Kim Philby: did he ever have regrets?
People like the patrician British double agent Kim Philby fascinate me. Are they natural cons who are drawn to the game aspect of spying? Are they True Believers? Psychopaths? Idealists? Narcissists? Some of the above? All of the above?
Kim Philby had an excellent education, and in fact it was at Cambridge that he became enamored of Communism. Nothing dissuaded him; not the excesses of Stalin, and not even—if you believe what he told the KGB after defecting in 1963—actually living in Soviet Russia, and seeing firsthand the mess there and the misery of its citizens:
Speaking as if from beyond the grave – his voice recorded during a talk he gave for KGB officers in 1977, 14 years after defecting to the Soviet Union – Philby is heard saying: “There is an awful lot of work for us to do it seems. I have no regrets whatsoever about the past, just the mistakes I made doing it.”
Quoting the Russian revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky – founder of the KGB’s forerunner the Cheka – Philby closes his speech in Russian by saying: “If I had a chance I would do it all again. I would do it exactly the same way.”
Lie? Truth? Rationalization? I think it’s the inability of most fanatics to change a fundamental set of beliefs, especially after betraying one’s country for the cause. It would take a lot more courage and a lot more honesty than Philby was likely to have possessed to have said: “I sold my country out for something horrific.”
There are some clues there about what happened in the beginning, though. For example, as with most and perhaps all Communist fanatics, Philby was an atheist. Lack of religion is replaced by quasi-religion:
in his talk Philby admitted to being a rebel from an early age, shocking his grandmother by announcing he did not believe in God and growing up with what he called a greater affinity for the poor than the previledged.
He said: “In the year 1929 I was enrolled at Cambridge University at the age of 17. I already had a deep emotional connection to the weak, poor and less priveliged compared to the strong, rich and arrogant. I began my rebellious nature at a very early age. I scandalised my grandmother by informing her there was no god.
“Early rejection of Christianity probably had something to do with my early rejection of the bourgeois state.”
I do believe Philby is telling the truth when he cites his “rebellious nature” and his atheism.
Philby’s Russian/Polish wife tells a different tale about his last years in Russia:
Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview…
Rufina Pukhova, his Russian-Polish wife, said Philby struggled to control his drinking by downing only two glasses of cognac a night and then handing her the bottle to hide…
His habit was fuelled by his sorrow over what he saw around him, she added. “Kim believed in a just society and devoted his whole life to communism. And here he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears. He said, ‘Why do old people live so badly here? After all, they won the war.'”
Maybe if he’d spent a little more time in Moscow before taking up spying, he’d have learned more about the regime he was helping. I doubt it would have mattered, however. He would have just offered this familiar excuse:
“He saw people suffering too much,” but he consoled himself by arguing that “the ideals were right but the way they were carried out was wrong. The fault lay with the people in charge.”
Sound familiar?
Notice the parallels with his father?
re: Kim Philby: He was the son of Dora (Johnston) and St John Philby, who was an author, orientalist and convert to Islam….
re: St John Philby: He converted to Islam in 1930, and later became an adviser to Ibn Saud, urging him to become King of the whole of Arabia,[2] and helping him to negotiate with the United Kingdom and the United States when petroleum was discovered in 1938; in addition he married for the second time, to a Saudi Arabian.
—————————–
They both turned their back on their upbringing. Another reason Kim Philby was distraught after his defection is that he was told before the defection that he was a colonel in the KGB. Alas he was not. Moreover the Russians never utilized his service and it was a long time before he was allowed to set foot in the KGB headquarters because Russians never trust traitors.
Sorry. No sympathy for this psychopath.
Did Philby—that master manipulator—have regrets? I very much doubt it. And frankly, aside from the curiosity (“academic”?) angle, who cares? (By the way, he was an extremely heavy drinker before he fled Beirut.)
He was a killer. In support of a murderous regime. An utterly criminal regime.
And if it’s for backing the wrong horse? Well, tant pis.
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, wrote about intellectually closed systems:
“A closed sysem has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emoional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself.”
Philby was a cosmopolitan not spending much time on any particular piece of ground. He wasn’t rooted to any particular person, either, running through four marriages (not to mention mistresses while married, and who knows how many random trysts). He sired children, but appears paid them no mind after about 1950. Note that he was one of a small minority of his cohort (perhaps 4%) to acquire a university diploma. What do you fancy the mentality is there? How about, “superior persons such as myself have to take orders from politicians and businessmen”?
These guys were outliers at the time. Our problem as we speak is that the professional class in occidental countries is by and large not loyal to the places they inhabit and is indifferent to the vernacular population. That’s who Democratic pols pitch to.
I recently read KGB mole Anthony Blunt’s book about Picasso’s Guernica.
Blunt’s case was even stranger than Philby’s.
I do think it is an interesting question about what was going on inside the diabolical man’s head. Andy gives us some strong clues. I’d give no weight to the KGB recording.
There is a scene at the end of the HBO movie “Citizen X” about the Soviet’s worst serial killer, Chikatilo (sp). After a 5 minute trial, a guard ushers the criminal into a tiled cell with a drain in the floor and blows his brains out with a handgun. I don’t think Philby was inclined to tell the truth on a KGB tape.
____
“The fault lay with the people in charge.”
Yes, well … My theory is that even if the Trotskys or Chavezes of the world were moral men and actually knew something about running a gov. effectively (doubtful but possible), the power and potential for corruption of the system they’ve created is an overwhelming draw to exactly the wrong sort of people. Even if such a country has quality leadership for a time, it can’t last.
