On the Threshold of the Eighties

...As Orwell envisaged, in a chaotic world, power emerges as the only reality, and the utopias which traffic in happiness, one after the other, are being seen as a pipedream...

...A good place for considering how matters now stand between the two soc a l l e d superpowers, in the light of this great accession of Russian power, is standing on the Berlin Wall, with on one side the Western city, on the other the Eastern city, and in between the no-man's land dividing the two, with its land-mines, its armed patrols, its guard-dogs and look-out posts...

...The workers, when, through nationalization they became part-owners of the enterprises in which they worked, could be relied on to give of their best, and would certainly never, never strike, if only because it would amount to striking against themselves...

...The cultural yield of the groves of academe was more in the nature of sloganshouting and punk music than art or scholarship...

...The seventies ended with the Americans meekly putting the case at the International Court of Justice at The Hague-which anyway hag no power or authority-for the release of the staff of their Teheran Embassy, who had been taken and held as hostages by students acting on behalf of the Ayatoll~ih Khomeini, a contemporary version of the Sudanese Mad Mullah of General Gordon's time...

...In the groves of academe, ever expanding and multiplying to provide in due course a place for every citizen who wanted one, the teachers and writers and artists of the future, the makers of culture, would be incubated...

...They merely took possession of a booty that was open to everyone...

...Whoever wanted anything, had any project to promote that needed funding, any plan for the betterment of mankind, was bound to show up there sooner or later...

...while in urban areas, libraries and theaters and leisure centers would replace bookmakers, public houses, and low dives generally...

...If we wanted to we could harm the United States 20 times more than it would harm us...

...As soon as Lenin had the reins of power in his hands, he set up the Cheka, an organ of terrorism which, under various initials, the latest being KGB, became an integral part of the Soviet regime...

...Having thus disposed of the Revolution and the revolutionaries, Russia could resume its history, with Stalin as Tsar, and pursue its old pan-Slav imperialist policies...

...in the darkness, glimmers of light will shine...

...And behind our rhetoric and gesture there is a good deal of confusion, especially about what constitutes meaningful action...

...Undoubtedly he would now see television as an incomparable means of inducing the servile intellectuals and the proles equally, to do and think and be what was required of them...

...In the process, position after position outside the United States was lost or surrendered...

...So that "The Decade of Lost Utopias" seemed like an appropriate sequel to "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death-Wish," more particularly as George Orwell's nightmare forecast of the ultimate consequences of the pursuit of power for power's sake alone is put in the eighties...

...My earliest memories are of the arguments for and against--but mostly for--being marshaled in our suburban sitting-room, to the accompaniment of clouds of tobacco smoke and mild libations of whiskey and water...

...t h the American dream thus summarily disposed of, how stands the socialist-welfare dream, our own special British line in utopias...

...Thus, Americans are increasingly content to settle for the realization of their dream in images on a television screen, or in glossy magazine pages, while beneficiaries under Britain's welfare state collect their benefits without bothering their heads about how and why they ever became available...

...Through the first decades of its existence, the Soviet regime went on attracting the enthusiastic admiration and support of the intellectual elite of the Western world, despite purges, terrorism, famines, and the emergence of Stalin as a ruthless and bloodthirsty dictator...

...Malcolm Muggeridge, whose "Operation Death-Wish" appeared in our tenth anniversary issue, is working on the third volume of his autobiography...

...shops with few goods to display in their windows, and only very occasional motor cars...

...I hope not...

...Our position in the world, both politically and militarily, has deteriorated over recent years because we have appeased, and, I suggest, it will probably continue to deteriorate because we will probably continue to appease...

...indeed, to a great extent it has already, with the media, especially television, ensuring the requisite indoctrination--viz., man is the only incumbent, and satisfying his needs the only pursuit, on earth or in the universe...

...Are the basic lines of Soviet strategy, despite the camouflage of d~tente, any more hidden to us than Hitler's were after Poland...

...And where has all this started happening...

...Although the thermonuclear relationship forecloses that part of the analogy which would have us "declaring war" on the Soviets, we are now engaged in mouthing criticisms of Moscow and applying economic sanctions without, as I have tried to show, making the kinds of decisions that would signal a true commitment to our allies or even to our own security...

