Shaw was singing the praises of Stalinism the Soviet Union was gripped by a terrible – and entirely avoidable – famine
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A notorious example from the twentieth century is that of George Bernard Shaw, a prominent British author and playwright. Shaw was feted by the communist authorities on his journeyings around Russia and granted a two-hour long private audience with Joseph Stalin. In October 1931 Shaw – who made a great deal of his ‘scepticism’ so far as it concerned the actions of his own government – appeared on the BBC to talk of the Soviet Union’s “atmosphere of such hope and security for the poorest as has never before been seen in a civilised country on earth”.
While Shaw was singing the praises of Stalinism the Soviet Union was gripped by a terrible – and entirely avoidable – famine. Yet the spell cast by Stalin’s flattery overpowered any potential concern on Shaw’s part for the starving peasantry.
In more recent times fringe journalists such as Vanessa Beeley have travelled to Syria only to return to Britain toeing the regime line that President Bashar al Assad is engaged in a manichean struggle against the terrorists of the Islamic State. In return for such obsequies, those like Beeley, the daughter of the late British diplomat Sir Harold Beeley, have received access to parts of Syria such as Aleppo usually denied to independent journalists.2
In normal circumstances Beeley would be considered a crank. She believes that the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015 was a false flag operation and that Al Qaeda was not responsible for 9/11. But Beeley is useful to the Russians and their client state in Syria, and appears regularly on English language Russian State media.
The willingness of Beeley – as well as other activist-cum-journalists including Neil Clarke and John Pilger – to champion the Kremlin line has the happy side effect (for those in question at least) of opening up large media platforms denied to them by the mainstream, spreading disinformation about Russia’s blood-soaked foreign policy.
The Relativist
The Relativist is a person who expects other people to adhere to rules which they have little intention of abiding by themselves, or who sees no hypocrisy in viewing other people (typically foreigners) as undeserving of the rights one takes for granted for oneself.
One example is the late Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. A long-time admirer and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, García Márquez once told The New York Times that although he supported the Cuban revolution he could never live under the communist system himself:
“I would miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.”
Which begs the question: did the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude ever wonder if there were Cubans who felt the same way? Koestler likened such people to peeping toms, peering through a hole in the wall at ‘history’ while not having to experience it themselves.
There are many such people around today. They are bleeding heart moralists when it comes to the actions of the United States but cool rationalists – forever unearthing some mitigating ‘context’ – when informed about the crimes of America’s enemies.
This attitude came to the fore particularly forcefully after the attacks of 9/11. Who can forget the editorial in the New Statesman of 17 September 2001, written by the then editor Peter Wilby, which included the following passage:
“American bond traders [killed in the World Trade Center], you may say, are as innocent and undeserving of terror as Vietnamese and Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no… They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and Ralph Nader.”
The Stability-Fetishist
Both left-wing ‘anti-imperialism’ and traditional realism can be filed under this category. Each represents a different face of an attitude which views people as mere chess pieces in the great game of international statecraft.
For many left-wing anti-imperialists a murderous regime such as that of Bashar al Assad in Syria ought to be defended on the basis of its hostility to the United States. The latter being the most powerful capitalist – and by extension imperialist – country in the world, this logic runs that any state or movement which points an AK47 in its direction cannot be altogether bad.
A rush to exculpate the Assad regime each time it uses chemical weapons against civilians has thus become a hallmark of the anti-imperialist left,3 with pundits seeking to cast doubt on any official narrative which draws attention to the brutality of an anti-Western power. Something similar occurred in the aftermath of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, with activists of the far-right and far-left quickly out the blocks to cast doubt on the official narrative that the Russian state was responsible.4
The ‘realist’ on the other hand is likely to defend the likes of President Assad as a stable bulwark against the ‘chaos’ which could be unleashed along with the Syrian people’s desire for democracy. Left-wing anti-imperialism – with its all-encompassing hostility to ‘regime change’ – is often indistinguishable from this worldly-wise realism.
The Nostalgist
The appeal of Russia to many in the West is harder to comprehend today than it was during the Soviet era. For while those like Sidney and Beatrice Webb who wrote paeans in the thirties to the ‘New Civilisation’ in Moscow were credulous dupes who ought to have known better, there was at least a degree of progress hanging over the Soviet Union.
Today Russia is an economically stagnant backwater characterised by palm-greasing at home and violent chauvinism abroad. But to some, Russia’s attraction lies in the image of a pure and untainted ‘Russian Bear’ holding out against the decadent and feeble west.
As such, prominent figures from the contemporary ‘alt-right’ can be frequently heard paying tribute to Vladimir Putin who is said to embody traditional masculine virtues; virtues which have been undermined in the West by feminism and homosexuality. “I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now,” the prominent American neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach told Business Insider in 2016.
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While this list is by no means exhaustive, most bouts of useful idiocy can be understood with reference to at least one of these roughly drawn ‘types’. Although, of course, many who are susceptible to one category are often also drawn to another.
I suspect many readers will wonder whether any of this matters – isn’t it obvious that such people are foolish and irresponsible? Does it really need pointing out?
The only persuasive answer to this objection is to say that it isn’t as obvious as it ought to be. There are still those left-wing politicians and activists who, to paraphrase Orwell, will flock to anything emitting a whiff of revolution “like bluebottles to a dead cat”.
The Labour leadership will faithfully turn up at a Cuba Solidarity meeting (solidarity with the dictatorship rather than the people of Cuba), while these ‘solidarity’ campaigns are propped up by some of Britain’s largest trade unions. Meanwhile, on the right of politics you are rarely far from someone who will rightly condemn any number of anti-western regimes before suddenly transforming into a cool rationalist when informed about the crimes of Saudi Arabia or the Israeli occupation.
We are probably all guilty of similar double standards from time to time. But only an incorrigible ideologue – or perhaps a congenital fool – would be entirely unconcerned by the tendency on the part of those living in liberal democracies to slip into the malignant state of useful idiocy.
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SubscribeI think you mean panegyrics not obsequies, which is usually specific to funerals.
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