Lessing began as a committed leftist, a Communist. She also was a feminist, and I believe she remained so in one way or another for her entire life. But in many ways she thought for herself and quite early on understood the danger represented by PC thought. She left the hard left quite early on, as well.

Here are some interesting quotes from this article in November, 1997:

Lessing: Capitalism was dead [postwar 40s and 50s in England]. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks — everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people.

Question: You call these beliefs a kind of mass hypnosis.

Lessing: I call it mass psychopathology. Because what we believed was rubbish. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the world.

Question: But it was such a heady kind of belief, wasn’t it? Was it truly all rubbish?

Lessing: Look, most of it was rubbish. But it had an enormous emotional charge behind it, which meant that people could achieve more if they believed this kind of thing. You know, if you are fueled by this pure belief, amazing things get done.

Question: You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.

Lessing: Well, that’s why socialism is, for our time, dead. Because young people say, “Right, all you Reds — look what you were supporting. China and the Soviet Union.” The interesting thing is to ask yourself this question: Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on — this is another cliche, forgive me — progressive thinking of every kind.

I think she sees it somewhat clearly in some ways, but in others she connects the failure with Stalin and Communism rather than something inherent to leftism. In the 90s, when she gave this interview, young people were more aware of the Soviet Union and its horrors. It was recent, and the fall of the USSR was recent and within their experience and memory. Nowadays “young people” seem to either have no clue what happened then and earlier, or to know about them and to figure they will avoid them when they get the power, or to be drawn to repeating those horrors because they regard them as an important and necessary tool to be used by the left for control.

More:

Question: You compare that kind o[f progressive thinking to today’s political correctness, to use another cliche. How true is that?

Lessing: I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.

Question: What are those attitudes?

Lessing: A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

Question: Your book is, in many ways, about falling out of love with communism….

Lessing: This process was going on right from the beginning. I’m talking about the Soviet Union — people seeing what it was like and leaving. Everywhere you went you met people who had been communists and understood perfectly well the perils of the dream, and were now angry with themselves for falling for it. I think [this interest in communism] was rooted in the First World War and people’s passionate identification with what had been done to the soldiers, which crossed all the national boundaries. I think that’s where a disgust and contempt for government began, at the level we see it now. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism [I don’t think shes talking about Islamic terrorism here]. Anyway, that’s my thesis. It’s very oversimplified, as you can see…

Question: On the subject of feminism, let me ask a different question. You’ve written that women seem to be much more easily shocked these days.

Lessing: Yes, they are. Almost as a political intention, they’re shocked. I can’t remember ever being shocked if someone exposed himself, or made a pass which I though was inept. I’d just go, “Well, that’s life.” But now, it’s a whole political agenda.

Question: The sudden vogue of sexual harassment, you mean?

Lessing: Well, I’m not saying this isn’t serious, obviously I’m not. That’s the difficulty of this discussion, because I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to women who are sexually harassed, because I know they are. But I think a great many women complain about sexual harassment when it’s nothing of the kind. It’s just one of the minor annoyances of life. When a little boy kisses a little girl at school and it becomes a national issue, what can we say about this? It’s just such lunacy.

Remember, that was in 1997. And then in August 2001 Lessing gave this talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Oh, can you imagine? Someone should go to every book festival in the world and just re-read it:

The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, “continually demeaned and insulted” by women without a whimper of protest.

Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a “lazy and insidious” culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.

Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.

“I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday…

“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”

Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.

She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

“Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”

That was almost twenty years ago.

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A Child’s Garden of Verses and Treasure Island, of course (which I now see were published in the same year), and then the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And although the only works of his I’ve actually read are those for children, his oeuvre was certainly not limited to that. It included musical compositions for the flageolet (which is a sort of recorder and not a bean, although beans have been called “the musical fruit“).

