A collection of essays written by formerly fervent Communists who realized the lie and deconverted. Includes a heartfelt essay from Arthur Koestler, author of the excellent Darkness at Noon, and a wonderful essay by Andre Gide, someone who I've never read and need to read more of.
Note that this collection of essays was published in 1949 (and these authors' "deconversions" happened in some cases many years earlier). This book was widely-read and well-known in its day. And yet there were (seemingly) intelligent people still totally fooled by the Soviet "system" as late as the late 1980s (I'm looking right at you, John Kenneth Galbraith). There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Back to Andre Gide for a moment: Gide saw through the ruse the quickest; he saw it all for the Potemkin village it was the moment he was wined and dined, fetted and fluffed by officials all across Russia--he saw it as a clear contraindicator and it disgusted him: "I had arrived there a convinced and enthusiastic follower in order to admire a new world, and they offered me, to tempt me and win me, all the prerogatives and privileges which I abhorred in the old world."
In stark contrast, all the other "intellecshuals" and writers who went to Russia ate it all up, they loved the attention, and they rationalized it by simply assuming that Russia treasured writers more than the decadent, bourgeois West. They never figured out that they were useful to the regime, and of course no intellectual wants to find out he's been a useful idiot.
On one level you feel pity and sorrow for these gullible intellectuals--and not just for how badly they were fooled, but even for how badly they were treated while they were being fooled. You see, real communists hate the intelligentsia: you're either of the proletariat or you're useless. Koestler discusses in stark terms how intellectuals were mocked, insulted and taunted, and yet responded by believing still harder in the cause--a sort of smart person's Stockholm syndrome.
On another level you're impressed that these writers were willing to admit that they were wrong. This of course is something intellectuals (then and now) rarely do, despite being wrong all the time. Something we should all remember.
Notes:
Forward (to the 1982 editions) by Norman Poderetz
1) On how the Soviets/Communitsts "changed their line" and presented themselves as "liberals in a hurry" in order to align themselves with New Deal Democrats in the United States, and to ally with other "bourgeois democracies" for help with the threat of Hitler and other fascist systems. After the war of course the Soviets "changed their line" right back.
2) Note also that Communism was more dangerous than fascism or Nazism because ideologically it was attractive to so many people, despite being just as brutal a totalitarian system as Nazism or fascism. Why so many intellectuals credulously fell for it.
3) All of these authors were extremely famous in their day, which is one of the reasons why this book had such an impact when it came out in the 50s.
4) Note also: all of the anti- and former Communists who wrote essays for this book all remained leftists, some even remained Marxists. Many former Communists came to rest initially with the ideal of democratic socialism, yet another illusion. In any event these authors (despite their anti-capitalism!) had to still look to the United States as the only power that could resist the evil of Communist expansion.
5) Poderetz considers these authors to be pussies, essentially: they didn't go far enough. They were still apologetic for Communism or Marxism, and only drew the line at a certain point. "It has become clear in retrospect, then (and poignantly so for me), but the kind of anti-Communism legitimized in The God That Failed was shot through with too many reservations and qualifications to stand firm against the pressures of the years ahead. Nevertheless this book performed an enormous service for its time."
Introduction by Richard Crossman
6) This book was born of arguments with Arthur Koestler: "Tell me exactly what happened when you joined the Party--not what you feel about it now, but what you felt then."
7) "Our concern was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period--from 1917 to 1939--when conversion was so common."
8) "The intellectual attraction of Marxism was that it exploded liberal fallacies--which really were fallacies. It taught the bitter truth that progress is not automatic, that boom and slump are inherent in capitalism, that social injustice and racial discrimination are not cured nearly by the passage of time, and at power politics cannot be 'abolished,' but only used for good or bad ends."
9) "... the idea of an active comradeship of struggle--involving personal sacrifice and abolishing differences of class and race--has had a compulsive power in every Western democracy... the attraction of communism was that it offered nothing and demanded everything."
10) "It is useless to discuss any particular aspect of politics with a Communist. Any genuine intellectual contact which you have with him involves a challenge to his fundamental faith, a struggle for his soul." [In other words, it's effectively a religious position.]
