The Treason Of The Intellectuals

David Pryce-Jones is an internationally acclaimed writer, historian and commentator. In his early career, David Pryce-Jones was the literary editor of the Financial Times (1959-1961) and the Spectator (1961-1963), and a special correspondent for the Daily Telegraph (1966-1982). A contributor to The Times, The Financial Times, The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic, he is also the author of numerous books – significant among these are Paris in the Third Reich (1981), The Closed Circle: An interpretation of the Arabs (1989) and The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire (1995). On Monday 16 November 2012, David Pryce-Jones addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss his most recent book – Treason of the Heart – From Thomas Paine to Kim Philby.

THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS 

DAVID PRYCE-JONES

To the man-in-the-street,

who, I’m sorry to say,

is a keen observer of life,

The word “intellectual” suggests straightaway

A man who’s untrue to his wife.

W.H. Auden influenced the climate of opinion in his time and in this verse he is making fun of the clever folk around him. George Orwell influenced the climate of opinion to an even greater extent, and he wanted to put these same clever folk down. One of his pet themes is the wrong-headedness of intellectuals, the way they abuse the privileges they are trading on, their propensity to snigger (one of his favourite words of abuse) at patriotism, their surrender to totalitarian or pacifist ideas – at one point Orwell goes so far as to say that some things are so silly that only an intellectual could believe them. In this view, then, it isn’t just their wives to whom intellectuals are untrue, but their countries and the identity and values those countries stand for.

Of course there are circumstances in which the adversarial stance is right and proper. It doesn’t need saying that dissent and protest is admirable in a totalitarian, sectarian or tribal society and those who stand up for the purpose are the bravest of the brave. Democratic societies are what they are only because, in the past, individuals have fought against absolute power in order to achieve the touch-stones of democracy, the rule of law and government with the consent of the people.

“My country right or wrong” has never been a very convincing slogan, and it is no more convincing when the adversarial stance turns it into “my country wrong or wrong”. It’s more or less standard these days that we are invited to think that what has been done in our name is shameful and we must beat our breasts in atonement. Guilt is to us what worship in church was to our forbearers.

So President Obama apologises to an audience in Cairo for the harm done by American foreign policy to Muslims. So a book about the British Empire is a history of serial crime, all looting and murder with nothing on the positive side of the ledger. So Prime Minister Blair feels obliged to apologise for the Irish potato famine a hundred years before he was born. So Nazi extermination camps and the Allied bombing of Dresden are treated as the same level, as war crimes. So the assassination of an American ambassador in Libya is the fault of some video shot by an amateur in California. Whatever bad thing anybody did to us, in short, we did worse to them.

Go into any bookshop, and chances are that the shelves there are bulging with some of the 100 and more books by Noam Chomsky. Born in 1928, he emigrated as an adult to the United States where he has enjoyed a successful career as a Professor at MIT and been much praised and honoured.

Yet whatever the ostensible topic of those 100 and more books, their theme is always identical: namely that the United States is a repository of wickedness and folly, conspiring against the whole of humanity in issues great and small. The Vietnam War and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, for instance, are supposedly evidence of American aggression against peace-loving people and have nothing to do with the activities or political ambitions of anyone in those countries.

Complaining lately about the assassination of Osama bin Laden, for instance, it was typical of Chomsky to declare that President Bush was a far greater evil and responsible for many more deaths. Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon have killed a great many Americans and provoked war with Israel and it is equally typical that Chomsky has just gone out of his way to attend a Hizbollah jamboree in Lebanon.

The Chomsky Syndrome is a blend of self-abasement and ingratitude that now conditions how the common run of those who consider themselves informed and intelligent look at the world. Education, culture, experience, is not proof or protection against it. There weren’t many people more intelligent or cultivated than Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, two friends whose correspondence has been published. They took their good fortune as their due.

Arendt and her husband used to spend summers in Switzerland; they held professorships and received reparations from Germany, the country from which they had fled to find refuge in America. McCarthy spent her summers in Italy, she had settled in Paris and owned a large house in Maine, all sustained by handsome royalties.

In the midst of discussing the domestic hardship that the chauffer might not be able to do some driving, the ladies wrote about “resistance” to the Vietnam War as though they were living in Nazi-occupied France. In Mary McCarthy’s perspective, the American military in Vietnam might as well have been the S.S. President Nixon setting up a police state: “it looks like the end of the republic, though not necessarily of the country.”They told one another with absolute confidence in their depiction of an America that could only do harm.

Gore Vidal has his place by right of birth in what may be called the upper class in the United States. For him, everything could be reduced to a smart-aleck pot-shot that put his country and its public personalities in a bad light. America was a country of greed and envy and stupidity, whose brutish intention was to conquer the largest empire and spread these characteristics around it. What Vidal evidently thought was his superior intelligence and wit, was a parading of conceit and condescension.