Stevenson and Longfellow seemed to have long ago merged in my head. But in an effort to differentiate them (sparked by seeing this painting earlier today) I decided to do a bit of research on Stevenson. Lo and behold, I discovered much interesting stuff in his Wiki profile. He was quite the youthful rebel in his twenties, in a way that sounds mighty familiar:

His dress became more Bohemian; he already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket and rarely attended parties in conventional evening dress. Within the limits of a strict allowance, he visited cheap pubs and brothels. More importantly, he had come to reject Christianity and declared himself an atheist. In January 1873, his father came across the constitution of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club, of which Stevenson and his cousin Bob were members, which began: “Disregard everything our parents have taught us”. Questioning his son about his beliefs, he discovered the truth, leading to a long period of dissension with both parents…

As for politics, the following should sound extremely familiar:

Stevenson remained a staunch Tory for most of his life…During his college years, he briefly identified himself as a “red-hot socialist”. By 1877, at only twenty-six years of age and before having written most of his major fictional works, Stevenson reflected: “For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men…

But Stevenson was not too happy about the change, although he remained a conservative:

Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men’s opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better””I dare say it is deplorably for the worse.”

If you read his Wiki entry or other accounts of his activities, you’ll see that Stevenson suffered from ill health almost continually but lived an incredibly varied and energetic life not just in terms of writing (and of music: “over 123 original musical compositions or arrangements, including solos, duets, trios and quartets for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano”), but he was especially well-traveled in an age in which travel was a long and difficult undertaking. He lived in many lands, including California, and ended up in Samoa. His literary reputation has waxed and waned over the years and then waxed again.

It’s shocking to read an account of Stevenson’s life and all his accomplishments and realize that he died at the ripe old age of only 44. He packed quite a lot into it, and he himself said towards the end of his life, “sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little .”

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I am compelled to reject Bolshevism for two reasons: First, because the price mankind must pay to achieve Communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly because, even after paying the price, I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.

In this piece he wrote in 1929 for The Nation, he painted an illuminating portrait of Lenin and to a lesser extent Trotsky. In his description of Lenin in particular, I recognize the type [emphasis mine]:

I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of selfseeking, an embodied theory.

“An embodied theory.” I know what he means; I have known political fanatics like that. Very cold-blooded.

I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat. …

I found in him, as in almost all leading Communists, much less eagerness than existed on our side for peace and the raising of the blockade. He believes that nothing of real value can be achieved except through world revolution and the abolition of capitalism…

He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing.

Ha ha ha.

And this is the most important part. After saying that Lenin had no love for liberty, he adds [emphasis mine]:

Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the skeptical temper of the Western world. I went to Russia believing myself a communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not only of communism, but of every creed so firmly held that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

The very same thing happened to the historian Will Durant when he visited Russia. I described his change of mind in this post. In the case of both Durant and Russell, most of the other members of their entourage did not share their disillusionment, and remained enthralled with Russia. Therein lies the difference between the changer and the true believer.

But neither changed all that much, although Durant went further than Russell. Durant remained a liberal; Russell remained a socialist, much as Orwell did during his lifetime of criticizing Communism. This is exceedingly puzzling, I think, and I attempted to explain it in regard to Orwell in this post. With Orwell, I think he just was so disgusted by the inequalities and unfairnesses of life that he greatly desired that it be possible to reconcile socialism and its goal of equality with liberty, although he realized the two were almost certainly incompatible. Russell seemed to realize the same thing, too, but he clung to socialism (intermittently, anyway) despite that fact.

Perhaps he was able to do so because he was something of a political dilettante. You don’t believe me? Russell said so himself:

At various points in his life [Russell] considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had “never been any of these things, in any profound sense”.

People are mysterious, aren’t they?

The post Literary leftists: Bertrand Russell on the Bolsheviks appeared first on The New Neo.

He also gave his wife quite a roller coaster ride, particularly in later life when he became a fanatic of self-denial but still was part of the landed nobility with a large estate and many dependents, a situation over which he and his wife struggled for decades. You can read about the Tolstoys’ astoundingly complex (and literary; both kept voluminous diaries) marriage—one that produced fourteen children, several novels, and lots of angst—here, here, and here.