...It might be said that pretty well everyone wanted to live like Americans, but knew deep inside them that they were fated sooner or later to live like Russians...

...through cracks in the concrete face, tiny green shoots will appear...

...To guard against any relapse into the old squalid capitalist ways, the BBC would be called upon to follow strictly the guidelines laid down by the first Director-General, John Reith, whereby, as he put it in his inimitable style, "all things hostile to peace or purity would be banished from its programmes, and listeners and viewers, inclining their ears to whatsoever things were beautiful, honest and of good repute, would tread the paths of wisdom and righteousness...

...lights coming out meagerly, one by one, in comparison with the blaze across the way...

...It is such words as his, such experiences as he describes, that make me say, and mean, as a final comment on these and other times: Thy will be done...

...It still took two days for Chamberlain to admit that a state of war existed, and even then it wasn't waged...

...Or down THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 15 at Passfield Corner where the founding mother, Beatrice Webb, and her consort, Sidney, delivered their pronunciamentos, one of Beatrice's being, rather surprisingly, that "the unemployable, whether work-shy or merely inadequate, would have to be put in colonies and trained and disciplined according to their shortcomings"--which reads now like a plea for building a Gulag Archipelago in England's green and pleasant land...

...This was true even of the Communist countries, where authentic jeans were at a premium, and clandestine recordings of rock music a rare treasure...

...Nineteen Eighty-Four is, indeed, a prophetic book...

...Or at open-aii" meetings, shouted against the noise of traffic and occasional dissenting interruptions...

...I begin with the American dream...

...but he had already grasped its potentialities, as the role of Big Brother THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 13 indicates...

...There would seem to be three patterns to one or the other of which all current utopias conform: first, the American dream of happiness successfully pursued, funded by an ever rising Gross National Product, promoted by advertising in all its guises, and facilitated by nonstop technological developments...

...Now they lie about in the world like the ruins of old civilizations in Asia Minor and along the Mediterranean coast of Africa--heaps of ideological debris, smudged blueprints for an earthly paradise, empty rhetoric proclaiming the coming to pass of a suburban Garden of Eden...

...and even were they willing to use it, the Europeans would never have the nerve to agree...

...Systematically, stage by stage, our way of life had been dismantled, our values depreciated, our certainties undermined, and our God dethroned--all this in the name of promoting the health, wealth, and happiness of one and all...

...At the same time, there had emerged in the United States a notable exponent of the American dream at its most elevated, in the person of President Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton don, with a high mind, a slow voice, and a tall hat...

...It would surprise me if another decade slipped by without this particular expression of reductio ad absurdun becoming dramatically manifest: that the only serious defense today of what used to be called the free world is America' s nuclear power, which the Americans will never have the ruthlessness to use...

...The Stock Exchange would close because there would be no speculators, and the brothels because there would be no whores...

...I n practice, if not in theory, the Marxist-revolutionary utopia came to an end in the thirties, when Stalin killed off all the Marxist revolutionaries who had made the October Revolution, first inducing them to confess that they had worked for foreign intelligence services, including the American one, which did not then exist...

...Washington in those days was the center of the world...

...In the unlikeliest of all places--the Gulag...

...L e t us, then, take a look at these lost utopias which will assuredly be haunting the eighties as, according to the Communist Manifesto, the specter of Communism did earlier decades...

...but few, if any, souls will be saved thereby...

...I see this process of reductio ad absurdum, already far advanced, soon reaching the point of no return, when the clear choice will present itself between the chaos of self-indulgence and dictatorial order...

...The happenings, that is to say, like nature itself, are parables, bearing in themselves their own message...

...In such circumstances, there will be no literature other than escapist fantasies, no music except muzak and discord, no buildings except indeterminate concrete masses, no thought except acquiescence, no art except photography, no entertainment except porn and inconsequential lunacy...

...Do they, I wonder, read Spengler in the Kremlin...

...Having, during the past half-century, had occasion, as a professional communicator, or, in St...

...His last book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, has served to give this date a widespread aura of momentousness, though Orwell himself chose it quite arbitrarily by transposing the last two digits in the year 1948 when he was working on the book in his house on the remote Isle of Jura, already gravely ill with the tuberculosis from which he died two years later when he was 47...

