the mountains of youth *read
mountain jubillee
mountains of memory
the alps
*switzerland ('swit' below) and the english
the history of ski-ing
the story of ski-ing
alpine ski-ing at all heights and seasons
the complete ske-runner
ski-ing for beginners
ski-ing in a fortnight
the alpine ski guide to the bernese oberland
a guide to montana
swit: its literary, historical and topographical landmarks
the cradle of swit
zermatt and the valais
oxford mountaineering essays. a symposium
the englishman in the alps. an anthology
swit in english prose and poetry
the harrovians
loose ends
family name
within the precincts of the prison
the italian lakes and lakeland cities
venice: its story, architecture and art
roman converts
*john wesley
things that have puqaqled me
*the flight from reason
difficulties (with Mgr. r.a.knox
is christianity true? (with c.e.m.joad)
science and the supernatural (with j.b.s. haldane, F.R.S)
now I see
within that city
a saint in the slave trade
spanish rehearsal
*come what may
and the floods came
communism and socialism
whither europe?
the good gorilla
*the third day
is the catholic church anti-social? (with g.g.coulton)
*the revolt against reason
public school religion
auction piquet
this book reviewed here was one of the least helpful to me so far, but Lunn's strength of good analysis shines through a bit in several places...
...'I'm an englishman and proud of it'.
'I'm proud of it' is usually a 'Phrop', that is a PHRase which is the pricise OPposite of what the man who sues it really thinks, as for instance 'It's not the money I am interested in but the principle.
in the course of an amusing sketch the New Yorker mentioned that I collected 'phrops', which inspired miss marghanita laski to offer prizes in one of the Spectator competitions for the five best 'phrops, the competition was a success. 'this was far and away, wrote miss laski, the best set of entries I've had. we may be a hypocritical nation, but at least we know what we're doing, though it's chastening to realize who often these 'phrops' are in our mouths.
,,,first prize,, 'I wasn't a bit annoyed-I found the whole thing extremely amusing.
..other..'do stop me if I'm boring you
'Oh, I didn't mean YOU to do it.
'give a man a decent living wage and he's satisfied.
'it's not the danger I mind.
'I'd love to but I have to go to a dreary party that day.
24 ..in the five centuries from marignano to the first world war the swiss
overran norther ital,
defeated the emperor maximilian,
captured the greater part of savoy,
endured two religious and three civil wars and finally
fought as Swiss (apart from the Swiss in foreign service) in the final campaign against napoleon.
until 1848 Switzerland was a loose federation of virtually autonomous states, some of which were democratic but most of which were ruled by oligarchies.
finally it was not the Swiss but the Black Forest which 'produced the cuckoo clock. in 1952 the swiss consul in philadelphia told me that he had informed his government during the second world war that there had always been a good sale for cuckoo clocks in america and that the swiss had an excellent chance of capturing this market from the germans whose cuckoo clock factories were making munitions, he received a stern rebuke, 'it is below the dignity of the swiss to make cuckoo clocks.
63 ..in 1933 there was an election and the spanish people by a decisive majority repudiated communism, semi-communism and atheism, and returned a parliament which was predominantly conservative and catholic. nobody pretended that this majority had been achieved by violence. and then suddenly the socialists and communists behaved as Fascists (note 'govern by dictator) had been blamed for behaving. they rose in armed revolt, subsidized by russia (see my book, Spanish Rehearsal) against the democratically elected government. the socialists had lost the game by the democratic rules and they tried to win by fascist methods. 'and what did liberalism (believe in maximum individual liberty) say? asks chesterton.
'what did my dear old friends of liberty and peaceful citizenship say? naturally, I assumed on opening the paper..that it would rally to the defence of parliament and peaceful government and rebuke the attempt to make a minority dominant by mere military violence. judge my astonishment when i found the liberals lamenting loudly over the unfortunate failure of these socialistic fascists to reverse the results of a general election. the only inference was that liberalism was only opposed to the militarists when they were fascists; and entirely approved of fascists so long as they were socialists.
