biography of Singh, the Indian Royal was, however, prepared to shock.  Singh was the daughter of the last Maharaja of the Punjab, who had been deposed and exiled to Britain and bought off with a large allowance to dissuade him from returning to India to stoke insurrection against British colonial rule.  Made god-daughter of Queen Victoria, Singh, too, received a generous political pension (£600 a year) and a luxurious palace with all the trappings (cooks, servants, prize-winning Pomeranians and thoroughbred horses).

Her politically docile upbringing was, however, shaken by trips to India where her hectic social round of grand balls and dog shows in Britain lost their gloss when compared to the poverty and deprivation which resulted from India being drained economically dry of its natural and human resources by India’s British rulers.  The British aristocracy’s refusal to allow Singh’s proposed mixed–race marriage also soured her attitude to Britain.

After adopting the cause of Indian self-determination, Singh’s radicalisation really flared from the fiery campaign for the vote for women in Britain.  An exotic, celebrity member of the Women’s Society for Social and Political Union (WSPU), Singh gave money, sold the WSPU’s paper outside her palace and put her body on the line in the violent street battles between suffragettes and the police whose state-sanctioned ferocity shocked even the police’s political boss (Winston Churchill).  Often arrested, Singh was never sent to prison because of the embarrassment this would cause to the government from jailing  a favoured royal ward.

Singh was a WSPU loyalist, becoming a nurse and fund-raiser for the British empire’s Indian troops as she followed the WSPU’s descent into shabby patriotic compromise when it did a deal with the government to cease all protest and to support Britain’s war effort during World War 1 in return for government reconsideration of the women’s franchise after the war.  The vote was granted in 1918 but only to middle class women.

There is much biographical material here for a politically vibrant history of colonialism and feminism but Anand, a BBC journalist with a touch of princess worship about her, squanders it.  Anand clogs up with numbing literary detail the emptiness of the privileged life of the vacuous social parasite whilst Singh’s radical transition is told with draining slowness.

Although the political narrative picks up with Singh’s WSPU activism, Anand, with bland BBC reserve, shirks analytical reflection on the class brakes applied by a socially elitist, middle class WSPU leadership to the feminist struggle for the vote.  Singh shared this shortcoming – her instincts for the working class ran to philanthropy, the preserve of the wealthy, whilst, totally mystified by public transport, she attended suffragette rallies in liveried horse and carriage, wearing expensive furs.  Singh was a socialite feminist, not a socialist feminist.

Both the tactical desperation of the WSPU’s campaign of property damage (which Singh supported) and its ultimate class allegiance to  the men who ran Britain’s war for empire trumped the mobilisation of working class women for the vote and for broader political, social and economic justice for women.  A biographer less regally awestruck and more politically enquiring could have made more of Singh’s class-conflicted contribution to full women’s voting rights in Britain (won in 1928) and Indian independence (1947), a contribution that deserves to be both properly critiqued and honoured.

BLOOD & GUTS by SAM VINCENT

BLOOD & GUTS: Dispatches from the Whale Wars
SAM VINCENT
Black Inc., 2014, 274 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Industrial-scale whaling, writes Sam Vincent in Blood & Guts, had picked clean the world’s oceans until only the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary remained, protected by the icy remoteness of Antarctica and a worldwide ban on commercial whaling.  A convenient loophole allowing lethal whaling for ‘scientific research’, however, was exploited by Japan, resulting in many thousands of gory whale deaths – until the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society began physically disrupting, on the high seas, Japan’s annual hunt.

The “bad-ass do-gooders” of Sea Shepherd come with the blessings of the nine out of ten Australians (including former Greens leader, Bob Brown) who support the organisation’s direct action campaign.  Vincent, a journalist for the Australian establishment media, has, however, some disillusioning news for what he derisively calls the “whale-huggers”.

During his time with Sea Shepherd in 2013, Vincent uncovers, behind the donor-friendly, charismatic image of the Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson, a domineering, “megalomaniacal misanthrope” who harbours, amongst his whale-loving crew, like-minded “human-haters” who care more about whales than the plight of refugees in Australia or homosexuals in Africa.