...When Orweli wrote Nineteen EightyFour, television had by no means reached its present range and influence as an instrument for propagating a universal materialist-humanist orthodoxy, called the consensus...

...It was only a "revolt of conscience" (as the historians Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott put it) in the back benches that forced the war...

...Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, immaculate in gaiters and full deaconal rig, proclaiming from his pulpit that Stalin was busy building the Kingdom of Christ, which turned out to be itself, in the Dean's estimation, a super-welfare state...

...East Berlin is the extremity of an empire now stretching almost without a break from Berlin's Wall to China's, and soon, perhaps, taking in India, and maybe receiving back China into the fold, with large and growing affiliates in Africa, and promising possibilities for expansion in the Caribbean and Latin America and maybe Quebec...

...U topianism is, of course, a deep-rooted impulse in human beings...

...notably, today there is a high rhetoric (as we have observed) of anti-Sovietism (even though there seems to be an almost direct relationship between the former dovishhess of our leaders and their high rhetorical posture today...

...Not a drop of British blood was shed in Poland's defense during the phony war...

...The pursuit of happiness written like a rainbow across the sky...

...Thus, when one of the richest men in the world, Howard Hughes, dies of neglect, like any one of Mother Teresa's derelicts brought in from the streets of Calcutta, it spells the end of the mystique of money, just as the obsessive preoccupation with erotica in a society dedicated to carnality spells the end of the mystique of sex, leaving nothing...

...In an astonishingly candid interview with Die IVelt, Boris Davydov, a KGB official, put it rather well: "The Americans are much too conceited," he said...

...All this will come to pass of itself...

...Then later, in grander style, in the columns of the New Statesman in its early days--we were original subscribers--or at Fabian lectures, with the majestic figure of George Bernard Shaw on the platform, red-bearded, Mephistophelian, his arms folded, explaining how there was no need to slaughter our millionaires, since their eventual death could more conveniently be assumed and thus death-duties levied...

...The disaster of our time lies essentially in the replacement of this sense of the intrinsic inadequacy of human beings by the notion of progress achieved through evolution, whereby man himself fashions his own perfectibility through his own efforts, without any need for a God, or involvement in any mystery, in any "Cloud of Unknowing' '--just mortal men in Time creating a utopia wherein they may, in fairy-story style, live happily ever after...

...Hitler intended to use military force to control Europe and, ultimately, probably the world...

...Against this stands the Western Alliance, grouped round America and comprising the distracted countries of Western Europe, themselves joined tog e t h e r in a European union of sorts, as nebulous and seemingly ill-fated as the Holy Roman Empire...

...T h e i r strength is but a strength of words...

...In a somewhat different vein, there was Dr...

...Given that condition-battered and bedraggled, with a mutinous crew and a newly-appointed skipper and officers whose seamanship, such as it is, would seem to belong to other climes and seas, her engines in a deplorable state and liable to break down at any moment--the good ship's chances of navigating the stormy weather ahead and arriving at her destination must be regarded as negligible...

...Stranger things have happened...

...Far from flourishing, industry fell into a chronic decline, with the Mint as the only truly booming enterprise, and a new kind of economic miracle manifesting itself: high levels of unemployment coinciding with an acute labor shortage...

...There is a useful analogy, however, between the phony war of 1939-1940, after the attack on Poland and before the occupation of Norway, and the period into which the West is now going...

...O Q O Q O O I O O O O O O O m O I Q 4 O a O B Q 4 O O O O Q O O O O O Q ~ O 6 Q Q Q Q O O a Q i 6 ~ . . . . . . O g Q Q O O O O O Q O 9 6 Q O O O 6 1 ~ i W Q q q O O O O Q Q Q Q O O ~ O . . . . t O Q O O . . . . g Q Q I O O O O O B B O Q O O O Q O O ~ I O O O O O g I Q Q O O O O t ~ O O ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE EIGHTIES Three great utopias stand ready to fail...

...The two of them--Lenin and Wilson--were, indeed, Janus faces gazing in opposite directions...