Tolstoi began early adulthood as a pleasure-seeking aristocrat, fond of gambling and licentiousness, but still (in his very Russian way) mulling over those deeper questions of life and existence. With his marriage in his late 30s to a lovely young woman of 18, he embarked on a passage through husband- and fatherhood, and later in midlife had a serious spiritual crisis and depression from which he emerged a very changed man. From henceforth on, he considered literature that lacked a didactic spiritual massage to be garbage, and a life without self-abnegation and sacrifice and a simple faith was likewise. This is the extremely famous later-life Tolstoy whom many people revered as a near-saint, the one with whom you may be familiar from the many photos taken of him (at first I thought this one was colorized, but according to Wiki it’s the first color photo portrait ever taken in Russia):

Many people seem to think that Tolstoy was a man of the left, and some even blame him for influencing the Russian Communist Revolution. But he was not a statist; he could better have been described as an anarchist with a Christian bent (he is actually considered the founder of something called Christian anarchism). Is anarchy left or right? That’s an ancient and complex argument and I don’t want to mire myself in it right now. Suffice to say that anarchists are not statists; they want the state obliterated, and so did Tolstoy.

Tolstoy’s own anarchy seems to have been rooted in his personal crisis, which seems in turn to have been activated (at least in part) by his very strong sense of guilt. Here’s an excerpt from the book Married to Tolstoy (Sonya was the name of Tolstoy’s wife):

But how, without government, could civilization survive? wondered Sonya, who had no more hope than Turgenev of what he called “Christian Nihilism.”…Tolstoy must have known that there were appalling slums in Moscow, but because [during his crisis] for the first time he had been to look at them, he was so much shocked by social injustice that all of a sudden he couldn’t even bear to see his family enjoying their meals—the kind of meals at which he himself habitually ate far more than anyone else. And his personality was so strong that in his presence no one could be so little sensitive as to suffer from his disapproval, even if it remained unvoiced. Everyone developed a sense of guilt and became miserable. Why, indignantly asked Sonya, should innocent children suddenly be made to feel in disgrace for living in the way in which their father had himself been brought up? Did Leo assume that people who behaved normally were necessarily indifferent—that no one but himself was capable of compassion?

The ever-mercurial Tolstoy wasn’t always in such a bad mood, even during that period. But the self-denying strain in his personality become more marked as he got older, and disciples came to visit and at times to live with the family at the country estate where they spent most of their time. Tolstoy did not live to see the Revolution, although his wife (who outlived him by nine years) did. But he showed his prescience by writing in 1904 (also from the book Married to Tolstoy):

The greatest enemy to mankind is this Social Democracy [the Bolshevik Party]. It is preparing for new slavery. It teaches a future good without a present betterment. It promises golden streets without the bloody Gethesmane. It will regulate everything. It will destroy the individual. It will enslave him. It will make chaos out of cosmos, breed terrorism and confusion, which only brute force will be able to destroy.

I think you could safely say he was not a fan.

[NOTE: I put this post in the category “literary leftists,” a series of mine. I don’t think it fits, exactly, because I don’t think Tolstoy was a leftist. But I put it there anyway because as an anarchist he occupied a sort-of-leftist sort-of-rightist gray area. He was also a political changer, too, although not of the conventional sort.]

The post Tolstoy on Communism—and a lot of other things appeared first on The New Neo.

It was pretty funny at the time, but it engendered a lawsuit by Hellman, a lawsuit designed to bankrupt McCarthy. It might have even succeeded in doing so had Hellman not died before its completion, and had not Hellman’s executors dropped the suit.

The story of the remark, the lawsuit, and the two women lingers on, which may at this point be what they’re both most famous for—although I’m pretty sure that, of the two, Hellman remains the more well-known. She was indeed a liar, who herself said, ” [or wrote; not sure which]: “Everyone’s memory is tricky and mine’s a little trickier than most.”