Racism, too, Vincent discovers, is an “integral part of Australia’s whale advocacy”.  Norway and Iceland kill more whales than Japan but it is only the latter that draws condemnation because, he says, it is easier to demonise Orientals as barbaric, especially Australia’s old war-time enemy.

Vincent also disparages Sea Shepherd as an example of cost-free environmental activism, its feel-good whale-saving theatrics allowing us to ignore the greater threats to whales from pollution, overfishing and climate change with their attendant demand for changes in personal consumption behaviour.

Vincent’s killer blow against Sea Shepherd is to blame it for the continuation of Japanese whaling.  If only the anti-whaling zealots in Sea Shepherd (and Canberra) would back off, he says, then Tokyo would have no pretext to play the nationalist card in defence of a bogus ‘tradition’ against ‘Western cultural imperialism’, leaving market forces to bury an antiquated industry kept alive only by a  large government subsidy.

Vincent’s lack of awareness that irrational and uneconomic government policies can well continue because of their domestic political benefits is on a par with the rest of his obsessive fault-finding crusade against Sea Shepherd.

Yes, Watson is personally and ideologically fallible but he is extremely good at what he does – disrupting the whale-hunt to financially cripple a terrible industry.  Yes, a proportion of Sea Shepherd’s popularity does come from anti-Japanese racial prejudice but this layer of support is an aberration.

And, yes, whilst there are other issues deserving attention, the whale slaughter, which, for Australians, takes place in Australia’s own backyard/ocean, raises a philosophically profound environmental issue ripe for political generalisation - is Nature simply a resource to be ruinously exploited or are we hominids part of a mutually inter-dependent biosphere, a part, moreover, with a unique responsibility to mind our technologically oversized ecological footprint.

Vincent, however, is exercised by a different question.  Because whaling is “so miniscule in every respect – whales killed, money made, cultural importance”, Sea Shepherd’s fixation on it must be about something other than whales, he reasons, nominating Watson’s “Gaddafi-size ego” and vegan fanatics using whale conservation to aggressively promote their extremist (to the “no moral qualms” carnivore Vincent) creed of animal rights.

This is too cynical, by half.  Saving whales can serve as a symbolic entrée to the necessary revolution in thinking from anthropocentrism to biocentrism.  Life on planet Earth is not all about us, especially not the profit-crazed elite who literally make a killing out of exploiting the natural world which is our one and only home.

THE POLITICAL BUBBLE: Why Australians Don't Trust Poilitics, MARK LATHAM

THE POLITICAL BUBBLE: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics
MARK LATHAM
Macmillan, 2014, 291 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The only thing surprising about the 4% of Australians in 2013 who ‘almost always’ trusted the federal government is that the figure is that high, considering the many failures of Australian politics enumerated in The Political Bubble by an angry Mark Latham, the former national leader of the Australian Labor Party.

Now considered as standard political operating behaviour are broken election promises and post-election linguistic spin, politics packaged as a sub-genre of the entertainment industry and the triviality of personality politics, vitriolic abuse and three-word slogans, pilfering of the public purse and the feathering of politicians’ remuneration nests, and corruption and policy-for-sale through political donations.

The only thing that keeps the system going, says Latham, is compulsory preferential voting which forces everyone, including the don’t knows and don’t cares, to eventually select, however reluctantly, one of two shop-worn (Labor/Liberal) brands.  The result is the “hollowing out of democratic engagement” as an apathetic public turns off politics, whilst party membership becomes “smaller, older, less representative” with a “shrinking gene pool of dedicated apparatchiks” who eye off a comfortable parliamentary tenure and the lifestyle of the top 3% of income earners which goes with it.

Politicians are thus cocooned in their own little bubble of privilege and self-importance, with career benefits also for those orbiting the bubble, including political staffers, journalists and, it could be added, increasingly-long-ago ex-politicians (Mark Latham Literary Enterprises is going strong - Political Bubble is book number nine, and counting).

