Trumpeting Stalin

Very Rotten Apples

One of the most disturbing scandals of the previous century was the willing complicity of the English and American intellectual “elite” with the Soviet regime. This elite, which effectively controlled some of the most prestigious newspapers of the day (for example, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New York Times) willed themselves to believe and assert the beneficence and goodness of the Soviet Union. Their naiveté, credulity, and willing suspension of disbelief leads a detached observer to conclude that they were puerile, but also corrupt in their gullibility. For them, the Soviet Union had to be an exemplar of a new and better world, because it had become a warranting concept, a justification for their own supercilious and bankrupt world-view in which man had the power to create a perfect, sinless utopia.

For example, Martin Amis, in his powerful book, Koba the Dread, described the fawning credulity and blind dishonesty of the founders of the New Statesman. This newspaper was

founded in 1913 by, among others, . . . the century's four most extravagant dupes of the USSR: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Wells, after an audience with Stalin in 1934, said the he had “never met a man more candid, fair and honest”; these attributes accounted for “his remarkable ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him”. Shaw, after some banquet diplomacy, declared the Russian people uncommonly well-fed at a time when perhaps 11 million citizens were in the process of dying of starvation. The Webbs, after extensive study, wrote a book which “seen as the last word in serious Western scholarship, ran to over 1,200 pages, representing a vast amount of toil and research, all totally wasted. It was originally entitled, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? but the question mark was triumphantly removed in the second edition—which appeared in 1937 at precisely the time the regime was in its worst phase.” (Robert Conquest). Sidney and Beatrice Webb swallowed the great Show Trials of 1936—38 and the New Statesman was not much less sceptical: “We do not deny . . . that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth”; “there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the USSR”; and so on.
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 21. Emphasis, ours

Malcolm Muggeridge later described his eager enthusiasm when he worked as a reporter in Moscow in the early nineteen thirties:

How marvelous the Russian revolution seemed when it happened! A little bearded man wearing a cap, Lenin, had taken over the vast empire of the Tsars on behalf of the workers and the peasants; his Jewish lieutenant, Trotsky, had created a Red Army of legendary valour, without officers, gold braid, bands or any of the other contemptible insignia of militarism. How we rejoiced and cheered and exulted as the time . . . In the distant, fabulous land of the steppes and vodka the proletariat had seized power and the millennium had begun.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Tread Softly, For You Tread On My Jokes, (1972 edition) p. 23.

Muggeridge was married to Kitty, who was Beatrice Webb's sister. He, of course, was one of the first of the fadishly socialist left-wing-set to face up to the truth about the Soviet Union. When he did he became a tireless opponent of the regime.

People who were supposed to be educated and intelligent came back from visits to the Soviet Union proclaiming it was a paradise. They swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. They were the regime's willing cheerleaders in the West. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes how a group of prisoners were transported throughout the streets of Moscow in closed vans with signs on the outside in four languages proclaiming “Bread” and “Meat”.

One of the vans stopped at an intersection. A shiny maroon automobile was waiting for the same red light to change. In it rode the correspondent of a progressive French paper Liberation who was on the way to a hockey match at the Dynamo Stadium. The correspondent read the legend on the side of the van: MYASO—VIANDE—FLEISCH—MEAT. He remembered that he'd already seen more than one such van, in various parts of Moscow. And he took out his notebook and wrote in red ink: “On the streets of Moscow one often sees vans filled with foodstuffs, very neat and hygienically impeccable. One can only conclude that the provisioning of the capital is excellent.”
Cited in L Praamsa, The Church in the Twentieth Century, (St Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1981), p. 105.

Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, notes that his father joined the British Communist Party in 1941 and remained a “believer” in the Soviet Union for fifteen years. He realised later, with deep embarrassment, that he had willingly shut out the facts, and had credulously and gullibly accepted Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. Overwhelmingly the intellectuals of the West were choosing to believe a lie. Yet the facts and the data were there all along for any who cared to look.

This shameful episode demonstrates the truth of the adage that there is none so blind as those who will not see. There are manifold contemporary instances of the same sickness. For example, almost without exception the Western liberal-academic-media-complex has shown itself gulled repeatedly by Palestinian and Hamas propaganda stunts over alleged atrocities by Israeli armed forces. Now, we do not doubt that atrocities may occur: what is clear, however, is that the liberal-complex itself does not maintain even the slightest scepticism about Palestinian and Hamas propaganda. The complex wilfully believes everything the Palestinians portray to be true.

We suspect that there is a complex of influences at work here. Firstly, there is likely the elite's condescension towards the Palestinians (they are poor, ignorant, simple, and backward folk. They would not be sufficiently clever or subtle to lie or engage in propaganda). Secondly, there is likely the old Marxist ethic at work which equates good morals with the oppressed and the downtrodden (you can rely on the honesty and integrity of the Palestinians because they are the downtrodden; the Israeli's, however, being oppressors, are evil and corrupted). Thirdly, there is likely to be the influence of the self-satisfied smugness and sense of superiority which belongs to the intellectual elites (we are too clever to be gulled by anyone; no-one would even try). Finally, there is likely to be the powerful suasion of guilt and pity, which leads the elite to “stand in solidarity with” the oppressed Palestinians no matter what as a means of assuaging their own self-loathing.

Another example is the way the Western liberal-academic-media-complex generally turns a very, very blind eye towards the oppression of women in Islamic society and ideology. It discounts its existence—and if oppression were to exist, it is regarded as a minor matter in the wider scheme of things. This is why the innumerable secular feminists which populate the liberal-academic-media complex religiously ignore the oppression of women in Islam. They have bigger fish to fry. Consistent Islam—the manifestations of Islam that are consistent with the Koran and authoritative Islamic traditions—is widely found amongst the poor and dispossessed. This fact alone demands solidarity and support from the elite feminists of the West, regardless of how they treat their women-folk. They are willing to accept it as mere “collateral damage” in pursuit of more important goals.

The bottom line is that the shamefulness of the adulation of the former Soviet Union by the Western intelligentsia has its direct descendants in our day. The rotten apple has not fallen far from the tree.