{"id":79751,"date":"2004-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/saintly-institutions-notes-on-a-common-prejudice\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:29:14","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:29:14","slug":"saintly-institutions-notes-on-a-common-prejudice","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/saintly-institutions-notes-on-a-common-prejudice\/","title":{"rendered":"Saintly institutions? Notes on a common prejudice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"A
A memorial service march for victims of the La Coubre explosion. On the far left is Fidel Castro, while in the center is Che Guevara.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Sometimes I think all the trouble in the world is caused by intellectuals who have an \u201cidea.\u201d<\/i>
\n\u2014David Hare, Stuff Happens <\/i><\/font><\/p>\n

Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent, though the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.<\/i>
\n\u2014George Orwell, \u201cReflections on Gandhi\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n

Yet sit and see, Minding true things by what their mock\u2019ries be.<\/i>
\n\u2014Shakespeare, Henry V,<\/i> <\/font> iv:I<\/font><\/p>\n

W<\/font>hen I was in London recently, I happened to walk down Haymarket on my way to Trafalgar Square. As I neared Pall Mall, I caught the glint\u2014white embossed lettering on cerulean field\u2014of a blue plaque, one that I\u2019d not noticed before.<\/p>\n

As any visitor to London knows, the blue plaques are one of the quiet glories of the city. The attractively glazed discs, about the size of a luncheon plate, punctuate the cityscape, commemorating an impressive procession of historical worthies. Did you know that Sir Isaac Newton (1642\u20131727), \u201cnatural philosopher,\u201d lived on Jermyn Street? Or that Mozart (1756\u20131791) \u201ccomposed his first symphony\u201d at 180 Ebury Street, SW<\/font>1? I have several times taken a short \u201cblue plaque tour\u201d in some corner of London with a friend whose knowledge of London is as encyclopedic as it is infectious. There are some striking conjunctions. Hyde Park Gate, for example, was within a couple of decades home to Robert Baden-Powell, \u201cBritish general and founder of the scout movement,\u201d Leslie Stephen, the great Victorian scholar (and father of Virginia Woolf), Winston Churchill, and Jacob Epstein, the sculptor. The next street over displays plaques for Robert Browning and Henry James. Try to imagine that<\/i> neighborhood colloquy.<\/p>\n

What stupendous cultural and political achievements those blue plaques bespeak: more than 800 statesmen, scientists, artists, writers, and other notables. What extraordinary talent, what extraordinary energy, London has sheltered! In recent years, of course, the quality of blue-plaque commemoration, like just about everything else in England, has bowed somewhat to the pressure of multiculturalism and political correctness. Feminists have scoured the past for available females; \u201cpersons of color\u201d have touted candidates who share their skin color or national origin; other partisans of virtue have urged the inclusion of various figures whose chief distinction is the rectitude and vociferousness of their political orientation. I knew this, and should therefore not have been surprised, as I ambled down Haymarket, to find that the plaque I noticed commemorated Ho Chi Minh.<\/p>\n

Yet I was<\/i> surprised. How striking, I though, that Ho, a totalitarian enemy of gentle civilization, should be thus decorously honored! (In 1913, it turned out, he had worked in a hotel that once stood on the spot.) What struck me as even odder was the thing he was honored for. Newton was a \u201cnatural philosopher\u201d; Mozart composed symphonies; Ho Chi Minh, 1890\u2013 1969, was the \u201cfounder of modern Vietnam.\u201d Well, yes. But supposing Stalin had had a stint in London. Would we then have \u201cJosef Stalin, 1879\u20131953, Soviet agricultural reformer\u201d?<\/p>\n

Now, there is a sense in which Ho Chi Minh was the \u201cfounder of modern Vietnam\u201d just as Stalin did a great deal to change the habits of farmers in the Soviet Union. But these truths are tendentious: they are one-sided, deceptive truths because in stating a fact they omit the context that explains the fact. Ho Chi Minh was a mass murderer\u2014not in Stalin\u2019s league, it is true, but he did the best he could with the tools he was given. Yet to the Left, Ho is a hero, a sainted figure (as\u2014let us not forget\u2014was Stalin until fairly recently). Who can forget the raptures of American intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s about Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong? Remember Susan Sontag\u2019s \u201cTrip to Hanoi\u201d (1968), where she explained the real problem for the North Vietnamese trying to fight the Americans is that they \u201caren\u2019t good enough haters.\u201d<\/p>\n

They genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, \u201cbecause they\u2019re bigger than we are,\u201d as a Vietnamese army officer told me, \u201cand they\u2019re used to more meat than we are.\u201d People in North Vietnam really do believe in the goodness of man \u2026 and in the perennial possibility of rehabilitating the morally fallen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is in this context that we must understand the comment of an American admirer of Castro who enthusiastically described him as \u201ca sort of Cuban Ho Chi Minh.\u201d No higher praise was available.<\/p>\n

M<\/font>y brief trip in England provided ample opportunity to contemplate the phenomenon of secular canonization\u2014and it\u2019s converse, secular demonization. My chief reason for visiting Albion was to attend a conference in Tunbridge Wells on the subject of \u201cCorrupt Humanitarianism,\u201d with special reference to international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. Tunbridge Wells might seem the ideal place in which to contemplate the depredations of cosmopolitan behemoths like the UN<\/font> and the E.U.<\/font> A storied watering hole some fifty miles southeast of London, it was for decades home to maiden aunts (like Jack\u2019s imaginary aunt in The Importance of Being Earnest<\/i>) and ex-India army colonels who wrote furious letters to The Times<\/i> invariably, or at least proverbially, signed \u201cDisgusted of Tunbridge Wells.\u201d<\/p>\n

The town retains a trace of that grateful parochialism, though modernity\u2014or perhaps it is post-modernity\u2014has made many inroads. Still, Tunbridge Wells, though smarter and more cosmopolitan than in former days, still seems proudly English, something that London ceased being some years ago.<\/p>\n

I am searching for some rays of light, some good news, that emerged from our discussion at Tunbridge Wells. I am not sure that there were any. One topic of conversation was the UN<\/font> oil-for-food scandal, a relief program designed (at least ostensibly designed) to allow Saddam Hussein to sell oil in exchange for baby formula, medical supplies, and kindred humanitarian goods. As Claudia Rosett (a participant in the conference) has pointed out in several brilliant pieces of investigative journalism, what actually happened amounted to the biggest financial scandal in the history of humanitarian aid. Purportedly set up to aid the Iraqi people, it turned out to be a means whereby Saddam enriched himself and his cronies to the tune of nearly $10 billion while the UN<\/font> skimmed off nearly $2 billion in \u201ccommissions\u201d and administrative fees. All told, Rosett estimated, the program involved a staggering $65 billion.<\/p>\n

The mechanics of the scandal are convoluted. What is noteworthy is how relatively little outrage it has inspired. Remember the Enron scandal? My, how The New York Times<\/i> went to town on that outrage. The oil-for-food scandal dwarfs Enron and involves several major figures on the international stage, beginning with Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN<\/font>. It has been reported but not denounced, at least not by the Times<\/i> and other organs of politically correct opinion. Why not?<\/p>\n

One reason was suggested by another participant in our discussion at Tunbridge Wells. Some institutions\u2014and indeed some individuals\u2014enjoy a sort of plenary indulgence in the court of liberal opinion. They are by definition \u201csaintly.\u201d The UN<\/font> enjoys this semi-beatified status. So do Oxfam, the BBC<\/font>, and Amnesty International. So do Kofi Annan, Princess Diana, Bob Geldof, and Bill Clinton. So, far that matter, do Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and, ex officio<\/i>, Karl Marx. If they do wrong it is only because they are endeavoring to do good. Their intentions are noble, hence their malfeasance is automatically exonerated\u2014indeed, it is not really malfeasance at all but an excess of \u201cidealism.\u201d Your mother probably told you that \u201cthe road to hell is paved with good intentions.\u201d Your mother was right. But her wisdom is too deep\u2014or perhaps it is not deep enough\u2014to impress the politically correct partisans of benevolence.<\/p>\n

A <\/font>book could be written about the dynamics of saintly institutions. Let me share one anecdote that John O\u2019Sullivan, another participant in that conference, related when the subject of saintly institutions was broached. When Mr. O\u2019Sullivan was an editor at the London Times<\/i>, he read Gertrude Himmelfarb\u2019s essay \u201cThe \u2018Group\u2019: British Marxist Historians,\u201d a penetrating look at the life and work of the English communist historians who congregated around the journal Past and Present<\/i>: Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, R. H. Hilton, and others. Himmelfarb\u2019s essay is notable both for its measured tone and its explosive revelations about the extent to which several members of the group regularly subordinated their work as historians to a party line, indeed, to the Communist Party line. Himmelfarb shows in meticulous detail how they deliberately let \u201ctheir politics inform their practice as historians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hobsbawm, for example, has freely acknowledged that \u201cfor obvious reasons\u201d he and his communist colleagues felt \u201cvery constrained about twentieth-century history.\u201d (\u201cConstrained?\u201d Read: \u201cmuzzled.\u201d) Being a loyal communist did require a certain \u2026 pliability. As Himmelfarb drily observes, for the first two years that Britain was at war with Germany, if one was a British communist one had to be anti-war and pro-German. Of course that changed abruptly with Barbarossa, Hitler\u2019s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. But asked how he felt and behaved about the Hitler-Stalin pact, Hobsbawm said, \u201cOh, like most people I was absolutely loyal to the party line.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a loyalty he maintained with breathtaking sang-froid. The post war years, Himmelfarb notes, were<\/p>\n

