Centrepiece
Hell starts to freeze
Colin Welch
Long before the fall of Constantinople the Greek Phanariot community had made peace with their prospective con- querors. They regarded the Ottoman triumph as inevitable and (at least for them) tolerable. They accordingly offered their services to the conquerors, seeking in advance to reserve good posts for them- selves and perhaps to protect the interests of others under the new dispensation. If dishonourable, such hopes were not entire- ly unreasonable. Nor did Ottoman rule turn out to be totally oppressive. The Conquerors felt they had much to learn, retained many Byzantine institutions, res- pected religion, indeed governed to a great extent loosely and indirectly, using the Phanariots and church dignitaries to fix the Yoke on their new subjects and to render it bearable. If some Byzantines preferred them to the barbarian fellow-Christians Who had devastated the great city and Installed a whore on the high altar of Santa Sophia, who can altogether blame them? Yet I suppose that by acquiescing in and hastening on the apparently inevitable (which never is so), they played their sorry Part in a historical tragedy, an irrevocable mistake which has so far condemned the Greek world to four centuries of weeping. I owe this perception (I hope accurately summarised) to a remarkable unpublished monograph on the Phanariots and their role by an Hungarian refugee writer and scholar, whose name and address I lost in my lamented bag-snatch. Should he chance r0 read this, how glad I would be if he got In touch. Not only did he study the Phanariots in great depth but he also drew, without any straining of fact or interpreta- tuM, the most illuminating parallels with °lir own time. With an eye sharpened by experience of treachery and disaster, he saw all around us our own Phanariots Poking their heads out, sniffing the wind, Placing their bets, booking their comfort- able berths on what they see as the ship of the future, wondering inwardly when treason having prospered, will be no 1°nger treason. He discerned in them the nucleus of what will constitute, in the event our formal or informal subordination to Russia , a new ruling class, our own Doriots and Quislings, Kadars and Jaruzelskis, who can hardly be expected to view with abhorrence or to guard against dire and Perhaps imminent misfortunes, as we
would think them, which might hoist them up.
Lacking my friend's bitter insight, we in this country note these phenomena, if at with great reluctance. My friend was "ur, I think, fool enough to think that
Phanariotism embraces the whole of Labour (though it sometimes seems to), or that it is confined to Labour. But he would surely have been astonished by our reac- tions to the recent Labour defence docu- ment, which have ranged from derision ('absurd', Tory MPs) to baffled incredulity Chard to believe', the Times). Few have faced the possibility that the document is properly to be construed not as a dis- astrously naive, silly and inept shot at a defence policy but rather as a sophisticated and disingenuous recipe for surrender.
Even Mr Kinnock's position has been benignly misconstrued. Mr Leon Brittan has accused him of paying, for a trifling and evanescent victory about reselection, 'a heavy price' — to wit, 'a total cynical capitulation to the far Left on unilateral disarmament'. To Mr Heseltine this was 'a sell-out without precedent'. Heavy price? Cynical capitulation? Sell-out? Does Mr Kinnock see it so? All this abuse presup- poses that Mr Kinnock is 'certainly no neutralist', has a heart 'in the right place', would be 'sound' about defence if the Left would let him, will be when he has to be, greatly values our defence arrangements, Nato and the deterrent, and is only pre- pared 'cynically' to jeopardise them all in order to secure some party advantage. Very shocking even this, of course, if true, though not in Labour's annals unpre- cedented. Yet it utterly ignores the fact that Mr Kinnock has always been a nuclear disarmer, that 'the heavy price' paid is for him a burden lifted from his conscience, that he has 'Capitulated' gladly to his better self as he sees it and has 'sold out' what, so far from valuing, he abhors. He has not surrendered; he is approaching his goal.
In a fine article Peregrine Worsthorne warned against the temptation to dismiss the document as 'just a product of the silly season', like the Loch Ness monster. Labour contends, in his view, 'that West- ern Europe would be just as safe, if not safer, if it based its defence entirely on conventional weapons'. This nonsense he memorably exposes: how could a conven- tional Europe be safer, coveted by all, bombless in a world full of bombs, ex- cluded from all tables, Nato destroyed, the Americans gone, our conventional forces totally inadequate (as all such are in the nuclear age)?
Mr Worsthorne concedes that 'some sections of the Labour Party, far from regarding these results as objections to the policy, find them strong arguments in its favour'. Some think a weak Europe will always be safe, because Russia will for some reason never attack it. To say the
least, what Russia would do if' no longer deterred is debatable: her past record is not reassuring. To others the subjugation of Europe would not be wholly unwelcome or intolerable, preferable anyway to Amer- ican imperialism,.and perhaps 'inevitable' too, the highest commendation known to Marxists. To some the danger is non- existent, to others a blessing in disguise; neither can give a damn whether conven- tional defences would be effective or not.
Both categories are represented among the document's begetters. Mr Benn is insistent that Russia should not be 'de- picted' as posing an active threat. Mr Mortimer, party general secretary, a for- mer Young Communist, member of pros- cribed organisations and once said to read Trud every day in Russian, views the Russian Revolution as a 'momentous event in social progress', Russia's political ex- perience as 'irrelevant' and her economic achievement under communism as 'very great'. Mr Kitson, chairman of the working party which produced the docment, de- clared in Moscow in 1977 that it was 'pleasant to be in a country where the situation differs from the position at home, in a country . . . where there is a constant and unswerving growth in the living stan- dards of ordinary workers.' Long live the October Revolution,' he cried.
Only a lunatic would wittingly entrust the defence of our realm to such folk: yet Labour's lead in the polls is growing! The enormity of their views can be illustrated in two ways. One is by contemplating the nature, far worse than the Ottomans, of the Russian reality before which they now bow, as revealed not only by tormented writers of genius and by humbler witnesses innumerable but such startling 'achieve- ments', near unique in our day, as life expectancy rates falling in the USSR, death rates rising since the mid-Sixties and infant mortality rising by more than a third between 1971 and 1976. Is it that people like Mortimer and Kitson don't know or believe what is going on or — infinitely worse! — that they do know but don't care or, worse still, approve?
Why have Labour's 'moderates' not risen against this monstrous betrayal of what they are supposed to believe in? Why has Mr Shore been struck dumb? Is Mr Hattersley's capacity for self-deception perhaps infinite? He affects to regard as Labour's 'most positive commitment to the Nato alliance since Attlee and Bevin' proposals which would in fact destroy it. And Mr Healey? Will this 'robust intelli- gence' drain the poisoned cup? Hell will freeze first, he says — in private! If he takes the wrong path, alas, it will not be for the first time. His previous sojourn in the Ottoman tents was longer than he now implies, and more positively motivated. He joined the Communist Party supposedly because it opposed Hitler, stayed in it when it was for Hitler, was still under its spell after the war. If he moves left, will he in fact be going home, to his freezing hell?
Previous page