To quote just one illustration, “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” President Roosevelt, he held, was really responsible for Pearl Harbour. The Beatle John Lennon, a child of the times quite as spoilt as Vidal, “represented life, and is admirable, and Mr Nixon and Mr Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing.” The Oklahoma Bomber, Timothy MacVeigh, was excused on the grounds that he had good reasons to kill a lot of people.

For the journalist John Pilger, the United States waged war on the hapless peasants of Vietnam and Cambodia out of pure aggression. So the millions of boat people who fled the victorious regime are not victims but brushed out of the picture as though they had been pleasure-seekers on excursions at sea. What of the Vietnamese foreign minister who was to tell the Westminister parliament that the people used to believe nothing could be worse than the B52 bombings, only to discover than Communism was really the worst of everything?

To Pilger, in the verb Auberon Waugh coined to fit the name exactly to the act, is “to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion.” In a similar reversal of causality, Pilger now concludes that the Arab Spring shows that the United States is ‘fascist’.

The name of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, has also earned a place in the special vocabulary of the Chomsky Syndrome. “Fisking” means accusing the United States of doing harm and thereby making enemies about to take imminent and well-deserved revenge. For him, Israel is kept to serve as a puppet of American Imperialism, and is incapable of independent existence to which it in any case has no claim. Arabs do not really do wrong, in his view, because far greater wrong is done to them.

“When it comes to law, moral compromise and hypocrisy,” he sneers, “the West takes the biscuit.” So many factors concerning 9/11 seem suspicious to him that he wonders whether the United States might not have flown those aircraft into the Twin Towers after all.

Intellectuals undermining the society that guarantees their privileged position, boasting that they are speaking truth to power while actually playing games with reality, ought to attract ridicule for their posturing. Instead they have the reputation of sages and oracles, promoted to the centre of debate on issues of the day.

How to explain this? A starting point is La Trahison des Clercs (hard to find a better translation than the treason of the clerks) a book by the French author Julian Benda that made a splash between the wars. Perceiving intellectuals as a sort of priestly caste, he ascribed to them the essential social function of being true to themselves; going beyond emotions, they were to assess facts and opinions rationally and dispassionately. To back a political cause, to commit to an ideology, is therefore not just unworthy but an abrogation of a high calling.

At the time French intellectuals were already divided between Communists and fellow-travellers like Aragon, Romanian Rolland and Andre Malraux, and those willing to collaborate with Nazism, such as Robert Brasillach or Celine. Andre Gide, then perhaps the most eminent writer in France, became the centre of a row that defined the period.

After a visit to the Soviet Union, he wrote a book praising what he had found, only to reverse himself in a subsequent book and declare that he had been deceived. Julian Benda was pointing out how the dominant and conflicting ideologies of that time were politicising all sorts of areas – literature, the arts, human relations, simple friendships – that could only be diminished by such politicisation.

Stalin’s show trials, the Spanish civil war, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, were events that seemed to demand commitment and emotion rather than rational inquiry. Curiously, Benda was to visit Hungary after the war at the moment of the Communist take-over.

The poet George Faludy has described how the secret police took him from prison but then sat in on the meeting arranged to convince Benda that post-war Hungary was not a police state. Obliged to speak obliquely, Faludy could not make Benda understand that the nightmare of politicisation was right there in front of him.

The title of Treason of the Heart, the book I published last year, tips its hat to Benda. I wanted to trace the adversarial stance that now is the customary expression of opinion on the part of journalists, clerics, disc jockeys, actors and the Jane Fondas and Alice Walkers of this world.

Partly these types are taking advantage of the fact that the stability of their home country allows them to do whatever they like without fear of reprisal. Bored, they want excitement. And partly because flags and barricades feed rich fantasies about representing liberty, equality and fraternity, they latch on to a foreign cause, preferably one sufficiently far away for the facts to be beyond verification and therefore easily emotive.

Volunteers have dedicated themselves to the causes of the hour – Cuba, Rwanda, Palestine, Nicaragua – often having little or no understanding of the complexities involved, the geography or the languages. Some course-mongers make poor Benda’s prescriptions look naive.

George Galloway, in one example, a rogue member of the British parliament, gloried in praising Sadaam Hussein and then Bashar al-Assad at moments when these men were responsible for endangering and then killing large numbers of their subjects. Cause-mongers are in the habit of claiming to be pacifists though they are drawn to war and incite it without hesitation.

Implicit in political causes, in pilgering and fisking, is violence and the killing of those deemed to be on the wrong side. Only the greatest novelists, as I wrote, could do justice to the motivations that drive the adversarial stance: “the complex bundle of Utopian or millenarian fantasies, the twinned hatred and self-hatred, the narcissism, guilt, sanctimoniousness, hunger for power, fanaticism and nihilism.”

