Another voice
Thin green line
Auberon Waugh Earlier this week, I saw a most amazing sight. It happened a few hundred yards from my French abode, on a track which runs between the village of Montmaur and the village of St Paulet, in the department of the Aude. St Paulet is memorable for the fact that the Duke of Wellington billeted himself there for a time on his way back from the Peninsular campaign. A small British cemetery in the neighbouring village of Les Casses holds the mortal remains of his soldiers who died during the stay— officially from cholera, although I would not be surprised to learn that the real reason was the local cassoulet, a bean and pork stew which often produces similar symp- toms to cholera among British visitors. The castle where Wellington stayed is now the summer residence of my very good friend the Prince de la Tour d'Auvergne. I tell you all this not as an explanation for what occurred, merely as background informa- tion.
Rather than keep everyone in suspense, I suppose I had better reveal what l saw. Briefly, I saw not one but three chains of caterpillars walking in a straight line, nose to tail, of which the longest chain was three metres long. This measurement is plainly approximate, and I do not really know why I give it in metres. It was three large strides in length. As a matter of fact, I have always been puzzled, since yards and metres are plainly the basic unit of measurement and derive from the length of a human stride, why Latins, with their low-slung bottoms and short legs, prefer the larger unit. Prob- ably there is some simple explanation. But it is not in order to discuss the metric sys- tem that I draw attention to the extraordin- ary sight of the caterpillars—in fact the piece of the evidence about low-slung bot- toms is my only contribution to the raging debate. I gabble in this neurotic way out of a terror that I may be disbelieved when I say I saw three yards or metres of caterpil- lars walking nose to tail in a straight line on a lonely path in the Languedoc. If it helps, I might add that my wife saw it too, who is a Protestant and generally sober.
I can offer no explanation for this pheno- menon, and I was unable, at the time, to think of any relevance it might have to the burning crises of the day (except possibly the metric debate) when I came to write about it. How could one link it to the stirrings of counter-revolution or the glori- ous reactionary movements of our time ? An old peasant woman whom we questioned said that yes, she too had seen such a sight in her youth. She believed that the cater- pillars live inside a sort of gigantic white football which hangs from the branch of a tree until the football bursts, when they all drop to the ground and form into long, straight, shuddering lines. We asked why they behave in this way. The old lady waved her hand around, then puffed through her fine Gunner moustaches. 'Eh be.' Elles changent de location', she explained.
Not quite what Russian Jews can do very easily nowadays, is it, eh ? Geddit? But per- haps I should pause before taking the op- portunity to write at great length about the plight of Russian Jews. This is partly be- cause unlike my controversial friend Patrick Marnham I know little or nothing about the subject. It is also partly because, broad- minded as I am in other ways, I must admit I find myself slightly appalled by the thought of a thin green line of Bernard Levins crawl- ing nose to bottom in a single file which stretches all the way from Kiev to Liver- pool, waiting to burst upon the London scene and scold us poor, bewildered natives if we are caught laughing at the wrong sort of joke.
"It makes a change from flat racing" Another consideration might be that out of all the brutality inflicted on the Russian people by their bestial socialist system, the sufferings of Russian Jews seem to have been fairly well publicised in the West. Plainly, it is a shocking and beastly thing that Russian Jews are not allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Israel if they want to do so, and it is even worse that they are persecuted for trying. But this is surely only a small part of a tyranny where every Rus- sian citizen requires not only an internal passport but also official permission to move from one town to another inside the Soviet Union—permission which is as likely as not to be refused if the request does not conform to some official order of priorities. The horrors of Russian society—and of
the sort of society which the working classes will inflict on this country if they are given the chance—are not best described by this continual harping on injustices done to the Jews. Many people may be left with the impression that this is no more than a slightly eccentric prejudice on the part of the Soviet authorities, instead of seeing it as a small part of the almost universal oppres- sion which necessarily results from apply- ing socialist ideology to government, and more particularly from allowing the work- ing class to seize control of its own destiny.
An even greater error in all this agonising about the fate of Soviet Jews is to suppose that there exists a force—call it liberalism, compassion, a sense of fairness, decency, even simple goodness—which can usefullY be pitted against the forces of tyranny in the modern world. In the days of kings, when kings were at any rate instructed in the Christian religion, it might have been possi- ble to catch the conscience of a king. In the days of power exercised by secretive, fright- ened committees representing and answer- able to all the stupidity, greed, laziness, improvidence and brutal insensitivity which emerge when you distil the essence of popu- list materialism, there is no such conscience to be caught.
If I am right, the war against stupidity and oppression cannot be fought in terms of good and evil because, in a materialist, proletarian society, this concept of good- ness has no purchase. It can be fought m materialist terms, by pointing out that the working class is liable to be more prosper- ous in a bourgeois society than it is in a proletarian one, but if the history of our times proves a single point it is surely that the stupidity and improvidence of the work- ing class have greater force than its most intelligent assessment of its own self-inter- est.
In other words, the correct way to see modern history is in terms of the class struggle, as Marxists see it. If I am some- times boring and repetitive in my constant harking back to a class analysis of every weekly topic, this is precisely because it seems to be a totally neglected area, except on the left, although I must admit that Mr Worsthorne sometimes dips his toe into the water when the censors allow him to do so. Neither Levin, with his humble origin and fine liberal indignation, nor Solzhenitsyn, with his magnificent religious faith, touches upon it at all. Yet it is surely the battle in which We should all be engaged. We can fight the encroachment of proletarian values in the schools, we can fight it in the arts, we can— and should—fight it over the ruins of the House of Commons. Perhaps this is not what the caterpillars had in mind when they set out on their journey across the Langue- doc countryside, but it is one of the risks of living exempt from public haunt, as the Duke remarks in As You Like It, that visa- ing philosophers are liable to use you for their sermons and bizarre reflections on life.
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