Heck, look at our own leadership. Certainly some are/were fine people, (and they all assume the posture of fine people) but many or most are craven whores for money, power, and self-aggrandizement. (I suppose a bit of that is a requirement for leadership.) It is only our limited form of government, limits that are largely dismantled, that has saved us so far.
Judges divining plaintiff’s unknowable motives is the latest creative step in that dismantling. Thank you John Roberts. Judge Jeanine Pirro reamed the SCOTUS this morning on Fox Biz network, on just this point.
Those involved in Intelligence work are, indeed, often stumbling through a “wilderness of mirrors.”
I don’t know how many people here know about OLLI, the Osher Life Long Learning organization that is affiliated with universities around the country, and which organizes excellent, low-cost, non-credit college level classes for people 50 and older—many dozens, sometimes hundreds of courses each semester at many different locations around the country—classes on all sorts of subjects.
These classes are taught by volunteers—quite often retirees who have a wealth of knowledge and experience in their subject area, and we have found these classes to almost invariably be excellent.
Well, I just attended one such excellent, two part, 4 hour class, taught by someone who had 30 some years experience in Navy Intelligence/working with codes and cyphers and then, another twenty or so years as a civilian in DOD.
His subject was the English and later American efforts to break German codes during WWII—the German’s ENIGMA code machine, and the highly secret, very restricted access decoded traffic from it called the “ULTRA” material.
His view was that our victory in WWII was not assured and, in fact, was a “close run thing,” with our ability to crack the supposedly uncrackable codes produced by the German’s ENIGMA machine arguably, perhaps, the deciding factor in our victory.
By the end of the war our ability to crack ENIGMA material giving our side access to what the Germans were thinking, planning, positioned, and doing, so that we had virtually complete, real time knowledge of it all.
Ironically, our ability to crack ENIGMA generated codes was mostly due to the Brits ability to exploit a design flaw in ENIGMA, and to the German’s own sloppiness in using their own ENIGMA machine; their not changing it’s settings as, and as frequently as they were supposed to be changed.
In the course of his lectures on ENIGMA and ULTRA—which were extremely well organized, and backed up by numerous excellent maps, pictures, charts, and graphs—he also told how the British rolled up the German spy ring in the UK early in the war, apparently executed those spies who remained loyal to Hitler, and turned some 14 other spies into double agents.
He showed how ULTRA information allowed us to know where enemy forces on land and sea would be, so that our military forces could locate them, and attack them successfully. But ,that one of the problems with using ULTRA information was that using it operationally might clue the Germans into the fact that we were cracking their codes.
He also outlined the whole amazing and complex host of deceptions—layer after layer, spy after spy, operation after operation—which the British were able to create and employ to convince the Germans that what the British wanted them to believe was real and true—deceptions which caused the Germans to send military forces to the wrong places, to keep their military forces in place when they should have been on the move, to believe that we had 25 more divisions poised to invade Europe at Calais when we had no such thing, that there were spy rings composed of dozens of spies reporting back to them and giving them true, critical inside information, when it was actually the work of one extraordinarily inventive spy, a double agent, code name GARBO, who was feeding them deceptive information.
The Cambridge Five Soviet Communist spy ring of McClean, and Burgess, Cairncross—Cairncross inserted into the UKs extraordinarily secret ENIGMA cracking organization at Bletchley Park—Blount, and Philby was just touched on in passing.
Overall it was an extraordinary story, and one whose layers of detail I don’t think a lot of people these days know much, if anything, about.
I was amazed at the gigantic web of deception and deceit that the British managed to ensnare the Germans in.
Could we create and pull a grand web of deception, deceit, and disinformation like this off today?
Looking around at much of the material we have to work with today, and their attitudes, it would be a lot harder to do than it was back then.
The socialists always claimed they could create heaven on earth, but the right people have to be in charge. So far, the right people haven’t been found. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez, obviously not the right people. You just have to continue believing and trying. Many old communists never gave up their belief in the goodness of communism despite what they could see with their own eyes.
John LeCarre’s version of Philby, in his novel “Tinker, “Tailor… Was pretty good. Philby had lots of friends, including James Angleton, I have a book about a friend of Philby’s who was taken in and then learned the truth.
It probably did not hurt that they had the head of the Abwehr more or less on their side as well.
I never realized until recently just how extensive the anti-Hitler movement was in the German military. I thought it sprouted up there only after the reverses in the East and D-Day. Not so apparently.
All of the above.
DNW–According to our lecturer there were some 40 plots to kill Hitler, obviously none of them successful, because, as he saw it, none of the people behind them were willing to go all out to make them successful.
He also suspected that some in the German military realized that there were significant innate defects in the ENIGMA machines, and engaged in a subtle form of sabotage by not passing that knowledge up the line, so that this vulnerability could be eliminated.
It seems to me that many psychopaths will latch on to whatever ideology will allow them to play out their violent, vicious fantasies while justifying them; an ideology or movement that enables them to convince themselves that they are not evil but are, in fact, doing what they do for a righteous cause, or for the betterment of their fellow men.
Welcome to the beautiful post-soviet union …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V47PzGpmwXo
Apparently Belarus has a lot of well preserved socialist heroism architecture available for your admiration.
“Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” R.A. Heinlein
Philby’s life is just one more demonstration of the fact that any perfidy can be rationalized.
The argument that Philby’s treason was caused by Atheism is an interesting one. I have heard many arguments for the existence of religion based upon ideas such as:
– It is only fear of God that makes people moral.
– The charitable works carried out by religious organizations.
– Religion is the foundation of our culture
– Lack of religious belief make people susceptible to other cults and ‘isms.
Each time I hear such an argument, I ask simply, “Yes, but is it true?” In every single case, these persons have dodged my question and returned to the useful contributions made to society by religion.