The McCarthy-Hellman feud was about a lot of things. To Hellman, it was about her literary reputation as well as her construction of a life, since a lot of that reputation rested on her memoirs and the stories she told there. For McCarthy, it seems to have been about her devotion to truth, and the truth of—among other things—Hellman’s self-serving whitewashing of Hellman’s Stalinist politics. There was also the possibility of a stolen lover, back in the days. If you read this essay about the episode, you’ll see that Hellman does not come across very well, to say the least:

Others saw it as a continuation of the feud of the anti-Stalinists of which McCarthy was an early member vs. the Stalinists which included Hellman, Hammett, and other left-wing liberals who continued to defend Stalin long after his crimes had been made public. Hellman once chastized Kruschev for turning against Stalin, she felt he was disloyal. Although she claimed not to know anything about the Moscow purge trials, Hellman had signed petitions applauding the guilty verdicts and encouraged others not to cooperate with a committee that sought to establish the truth behind the trials. McCarthy, herself, said that the enmity was personal. She hated what she saw as Hellman’s attempts to make herself look more like a heroine at the expense of others.

Both women had been pro-Soviet way back when, but McCarthy had renounced that position and Hellman never seems to have done so. There was another, earlier altercation they had, about the writer John Dos Passos and his political change:

Hellman and McCarthy had only met a few times in their lives, the most notable being at Sarah Lawrence College in 1947, at a dinner party thrown by the college president, Harold Taylor, to discuss a writer’s conference. McCarthy attended as did Stephen Spender who was also teaching at the college. Hellman was an invited guest. Just before dinner, McCarthy overheard Hellman flippantly telling a group of students that the writer and painter John Dos Passos had sold out the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War because “he didn’t like the food in Madrid.” Incensed, McCarthy stormed in and proceeded to tell the students that if they wanted to know the truth about Dos Passos’ change of heart, they should read his book, Adventures of a Young Man. Hellman, in turn, was not pleased at being dressed down in front of a group of students.

I wrote a lengthy piece about that change of heart, here. It certainly wasn’t about the food:

Dos Passos’s main contact in Spain was to have been a good friend of his named Robles, a left-wing intellectual who seems to have angered Moscow at some point and who was “disappeared,” apparently shot by the Communists after being accused of being a Fascist spy.

Dos Passos tried to discover what had actually happened to his pal Robles…

That was the disillusionment that led Dos Passos from Spain, which Hellman flippantly dismissed. Lovely.

The post Everything she says is a lie, including “and” and “the” appeared first on The New Neo.

OK, OK, I hate to be this guy, but Orwell would have been fine with Ball’s reading. Orwell was a socialist. His problem with the pigs was that they became no different from the neighboring farmers; his problem with Soviet Marxism was that it acted just like capitalism

Orwell self-identified as a socialist, and “Nick” makes a thought-provoking point, but I disagree with it. Animal Farm isn’t about Orwell’s own complicated and contradictory political stance. It’s a parable that was meant to illustrate some of the inherent evils of Communism. Yes, economic exploitation by those in power towards the workers (all in the name of a false “equality”) was part of it. But the focus was on totalitarianism, lack of liberty, and statist control—problems he located in the left, not capitalism.

That said, it is also true that Orwell was very much against income inequality. In fact, that’s the main reason he identified as a socialist. His socialism was a strange beast, however, and he himself recognized the inherent contradictions and difficulties of adherence to it:

As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”

Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world.

Animal Farm is a critique of Stalinism/Communism, and although capitalism as an exploitative system plays a role at the beginning of the book, by the end the astute reader sees Communism as at least as bad or even worse. Orwell was also aware of the strong possibility that liberty and socialism of any sort (not just Communist Stalinism) could not be reconciled, as the above quotes from him indicate. It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.

More:

Socialists have also raised some interesting questions about what Orwell seems to be saying about Lenin and the rise of Stalinism. In fact, Orwell has suggested elsewhere that Trotsky and Lenin are partly responsible for the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and that Bolshevism itself contained elements of authoritarianism. Molyneux, the British socialist, has written a compelling article with a very close reading of the plot and characters of Animal Farm, and concludes that Orwell equates Lenin with Stalin (morphed into the single Napoleon character). Molyneux argues that Orwell gives no way to understand the reasons for the revolution’s failure except human nature (as opposed to insufficient material conditions). All this leaves the book with the reactionary message at the heart of it”“that all revolutions fail.