11) "One of the strangest revelations of these six autobiographies is the attitude of the professional Communists to the intellectual convert. They not only resented and suspected him, but apparently subjected him to constant and deliberate mental torture. At first, this treatment only confirmed his faith and heightened his sense of humility before the trueborn proletarian. Somehow he must achieve by mental training the qualities which, as he finally imagined, the worker has by nature. [Again, this is Stockholm syndrome right here.]
Part I: The Initiates
Arthur Koestler [Author of Darkness at Noon]
12) "Every page of Marx, and even more of Engels, brought a new revelation, and an intellectual delight which I had only experienced once before, at my first contact with Freud." [I get this: there is something enticing, and intellectually thrilling, about Marx's world view, despite the fact that it always seems to manifest in the real world as the worst totalitarianism imaginable.]
13) [Money quote right here: he really nails what it's like to have a true ideological ephipany]: "I began for the first time to read Marx, Engels and Lenin in earnest. By the time I had finished with [Engel's book on Ludwig] Feuerbach and [Lenin's book] State and Revolution, something had clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had 'seen the light' is a poor description to the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless of what faith he has been converted to). The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past--a past already remote, when one had lived in diesel ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don't know. Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert's inner peace and serenity--except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth."
14) [But... here's where the confirmation bias kicks in, unfortunately] "Gradually I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place. Both morally and logically the Party was infallible; morally, because its aims were right, that is, in accord with the Dialectic of History, and these aims justified all means; logically, because the Party was the vanguard of the Proletariat, and the Proletariat the embodiment of the active principle in History."
15) [Then gradually becoming an autonomic NPC, spouting whatever your elites tell you to think]: "Our literary, artistic and musical tastes were similarly reconditioned. Lenin had said somewhere that he had learned more about France from Balzac's novels than from all history books put together. Accordingly, Balzac was the greatest of all times, whereas other novelists of the past merely reflected 'the distorted values of the decaying society which had produced them.'"
16) Fascinating discussions here of thinking in "mechanistic" rather than "dialectical" terms as a form of rhetorical control over debate/questions: See for example issues of "bourgeois matrimony" versus "proletarian matrimony": the communist opinion was that "bourgeois matrimony was merely a form of prostitution sanctioned by society." But proletarian morality was to get married, be faithful to one's spouse and produce proletarian babies... but wait, wasn't this the same thing as bourgeois morality? "The question, comrade, shows that you are thinking in mechanistic, not in dialectical, terms. What is the difference between a gun and the hands of a policeman and a gun in the hands of a member of the revolutionary working class? The difference between a gun and the hands of a policeman and in the hands of a member of the revolutionary working class is that the policeman is a lackey of the ruling class and his gun an instrument of oppression, whereas the same gun in the hands of a member of the revolutionary working class is an instrument of the liberation of the oppressed masses." [It's astonishing to hear this cult-like behavior, fervor... and blindness to reason]
17) Koestler does not call Stalin "Stalin" but rather Josef Djugashwili. Interesting...
18) On how the intelligentsia could never be proletarians, no matter how hard they try; but they would perform "intellectual self castration" on themselves (essentially to join a club that wouldn't have anyone like them for a member), not unlike the "useful Jews" in the Third Reich, kept alive until their "usefulness expired."
19) On how the Communist Party in Germany was disintermediated very efficiently by the Nazi party, despite all the secret cells and all the precautions taken: "we lost the battle against Hitler before it was joined." Within a few months the entire leadership was arrested; note also that the propaganda instruments at the USSR blamed "internal agents of fascism" and then claimed that the German Communist Party had suffered no defeat but merely ""a strategic retreat."
20) Koestler gets invited to tour the Soviet Union to write a book about it, and is granted a visa in 1932. The state apparatus pays him handsomely (too handsomely) for his writing, at the time he believed that Soviet Russia was a writer's paradise where writers were held in higher esteem; he didn't understand the real mechanism at work here: this was a system to generate extrernal propaganda, via sympathetic useful idiot intellectuals, and it was run deliberately by the Soviet system. "The average visiting foreign author knows little about all this; and the little witch his intuition makes him guess, his vanity will quickly make him forget. The people whom he meets at banquets and parties seem to know his works by heart; he would have to be a masochist, with a touch of persecution mania, to assume that they have been specially briefed for the occasion." [It's shocking how analogous this sounds to the "grant system" of the US FDA/NIH, as well as the "honoraria system" so effectively used by the pharmaceutical industry.]