I wonder how many “religious” people there are that believe in the utility of religion, without a literal belief in the mythology. This I can understand and comprehend, even though I myself take a different path to finding fulfillment and meaning in life.
unfair bait
this is an area Ive been detailing to you for 10 years, and its linkages
ah… Babette Gross…
Why dont you first start with a changer you ignore, that Ronald Reagan wrote well of, that was a very important woman, who was erased…
The problem with Philby is the shadow world of “smoke and mirrors”, and all that is a rotten place to go for ANY understanding at a personal level. EVERYTHING is way too complicated by all manner of things, and few people want to read enough detail to get to know lots of oddities that were common that tend NOT to be in the more read tracts or the more self serving…
this was the area of counterintelligence… not regular stuff…
You have to put pieces together.
Like knowing homosexuals had a big part in these services… they were tapped tagged and even blackmailed with prison time and more…in that period it gets to the point where you cant tell because of all these other things in play too.
Gay men and women played such a big part because they already knew how to live dual lives, or triple lives… they posed one way and yet, have a separate life with all kinds of things that cued knowing without showing and more. like having a gay name vs a straight name.
Philby roommate was the openly gay Guy Burgess..
so dont think your going to get anywhere musing around philby and so forth
such people are usually in two categories… for ideology, or for money… some both… but that’s all it breaks down to… the ones that do it for ideology are a lot harder to catch, because they may not get a reward… or as in Philby case, the reward may be what they thought they would get being a hero of the homeland..
there is quite a interesting parade of those “types”…
Which even include the man who shot Kennedy.
A decent study of history would show over and over, that the thing they wanted to get something from, almost never keeps a promise of any kind longer than its convenient for them (or a cover)
With such things at the time ending up causing the suicide of one of the worlds greatest programmers… by poison apple… we do not and wont ever know what pressures were on him, or not… and given what we do know, there is no coherent picture to really draw… if you think you have one, you haven’t enough detail yet of not just his history but of the era, the many others who had huge influence known and unknown.
so while its intent to stop the problem, the lavender scare actually made the black mailers (if any), more powerful…
Was he Bi? was she his contact arranging things for that fateful day?
Philby finally defected to Moscow in January 1963…
And Jesus Angleton was shattered… lost confidence… for 19 years he been played
was anything real? if not, what was or wasnt?
“The knowledge that he, the top expert in the world on Soviet espionage, had been totally deceived had a cataclysmic effect on his personality.”
From Moscow, his former pal Philby tormented him.
So maybe Philby wasn’t hating Moscow so much? Maybe he was following orders?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
“The key to Philby, if there is a single one,” wrote McCargar who worked with both men, “is less likely to be found in the faults of the Establishment, than it is in a compulsion to betray and deceive, which underlay all his relationships.”
Bi, spy, etc… from a whole picture, Philby was a sociopath/psychopath…
He enjoyed duping people, and that world was the duping delight Olympics…
Basically, it’s narcissism. Believing one knows better than general society. Sure, some distrust and dissent is needed but the length fanatics go to is nothing short of narcissism.
Roy Nathanson — If I don’t believe in God and some kind of judgement and reward or punishment after death, why should I not give into my basest impulses, take a room on the 34th floor of a Las Vegas hotel, and open fire onto a concert below, and then kill myself?
I do believe Philby is telling the truth when he cites his “rebellious nature” and his atheism.
then you be a fool, who don’t know enough about Philby and the group…
though i do think its interesting that a man who was with him for 19 years, trained and specialized… who had a bromance of sorts, couldn’t tell anything about him.
His wife was Eleanor… She obviously didnt know him as well either…
and you believe Philby
why? you think his stuff started AFTER that?
what if it was all his life… that Cambridge gave him the way to look down
which made it easy to feel superior (as so many i know from that space are)
you really have to include some important facts if your going to armchair analyse philby
On 12 December 1957, Aileen Philby was discovered dead in the bedroom of her house in Crowborough. Her friends believed she had killed herself, with drink and pills. However, her psychiatrist suspected, that she “might have been murdered” by Kim Philby because she knew too much
Philby, again, if you read about him in detail and total was one of those rare psychopaths that were really smart enough to be sub-clinical in terms of getting in trouble, and spent their WHOLE LIVES trying to trick everyone..
now i have brought up Anatoliy Golitsyn a dozen times, but now, you bring up Phiilby and that makes Golitsyn important…
Philby went bye bye in 1963…
So, ya think Golitsyn was telling the truth? what else did he tell us?
why did we ignore it? why do we still ignore him now? what choices insure that?
back up to your post neo: Rufina Pukhova, his Russian-Polish wife, said Philby struggled to control his drinking by downing only two glasses of cognac a night and then handing her the bottle to hide…
Eleanor was his wife… and so who was Rufina Pukhova?
[did Rufina work for the KGB? and so Philby was neutered 100%]
So no… Philby NEVER INTENDED TO BE CAUGHT…
HE NEVER INTENDED TO END UP IN MOSCOW…
Between Golitsyn’s defection and the time you write about…
his whole world was completely torn apart or would be soon…
and at that time, you got the DEATH PENALTY for what he did..
so he was forced to go to Moscow…
and ya know, they kind of let him go..
and smoke and mirrors watching your compass spin?
It has since been suggested that the whole confrontation with Elliott had been a charade to convince the KGB that Philby had to be brought back to Moscow, where he could serve as a British penetration agent of Moscow Centre
so he kind of sort of… ran away.. .
On the evening of 23 January 1963, Philby vanished from Beirut, failing to meet his wife for a dinner party at the home of Glencairn Balfour Paul, First Secretary at the British Embassy
and he was gone, and no one is sure if it was by his boat, a russian ship or through syria..