a time when intellectuals, scientists, and artists, to say nothing of politicians and political dissidents, were the victims of systematic purges; when Lysenkoism was the official doctrine of state, and when not only Darwinism but other manifestations of \u201cbourgeois science,\u201d such as the theory of relativity, were proscribed \u2026 when the trials in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia recalled the Moscow trials of the thirties; and when the \u201cDoctor\u2019s Plot\u201d of 1952\u20131953 was accompanied by an anti-Semitic campaign in the course of which a hundred or more Jewish intellectuals were shot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Himmelfarb is right that, as loyal party members, Hobsbawm and his colleagues \u201ctacitly sanctioned\u201d these events.<\/p>\n

And what should we think of that \u201cloyalty,\u201d if unwavering devotion to a murderous ideology deserves the term? David Pryce-Jones, writing about Hobsbawm in these pages, put it well when he observed that \u201cThe man who sets dogs on concentration camp victims or fires his revolver into the back of their necks is evidently a brute; the intellectual who devises justifications for the brutality is harder to deal with, and far more sinister in the long run.\u201d<\/p>\n

But is Hobsbawm widely regarded as a sinister character? Speaking for himself and his colleagues, Hobsbawm said they \u201clook back without regret on their years in the Group.\u201d Indeed, regret does not seem to occupy a prominent place in Hobsbawm\u2019s moral economy. In 1994, he discussed the former Soviet Union with a television interviewer. What Hobsbawm\u2019s position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, \u201cis saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?\u201d Hobsbawm: \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

And why not? Far from being called to account for his betrayal of history for politics, Hobsbawm has been widely adulated as \u201cthe greatest living historian\u201d and boasts a score of honorary degrees. A portrait of Hobsbawm and other members of \u201cThe Group\u201d hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. \u201cNo historian now writing in English,\u201d wrote one admirer, \u201ccan match his overwhelming command of fact and source.\u201d Hobsbawm\u2019s government apparently agreed, for in the late 1990s he was named Companion of Honor.<\/p>\n

Hobsbawm is one of the untouchables, a \u201csaintly figure\u201d whose professions of virtue (equality, freedom, brotherhood, an end to suffering and exploitation \u2026) exempt him, in the eyes of the liberal establishment, from moral accountability. This was the point of John O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s anecdote. When he read Himmelfarb\u2019s essay, he knew it was dynamite. He prepared an edited version for the Times<\/i> and was set to run it when a colleague objected. Why? Because it was what Americans would call \u201cred-baiting\u201d: pointing a finger at a self-declared communist and exposing him as \u2026 a communist. The editor of the paper was brought in to adjudicate and sided with O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s colleague. The issue was not whether Himmelfarb was right: apparently all concerned agreed that she was. The issue was the inviolability of certain political positions. Hobsbawm\u2019s communism, handmaiden though it was to the most murderous ideology in history, enjoyed that diplomatic immunity.<\/p>\n

A <\/font>world populated by \u201csaintly\u201d figures and institutions would be incomplete without the converse: demonized<\/i> figures and institutions, entities that are regarded as evil not because of what they do but because of their assigned role in the passion play of liberal self-promotion. Who are today\u2019s demons? It is a familiar lot. Some long-running favorites that came up in our discussion at Tunbridge Wells were Exxon (greedy multinational oil corporation), the British Conservative Party (partisans of greed and selfishness), and the Roman Catholic Church (for about eighty-seven different reasons). But the chief demon, the Satan who presides over an unholy host, is America, epitomized by George W. Bush and his administration.<\/p>\n