102..'to this day, wrote the late prof. a.n.whitehead, f.r.s., perhaps the most distinguished mathematical philosopher of our century, 'science has remained an anti-intellectualist movement base on a naive faith'. i could only accept this statement if the word 'scientism' were substituted for 'science', for it was certainly the 'naive faith' of scientism that sowed the seeds of modern irrationalism. it was scientism not science which was responsible for what prof. whitehead calls 'an anti-intellectualist movement', a movement responsible for the modern flight from reason. marx began the work of undermining our faith in the power of the mind to arrive at valid conclusions, for he insisted that our beliefs are the by product of economic causes. freud arrived at a similar conclusion for, according to freud , our beliefs are the by product of complexes, mainly sexual. the Behaviourists have carried the denigration of reason to its logical conclusion by maintaining that thought is a mere epiphenomenon, a conditioned reflex of physical behaviour.
the word 'Rationalist' was monopolized by those who had rejected christianity, it is increasingly claimed today by those who are in revolt against the fashionable irrationalism of the anti-christians. i hope and believe that an increasing number of genuine rationalists will return to christianity. that brilliant anglican apologist mr. c.s.lewis seems to me a case in point...
dr. joad in his autobiography devoted a chapter to 'The Cult of
103 Unreason'. 'owing to the influence of psycho-analysis, he wrote there prevails in modern society a refusal to discuss any view on its merits. if X expresses an opinion Y, the question discussed is not whether Y is true or at least reasonable, but the consideration which leads X to believe it to be true. objective truth being regarded as unobtainable, what alone is thought interesting are the reasons which lead people to formulate their particular brands of error'.
124 ..the queen (note: of spain) who was one of the loveliest women of her generation, is still beautiful and has a serenity which no tragedies have been able to destroy. 'it is useless, she once said to me in her home at lausanne, to allow the mind to dwell on sorrows which cannot be remedied. one's brains should be used for problems which one can solve'. her eldest boy made a disastrous marriage and was killed in a car accident. her second so, who was born deaf, parted from his first wife and few connections could be more distressing to his mother than his second marriage.
135 ..the 'democracy' which the Republicans defended in the spain of the civil war had little in common with the democracy of great britain.
the debate took place at the cambridge union in the autumn of 1944. i opposed the motion that 'the victory of Franco was a disaster for europe'. i expected to lose by about three to one, for the debate took place during our honeymoon with stalin and never had franco been more unpopular. instead, i won by a very comfortable majority.
I began by making it clear that I was not defending general franco, still less his particular variety of dictatorship. the question we were invited to decide was not whether general franco was an admirable ruler, but what would have happened if franco had been defeated and the communists had won. in 1940, the most critical year of the war, the communists in the countries which were still unconquered by the nazis were collaborating with hitler and working for a nazi peace. i myself saw communists picketing the white house against Lend-Lease, the one thing which stood between britain and certain defeat. in england the Daily Worker, which followed moscow in its support of the nazi line, had to be suppressed. if the communists had been in power in spain, they would have offered no resistance to a german demand to march through spain, attack gibraltar and close the mediterranean. general franco, on the other hand, did not yield to german insistence that he should enter the war and earned the thanks of mr. churchill in a speech made in the House of Commons.
136 ...my argument at cambridge was reinforced by the story of the lady whom i met when staying with the Infante Alfonso and Infanta Beatrice at san lucar. during the 4 months of increasing violence between the return of the Popular Front Government and the outbreak of the Civil War, my friend attended a political meeting in southern spain which was addressed by a conservative.
'now, my friend, I said during the cambridge debate, who was then about 20 years of age, is still very beautiful' (sniggers from the Opposition) and she is an aristocrat (triumphant jeers) and she is blind'. and a sudden silence descended on the Opposition benches, like the silence which flaubert describes as descending on the noisy assembly at carthage when they learned of the great disaster...
after that, all that was necessary to secure a majority at the cambridge union was to explain why my friend is blind for life. a communist had walked into the political meeting which - let me repeat - was held before the outbreak of the Civil War, pulled out a revolver, shot and killed the principal speaker and blinded Senora Larios de Domecq for life. a few days later this murderer was triumphantly acquitted by the tribunal which tried him. he had only murdered and blinded 'Fascists', a 'Fascist' being anybody who objects to being murdered by Communists. there was no redress against political murder. it was to restore the rule of law and to bring to an end a system of legalized assassination, that the christians in Spain rose in armed revolt in july, 1936...