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was informed that one of MI6’s top men was a spy for the Russians, he said, “Tell ’em Jesus Christ only had twelve, and one of them was a double [agent].”
was he referring to Gethsemane or Angleton or both?
one more post, and i am done.. its a simple one..
I just happened to run across a video today talking about men and “masculinity,” and about how, in today’s society, men and masculinity are under attack, are denigrated, are seen as “bad,” male children not allowed to be and grow up to be what they instinctively are, and “toxic masculinity” is the topic of the day.
Thinking, as well, about the Intelligence operations, deceptions, and disinformation that I have been writing about today—and a light went on—and I wondered if the “toxic masculinity” meme currently infecting our culture might be a deliberate attempt by our enemies to weaken us.
To insure that, if and when a conflict arises, we will find that masculine men, men who are willing to fight, men who have guts and spirit, will be in short supply, and will be—on average—weaker, and and not as willing to fight, to persevere, and to triumph as the men of earlier generations have been.–see D-Day.
The masters of creating and circulating such destructive memes have been, of course, the Russians, as attested to by the world-wide success and the continued persistence in public consciousness of several of the KGB created memes, and by their campaigns—the CIA developed the AIDS virus to target Blacks meme, the CIA has flooded the Black community with drugs meme, the Pope who helped the NAZIS meme, the World Peace Council, and other Soviet/KGB front organizations, the U.S. Peace Committee, and the demonstrations by various “peace organizations” in the U.S. and abroad to stop the emplacement of U.S. nuclear intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe—memes and campaigns put into place by the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which was dedicated to the creation of propaganda and disinformation.
That got me to wondering, as well.
Are we all so sure that the KGB—by whatever new name—and the functions of its First Chief Directorate are not still in operation, not working busily away at weakening and confusing the nations and forces of those countries the troops of Mother Russia are likely to be fighting on a battlefield some day?
Upon his arrival in Moscow, Philby discovered that he was not a colonel in the KGB, as he had been led to believe. He was paid 500 rubles a month and his family was not immediately able to join him in exile
Promise things that never arrive tomorrow to get things that are real today…
Study who you work with before you work with them…
It was ten years before he visited KGB headquarters and he was given little real work.
they broke him, he was neutered 100% as i said…
a nothing, no longer useful
material that is no longer useful is what?
Philby was under virtual house arrest, guarded, with all visitors screened by the KGB. Mikhail Lyubimov, his closest KGB contact, explained that this was to guard his safety, but later admitted that the real reason was the KGB’s fear that Philby would return to London
he basically sat around, read the paper, and could do almost nothing
The award of the OBE was cancelled and annulled in 1965…
What the lord giveth the lord take away..
he consoled himself by arguing that “the ideals were right but the way they were carried out was wrong. The fault lay with the people in charge.
Philby drank heavily and suffered from loneliness and depression; according to Rufina, he had attempted suicide by slashing his wrists sometime in the 1960
Rufina Philby wrote two memoirs about her life with Philby. One, titled “Island on the Sixth Floor” She also wrote the memoir titled The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years
The book focuses mostly on the relationship between Rufina and Kim and not his work as a double agent for the KGB. The memoir is “perfect” for spy aficionados who would like a closer look at Philby’s inner thoughts
ive never bothered to read it..
but now you have something to add to the book list?
not much else to say at all about philby..
Snow on Pine on June 28, 2019 at 2:26 pm said:
DNW–According to our lecturer there were some 40 plots to kill Hitler, obviously none of them successful, because, as he saw it, none of the people behind them were willing to go all out to make them successful.
Too bad you couldn’t ask him if taking a bomb that had its timer set already into the wolfs lair and leaving it with one arm was all out enough… [it was dumb luck it didn’t work not lack of going all out]
there are very good reasons why he was hard to get.. including how those parades were staged and the structure of who was positioned where… its not clear in the films but there were many layers and many routes… and then there was the level of brutality in the reprisal, even the underground wasnt too keen on allowing a whole village to be executed for their actions… but yes, that was a potential.
In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942….
Lidice massacre: In World War II, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, the Lidice massacre was a complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now in the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
all 173 males over 15 years of age from the village were executed on 10 June 1942
Another 11 men who were not in the village were arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others already under arrest
The 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Che?mno extermination camp where they were gassed
Whoever was talking probably didnt care what would happen if he put his shoulder into it the way he claims…
Are we all so sure that the KGB—by whatever new name—and the functions of its First Chief Directorate are not still in operation…
of course they are still in operation..
okhrana – The Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order (Tzars)
VChK – Commonly known as Cheka All-Russian Extraordinary Commission
1917–1922 Cheka under SNK of the RSFSR (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission)
1922–1923 GPU under NKVD of the RSFSR (State Political Directorate)
1923–1934 OGPU under SNK of the USSR (Joint State Political Directorate)
1934–1941 NKVD of the USSR (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
1941 MGB of the USSR (Ministry of State Security)
1941–1943 GUGB of the NKVD of the USSR (Main Directorate of State Security of People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
1943–1946 NKGB of the USSR (People’s Commissariat for State Security)
1946–1953 MGB of the USSR (Ministry of State Securtiy)
1953–1954 MVD of the USSR (Ministry of Internal Affairs)
1954–1978 KGB under SM of the USSR (Committee for State Security)
1978–1991 KGB of the USSR (Committee for State Security)
1991 MSB of the USSR (Interrepublican Security Service)
1991 TsSB of the USSR (Central Intelligence Service)
1991 Committee of protection of the USSR state border
The KGB’s main successors are the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).
The GRU (military intelligence) recruited the ideological agent Julian Wadleigh, who became a State Department diplomat in 1936. The NKVD’s first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934
From then on, its been GO!
has never stopped, and AFTER the “fall”, it increased a whole lot more and never slowed..
“Well, it depends …” as they say.
– On what you mean by “moral” (does that mean good or just accepting the mores at hand?)
– On what you mean by “fear”
– And on what you mean by “arguments for the existence of”
I agree that “Is it true?” is the one really important question. But some might try to argue along pragmatic lines that religion (as we use the term), given the evolutionary psychology of man, serves a “necessary” instrumental purpose in the internalization of interpersonal rules which no other social practice can match.
And some people, not put off by what appears to be a cynically pragmatic stance (the The Cynical Moses, theory) might go on to argue that something about the relation between supernatural religious practice as we understand it, makes it probably true on the basis of a form of argument akin to that used in anthropic principle arguments: “See how well it fits and functions? It cannot be a chance occurrence”
Of course others will immediately point out that many pagan religious practices had nothing to do with virtue and goodness, but were merely elaborate schemes intended to get invisible powers greater than men to do their this-worldly bidding.
But I believe that on one formulation, it is certainly true that moral action aiming to an ultimate good, can only be sustained if one grants the existence or the reality of an ultimate Good.
Otherwise, what you have as motives are sentiment, emotion, honor, identification, a quest for fame and respect and so-forth, but very little reason to see the imperative to do right and avoid wrong, as an absolute one. Because in truth, lacking an ultimate Good in reality, there would be no reason to act as if your actions tended toward an eternally existing end.
I, with a certain amount of perhaps rude and maybe misplaced presumption, take it by your last name [if it even is your last name] that you might not be conversant with the Christian scriptures.
But you’re certainly familiar with a quote which expresses the reasoning framework of many Christians on some aspects of this question:
So, while making his theological point, Paul points out that an ultimate sacrifice might be made by some, sometimes; but in order to see this expressed as a universal principle, another ultimate level of reality so to speak, comes into play.
I was going to make a remark the other day concerning the varieties of moral and ethical reasoning we see here; which are fairly typical: instrumental, situational, evolutionary, virtue ethics.
But what makes the sensibilities of the Catholic commenters here somewhat distinct, is the deductive nature of their moral reasoning which proceeds from a first principle that God is Good and can neither deceive nor be deceived nor ny His nature tolerate it; and that man, each individual, is a being with an eternal, individual, destiny found in relation to that set of facts.
Thus, the old “Baltimore Catechism” in its various iterations of days gone by, actually began with first principles in its question and answer format.
Some may have obvious problems with the formulation of a seemingly question begging question such as “Who made me?” which presumes a creation made by a Creator. But as a logical structure, it was internally coherent. And given the posited nature of the Ultimate Reality, moral principles of an imperative sort flowed as implications from the first premisses.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that that is not how the great majority of Americans were taught right from wrong, even if they had religious training that involved instruction in morals. They may, some of them, be moral absolutists of a sort, but their reasoning seems to proceed along rather different lines.
You’re really p*ssing me off Saunders … saying in just three lines what I took a stumbling page length comment to try and get across.
I just found an article on Philby written by Malcolm Muggeridge for Esquire magazine in 1968. He knew Philby well and it’s full of interesting insights. You can read it here.
Two things that jumped out: Muggeridge says that Philby had a “devastating stutter which, in its intensity, was almost like a fit”. And this: “Authoritarian government appeals to a certain sort of person and is repellant to others … Philby, I should have said, is the classic type to find authoritarianism appealing: ambitious, romantic, weak and violent. As in so many cases, the appeal of the Soviet regime to him is unlikely to have been its Marxist theory, or its utopian aims … but rather its inexorably brutal practice. I never detected in him the faintest indication that he had studied or cared about dialectical materialism, but he constantly betrayed his admiration for ruthless action, whatever its aim and auspices. For instance, he once said to me of Goebbels when we were discussing the Nazi leaders: “That’s a man I could have worked with”.
“For instance, he once said to me of Goebbels when we were discussing the Nazi leaders: “That’s a man I could have worked with”.”
There was apparently a pretty significant crossover from Communism to Socialism. When the English traveler/writer was in Germany circa 1933, a factory worker he had met at a bar invited him to stay over in a spare bed. It turned out that there was Nazi regalia everywhere, and an SA uniform hanging neatly ironed. “When Paddy I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on his bed and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures or Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite!” He went on to say that he and his friends “We used to beat hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us…Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me!” His old friends had all changed sides as well; the only problem he saw was that there were hardly and socialists or communists left to beat up. His parents did not share his enthusiasm, he said; they were “old-fashioned,” with his father still talking about the greatness of Bismarck and the Kaiser and Hindenburg and his mother focused only on the church. (The story about Communist-to-Nazi conversions is entirely consistent with the observations of Sebasian Heffner in his memoir.)
Barry Meislin:
People who change their minds in the political sense interest me. Those who don’t and won’t also interest me. Spies and betrayers are interesting as well.
David Foster
There was apparently a pretty significant crossover from Communism to [National] Socialism.
Consider what Hitler had to say on Communists versus Nazis. Hitler’s Table Talk: 1941-1944.HIgh Trevor-Roper, ed.
Both Fascists and Nazis have advocated for social equality.
While both Nazis and Bolsheviks advocated “social equality for the masses,” they both governed in an extreme top-down mode: what a surprise! Sarc, Sarc.
Hitler saw more in common with Communists than “social equality for the masses.” He saw Nazis and Communists also utilizing women in their ranks in a similar manner.
