Another Country.

And other peoples' heroes.

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The scene is a middle-class dining-room in a western country in the late 1960s. A fresh-faced Child, flushed with excitement, just home from university, recounts their participation in a march against the Vietnam War.

“So what you mean” says Parent, “is that you want the Communist system set up here. You won’t be so happy when they take you away to a labour camp like they do in Vietnam.” the discussion rapidly degenerates into an exchange of insults and Child rushes out of the room.

The scene is the same middle class dining room two decades later. Child is visiting with children and begins explaining why political change is coming in South Africa, according to well-placed friends of his.

“So what you’re saying,” says Parent, “is that you want Communism installed in South Africa like everywhere else in Africa and the whole continent ruined, just like the Congo.” The discussion degenerates into an exchange of insults.

A decade later or so later, Child is arguing with one of their children about the war in Iraq. “So what you really mean” says the elder, “is that we should just let the Iraqi people suffer and do nothing about it. I thought you were a human rights activist?” The discussion degenerates into an exchange of insults.

And just recently Child’s Children have been arguing about Ukraine and the bellicose role of Frau von der Leyen. “What you really mean” says Daughter “is that women shouldn’t be allowed in politics. You think she should be in the kitchen preparing her husband’s meals.” The discussion degenerates into an exchange of insults.

No doubt you can think of similar examples. Now the idea that political discourse these days is cruder and more violent because of social media seems to me to be misguided: it was always like that, but it was hidden away to a large extent in family disagreements, in violent arguments within social groups and in the letters newspapers never published and the poison-pen letters regularly received by Ministers and occasionally answered, but more often not, by young civil servants like me. Even in times that we used to think more tolerant, violence and hatred dwelt just below the surface. Sometime in the early 1970s I was on the top deck of a London bus watching a small student demonstration passing, demanding an increase in student grants, in the days when there were student grants. A middle-aged working-class male bounded to his feet, yelling “run ‘em down, kill the lot of them.” Nobody seemed to find the idea disproportionate. And it wasn’t that much later that a faultlessly middle-class educated woman we vaguely knew opined unprompted that the whole of Jim Callaghan’s Labour Cabinet should be sent to the gas chamber.

The real question is why, and why apparently simple, and even relatively technical, disagreements between people turn so readily into screaming matches. You can’t even blame ignorance these days: if you want to know something about, say, crime statistics or rates of taxation, a little research on the Internet and sensible comparisons of sources will settle most questions. But by and large people don’t do this, and don’t want to.

The simple answer, according to psychologists, is that our opinions generally have emotional rather than intellectual roots, and indeed rationality largely functions as a post hoc justification. Our political opinions, ultimately, are what we feel about the world, not what we think about it. And in turn, our opinions about particular events have a lot to do with how we feel about the world in general. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most people’s views about the kind of things that happen today are extensions of concerns of their own ego. And consequently, invitations to change their minds because new facts emerge, or because old ideas are discredited by new evidence, are in fact a threat to the strength and even survival of that ego.

I didn’t always realise this, and I probably wasted years of my life under the delusion that people could be convinced by rational argument. Having changed my opinions a number of times in my life on the basis of new information or better arguments, I naively supposed that everybody did the same. The situation is complicated, and partly obscured, because very few people consciously think and act emotionally and irrationally. Rather, they convince themselves that they are thinking rationally, and so they pepper their conversation with phrases like “it’s obvious that,” and “it stands to reason that,” although in practice it generally doesn’t. Such phrases should always be treated with suspicion, and should always be countered by saying “explain to me the obvious logical steps,” or something similar; Mind you, if you do that, you stand a small but real chance of being physically assaulted.

The corollary is that if most people fool themselves that they are thinking logically, then, if you disagree with them, you cannot be thinking logically yourself. At that point, you hear deadly phrases like “I suppose you think,” and “what you really mean is,” which are attempts to circumvent the need for rational argument by pretending that it is the other person, not you, who is being unreasonable. I try to walk away from such assertions whenever I can, since you can’t argue with them, and I tell my students to do the same. They are simply defence mechanisms, to protect the ego from the kind of rational enquiry that might damage it. The politest response is, “if I had meant that, I would have said that.”

