Utopia Limited
I was, I admit, disappointed when Christopher Hitchens–sharp-taloned hawk on the subject of Islamic terrorism–announced that he was joining the Obama brigade. Was he, too, susceptible to that charismatic fairy dust that Obama exudes in such profusion? Up to a point, perhaps. But I am happy to see that he emerged from the episode with his critical faculties intact. In an column in Slate yesterday, he sounded a welcome cautionary note:
Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don’t think a diet of hope is going to cover it.
Indeed. And Hitchens is appropriately acerbic about the “pain-free and self-congratulatory” Obama surge. The embarrassing cataract of enthusiasm–the demand for a national Obama holiday, for example (shouldn’t we, asked Glenn Reynolds, wait till he has actually done something?): is there not an awful hollowness to it? The Wizard-of-Oz (“pay no attention to that man behind the curtain“) meets Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia Limited in which the Good King Paramount has the splendid idea of transforming his country into a limited liability company, thus evading all manner of unpleasant realities.
The problem is those unpleasant realities have a way of poking through the fabric of our hopes, not matter how audacious. As Hitchens notes, “there are vicious enemies and rogue states in increasing positions of influence throughout the world, . . . yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile forces.”
In the waning days of the campaign, John McCain took to accusing Obama of being a socialist. The epithet lacked traction. There were, I think, two main reasons for that. One was the fact that McCain was a poor messenger for his own ideas: he never really articulated his position in a compelling way. The second reason is that many people who have not had the misfortune of actually living under under a socialist regime regard it as a jolly good thing. Socialism, as Joshua Muravchik noted in his book Heaven on Earth: the Rise and Fall of Socialism, was “the most popular political idea ever invented.”
It was also undoubtedly the bloodiest. Of course, many who profess socialism are decent and humane people. And it is worth noting that socialism comes in mild as well as tyrannical versions. Muravchik, who was once a socialist himself, pays frequent homage to the generous impulses that lie behind some allotropes of the socialist enterprise. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that “regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered more than one hundred million people since 1917.” Why?
A large part of the answer lies in the intellectual dynamics of utopianism. “Utopia” is Greek for “nowhere”: a made-up word for a make-believe place. The search for nowhere inevitably deprecates any and every “somewhere.” Socialism, which is based on incorrigible optimism about human nature, is a species of utopianism. It experiences the friction of reality as an intolerable brake on its expectations. “Utopians,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered,” “once they attempt to convert their visions into practical proposals, come up with the most malignant project ever devised: they want to institutionalize fraternity, which is the surest way to totalitarian despotism.”
Obamania may be a harmless enthusiasm that will spend itself naturally in the coming weeks. Then again, its “spread-the-wealth-around,” egalitarian tendencies may presage something far graver. It’s just possible that Obama actually believes what he says about redistributing wealth and sitting down for cozy chats with dictators, etc. In that case, the country is in for a very rude awakening. I think that is what worries Hitchens. It worries me, too.
What Hitchens and the rest of the media are doing is waking up from the Obama jag they’ve been on since he threw his hat in the ring. Like any drunk with a hangover, there is regret, humiliation and a feeling of contrition. They know they can never get back what they threw away during that bender, starting with their credibility as honest brokers of information.
Instead of understanding and accepting human nature, liberals are on a never-ending quest to cure the world of what they perceive to be aberrations, evil cultural impositions, and motives, prejudices and drives that are human, not societal ills to be eliminated. War, greed, lust, the quest for power, the need to label and discriminate (in the true sense of the word), etc., are all part of human nature. The purpose of civilization and society is to control and channel these for positive outcomes, not to eliminate them. Liberals are all about changing and eliminating human nature. They also deny we are part of the natural world and believe we are a cancer upon it. They are the real haters and deniers of science and the natural world.
This is why socialism never works, no matter how attractive. It appears to be an easy solution to a stubborn problem, but human nature will always prevail. We are a very thin veneer of civilization away from our animal natures.
Oh, so now Hitchens is angry about Obamania, a bit late for that, eh. Hitchens is great at being angry, but not so great at articulating the sometimes messy compromises that are made in politics. Of all people, Hitch should have seen redistribution when it was there to be seen.
“Hope is not a method. Neither is Enthusiasm.”
- United States Special Forces
During the Hippie era, I lived in a commune. There is NOTHING like communal living to bring home the essential problems of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Those ‘needs’ had a way of slithering into every nook and cranny.
It depends on how brutally and how ruthlessly he holds on to power. Based upon who he chose as mentors, and who he turns to now to staff his inner circle, I predict he will be pretty brutal and ruthless.
We mistook our resilient form of government for an invincible form of government… thinking that nothing could break it. That mistake has been made before, now we’ll get to see if we have the spine to get ourselves out of this mess.
And so, the lies unfold. Robert Malley was not an “official”, but rather an “informal” advisor to the Obama campaign.
Hmmm. We see the jackals, maggots and cockroaches returning to the carcass…as one after another the hidden away vermin sneak back into the picture.
Malley, the son of communist, Egyptian Jew hater, Simon Malley…the toady to Arafat and bootlicker of communist dictators, apparently now has an “official role that he “didn’t” have before. How coincidental. How convenient.
Perhaps Dennis Ross can explain it. Or Rahm Emmanuel. Or even Hitchens.
Red diaper babies tend to flock together. Some them grow out of those diapers, and usually into strong enlightenment. Some just continue to soil them. This is a sign that needed watching all along.
The ties to leftist extremism and idealogues with no small amount of Jew hating ran deep and wide…how many of the other vermin will reappear now?
Can’t you already hear Obama’s opening gambit in his race for a second term? “But I inherited this mess!”
The best description of socialism ever.
“Living in a socialist country is like having
to go to the DMV everyday for the rest of your life.”