21) 1934: the 7th Congress of the Comintern does a rebranding: avoiding all discussion of revolution or "dictatorship of the proletariat" etc., now instead using slogans like "Popular Front for Peace and Against Fascism" were used; "We no longer
referred to ourselves as 'Bolsheviks,' nor even as Communists--the public use of the word was now rather frowned at in the
Party--we were just simple, honest, peace-loving anti-Fascists
and defenders of democracy"
22) He enters Spain post Franco's coup; published details on German pilots and planes in Franco's army, was then captured and jailed for four months, expecting to be shot at any time, set free thanks to the intervention of the British government. "But when I was liberated I did not know that I had ceased to be a Communist."
23) She also Koestler's contact with Alex Weissberg and his wife Eva: Eva gave him much of his information about what it was like inside Russian prisons that he used to write Darkness at Noon.
24) He writes about all of the people he and his fellow Communists knew who were liquidated or sent to the gulag in the various show trials, and the guilt hanging all over all of them: "...how
silent we were when our comrades, without trial or conviction,
were liquidated."
Ignazio Silone [Silone was a well-known Italian novelist in his day]
25) "And if my poor literary work has any meaning, in the ultimate analysis, it consists of this: a time came when writing meant, for me, an absolute necessity to testify, an urgent need to free myself from an obsession, to state the meaning and define the limits of a painful but decisive break, and of a vaster allegiance that still continues." [Communism sounds like a sort of masturbatory religion: these people are searching for something, anything, and they seem to have no idea what they've grasped onto until much too late.]
26) He remembers a vivid example of a peasant seamstress in southern Italy being mauled, on purpose, by the dog of one of the local gentry; she went to court against the squire but no one would act as a witness, while the gentryperson's lawyer rounded up a number of phony witnesses who perjured themselves by describing a grotesque version of what happened; the squire was acquitted. [This was an astounding experience to read these examples of genuine feudalism, but yet they occurred in early 1900s Italy!!]
27) The local prince/squire loses an election, by a lot. Silone is transfixed by this: "Nobody asked himself: why can the will of the people only express itself sporadically?"
28) "Such episodes of violence--with their inevitable sequel of mass arrests, trials, legal expenses, and prison sentences--reinforced distrust, diffidence, and skepticism in the peasants' minds. For them, the State became the irremediable creation of the devil. A good Christian, if he wanted to save his soul, should avoid, as far as possible, all contact with the State. The State always stands for swindling, intrigue and privilege, and could not stand for anything else."
29) On the 1915 earthquake in Italy, and the corruption of the reconstruction program; the author reports the facts to someone in authority, but was told not to get mixed up in it: "you're young, you must finish your studies, you've got your career to think of, you shouldn't compromise yourself for things that don't concern you." He later writes articles for the socialist papers specifying the corruption, but a leading socialist intervene with the editorial staff. "This showed me that the system of deception and fraud oppressing us was much vaster than at first appeared." [You can't help thinking about the captured pharma regulatory agencies when you read about this, or other other captured institutions (tech/social media companies that quietly obeyed censorship requests for example; captured mainstream media; etc) in the modern, Fourth Turning-era USA.]
30) On Russian Communism being much different from Western communism: one is in a region with zero political liberty (in fact political liberty was an alien idea) thus "The history of the Communist International was therefore of a history of schisms."
31) [This is quite a striking quote]: "I spent hours one day trying to explain to one of the directors of the State publishing house, why she ought at least to be ashamed of the atmosphere of discouragement and intimidation in which Soviet writers lived. She could not understand what I was trying to tell her. 'Liberty'--I had to give examples--'is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying no to any authority--literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political.' 'But that,' murmured this eminent functionary of Soviet culture and horror, 'that is counter-revolution.'"
32) On a group deciding to condemn a document that Trotsky wrote, but no one read it, no one wanted to read it, and Silone protested that you can't condemn a document that you haven't read! He didn't understand that this was "the thick of a struggle for power between two rival groups of the Russian Central Directorate. Which of the two groups do we want to line up with? That's the point. Documents don't come into it."
Richard Wright [African-American writer; born in poverty in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, became a communist during the depression]
33) The John Reed Club per Wikipedia: "The John Reed Clubs (1929–1935), often referred to as John Reed Club (JRC), were an American federation of local organizations targeted towards Marxist writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist and activist John Reed. Established in the fall of 1929, the John Reed Clubs were a mass organization of the Communist Party USA which sought to expand its influence among radical and liberal intellectuals."
34) Wright is suspicious and cynical of the idea that white people could/would treat him without condescension. "I felt the Communist could not possibly have a sincere interest in Negroes." After attending a meeting of a Communist group, "I went home full of reflection, probing the sincerity of the strange white people I had met, wondering how they really regarded Negroes."
35) "I got the notion of writing a series of biographical sketches of Negro Communists. I told no one of my intentions, and I did not know how fantastically naive my ambition was."
36) A schism happens in the club and Wright becomes a political pawn in it; a bloc of writers used Richard Wright to oust the "painters" from the club's leadership. "Without my knowledge and consent, they confronted the members of the party with a Negro, knowing it that it would be difficult for Communists to refuse to vote for a man representing the largest single racial minority in the nation, inasmuch as Negro equality was one of the main tenets of Communism."
37) "Comrade Young" joins the group from the Detroit John Reed club, it turns out he's a kind of SJW incursion, he proceeds to disrupt the organization from the inside. "'I've been asked to rid the club of traitors... We must have a purge,' he said, his eyes bulging, his face quivering with passion." It turns out he was an insane man who had escaped from a mental institution. (!) Wright struggles to grapple with the implictaions of this: "I was thunderstruck. Was this true? Undoubtedly it was. Then what kind of club did we run that a lunatic could step into it and help run it?"
38) He goes to his first cell meeting in the Communist Party and is roundly mocked and laughed at by other blacks because of his clothing and his style of speaking, they thought he was an intellectual: "'He talks like a book,' one of the Negro comrades had said.
And that was enough to condemn me forever as bourgeois."
39) [You can see why the Communist party never got traction in the United States: it kept eating itself alive like an ouroboros, ousting and isolating its own members, rejecting those who wanted to join and help, especially "intellectuals" who it openly derided and disparaged--despite the fact that these were the people who could have actually helped them get wider traction! Worse, they would hold private little show trials to convict and scapegoat their own members in front of everybody else.] "...whenever I heard news of the Party's inner life, it was of charges and countercharges, reprisals and counter-reprisals."
40) Unfortunately, Wright finds the same "reprisals and counter reprisals" culture in a black theater that he helped run as part of a WPA job: his own people charge him for being an Uncle Tom. "I was transferred to a white experimental theatrical company as a publicity agent and I resolved to keep my ideas to myself."
41) "I knew in my heart that I should never be able to write that way again, should never be able to feel with that simple sharpness about life, should never again express such passionate hope, should never again make so total a commitment of faith." [Communism as religion again: you can feel the earnestness, and you can feel how the ideology literally transfixes people, only to crush their dreams afterwards one way or another.]
Part II: Worshipers from Afar
André Gide (Forward about Gide's "arc" with Communism, by Enid Starkie)
42) On how Gide, on an African expedition, was deeply shaken seeing exploitation of Africans in the French colonies in the 1920s. On Gide's "religious" conversion to Communism [again: it's a religion, not an ideology!]
43) "I have written, and I believe firmly, that if Christianity had really prevailed and if it had really fulfilled the teaching of Christ, there would today be no question of Communism--there would indeed be no social problem at all."
44) Later Gide "ashamed of being a man of independent means, of not having been obliged ever to work with his hands." [Once again: the existential problem intellectuals face in Communism: they can never be real "proletarians" and they become self-loathing as a result.]
45) But by 1937 he considered Italian fascism and Russian communism indistinguishable.
46) After World War II Gide became much less of a radical, much less of an interventionist in his ideas: essentially he changed from a youthful desire to burn it all down, and began to realize that you need an attachment to history and a thread across history "to return safely from the Maze."
