Notes on the Garbled Ideologies of Our Time
BELL, DANIEL
Paradoxes of 1957 Notes on the Garbled Ideologies of Our Time By Daniel Bell Revolution. Almost all the French intellectuals, with Jean-Paul Sartre in the van, have affirmed their ringing break...
...and this myth had sustained Sartre and other French intellectuals in their allegiance to Russia despite all the rational evidence of betrayal which had become apparent five, ten, twenty, twenty-five years ago...
...One of the men who led the Hungarian writers in their courageous stand against the Rakosi-Gero clique was the playwright Gyula Hay...
...Equally strange to read in Hansard, therefore, the blistering attack on America by Tory MP Julian Amery, hitherto one of the strong defenders of the Atlantic Alliance, charging that American dollar interests want to take over Britain's position in the Middle East, while the New Statesman and Nation, Britain's left-wing weekly, praises Eisenhower's moderation on the Suez issue...
...Historically, too, the Tory party has been pro-American, while the Labor party, especially its left wing, has always been suspicious of the capitalist intentions of the U.S...
...And it seems complete...
...Now the Hungarian workers have risen in the very same heroic posture and with the same lack of arms, but against the Russians...
...Labor, sympathizing with the "little man," has always understood Israel's aspirations...
...Almost all the French intellectuals, with Jean-Paul Sartre in the van, have affirmed their ringing break with Russia—yet, for the "wrong" reasons...
...His book Geschichte und Klassenbeumsstsein ("History and Class Consciousness") was a classic of Marxism...
...In fact, just two weeks before Israel attacked in the Sinai Peninsula, Ian Mikardo, a left-wing Labor MP, charged in the New Statesman and Nation that the British Foreign Office was plotting with Jordan and Iraq to curb the Israelis...
...A serious man...
...Because these writers were caught in their own cliches...
...What the Moscow Trials, the concentration camps, the Jewish doctors' "plot," the hanging of Rajk, the war in Korea could not do, Budapest has finally done...
...Strange to read in Hansard Eden's statements in Parliament that Egypt had been guilty of provocation and that Israel had acted in self-defense, while Gaitskell decried the "naked aggression" of the Israelis...
...Y et he, too...
...Communism...
...The U.S., of course, in the eyes of most Socialists has always been guilty of "dollar imperialism," while Russia has despoiled Eastern Europe in classic robber fashion...
...A veteran Communist, Hay was active in the Bela Kun uprising, went to Germany in the Twenties, fled east to Moscow rather than to the West after Hitler, lived in Russia until 1945, returned to Hungary as one of the cultural commissars, and was able, if he chose, to live well and in comfort...
...This was the compelling myth—the proletariat, bare-handed, tearing up the cobbled streets, defending themselves against tanks and guns...
...Yet, look at his record...
...He was, perhaps, the leading ideologist of Communism in the field of philosophy...
...The Minister of Education in the short-lived Nagy Government was Georg Lukacs, the philosopher...
...Historically, the British Tory party has always been pro-Arab, while the sympathies of the Labor movement have been with Israel...
...A French intellectual can withstand anything but the destruction of his myth, so the break has finally come...
...During the late Thirties and Forties, Lukacs was in Moscow, where he was one of the editors of International Literature, an official Communist journal...
...turned against Russia...
...Lu-kacs, too, had participated in the Bela Kun revolution and afterward had fled to Germany...
...What brought these intellectuals to Communism was the mystique of revolution, for what French workers could not accomplish in 1848 or 1871 the Russian workers had accomplished in 1917...
...Tory romancers like T. E. Lawrence were fired with the thought that the anchor of British glory lay in its solid control over the Middle East, and that this could be maintained only by supporting the Arab sheiks...
...Anti-Americanism...
...Curiously enough, two of the three countries guilty of aggression in Suez have Socialist governments, while their chief accusers have been powers bearing classic imperialist tags...
...never a hack, he would have had to be considered, however, a "true believer...
...The attacks on the U.S...
...From the cold record, a hardcore Communist...
...Ben-Gurion, after all, heads the Mapai, a party in good standing in the Socialist International, while Guy Mollet is still general secretary of the French Socialist party...
...In France, right shoes are on left feet as well and vice versa...
...are led by Pineau, Mollet and the Socialists, while cautious words are uttered by the Right (Pinay) and the non-Communist Left (France-Observateur) in favor of the U.S...
...Socialism and imperialism...
...Pro-Arabism...
...and the Russians, in the classic answer of oppressors, have coldly shot them down...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 3
