To Double Think
Even odder is the fact that people have not yet learnt that they cannot accept at face value the Communist account of any political case whatever. Over the years, trial after trial has reached the British left in a form given it by Communist mythology. Eventually, facts emerge disproving the fraud—over the Reichstag Trial, the Moscow Trials, Katyn, and almost any other one might mention. But the moral is never drawn. There is always a new myth or misrepre- sentation available. I happen to believe that the release of Ambatielos could do little harm and that Grimau should not in the circumstances have been executed—an action which Franco now appears to realise was, as Fouche said of the shooting of the Duc d'Enghien,worse than a crime, it was a blunder.' But before listening to outpourings about martyrdom from the left, I should require a certificate from the speaker proving that he had protested in the same terms about the unfairness of the trial of another Communist police chief, Beria, liquidated for crimes going back to 1919.
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