|
How did it come about that much of the British
intelligensia, for decades, was persuaded of the moral superiority of
Communism, and of its inevitability as the future political system of the
world? One man, virtually unknown and unnoticed, can claim the dubious
distinction of being the prime mover.
Willi
Münzenberg was born in 1888, the son of an alcoholic innkeeper in Thuringia,
Germany, who killed himself cleaning a gun while drunk. Unlike most of the
leading early German Communists, who were upper-middle class, he could claim
to be a genuine proletarian.
During
the First World War Münzenberg was a young left-wing radical living in
Switzerland. Talent-spotted by Trotsky he soon became part of the Bolshevik
circle around Lenin, as they waited their opportunity to return to a
revolutionary Russia. It was to Münzenberg that Lenin turned as the famous
sealed train left Zurich for Russia in 1917. "Six months from now we
will either be in power or hanging from the gallows" he said.
Trotsky
chose well in Münzenberg. Following the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, he
pioneered most of the manipulative political techniques which are a feature
of life in Britain today. Ad hoc
committees for endless causes, politicized arts festivals, mock trials,
celebrity letterheads, disinformation stunts and protest marches all sprang
from Münzenberg's sheer genius for propaganda.
Stephen
Koch, in his book Double Lives: Stalin,
Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, calls this
"righteous politics." Political issues are turned into a
quasi-religion, which brooks no debate – witness the 'no platform' antics of
left-wing students who can tolerate no outlook besides their own.
During
the 1920's and most of the 1930's Münzenberg played a leading role in the
Comintern, Lenin's front for world-wide co-ordination of the left under Russian
control. Under Münzenberg's direction, hundreds of groups, committees and
publications cynically used and manipulated the devout radicals of the West.
Most
of this army of workers in what Münzenberg called 'Innocents' Clubs' had no
idea they were working for Stalin. They were led to believe that they were
advancing the cause of a sort of socialist humanism. The descendents of the
'Innocents' Clubs' are still hard at work in our universities and colleges.
Every year a new cohort of impressionable students join groups like the
Anti-Nazi League believing them to be benign opponents of oppression, rather
than the Trotskyite fronts they really are. The old tricks certainly are the
best!
Münzenberg's
right-hand man, Otto Katz, established an Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood,
placing the writer Dorothy Parker in charge as celebrity window-dressing. The
novelist Thomas Mann was one of the few to detect a swindle, although it took
him five years to grasp the realities. How familiar it all seems in a Britain
in which extreme left-wing groups sport the names of duped and half-brained
actors, sportsmen, etcetera as patrons!
Katz
worked hard in Britain to establish the Left Book Club. It networked the
Stalinist influence and promoted the left as the chic fashion of the time. The Club ran camps, conferences and
propaganda tours of Russia. As in all the Western countries in which 'the
Münzenberg men' extended their networks, the 'innocents' believed that they
were working to oppose Hitler. In reality the purpose was the undermine the
West and pave the way for Soviet control.
The
Comintern were able to play upon the vanity of the elite for whom life could
never reach their gilded expectations. The secret world offered a
"wonderful restorative" – Koch's phrase again – with a particular
appeal to the homosexual milieu of Bloomsbury which made up its centre. A
connection to power is an aphrodisiac to people of this ilk. Thus the
Cambridge spies Blunt, Burgess et al.
Burgess
worked for the BBC for several years – helping other Soviet agents onto the
airwaves. Appropriately, he lived out the war years in the house in Bentinck
Street where Gibbon wrote The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire !
By
1935 Münzenberg had almost out-lived his usefulness to Stalin, and was lucky
to escape from Moscow when he attended the last world congress of the
Comintern in 1936. Stalin had no use for proletarians with attitude. The
Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 stripped away any illusions of Soviet anti-fascism
and the notion of a popular front against Hitler.
Münzenberg
lived precariously in Paris until the Nazi invasion of June 1940. He then
fled southward and his strangled corpse was found in a wood near Grenoble in
October. Almost certainly he had been murdered by a Soviet agent.
Otto
Katz survived until 1952. He was arrested by the regime, on whose behalf he
had been a devoted and obedient servant, and hanged after reading a prepared
'confession' at the show trials in Prague of that year. Knowing well what was
in store, he offered his 'confession' the moment he was arrested. This was
insufficient, and he was tortured for months while his final service to
Communism, the 'confession' as an instrument of disinformation, was worked
up.
Despite
the formal collapse of Communism in 1989, the legacy of Stalin's strategy of
destroying the West by propaganda has an increasing hold through the cult of
'political correctness.' The undermining of our society by the media has
steadily intensified since then. Münzenberg's spectre hovers as vital as ever
in contemporary life. At a time when Communism has little remaining formal
influence, Münzenberg's techniques of propaganda and disinformation pervade
our lives.
His
legacy had far outlasted the formal cause it served, and now works for new
masters. The opinion-formers who so misjudged Communism still claim
legitimacy in dictating political ideals. Their track record is little
considered. Marx wrote in 1857, "It is possible I've made a fool of
myself, but that can always be remedied with a little bit of dialectics."
The malady lingers on.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment