Peter Hitchens writes:
A recent rather silly article in The Times (of London), which I cannot reproduce because of a paywall, irritated me so much that I sent a letter to that newspaper to express my disagreement.
I don’t think it will be published, but, as debate so often does, the argument gave me a new insight into something I had previously known only vaguely.
The author was angry with those who though Russia was the wronged party in the current EU/NATO/US attempt to de-neutralise Ukraine and place it firmly into a NATO and EU alignment. Not membership, that’s currently impossible, but the Association Agreement is clearly and explicitly politico-military as well as economic.
Well, we’re all familiar with this.
But he chose to suggest that there was a continuity between those who took this position and those who had been the mental servants of the old USSR.
He used the expression ‘Useful Idiots’, said to have been employed by Lenin to describe the willing regurgitators of Soviet Communist propaganda in the West , whose support was welcome but who were secretly scorned by the cynics in the Kremlin for being gullible dupes.
It’s actually rather a good phrase, and immediately conveys its message, though at the last count there was no evidence that Lenin himself had ever used it.
I would myself be tempted to apply it to quite a lot of leftist intellectuals taken in by Soviet lies, from Beatrice and Sidney Webb to George Bernard Shaw, and indeed many of the stalwarts of various disarmament and ‘peace’ campaigns in the Cold War period.
These people, in person herbivorous and gentle, unknowingly did the work of the violent and homicidal Bolshevik state, in many cases almost up the moment of its dissolution.
Having very much not been one of these people (at least not since I was about 15 years old), I found the suggestion ridiculous.
Indeed, if there is anything that the defenders of Mr Putin’s foreign policy have in common, it is a certain amount of social conservatism, and/or opposition to the European Union.
Personally I think this is tangential, and, if genuine, the result of a misunderstanding.
I have no affection for any aspect of the modern Russian state, though I have noted the paradox that thought and speech on matters of political correctness are probably freer in that dingy polity than they are here or in the USA.
That is despite the great lack of freedom in real political choice, and the almost total suppression of real dissent.
This is mainly because Russia simply missed the great PC re-education programmes that swept North America and most of Europe from about 1985 onwards, and its current isolation keeps it that way.
It is also because patriotism and religion were persecuted or perverted by the Soviet regime, and so have strongly revived in the years since it fell. Both therefore exist in a much more potent high-octane form than is to be found in most of the ‘West’.
Their strength prevents any current moves in the politically correct direction, though one cannot really be sure that this suits the Russian government.
And I am sure that the Russian state would leap at the chance to join the EU, with all the compulsory political correctness that would require, in the highly unlikely event that it was offered.
It is precisely because such an offer is more or less impossible that things are as they are.
So there isn’t really any idealistic or dogmatic element in the position that Russia is, in this case, on the receiving end of diplomatic aggression by the EU/NATO/US. It is just a matter of observable, measurable fact.
Some sentimental old leftists, who still yearn for the old red flag, and have always found Eurocommunism too weak a brew, may enjoy the apparent revival of the old conflict.
But they are as ill-informed as those in the West who kid themselves that Vladimir Putin is the product of a KGB plot to win back the world for Marxist-Leninism, and revive the USSR, and is poised to invade the Baltic states and Poland.
The point of all this is as follows.
Those in this argument who are moved by a utopian ideology , and are its ‘useful idiots’, are not the cynical realpolitik-loving critics of the Euromaidan. Anything but.
The ones whose shining, joy-filled (and naïve) faces belong on a propaganda poster are the young idealists of the Euromaidan, with their flags and their songs and their ludicrous hopes that they can begin the world over again with mass demonstrations and the storming of palaces.
It is they who, like the Bolsheviks of a century ago, dream of a new world order, a borderless planet of pace, love and honesty, in which corruption is swept away by nobility, and we all live happily ever after.
Such utopianism always attracts its share of foreign admirers, who long for something similar in their own slow-moving, non-idealist and conservative nations.
From such dreamers are useful idiots created.
Such people no longer look to the dead and buried USSR, nor to the Kremlin. They are inspired instead by the USA as the new liberator.
These are the people who thought they could install freedom in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. Why, they even thought they had installed it in Russia via Boris Yeltsin, a big mistake.
And, oddly enough, such ideas have the same Utopian roots as Bolshevism.
American neo-conservatism, which allied itself with George W.Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in the form of the Project for the New American Century; is neatly embodied in the figure of William Kristol, himself the worthy son of that powerful thinker Irving Kristol, who had begun his intellectual life as a Trotskyist.
It’s a fundamentally idealist view of the world, not necessarily much to do with the basic interests of the USA, much more to do with a conception of a re-ordered planet, ruled by democratism.
Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State prominent in the encouragement of the Euromaidan, is married to Robert Kagan, who prefers to be called a liberal interventionist but whom many regard as a prominent neo-conservative in the Kristol tradition.
Another rather good example of this continuity was of course my late brother, Christopher, who never abandoned his admiration for Leon Trotsky and yet managed to combine this with militant support for George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq .
He became an enthusiastic US citizen partly to demonstrate his sympathy for the USA’s new role as the headquarters of world revolution.
Once people have puzzled out this equation, they are a lot closer to understanding what is actually going on.
Those who still think in pre-1989 categories have no idea what is happening.
Anyway, the utopian idealists are all on the other side now. The conservative cynics are around here somewhere.
On the Labour Left and the re-emerging traditional Labour Right, mostly. And in the anti-Clinton sections of the Democratic Party. At least where politics is concerned. Such voices are excluded from journalism, which is therefore a different story.
A recent rather silly article in The Times (of London), which I cannot reproduce because of a paywall, irritated me so much that I sent a letter to that newspaper to express my disagreement.
I don’t think it will be published, but, as debate so often does, the argument gave me a new insight into something I had previously known only vaguely.
The author was angry with those who though Russia was the wronged party in the current EU/NATO/US attempt to de-neutralise Ukraine and place it firmly into a NATO and EU alignment. Not membership, that’s currently impossible, but the Association Agreement is clearly and explicitly politico-military as well as economic.
Well, we’re all familiar with this.
But he chose to suggest that there was a continuity between those who took this position and those who had been the mental servants of the old USSR.
He used the expression ‘Useful Idiots’, said to have been employed by Lenin to describe the willing regurgitators of Soviet Communist propaganda in the West , whose support was welcome but who were secretly scorned by the cynics in the Kremlin for being gullible dupes.
It’s actually rather a good phrase, and immediately conveys its message, though at the last count there was no evidence that Lenin himself had ever used it.
I would myself be tempted to apply it to quite a lot of leftist intellectuals taken in by Soviet lies, from Beatrice and Sidney Webb to George Bernard Shaw, and indeed many of the stalwarts of various disarmament and ‘peace’ campaigns in the Cold War period.
These people, in person herbivorous and gentle, unknowingly did the work of the violent and homicidal Bolshevik state, in many cases almost up the moment of its dissolution.
Having very much not been one of these people (at least not since I was about 15 years old), I found the suggestion ridiculous.
Indeed, if there is anything that the defenders of Mr Putin’s foreign policy have in common, it is a certain amount of social conservatism, and/or opposition to the European Union.
Personally I think this is tangential, and, if genuine, the result of a misunderstanding.
I have no affection for any aspect of the modern Russian state, though I have noted the paradox that thought and speech on matters of political correctness are probably freer in that dingy polity than they are here or in the USA.
That is despite the great lack of freedom in real political choice, and the almost total suppression of real dissent.
This is mainly because Russia simply missed the great PC re-education programmes that swept North America and most of Europe from about 1985 onwards, and its current isolation keeps it that way.
It is also because patriotism and religion were persecuted or perverted by the Soviet regime, and so have strongly revived in the years since it fell. Both therefore exist in a much more potent high-octane form than is to be found in most of the ‘West’.
Their strength prevents any current moves in the politically correct direction, though one cannot really be sure that this suits the Russian government.
And I am sure that the Russian state would leap at the chance to join the EU, with all the compulsory political correctness that would require, in the highly unlikely event that it was offered.
It is precisely because such an offer is more or less impossible that things are as they are.
So there isn’t really any idealistic or dogmatic element in the position that Russia is, in this case, on the receiving end of diplomatic aggression by the EU/NATO/US. It is just a matter of observable, measurable fact.
Some sentimental old leftists, who still yearn for the old red flag, and have always found Eurocommunism too weak a brew, may enjoy the apparent revival of the old conflict.
But they are as ill-informed as those in the West who kid themselves that Vladimir Putin is the product of a KGB plot to win back the world for Marxist-Leninism, and revive the USSR, and is poised to invade the Baltic states and Poland.
The point of all this is as follows.
Those in this argument who are moved by a utopian ideology , and are its ‘useful idiots’, are not the cynical realpolitik-loving critics of the Euromaidan. Anything but.
The ones whose shining, joy-filled (and naïve) faces belong on a propaganda poster are the young idealists of the Euromaidan, with their flags and their songs and their ludicrous hopes that they can begin the world over again with mass demonstrations and the storming of palaces.
It is they who, like the Bolsheviks of a century ago, dream of a new world order, a borderless planet of pace, love and honesty, in which corruption is swept away by nobility, and we all live happily ever after.
Such utopianism always attracts its share of foreign admirers, who long for something similar in their own slow-moving, non-idealist and conservative nations.
From such dreamers are useful idiots created.
Such people no longer look to the dead and buried USSR, nor to the Kremlin. They are inspired instead by the USA as the new liberator.
These are the people who thought they could install freedom in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. Why, they even thought they had installed it in Russia via Boris Yeltsin, a big mistake.
And, oddly enough, such ideas have the same Utopian roots as Bolshevism.
American neo-conservatism, which allied itself with George W.Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in the form of the Project for the New American Century; is neatly embodied in the figure of William Kristol, himself the worthy son of that powerful thinker Irving Kristol, who had begun his intellectual life as a Trotskyist.
It’s a fundamentally idealist view of the world, not necessarily much to do with the basic interests of the USA, much more to do with a conception of a re-ordered planet, ruled by democratism.
Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State prominent in the encouragement of the Euromaidan, is married to Robert Kagan, who prefers to be called a liberal interventionist but whom many regard as a prominent neo-conservative in the Kristol tradition.
Another rather good example of this continuity was of course my late brother, Christopher, who never abandoned his admiration for Leon Trotsky and yet managed to combine this with militant support for George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq .
He became an enthusiastic US citizen partly to demonstrate his sympathy for the USA’s new role as the headquarters of world revolution.
Once people have puzzled out this equation, they are a lot closer to understanding what is actually going on.
Those who still think in pre-1989 categories have no idea what is happening.
Anyway, the utopian idealists are all on the other side now. The conservative cynics are around here somewhere.
On the Labour Left and the re-emerging traditional Labour Right, mostly. And in the anti-Clinton sections of the Democratic Party. At least where politics is concerned. Such voices are excluded from journalism, which is therefore a different story.
No comments:
Post a Comment