Most of the angst over socialism these days is about
our response to it rather than about the
deadly flaws of the system itself: Should former college communist Obama have
shaken Raul Castro’s hand?
Should
Mandela be faulted for endorsing violence and communism in his struggle against
Apartheid?
And should I honor one of his
allies by singing
Peter
Gabriel’s “Biko” in karaoke sometime?
Probably, on that last one.
(Of course, Obama shaking Castro’s hand during Mandela’s
funeral is less embarrassing than
Obama
taking a happy selfie during the event, his unhappy-looking wife planting
herself between the President and the cute Danish prime minister, or the whole
event being infiltrated by a mentally ill sign-language interpreter who was
making things up -- though if Obama unexpectedly said after the affair, “Hey, I
was having fun the whole time -- a communist had died!” some conservatives might
well be pleased.)
With luck, communism will never again murder 100 million
people as it did in the twentieth century (something like 300 million, about a
tenth of the human race at the time, died thanks to actions by big-government-in-general
last century, depending on how you do the math). Yet with countless intellectuals and young
activists enamored of various watered-down forms of socialism today, it can still
do serious damage to the economy even without openly murdering as many people.
Unfortunately, socialism (in varying forms and to varying
degrees) is or has been pretty much everywhere (thus the list of locales below),
even if outright communism is now rare.
Marx
wrote of socialism “haunting” Europe, but it might be more apt to think of it
“stomping all over and destroying” places (
a bit like Godzilla in the
new trailer for the remake coming out next year):
1. Though
libertarians should love Orwell, he was certainly criticizing socialism from
within -- or at least criticizing it as a left-anarchist in the final days when
intelligent people could plausibly still believe that and Communism amounted to
roughly the same thing.
That’s what he believed when he went to SPAIN to fight in its 1936-1939 civil war, in any case, as his
mid-war account Homage to Catalonia
makes clear. But his every sentence
reflects his realism, skepticism, frankness, and lack of illusions (which is
why he was an inspiration to Christopher Hitchens, among others, and why I
defended him against a class filled with leftists back in college, when
Orwell’s insistence on apolitical, jargon-free language was seen as un-p.c. --
that’s how radical Brown University was two decades ago, and I will not assume
it has improved all that much).
Lionel Trilling wrote of Orwell in his introduction to the
book, “he does not dream of a new kind of man, he is content with the old kind,
and what moves him is the desire that this old kind of man should have freedom,
bacon, and proper work.” Not a bad
platform.
What Orwell found instead in Spain was protracted, largely
futile trench warfare between fascist rebels with bad aim and an
internally-feuding mix of socialist and anarchist factions with even worse aim
who hoped either to rescue the liberal/democratic government of Spain from the
fascists, turn it into a bourgeois-yet-Communist vassal of Russia, or replace
it with perpetual left-anarchist revolution, depending on which faction you
were talking to at which point in a very confusing war.
Orwell devotes one large chapter in mid-book to trying to
identify the various factions and their various tensions, but you sense that on
some level he knows that keeping track of it all is beside the point and that
there is a decent chance history will conclude it’s just as well the fascists
won in the end. The empirical details
are what make an impression, such as Orwell’s faction using a megaphone to
spout dispiriting propaganda at the fascist lines -- lying and telling them
that the leftists had lots of yummy buttered toast in their trench, for
instance.
As the government crumbles before the fascist onslaught, in
Orwell’s account, it turns increasingly Soviet-backed Communist and therefore
devotes a great deal of energy not to beating the fascists but to crushing its
left-anarchist rivals. And, yes, this
includes confiscating the guns of anarchists, including the P.O.U.M. faction of
which Orwell was a part (but then, even some conservatives such as Heather Mac
Donald think the Second Amendment is overrated, I’ve found, so how can one
expect better from Communists?).
The factionalism on display in the Spanish Civil War is
almost as bad as that among libertarians.
Gallingly, the Communists of the 1930s were never content
merely to criticize their rivals but had to smear them as covert fascists (or
as Trotskyites, which amounted to the same thing, since they’d begun claiming
that Trotsky was himself a covert fascist ally -- ironic considering Stalin’s
own pact with Hitler). In truth, Orwell
and others found in the camaraderie of the front -- and the short-lived
takeover of businesses and buildings in cities such as Barcelona -- an
intoxicating microcosm of the imagined egalitarianism of full-fledged
anarchist-socialist society. He was as giddy as an Occupy participant when he wasn’t getting shot at.
Within months, though, the bourgeois modes of dress and
speech began creeping back into the way of life in towns, even as people
continued dying on the front and shortages made the pretense of normality in
town difficult. Interestingly, Orwell
saw the Communist/Russian influence -- from his perspective as a true radical
-- as one more form of “bourgeois” influence, and because of it he predicted
early on that the Communists and liberals would end up reaching some sort of
accommodation with the fascists to avoid ongoing anarchist disruptions. Orwell was a pragmatist and realist but by no
means a moderate.
One important lesson he learned from it all, applicable to
countless political persuasions, is that first-hand experience always teaches
you how inaccurate press accounts are, especially when they’re influenced by
political agents: “Throughout the fighting I never made the correct ‘analysis’
of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles
away. What I was chiefly thinking about
was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply
the discomfort and boredom.”
By the time it was over, he’d see friends of his who’d died
fighting for socialism pilloried in the communist-influenced press as covert
fascists, see his wife (who lived not far from the front all the while he was
fighting) confronted by inquisitive Spanish government cops over her possession
of writings from multiple factions including the Nazis, hear the, uh, Orwellian
coinage “Trotsky-Fascist” for those disfavored by Moscow popularized, and see one
of his P.O.U.M. pals disappear as a political prisoner into an ostensibly
leftist prison system (likely to be executed later in the war).
He writes that many people in Barcelona at that time summed
things up in almost the same words: “The atmosphere of this place -- it’s
horrible. Like being in a lunatic asylum.”
And you know, the dumbass -- lucky enough to survive getting
shot in the neck at one point -- still wanted to go back and fight after he and
his wife sneaked out via France (now hoping to appear as bourgeois as possible
to avoid attracting attention as proletarian radicals but occasionally pausing
to scrawl leftist graffiti on fancy restaurant walls) and went back home to
England. But then, he rightly suspected
similar fighting would soon engulf all of Europe anyway, and concludes admiring
England but seeing his countrymen as “all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of
England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are
jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
Nerd sidenote: The immediate fascist aftermath of the
Spanish Civil War also inspired Guillermo del Toro’s films
The Devil’s Backbone and
Pan’s
Labyrinth, which depict fascists during WWII juxtaposed with menacing supernatural
elements. I only recently learned that both were in turn influenced by the
acclaimed Spanish film
Spirit of the
Beehive (which helps explain del Toro’s otherwise creepy habit of
showing kids in jeopardy -- and perhaps explains the band name Voice of the
Beehive to boot).
3. Sunday’s
speaker, Michael Malice, was born in
UKRAINE,
itself now
wracked
by government crackdowns on pro-EU protestors.
The modern press’s approach is not merely to
misrepresent political factions as in Orwell’s day (though there was a little
of that in this case, as the Ukrainian government attempted to blame the
protestors for some of the violence) but to sound so haughtily above the fray
that it needn’t even bother about details like who