SELECTIVE INDIGNATION
this phrase was first launched in a letter of mine to the New Statesman. i had submitted an article which kingsley martin, with whom i have always been on friendly terms, preferred to print as a letter, but
137 which he paid for at article rates, a noble gesture. selective indignation is an occupational disease of Socialists. (note: def. 'one who believes that the fruit of every individual's 'work' should be controlled and distributed by the community) in the thirties Socialists objected very properly against the persecution of jews and socialists in germany, but condoned the massacre of many thousands of priests and nuns and many more thousands of conservatives in spain.
in 1934 a General Election in spain returned a strong conservative government, whereupon the Asturian miners rose in armed revolt against the democratically elected government and were enthusiastically supported not only by the Socialists but by the Liberals. i have already quoted chestertons's comments on this betrayal of liberalism..two years later when franco followed the precedent of the asturian miners and led a rebellion, the socialists were loud in their protests and indeed only recovered their enthusiasm for armed revolt against democratically elected government when the Greek communists rose in revolt against the greek government which had just been returned at the polls.
it is the exception rather than the rule for the choice of a political system to be determined by principle, for most people tend to judge a political system by the opportunities which it offers to the social, industrial or racial group to which they belong. it is because, to take one obvious example, scientists enjoyed exceptional privileges in soviet russia that the proportion of communists and fellow travellers in scientific circles was at one time unusually high. Clercs, in the sense in which i use the word (p. 71..the french word clerc (english clerk) reminds us that in the middle ages the clerics were distinguished from the majority of laymen by their ability to read and write. i should like to see the word clerc revived as a convenient and necessary word to describe those intellectuals of the left who are temperamentally hostile to what they call 'militarism'. it is a mistake to use the 'intellectual' in this context, for this encourages the illusion that virtually all intellectuals are Leftists and obscures the fact that many of the most gallant officers have been intellectuals.) would not seem to have any particular bias against dictatorships as such, for in the 20s and 30s most clercs were either communists or fellow travellers. the contrast between the attitude of the clercs to the communist and nazi dictatorships was largely influenced by the fact that soviet russia seemed to offer a career open to intellectuals, whereas the nazi attitude was crystallized in goering's 'whenever i hear anybody talk about culture I reach for my gun'.
the bitter rivalry between the intellectuals and the officer caste, which i have tried to analyse on page 70 of this book, was reflected in the spanish civil war. the intellectuals won the first round and according to the rules of the game as approved by the clercs the defeated minority should have accepted the 'will of the people' and allowed themselves to be murdered (or blinded) without protest. it was monstrous that a spanish...should attempt to reverse by bullets a result achieved by ballots.
138 ..revolutions, said Maistre, are permitted by God for two reasons, as a warning to the rich that their selfishness is the cause of revolutions and as a warning to the poor that the cure is worse than the disease.
139 ..had there not been widespread disillusion among all classes of the population, the nationalist uprising must have failed. general Mola started the revolt in Pamplona with 400 soldiers, Queipo de Llano in seville with 185 soldiers and within a fortnight 30,000 basques of Navarre wearing their famous red berets flocked to mola's standard.
i drove for hundreds of miles in spain. had there been anything in the nature of a Maquis in Nationalist spain I would have been as reluctant as were german officers in occupied france to travel without armed escort.
i commend to the reader Spain: 1923-1948 by arthur loveday..the best brief history of this troubled period. he draws the only possible moral from the fact that it was unnecessary for the invading armies to leave large garrisons behind. 'when the revolutionary minority fled before the advancing armies of general franco they left behind the recently terrorized majority, who hailed the nationalist forces as saviours and obviated any necessity for guarding the lines of communication'.
140 ..at the outbreak of the civil war no cause could have seemed more hopeless than the christian cause in spain. the Reds controlled the
141 great centres of industry, all the gold reserves of the spanish bankes and , after murdering the naval officers, the Fleet. the nationalist were desperately short of everything, excepting hope and courage. their financial resources were so slender that unless they had been provided with petrol on credit for many weeks they must have lost the war. at the end of the first World war we buried an unknown soldier. the spaniards have all but buried in oblivion the unknown benefactor who saved them. they should erect a statue to mr. brewster of the Texaco Oil Company who provided petrol on credit and cardinal segura should be asked to unveil the statue of this great american protestant.
..in america the catholic press were behind the nationalists and it was the pressure of catholic opinion at a critical stage of the war which stopped mr. roosevelt sending arms to the Reds, as he had intended to do.
...sir arthur bryant, the great historian...at the time...held an important position in the conserrvative party, whose leaders were anxious that the case for the nationalist should no go by default. bryant sent for me in 1937 and asked me to visit the spanish fronts and write a book which would be sent to every conservative M.P. and to every member of a conservative book club...
142 there is no time to lose, he said. every effort is being made to influence the conservatives against franco. the reds have already captured the duchess of atholl. the possibility that we may be at war with germany before long and that hitler is helping franco, is the trup card which the reds are playing with great success. the sooner you can get out to spain and write your book the better.
whatever may be the merits or demerits of my book, the title, Spanish Rehearsal, was prophetic, for the Red revolt which failed in spain was a rehearsal for revolutionary movements which have already transferred many countries in europe and asia to communist control.
144 chapter 16 -death of a knight-errant (def. a knight of mediaeval romance who wandered in search of adventures and opportunities for deeds of bravery and chivalry. this chapter is about the passing of the author's father, Sir Lunn)
'i shall fail signally in the duty which i owe to an old friend and to the world at large if i do not pay my tribute to the services to humanity which have given Dr. Lunn a well merited place in the roll of knighthood. he is one of those men for whom a knighthood is the most appropriate of all honours, for he is a knightly soul constantly riding out on some perilous quest, from which he emerges time after time, bruised and battered and wound sore but never daunted or disheartened.' w.t.stead
during the first week of the spanish civil war my father was embarrassed and reluctant to discuss the issue. he was a member of the liberal shadow cabinet and the liberals, as a whole, supported the reds in spain. i once defined a liberal as a man who objects to the persecution of conservatives. my father was that kind of liberal, but most of his friends only objected to the persecution of liberals.
i did not force the issue, but 2 weeks after the war had broken out we went for a walk.
'by the way, Father, i said, you regard yourself as a catholic, don't you?
'of course i do, he growled, it's just like the insolence of you romans to pretend that your're the only catholics.
'splendid! that simplifies the issue. if you're a catholic, its your churches which are being brunt in spain and your priests that are being murdered. what are you going to do about it?
'yes, said my father slowly, it is a difficult decision. i've been worrying about it ever since the civil war started. i owe so much to the great saints of spain, to st. teresa and to st. john of the cross, that i can't pass by like the priest and the levite now that the church has fallen among thieves'.
once his decision had been made there was no further room for doubt. he became one of the most active members of the committee of the friends of national spain.
his decision was courageous, for almost all his friends were either actively supporting the Reds or convinced that it was a case of '6 of one and half a dozen of the other'.
145 in 1937 just before my father left to attend the annual methodist conference, he welcomed my suggestion that when the methodists moved their usual vote of sympathy with pastor niemoller and the persecuted jews in germany, he should move an amendment to include the persecuted christians in spain.
the amendment embarrassed those methodists who were most reluctant to pass any amendment which might be interpreted as critical of the spanish reds, but it was clearly impossible officially to go on record as having no sympathy at all with persecuted christians of the genus Catholic. there were, of course, a strong minority of methodists like my old friend ernest rattenbury who supported my father con amore. the amendment was therefore passed and my father wrote a letter to The Times in which he quoted this resolution and in which he called for a united Christian front against atheism. to this letter cardinal hinsley replied at some length. he expressed his gratitude to my father and to the methodists, some of whom certainly deserved his very sincere thanks. and even if there were many others who were indignant at being manoeuvered into supporting a proposal with which they had no sympathy, there may be many methodist today who will not resent being reminded of the fact that outside the Catholic church the Methodists were the only christian communion which went on record as protesting against the persecution of catholics in Red Spain.