The same dreary bureaucrats, the paperwork that is never quite in order, the rigid “rules” against which no common sense prevails, the herding together of all of society into gray homogenous low IQ mass. Ah yes…the Valhalla of Socialism: the waiting room with a numbered ticket in your hand.
Forever and ever and ever.
I think we can safely file Hitchens’ piece in the “No S***, Sherlock” file.
Chrissie Hitchens–”Mr. Swayvee and Deboner”–knew exactly where he was traveling when he hopped aboard Obama’s “Chicago Snake-Oil” medicine show wagon. However, now that he’s had his “Oh S***, What Was I Thinking? Moment,” he’s now frantically trying to cover his pasty-white ass.
Sorry, old boy, too late for that. You demanded Obama and now you’re gonna get him–good and hard. So lube up and roll over.
Another reason that “Obama the socialist” never stuck is that it is in competition with (in my view) an even more convincing caricature, “Obama the empty suit.” In this narrative, Obama is an ambitious yuppie with no firm ideas other than that he should be in power. Yes, he hangs out with lefties of various stripes, but that’s the obvious path to power for a black man in the Democratic party. The first time we see him do something (anything) that actually costs him votes we will have some indication that he really believes something.
What socialism are you talking about? France? Italy? They were much bloodier in the Republic phase of their development.
If you are talking about Marxist countries (Russia, China Cuba) then I would agree — Yes, they were bad and a good example of Failed states (although China does see to have more money than us)
You really fall into the nut job category if you think Obama is heading towards us becoming a Marxist nation. A more reasonable thing to say might be, “Obama may make us much more like Germany if he gets his way.”
Socialism is a very loaded word — it might be nice if you explained what you meant by it.
And remember – Hitchen’s tried to get us calling Al Qaeda ‘Islamo-facism” when Fascism is probably the farthest stretch imaginable from what Islamic extremists are all about.
Hitchen’s did it for the WORD Fascism – Hitler, that sort of thing – not because it was real, but because he could enflame people with the connection.
Sort of Goebbelish if you think about it, using the illustration that the right wing is closer to Hitler than Reagan these days
What Obama wants and what he gets may be different things. After all, President Bush wanted a different agenda for his administration than war. He wanted to attend to domestic policy. He campaigned against nation building, but the world would not let him avoid that.
Obama has constraints placed on him which words may not overcome. The problem is that he has made too many promises to too many people, so he must disappoint some. And trying to please everyone is a good recipe for pleasing no one.
Next, we are still at war as long as someone is at war with us. Our enemies are patient and resourceful; they might wait for us to let down our guard. Obama is likely to placate his domestic followers by savaging the military. If he gives up America’s traditional role as the world’s policeman, he invites chaos abroad.
The financial bubble in America has provoked a world-wide recession. This economic downturn, with its lower oil price, has hit our Muslim friends and enemies rather hard. Iran needs $60 a barrel oil to fund its government and its costly terrorist allies. One temptation, to deflect unrest at home, is for Iran’s Mullahs is to look for adventures abroad. They will find the undefended oil fields of Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia quite tempting.
Finally, Obama will find that he has few resources to fund his objectives. He has plans to spend trillions and only pennies to work with. He may find that the Republicans are easier to deal with than the Democrat Party Prima Donnas in Congress. We may have divided government, because Obama could not possibly satisfy all the pent up desires of his Congressional allies.
Worse, none of Obama’s past has prepared him to “rule” as one of his spokesmen put it. We may find that Obama has no ability to lead, nor has he built up a list of objectives which can work.
Each bit of Socialism he tries to implement will procure him enemies. He will be hemmed in by the disappointed, disillusioned, the resentful and the angry.
He is better prepared to Rule a “Banana Republic” than a real one. Of course, he may try to turn America into a Banana Republic, as he follows Jimmy Carter’s path toward obscurity.
“Obama is an ambitious yuppie with no firm ideas other than that he should be in power. Yes, he hangs out with lefties of various stripes, but that’s the obvious path to power for a black man in the Democratic party. The first time we see him do something (anything) that actually costs him votes we will have some indication that he really believes something.”
Absolutely, Bob
Obama’s strategy:
1) From Lenin, “The worse it is, the better it is” — a power grab.
2) Worshipful MSM support
3) From 1984, Bush as Goldstein — the scapegoat.
@Mike Brady: Nobody ever sets out to wind up as what you call “a Marxist nation” – an authoritarian, murderous communist regime. It just happens to be where a lot of utopian socialists wind up via the ‘law of unintended consequences’. And it’s difficult to believe anyone who’s ever read a book thinks there’s much in common between the GOP and NSDAP (Nazis).
Mike Brady wins the coveted Godwin Award for this article. And it only took 12 comments to do it. High fives all around.
European socialism is bad. It encourages sloth and reduces productivity. Plus as a world leader it is human nature to jump on a failing leader to finish them off. Particularly if you are the leader.
Russia will want to show us scorn, especially a Kenya American president. Russia is very anti Negro and they do not have the same progressive attitude as the rest of the west.
Terrorists will test how much BS Obama will take. Iran will run the clock with talk while they get a nuclear weapon. N Korea is unknown with the failing health of it s leader, but the generals will probably continue to try to bully and get a working missiles. Their initial batch does not seem that good.
Obama is restricted by the politics of the US not too go too far despite his preferences. My sense is he is cautious and does not like to stick his neck out. I think he never thought he would get this far but once he did so well in the primaries he was not going to stop. Now he has to actually do things and that will be difficult for his cautious habits.
The increasing social liberalization is not good but not fatal. He is limited on how much he can spend with the entitlement programs taking up so much the budget. He does not have unlimited debt ability since Bush has spent a good portion of that.
