Killing fields
From Mr Joseph Askew Sir: Simon Carr's critique of Martin Amis ('Stalin was had — shock', 24 August) was both a welcome and an interesting piece on the fascination that Western intellectuals have with mass murderers. However, in my opinion, it does not go far enough. To claim that the desire for a perfect society is why so many people were willing to forgive so much cannot explain away this sort of behaviour. After all, Western intellectuals stop supporting mass murderers when they stop murdering, not when they stop having Utopian dreams.
When China rejected the Gang of Four and ceased the grosser forms of humanrights abuses, the Chinese communists did not stop being committed communists. They just became more careful about the means they used. Yet by 1980 the majority of those in the West who had supported the Cultural Revolution turned on the Chinese Communist party. The Soviet Union, down to Gorbachev, remained committed to the perfect society, but when, in the 1970s, dissidents were allowed to speak without being immediately shot, most Western intellectuals abandoned their love of Stalinism. Even Pol Pot, universally praised and adored by Western specialists, was viciously attacked only after he fell from power.
The answer is surely that Western intellectuals support the murderers, not the Utopian dreams. The desire for a perfect society is simply a polite fiction to prevent them looking like complete psychopaths. Where Martin Amis stands in all this, I do not know, but his book would have been much more interesting if it had been written 30 years ago. Although if it had, Amis might not be such a staple of university English courses and elegant dinner-party conversations.
Joseph Askew
Blackwood, South Australia
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