…Even in his best political writing, and his sharp exposés of aspects of capitalism, Orwell was never sure whether a real alternative was possible. Whatever Orwell’s intentions, his most famous books undoubtedly reflect these frustrations and despair. Writing as an isolated intellectual removed from day-to-day struggle, (with the notable exception of his participation in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell never regained the hope for workers’ power he experienced while in Spain.

And that’s coming from a pro-socialist, writing in a socialist periodical.

The post Orwell, <i>Animal Farm</i>, and socialism’s inherent contradictions appeared first on The New Neo.

I call it the “sort-of” millennium because it took place in late December of 1999, whereas the real millennium would have begun with the year 2001. But no matter; Conquest, who wrote the book (actually, several books) on the Soviet and especially Stalinist crimes of the 20th century, had quite a bit to say in the interview:

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’ve seen the ravages committed by the Nazis and Communists in the huge scale. I mean, millions have killed but in this book I’m not so much concerned to present the actual ravages as to how they came about, how people who went in to perform these horrible operations, what motivated them. Where did they pick up these awful ideas?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It is ideas, ideas you are exactly what you blame for these ravages.

ROBERT CONQUEST: With a capital “I” these things not ordinary idea like you and I would have but an overwhelming idea that we’ve got everything right, we know the answers for everything, and we can do anything to enforce it…

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it’s very attractive in some ways. People do want answers; this is natural, but the ordinary man in the street didn’t think he got all full answers. He knew he didn’t – it was the intellectual, creating the single, perfect answer and time and time again this has happened.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You use a term that is — Orwell’s term actually — that I like “the lure of the profound” — what do you mean by that?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, that I use because in the book I’m trying to avoid anything plotted and incomprehensible or referring to things that nobody is going to be interested in. I tried to keep it like in Orwell’s terms, clear, and making the points and illustrating with many examples — not just examples of horror or stupidity but striking ones.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But the lure of the profound is also one of the things that at least from what I’ve observed, drives intellectuals into these totalitarian ideas, right?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Yes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: They want the deepest, most scientific, most modern and most profound idea to be theirs?

ROBERT CONQUEST: I think they think it’s modern, that counts as profound…

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So, do you think that there are still in our intellectual life right now, ideas that are like – or remnants of ideas that are still quite dangerous?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, I think there are ideas that given much more scope and importance than they are willow wisps on a dangerous marsh. I would include the idea of the European Community, for example. I mean, Europe is not really, cannot be a nation state. So it’s a big thing, horrendous bureaucracy. And it can’t hang together. But that’s nothing like the totalitarian ideas, it’s still an idea with a rather small, capital letter, which is distorting European history and the West —

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What else do you see right now that worries you for the next century?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’re nearly there. Russia, of course, is in a terrible state. And we don’t know what’s happening today in Chechnya for one thing, in Moscow. And it doesn’t look very nice, and that could cause real trouble. But I still think that –

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Expand on that, what do you mean?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it could spill over into the caucuses, into Azerbaijan or somewhere. But I still think that real trouble is getting the real unity of the democratic countries which will be able to face the troubles together, based, of course, on American alliance, and be able to cope with the really rogue states. There are states worse than Russia that don’t have much arms, but enough to cause trouble.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You’re talking about —

ROBERT CONQUEST: North Korea. Iraq. There are rogue states which have to be somehow accommodated or prevented from doing — it’s a dangerous situation.

Conquest is a poet as well as historian, which makes him a rara avis in my eyes. His 95th birthday is due to arrive on July 15. As recently as 2010 he was still actively writing poems, such as this one entitled “Getting On”:

Into one’s ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain’s
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one’s dreamt, seen, felt, read,
Loathed, loved”¦
. . And on one’s dead.
-Which makes one’s World, one’s Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.

