Sleight of hand
ilidePendent Czechoslovakia came into being sixty years ago. This year sees too the anniversary of three other ei.vents in that country's short and melancholy history: the wlw lauch agreement of 1938, which effectively prepared the „aY for Hitler's seizure the following year; the Soviet coup u_11948; and the later Soviet invasion of 1968. Of the three AultlY. the last is being widely commemorated, which is paranlcal. For it was the events of 1938 and 1948 which really demonstrated the key to Czech history, the lack of ability or hwill on the part of the western democracies to defend what ,TV been the one liberated democracy in eastern Europe. illere is another paradox. The 1968 invasion is being ii3.11tmemorated by the Left more conspicuously than by the thigh t. This is an interesting example of the way in which .Left has appropriated the tide of resentment against '1)(Iviet tyranny. There is for example, a Committee to :fend Czechoslovak Socialists. Few people pause to 2nder why there is no committee to defend Czech con'cry,,at.ives or liberals. is, 1 his shows how far we have come in accepting the social sleight of hand. Time and again when the case of some ;iseissiclent within the Soviet block is discussed it is emphaserod that the victim is a 'good socialist', or even a!loyal dniarnunisr. Letter-writers to the papers profess their fun74;1111ental sympathy towards Soviet Russia before crawlsthgA. s°111e particular example of tyranny. The whole tenor of in-tla,rgument is to suggest that any failings or inhumanities dame Communist system are incidental rather than fun illental; and that Communism 'is here to stay. pr ut ls this so? And does the Left have any moral right to pacnest against Soviet barbarism? An article in a left-wing P,e,r emphasises that 'the human rights movement in ar-J,c;1°slovakia is socialist': and indeed the title of the r,fe.le. claims that 'Prague still waits for socialism'. The _Fuess. ibility is not considered that Prague has already got rovia1.1sM. That is, after all, what the rulers of Czechoscallap,kja Claim. Mussolini called himself a Fascist; Hitler Naju himself a Nazi, or rather, and more interestingly, a flat Socialist. Their claim to these titles is not dis puted. Mr Brezhnev and his colleagues, and their associates in the Iron Curtain countries, call themselves socialists and their countries socialist societies. Perhaps they mean what they say.
The question is raised in a different way by the campaigns to rehabilitate those Communist leaders such as Bukharin who fell victim to Stalin. In fact, of the twentytwo men who formed the Bolshevik committee that organised the 1917 Russian revolution, no less than seventeen were subsequently killed by Stalin. Of course, they were innocent of the charges laid against them in the preposterous show trials that Stalin organised. But were they innocent men in a more general sense? Bukharin and Radek helped create the monstrous system which finally devoured them. In a sense their fate was of their own making. Sympathy should be felt for anyone incarcerated or murdered by despotism, but some are more deserving of sympathy than others; and those who resolutely opposed communism before falling victim to it are more to be pitied than those who supported it. It is not a coincidence that every state, which has called itself socialist has been brutally authoritarian. Nor is it a coincidence that such political parties as the Labour Party, or the west Eurdpean social democrats, which are basically humane and democratic, are not really socialist at all. In the early days of the Soviet Union Shaw described the essence of socialism as being compulsory labour, enforced as a last resort by the death penalty. This is an adequate working definition, even when it is not taken to the extremes now witnessed in Cambodia. Socialism, if it has any meaning at all, must mean equality and fraternity under duress.
That is why there can be no 'socialism with a human face', in the phrase used during Mr Dubcek's brief relaxation of the more extreme aspects of communist authoritarianism. It is why the claims of socialism are as fraudulent when made in the name of Trotsky — a brutal tyrant if ever there was one — as of Stalin. And it is why the Soviet rulers were quite right; in their own terms, to send the tanks into Prague ten years ago.
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