He is limited in the damage he can do. But I expect the Baltic and Balkan counties are scared. I expect Russia to make Obama fold on the anti missile systems in Poland and Czech. So Poland is at risk and Europe is vulnerable. India faces more danger from two foes, China and Pakistan. Afghanistan will be closed up soon since Obama will see that as unwinnable.
Hitchen is a cynic and he may have wanted Obama but he knows that Obama is just a politician.
Roger,
While I’m glad to see the Hitch express some trepidation about Obama, his previous three columns for “Slate” were hysterical attacks on Palin and a defense of Rashid Khalidi which was shameful. I don’t know if I can forgive him for such shilling for Obama. If you know him personally, you need to show him a couple of Martin Kramer posts: http://www.martinkramer.org/ and then ask him to apologize to McCain for his outrageous defense of Khalidi. You also might want to gently remind him that his poisonous attitude toward religion is like an acid eating away his normally sharp powers of analytical reasoning.
Hitchens goes in the same bin as all the rest. Now that they got their guy elected, they’re scrambling like crazy to reposition themselves as “objective” and distance themselves from the coming backlash.
Forget it, Hitchens. You – and every other shill who sold out for him – are tied to Obama. Forever. He’s your fault. You owe the rest of us.
Re Ehunter
Going to DMV in America is pure joy and
no trouble at all compared with what you
have to endure in a socialist country.
Trust me, we were ALL slaves there. I hated it while there, love America and
hoped I left it behind for good. Alas!
“It’s just possible that Obama actually believes what he says about redistributing wealth and sitting down for cozy chats with dictators, etc.”
Really? Well, don’t blame me. I saw through Barack Obama a long time ago. He is intellectually shallow and existentially committed to the notion that the United States is responsible for much of the evil in the world. The man is also an economic illiterate. He has virtually no idea how wealth is created. Instead, he places the proverbial cart before the horse. Obama fails to comprehend that you can’t share what you have not produced. Buyer’s remorse is already setting in. A lot of Obama voters are soon going to wish they never heard of him.
Hitch didn’t disown his decision to vote for Obama. He just refuses to join in the flight to fantasy land.
Is O’bama more “socialist” than McCain? Well, yeah. And it’s a shorter drive to China from Chicago than it is from New York. It doesn’t make Chicago and China neighbors. As for the socialism/fascism debate, read Goldberg’s book. He makes a good case that fascism is a brand of socialism. (And if you don’t like Goldberg, use Wiki.) Sure you can label aspects of the right wing fascist, but you don’t have to stretch any further to do the same with aspects of the left. It’s just useless namecalling.
Hitchens is a journalist..not a thinker.
Big distinction. He is basically a incoherent
mess. He made the mistake of trying his adolescent Atheism against Roger Scruton, a real philosopher. Hitchens revealed himself for what he really a dormitory room level
Sophmoric ninny of the “lets shock the adults” type.
Everyone of these left wing clowns rammed
Obama and his Utopian ga-ga drivel down our throats. I am glad they won the election. They can no longer lead a adolescent existence of
smirking at the adults in charge..they are in charge now. And they will be held completely
accountable for the coming disaster.
Fascism: Oppressive, dictatorial control. This precisely describes the system of governance desired by the likes of al Qaeda. Hitchens’ use of the term is exactly proper in this context.
I read Hitchens’ disappointing and rather shallow about-face. It was hardly an embrace of Obama, but rather a rejection of the fact that faith drove at least part of Sarah Palin’s populist appeal. He joined in their demonization of her past, her person and her candidacy with the same abandon (that is, abandoning the facts) exhibited by the entrenched media. The few notes in support of Obama/Biden were curiously unprocessed by Hitch’s typically ruthless cognitive dissonance filters (re: “…the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction…”? Huh???).
Too bad. Hitchens makes a tight case in his distracting rants against religiosity. Perhaps wound a bit too tight. He refuses to acknowledge the reality that an overwhelming majority of Americans – over 80% of his new countrymen and women – profess some form of religious faith. And that ain’t gonna change appreciably in his lifetime. More Americans are thanking God for Obama’s victory than not, I’m sure.
Anyway, he’s spot-on about Obama. To boot, he has the bona fides to criticize him (after endorsing him). Perhaps, once the media had declared Obama’s inevitable victory – demoralizing and chiding conservatives not to bother, and to stay home on Nov. 4, which they apparently did in droves – perhaps this was his game all along.
On Obama as a socialist, his past alliances and Senate voting record leave no doubt whatsoever on this issue. And if his as-yet-poorly-articulated and constantly shifting plan for “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded” as the our present military is in fact to be a facet of our future, then he’s already answered which form of socialism he’s pushing for. It’s not the “mild” version.
Shocking idea here: instead of worrying that the person you put into office is really going to do what he spent 2 years telling you he was going to do, you vote for the other guy instead?
Hitchens is merely engaging in a bit of CYA while being a gadfly in the process. John McCain was certainly no prize (I did not vote for him), but the Messiah was the antithesis of everything Hitchens claimed to believe in when it came to the fight against Islamofascism (McCain, on the other hand, would have become President Bipartisan had he won and almost certainly carried out Obama’s platform on Iraq).
Hitchens could have done the “a pox on both your houses” thingy. I did that while leaving the Presidential race blank and voting straight GOP in all of the down-ballot races. Why should I choose between two a**-wipe Democrat Senators for President?
Early on in the campaign I drank (deeply) the McCain Kool-Aid. The Messiah was (and still is) a Robert Mugabe-esque figure, and His election signals the coming of fascism to America. But as the campaign wore on I realized that McCain was no solution at all. John Boy was – and will be forever – head over heels in love with his “Senator Bipartisan” image.
There was a third reason the “epithet lacked traction.”