The phenomenon of rejecting one’s own nation state in favour of another seems to have been a British specialty and is exemplified by Tom Paine. A contrary character if ever there was one, he lived a life of disloyalty that qualifies him as the first modern intellectual. Others were to earn their place in the history books through a similar coincidence of ambition and the adversarial stance, even if not quite as single-minded as Paine.

Born in 1737, Paine came from a modest background. It is not clear why he joined the Customs and Excise but his dismissal from it is almost surely the source of what was to be a lifelong hatred of his country. “It appears very clear to me,” wrote the contemporary crusading journalist William Cobbett, “that some beastly insults, offered to Mr Paine while he was in the Excise in England was the real cause of the Revolution in America.” Reaching America, Paine threw himself into the cause of its independence.

He was right for the wrong reasons. His love of liberty was a disguise for hatred of England. Common Sense, his most famous pamphlet, is a prototype of pilgering. England’s monarchical racketeering, he says, had laid the world in “blood and ashes”.  George III was the “royal criminal”, “the royal brute of Great Britain”, and much more in that vein.

A favourite fantasy of Paine’s was that a few thousand men invading England would be enough to depose the King. The choice Paine offered the colonists was independence or slavery. In reality, the colonists made sure of independence for themselves and slavery for the Africans they had purchased and put to work.

The issues of the new republic exclusively preoccupied Americans and a disappointed Paine went to revolutionary France where the prospect of war with England was growing. Granted citizenship, although he never learnt to speak or read French, he was elected to the National Convention and after the execution of Louis XVI he called for the British to revolt. Arrested during the Terror, he spent ten months in the death cell, and recorded how between 20 and 50 prisoners would pass his cell almost every night on the way to the guillotine. Untold thousands were to endure such an ordeal in twentieth century jails.

Eventually seizing power, Napoleon agreed that Paine should head a provisional English Revolutionary government and accompany the French invading forces as a political advisor. Paine paid for thousands of pairs of boots for French soldiers to wear on the planned invasion.

Perverse personalities recur. The Duke of Wellington himself recorded that when the British army had won the battle of Waterloo, Lord Sefton, an exceptionally rich aristocrat, lamented, “Horrible news! They have gained a great victory.” The capitulation of Napoleon was so unbearable to Samuel Whitbread, the brewer and Member of Parliament, that he immediately committed suicide.

Lord Byron, the explorer Richard Burton and many others made careers of flaunting their hatred for England. Sir Oswald Mosley took subsidies from Hitler, putting himself in the Paine position of hoping to come to power by means of foreign sponsorship. Mosley’s mother-in-law Lady Redesdale is quotes saying in the war, “we bombed Coventry last night but we lost twenty of our best bombers.”

Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims is still the last word on the great number of intellectuals of one type or another who wanted to install Soviet Communism in their countries, in effect replacing the old historic identity with a new one. Hardliners of course were fully informed about the millions the Bolsheviks had murdered, and the millions more in Gulag, and were indoctrinated to be prepared for every violence.

When Bernard Shaw wrote as a Communist, “Our question is not, to kill or not to kill, but how to select the right people to kill,” did he mean what he was saying, or was this another example of his “brutal frivolity”, in the phrase with which Henry James summarised him perfectly.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, specimen intellectuals, were the authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, a book that had no contact with reality. They often applied the word “liquidated” to whole classes and if they meant it literally then Communism could not be the paradise of their imagination. Nevertheless, these suckers hors concours are buried in Westminster Abbey along with those who shaped Britain’s destiny.

Reader Bullard, British consul in Leningrad as it then was in Stalin’s time, has left an unforgettable snapshot of the ignorance that coloured belief in Communism. A ship docked with a hundred immigrants from the West, bringing with them golf clubs, gramophones and so on. By nightfall the Soviets had stripped them of all their possessions and Reader Bullard had to find a warehouse in which these Webb-like dupes now destitute, could shelter for the night.

Some who became spies and traitors in order to advance the cause of Communism, for instance Alger Hiss and Anthony Blunt, could never have adapted to life in Soviet Russia and made sure they escaped such a fate. Obliged to make a run for it. Others, for instance Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, lived unhappily in the police state they had helped to strengthen.

At all levels of society in the West, a range of people worked to the best of their abilities to give their various countries a new Communist identity. Nothing quite like this complex of deception and self-deception had previously been seen. Here was a wholesale substitution of fantasy for rationality – it was a particularly cruel joke that Marxism, a set of purely hypothetical notions, could be described as “scientific”.

Posterity will have to come to terms with this extraordinary psychological enigma. Communism lost the struggle against nationalism, its old ingrained enemy, but not before a great many influential Europeans had persuaded themselves that nationalism had really been responsible for the wars that kept on wrecking the continent and would probably do so again.

The core belief that Communism was an international experiment bound to be in the general interest, has a fresh lease of life through its illegitimate offspring, the European Union. The EU’s centralisation, command bureaucracy and democratic deficit reproduce the old, old wish fulfilments that have long since been tested to destruction. But the next instalment of this sad story is for another day.