This, obviously, is why people remain attached to their opinions in the face of better information, or rational disproof, or even personal experience that seems to disprove their earlier assumptions. It’s interesting to watch how, over a period of time, people even adjust their own memories so that those memories no longer contradict their current opinions, in which they are often so emotionally invested.

But few people, especially those who have received a decent education, want to acknowledge that their views are based on emotion and not reason. They therefore try to argue that what they believe (or for that matter recommend to governments or even practice as governments) is not derived from random emotions, but from a coherent view of the world. The test here is essentially a logical one. I always suggest to students that in that case, the logical question is “what is the general principle of which this is a particular case?” For example, to the assertion “we should support X” or “we should do Y,” the question is “list for me the principles from which you would begin to make such a judgement, knowing nothing of the specific case.” This is unwelcome to many people, because they cannot be sure in advance where such an argument will lead them: it’s pretty certain that any consistent application of principles in international relations, will eventually take you to places you don’t want to go. At which point, the (emotional) response will be “this is obviously different,” or “you haven’t understood,” or simply “I suppose you want them to die then.”

A good example begins with the immediate post Cold-War years, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Among western governments, this was a moment of unanticipated moral luxury, after the decades of grubby compromises of the Cold War. Here was an apparently noble cause, justified specifically by the UN Charter, where a state attacked by another was going to be rescued. And so people I knew began walking around with FREE KUWAIT badges (I made myself mildly unpopular by asking if I could have some), speaking proudly of upholding the timeless principle of the inviolability of state frontiers. Much of the media and pundit class followed suit. A few years later, as the desire to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic at all costs and thus (it was hoped) bring some sort of stability to the Balkans reached crisis proportions, the same people spontaneously remembered that “of course” the inviolability of frontiers was never intended to be absolute, and didn’t extend to situations where a “dictator” was “oppressing” their people. Thus the intervention in Kosovo was right and proper and itself hallowed by timeless principles. Much of the media and pundit class followed suit again. Of course the invasion of Iraq a few years later complicated things even further, since many of those who had enthusiastically cheered the attack on Serbia deplored the attack on Iraq. Human Rights lawyers in particular (a notably emotional group of people) drove themselves nuts trying to reconcile these two positions

Now of course the tendency is to dismiss all this as hypocrisy, and those with a visceral, emotional dislike of western policy tend to do so automatically and without thinking. It’s always wise to take hypocrisy into account as a factor in such situations go-f course, but it’s not anything like a complete explanation. Indeed, the degree of righteous indignation and moral superiority felt by the western political class over Kosovo was extraordinary if you saw it first hand, and in some ways worrying, because there is no-one more dangerous than the person who has convinced themselves that they are acting for reasons of principle. Give me a bog-standard hypocrite any day.

It follows that people will adjust their own memories, or for that matter invent things that never happened and thoughts they never had, rather than change their ideas after new facts are revealed. Moreover, as the years pass, they invest more emotion in these memories, and in turn they become more attached to them. Of course, this is relative to some degree: most people will eventually accept that they were wrong about something so long as the stakes were not that high. (Even then, “I was misled by others” is a favourite get-out.) There have been muttered recognitions by pundits that perhaps globalisation was oversold as an idea, that maybe western policy towards Russia in the 90s could have been better handled, that perhaps Paul Kagame the Rwandan dictator was not the gentleman they thought he was … but few of those who have marginally recanted were directly involved and so morally engaged. If you were actually concerned with the invasion of Iraq, for example, you have to justify the hundreds of thousands of dead, at least, that resulted, and it’s hard then to say “I was wrong.” After all, many of the British politicians involved in the Suez adventure in 1956 insisted to the end of their days that the operation was justified and successful because it prevented Nasser—the new Hitler—from sowing war and chaos across North Africa.