Obama’s not a socialist. Really not. Unless you take one snippet — “spread the wealth around” — and treat it as Obama’s defining principle applied to everything. He’s a fiscal center-leftist who believes in slightly higher tax rates at the highest end, tax credits for the middle class, and the need for better regulation to ensure the effective functioning of markets. His health care plan is for universal availability of insurance, not single payer. It’s not socialism. It wasn’t the messenger. It wasn’t that people thought socialism was good. It didn’t stick because it was wrong.
You don’t remember Obama praising Reagan for significant tax cuts and deregulation in the 1980s, do you? Was the primary that long ago?
Obama may screw up. But he will not turn this country into a socialist republic. In fact, he will do much less of that than has occurred under Bush, between the bailout and the strengthening of the government relative to constitutional civil rights.
Okay, everybody take a Valium.
The experience in Australia, which voted in a “change” government more than a year ago, suggests that it will be a long time before many people admit disillusionment with Obama, even if he turns out to be a socialist or an empty suit. Australia’s new government is blatantly incompetent, far more so than we might expect of an Obama administration, but it still enjoys slavish MSM support and rides high in the polls. In truth, those who changed their vote to elect these governments will be very slow to admit any error, even to themselves. It will take years and much rationalisation to change back.
Uh, Dan. You’re easily deceived.
Then again, boy tie boy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Vote for the extremist loons.
Good idea.
29. Mwalimu Daudi:
Hitchens is merely engaging in a bit of CYA while being a gadfly in the process. John McCain was certainly no prize (I did not vote for him), but the Messiah was the antithesis of everything Hitchens claimed to believe in when it came to the fight against Islamofascism (McCain, on the other hand, would have become President Bipartisan had he won and almost certainly carried out Obama’s platform on Iraq).
There two kinds of socialism. One is the unenforced kind that we see in Europe today which ultimately collapses under its own denial of economic reality and of human nature. The other is the enforced kind which tries to alter human nature by force to make the flawed system work and invariably ends up becoming both insolvent and tyrannical.
I’m afraid the Obama type will have to fall back on force because it faces enormous obstacles to gaining a grip on the economy in the short term —-and because Obama is surrounded by impatient and ruthless dvisers rather than philanthropic idealists.
Very good, thoughtful comments.
ehunter:
“The best description of socialism ever.”
“Living in a socialist country is like having
to go to the DMV everyday for the rest of your life.”
and the wonderful follow up:
Tatiana Cherednik:
“Going to DMV in America is pure joy and
no trouble at all compared with what you
have to endure in a socialist country.
Trust me, we were ALL slaves there. I hated it while there, love America and
hoped I left it behind for good. Alas!”
Very Nice!
You should look at this video from The Onion, if you haven’t already: http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_win_causes_obsessive
RK is correct is saying that “Utopia” is a Greek word for “nowhere.” But that’s not the whole story. “Utopia” means “nowhere” when the “U” is construed as Greek “ou” (= not). This is the only etymology that I find in my English dictionaries. But the “U” can also be construed as Greek “eu” (= well, adverb of “good,” as in euphony = good sound). So a Utopia is both a good place and no place. Thomas More’s Greek pun isn’t quite as blunt as the dictionaries make it sound.
Well, if we’re all done being self-righteous about the awfulness of Obama (true though it may be), let’s turn to some less convenient truths.
No true Conservative worthy of the term showed up to contest this election.
I loved Duncan Hunter, but if you’re saying “Duncan who?” that pretty much sums up what was wrong there.
Rudy bungled his campaign in any number of ways, and Fred couldn’t really be bothered working weekends … or most days, come to that … to gain the nomination. I was and am horribly disappointed, but they apparently didn’t want the job.
Mitt Romney would have been a much more reliably Republican choice, but had innumerable enemies. Thus, we ended up with John McCain, who, as I believe Mark Steyn memorably said, had been running against Republicans for so long that he didn’t know hoe to run for them.
The public came out in droves when they saw what looked like a genuine Conservative: Sarah Palin. That the Commentariat reacted to her in the same way that minor demons react to Holy Water … hissing, shrieking, writhing, and making a bad stink … told me as much about her authenticity and quality than any commercial or photo-op ever could. Similarly, McCain’s disinclination to explicitly come to her defense during the pre- and post-election smear-fest confirms every doubt I ever had about his lack of character and intergrity, too.
Yeah. Obama sucks. So what? That didn’t win this year, and we’ll have to do much better to have any chance of winning next time around. Deal with it.
Utopia can be either outopos (No place) or Eutopos (Good place. Knowing this, one can infer that, to the Utopist, no place is a good place. (In my experience, every sincere Left person I have ever known, was brimful of criticism for everyone and everything under the sun.) This leads to the impossible position that what is merely good but possible to install and maintain, none the less ought not be done, because it will take energy away from the Utopist’s “perfect” solution, which happens to be impossible to do.
Obama doesn’t have to know anything; he is the charismatic vehicle for those who do know something.The entire process could provide a template for bloodless coups anywhere– perfectly legal, yet morally reprehensible.
THE THIRTIES
by Malcolm Muggeridge
Men do wrong to lament the flight
of time, complaining that it passes
too quickly and failing to perceive
that its period is sufficiently long;
but a good memory, with which
nature had endowed us, causes
everything that is long past to
appear to us to be present.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
INTRODUCTION
I wrote the last pages of The Thirties in December 1939, in
a barrack hut at Ash Vale, near Aldershot. It was the
depot of the Military Police, to whom at that time we,
the embryonic Intelligence Corps, known then as Field
Security, were attached. The surrounding scrubland country
remains fixed in my mind as particularly desolate and
stale, as though troops had been tramping over it for
centuries past, stunting its growth and drying up its
fertility. Aldershot, likewise, I recall as a place of dull
streets echoing with heavy footsteps from whose sombre
gloom one turned with relief into the lights and sounds
and human throng of public bars.
