Robert Conquest once tried to account for why it was that certain countries were convulsed by full-blooded totalitarianism whereas other countries only ever suffered the outcroppings of it in endowed chairs at major universities. It's the difference, noted the author of The Great Terror and the onetime Sidney and Beatrice Webb Fellow at the London School of Economics, between "ideitis" and "ideosis." Ideitis is a chronic ailment of ideological or messianic thinking, whereas ideosis merely the occasional and easily treatable case. Russia and Germany have ideitis, England and the United States have ideosis. When the two come together, we get the journalism of Walter Duranty, the plays of Lillian Hellman, the non-historical writings of Eric Hobsbawm, and titles like Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, written by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
Nick Cohen recently sat through what sounds like an agonized circle-jerk at the LSE about free speech in Russia. As ever, the Kremlin needn't have sent any of its own apologists:
On the stage were sleek representatives of Putin’s new civilisation. Like the Webbs before her, Dariya Pushkova, the London correspondent of Russia Today, a state-controlled TV channel, dealt with the difficult question of Kremlin repression by changing the subject. The British media were just as bad, she said. They reported unverifiable facts as truth and came out with half-baked accusations that Alexander Litvinenko had been poisoned with polonium 210 on the orders of Putin’s henchmen. What was the difference between her propaganda and ours? Who were we to throw stones?
Pavel Andreev from Novosti, the state-controlled Russian news agency, took the stage to argue for the censorship of investigative reporting. Eighty per cent of Russians approved of what Putin was doing and tough tactics were needed to give the people what they wanted. ‘Russia has always been best under strong leaders,’ he added with a nod towards the legacy of the Webbs’ Stalin.
I expected the audience to go along with him. Just as urban legend has it that you are never more than six feet away from a rat on the streets of London, so dismal experience has taught me that you are never more than six feet away from an apologist for tyranny at a meeting of London liberals. (A good example of this came a few days later when Martin Amis, a serious novelist, was confronted by Chris Morris, a light entertainer, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Amis was so exasperated by the betrayals of principle that he asked members of the audience to raise their hand if they considered themselves morally superior to the sexist, racist, homophobic and psychopathic Taliban. Fewer than a third did.)
I've just found out from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin that Vladimir Putin's grandfather worked as a chef in the kitchens of Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin, a culinary trifecta that makes him the most poison-paranoid — and poison-tempted — man of the 20th century. Given that Alexander Litvinenko's assassination was eerily reminiscent of the KGB's "Umbrella Murder" of Georgi Markov (see my earlier post about that here), might we conclude that Putin channels his Soviet forebears in every way possible?
Another thing that's been bugging me all week. Martin Amis did not say, as the dire Terry Eagleton claims he did, that he favored treating Muslims as second-class citizens. Nor did Amis say it, as Eagleton maintains, in his Guardian essay, "The Age of Horrorism." Amis told an interviewer that "there is a definite urge" to treat Muslims badly until they "get their house in order," which is a distinction with a difference. Put it this way: If you argue against racial profiling on airplanes, do you do so because your instinct tells you that singling out the one demographic associated with religious terrorism is wrong? Or do you do so because you eventually reason that it is unjust and cruel? What is the "definite urge" and what is the moral calculation?
Eagleton, inexplicably credited for his way with irony, sculls the shallow bay of literalism when he says that he was able transition from Catholicism to Marxism "without having to pass through liberalism." How easy it must be to reupholster the wardrobe of the captive mind. But odd that a literary critic would so disastrously confuse "texts;" odd also that he is able to parse Amis' "definite urge" as Amis' endorsement of state policy.