ANOTHER VOICE
Do we want them all to be as rich as we are?
AUBERON WAUGH
n this still uncelebrated area of the Languedoc to which I first came in 1963 when I was looking for somewhere inex- pensive to write a novel, the news from Russia excited very little interest — about as much as the arrest of the Jeremy Thorpe gang in 1978, which gave us earlier cause for rejoicing in the isolated farmhouse to which the Waugh family has repaired annu- ally ever since.
In the context, there seems to be some- thing rather admirable in this lack of inter- est in world affairs. Farmers of the Laura- gais, Corbieres and Roussillon will turn out to demonstrate violently against any reduc- tion in farm prices, but that seems to be the limit of their political concern. Could any approach be more sensible? In the 28 years I have been coming here, the life of the farmers has improved beyond recognition. Where once our next-door neighbour spent the whole day watching his six cows grazing in a field, he now produces redundant cere- als at such a rate that for the last six years he has seriously entertained the thought of taking a holiday in England and coming to call on us in Somerset. Where once the farmers' wives gathered over the cold stream running through the village wash house, they now drink coffee together in houses buzzing with every sort of electrical device. Where once they slept over their animals, with rats running over their beds. . . . The lady who cleans the house for us now has a swimming pool in her gar- den.
The decorous prosperity of the Langue- doc may not be reflected in the horrors of French industrial prosperity to the north, but it is surely symptomatic of the way prosperity has crept up on us all in the West, almost unnoticed and certainly with- out great effort on our part, in the course of my own adulthood. The English popula- tion, no less than that of France, is now richer and freer than it has ever been. In the entire history of the world there has never been so much freedom and affluence for so many. About thirty million of us have the use of a motor car into which we can climb at any hour of the day or night, and drive wherever we want, subject only to the constraints of having to earn a living. Moan as the minnies may, our current standards of freedom and prosperity would have seemed unbelievable even 30 years ago.
Perhaps it was a similar lack of interest about foreign affairs which helped keep the Soviet peasant and factory worker in igno- rance of what was happening in the rest of the world. Perhaps the average Russian peasant and factory worker share the same deep hatred of freedom which we see in the great Russian thinkers from Dostoevsky to Solzhenitsyn, although it is hard to imagine he shares the same hatred of prosperity as Soilzhenitsyn. But at last I think I under- stand what has been happening in the Sovi- et Union since the death of Brezhnev, and at last I can understand that the thing we should be marvelling about is not that the stifling authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union should suddenly be lifted, but that it should have been allowed to continue for so long.
Politicians, we may safely observe, have no great interest in ideology (what they absurdly refer to as their 'principles'), only in feeding their sick urge to exercise power, whether they call themselves Conservatives, Liberals or, like Mr Hattersley, socialist. The function of the CPSU was no more and no less than to provide the means for the leadership to exert authority. As such, it was always expendable whenever any alter- native means of imposing the same degree of discipline presented itself. Because socialism offers the duddest of dud eco- nomic prospectuses, it was necessary to keep the entire Soviet Union in ignorance of its abject poverty visa vis the rest of the developed world. Stalin achieved this by imprisoning any Soviet citizen who had been abroad, even if his only glimpse of abroad had been the inside of a German prisoner of war camp. Stalin's successors achieved it by feeding the Soviet Union a steady diet of lies about conditions in the free world and by preventing its citizens from communicating any alternative per- ception: simple duplicating machines were kept under lock and key, let alone photo- copying machines or faxes which were no sooner invented than effectively forbidden throughout the Soviet Union.
This was all designed to keep the Great Secret, which a child of nine could see for himself, that socialism is against human nature and does not work. My point is that there was no need to keep this secret, or to maintain the Great Lie that it might work, one day, in certain circumstances. The CPSU could easily have been converted into a Jesus movement, a Joggers or Ram- blers association or some organisation to protect the Birds of Russia, Any of these would have been equally effective (bol- stered by the same apparatus of privilege) as the Communist Party, and would have involved much less elaborate deceit.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that there is a strain of high intelligence within the Russian soul which rejects not only freedom but also prosperity. Who are we to decide it is wrong? I see no obvious reason why we should rejoice at the col- lapse of socialism in Russia, except that it confirms what we have always said about socialism. Do we really wish to see the whole of the Soviet Union and China as prosperous in 30 years' time as we are now?
A few years ago I complained bitterly when, having eventually reached the Great Wall of China, I found it swarming with German, Dutch, Swedish, Belgian, Japanese and American tourists, -14 deep, all jabbering or bellowing at each other. In the age of mass travel, I decided, the time had come to stay at home. Fortunately, the grotesque overcharging of the British hotel trade keeps foreign visitors down to man- ageable proportions in the present, but every site of beauty or interest in the West Country now swarms with fellow citizens from the north of England, all moaning to go to the lavatory.
Affluence is a wonderful thing, and so is freedom, but both are self-frustrating beyond a certain point. It is a question of which is the greater good, the greater evil. My own little corner of the Languedoc has not yet been spoiled, but one reads about the sort of Brits settling in Provence, and one fears the worst. There can be no ques- tion that democracy will always choose the path of more prosperity: these revolting people will always want more foreign holi- days, more houses in Provence, more English beauty spots to ruin. Perhaps Dos- toevsky and Solzhenitsyn were right to hate freedom as the devil hates holy water. I am not, of course, urging that we should impose a Lenin-style terror or even that we should hand over the reins of government to Hattersley and Kaufman. Democratic prosperity has within itself the seeds of its own frustration without recourse to such desperate measures. But perhaps we should join our voices to the moronic chorus beg- ging Mr Major to spend more money on the health service to 'invest in the future' with massive expenditure on mechanical teaching aids for Britain's kiddie-widdies.
Previous page