Latham is not the first to observe that life inside the bubble is a world apart from the real life concerns of the public but where Latham goes off the well-evidenced rails is his argument that the grounds for divorce between the people and their representatives is less about political betrayal of popular trust than irrelevance.

Apparently, there has been a “self-reliance revolution” out in “middle-class suburbia”, in which depoliticised individuals have become bootstrap-lifting agents of their own self-improvement and prosperity, making for a society that is “affluent and satisfied”.  “Contrary to Marxist theories of the radical left” (and oblivious to the voluminous research of non-Marxist economists like Thomas Picketty), “capitalism is becoming more equal, not less”.  In this glorious, petit-bourgeois utopia of self-sufficiency, there is much less for government to do.

In Latham’s shill for this vast, “sensible middle”, he rejects not only the “feral right” of Liberal politicians, Murdoch’s News Corp and the “hate-fests” of right-wing radio  talkback (low-hanging fruit for even a tepid social-democrat) but he also flails against the green-left “fanatical fringe”, punching out not only the most radical mainstream party (the Greens) but every street campaign and protest movement.

The substantive centrepiece of Latham’s alternative, “minimalist” politics is government by experts.  Expert bodies would take charge of fiscal policy (government expenditure and revenue), climate change policy and other areas of government dereliction.  Such old-hat technocratic solutions, however, would only further blow out what Latham justly deplores as Australia’s “democratic deficit”.  Experts are not ideology-free and they would be government-appointed, not elected or subject to democratic accountability.  The experts themselves would be elite members of the Bubble. 

Latham is right to say that Australian democracy is broken but it is bourgeois democracy (economic rule by the rich, political rule by their class buddies) that doesn’t work for society.  We only have nominal control over our law-making political representatives, and we have zero control over law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, public service chiefs and big media, the banks, miners and other powerful corporations.  Political, economic and social decisions that affect everyone should be made by everyone, not just the Bubble People.  What is needed is socialist democracy.  On this, Latham has nothing to say.

UNLIKELY HEROES: The Extraordinary Story of the Britons Who Fought for Spain by RICHARD BAXELL

UNLIKELY HEROES: The Extraordinary Story of the Britons Who Fought for Spain
RICHARD BAXELL
Aurum Press, 2014,  531 pages, $24.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The defiant red and black flags, the proud trade union banners, the clenched fists, the full-throated slogans (No Pasaran! No Pasaran!), the spine-quivering singing of The Internationale – these drove the waves of emotion in Spain amongst the 2,500 British volunteers who came to the military defence of the Spanish Republic against General Franco’s fascists in the late 1930s, writes the London School of Economics’ Richard Baxell in Unlikely Warriors.  The Britons, although they and democratic Spain were to lose the Spanish Civil War, would never lose the memory of this electrifying solidarity.

The English-speaking volunteers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries (including over fifty from Australia) comprised the 15^th International Brigade from amongst the 35,000 overseas volunteers from 53 countries.

Most of the Britons were anti-fascists who had waged a “muscular response” to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in England.  They would now do, in Spain, what their anti-communist governments, adopting the policy that the Spanish Republic was ‘better dead than red’, would not.

Unlike the early wave of literary intellectuals and other “radical romantics and middle class Marxists” in spontaneously-formed militias, the Brigaders were organised by the Communist International (the Moscow-led global network of national communist parties), around three-quarters being members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  Most were working class men (and the occasional woman – the first British volunteer to be killed in battle was the sculptor, Felicia Browne).

The communist foundation of the International Brigades has allowed Cold War polemicists to argue that the Brigades were simply a political instrument for Stalin to pursue a satellite Spanish dictatorship behind an anti-fascist façade.