The Military Police, especially their warrant officers, had
the greatest contempt for us Field Security men. From their
point of view, we were a scruffy, miscellaneous lot, who
wore our uniforms awry, made a pitiful showing on
the barrack square, and nonetheless gained promotion
all too quickly, sprouting overnight with stripes and
other insignia of rank. We had been recruited as a result
of a newspaper advertisement for linguists; in England
the surest way of assembling oddities and delinquents,
ranging between carpet-sellers from Smyrna, travel agency
couriers, unfrocked clergymen, language teachers and
free-lance journalists.
Seated on my barrack-hut bed, one of fourteen, I
scribbled out the last pages of The Thirties; an ageing
private, clad in breeches, puttees, heavy boots and a highnecked
tunic (battledress was not yet on issue), with
thick combinations underneath to protect against the
winter’s cold. At the time, I assumed myself to be an
object of some curiosity among my fellow-privates, who,
as I supposed, took me to be one of those poor creatures
so domestically tied that I felt bound to write interminable
letters home. When I got to know them better, it
turned out that they were nearly all practising or manque
writers themselves, and knew only too well what I was up
to. With the occupational envy of the trade, they hoped, I
am sure that my zealous efforts in such unpropitious cir-
cumstances would soon falter and come to nothing. They
need not have worried. I scarcely wrote another word
from then on till after the war’s end.
It is one of the great illusions of war that, by participating
in it, one will escape from the sort of life one has
hitherto lived and the sort of companionship one has
hitherto found. Not so. As the great process of sorting
everyone out goes on, one necessarily soon finds oneself
back in one’s own milieu. An egghead came I into
this world, and an egghead shall I depart thence. A
chance conversation in the N.A.A.F.I. with a burly lancecorporal
who, in my eyes, bore every mark of authentic
proletarian origins, would, sure as fate, soon get round to
The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf. When I had been at
Ash Vale for some months, and attained the acting local
rank of C.S.M., I was instructed to meet an officer from
the War Office at the local railway station, who was
visiting us on some special mission. I pressed my uniform
until it almost stood up of itself; I polished my belt and
the crown on my sleeve until they shone like the morning
sun; the toes of my boots, treated with a hot spoon,
likewise gleamed. As the officer descended from a first-class
railway carriage I gave him a salute clamorous enough
to be heard a mile away. He nonchalantly returned it
and we got into a waiting motor car; he at the back, and
I in front beside the driver. As we drove along, I
examined him in the driving-mirror, and seemed to find
something familiar in his sensitive, intelligent, vaguely
melancholy countenance. He was doing the same thing
to me. The moment of recognition was mutual and
instantaneous. It was Edward Crankshaw. Afterwards,
he told me that my terrific salute led him to reflect that
old sweats such as he supposed me to be were the backbone
of the British Army. To the consternation of our
driver, we began to fall about in the car in a condition
of hopeless mirth at the unconscious deception we had
practised on one another. I believe I never took the war,
certainly not the army, seriously again.
Though I did not realise it at the time, no conditions
could have been more appropriate for concluding a study
of the Thirties. As a pseudo-warrior in a still pseudo-war
(my family were living near Battle, in Sussex, so that my
leave-pass would be made out ‘for the purpose of proceed-
ing to Battle’; about the only British soldier, as I used
to reflect, then so bent) I was ideally placed to survey the
last phases of the decade which had just passed. At the
time it seemed otherwise. I anticipated an impending
Judgment Day, and even asked myself whether it was
‘ worth while bothering to complete a manuscript which
was bound never to be published, and which in any
case would almost certainly be destroyed in the holocaust
from the air, long prophesied by all the experts, and
expected at any moment. What I failed to realise was
that Judgment Day had corne and gone, unnoticed. When
the holocaust belatedly occurred, it only fell upon what
was already a wasteland; like the bombardment of Pompeii
in the course of the Italian campaign, leaving traces of
bullet marks on walls volcanically blitzed many centuries
before.
However, I did finish the book; rather cursorily, as a
matter of fact, and it was duly published, with, as things
turned out, a certain measure of success, even though its
appearance was swamped by the march of events. By that
time, we had been transferred from Ash Vale to the
Island of Sheppey, where we constituted the sole garrison
against an anticipated Panzer invasion, having been issued
for the purpose with steel helmets, twelve rounds of
ammunition, and rifles which we never had an opportunity
of firing. Our nocturnal prowlings about the coast were
interrupted by the arrival of demoralised French troops,
in variegated uniforms, quite bewildered, to whom we
provided succour in the form of cigarettes (the one reliable
currency of our time; the Fag Standard) and good cheer.
I have a vague memory of marching rather absurdly at
the head of a column of these battered and disheartened
allies whom I had attempted to rally by means of a
spirited but incoherent discourse delivered in bad bombastic
French. These events also fitted in well with what
I had tried to say in The Thirties.
Proposals were subsequently made and entertained for
dealing with the Forties and Fifties in a similar vein.
I even made a start on the Forties, but whether due to
indolence, other preoccupations, or the intrinsic unsuitability
of the material, the result seemed unsatisfactory,
and the project was abandoned. It is, I think, a fact that,
whereas the Thirties fell neatly into one theme, begin-
ning with a phoney peace and ending with a phoney war,
the two succeeding decades had no such clear pattern.
The conduct and ostensibly victorious conclusion of the
1939-45 war under Churchill, followed by the Beveridge
Era—from the stuffed lion to the stuffed sheep; then
two small mice, Attlee and Truman, in labour and bringing
forth a mountain in the shape of atomic raids on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Churchill’s inglorious return to
power, followed by the even more inglorious interlude
of Eden; the Cold War and the final emergence of the
two giants, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., in whose shadows
the rest of us perforce lived, and live—all this was not
susceptible to arrangement in ten-yearly sections, or to
the kind of treatment I had attempted in The Thirties.