Which reminds me. The appalling persistence of the Hitler/Nazis discourse, now pretty much unmoored from any historical connection at all, is an example of the emotional shorthand in which arguments about politics take place these days. The use of such epithets serves not to persuade, for the most part, but to intimidate: I can find a more emotionally wounding charge to make against your side than you can against mine. But such epithets also act as signals to your side that you share their emotional biases, and warnings to potential opponents that you are uninterested in evidence that might disrupt your emotional conclusions. So comparing Trump to Hitler, or claiming that Orban or Le Pen are fascists, calling the government of Ukraine “Nazis,” or referring to European nations as “vassals” of the US, is not just a propaganda ploy, it’s also, and more importantly, a series of signals, the most important of which is that you are not interested in actually understanding, and will not welcome somebody trying to argue with you rationally, so don’t bother.

One consequence of this emotional identification, of the transformation of political commentary into the discourse of sports competitions, is that it’s very hard not to have favourites, and cheer for one side or another. Now whilst this is legitimate in small doses—we would look askance at authors who produced overtly pro-Nazi accounts of the Second World War, though they do exist—it shouldn’t and mustn’t get in the way of attempts to actually understand and interpret. It’s particularly hard when you profoundly dislike the subject of your analysis. Thus, the controversial psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, himself briefly interned in Nazi concentration camps in the late 1930s, refused to read accounts of interviews with SS personnel in later years, precisely because he was afraid of understanding their motives, something which his ego could not cope with .

Notoriously often, small but key events in our lives can produce a rigid intellectual or political orientation thereafter, and many people will trace their political awakening to one emotionally-charged incident that happened to them personally. The poet Roy Campbell, for example, then a war correspondent in Spain, was in Toledo at the time of the exactions committed against the Church in 1936. After witnessing the massacres of priests and nuns by Communist militiamen, Campbell became a firm supporter of the Nationalist cause. (Which did not prevent him serving in World War 2, or being an early opponent of the apartheid regime in his native South Africa.)

Even if we don’t go through such harrowing experiences ourselves, we grow up with certain ideas about the world, history and recent events, which eventually become part of our identity, and so part of our ego. Deliberate questioning, mere doubts, or the simple availability of new material, are thus a threat to the integrity of the ego. This is why, perhaps, popular interpretations of historical events are often fixed at an early stage, and the availability of new information doesn’t dislodge them from the minds of the popular, and even educated readership. I still come across people who think that Shirer’s journalistic account of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, published sixty years ago, represents the final word on the subject. When the traditional interpretations are morally satisfying, resistance against change is often stronger: people cling to popular if now wildly outdated myths of the “failure” of the Maginot Line, the alleged ”stupidity” of Allied Generals in World War 1, or the “shame” of the Munich settlement in spite of all modern research, because the traditional interpretations now form part of their ego and their sense of who they are, and because, not trivially, they also allow us to feel superior to our ancestors. Many years ago, I was talking to a military analyst who was preparing prosecution materials for some of the war crimes trials in The Hague. He was convinced, he said, that the proceedings of the trials would “fundamentally change” our view of the fighting in the Former Yugoslavia. It hasn’t, though, simply because those who constructed and disseminated the authorised version were so emotionally committed to it that nothing would shift them.

Obviously, this emotional commitment applies to more recent events as well. For example, since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, the 2014-15 Minsk “agreements” have produced violent disagreements and reciprocal insults, in general by people who have not actually read the texts, but have assimilated the different arguments into the football supporter mentality which is unfortunately typical of politics today. I have myself devoted most of an essay to the “agreements,” pointing out that they were essentially minutes of discussions and political promises by different parties. But this and similar analyses have had effectively no influence on the debate, which continues to be conducted on a predominantly emotional level, with reciprocal accusations of bad faith. There’s been another mordantly amusing example just recently, with the sentence passed by a French court on Marine Le Pen for misuse of EU parliamentary funds. Because Internet pundits move together, like clouds of starlings, people who know nothing of the case, haven’t read the judgement and may not even read French, have been pompously sounding off according to how second and third-hand reports of the judgement make them feel.

A consequences of this way of thinking, and the subject I want to turn to now, is that under normal circumstances we grow up with an emotional investment in our society and our history, and with admiration for those who have done extraordinary things, or represent our society’s better values particularly well. After all, we are not in practice the Liberal automata, rationally pursuing wealth and independence that some would have us believe. We are part of a society and a community, and we identify emotionally with its values and its history. At least we usually do.

