The great intellectual crime
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
The most remarkable piece of journalism last week was the comment of the Morning Star on the Greek plebiscite. The Greek plebiscite was, of course, rigged, as many plebiscites have been rigged in Greece and elsewhere, but, despite the law, about a quarter of the Greek electorate refused to vote and 7.3 per cent actually voted against the junta's constitution. The Morning Star, naturally, is indignant : `So the claim by the Greek fascist junta that Sun- day's vote has endorsed its rule is as phoney as the referendum it engineered.'
I can fully understand the Morning Star's indignation. As riggers of plebiscites, the Greek colonels are incompetents, as most professional soldiers are in political matters. Could we doubt that if the Greek communist armed take- over bid in 1944-45 or the later bid (run largely from Yugoslavia) which produced the Truman doctrine had succeeded, there would have been far better plebiscites organised with something like 99.5 per cent of the free Greek population welcoming the new democratic government backed by Tito and Stalin? Like good profes- sionals, the apparatchiks of King Street must be shocked at the incompetence of the fascist beasts now ruling Athens. I was very pleased to see that one delegate to the Labour con- ference, Mr Padley, pointed out that the troops enforcing order in Athens were, in fact, Greek troops and not troops brought in from the outside as in Prague; the distinction is worth making. After all, did not the most popular 'Briton' in Greek history, whom I understand the Greeks call Veeron, comment on this phenomenon when he wrote that `. . . Our tyrants then Were still at least our countrymen'?
This reminds me of Mr Robert Conquest's new book on the first of Stalin's terrors which reveals the greatest trahison des clercs and bourrage de crane in modern history, a con- spiracy joined in by many eminent and officially virtuous people to suppress unpleasant truths and, in some cases, to tell positive lies about the character of the Soviet Union. I have bought, but I have not yet read, Mr Conquest's book, but he has in a short article in Encounter actually named some of the guilty parties. We are now getting the usual evasive stories that nobody knew about the character of the Stalin terror till Khrushchev's speech to the twentieth congress. This, of course, is totally untrue. There was already a great deal of evidence about it available to anyone with natural curiosity before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Russian experts who refused to comment on this or notice it or denied that it existed were just as plausible as Hans Baldur von Schirach was on Tv when he denied any knowledge of the 'final solution.' Herr von Schirach was a liar; so were some eminent com- mentators on Russia, including a friend of mine.
Some of the worst offenders are odd. There were the two Webbs. I have always thought that Mrs Webb displayed far more beauty than brains. She seemed to me to have many of the faults and I suppose (as Kitty Mug- geridge has reminded us) some of the virtues of Lady Astor. Both were arrogant, spoiled, rich women whose opinions I never thought worth taking seriously. There is in Mr Con- quest's article and in his book a really nauseating example of Mrs Webb's com- placency about other people's troubles when she compares favourably the Russian trials, where sensible guilty people confess, with the long run-around given by the alleged liberties defended by English law: no Habeas Corpus nonsense for Mrs Webb!
I was always more sympathetic to Sidney, who was much more intelligent than his wife. Graham Wallas once told me that Sidney Webb, if he had not fallen into the hands of 'that Potter woman,' would have been per- fectly content to go on as a second division civil servant, rising by mere seniority to a respectable job and a respectable pension, eating up statistics as his mental food and writing an occasional intelligent pamphlet. Instead of that, he was elevated into a kind of guru by uncritical people and buried with his wife in Westminster Abbey by his equally credulous nephew-by-marriage Stafford Cripps. It is possible, since all authors are vain, that a great deal of the odious credulity and plain mendacity of the Webbs' account of Soviet Russia came from the fact that Lenin had trans- lated one of their books. A man who could do that could not be wholly bad.
The role of Shaw in this bourrage de crane was typical. He was a man of most extravagant vanity and would do anything to attract atten- tion by uttering real and bogus paradoxes and, indeed, plain lies. He once asserted that Stalin was 'a simple party official liable to dismissal at five minutes' notice.' The New Statesman, like the Manchester Guardian under C. P. Scott, was particularly guilty of at any rate very serious suppressions of the truth. Suppressions of the truth in a good cause are apparently all right. One problem is that these suppres- sions may keep foolish people from discover- ing what is going on in the world. For example, the reaction of the left to the Spanish civil war was made extremely muddled and perhaps less helpful to the Spanish Republic than it might have been if there had been less mendacity and censorship by the enlightened press.
I was a supporter of the Spanish Re- public, although I did not go to the university city to shake my fist at the fascist beasts as so many other militants did. But I at least knew that the Spanish civil war was a Spanish civil war, which had its roots in Spanish history far anteceding any Russian revolution, and that probably it would be settled by the Spaniards in a Spanish way, as, in fact, it was. Yet I can remember attending a meeting in Oxford Town Hall after it was obvious that the Spanish Republic was collapsing—indeed, after I myself had sailed in the same ship as General Miaja, the last Republican commander of Madrid, from Algiers to Marseilles—and was forced to listen to an ex-member of the International Brigade asserting that the Republic had still a good chance of surviving, for Barcelona would hold out to the last. Later, I had occa- sion more than once to discuss the last days in Barcelona with the great surgeon Trueta, and I got a very different picture of the last days of Barcelona from him.
The same ex-member of the International Brigade, in reply to a question, asserted that every parish priest in Spain had had a machine- gun in his church tower, and that was why it was necessary to liquidate so many parish priests. He also advanced the plausible, but dangerous, theory that the hatred of the Spanish peasantry for the clergy was itself a final condemnation of the clergy. I was, and indeed am, inclined to believe that this is true, but I did wonder whether people with different sentiments from my own might not say the same thing about anti-semitism as proving something about the Jews? In the audience, during this piece of assurance and, indeed, base propaganda, were several left-wing priests, including a very learned Jesuit partisan of the Republic. I thought that the Republicans' cham- pion was making superfluous difficulties for it.
But anyway from the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin (naturally not foreseen by any of our deep thinkers), it was necessary to lie about the Soviet Union if it was to be 'the last best hope of earth.' Sometimes the people who told the lies were intrinsically credulous people: Henry Wallace in America, Harold Laski in England. Some were people who had invested too much of their life in the goodness of Russia, like Professor Bernard Pares, whom I used to see very often, who could not begin to believe that things had gone badly wrong since the days of the first Duma. And there was a great deal of that vicarious militancy which goes so easily to the literary head.
Again and again, the question put by Bar- nave after some of the atrocious massacres of the French Revolution, 'And was this blood so pure?' was put when the Poles, White Rus- sians, Lithuanians and all kinds of Christians were persecuted, when Polish government leaders were kidnapped and murdered in Mos- cow in 1945, when the murderers murdered each other. And all this time we had been told of the great legal improvements wrought by that eminent legal thinker Mr Vyshinsky, and asked to avert our eyes from the other legal activities that marked Comrade Vyshinsky as the Fouquier-Tinville of the Russian Revolution.
So when, at Blackpool last week, the Prime Minister appealed, I think sincerely and rightly, to the tradition of the Labour movement, as distinct from the Labour party, in defence of his policy, his appeal was weakened by the fact that, for so long, so many members of the Labour party, some of them concealed communists, had supported and praised this odious tyranny and denied that it existed. A great debate should now begin about the role of the intellectuals in this great intellectual crime, and there are a great many deep thinkers who would be well advised to keep their mouths shut instead of trying to explain now how and why they were so gullible right up to the twentieth party congress.
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