in his scale of priorities (my father) did not, like so many Dissenters, put democracy first and christianity second. the one supreme consideration, so he believed, was that the spanish church should be saved and that the government in whose territory every church was desecrated, destroyed or closed should be defeated.
147 ..I have quoted stead's tribute to (my father) on the occasion of his knighthood, but that great victorian journalist did not know him as i did, did not see him as i did, UNDAUNTED BY IMMINENT RUIN (note: my caps...O Lord make me like in the realm spiritual..). again and again in his career he imperilled his business and his own future by following an unpopular line, as, to quote one of many instances, in the boer war. and he was not only morally but physically courageous. i remember seeing him just before a serious operation, when he had passed his 70th birthday. until summoned to the operating room he talked to me with great intensity about a business project and he resumed the conversation where he had dropped it when i saw him just after he had recovered from the anaesthetic. courage (def. face difficulty, danger, pain, etc. without fear) is not the only virtue, but it is the loveliest of all virtues and he possessed it in full measure and overflowing.
148 first year of the second world war...
few political illusions have had a more mischievous influence in confusing the west than the naive belief that the communists had far more in common with western democracy than with the nazis. the reverse was the case. stalin and hitler agreed in their detestation of the traditional rights associated with democracy, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and above all, the right to criticize and to dismiss the rulers of the nation.
149 ..Communism, Fascism and Nazism were varieties of socialism. democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms, for genuine socialism can only be maintained by a dictatorship. both hitler and mussolini were supported in their struggle for power by capitalists who regarded them as allies against communism. it is a myth that nazism was a right wing movement, for hitler's real support came from the lower middle and working classes, and it was the aristocrats who were the main architects of the plot to assassinate him. mussolini in his first years of power enjoyed widespread popular support.
most people, irrespective of class, are mainly concerned for their own selfish interests and it is only the odd man in a thousand who is prepared to make any genuine sacrifice for principle...
153 ..(etta bonacossa, daughter of the marches della Valle di casanove, a member of an anglo-irish (3/4 irish; 1/4 neopolitan..an explosive mixture) family living in italy speaks with the author)..'you don't understand this country, my dear Arni', (was her reply to his concern at her holding forth on the evils of the Fascists, on a terrace outside a hotel where we were having coffee) ,'the Italians are not dupes like the german nazis but cynics, the disciples of machiavelli. they know that fascism is a racket and have no interest in the racket excepting for what they can get out of it. if i was in government service the man below me would have to denounce me to get my job, which would strike people as reasonable as every racket has its rules and if you break the rules out you go. but there is no divorce in catholic italy, so nobody but i can have the job of aldo's wife and therefore there is nothing to be gained by denouncing me'...
157 ..in chapter on america before pearl harbour...my lecture tour..was finance by american catholics..'you can't complain, more than one of my kind sponsors remarked. 'we're paying you for british propaganda. sometimes i anticipated this comment. 'i want you to understand, I began many lectures, that this is propaganda. i'm here to state the case for my country...
158 next morning i was received by the cardinal who had always been more than kind to me. 'england, he began, should give in. churchill ought to resign himself to the blessed will of god. i don't admire the courage of the british. it's just bulldozing obstinacy'. which, of course, was what the pagan romans said about the christians in the amphitheatre. i was able to give the cardinal the famous quotation from Tertullian.
'that very obstinacy which you condemn should be your teacher. no man beholding this great endurance but is struck by a sudden scruple and on fire to find out the cause therefore'. and on the great endurance of the british, i continued, depends the fate of ireland which you love and of the church in europe'.