Whilst the Brigades’ political leadership certainly kept a watch on dissidents and rival leftist forces, the British Brigaders did not share in the responsibility for the Stalinist bastardry, so brutally illustrated in the suppression of the anarchists and the radical Partido de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) in the 1936 Catalan uprising.  There were no executions of Britons for political disobedience, a leniency extended to deserters whose harshest punishment was being sentenced to digging trenches or latrines, the comparatively mild disciplinary reactions of a “desperate army in a bitter struggle for its very survival”.  If the war was lost through military indiscipline, concludes Baxell,  then no revolution could be won.

The Stalinist “civil war within the Civil War” was tragically unhelpful at best, although Baxell notes that the Spanish Republic was to be defeated, not by Stalin’s terror, but by the “utterly farcical”  non-intervention agreement signed by 28 countries, including fascist Italy and Nazi Germany which blatantly supplied weapons and soldiers to their Francoist ally.  This one-sided pact left the Spanish Republic out-numbered, out-gunned and out-financed, doomed in the face of the ferociously effective, elite military forces of Franco’s Army of Africa from France’s Moroccan colony. 

Nevertheless, the political fervour and suicidal bravery of the Brigaders served to delay the end until they were withdrawn in 1938 by a besieged Spanish government in a vain attempt to mediate a peace with Franco through obtaining international assistance by expelling the illegal overseas fighters.  The International Brigades not only made a difference, they were different in that, as a British ambulance driver put it, ‘it was their war, they were fighting for their interests, unlike soldiers in large imperialist wars’.

As a work of academic scholarship, Unlikely Warriors is more than sound, and more than ethically decent in its not-uncritical empathy with the sometimes-shades-of-Stalinist-grey cause and personnel of thirties’ anti-fascism.

Baxell does not gloss over brute military reality (the wretchedness of life as a soldier) and he acknowledges that all was not battlefield heroism (incompetence and individual weakness fray the edges of the anti-fascist epic) or working class harmony (the Irish decamped en bloc from their ‘British’ comrades to the American battalion).  Baxell also examines the grudgingly-tolerated affront to the volunteers’ egalitarian political idealism offered by a traditional, non-democratic army (the Brigades were part of the Spanish Republican Army). 

Unlikely Warriors is, however, primarily a work of oral history, and in this it excels by giving vivid, moving and honest voice to those who upended, and too often ended, their own lives in their attempt to save millions of others’ from fascism.

KLAUS FUCHS (Mike Rossiter) and KIM PHILBY (Ben Macintyre)

THE SPY WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: Klaus Fuchs and the Secrets of the Nuclear Bomb
MIKE ROSSITER
Headline, 2014, 344 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

BEN MACINTYRE
Bloomsbury, 2014, 352 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Klaus Fuchs has had a very bad press because the refugee German physicist who was at the heart of the war-time British and American nuclear bomb projects also passed on all their secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union.  There is, however, more to Fuchs than his depiction by conservative Cold Warriors as a reprehensible traitor, as can be gleaned from Mike Rossiter’s biography.

Fuchs came of political age during the rise of Nazism when he joined the German Communist Party (KPD) as the only effective resistance force to Hitler.  A fearless activist, Fuchs was once attacked by Hitler’s street thugs outside Keil University and thrown in a river, losing some teeth during the assault.

After Hitler’s power-grab, the KPD leadership sent their highly valuable young scientist to safety in Britain with a dual career as nuclear scientist and Soviet spy.  MI5, Britain’s domestic secret police, was unaware of Fuchs’ covert role and waved aside what they assessed as Fuchs’ ‘slight security risk’ for the sake of Britain’s greater nuclear good.   

A decrypted Soviet spy message, however, trained their gaze on Fuchs in 1949.  The evidence was scanty, vague and circumstantial, and, as MI5 would not want to reveal in court that it had cracked the Soviet’s secret espionage code, Fuchs would almost certainly have escaped prosecution.

Under gentlemanly interrogation by MI5, however, Fuchs volunteered a confession.  He may have developed doubts about the Soviet Union, and he was concerned about his colleagues, friends and family getting dangerously caught up in his MI5 investigation, but the inducement of immunity from prosecution, which was beyond MI5’s powers, in return for a confession was crucial.