...The American century prophesied by Henry Wallace fizzled out before it properly began, and the American dream resolved itself into a gigantic exercise in self-indulgence, at which the rest of the world looked on enviously, and, within such means as were available, sought to emulate...

...Similarly, with the ostensible revival of Islam taking place, notably in the Middle East and Iran, the oil revenues speak, the Shah goes and the Ayatollah comes, the muezzin (now recorded on tape) is played more frequently, the incidence of power shifts...

...Augustine's term, as a vendor of words, to watch over the happenings in the world, I have come to see that their significance lies, not in themselves, but in the revelation they provide of an inward fearful symmetry-Blake's expression--in our human affairs...

...whereas Wilson, at about the same time, labored earnestly to advance the institution of a League of Nations at Geneva as a custodian of world peace, to be later resurrected as the United Nations in Manhattan, the whole enterprise amounting to a 20th-century Tower of Babel, in which, as in the original one, many speak in diverse tongues, but few listen and none understand...

...It is there, where there is no freedom, that freedom is being rediscovered-there, where there is no hope, that hope is reborn...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 17...

...Considering what has been happening in Southwest Asia, the African Horn, the Caribbean, and Indochina, I think not...

...In the television age, the past is quickly obliterated...

...Leaflets were dropped over Germany, while the Luftwaffe strafed Poland...

...The extraordinary credulity they displayed on their visits to the USSR, their naive acceptance of everything they were told about the prosperity and well-being of the population, provided a hilarious, if somewhat macabre, spectacle, which I had the privilege of enjoying when I was in Moscow as a Manchester Guardian correspondent...

...In any case, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a brilliant analysis of how totalitarian dictatorship works in our time, of its brainwashing techniques, and of its sloganeering and terrorism, resulting in not just destroying any practical possibility of individual freedom, but, like the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, rooting out in those subjected to it the very wish to be free, the very concept of freedom...

...How weird, but in a way how apposite, if this date, casually adopted by a dying man as marking the final expiry of our civilization and its replacement by a monolithic power structure with no other purpose than its own continuance, should prove to be correct, in some measure because he envisaged it so--in Biblical terms, in order that the prophecy might be fulfilled...

...Wells in his squeaky voice propounding vast collective enterprises, and the vast benefits they would bring...

...Our Creator's favorite method of curing His creatures of such egotistic fantasies would seem to be reductio ad absurdum: They want to be rich, so they accumulate wealth, which, thanks to inflation, turns out to be useless paper, they want to be secure, so they develop a weapon powerful enough to blow themselves and their earth to smithereens...

...As the good ship socialist-welfare sails into the eighties, then, her condition sadly belies the enthusiasm and high hopes with which she was launched...

...And what a dream that was...

...As for the Marxist dream, in the USSR it has been embalmed with Lenin in his mausoleum, and elsewhere is liable to crop up on campuses wherever two or more sociologists are gathered together, among laicized Jesuits and svelte nuns with tiny crosses on their well-cut habits, and as background music at Labour Party annual conferences, culminating in the supreme moment when the trade union bosses and political leaders on the platform fraternally link arms and lustily intone the "Red Flag...

...The strong probability is, therefore, that in the eighties the American dream, deprived of these two essential elements-money and sex--will finally flicker out, like the images on a television screen when the power is cut off...

...Then, in East Berlin, the characteristic evening street scene in any Communist city: pedestrians hurrying homewards with that curious, somehow furtive walk of people who have grown accustomed to living with fear and privation...

...The third of our contemporary utopias, the Marxist-revolutionary one, took shape when, in the t914-1918 war, the Germans irfjected Lenin into the body politic of Russiaman early essay in germ-warfare...

...Such sanity as Western man has displayed during the centuries of Christendom has been due, more than anything else, to the fact that this vision of lasting felicity and well-being was seen as belonging to our heavenly, not our earthly, existence, to Eternity and not to Time...

...And hanging over them at home was the dread threat of a shortage of gasoline, the precious fluid which fuels the pursuit of happiness, making it possible, as P.G...

...they want to be carnal, and find themselves stranded in the wasteland of eroticism and porn...

...The game in the eighties will be a power game merely...

...there are many others...

