Frances Stonor Saunders’s new London Review of Books piece on Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s file at MI5 is well worth reading, but it ends with an odd coda:

The two sides in the Cold War, finding each other irresistible, ended up in a contrapuntal relationship where, as George Urban put it, “they marched in negative step, but in step all the same.” They had their spies, we had ours. They had their files, we had ours. True, we didn’t have gulags. But what kind of democracy is it that congratulates itself on not having gulags?

Never mind the dragnet surveillance, the burglaries, the smearing of reputations, the bugging of public telephone boxes, cafés, hotels, banks, trade unions, private homes, all this legitimised by the thesis that everyone is a potential subversive until proven otherwise — the problem is that the defenders of the realm took on the symptoms of the disease they were meant to cure.

Somehow, in other words — and despite adopting similar methods — the West during the Cold War occupied a morally elevated position. Stonor Saunders hints that this is so because the “disease” — an Eastern Bloc with contrary geopolitical goals — antedated its Western “cure.” But the methods of control, surveillance, and repression listed by Stonor Saunders had all been pioneered in the capitalist world.