47) Gide goes to Russia in 1936 and was quickly disappointed. "There was in my Soviet adventure something tragic. I had arrived there a convinced and enthusiastic follower in order to admire a new world, and they offered me, to tempt me and win me, all the prerogatives and privileges which I abhorred in the old world."
48) "He saw everywhere the same gulf which separates the privileged from the underprivileged" when he was in Russia
49) Gide's essay is drawn from two books that he wrote on his return from the Soviet Union: Retour de l'U.R.S.S. and Retouches à mon Retour de l'U.R.S.S "with the help and approval of André Gide himself"
André Gide
50) On the goddess Demeter who nursed and took care of the boy Demophoön: desiring to transform him into a god, she would lay him naked on a bed of glowing coals; however, his mother one night bursts into the room and thrusts aside Demeter, scattering the embers, "and, in order to save the child, sacrificed the God."
51) "...it is only right that I should recognize my error as soon as possible, because I am responsible for those at home whom my opinions might lead astray." [Wow: a rare intellectual who not only can admit his errors but corrects them on behalf of those who may have listened to him. The exact opposite of a modern day "expert"... the exact opposite. I gotta read more of this guy.]
52) "...what distressed me most was not what was not yet perfect, but rather to find there everything from which I had always fled at home--the privileges which I had hoped abolished forever." He sees how Communism just replaces one set of elites with another.
53) [This definitely makes you think about the gullibility and credulousness of so many of the "intellectuals" who went over to Russia and were fêted the same way Gide was, but didn't see it for what it was, and who essentially sold their souls for a ruse.]
54) He also saw through the Soviets' education and cultural system, seeing it as non-critical, non-disinterested and also just another instrument of the regime.
55) He visited a "model collective" in the Soviet Union, but was still depressed by the uniformity of each dwelling, the overall social conformity led to total loss of individuality. "There can only be one opinion, the right one."
56) Also regarding the Spanish Civil War: at one of the dinners in Russia one of the foreign writers praised the Spanish Front in a toast, and none of the Russians knew how to react, because the Party hadn't made any final official statement on it yet! "...they did not dare risk approval without getting a lead knowing what they were expected to think... By now the minds of the people are so well trained in conformity that compliance has become natural and easy for them."
57) "The disappearance of capitalism has not brought freedom to the Soviet workers--it is essential that the proletariat abroad should realize this fully. It is of course true that they are no longer exploited by shareholding capitalists, but nevertheless they are exploited, and in so devious, subtle and twisted a manner that they do not know any more who to blame."
58) Today Gide would be thought of as a very earnest "bleeding-heart liberal." He's also such a good writer that I want to read more of his stuff.
59) "...all the old layers of society forming again--if not precisely social classes, at least a new kind of aristocracy, and not an aristocracy of intellect or ability, but an aristocracy of right thinkers and conformists... Although the long heralded Dictatorship of the Proletariat has not materialized, there is nevertheless dictatorship of one kind--dictatorship of the Soviet bureaucracy." [Sounds like the Administrative State and inverted totalitarianism, shades of Sheldon Wolin's book]
60) Gide observes workers tied to their factories "like Ixion to his wheel": if they leave they lose their living quarters and much of their wages; also a worker could be transferred by the authorities--and he cannot refuse. "He is free neither to go when he wishes nor to stay where his affections and personal interests are centered." [This is serfdom all over again, just different bosses.]
61) On the freethinkers/those who think for themselves, who disappear or are liquidated: "among the greatest and most independent of those who distinguish themselves from the masses" and "martyrs"... "When I raise my voice in their favor I am told--again in the name of Marx--that these deportations, the poverty of the workers and the abolition of suffrage, all these are only provisional measures and are the necessary price to pay for the gains of 1917."
62) "I blame the Communists in France--and elsewhere too--and I do not mean those who were duped in all good faith, but those who knew--or ought to have known--better, and yet lied to the workers abroad while all the time seeking political aims. It is time that the workers outside the Soviet Union should realize that they had been bamboozled and led astray by the Communist Party, just as the Russian workers were duped before them."
