AFTERWORD

 

Shortly after my return from North Korea, I met a professor of medicine, a man of wide culture and learning, at a party. I described to him the ceaseless, ubiquitous and inescapable propaganda I had encountered there.

‘Ah,’ he replied, with a faint but knowing smile playing upon his lips (he had never been to North Korea), ‘but have you considered how much power Rupert Murdoch wields in this country?’

This was not untypical of the response of liberal intellectuals to my unflattering descriptions of life in the communist countries I had visited. If one were to respond to a description of the horrors of Nazism by remarking on the prevalence in one’s own country of domestic violence or of cruelty to animals, one would be regarded (rightly) as a moral idiot; yet when one responds to the horrors of communism by making fatuous comparisons with the imperfections of representative democracy, one can still consider oneself to be, in some unspecified way, on the side of the angels. And this long after the Soviet Union has admitted that what for nearly seventy years it called anti-Soviet propaganda was actually the truth.

It is curious that western intellectuals who have demanded, and generally enjoyed, the utmost freedom for themselves should for so long have felt a sentimental attachment to a form of tyranny more thoroughgoing than any other in history. For decades they blinded themselves to the obvious, and indulged in the kind of convoluted apologetics that required for their elaboration both intelligence and dishonesty. The social and psychological consequences of a system of food rationing controlled by the same power that controls the secret police and all sources of employment and information somehow failed to impinge upon their imagination. They wanted a utopia, but they wanted it elsewhere.

It was never a utopia, of course. The extraordinary deadness of communist countries, detectable even at their airports, is simply the deadness of communist prose transferred to life itself. The schemes of communist dictators to reform the whole of humanity, to eradicate all vestiges of the past, to build a new world with no connection to the old, are not the whims of despots made mad by the exercise of arbitrary power, but the natural outcome of too credulous a belief in a philosophy which is simple, arrogant, vituperative and wrong. When men reach power who believe that freedom is the recognition of necessity, is it any surprise that tyranny ensues?

The creed is dead or dying, at least in Europe. But Europe is not the world, and credulity springs eternal. There are Marxist guerrilla movements in many parts of the world where intellectuals take advantage of the desperation (which they do everything to augment and magnify) of the poor. Everywhere they are fighting to create the New Man and the New Society, as if it had never been tried before, as if the consequences were unknown. After completing my journeys through Albania, North Korea, Romania, Vietnam and Cuba, I visited Peru. By then Romania had had its revolution, Albania was wavering, and cracks had appeared even in North Korea’s granite facade. But in Peru, the former Professor of Philosophy at Ayacucho Uni versity, Abimael Guzman, led the Shining Path movement, Sendero Luminoso, believed by him to be the only truly Marxist movement in the world, the vanguard of the coming universal revolution. In the name of the proletariat, to which Guzman never belonged, children of nine and ten were being taught to cut throats with knives and crush skulls with rocks; and a new device, drawing inspiration from the car-bomb, had been employed to some effect – the niño-bomba, the child-bomb. Children were loaded with dynamite and exploded at their target. Sendero Luminoso justified the means by the inevitable end:

 

Fifteen thousand million years of matter in motion are leading necessarily and inexorably…towards a society of Complete Harmony.