Western Intelligentsia and the New Jerusalem

Omelettes, Eggshells, and Propaganda

We have commented upon this subject before--yet in our view it is a topic which needs to be revisited constantly, lest (as the saying goes) we forget.  We have in mind the near wholesale acceptance of the Left in the UK in the 1920's and 30's to the propaganda issuing forth from Soviet Russia.  

Strikingly, these are the very same folk whom the media, and the establishment viewed as the intelligentsia of the country.  It is one of the most degrading instances of "groupthink" seen in modern times.  Here was Uncle Joe, systematically grinding the bones of millions of people in his beloved Gulags, whilst the clever, educated, and sophisticated elites in the United Kingdom clapped and cheered the Soviet Union as representing the great promise and glorious future of mankind.

Many of these sophisticated folk believed Marxist doctrine, of course.  In 1929, the great stockmarket crash was followed by the Depression.  This, to many a Marxist mind in the UK, confirmed the Marxist dialectic: capitalism would fall apart to be replaced by the reign of the working classes, the Proletariat.

Communism . . . especially after the Wall Street Crash, attracted many intellectuals, not a few with public-school, Tory and Oxbridge backgrounds, dazzled by the contrast between a "successful" Soviet Russia and a faltering capitalist world.  The Communist Party never attracted more than a few thousand full members in England, but progressives--led by an elite of economists, political scientists, composers, actors, artists and writers--hailed Moscow as the New Jerusalem.  [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p. 672.]

It is not that all these talking heads were unaware of the horror and oppression, the famines and the cannibalism.  Many were, but rationalised them away as being little more than teething problems.  H. G. Wells went further and admitted the Soviet Union's  permanent Terror, yet he still believed that the Soviet Union represented the glorious future of mankind.  The USSR remained "something splendid and hopeful".

Tombs continues the indictment:

At the height of the Great Terror in 1936, Victor Gollancz, director of the Left Book Club, named Stalin his Man of the Year.  Many visitors to Russia, including Shaw and the Webbs, saw only happiness, prosperity and freedom; even some who admitted the regime's tyranny accepted that omelettes required broken eggs.

The Webbs showed their growing confidence by removing the question mark from the title of their 1937 edition of their Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?  "All I know,' wrote Beatrice, "is that I wish Russian Communism to succeed," and she angrily dismissed the view of her more perceptive nephew, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, that it was based on "the most evil and cruel elements in human nature."  [Ibid., p. 673.]

The Webbs and their coterie, along with most of those cheering the Soviet Union, saw it as representing the emergence of a New Model Man, a great step forward in the evolutionary chain of being.  They systematically refused to see what was increasingly before their very eyes and instead created a kind of parallel universe.  Lest we forget, these folk regarded themselves and their colleagues as representing the educated and sophisticated intelligentsia of the United Kingdom.  (In many ways the Group-think consensus into which they bound themselves is paralleled in our day by the great Global Warming scam.)

Tombs describes some of the lengths to which the creation of a parallel thought universe went.

The Webbs imagined the Soviet Communist Party as a combination of charitable organization and religious order, "a remarkable companionship" with a "vocation of leadership" over many "voluntary organizations" forming a "multiform democracy"--certainly, not a dictatorship, and Stalin was not "the sort of person to claim to desire such a position" [Ibid] 

One wilfully dumb Labour MP opined that if it were true that Soviet Interior Ministry officials had been sent to prison it would only have been to make sure that conditions were comfortable! Invincible ignorance.

We recently heard of a Chinese national student sent by his parents to study in a New Zealand secondary school.  Hearing one day about Mao's Long March and the oppression of the Communist Government in China, the young man bristled with indignation.  "Lies! Lies!", he insisted. 

Self-deluding Group Think has been just as pernicious in the so-called Free West where people long to see a secular heaven upon earth and so fall into the trap of believing their own propaganda--despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.