Louis Fischer [American journalist, ex-Communist, biographer of Gandhi]
63) On the Kronstadt mutiny, where the Soviets suppressed a sailors' revolt on the island of Kronstadt. "Kronstadt" becomes a metaphor here: "my Kronstadt" is when ones sees an example of Communist brutality, of cruelty, of repression, of incompetence, that makes one realize the entire ideology was a total lie.
64) This author was already appalled that the tremendous amount of political prisoners and political repression under the Bolsheviks, but he still "weighed the Soviet regime in the balance."
65) On "Socialist realism": the Soviet device for distorting the truth about the present by treating the present as if it did not exist, and treating the future is if it had already arrived. The author gives a few different examples of this, and it's quite intriguing the psychological ploys at work here. But it worked to sustain people through various five-year plans where they had to give up much on the way to a far better "promised" future--which of course never actually arrived.
66) The forced collectivization of farms across Russia was another event that caused people to go totally sour on the Soviet regime: "...the collectives were an ingenious, twentieth-century form of wholesale serfdom which forced the peasant to work under the eyes and prods of picked village Communists and made him dependent on the state for seeds, tools, work animals, and most of his income."
67) The author is grossed out by the idolatry of Stalin.
68) Then, in 1934, the Kremlin pivots to Russian nationalism, rehabilitating prior czars, forcing the Russian language on all the minority peoples throughout the country, etc. They brought back many of the trappings of the czarist era. "Titles for army officers and epaulets reappeared." "The fact that Bolshevism would want to drink at the mouldy wells of Czarism shocked and repelled me. My strongest bond with the Soviet System had been its internationalism and its forward look."
69) The Soviet Constitution 1936, the "Stalin Constitution": it lacked any executive machinery to implement or judiciary to safeguard its Bill of Rights, then in 1936-37 all the show trials began.
70) On Franco's coup in Spain in 1936: "Death stalked Russia in the cellar. Death came to Spain in open combat in the sun. Spain was sad but noble... The Soviet System elicited intellectual approval, the Spanish struggle aroused emotional identification."
71) Then the Soviets started recalling and executing all of the military and civilian Soviet citizens who were helping the Republican cause against Francoist Spain. Many were recalled to Russia and were never heard from ever again.
72) Finally the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939 drove Fischer over the edge: "The Communists and their fellow-travelers had denounced anybody who predicted a Soviet-Nazi agreement; they said it was inconceivable. On the very eve of its signing, they heatedly refused to believe it. When it became official, they defended it. They defended it because they automatically defend everything Moscow does. On all other grounds, the pact was indefensible. The Soviet-Nazi Pact was the gravestone of Bolshevik internationalism and the cornerstone of Bolshevik imperialism."
73) Russia went on to invade Finland in December 1939.
74) "Some are so obsessed with a crimes of the capitalist world that they remain blind to the crimes and bankruptcy of Bolshevism."
75) [Again, the old lie that fooled so many "smart boy"-type intellectuals: that the ends would justify the means and that a "temporary suspension of freedom" would actually be temporary.]: "I believed that a temporary suspension of freedom would enable the Soviet regime to make rapid economic strides and then restore the freedom... The millions in Soviet concentration camps and prisons thirty years after the Revolution mock every claim of political or economic democracy."
76) "My pro-Sovietism led me into the further error of thinking that a system founded on the principle of "the end justifies the means" could ever create a better world or a better human being."
77) "Capitalism's trusts and cartels and monopolies are pygmies compared to the one mammoth political-economic monopoly which is the Soviet State."
78) "I thought, in my Soviet phase, that I was serving humanity. But it is only since then that I have really discovered the human being."
79) [One can't help read this essay by Lewis Fischer and feel sorry for the guy for having his head so far up his ass; that he was so easily fooled, so gullible. A "temporary suspension of freedom"??]
Stephen Spender
80) [This final essay turned out to be poorly structured and all over the place, the weakest of the book; but at the same time it offers some wonderful long quotes, and some very useful context for the Spanish Civil War and the role played by Russian communists in it.]
81) "I was a member of the British Communist Party for a few weeks during the winter of 1936-37." [Interesting lede here, a good one.]
82) Spender gets fooled by another writer who had been on a tour of Russia, fooled by the same scam that failed to fool Andre Gide.