163 ..i cannot recall a single example of a government subordinating the interests of the country to the interests of the Church, but it would be easy to multiply examples of statesmen, such as Cardinal Richelieu, who sacrificed the interests of the Church to the national interests.
164 ..among the many points in which the International whose capital is Rome differs from the International whose capital is moscow, not the least important is the fact that national loyalties cease to count for the communist, whereas for the Catholic they have almost always taken precedence over catholic loyalties
again, whereas communism is unthinkable without a rigid concentration of power, there is something in catholicism which seems to promote the distribution of power. providence has provided in the constitution of the church important checks on the tendency of fallen men to abuse power. the diocese are largely autonomous, the parish priest is virtually irremovable. however much pope and emperor might disagree about the limitations of their respective domains, neither pope nor emperor ever claimed supreme power or ever exercised power faintly comparable with that exercised by hitler or by stalin.
the contrast between the communist concentration and the catholic distribution of power may be illustrated by the second world war. every communist throughout the world was violently anti nazi before the nazi-communist pact was announced and collaborationist on the day after. in more recent times we have seen the same disciplined reversal of attitude in the case of Tito. 'when Rather says turn, we all turn' is the communist motto.
pius XI had denounced Fascism and nazism in different encyclicals, and pius XII had protested in writing and over the radio against nazi atrocities in poland and elsewhere. that the vatican dreaded a nazi victory is certain. that the vatican hoped that the war would end by the elimination of the nazis in germany and in a peace of compromise which did not leave russia dominant in europe, is also certain.
pius XII's attitude to the nazis was unequivocal. he condemned their behaviour in poland both on the vatican radio and in various written statements. i was in rome during von ribbentrop's visit in march, 1940. he had suggested to the pope that the church should come to terms with hitler's new europe. the pope, so i was assured
165 by the general of the Dominicans, kept him standing throughout the audience and reaffirmed his strong disapproval of nazism.
...when i returned to the states in october, 1941, i was depressed by the fact that isolationsim was increasing among catholics as the result of russia's entry into the war as our ally. i was, therefore, greatly cheered by the vigorous radio campaign against isolationsits which monsignor hurley initiated shortly after his appointment to the See of st. augustine. among the papers which travelled with me in those days, was a copy of The Tablet containing a report of a powerful broadcast on the Vatican Radio by an unnamed american priest, in the course of which he attacked american isolationsits in general and colonel lindbergh in particular, an attack which was made 3 weeks after italy had entered the war as the ally of germany. i compared this script with the script of monsignor hurley's attack on the isolationists and it was clear that the Pope had chosen one of the most critical moments of the war to appoint as bishop of an american See, a priest who had already attacked the isolationists on the vatican radio.
166 shortly after my return to england, colonel leslie sheridan recruited me for a branch of the War Office whose obje ct might be summed up as the ambition 'tgo do harm by stealth and blush to find it fame'. it was a fascinating job in which i made many good friends. indeed, my friiendship with leslie sheridan is almost the only enduring friendship in my life which has its root neither in catholicism nor in the alps...
167 ...when i returned to spaine in 1942, america was in the war and mr. roosevelt had appointed dr. calrton hayes as his ambassador to madrid, in a country in which many catholics find it easier to die for and fill for, than to practise the Faith, the fact that the ambassador, his wife and daughter were daily communicants made a great impression...
168 ..our diplomats had lived through the perilous days when the ambassador kept a private plane waiting to take him back to england whereas dr. hayes was in the position of bringing as much pressure to bear on franco as seemed necessary without the least fear of forcing spain into war. on one occasion when the allies threatened immediate reprisals, including a virtual blockade, the spanish government surrendered within a week.
171 the second world war might have been called 'the two world wars', for two wars were fought simultaneously, the war between nations in which germany and italy were defeated and the war between ideologies which is not yet decided but in which almost every campaign has so far been won by the communists.
from the first the communists and their allies, conscious and unconscious, endeavoured to put into practice the classic principle of communism, the duty to transform every imperialistic war into a revolutionary war. most of those who FOUGHT believed themselves to be fighting for their country. many of those who did not fight would have endorsed harold laski's contention that 'the object of victory is not to restore the traditional britain', in the making of which the laskis played no part, but perhaps in laski's view to replace (the old with) the new ruling class.
