This misses the point of the books. The question isn't whether the Soviets are morally equivalent to the west; it's whether foreign intelligence services were anything more than state-sponsored organized crime syndicates.
I wasn't talking about any book, that I haven't read anyway, just making a distinction, nitpicking if you prefer it that way, about a specific paragraph.
In it, photochemsyn states that you don't know who the good guys were, citing different episodes of the cold war, comparing it to WW2, somehow suggesting that there's a difference because Hitler was clearly bad.
But that's not how I see it. The "good guys" side of WW2 involved the URSS (and only because they were attacked, after breaking Mólotov-Ribbentrop) and at a least morally ambiguous measures like bombing civilians in Germany and Japan. So neither in the goals nor in the means I see so big of a difference.
The point of the comment is that Fleming provided a nicer narrative than Le Carré so it was prefered for political reasons.
Fleming, in the article, pretty much says that he doesn't care much about politics, that he wrote for his own pleasure and the readers'. Saying that spy agencies promoted Fleming's work is unsubstantiated. I've seem weirder, like the CIA supporting abstract expresionists, but anyway it seems more likely that Fleming was successful just because it was entertaining. Le Carré was also very successful, so no need to create a war there.
This point is unrelated to the one I made. But the preceding commenter didn't make up the fact that le Carré drew flak from the British IC; that's one of the most often-told stories about him.
For instance (first thing off the SERP, didn't dig deeper):
Not totally unfamilliar, I've probably seen some movie based on his books... I remember hearing about his troubles, maybe when he passed away.
BTW, I wouldn't need to read Tarantino's book. I watched the original sources at that time, and we had Bond in the same bag as Wang Yu, Trinidad or Bruce Lee, even if we were teens.
So I totally believe that Le Carré had a bad time, but Fleming wasn't really in the same genre to function as an antidote.
Oh, I agree that they aren't antidotes to each other. But: the moral dilemma in le Carré's work is nowhere nearly as simple as you make it out to be, and it's interesting to hear Tarantino say which movies he stole things from, and why he paid so much attention to them, and which 9 movies those movies drew from. It's a fun read.