More on Conquest and the intellectuals (and of course he himself is one, but a gadfly to the left rather than a member of it):

[Conquest] accused [left-wing intellectuals] of denying the full scale of the [Stalin-induced] famine, attacking their views as “an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale.” He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: “Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act.”

My favorite anecdote about Conquest is the following (which probably is not about Conquest at all but rather his longtime friend, the writer Kingsley Amis):

After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest’s publisher asked him to expand and revise [his book] The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest’s old friend, Kingsley Amis.

And it comes as no surprise that, like so many illustrious minds on the right who understood the mentality of the left, Conquest was a political changer:

In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford [and got a doctorate in Soviet history], joining both the Carlton Club and, as an ‘open’ member, the Communist Party of Great Britain…

In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, and then to the Allied Control Commission…At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia. Witnessing first-hand the brutal Stalinist takeover in Bulgaria, he became completely disillusioned with communist ideas…

Conquest joined the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created by the Labour government to “collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.”

Conquest has kept on doing so for the bulk of his very long and productive life.

The post An interview with Robert Conquest… appeared first on The New Neo.

You may know Will and Ariel Durant as the authors of a series of books on world history called The Story of Civilization, which I read one long-ago summer when I was bored and found myself in my in-laws’ house, which had the entire set. If you know something about their lives, you may also know that they met and married under rather suspect circumstances, to say the least, (the Durants, not my in-laws) although they had a very long and apparently happy marriage (the Durants and my in-laws).

Will Durant was a political changer, or perhaps you might say a half-changer or a partial-changer. In the Durant’s dual autobiography, entitled (appropriately enough) A Dual Autobiography, Will writes about his change experience. Although he remained a liberal to the end of his days, he had started out as a rabid socialist. Here’s the reason he gives for his change, which occurred when he was in his late 20s to early 30s and a student at Columbia:

I think it was my studies at Columbia University, as well as my slowly rising income, that diluted the wild radicalism of my 1914 letter to the New York Call into the mild liberalism of my pro-Wilson stand in 1916. The biology courses did most to sober me—though they merely expanded what I might have learned from Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1905. They forced me to recognize the social and political implications of the inescapable, omnipresent struggle for existence. Now I saw that struggle not merely in plants and animals, but as well in the competition of man against man, of woman against woman, of class against class, of state against state, of religion against religion, of idea against idea; competition is the law of life. In this view the socialist call for a warless and classless society seemed doomed by the processes of nature and the resultant nature of man.

Moreover, the study of psychology indicated that variety and inequality are rooted in the needs and method of evolution as a survival of advantageous differences in the struggle for existence. Almost every organism differs from every other; two peas are never quite alike. All men are unequal, even at birth, in physical qualities and mental capacities; and congenital superiorities combine with environmental differences in developing acquired inequalities. In every society the majority of abilities lies in a minority of men; so, in every society some concentration of wealth is natural, and grows with the complexity of the economy and the unequal value, to the community, of diverse talents in its individuals. In light of these ABC’s, it became clear to my budding brain that the communist ideal of equal reward and a classless society is impossible, and that socialism would have to reconcile itself to a considerable inequality of possessions and power…

Durant rejected communism because it did not hold up to the light of scientific observation of human behavior. But he could not go the whole way towards conservatism, because abandoning the dream was too much for him. He compromised and adopted the “hope that the proximate aims of socialism might be realized sooner, and with less turmoil, if socialists should carry on their campaigns within the Democratic Party.”

In 1932 Will and his wife Ariel (whose Jewish emigrant parents had come from Russia, and whose original name was Ida Kaufman) visited Russia. They still hadn’t given up their hopes for the leftist cause and Russia itself, whose revolution Durant had greeted with joy and optimism, despite his hard-learned lessons at Columbia. But once again, reality won out:

We became increasingly uncomfortable during our twenty-four days in Moscow. The inhabitants were glum in the vise of the Man of Steel; voices were hushed in fear of omnipresent spies; all publications were censored, elections were fixed, every air wave proclaimed the virtues of the state…

So we, who had come to Russia singing hymns to the great experiment, were glad to leave the scene of shattered hopes and broken men…Miserable and happy, we fled from paradise.