European anti-Americanism is a familiar feature of the cultural landscape today. But what is extraordinary is not so much the virulence of the phenomenon as the aura of ineluctability that attends it. America occupies an indispensable place in today\u2019s politically correct cosmology. Along with a supporting cast that includes Israel and the demonized institutions mentioned above, America is the repository of the shattered dreams and wayward programs of the Left. If there is misery in the world, the root cause is, somehow, America: its power, its influence, its supposed irresponsibility, its stupidity, its cupidity, its very being.<\/p>\n

I thought about this while watching Stuff Happens<\/i>, Sir David Hare\u2019s new play at the National Theatre about the American role in the war in Iraq. The title repeats Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s comment when asked about reports of looting in Iraq following the liberation of Baghdad. In an \u201cAuthor\u2019s Note\u201d accompanying the play, Sir David describes the work as \u201ca history play, which happens to center on very recent history.\u201d But that is not really accurate. Stuff Happens<\/i> is a fiery political sermon delivered from the stage instead of a pulpit. Several English reviewers, although acknowledging Sir David\u2019s left-wing, anti-American bias, nonetheless described the play as surprisingly even-handed. I disagree. I found it underhanded. Sir David cleverly endows his bad guys\u2014George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and most of their advisors, especially Dick Cheney\u2014with a semblance of humanity. But that is only to highlight their moral cravenness. The characters remain caricatures, but caricatures into which a little air has been pumped.<\/p>\n

A large part of Stuff Happens<\/i> is a mosaic of verbatim quotations from the principals. If nothing else, Stuff Happens<\/i> shows to what extent even exact quotation can be used in the service of propaganda. All it takes is a willful adjusting of context and invention of intervening scenes to shepherd the meaning in the right, i.e., the left, direction. \u201cThe United States of America Has Gone Mad.\u201d John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s piece to The Times<\/i>, written a few months before the invasion of Iraq, appears in the playbill for Stuff Happens<\/i> and epitomizes its rhetorical temperature. \u201cWhat is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat,\u201d le Carr\u00e9 wrote, \u201cbut the economic imperative of U.S.<\/font> growth\u201d\u2014that and America\u2019s \u201cneed to demonstrate its military power to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sir David employs many devices to stir up contempt for President Bush and his advisors. One that seemed particularly effective with the audience was to mock the President\u2019s religion. Two or three times in the course of the play, the President is shown opening a meeting with a prayer, asking that God \u201cdirect our thoughts,\u201d \u201cgive us wisdom, that we may surely do good. In thy name.\u201d To which the other characters on stage say \u201cAmen,\u201d and the audience titters. (It is one of the ironies of our secular sainthood that only demons believe in God.)<\/p>\n

The dramatic crux of the play came about half-way through when a female \u201cPalestinian academic\u201d takes the stage and delivers a soliloquy about the plight of the Palestinians, the perfidy of Israel, and the arrogance of the United States. \u201cWe are,\u201d she concludes, \u201cthe Jews of the Jews.\u201d Sir David had the audience eating out of his hand.<\/p>\n

I<\/font>f Stuff Happens<\/i> has any heros, they are Hans Blix\u2014who is called back from a trek in Patagonia with his wife to resume his job as arms inspector in Iraq\u2014and Colin Powell, who emerges as a voice of reason in a wilderness of superhawks and madmen. One line attributed to Powell found great favor with the audience: \u201cI want my country to be less arrogant.\u201d But it was another line attributed to him that seemed to me to capture the essential point about the play: \u201cSometimes I think all the trouble in the world is caused by intellectuals who have an \u2018idea.\u2019\u201d One of the governing ideas of the chattering class today is that the pursuit of national self-interest is an expression of culpable selfishness, that the age of the nation state is waning, and that America is a summary of atavistic attitudes standing in the way of humanitarian progress. Out of such stuff are saints and demons fabricated.<\/p>\n

When the play ended, and the audience erupted into applause, I recalled a few sentences Bush spoke at a meeting of his national security team after 9\/11. Sir David quotes it verbatim: \u201cI want you all to understand that we are at war, and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they\u2019re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.\u201d That is not, perhaps, evidence of a progressive outlook. But it is evidence of a realistic one, pace<\/i> David Hare. \u201cHistory,\u201d Walter Bagehot once observed, \u201cis strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.\u201d Where is Walter Bagehot today?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Roger Kimball<\/b>\u2019s latest book is The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art<\/a><\/i> (Encounter Books). <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On some \u201csaintly\u201d and \u201cdemonized\u201d institutions and individuals.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1255,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[563],"issue":[3062],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":5,"value_formatted":5,"value":"5","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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