Past fantasies remain unexplained
Anthony Daniels
THE RED DEAN by Robert Hughes Churchman Publishing, f17.95 When my father was courting my mother, he used to read her Engels' Anti-Duhring, Nevertheless, she married him. I grew up in a household full of elaborately-tooled propaganda volumes proving that Russians had invented every- thing from chocolate to submarines and were, moreover, communists avant la lettre to a man. These volumes had sepia pictures of happy Ukrainian girls in national dress, practically lost in a sea of wheat, with combine-harvesters looming on the hori- zon. There were pictures too of ten-foot tall porcelain vases with hand-painted por- traits of Generalissimo Stalin in boots, a gift to the Vozhd from the devoted Stakhanovite porcelain workers of Uzbekhistan. The transcripts of his speeches were punctuated by lines in ita-
lies: prolonged and stormy applause; the audience rises to its feet; a delegate shouts Glory to Great Stalin! The applause rises to a crescendo lasting ten minutes. How could any intelligent person have believed in this kind of thing? The fact is, however, that many did; and it is a fact in need of explanation. None is provided in this biography of the Red Dean, although it is subtitled 'The Life and Riddle of Dr Hewlett Johnson'. How did an upper-middle-class English churchman, trained in scientific method, Come wholeheartedly to identify with a murderous atheistic regime that would not have tolerated him for an instant had he lived within its jurisdiction, and become an abject apologist for social and political conditions infinitely worse than those that allegedly provoked him to adopt his stance in the first place? The author, the son of the novelist Richard Hughes and himself a churchman, fully partakes of the intellectual evasions of his subject. When discussing Johnson's approval of the suppression of the Hunga- rian Uprising, for instance, he mentions — in the same breath — Grenada. He quotes without comment Johnson's remark that communist China was more Christian than any Western country because it had abo- lished hunger — a remark made in the year of the Great Leap Forward, that condemn- ed millions to die of starvation and insti- tuted terror beyond Johnson's (or the author's) feeble powers of imagination. For the author, as for Johnson, the exter- mination of millions under Stalin was 'a mistake'; but it was not a mistake. On the contrary, it was the result of a deliberate and essential policy. The evasions in this book are legion. In the trial in France that followed the pub- lication of Kravchenko's book I Chose Freedom, Johnson testified against the existence of forced labour camps in the Soviet Union. That his experience as an honoured guest in a totalitarian dictator- ship of eight million square miles might not have been sufficient to provide this testi- mony does not appear to have occurred to Mr Hughes. Describing the deplorable witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, Mr Hughes admits they were not as bad as the great show trials of the 1930s. `. . . But then,' he continues, `Russia had never pretended, as America claimed, to be the land of free speech and individual liberty.' Not only is this histor- ically inaccurate (one has only to remem- ber the Webbs' dithyrambs to the Stalin constitution), but it implies that vile be- haviour is acceptable so long as one does not claim to be virtuous.
The Red Dean demonstrates, clearly but unintentionally, that goodwill, love of children and a subscription to the Guar- dian are not sufficient to understand the events of the 20th century. Lenin had a term for Hewlett Johnson and his ilk: Useful Idiots.
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