Moreover, the Communists and ourselves were the only parties that had women in their ranks who shrank from nothing. It’s with fine people like those that one can hold a State. (p113)
Hitler viewed Communists more as rivals for power rather than ideological opponents. Just like David Foster wrote:
In sum, Hitler saw a fair amount of affinity between Nazis and Communists. Like the Communists, Hitler had nothing but scorn for the bourgeois.
Hitler’s “new society,” the “new man” of Che Guevara and other Commies. Nazis and Commies- not as far apart as you would think.
I never delved into Philby. According to wiki, FWIW, he was a sympathetic leftist who was recruited in 1934 through his first wife, Litzi Friedmann, a devoted communist. Philby was in his early twenties. In the era before, during and after WW II, Philby was drawn more deeply into covert action on behalf of the USSR.
As I read his wiki entry, Philby seemed to have fallen victim to the fallacy of sunk costs. The more he did for the Soviets, the more committed he became and the less able to back away from that commitment.
He doesn’t sound much like the Bill Haydon character in Le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor.” Though oddly, the elder Philby looks surprisingly like Smiley, played by Alec Guiness in the marvelous BBC mini-series of the novel.
The first thorough analysis of Soviet communism by an expert who lived in Moscow during the late 1920’s and 30’s. It was widely read by the (non-Marxist) American intelligentsia and established Freda Utley as one of the nation’s premier experts on communism.
I have that book in my library
The necessity of both using ULTRA information and not using it so much that it was obvious that ENIGMA was broken is an important plot point in Neal Stephenson’s excellent “Cryptonomicon”.
For instance, he once said to me of Goebbels when we were discussing the Nazi leaders: “That’s a man I could have worked with”.
Was Goebbles a man of ‘ruthless action’, or just a frustrated intellectual and inveterate liar?
David Foster on June 28, 2019 at 12:45 pm said:
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, wrote about intellectually closed systems:…In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, …
* * *
Why does that sound so familiar??
Oh, yeah —
“Judges divining plaintiff’s unknowable motives is the latest creative step in that dismantling. Thank you John Roberts.” — TommyJay on June 28, 2019 at 1:01 pm
* * *
This has certainly been an educational thread!
If the best thing you can think to do is kill a bunch of people and then kill yourself, you are a psychopath and no religion of any kind is going to make any difference.
The reality of religion, beyond any issue of divine truth or meaning, is that history teaches us the vast majority of people need to believe in something greater than themselves. The 20th century showed us exactly how bad it can get when that something eschews the concept of the divine.
Mike
DNW & Richard Saunders,
It wasn’t my intention to get into the debate over the existence of a deity. That is usually a fruitless endeavor.
It is the argument for the existence of a deity based upon the idea that such belief has a utility to society that interests me. It is a circular arguement. Which came first? The chicken or the egg.
Richard Saunders,
Has anyone ever done any studies that found a correlation between criminal acts and lack of religious belief? Without looking it up, I doubt that there is any positive correlation.
Richard Saunders,
So, I did look it up. In fact, there is a negative correlation at all levels. The most secular countries are also the least violent. And the prison population in the U.S. has a far lower percentage of atheists than the general population.
It wasn’t my intention to get into the debate over the existence of a deity. That is usually a fruitless endeavor.
It is kind of ironic that humans ascribe all their negative traits to a god (which makes it a psychotic god, a serial killing god of babies).
Humans visualize wars amongst gods the way they visualize killing their neighbors in a civil war or “election”.
The Counsel of the Divine finds this somewhat perplexing and troubling. Yes, there are differences amongst the gods, but generally speaking, there is no dissension with the Creator or the Source or the Most High or the Almighty. That’s somebody else’s job.
Trying to “prove” the existence of a deity using materialistic science is like an avatar stuck in an rpg game world on Facebook, trying to “prove” the existence of the corporate users that created the entire Facebook edifice.
It’s like a 2d entity trying to see and perceive 3d and 4d.
So, I did look it up. In fact, there is a negative correlation at all levels. The most secular countries are also the least violent.
I gather multivariate regression isn’t made use of in the construction business.
“The fault lay with the people in charge.”
It always does, because :
A. They’re people, and ;
B. They’re in charge
Art Deco,
Condescension? So unbecoming…
I do understand that correlation, or lack thereof, is not proof of causation, or lack thereof.
However, Rixhard Saunders seemed quite certain that he and the rest of the population would go postal without the threat of punishment in the afterlife. That is sufficiently extreme that it should be reflected in the statistics. It is not.
Back after further research. I addressed all crime and violence. However, Richard Saunders comment addressed only mass shootings.
These are like airplane crashes vs. car crashes. Statistically, we know that, per passenger-mile, we are far more likely to die in a car accident. But, the large number of victims at once makes airline accidents particularly horrifying. Mass shootings have the same effect on us and they get a disproportionate amount of news coverage.
In any case, it turns out that mass shooters do have a strong tendency toward a lack of religiosity. In this case, I think that the lack of religiosity is simply one more symptom of the root cause, which is a near total isolation from society. The people who commit mass shootings are typically isolated loners. It isn’t that they don’t go to church, it is that they don’t engage in any social interactions that would reinforce their natural empathy for other people. They see everyone as “them” and no one as “us”.
(As an aside, this makes me worry about Richard. His example was very specific. If his religious beliefs are the only thing holding him back, then he really needs some intervention.)
I’d have to read a good bio of Philby plus several articles before I’d hazard much of a guess as to his psychology and motivation. Stalin was a poet and seminarian before he became an atheist, then a radical, then a revolutionary. Do we attribute Stalin’s communism to poetry and the seminary?