In any case, as far as I am concerned, wars, like rhetoric,
their language, are exciting but not interesting, and no
labour could be more tedious and unrewarding than
sorting out the battles and campaigns of which they largely
consist. Of all Shakespeare’s plays I most dislike Henry V.
By the same token, the Churchill cult is one in which I
did not join at the time, and find even less sympathetic
as the years pass, while recognising, of course, the unique
character of his services in 1940—services whose performance
required the very temperament and characteristics
I find so little to my taste. This, as I am well aware,
is a minority position (though not, perhaps, quite so small
a minority as might be supposed), which would make
the central figure of the Forties as derisory as the comparable
one of the Thirties—Ramsay MacDonald. As I
indicate in The Thirties, MacDonald’s efforts to promote
‘the peace of the worrrld’ soon came to seem merely ridiculous,
leading, as they did, to Neville Chamberlain’s sorry
and disastrous transactions at Munich. Yet both his and
Chamberlain’s performances, surely, pale into insignificance
compared with Churchill’s at Yalta, when he and
the dying Roosevelt, in effect, handed over Eastern and
Central Europe to the most untender mercies of Stalin, the
third man of the ribald triumvirate. Such inclination as
I had to expatiate, in detail and at length, upon all this, in
any case expired when I read the late Chester Wilmot’s
masterly The Struggle for Europe. With an erudition and
historical grasp which I could not hope to emulate,
and a patience and persuasiveness quite beyond my
capacity, he shows how the ostensible champions of
our civilisation themselves blew the trumpets which brought
its already tottering walls crashing down.
Even so, it seems reasonable, now that The Thirties is
being reissued some quarter of a century after its first
appearance, to consider how far its general account of our
times has stood up to what has actually happened. Here,
one must make a corrective, in a way that comes more
easily to the old than to the young, for the play of one’s
own natural, but not necessarily well-founded, predilections.
I have always felt myself, perhaps to an abnormal degree,
a stranger in a strange world. In my earliest recollections
of life (actually, of walking down a suburban street in
someone else’s hat) I was consciously a displaced person
—an expression which, doubtless for that very reason, has
always filled me with a mixture of rage and heartache; of
rage that it should ever have been devised, and of heartache
that it should ever have been required.
This sense of being a stranger in a strange land induced
the related feeling that the whole life of action, one’s own
and the society’s or civilisation’s to which one happened
to belong, is theatre; a lurid melodrama or soap-opera
with history for its theme. Such an attitude of mind is,
of course, common enough, both among the ever increasing
number of the mentally deranged with lost identities, and
among mystics and religious exaltes—the Kierkegaards and
Kafkas down to the crazier specimens like Black Moslems
and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Politically, its commonest manifestation
is one version or another of anarchism.
As it has afflicted me, I have been unable to take
completely seriously, and therefore to believe in the
validity or permanence of, any form of authority. Crowns
and mitres have seemed to be made of tinsel, ceremonial
robes to have been hastily procured in a theatrical costumier’s,
what passes for great oratory to have been
mugged up from the worst of Shakespeare. Feeling thus,
I could not but assume that everything pertaining to this
aspect of life must shortly come to an end. It was too
absurd, too threadbare, too moth-eaten to endure. George
Orwell similarly was liable to break off a conversation
to. make statements like: ‘Eton’s doomed’, or, ‘Soon there
won’t be any more state openings of Parliament’.
Such a disposition made one ostensibly irreverent, pes-
simistic, disloyal, and—the commonest accusation—destructive
in attitude of mind. In the war, when I was with V
Corps at Salisbury, I was turned out of a mess by the
A.P.M., a Northern Irishman named McNally who happened
to be Mess President, on the ground that I talked.
When I pressed him to be more specific, he refused to
be drawn. ‘It’s just your talk,’ he said. I mention this
temperamental incapacity to accept the pretensions, or
even the reality, of power in any of its manifestations
(which, incidentally, has made me a hopeless failure as an
executive, and unsatisfactory in all roles which require
ardour and decision, like citizen and lover), because it
obviously affects one’s view of what is going on in the
world’s affairs. If, as I often think, power is to the
collectivity what sex is to the individual, then journalists
like myself are, as it were, power-voyeurs, whose judgments
will necessarily reflect our own quirks and peculiarities.
We look through a keyhole at the strange contortions
and capers of those who have become addicted to what
Blake called ‘the strongest poison ever known . . . from
Caesar’s laurel crown’.
Thus, for instance, the assumption throughout The
Thirties is that the capitalist system is irretrievably doomed,
and that some form of collectivist economy, whether or
not called communist, is inescapable everywhere. When
in the early years of the decade I surveyed the ravages of
the great depression from my editorial perch in the
offices of the Manchester Guardian, I was entirely convinced
that the economic arrangements which had produced
so tragic and lamentable a state of affairs were bound
to be discarded for ever. In the U.S.S.R., I considered, an
alternative system was in process of construction, and
gave every promise of being the wave of the future. By
the time I came to write The Thirties, a stint in Moscow as
a newspaper correspondent had cured me of the latter
assumption, but the former remained intact.