Until perhaps a century ago, this was pretty much taken for granted. It was accepted that some people would prefer other cultures to their own, and might expatriate themselves, and even that a large number of people would feel equally, if not more at home, in a country where they had not been born. And obviously from time to time even the most committed patriot would accept that their country had behaved wrongly or unwisely. Indeed, the argument “X or Y is not acceptable behaviour for our country, we should be ashamed of ourselves” was a powerful one. Societies can and do manage these kinds of tensions: lots of people, like me, prefer to live in a country different from the one they were born in, and that doesn’t have to be a problem.

Things started to come apart, I think, in the nineteen-thirties. At this point, with democracy apparently a failing system and the world economy in turmoil, a number of people found encouragement, and even hope, in what was going on in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. In reality, the number of genuine enthusiasts for Nazi Germany was very small, as opposed to the much larger number who thought that its ideology represented the one force that could conceivably combat the menace of Communism, but they did exist. The English writer Henry Williamson, for example, who attended the 1936 Nuremberg Rally and described it positively in one of his semi-autobiographical novels, famously thought Hitler was a “good man gone wrong,” The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a parallel case. Yet when it came to the crunch, vey few of these people actually took up arms or worked against their own country: they saw Germany as an example, perhaps, and certainly an ally in the fight against Communism , but in all cases they considered themselves patriots.

The situation with the Soviet Union was very different, not least because that country put itself forward as the “homeland” of the international working class, and mocked “bourgeois” patriotism. It also demanded international obedience to a Party Line dictated from Moscow, which could theoretically involve working against the interests of your on country. Yet even here, among ordinary people, a balance was struck. In France, for example, even during the latter days of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Communists were very active in the Resistance, and both the membership and its leadership considered themselves profoundly patriotic: the PCF was as keen as any other party on restoring the grandeur of France and retaining the Empire.

For various complex reasons, the situation in the Anglo-Saxon countries was different, partly because Communism was never a mass movement but rather an intellectual cult among parts of the educated middle classes. It was closely linked with a “scientific” world view in the vulgar sense of that term, and in the belief that a new society that offered hope to the entire world was in the process of being created. In such circumstances, there would, of course, be some inconvenience and even suffering, but it was in another country, and besides you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Although the number of such people was not great, they (rather than the feeble Communist Party apparatus itself) were an extremely powerful intellectual force in Britain in the 1930s. Victor Gollancz with his Left Book Club, and the New Statesman weekly, dominated progressive intellectual life, and both had a policy of never criticising the Soviet Union, since to do so would “strengthen fascism.” There was in any case a widespread intellectual revulsion against patriotism itself, among the educated and progressive middle class, largely a reaction to the mindless jingoism and the suffering of the First World War.

Yet of course the need for identification with a larger whole and support for its objectives and interests does not go away, and for many of these people, as for others we shall meet, it was simply transferred to Another Country which did not suffer from the ills and weaknesses of Britain, and whose leadership, notably Stalin, was worthy of praise and emulation. Thus developed what George Orwell aptly described in The Lion and the Unicorn (1940) as the “patriotism of the deracinated.” What Orwell didn’t know was that some of the English ruling class of the day had taken this logic of detestation of their own country and identification with another to the natural conclusion of becoming spies for the Soviet Union.

It’s interesting that these people collectively were described as the “Cambridge Spies.” Why they were all from Cambridge would require more of a detour into English social history than there is space for here: suffice it to say that Cambridge had in those days a reputation as more of a serious university and less of a finishing school than Oxford, and its orientation was more modern and scientific, thus disproportionately attracting the kind of person who might be sympathetic to the Soviet Union anyway. Besides the Five who are known to have definitely spied for Russia, as diplomats and intelligence officers (Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross) at least another dozen names have been put forward as potential Soviet spies recruited at Cambridge in in the 1930s.

