MOST REPUBLICS CHOOSE SOCIALIST SYSTEMS AS BETTER THAN MONARCHIES.
MANY WESTERN INTELLECTUALS, WHO ARE POLITICAL PILGRIMS, SEE THEM WITH ROSE-
COLOURED SPECTACLES AS UTOPIAS BORN AT LAST

A review of Paul Hollanders’ Political Pilgrims’ by Anthony McAdam in 1981 says many western clever, well-educated intellectuals have become pawns of a socialist cultural war on the west by the Soviet KGB.

“The really interesting thing about this apparent addiction among Western intellectuals to believing almost anything of alien ‘socialist’ societies is that the process never seems to stop, and subsequent generations never seem to learn. As the magic of the Soviet Union wore off with volumes of irrefutable evidence of mass slaughter and slavery, Cuba took its place.

“When the same process took place with Cuba, North Vietnam became the chosen candidate for Utopia then China, North Vietnam. When the post-Mao leadership ‘discovered’ the full human and economic catastrophe wrought by Mao, the Chinese claims to Utopia began to wane. At the moment eager pilgrims are in something of a dilemma, having been reducing to scraping the bottom of the Utopia barrel.

“There will always be Africa and that great nebula of the mind known as the Third World. And here the accessibility of information about totalitarian ‘Socialist States’ becomes important, or more-precisely those of non-Leninst persuasion tend to be more negligent about control of the mass media. Several unflattering newsreels and documentary movies have been made in and out of South Africa, various Latin American dictatorships, former Western colonies, and South Vietnam. It would be hard to come by such documentaries or even isolated photographs of this kind, about the U.S.S.R, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Albania etc.

“For our contemporary pilgrims, and all those aspirant pilgrims currently stumbling through Introduction to Revolutionary Praxis’ at our local centres for ‘higher learning’, Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique are still available for heady reverence. One can safely assume that the absence of elections, plus the tightening of repression in all three of these Marxist-Leninist States, will have at least the short-term effect of increasing their attractiveness.

“Hollander is also concerned to inquire as to what is it about the word ‘Socialism’ that can inspire such limitless credulity? Undoubtedly the attraction of so-called Socialist societies for many pilgrims also lies in that promise of equality, harmony, community and authenticity. No doubt some of the travellers – notably Lincoln, Steffens and Shaw (both became admirers of Fascism as well) – found the Nietzschean exhilaration of enormous centralised power mightily attractive.

“The readiness to believe the worst of their own society is very much an attribute of the more recent pilgrims. Mary McCarthy, when confronted with a large-scale massacre in Hue in South Vietnam when it fell to Communists, could not accept that the Communist side had committed it. Moreover the belief in the supposed innocence of these societies is not unrelated to the time-worn desire to read into ‘the noble savage’ a moral worth which Western intellectuals feels their society has corrupted or lost.”

Hollander asks: “Does the wholesale disaffection of Western intellectuals, from any sense of allegiance to their own free societies, make a difference?”