...second, the socialist-welfare dream of a strictly egalitarian society in which citizens are cared for by the state from the moment of conception (though caring in this instance may take the form of extinction) to their burial or cremation...

...Solzhenitsyn is, of course, not alone...

...There is a further point in the analogy, in the extent to which the two hands, Nazi and Soviet, had been fully revealed by the analogous times--September 1939 and today...

...In the seventies it had already become unmistakably clear that none of these expectations were to be realized in practice...

...There is also the possibility that he remembered the date from a book he greatly admired, Jack London's The Iron Heel, an imaginary account of the setting up of a fascist regime in America in which the enslaved proletariat are forced to build a great metropolis, completing the work in 1984...

...Only an occasional empty-headed actress, or trade union boss back from a free holiday by the Black Sea, or clergyman out on an ideological spree, is prepared to champion the Soviet regime as a source of light and hope in a dark world...

...ours has the unusual characteristic of having nurtured its own destroyers at the public expense, and dreamt up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite...

...Since there would be no dividends to pay out, working conditions would assuredly go on improving steadily, thereby facilitating higher wages, shorter hours, and longer holidays...

...On Capitol Hill, in the Senate especially, there was once again talk of America's manifest destiny, but, translated into the policy of President Truman's administration, this proved to be just handing out dollars to all and sundry, thereby, inevitably, earning the undying hatred of the recipients...

...This has been done with outstanding success, so that Russia has become immeasurably more powerful, and extended its territory and influence further and more effectively than ever was the case under the Romanovs...

...At the Wall, two lost utopias conjoin, and, like two drunks, in a certain sense hold on to one another, their confrontation being clearly in terms, not of freedom and servitude, but of two different kinds of servitude...

...they have a congenital propensity to believe that somehow or other, at some time or another, a golden age will come to pass, when tears will all be washed away, the lion and the lamb will lie down together and a little child shall lead them, captives will be released, swords will be beaten into ploughshares, and sorrow and suffering will disappear from our human experience...

...For, in the last resort, human beings will opt for order, however harshly imposed, in preference to chaos, however alluringly presented...

...I t was artfully contrived by Augustus Caesar," Gibbon writes, "that in the enjoyment of plenty, the Romans should lose the memory of freedom...

...The Genesis story has provided an apt basis for such a view: After Eve's sin and Adam's connivance, Man is a fallen creature capable of conceiving perfection, but by his very nature fated to be imperfect himself and in all his works--to toil for his livelihood, and to reproduce in the turbulence of his fleshly appetites reaching after a transcendental fulfillment, of love lusting and lust loving...

...In the most literal sense, I grew up with it...

...Faced with such a choice, the odds are that it is the latter that will be preferred...

...Past civilizations have collapsed through being overrun by barbarians from without...

...This confirms what a neutral diplomat in middle Europe told me recently: that the Soviets are openly acknowledging that d&ente, joke that it was, worked longer than expected: but now it is time to go on to the serious business of turning military realities into political realities...

...And how nearly it became the world's dream--something that is now largely forgotten...

...It all seemed so wonderfully clear and simple...

...they are greedy for knowledge, and in seeking to know everything find they know nothing...

...Wodehouse put it, for everyone in Little Neck to drive on Sundays to Great Neck, and for everyone in Great Neck to drive to Little Neck...

...Greatly expanded educational facilities at all levels would, as it were, phase out pursuits like gambling, drinking, dogracing, and the grosser forms of womanizing, while crimes of violence might be expected to decline and ultimately disappear as living and working conditions went on improving...

...To sum up--before this century is over, the countries of the West will have adopted in practice the materialist view of life they have already adopted in principle...

...Seldom, if ever, can there have been so large and varied an assembly of mendicants in one place...

...Subsequently, the euphoria has spent itself, and the Marxist-revoluxionary utopia has gone the way of the other two in losing its believers...

...That much, I am certain, Jimmy Carter has yet to learn...

...Thus, Solzhenitsyn writes: It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good...

...In the case of the American dream, for Augustus Caesar read the media and the advertisers who support them...

...Likewise, the co-op stores, since they gave back all their profits to their customers in the form of dividends, could not but in time absorb to themselves all retail business...