But what is interesting is that none of them showed much interest in Marxist theory, or even much enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. They acted primarily out of disgust for their own country and a desire to damage it, and hurt the social elite from which they came, which they worked with and which they despised. John Le Carré, who was in British intelligence at the time of Philby’s flight to Moscow in 1961, created the character of Bill Haydon, based on Philby with a dash of Blunt, in Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Haydon, unmasked at the end of the novel, makes his motives of disgust and revenge very clear: once, he thought he might be doing something useful, now he just wants to destroy. The Irish writer John Banville has memorably evoked this mentality in his roman-à-clef novel The Untouchable (1997), with its presentation of a Blunt-like central character disgusted with himself, his social circle and his country, and spying for the Russians to give himself some kind of identity and purpose in life. (It has to be said that English society and its personalities as portrayed in Banville’s novel would make lots of people want to work for the NKVD.)

For many in the Anglo-Saxon technocratic elite (and it’s interesting how many scientists in the Manhattan Project turned out to be Soviet spies) the Soviet Union represented the future in general, but more specifically a rational, scientific approach to government that appeared to be able to solve problems that democracy could not. But this could very easily mutate into power-worship, and worship of ruthless technocratic solutions, indeed almost of ruthlessness for its own sake. This first showed up in adulation for Stalin as “the Boss”, the man who got things done, but the same adulation was to land subsequently on the shoulders of many other unsuspecting world leaders and their countries, of all political colours. But let’s start with “the man of steel.”

It’s hard now to imagine just how thorough-going and all-embracing was the cult of Stalin in his lifetime, so deeply was it subsequently buried. We can get an idea from an extraordinary song—a piece of toe-curling, self-abasing cod hagiography if ever there was one—by the Scottish Communist songwriter Ewan McColl. Joe Stalin was a Mighty Man had a short life: written in 1951, it was very rapidly consigned to the memory hole and McColl was instructed not to sing it again. Ever. Now hagiography is defensible to some extent, and only historians will quibble with details like the suggestion that Stalin “fought at Lenin’s side” throughout the Revolution. But overall, the song portrays some kind of Nietzschean super-hero, beyond considerations of good and evil, capable of personally changing the weather and levelling mountains, all while forcibly creating the workers’ paradise. And to a degree, the worship of the Soviet Union by western intellectuals in the 1930s and later was precisely this worship of unconstrained power and ruthlessness. After de-Stalinisation, the focus of European intellectuals, at least, switched to Chairman Mao, his Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, where the same eggs and omelettes rhetoric was deployed. (Even the Khmer Rouge had a few timid supporters.) It’s no surprise, therefore, that it was from this group, especially in France, that the neoconservatives came, just substituting Washington for Moscow or Beijing. It was always about admiration for power and ruthlessness, really.

But the urge to worship dictators, tyrants and even monsters seems to be eternal, and irrespective of political affiliation. It generally arises from a disgust with one’s own country, and an identification with another, and its leaders, who are more successful, or just more ruthless. Now it’s normal to take inspiration from abroad, and in many cases it’s beneficial as well. But often, the feeling that “they do things better” elsewhere gets out of control. In the 1970s, for example, when Pinochet was murdering trades unionists and imprisoning students, it wasn’t unusual to hear lower-middle class tradesmen or shopkeepers muttering about “we need a dictator here. That Pinochet, he’s got the right idea.”

There’s a current of western public opinion, by no means limited to intellectuals, that despairs of their own country’s ‘lack of will” or inability to “do what needs to be done,” and identifies emotionally with Another Country, believed to be tougher and more decisive. During the long Rhodesia crisis (1965-80), for example, large parts of public opinion, and a disturbing number of Conservative MPs, thought that British troops should be sent to fight on the side of “our kith and kin,” who were confronting the Communist Menace in a way that Britain’s weak Labour government could never do. Support for Rhodesia, indeed, became a touchstone for acceptability on parts of the political Right. After 1980, this mantle was transferred to the South Africans, who, once again, had the strength to fight Communism in a way that the weak and decadent West could not. And finally, of course, the mantle landed upon Israel, whose combination of a superficially western-style society with audacity, ruthlessness and a total disregard for international law, was exciting to many and a model for emulation. Western support for Israel in Gaza makes much more sense when you realise that western politicians, and parts of the intellectual class, secretly admire the ruthlessness and brutality of Israel’s war. (And there’s still a brisk trade in macho memoirs of the fighting in Africa, by the way, if you know where to look.)