83) Also another author calls Spender "Gandhi" (as a pejorative) after he spoke to his disdain and dislike of violence: this is quite striking term that the word could be used as a pejorative in that day for a revolutionary who uses non-violence but to no effect; recall that in those days (the 1930s) no one knew what ultimately would happen with Gandhi's movement, it was assumed to be failing and no one knew how successful it would be ultimately.
84) On how Communist writers were in a weird position because their sensibilities were bourgeois, and they could not actually be proletarian, and could never have a working class mentality. Again, this is that whole kind of reverse Groucho Marx club: "I desperately want to join a club that would never have somebody like me as a member."
85) And all of these people rationalize the brutality of the dictatorship, rationalize Stalin's purges and show trials, because they felt that the future regime would be "good" somehow. Like a type of mysticism! "It is obvious that there were elements of mysticism in this faith. Indeed, I think that this is an attraction of Communism for the intellectual."
86) "There may be some truth in the argument of Arthur Bryant that the Spaniards on either side hated the interventionists who rushed into help them [in the Spanish Civil War], even more than they hated their Spanish opponents." Interesting.
87) "If the Communists had entered into the Popular Front with the same good faith as the Socialists and Liberals, a democratic movement would have extended from the extreme Left to the Liberal Center, which would have had the fervor, generosity and imagination of the liberal revolutions of 1848.[*] But the fatality of the Communists was to think only of forming united fronts in order then to seize control of them from within."
[*] Spender here is referring to a bunch of (temporarily successful) revolutionary anti-monarchy movements that erupted across Europe in 1848-49.
88) "The best books of the War--those by Malraux, Hemingway, Koestler and Orwell--describe the Spanish tragedy from the liberal point of view, and they bear witness against the Communists."
89) The Communist gain control of the international brigade (this was the international corps of volunteers who were recruited and retained to fight Franco in Spain) and Spender wrote an article explaining that it was a Communist controlled organization.
90) Notice the use of "atrocity propaganda" which both sides used, pointing out atrocities committed by "those guys" and deeming their side to be angels; quite reminiscent of the current Ukraine conflict.
91) "After the war, a Spanish corps Commander told me that he considered the Communist propaganda to have done the Republican cause more harm than good. 'We had a good enough cause to have been able to afford to tell the truth.' This remark contained wisdom. Propaganda which paints friends entirely white and enemies black persuades only those who are already convinced: to others it is humanly incredible... It dismays those who are sympathetic to the cause but also open-eyed."
92) Note also the response of the Communist press to Andre Gide's book Retour de l'URSS, it was so violent a reaction that it cost them credibility: "From being the world's greatest writer who had gone to pay homage to the world's most advanced democracy, Gide became a Fascist, a decadent, a traitor, reviled by the Communist press in terms which seem to me at the time almost unbelievable."
93) [Long but good quote here in part about being self-aware of your own mental gymnastics:] "At this time I came to a conclusion which, although it may appear obvious, was important to the development of my thinking about politics. This was simply that nearly all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp on reality. Only a few things, which illustrate their own interests and ideas, are real to them; other things, which are in fact equally real, appear to them as abstractions. Thus, when men have decided to pursue a course of action, everything which serves to support this seems vivid and real; everything which stands against it becomes abstraction. Your friends are allies and therefore real human beings with flesh and blood and sympathies like yourself. Your opponents are just tiresome, unreasonable, unnecessary theses, whose lives are so many false statements which you would like to strike out with a lead bullet as you would put the stroke of a lead pencil through a bungled paragraph.
"Not to think in this way demands the most exceptional qualities of judicious-mindedness or of high imaginative understanding. During the Spanish War it dismayed me to notice that I thought like this myself. When I saw photographs of children murdered by the fascists, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words. However, I never learned to be unself-critical, and thus I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked. It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not really care about children being murdered at all. I was performing an obscene mental act on certain corpses which became the fuel for propagandist passions, but I showed my fundamental indifference by not caring about those other corpses who were the victims of the Republicans."
94) "Why do you fuss about the lives of a few thousand Poles, when the whole Soviet Union is at stake?" An extremely revealing question put to Spender by the leader of the British Communist Party.