The 1930s were a harsh, turbulent time. It was after the disaster of WW I and during the misery of the Depression. There was much suffering. It was easy to question whether capitalism worked and to cast about for radical solutions. Furthermore, it looked like an apocalyptic conflict between fascism and communism was coming.
Marcel Ophul’s documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” dealt with that time in France and how some French ended up collaborating with the Nazis and some did not. I was struck by the interviews with one man who went fascist, Christian de la Mazière (thanks wiki!). He explained that in those days it seemed the choice was strictly black-and-white between fascism and communism. He chose fascism and actually fought with the Nazis.
At the tender age of 21, Philby’s first, great love was with an idealistic communist. He admired her and helped her with refugees from the Nazis. Soon after he was recruited by the Soviets for minor work, not to be some grand mole psychopath planted in the heart of MI6. However, clearly Philby was an intelligent, resourceful fellow and he advanced steadily in his official career and secret career until he climbed the heights of MI6.
neo leaves open the question of who Philby was and why he became what he became. I note that Philby’s path started with love, idealism and a compassion for those suffering in the face of Nazism. It seems like a mistake many people could make.
Hi.
It was not mine either. That is why I quoted you with regard to the question as to the possible necessity of a fear of God keeping people moral:
My answer was that “…it depends” on what you mean by “moral”.
If one merely means avoiding running afoul of statutes in such a way that it results in a judicial conviction and sentence, – whatever these laws might be – then, I would tend to agree with you that there is probably not much of a correlation.
And I would certainly not imagine that “religion” is a useful synonym for some vague acquiescence to the possible existence of a deity; nor, that any old deity will do in keeping people “good” if you believe that there is such a thing as the good, and that goodness has – as I argued traditional Catholicism taught – anything to do with “true” morals as opposed to simple customary or habitual or commanded behavior is this or that group.
So no, I don’t think that secular humanists are more likely to rob banks than drugged up morons who when captured are willing to say that there is a God of some sort.
But I think that someone who is convinced that human lives have eternal consequences and that the people they deal with daily have an objective and inherent value, rather than an instrumental value to the user as drudges, gardeners, drinking and card partners, or sex receptacles, will relate to them them under a different light.
Mass shooters might not see anyone at all as “us”. But plenty of people we are presently calling mass murderers in the political realm, saw lots of other taxonomically human organisms as “us”, and lots of other taxonomically human organisms, as not us.
And although empathy may be a natural byproduct of some chemical process or organic arrangement … your particular mileage will vary. It is after all not a psychic window into the mind of another but a chemically induced illusion that you have one.
And unless you have a standard beyond empathy to show that empathy is a “good” per se rather than just a useful effect to some degree; which might be contingent upon your aims, then empathy isn’t much.
For example you might say the more empathy, the more people distant and different are likely to find a place in this or that social arrangement and survive to reproduce. But then you have to ask … how do you know that that is what you must aim for in order to be ‘moral”. Why have “surplus” empathy? What’s it supposedly in aid of and how do you know it serves your interests?
Not anymore than we should attribute to Stalin any real supernatural faith or interest, on the sheer basis of his presence as a student in a seminary; nor, attribute to him an interest in the art of poetry for poetry’s sake, to the fact that he scribbled away at verse.
The present state of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, being filled with homosexual males (who were allowed in as priests under misguided 1960’s psychological theories, or who wormed their way in to the hierarchy through patrons like themselves) who bugger boys and rob the institution of the widow’s mite contributions of old ladies, is proof enough that presence or practice does not indicate sincerity.
They, these prelates, are there for the panoply; and in order to avoid real work in a machine shop or farm. Apparently they figure being a false priest is a better gig than tending the counter in a flower shop.
DNW: So is there any reason to attribute to anyone real faith or real interest in poetry? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time or circumstance for anyone’s inner Stalin to emerge.
Having spent my time in parochial schools and studying the history of Christianity and Islam, I don’t automatically link morality with religious faith. Or the lack of such faith with immorality.
Most of the arguments above strike me as variations of the “Post Hoc, Propter Hoc” and “No True Scotsman” fallacies.
ArtDeco:
Be careful with the condescension or sarcasm with Roy Nathanson in his apologetics for his atheism (a non faith). Such reactions to his arguments may cause him to feel repressed or oppressed and then he will have to tell us all about it. Sigh.
Oh, he had a few, but he did it his way.
Both Hitler and Stalin were often beaten by their fathers. Hitler was almost beaten to death once, as I recall. Not all children who suffer abuse and violence become abusive and violent adults, but many do.
That doesn’t seem to be Philby’s story, He was a bright boy from an upper-class family who went to Cambridge University. He was set up for an elite career and achieved it.
Along the way, like many in his 1930s cohort, he was radicalized when young and through his first wife came to the attention of the Soviets. His commitment stuck and he was unable to renounce it, even in the light of Soviet failures and atrocities.
It’s not unusual for people to turn a blind eye to the faults of their lifelong commitments. Look how difficult is for the Roman Catholic hierarchy to come to terms with their scandals. (Note that these are people of faith, unless one pulls a “No True Scotsman” on them.)
Pete Seeger, the folk singer, didn’t acknowledge the horrors of Stalinism until Seeger was in his nineties. Rather late, one might say, but he did get there.
DNW,
In humans, the capacity for empathy is not binary. It comes in a range. People with very low capacities for empathy we call sociopaths. People also exist with an excess of empathy. These persons are overly emotional, and unable to make decisions involving others. They make very poor managers and leaders. In fact, many great leaders have been borderline sociopaths. As the saying goes, “It takes all types to make a world.”