Now in the various ways, supporters of Rhodesia, South Africa and Israel, or for that matter Chile, still regarded themselves as patriots: they just wanted their own countries to be more like their model. This didn’t apply to some western protesters from the 1960s onwards. The point of change was the protests against the Vietnam War, which produced a mentality of simple-minded emotional condemnation of the United States and its actions, together with an emotionally-charged vocabulary of “Empire” and “genocide.” I heard Americans at the time who believed that they were literally living in some kind of Fourth Reich, and that Richard Nixon was, if not literally Adolf Hitler, then, well, something. Many such people, I was sure, were actually disillusioned patriots, and all the more virulent for that. But since this patriotism had to go somewhere, it alighted on the enemy, and they genuinely wanted their own country, not just to retreat from the war, but actually to be defeated. Their patriotism was simply transferred to the VietCong.

Several generations later, the lazy, emotional conviction that the West was always wrong, and that any country or group opposed to the West should automatically be supported, has become the rule in certain quarters, where people continue to project their frustrated patriotism onto the most unlikely foreign beneficiaries, and anachronistically blacken their own country’s history. The modern, arrogantly dismissive, attitude to the history, culture and values of western nations is now very deeply ingrained after three successive generations of this. Such is the fear of any identification with one’s nation or community at all, as I described a few weeks ago, that statements such as Mr Macron’s denial of the very existence of “French culture,” do no more than raise the odd eyebrow. But again, all this frustrated community identification and suppressed patriotism has to go somewhere, and it has recently found its outlet, of course, in the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia.

What distinguishes the current polemic over Ukraine (it would be too kind to call it a debate) is its essentially emotional nature. One group, despairing of the West, and prevented by its own ideology from identifying with any western history, culture or values, seeks these in the creation of a fantasy Ukraine. Another, seeking the humiliation and defeat of the West, sees Russia as the agent that will make this possible. One group uncritically believes that brave Ukrainians with superior western weaponry are inflicting unsustainable casualties on the Russians that will bring Putin down, because it is emotionally satisfying to think so. Another believes (or did) in NATO biological warfare factories under Mariupol, because it was emotionally satisfying to do so. The rest of us, and I hope it includes you the reader, are somewhere else, trying to make sense of everything. I don’t say “in the middle” because the truth is seldom placed precisely there, but rather at right angles to the warring emotional artillery barrages that take up so many square gigabytes of the Internet.

And I think we shall have to get used to this. As I’ve suggested, the role of emotion in the way we perceive world events isn’t necessarily any greater than it used to be, but with the Internet, it’s much more visible. The barriers to participation are also lower. In ten seconds you can dash off an angry reply to a story whose headline has made you upset, telling people how you feel. It’s now trivial to set up a site like this one, and produce angry, emotional pieces telling people how you feel about world events, even if you have no particular knowledge. And there’s the rub. The number of people with something genuinely to contribute on world events is necessarily finite. (Ironically, in the case of Russia/Ukraine, that number is probably somewhat less than it was twenty-five years ago.) But the barriers to entry are now sufficiently low, and the demand for emotional sustenance sufficiency great, that good careers can now be made satisfying peoples’ emotional needs.

We live in a world which places a high priority on these needs, and a lesser priority on understanding. In my own humble way I have been told variations of “you may have been there, you may have seen what happened, you may have read the documents, you may be quoting the latest academic research, but I know what I think, and most of all I know what I feel.” Perhaps this will sound elitist, but I’m not greatly interested in reading about how people feel. If the subject is Ukraine, I would ask, does the author have a background in the region and its history and politics, and speak Russian, or alternatively are they familiar with the Operational level of war in theory (and perhaps in practice), or do they have a good understanding of military technology and tactics, or are they familiar with defence and politics in western countries etc? If the subject is Gaza or Syria, how much time have they spent in the region, how familiar are they with the intricacies of Arab politics, do they speak the language etc? I don’t think this is unreasonable, and I’m happy to let people who want us to know how they feel to talk among themselves, start screaming at each other and probably come to blows very quickly.