Durant went on to write a book about his experience, and he has something interesting to say about that, too [emphasis mine]:

I had written…several articles about our trip. My literary agent, the genial and enterprising George Bye, tried to dispose of these to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly; both of these rejected them on the ground that they would alienate too many readers; for Russia, in our Depression years, seemed to millions of Americans the last best hope of men…The articles [I wrote] frankly called the Soviet system a dictatorship over the proletariat, and described without glamour or prejudice—but perhaps with insufficient knowledge and understanding—the achievements and failures of Communist Russia in economics, morals, manners, religion, and government. I was warned, by a well-informed editor at Simon and Schuster, that the printing of these discourses in book form would further alienate the literary fraternity, and especially the reviewers, who were sympathetic with Russia…

I will conclude with an anecdote Durant tells about his encounter with the NY Times writer Walter Duranty (after whom PJ’s Duranty Prize is named) during that same 1932 trip:

Walter Duranty was of no help; when I asked him why he was sending such optimistic reports to the New York Times about conditions in Russia, when they seemed so discouraging, he answered gaily, “You don’t take these matters seriously, do you?” He was handsome and knew Russian; half the girls in the hotel were wooing him, and he had no reason for pessimism.

Durant is way too kind to Duranty, but he still manages to convey the idea of the reporter as a self-aggrandizing sociopath.

What was it in Durant that, despite his socialism, forced him to confront the truth about his philosophy, at least every now and then when it was staring him in the face? I think it was a dose of humility, a respect for reality, an interest in the course of history, and a difficulty in closing his eyes to unpleasant facts. Not everyone had those characteristics; some were a great deal more inclined to fool themselves.

Duranty, though, seems to have been a different case. More than that final “y” differentiated him from Durant. From what I can tell, Duranty was never fooling himself; he knew he was writing lies. He wanted to fool others. And if what Will Durant wrote about the press in the 30s was correct—and I have absolutely no reason to doubt it—many of them wanted to be fooled.

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She was political, too, as poets sometimes are. She opposed the First World War and picketed against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

But something happened to her right before World War II. During the late Thirties, she became alarmed, enraged, and activated by what was happening in Europe, including the appeasement that led to the fall of Czechoslavakia, and the anti-Semitism of Kristalnacht. Millay was moved to speak out publicly and loudly [the following excerpt is taken from the Millay biography by Nancy Milford, entitled Savage Beauty]:

I used to be a most ardent pacifist, but my mind has been changed. I am afraid the only hope of saving democracy is to fight for it…[There are people in power who are] not human beings in the sense that we have been brought up to understand that term. We have beasts in control of human beings. I am not speaking of the German people themselves, but if we have a wild animal to deal with we cannot be pacifists forever. Whatever we do, we cannot keep aloof from the general world situation, and it would be silly to think we can.

Words such as those were not going to sit well with the crew Millay usually hung out with. But in living her rather shocking life until then (lots of sex with men and women, inside and outside of marriage), courage is one thing Millay always had in abundance. She showed it now by stating:

Persons who begin writing lyric poetry at a young age are deeply concerned with themselves…As they mature, they begin to grow out of themselves and they feel a concern for others. Lyric poets who continue writing lyric poetry are likely to go into a dry rot and just say the same thing over and over again.

One impulse motivating Millay seems to have been a fear for the end of freedom of speech, a right she prized highly. She correctly saw that freedom as being imperiled far more by the threat from without than from within. The following passages from the Milford book concern a radio broadcast Millay made in October of 1939:

What we had to fear most, she said, was the menace of the “most loyal and idealistic Communist, and the most loyal and idealistic Fascist.” If we love democracy, then “We must love it in England and France. In Germany we must love it, if only we could find it there”—and here she paused for a long time—“but we have not found it there.”

Millay added:

Why, then, should we be so afraid to say that as regards the war between a Germany whose political philosophy is repugnant to us and an allied Britain and France whose concepts of civilized living are so closely akin to our own that we hope with all our hearts that Great Britain and France may win this war and Germany lose? [We must avail ourselves] as partiotic Americans, of this fine free speech of ours.