Well, as things have turned out the capitalist system, as
amended by the agile brain of John Maynard Keynes,
would seem to be in a more flourishing condition than ever
before. In the U.S.A., where in theory at any rate its
exigencies are the most respected and its operations the
least impeded, far and away the richest, and technologically
speaking the most resourceful, human community
in the history of the world has come to pass. It is true
that there are aspects of this prosperity, such as its
ever-increasing accumulation of indebtedness, which give
rise to doubts about its permanence, and that in baleful eyes
like mine it can seem nothing more than a glorified
trough set about with erotic squalor; a place of barbiturate
sleep, benzedrine joy and vitamin well-being. Equally,
it may be argued that it, too, has in reality become a
collectivist society, whose rulers’ nominal championship
of free-enterprise economics and representative institutions
is as empty as the equivalent Soviet championship of
Marxist economics and People’s Democracy. Even so, the
fact remains that to-day American prosperity, and the way
of life based on it, are the envy of the greater part
of mankind, and the focus of most of their dreams and
much of their endeavour. This is an outcome I certainly did
not foresee, either on rny Guardian editorial perch, or in
my Ash Vale barrack-hut.
Again, at the end of The Thirties a curtain falls. The
so long dreaded war has begun, the assumption being that
the last act of our tragedy is upon us, and that when it
has been played out the stage will be darkened and the
audience depart. It never so much as occurred to me that
anything would be salvaged; with a kind of exaltation,
which reached its height going about the streets of London
in the blitz, sometimes in the company of Graham Greene,
a kindred spirit, I felt I was present at the last bonfire
of the last remains of our derelict civilisation. Nor at
the war’s end, when the Nazis were defeated, and the
church bells rang out, not to proclaim an invasion, but
to celebrate a victory, did I suppose for a moment that
the past as we had known it could ever be reconstructed.
The rubble of Berlin, piled in strange heaps like a landscape
in the moon, represented, as I thought, an irretrievable
extinction; as the people groping about in the
rubble, constructing out of it little caves for themselves,
exchanging their bodies for cigarettes and tins of Spam,
or just yielding them before the rough importunities of
their liberators from the east, were troglodytes fated
never to emerge from their twilight. Yet emerge they did,
to sit in the sunshine consuming huge beakers of hot chocolate
mil schlag. From the rubble there sprouted a new
city, many mansions, mansions of chromium and glass. Was
it really a city? Or just an ingenious arrangement of lights?
Even now I am not quite sure.
Be that as it may, it is an indubitable fact that when
the dust and smoke of war finally cleared, there unmistakably
were the props and players whose disappearance
for ever I had taken for granted—a House of Commons
soon restored to Honourable Members; black coats and
umbrellas making their way down Whitehall as though
Hitler had never existed; the Athenaeum furbished up,
The Times coming out, even the Almanack de Gotha
resurrected; the House of Lords, the College of Arms,
Sir William Haley, all going strong, or at any rate going.
What I had assumed to be the end of the performance was
only, after all, an entr’acte; the curtain had fallen, certainly,
but only to rise again, disclosing the scenery,
actors and costumes just as they had been before. Actors
a shade tireder, perhaps, a shade more dependent on their
prompter, lines mumbled a bit and mechanically delivered,
costumes crumpled and shabby in the glare of the footlights,
the pace of the whole production noticeably slowed
down, yet indubitably the same old play and the same
old performers.
Up to a point, then, on Armistice Day I stood confuted.
The public rejoicings, recalling childhood memories
of an earlier version in 1918, seemed to contradict the
sombre shape of things to come envisaged in The Thirties.
There had been a glorious victory; this time there really
was to be a new and better world, on a basis of the Four
Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter and other enlightened
instruments, under-written by our three men of destiny,
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Where the League of
Nations had failed the United Nations would succeed;
with the Beveridge Plan to ensure that wartime sacrifices
had not been in vain, the new dawn would surely usher in
a bright day.
In the event, this mood of hope proved even more transient
than on the previous occasion. Roosevelt’s Four
Freedoms were no more durable than Woodrow Wilson’s
Fourteen Points had been; the United Nations outdid the
League in confusion and fatuity, and the cheques drawn
on the Beveridge Plan were honoured in inflated currency.
Before the 1939-45 war had long been over, the line-up
for another began, with the additional horror of being
against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud. The development
of nuclear weapons opened up, for the first time in
human history, the prospect of blowing the human race
and the earth itself to smithereens. It was in a war-scarred
and war-weary world, with this weird and macabre doom
seemingly so near at hand, that a Welfare State was
constructed to keep us all healthy, wealthy and wise for
evermore. By a strange irony—stranger than any I had
envisaged in The Thirties—a moment of unique tragedy
coincided with some of the most shallow and fatuous
hopes ever to be entertained by mortal men. Prosperity was
to broaden down from hire-purchase payment to hire purchase
payment; the birth-pill would safeguard the
pursuit of happiness against all impediments, and with
the Gross National Product continually expanding, a
dazzling prospect of everlasting felicity opened before
mankind. As the psychiatric wards went on multiplying,
suicide and crime increasing, the consumption of pillsfor-
all-purposes mounting, there was proclaimed with
ever greater fervour the coming to pass of a kingdom
of heaven on earth, richer, more easeful and blissful
than any hitherto known.
So now, looking back from the second half of the sixties,
I feel that, after all, the assumptions and prognostications
of The Thirties were not so wide of the mark as might
previously have seemed to be the case. Though we were
technically among the victors in the 1935-45 war, our
participation in the victory was purely nominal. It was
our positively last appearance in a major role on the stage
of history, as Churchill was our last international star.
He and our imperial destiny expired together; at his
funeral, both were interred, making of it a great national
occasion. As everyone realised, consciously or unconsciously,
for us as a people it was the end of such
occasions. There would never be another at all comparable.
So the most was made of it.
The Empire, which theoretically emerged larger and
stronger than ever from the 1914-18 war, was in fact even
then in an advanced state of decomposition, and went on
subsequently decomposing fast. Victory in 1945 did not
invalidate my observation in The Thirties that the sun
seemed to be setting on the Empire on which it never set.
