Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Monday-Morning Quarterbacking The Use of Nazis In The Cold War

I'm currently watching a show on the History Channel about the use of Nazis after WWII in the intelligence service. A ton of people on the program, until the last five minutes of the show, are saying about how horrible it is that we used all these bad people. One New York congresswoman seems particularly disturbed.

I'm sorry if I'm mean or something. But these complaints are naive, and they are the type of complaints that can only be made comfortably in hindsight.

Communists were very bad people. Nazis were very bad people. When the Nazis were the main threat, we worked with Stalin. When Stalin was the main threat, we worked with former Nazis. Are any of the above people complaining about working with Stalin?

This kind of thinking brought us the Toricelli amendment, which prevented intelligence services from recruiting bad people. We are not going to be recruiting choir boys to infiltrate Al Queda.

It's an imperfect world. Sometimes you got to deal with bad people to prevent an even greater evil