A Letter to an Ex-Communist

...And if history had to do evil, why then that was history's concern...

...Your first serious doubts came with the doctors' case before Stalin's death...

...As an intellectual you found American culture vulgar...

...While teaching-history or physics, was it?-with in telligence and even wit, you showed a strange blundering lack of perception about relationships involving human beings...

...I could, I think, give you some tips: do not write for the papers...

...No doubt, it is natural for you to be primarily interested in your own intellectual processes, but you must forgive me if I cannot share that interest...

...The purges...

...I only wish that some of the British left had shown a similar willingness to shun the Barmecide feasts at the Soviet embassy...

...So you see, though I welcome your conversion, I hardly feel like killing a fatted calf to celebrate it...

...Was not that the capitalist country par excellence...

...You say in your letter what a terrible thing it is for you to leave after all those years, how hard it is to lose old beliefs, how difficult to create new ones out of the wreck...

...Their Russian fellows at least take risks...

...What I wish to convey is that, in the struggle between human and inhuman, it is not enough merely to change sides to the accompaniment of a blare of publicity or to parade in a white sheet...

...While they were tortured, you drank with their torturers...

...You were meant to he an intellectual and you have dirtied the name-there is no worse intellectual disgrace than to go on believing something simply because it is psycho• logically comfortable...

...In this letter I have been concerned with your victims, but, if you can bring yourself to some sense of your responsibility for them and their sufferings, you may become a whole human being yet...

...To avoid doing so you closed your eyes...

...Nearly but not quite...

...First, I suppose, that I am glad...

...You were meant to he a man of the left, but you have brought dishonesty into that cause-"workers of the world unite" were once noble words, but what have you made of them...

...Consider how many people died during the twenty years you were a Communist, whose deaths you explained away in conversation or letters to the New Statesman...

...Ethics, after all, are not in practice the result of long reasoning...

...You stand accused by the dead, by those of Vorkuta and the Lubianka, by the Spanish Trotskyists, by the hundreds of thousands of deportees, by whole nations taken from their homes...

...By this time, you see, you had forgotten the reasons which had led you to join...

...Also you were a little prejudiced...

...I have seen so many bleeding hearts of ex-party members recently that the thing has become a nauseous bore...

...I am not speaking of your actual political beliefs, but there are certain facts you should meditate upon...

...Let me give you an example...

...Your faults have been the faults of weakness...

...And had you not been told capitalism could only live by provoking war...

...Once in the party-and idealism carried many there during the thirties -you belonged somewhere, and, once you belonged, you could not tear yourself away...

...Wishing you a useful and, above all, a modest future, (Reprinted from THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, published in England...

...In 1937-38 there was a lack of congruity between the existence of Dachau and Anglo-German beanos in London under the patronage of Herr von Ribbentrop, which kept fastidious people away from the latter...

...It is a platitude to say so, but there must also be a change of heart, a thawing of faculties atrophied by years of numbness...

...I never did you the injustice of thinking you capable of firing a pistol-shot into the back of a deviationist's neck...

...Let me be frank: it would be better if you were to try to atone for some of your past actions or, at any rate, to realize that they require atonement...

...By now you were deeply committed...

...think less of what your actions mean to you and more of what they do to other people...

...When you have recovered a little from your shock, won't you go looking for another orthodoxy to heal your wounded ego, an orthodoxy as cruel and dishonest as the one you have left...

...Mere devices to prepare the just downfall of Fascism...

...What has always struck me, my dear X, about British Communists and fellow-travellers is their consummate indecency...

...The Russian tanks in Budapest have pushed you past the point of no return, over the frontier which you had been contemplating with fear and hesitation eves since Khrushchev's revelations...

...Yet, perhaps there is something else...

...Where there is hope for the world there may be hope for you too...

...It was as if you simply did not know how to behave and, above all, how to distinguish those things that should not be done in the service of any cause...

...They were less noisy...

...I wonder if anyone reading this would know why you joined and why you stayed so long...

...The thing was becoming compulsive...

...One had to be realistic had to accept events like the Slansky and Rajk trials...

...Evidently you were still a liberal...

...There is never time for that...

...At all events you vastly preferred the exports from Moscow to the amusements of the American masses...

...And you have written to tell me about it...

...Do I make myself clear...

...Then Khrushchev spoke to the 20th Congress and there was Hungary, and you left the party...

...You lived in Hampstead with your family...

...Still, you were a little disturbed by the purges, though you apologized for them in public, and, when the Russo-German pact was signed, you nearly quit...

...I am afraid you may be doomed to remain as you are, maimed and bewildered, wondering what hit you, wondering why the god failed, searching for a new one...

...You blamed America for the clash between the West and Russia...

...This seems to me to show a certain insensitivity...

...I explain it by a basis of idealism combined with a need to be integrated into a group...

...Hungary, you say, was the last straw...

...keep off platforms of any kind...

...The party had become a necessity to you-like a drug...

...Did it never occur to you that they might be less spontaneous as well...

...you murdered nobody...

...you merely justified other people's murders...

...That indeed is the serious part of it...

...Europe is sickened with you and your type...

...And in June 1941 you felt yourself justified...

...For how could Chamberlain and Daladier be right and the Soviet Union wrong...

...As such it deserves the utmost harshness of compassion...

...But now, after Budapest, a certain nightmare is at an end...

...Think that, when you took part in delegations to Eastern Europe, there were democrats mouldering in prison whose names never reached the pages of your ecstatic reports...

...Indeed, what have you not done...

...While the prisoners in the camps starved, you stayed in luxury hotels and talked of peace at congresses...

...History was on your side, wasn't it...

...How many more human beings must be sacrificed before the sore place in your mind is healed...

...I doubt if at that time you had ever met a real Party Neanderthaler...

...The pact...

...You have done too much damage and behaved too badly in your time...

...And all this, as I say, not because you were entirely a rogue or a fool, though something of both there was...

...Remember how you insulted better men than yourself because they opposed a tyranny whose existence then you denied, but now acknowledge...

...You were a liberal brought into the party in the giddy thirties by the cry for a united front against Fascism...

...But these are palliatives...

...They are a matter of taste, of good taste in the strict sense of the word...

...You would not see, and you slandered those who had no tongues to reply...

...Then your psyche was happily united in the contemplation of a realized myth, of a world where good peasants and workers fought and conquered evil personified in the jack-boots and death's-heads of an S S division, and the myth was all the more effective in that the Nazi movement was every bit as bad as you thought it...

...After 1945 things became more complicated...

...Your disease is something to which we are all liable...

...Yet people can be cured of drug addiction...

...Soviet expansion did nothing to change you...

...You are disgusted with the British party, with their lies and evasions, with the patent dishonesty and careerism of the King Street bureaucrats...

...China and the disengagement of the Asian world from the colonial system encouraged you...

...With unspeakable relief we have realized that the human mind cannot permanently be stifled by the propaganda of an ideology, that we may dislike the Soviet system, but have no need to fear it, provided it is unassisted by our own follies...

...What you lacked might almost be called an aesthetic sense...

...What should I answer...

...What you lacked, my dear X, apart from a rigorous intellectual honesty to which you never aspired and which your friends would have scorned, was one of those elusive qualities which make us all human, and I must confess I do not quite see how you are ever to acquire it...

...Certainly you had never seen the machine at work from close to...