Her 1942 poem “The Murder of Lidice” was highly controversial, and many of her friends were highly critical—not just of its poetic value (I have no way to judge this, not having read it) but of its politics. No surprise there; we’ve seen this sort of thing before and since. Merle Rubin noted, “She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism.” And in his journal, her old friend Arthur Ficke wrote:

…this is so bad for her, so false to her real nature…

As a lyric poet, she was superb, unsurpassable…I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong: and although I do not doubt for a moment that we are less horrible than the philosophy and practice of Hitler, still I think we are very horrible: and I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.

This was written in 1942, in the middle of the horror of World War II. It’s the familiar typical stuff; the difference is that, today, most poets would probably say we are more horrible. But after all, this was the Nazis Ficke was talking about. And still, still, this poet called those such as Millay “hysterical,” a practitioner of kneejerk patriotic jingoism rather a clear-sighted observer of an intense conflict between morality and immorality.

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To me, of course, it’s an old story, not only because I experienced something of the sort myself, but because I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing the process.

Each such tale is unique in its details, but each one is also similar in broad outline. Mamet’s is getting a lot of attention because he’s a famous playwright who moves in artistic (read: highly liberal) circles, and the Village Voice venue (hey, I like that alliteration!) in which he chose to “come out” guarantees him high visibility. And it doesn’t hurt that his piece was linked by Drudge.

And so as a self-styled expert on the subject, I want to welcome Mamet to the fold.

His tale involves three important elements that I have found are almost standard in such stories. The first is a conversion to what he refers to as the “conservative (or tragic) view” of life versus the “liberal (or perfectionist) view.” I write “conversion,” but Mamet’s journey—like most such trips—involves not so much a change of mind as a realization of a viewpoint one may have already held for some time, but never known what it signified in political terms.

And that brings as to the second element: the willingness to open up the mind and actually read some conservative writers, often for the first time, with the subsequent realization that they make a certain amount of sense. And if they make more sense than the liberal stuff a person has been imbibing all those years, then there may be no turning back.

The third element is a rejection of the kneejerk idea, loudly vocalized in many liberal circles, that America is a mess and that nearly everything we do is wrong. Mamet found instead that he might just be in agreement with the statement (to paraphrase Churchill) that America has the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

But I submit that Mamet is only at the beginning of his journey—or rather, to paraphrase Churchill again, at the end of the beginning. His friends and colleagues, on the other hand, probably think it’s the beginning of the end for him, and might start acting accordingly. But he will find there’s a whole other world out there of simpatico people.

Mamet hasn’t shed some liberal assumptions that I see as incorrect. It is telling that he still spouts the old “Bush stole the election in Florida….Bush lied about his military service” routines. Perhaps some day he’ll do more reading and examine more of the facts in both stories and come to change his mind about both things; perhaps not.

Mamet’s stance on specific political personalities can be summarized as “Everybody is equally corrupt, and we might as well accept it and become conservatives and adopt the tragic view.” But although each side most definitely has its corruptions and distortions, that doesn’t mean that it’s all a perfect equivalence. Nor does it mean that the Party line (and in this case, the Party to which I refer is not only the Democratic Party but the MSM) on Bush and his “lies” is the truth.

When Mamet delved into conservative writings and opinion, he found that they meshed with his perceptions and experience of the world better than the liberal writings with which he’d previously been familiar. And so he changed. That is the risk (or the benefit?) of being openminded and honest enough to take in new information.

In the first paragraph of his piece, Mamet quotes John Maynard Keyes as saying, “When the facts change, I change my opinion.” In Mamet’s case, however, it wasn’t really new facts that he encountered so much as a set of philosophical viewpoints that fit better with the facts as he had already perceived them.

I applaud Mamet for his courage, and expect that he will continue to learn and his thinking continue to evolve. As a playwright, he probably knows that’s we’re all works in progress, anyway.

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