Churchill proclaimed indignantly that he had not been
appointed by King George VI to be his principal Secretary
of State in order to preside over the dissolution
of his Empire. Had he but known it, this, precisely,
was to be required of him in his confused and inglorious
premiership in the post-war years under George VI’s
daughter, Elizabeth II. Now the Empire has gone, and the
Commonwealth—a holding-company formed to realise the Empire’s dwindling residual assets—has almost
disappeared likewise. Figures like Redeemer-Emeritus Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Dr. Banda provide a perfect cast for playing out the farce to the end, until England once again blessedly exists as a small island off the coast of Europe.
Ironically enough, it is in the field of economics, where
scientific accuracy is supposed to prevail, that prognostications,
mine included, have proved particularly fallacious.
With great joy I described in The Thirties how MacDonald
formed his National Government to ‘save the Pound’,
which then was permitted to slither off the gold-standard.
God save our gracious Pound! Yet the economies which
MacDonald went to such pains to institute with a view
to persuading New York bankers that we were sjill
credit-worthy would scarcely have sufficed to finance for
a single day the war which broke out in 1939, and
continued for some five years, without evidently reducing
us to bankruptcy. For most of my lifetime we have
been living, economically speaking, in the red, to the
accompaniment of dire warnings from bankers, financiers,
and, between elections, from politicians, while all the
while, to the outward eye, growing ever more prosperous.
How this has come about, and what will be the outcome,
I have no idea. MacDonald was fond of saying,
with great emphasis, that you cannot put a quart into
a pint-pot. It seems that you can. He was likewise given
to remarking that we must cut our coats according to our
cloth. Apparently, we are under no such necessity.
‘They ever must believe a lie who see with, not through,
the eye,’ Blake wrote. It was, for me, a key-thought when
I was writing The Thirties, though then, of course, television
had not provided a third eye for us to see with; one,
moreover, which cannot be seen through, however hard
the seer tries. Blake’s saying has gone on echoing in my
mind ever since. Such lies believed! Never, surely, has there
been credulity like it. African witch-doctors and makers of
love-potions must look with sick envy at the impositions
of our advertisers and psychiatrists, reflecting that their
clientele, though black savages, would never for an instant
countenance deception so gross and palpable. When people
cease to believe in God, G. K. Chesterton has pointed out,
they do not then believe in nothing, but—what is far
more dangerous—in anything. The Christian religion required
us only to believe in certain specific dogma and
supernatural happenings like miracles; the religion of
Science which has succeeded it, as I indicated in The
Thirties, bestows its imprimatur upon any proposition,
however nonsensical, which can be stated in terms of the
requisite statistical-scientific mumbo-jumbo. Thus a condition
of moral, intellectual and spiritual confusion has
been created in which not only faith, but meaning itself,
has disappeared.
I well remember how, seated on my bed in my Ash Vale
barrack hut, with a pencil in my hand and paper before
me, striving to finish The Thirties, one phrase intruded
itself into all my thoughts and deliberations—’Lost in
the darkness of change’. It seemed to sum up my, and
everyone else’s, situation. We were lost; like children
trying to extricate some familiar shape or sound out of
the darkness which had fallen. All we knew was that
when the darkness lifted a new landscape with new contours
would be revealed. Meanwhile, we had to reconcile
ourselves to living in darkness. Fiat Nox!—it was our
fate, and must be accepted.
The phrase seems to me as valid now as it did in 1940.
We are still lost in the darkness of change. If anything, the
darkness is more impenetrable than it was then. The
difference, as far as I am concerned, is that now I find more
compensations in such a plight. In times of bright light one
is so easily dazzled. How readily one might have accepted, in stabler and more vainglorious circumstances, the pretensions
of power, the certainties of authority, the false
sense of security generated by seeming permanence. As
it is, one accepts nothing. One is driven back upon
those other certainties, propounded in darkness but shining
with their own bright inward light, which relate,
not to any conceivable human situation, favourable or
unfavourable, mighty or decrepit, but to the deserts of
vast eternity which lie beyond our shifting human history.
There, in all humility, I venture to cast my eye, intent
upon a land that is very far off, and in search of truth
which is not for yesterday or to-day or to-morrow, but
for all time.
To quote the Rev. Wright’s eloquent sermon from Wynton Marsalis’ New Orleans Function:
“When you swallow that dragon dust collectively, you reveal yourself as a chump and a sucker, one of those people P.T. Barnum said was born every minute”
Now we wait in horror to see if our expression of interest in peace is enough to deflect war’s interest in us, and hope that the economy can be grown from the bottom-up, and pray that American jobs can be protected while engaging in an increasingly global economy…
It would have been nice if Hitchens had pointed out the holes in Obama’s sail before we all set out to sea with the Big O. It seems he is now trying to reposition himself so he can snipe at his man when it is a convienient way to create column inches.
BTW, I recently read Utopia, to a person of the late Middle Ages it would seem a happy place, it stuck me as decidely Stalinist.
It tells you quite a lot about ‘conservatives’ like Mr. Kimball (not to mention the lot over at NR and The Weekly Standard) that they regularly praise the likes of Christopher Hitchens.
“sharp-taloned hawk on the subject of Islamic terrorism”
Pah! Warmongering Trotskyite neo-con would be more accurate. Of course it should also be added that Hitchens is one of the most vicious of the rabid, Christophobic atheists churning out screed after screed these days. He is an anti-Catholic bigot. Shame on any ‘conservative’ who wants to make common cause with him.
Um, there is no “mild” socialism because socialism by it’s very nature is founded upon the dubious notion that it’s OK to steal. Socialism is always the use of force to take the fruit of one person’s labor and bestow it upon another. The government as the agent in an armed robbery no matter how compliant the victims, and how worthy the cause of the criminals who receive the ill gotten gain is not “mild”.