...So, it is difficult now to recall that when I went to Washington as a Daily Telegraph correspondent shortly after the end of the Second World War, America was richer and more powerful, in terms of weaponry, than all the rest of the world put together...

...Solzhenitsyn was surely correct when he said that in the USSR and its satellites it would be difficult to find one single citizen for whom Marxism was other than a sick joke...

...Let us suppose we are standing on the Wall at dusk...

...Our policy of appeasement has been less conscious than Chamberlain's, but that may be a disadvantage, for, as Bacon said, "truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion...

...Or H.G...

...They symbolize the confrontation we have all been living with in recent decades, and that in the decade ahead may be expected to erupt--Lenin with his incisive words and ruthless purposes, Wilson with his meandering utterance and generalized goodwill...

...each day's news is 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 wiped off the video tapes in preparation for recording tomorrow's...

...they want to be free, and their freedom proves to be servitude, either to their own appetites, or to a Big Brother...

...That the Romans did not conquer the world is certain," Spengler writes...

...As the seventies unfolded, I felt that my prognostications were proving to be, in essentials, well founded, and now, looking into the eighties, I see the same process continuing, to the point of total disillusionment with the utopian expectations on which Western man has been living since he became persuaded that he was in charge of his own destiny, and responsible for creating his own heaven on earth...

...Yet underneath this frozen surface seeds will begin to germinate...

...and, with the frontier so near, a noticeable police presence, the Vopos, perambulating two by two...

...As for the Anglican Church, it would be disestablished, but if pockets of persistent believers lingered on, they would be allowed to make their own arrangements for worship in the confident expectation that, as they died off, there would be none to replace them...

...As for Reith's hope that things hostile to peace or purity would be banished from the TV screen, it seemed positively to cherish them...

...By his attack on Poland, Hitler ended the debate about his intentions...

...People in the eighties will have to live with these lost utopias as best they may, like Bedouins camping and watering their camels amidst the ruins of Carthage or Luxor...

...In West Berlin already the neon lights are coming out, announcing the evening's pleasures: r e s t a u r a n t s and hotels, strip joints and sex shops, theaters and cinemas and discos, the news even, in dancing illuminated letters--all the munificence in entertainment, pleasure, and refreshment 20th-century hedonism has to offer, spelled out in luminous words against the gathering darkness...

...Even after Hitler's attack on Poland, the British government tried, not to put too fine a point on it, to welsh on its commitment to the Poles...

...After thus wallowing, some of them uneasily, in their munificence, the Americans, behind their barrage of missiles pointing eastwards, settled down to enjoy their own afffluence--not, indeed, in the Scott Fitzgerald style of the twenties, as a great binge, but as a way of life...

...Likewise, since the death of Mao, and the discrediting of his associates, voices acclaiming the amazing rise in the standard of life in China, the absence of flies, 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 and the skills of the barefoot doctors seem to be largely stilled...

...The churches will either fall in with this (as, actually, many already have) or become extinct with residual followers carrying on fellowship in clandestinity...

...Leaving what ? Searching about in my mind at the beginning of the seventies for a name for that decade, I hit upon "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death-Wish," since, in my estimation, the process of death-wishing in the guise of liberalism, which had long been eroding what remained of Western civilization, was about to reach its apogee...

...Education will be solely concerned with literacy and implanting whatever version of materialism happens to be current...

...As the Soviet adventurisrfi in Afghanistan adumbrates, other humiliations and anxieties lie ahead in the eighties: Of the American dream, then, all that remains at the beginning of the eighties is sex, the mysticism of materialism, and money, materialism's least convincing manifestation...

...Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating Good and Evil passes, not through States, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart--and through all human hearts . . . . And that is why 1 turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life...

...The number of true believers in these utopian expectations has been drastically shrinking of late, and by the time another decade has passed, may well have dwindled to practically none...

...and, third, the Marxist-revolutionary dream of a triumphant proletariat who inherit the earth, leaving the abolished bourgeoisie to disappear from history, and the state and all its appurtenances to wither away, so that, with the mighty put down from their seats, the humble and meek may be exalted forever...

...The apologists had simply been wrong, and the decent among them were quick to admit it...