95) The way Spender describes the mentality of communist believers, it's a classic example of an I-it relationship Martin Buber describes in I and Thou. These believer have a certainty, an epistemic confidence about them: there's never any doubt or uncertainty--even when they change their minds and reverse opinions they held just a bare few months before! I can really see the egoic appeal to this political "religion."
96) [Another long quote which is instructive of of the beliefs of communist diehard believers; also a good example of both rhetoric and dialectic from both sides]: "At a meeting of the small group of Communist writers in London I told these stories [he tells here two stories of atrocities committed by Communists or in the name of communism], for a reason which I explained in words such as these: 'of course I understand that you have no reason to believe these particular incidents. But I know enough to know that they are characteristic. Therefore, if you do not believe what I know to be typical, I shall know that you are ignorant of facts which in my opinion you should certainly know. Whether you know them or not, and whether you deny them or not, has become extremely important to me. For if you are ignorant of them, or If you deny them even among yourselves, I shall believe that to belong to a Party whose members have no knowledge of the Party's actions, is a responsibility I cannot share. On the other hand, if you admit them, and if you argue that it is necessary to deny them in public, I shall feel that you are serious, and perhaps I shall accept your point of view.' [Note the savvy rhetorical trap Spender sets here. It's not a good enough trap though.]
"When I had finished speaking, one writer got up and said: 'It is typical of comrade Spender's bourgeois mentality that he invents stories of this kind.' Another then said, 'Even if what Comrades Spender says is not all together invented, it is characteristic that he draws attention to these incidents which are quite unimportant, in order to defend himself from having to face the real issues.' A third, who was well disposed toward me said: 'Look here, Stephen, you ought to remember that as your friend Y was himself in prison where he claims that these things happened, he is likely to have an embittered attitude. You should not attach importance to his evidence.'" [Well-played rhetoric here, on both sides.]
97) "I began to wonder how much Communists know about Communism. I still wonder. Other Communists do not say to them: 'We have slave camps in Russia.' Quite the contrary, if a fellow Communist even suggested this, he would be accused of occupying himself with unimportant details, if not of being a Fascist."
98) After all of this the author openly admits to falling for the false dichotomy of capitalism/communism. "In writing this essay, I have always been aware that no criticism of the Communists removes the arguments against capitalism."
99) On the hilarious eschatological tenet of Marxism that the dictatorship of the proletariat will "wither away" once the classless society was established.
100) The author is disgusted by "the dogmatic crowing of inferior talents" as he listens to Marxist literary critics and Marxist writers interpreting Keats and other authors through the lens of Marxism; likewise listening to a Communist hack poet saying in regard to Virginia Woolf's suicide that she had "chosen the path of historic necessity... indicating that other bourgeois writers could be
expected to follow her example.
101) "I do not believe that the central organizations of the Communists are capable of making a classless society, or indeed of doing anything except establish the rule of a peculiarly vindictive and jealous bureaucracy." [Again, administrative state/inverted totalitarianism vibes here.]
Vocab:
Oblation: a thing presented or offered to God or a god.
Ave spes unica: "Hail, our only hope": taken from (Ave crux spes unica: "hail to the Cross our only hope" a Catholic saying)
Témoignage: testimony, an attestation, a witnessing
To Read:
Bertrand Russell: Bolshevism: Practice and Theory
***Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy
V. I. Lenin: The State and Revolution
Ludwig Feuerbach: The Essence of Religion
Ludwig Feuerbach: The Essence of Christianity
Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography
***Alex Weissberg: The Accused
Alex Weissberg: Advocate for the Dead
***Ignazio Silone: The Story of a Humble Christian (historical play about Pope Celestine V) trans. by William Weaver
H.L. Mencken: A Book of Prefaces
André Gide: The Fruits of the Earth
***André Gide: Journals
André Gide: Return From the USSR
Henry George: Progress and Poverty
Jack London: The Iron Heel
***George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
Andre Malraux: L'Espoir (Man's Hope)
Arthur Koestler: Dialog with Death
Victor Kravchenko: I Chose Freedom
Whittaker Chambers: Witness
Louis Fischer: The Life of Mahatma Gandhi