MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN a club in London a few days ago I got into trouble for saying that I felt sorry for Klaus Fuchs. Such was the indignation aroused by my remark that, had I been a member rather than a guest, I might have been asked to withdraw my name. It was one of the respectable clubs, the members of which are no longer very young, no longer addicted to paradox, but inclined to exchange with each other emphatic but correct opinions in the great gaunt rooms. The moment I had made my remark, I regretted that it had slid through the barrier of my teeth. My host, I could see, was much embarrassed by my tactlessness ; his hand trembled a little as he stretched it out towards the ash-tray. There were two other men present at our table. The older one was evidently a person of powerful self-control ; although he coloured rapidly, he spoke in tones of sorrow rather than of anger. He said that he could not understand how one could excuse the actions of a man who had been granted asylum in this country, who worked with his colleagues on terms of equality and friendship, and who over a period of seven years could consistently betray both his adopted country and the team with l which he worked. I had to admit the force of this indictment ; I had to admit that the treachery we were considering had been cold, clandestine and prolonged ; I confessed that one of the most unpleasant features of the trial had been the manner in which the defendant had sought to give to it the abject atmosphere of confession and repentance which so shocks us in police States. But I contended that, although I did not for one moment doubt that absolute justice had been done, there were certain mitigating circumstances which aroused my sympathy. The regret expressed by Fuchs appeared to me sincere: he had not acted from motives of personal gain: and he seemed to be one of those exceptional individuals whose brain had developed at the expense of his mind, leaving the latter in a rudimentary state. The fourth man at the table could not stomach this observation ; he rose and left us, flushed of face ; the sibilants of "sissy sentimentalist" seemed to whizz in the air.
* * * * I was sorry indeed that I had made so indefensible a remark in such a place. Having started off on so wrong a foot, it was impossible for me to justify or even explain in inteflectual terms a statement which had been prompted by emotional impulse. Yet it is, in fact, possible to explain, although not to excuse, the processes by which a young man, having once been infected by Marxist fanaticism, can come to repudiate all moral obligations. A Communist is taught that the only criterion of right acticin is the degree to which it assists the cause of world revolution. He is taught that all former moral theories are the product of the economic stage which society has reached at any particular epoch ; and that, to quote Engels, he must "reject every attempt to impose any moral dogma as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable law." "Morality," wrote Lenin, "is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society. . . . We do not believe in an eternal morality." It is this amoral basis of Russian Communism which has in the end alienated the sympathies of such intelligent persons as Andre Gide, Stephen Spender and John Strachey, who were at first attracted by its economic doctrine. It leads, as Professor Laski has written, to "deception, ruthlessness, contempt of fair play, willingness to use lying and treachery to gain some desired end and complete dishonesty in the presentation of facts." In the writings of Marx himself we can detect, as Mr. Carew Hunt has pointed out, an anomaly between Marx the scientist and Marx the philosopher. It is interesting to speculate how far the Communist theory would have developed differently if it had first been established in an advanced society and not been twisted into strange shapes by the Slays and Mongols, by the Turanians and Samoyedes.
* * * * Those of us who have been nurtured in the Graeco-Roman- Christian tradition can agree at moments that certain ethical habits
and injunctions may, in fact, be due to contemporary social con- ditions and do not therefore deserve to be regarded or revered as transcendental. But for us there must always remain certain principles which lie at the foundation of human society and which no man can repudiate without grave damage to his own individuality. Untruthfulness, for instance, is evil always, every- where absolutely. Cruelty, fdr instance, is evil always, everywhere, absolutely. However much a man may believe in social justice, however much he may be enamoured of a classless society, he must remain convinced, unless he possesses a disordered or a Scythian mind, of these absolutes. It is in their denial of these and other absolutes that the Russians and the Nazis have run counter to such ethical advances as homo sapiens has been able to achieve in the last three thousand years. The terrible moral regressions which we have witnessed in our own lifetime (such as the reintroduction of massacre, torture and slave labour as political acts) cannot be justified by what Marx called "the concrete human situation" or explained as necessary products of existing conditions of produc- tion. Were we for one instant to admit such reservations, we should be denying the whole dignity of man. But all this does not mean that one is wicked, or even very foolish, in feeling sorry for Klaus Fuchs.
* * * * Should any Communist happen to read this page he will grin derisively at so sad an exposition of the bourgeois mind. But there are other and more mundane circumstances which rendered the Fuchs case so tragically interesting. Here, in fact, was information which it was very important for a foreign government to acquire ; in most of the spy-stories which I have read I have been unable to resist the impression that the secret documents to be abstracted, stolen or photographed can scarcely have been worth the risk. During the twenty years that I was a member of the Foreign Service no document ever came into my possession which was worth more than £75 or so to any foreign government. In military, naval and armament affairs there are, I suppose, many secrets which a potential enemy would much like to acquire. But the "diplomatic secret" is almost entirely a myth invented by the writer of stories about intrigue in high society. We now know that one of the servants in the British Embassy in Rome was an agent of the Fascist Government and that he regularly communicated to Ciano and Mussolini copies of the despatches which our Ambassadors sent to the Foreign Office. Did they acquire any benefit from the perusal of such reports ? None whatsoever. The only effect of such espionage is to create distrust on the part of a Foreign Secre- tary in regard to the Ambassadors and Ministers with whom he has to negotiate. And since mutual confidence is the basis of all sound diplomacy, this petty prying can only have a deleterious effect It is bad for the intelligence to open other people's letters.
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I have always been amused moreover by the meagreness of the bribes which, in the spy-stories of Mr. Oppenheim and othecs, are offered for the betrayal of diplomatic secrets. An embassy attaché is offered £500 in notes for the text of some treaty ; for a moment his soul and mind reel under the impact of so tremendous a temptation ; he resists it nobly, and in the end marries the lady and lives happily ever after. But what diplomatic secret was ever worth £500? And what attaché would ever risk his career and even life for so paltry a sum ? I have thus been bored hitherto by spy- stories since they bear no relevance to the facts. The Fuchs case changes all this ; on the one hand we have a secret of real magni- tude; on the other hand an inducement and a motive which are not material or despicable but insidious, invisible, compelling and destructive of all ethical values. The dread virus enters the blood, the character is altered and the mind bemused. The most efficient counter-espionage service on earth must find it difficult to detect and cope with such infiltrations.
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