Your discussion of an “ultimate good” is a little foreign to me. The only thing to which I could assign such a value is the survival and advancement of the human species. This would always be worth fighting and dying for.
But what is the “advancement of the human species?” Sounds pretty “touchy-feeley” to sacrifice your life for. But for Gaia, now that is worth sacrificing your life for. /sarc
Just thinking of two recent incidents were people sacrificed themselves to protect others; the grandmother who shielded the rabbi from the synagog shooter in San Diego county, and the high school student who interrupted the tranny/anti-Christian murderers in Colorado. I doubt these heroes thought they were advancing the human species by their actions.
Huxley says in part,
and earlier,
Well, at least now I know what you had in mind when you were referring to “the arguments above” and “No true Scotsman”. (which is one of those informal rhetorical so-called “fallacies” which I just cannot take very seriously as they are so intention dependent as opposed to formal deductive fallacies of inference.)
Anyway, you appear to be imagining I was asserting that “false priest” meant “something like “fake priest” rather than a priest false to his vows: consciously and repeatedly in violation of his vows, and possessed of heretical beliefs.
Or, maybe you meant that in order to avoid this “fallacy” we are to assume, even in the face of evidence and admissions to the contrary, the sincerity and fidelity of these persons … who somehow just went wrong.
The record however, is replete with proof that large numbers of mentally, emotionally, and sexually disordered males, managed on their own or were knowingly allowed by clerical sponsors to become validly ordained Roman Catholic priests. And as you probably know, according to Roman Catholic doctrine these males experienced an ontological change at ordination which remains even when their priestly faculties are stripped from them and they are dismissed from the clerical state: such as former Cardinal McCarrick was on Feb 16th of this year, for example
So, I make no claim that these damnable and often admittedly heterodox men, many of whom have been beavering away in order to erode what Catholics call the “deposit of the faith” for many years, are not “real” priests. I merely describe them for what they are: false
What you in turn mean by “people of faith” is best know to you.
I guess some people have faith in Gaia, or the lace and brocaded robes and miters which are merely meant as traditional signs of duty and authority, not as a public dress-up opportunity for gliding buggers and sexual molesters of youth and teens. I suppose they would nonetheless classify themselves as people of faith.
Not that it will do them much good, if the Scriptures are true.
“
I kind of know what you’re getting at Roy, but every last member of it?
It seems the species is in no danger of dying out. And I am sure that even Stalin did not intend to exterminate the species, but just those recalcitrant members of it who tried to keep back a cow or a bag of grain for their own use.
So it is observations like that which present us with the challenge of explaining either why all members of the species are categorically worth dying for in order to preserve; or why, assuming a sufficiency of healthy and congenial survivors, it would not be ok to pare the species down more to one’s own particular liking.
Roy Nathanson on June 29, 2019 at 7:04 pm said:
Hi. Allow me to quote myself from an earlier comment I made.
DNW on June 29, 2019 at 12:01 pm said:
…
But I think that someone who is convinced that human lives have eternal consequences and that the people they deal with daily have an objective and inherent value, rather than an instrumental value to the user as drudges, gardeners, drinking and card partners, or sex receptacles, will relate to them them under a different light.
* * *
Bottom line, assuming that by “different” you mean something “better” by the common traditional understanding of that word.
No surprised of the comments on this. Huxley, didn’t you say you were fine with “progress”, however it may come? Roy, didn’t you say that conservatives shouldn’t decry moral relativism because it’s not truth (e.g. neighbor down the street might have different morals than me)? Or least you chuckled when concern for it was expressed. Because evolution.
To get back to Philby:
In her “The New Meaning of Treason”, Rebecca West covers the period which included Lord Haw-Haw to Profumo. Beautifully written and covers certain aspects–many the human kind–of treason.
Why, she asked, did the children of privilege, who lived in the shelter of the Royal Navy, as safe as any since the children of the rich of classical times when the winds of war blew elsewhere, wish to tear the whole thing down?
She refers to earlier socialist works–the dole, nationalizing one or another industry, old age pensions and the credit those proponents gave each other, and themselves, for their work.
How to gain such credit for the next generation? The work’s already done. The answer was to move further left, which is only what communism looked like to them. Then they, too, could praise each other and themselves as morally superior to….the establishment. Even in its new shape, it was the establishment, as always, which had to be the enemy. Without it….
Snow, you asked could grand deception be done here and now. Certainly conspiracy land, flat earthers, and anti moon landing religion would say yes. Plus chem trails.
There are many rooms in Yammer’s Twilight Zone.
There are many rooms in ymar s mansion.
I notice dnw is not triggered by child hunting priests. His iq and focus is norm line. But when he reacted to the line, “the vatican burned and persecuted the saints of the most hight, the almighty,” he lost his focus and most of his iq points.
Quite a difference in human behavior patterns.
This circular firing squad of atheists vs theists, is something humans created for entertainment. It is quite an annoyance to watch.
AesopFan on June 29, 2019 at 10:34 pm said:
Yes, that would be right.
Was that the exact title you used? Maybe it was. Looks like more or less like it: The Mostest Highest Almighyist Bestest, or something along those lines.
So, not to wave off the infamous crimes committed undoubtedly by various persons inhabiting the Vatican and its offices, it would still be helpful if you could say just who this Most High The Almighty is, and give us the names of those saints of this Mostest Almightyist Highest whomever, who it is that the Vatican burned and persecuted. Or persecuted and then burned, as the case may be.
That way, if you cannot outright say who this Mostest Highest Almighyist is, one might be able to infer something about His Mostest, etc. etc’s identity and nature from those whom you identify as its saints.
Thanks again or your kind attention to this matter.