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:

The Face of Tyranny

Never Stop Applauding

The Spirit of Slavery and the Madness of The Tyrant

Blogger Patterico has posted that he has commenced reading Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. This just happens to coincide with our reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History.  Since we have written a couple of posts about the Gulag based on excerpts from Applebaum's excellent, thoroughly approachable history, it's relevant to add in Patterico's quotation from Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.

Patterico quotes Solzhenitsyn as follows:

Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred. A district Party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop?

The World According to Scientific Socialism

Depraved and Demonic

Stalin's Gulag would seem to be a most extreme example of man's inhumanity to man.  It strikes the historian or observer as inconceivable.  On, the other hand, arguably it was inevitable, given the general perversity of man coupled with a dictatorship in the grip of demonic powers.

Imagine a country filled with slave labour camps--filled in the sense of being all over the country, from Moscow through the empty steppes of the central and eastern USSR.  Beavering away were Moscovian communist bureaucrats laying down administrative rules and regulations addressing every minute aspect of camp life.  The making of rules was without end.  Prisoners were allocated food servings per day down to the precise number of grams of bread each prisoner was to receive, clothes (to last two years or longer), minimum hours of sleep, and so forth.  But, at the same time, the production targets of the labour camps were steadily increased.  So, local camp commanders and their officers cut corners on slave provisions and required longer working hours, shorter breaks and meal times, and so forth.

Anne Applebaum's Gulag comprehensively documents the demonic horror of the camps.  It is too long, too involved, and too complex to summarise adequately.  We will quote just one example: