1 16th September 2009, 02:57 AM

The Fellow Travellers: "Liberals" Supporting Dictators

One of the strangest features of the 20th Century was the number of "liberals", "intellectuals", "humanists" or whatever who supported Communist dictators. In any society, at any time, you will find people who make excuses for atrocities committed by their own side. This may be evil but at least it is understandable. The Fellow Travellers justified atrocities committed by the enemies of their own society. This is certainly unusual. Was it unique in human history?

George Orwell tried to explain the behaviour of the Stalinist liberals of the 1930s. I paraphrase, but Orwell wrote that English intellectuals had lost their religion and their patriotism without losing the need for a homeland and something to believe in. Thus they adopted the Soviet Union as a substitute Homeland, Marxist as a substitute Religion and Stalin as their new God.

Actually I don't think that Orwell went far enough. Supporters of genocide and slave labour had not "lost" their religion or anything else. They were consumed with hatred for their Church and Society and they supported a Communist butcher because he shared those hatreds. Thus for example, they did not support Franco because HE was a Catholic and a pro-western dictator. The fact that he killed far fewer people was irrelevant!

2   16th September 2009, 03:09 AM

Orwell and the Fellow Travellers

This is the comment by Orwell that I referred to (from his 1940 essay Inside the Whale). Again I don't believe that the 'Disillusionment' that Orwell speaks of, is enough to explain why English (and Irish) intellectuals supported Stalin's dictatorship and mass murder. HATRED - of self, of Christianity and of 'Bourgeois Democracy' - is a better explanation.

Orwell wrote that by about 1930 ...
"The debunking of Western civilization had reached its climax and ‘disillusionment’ was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline—anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes.

But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism.

But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and— at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts—a Fuehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory—all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour—all in one word, Stalin. God—Stalin. The devil— Hitler. Heaven—Moscow. Hell—Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the ‘Communism’ of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated."

3  16th September 2009, 09:11 AM

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand why you disagree with Orwell? He seems to be fairly logical in his thinking.

Liberal western democracies failed to avoid war , fumbled the peace and then tanked economically. A rejection of democracy by intellectuals, and a rejection of the traditional institutions of that establishment was understandable, and to a certain extent logical. Of course, WW2 etc has shown us that the alternative is far worse, but this is hindsight.

  4 16th September 2009, 11:27 AM

I agree with a great deal of what Orwell said - especially as he was one of the very few left-wingers who tried to explain the behaviour of Stalinist "liberals" while Stalin was still in power. After the demise of the Soviet Union a number of books have appeared on the subject but before that I only know of David Caute's "The Fellow Travellers" first published in 1973 (revised in 1988).

The reason Orwell's explanation for the behaviour of Stalinist intellectuals did not go deep enough, is that he tried to put Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot into the same category of "disillusioned intellectuals" as Stalinists like O'Casey and Shaw. Disillusionment can take many forms and they are not all on the same moral level. Joining the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church is not the same thing as supporting one of the greatest mass murderers in human history. Orwell's "disillusionment" theory is faulty because it tries to cover too much.

Moreover Sean O'Casey and George Bernard Shaw are still regarded as Progressive, Socialist etc in spite of their vicious hehaviour. Supposed they had supported Franco instead - can you imagine the howls of rage? The left wingers who still try to make excuses for them, share their Anti-Clerical views and/or their Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Bourgeoisie, anti-American attitudes etc These are all forms of Hatred not Disillusionment. Anti-Clericalism is a form of religious hatred.

 

http://www.politics.ie/history/102927-fellow-travellers-liberals-supporting-dictators.html