Fuchs’ illegally obtained confession should have been ruled inadmissible as evidence in court but with Lord Chief Justice Goddard hearing the case, there was no way this rank conservative would obey legal niceties.  Nor was Goddard moved by the fact that Fuchs also effectively spied for Britain, his phenomenal memory transporting highly classified American nuclear weapons know-how, jealously-guarded from even US allies, back to Britain.

Washington, says Rossiter, knew that its nuclear weapons dominance “gave a significant advantage to the country that possessed it” in terms of geo-political power and it was not just the Soviet Union but also Britain which believed, as Labour’s Foreign Secretary put it, that ‘we could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly’ of the atomic bomb.

Tricked into a confession, Fuchs got fourteen years and served nine for good behaviour before returning to East Germany, becoming that neo-Stalinist state’s most senior nuclear physicist where he died in 1988, the year that also saw the death, in Moscow, of Kim Philby, another Soviet spy and as reflexively vilified, including by his latest biographer, Ben Macintyre. 

Like Fuchs, Philby moved from moderate laborist politics to communism in the 1930s after witnessing the brutality of fascism in Berlin.  An underground communist activist in quasi-fascist Austria, Philby returned to London and Cambridge University where his impeccable upper-crust family credentials made him a perfect choice for Soviet intelligence which was scouting for well-connected students at elite universities with good career prospects who could blend invisibly into the British establishment.

Reinvented under the guise of a keen young fascist and anti-communist, a role Philby found ‘deeply repulsive’ but compensated for by the romantic thrill of espionage, he joined MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, eventually rising to head up MI6’s anti-Soviet intelligence operations.

From this position, all activities of MI6, and of the CIA courtesy of “long boozy lunches” with the CIA head in Washington, found their way to the Soviet Union which Philby never wavered from seeing as the embodiment of his left-wing political values, despite Stalin’s Show Trials and deadly purges, including the liquidation of Philby’s early, cultured and still idealistic Soviet ‘handlers’.

For Philby, his spying meant helping to foil the West’s Cold War ‘roll-back’ strategy which centred on MI6 and CIA operations to destabilise the strong national communist movements in France, Italy and Greece, to repress anti-imperialist liberation struggles in Latin and Central America, South America and Asia, and to foment insurrection behind the Iron Curtain.

When exposure loomed for Philby, he, too, like Fuchs, was offered immunity from prosecution in return for a confession but, unlike in Fuchs’ case, leading MI6 officers wanted to avoid what would have been a massive, and career-ruining, spy scandal and they did nothing to prevent his midnight flit to Moscow in 1963.

Philby’s services to Soviet intelligence had meant the deaths of those he fingered – the armed anti-communist insurgents in Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine and other Soviet satellites; a would-be Soviet defector bearing the names of those spying for the Soviet Union in the West; and anti-Nazi but right-wing, anti-communist Catholic resistance activists in Hitler’s Germany.

Whilst Macintyre vents unalloyed disgust at Philby’s regret-free “killing for the communist cause”, he fails to summon such moral outrage for Britain’s war-time execution of Nazi spies (also a result of Philby’s ‘legitimate’ spy job), nor for the Western spy agencies’ vastly more numerous Cold War toll of peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and others in the developing world.  For Macintyre, some causes (such as “combating the communist menace”) apparently justify guilt-exempt, spy-induced murder.

Top-heavy on the what and how of spying (codewords, clandestine rendezvous, etc.) both books are underweight on the why (motives and principles) of Fuchs and Philby whose guilt is posed only at the level of breaching official secrets and treason laws.  True political guilt, however belongs to Stalin who was guilty of misleading the likes of Fuchs and Philby into a blind belief that Russia under the counter-revolutionary tyrant was socialist and therefore worth spying for.

In the spy’s micro-universe, Fuchs and Philby were isolated from public engagement as socialist activists working for a democratic, egalitarian and war-free world.  These were the revolutionary ideals that Fuchs and Philby started out with and for which, despite their misguided strategy, they remain guilty – and proudly so.