Every once in a while you read something that is so stunning that at first you think you’ve misread it. Such an article ran yesterday in Foreign Policy Journal. The article, The Berlin Wall – Another Cold War Myth, by aged commie William Blum,

is a masterpiece of the dishonesty and balderdash that Western communists have always used to obscure their support for slavery and genocide. What are those myths?

Myth #1: The Wall was built to keep East Germans in.

Commie truth: West Berlin had it coming.

The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.”

Myth #2: Commies were bad.

Commie truth: West Berlin had coming.

During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

…

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, conservative coldwarriors, in one of their Cold War International History Project Working Papers (#58, p.9) states: “The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR [East Germany] to massive espionage and subversion and, as the two documents in the appendices show, its closure gave the Communist state greater security.”

The Berlin Wall was not brought on by the daily commute of a few thousand skilled workers into West Berlin. The Wall was a direct response to the fact that the open border with West Berlin had enabled an estimated 3.5 million East Germans from other areas to escape to freedom. This did not make Uncle Joe’s communist Eden look very good. Once the Wall was established it created a virtual free-fire zone on the EAST GERMAN side of the border where nearly 200 people were killed trying to “commute” to West Berlin.

There is no doubt that West Berlin was a locus for Western espionage activities throughout the Cold War.  But there is more to the story than he admits. Blum’s entire fanatasy of the Berlin Wall ignores the fact that the East Germans wanted nothing to do with the USSR. Throughout the Soviet occupation of Germany, rape was endemic. East Germans rebelled against the communist puppet state in 1953 and it was brutally suppressed by the USSR and East German lackeys.

Blum may or not be an idiot. But he thinks his readers are. For instance, he blames the United States for the division of Germany.

It should be further noted that the division of Germany into two states in 1949 – setting the stage for 40 years of Cold War hostility – was an American decision, not a Soviet one.

Like so many lies by the communists and Democrats this has a kernel of truth. Throughout the Cold War the Soviets and their fellatistos, like the Blum character, painted every decision by the United States and the West as an aggressive action against the USSR. The Federal Republic of Germany was created in 1949 because it was obvious that the USSR had ambitions beyond its borders. When divided Korea was supposed to have elections in 1947, Russia refused to allow them in its sector because it was certain it wouldn’t like the outcome and, besides, The People had already spoken. Little surprise that when the USSR proposed elections throughout Germany, the Allies were more than a little skeptical of Stalin’s motives. This has become a shibboleth of the American Left. Likewise, the American Left portrays the creation of the Warsaw Pact as a reaction to the North Atlantic Treaty. NATO was formed by free nations to establish mutual defense. The USSR had no need of such a treaty as they had complete control of client regimes.

This particular lie was really an attention grabber:

Finally, it must be remembered, that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union to wipe out Bolshevism forever, and that the Russians in World War I and II lost about 40 million people because the West had used this highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after World War II the Soviet Union was determined to close down the highway.

For a moment I checked the byline because it looked like Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias had been allowed to write unmedicated yet again.

If one forgets about the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the rape of Poland, the annexation of the Baltic States, the fall of France, Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain, then this could be construed as having some basis in reality. Otherwise, you have to conclude that Blum is one of the most blatant, careless, and unskilled liars to have ever sold his soul to serve communism.