...very clever book, Guilty Men...none of the authors whose cooperation produced this book were communists, but they had all assimilated a basic principle of marxist strategy, the irrelevance of reason in the class war. the revolutionary appeal is effective if and only if it be directed to the passions, particularly to the passion of envy. communists have proved that the effectiveness of a party line which appeals to the passion of envy, is undiminished by the fact that it flatly contradicts the party line of the previous week or year. similarly
172 the success with which the pacifists of the Left attacked the Tories as appeasers, is clear evidence of the irrelevance of reason in political controversy...
a marxist once remarked to me that there was only one rival
173 philosophy which he took seriously-Catholicism. the catholics, he added, were consistent and argued logically from their mistaken premises. i can, with certain reservations, return this compliment. i admire the communists for their devotion to their cause and my admiration is undiminished by the fact that i have been in the past inconvenienced by one manifestation of this devotion, the untiring energy which they devote to the character-assassination of their enemies.
the second world war provided the communists and their fellow travellers in england with opportunities for delation (def. 'inform against, denounce, accuse) which wer too good to be wasted. ..in june 1940 i had visited certaqin coastal towns hoping to see an air raid, for i was collecting experiences for my projected lecture tour in america. 'i had my usual bad luck', i wrote to my mother. 'i arrived in Hull a few hours after a big raid and saw nothing'. 'i was in the office, said Jerold's )most active as a supporter of the nationalists in the spanish civil war) friend, 'when this letter of lunn's was read. a nasty little horror exclaimed, 'now we can intern lunn under 18b. he's giving information about air raids'. you'd better pull some strings on his behalf'.
jerrold laughed, 'you needn't worry. he's on a government job at the moment in another country and is going to america shortly at the request of the foreign office.a few weeks later i sailed in an east coast convoy in search of experience and the ship was sunk a few hours after i disembarked at glasgow. once again i was delated by some optimist who hoped that the authorities would give serious consideration to his suggestion that i had informed the nazis of the ship's course.
their third attempt to discredit me was less of a fiasco and i should like to offer my sincere congratulations to the american communists for their success in partially paying off an old score. in 1938 earl browdew, communist presidential candidate, had accepted an invitation to debate with me in pittsburgh. he put up one of his lieutenants to try out my form in a middle western town and it would seem
174 that his nominee enjoyed the debate less than i did, for shortly afterwards earl browder telegraphed to my agent his regrets that a sudden illness prevented him meeting me at pittsburgh and that he had arranged for a substitute. i went to new york and engaged a private detective to track down the moribund browder and on the morning of my debate in pittsburgh the detective rang me up. on the day that browder had announced his sudden illness he flew to washington and he had been in robust health ever since. i rang up the leading evening paper in pittsburgh who headlined the story and made merry over browder's exposure. on my return to america in 1942 i was interviewed at the airport. now i was under instructions to make it clear that i was not stopping in america, so i mentioned that i was on my way to south america. a few days later a fake interview with me appeared in a pap;er of the extreme Left, in which it was stated that i was in the secret Service, for which i had never worked and that i had announced that i was going to south americal to warn them that a victory for england was equivalent to victory for communism. questions were asked in the House of Lords and the libel was reproduced in a british paper. i could not bring a libel action because i could only have defended myself under cross examination by statements which would have been embarrassing to contacts that i had made in various countries. the best service i could render my country was to remain silent under these attacks, a duty which was particularly distasteful to a born controversialist.
i recall these episodes to point a moral. (def. expressing principles of right conduct) if the communists could
175 go to such lengths to plant in newspapers, which though very Leftish were not under communist control, such ingenious lies about a man who was neither well known nor important, it is clear that they must devote both time and ingenuity to inventing slanders about men who hold key posts either in national governments or in trade unions.
176 ..a colleague in charge of our rumanian departent took me off to dinner. 'i'm feeling very depressed, he said and i want you to cheer me up. i believe that poland, rumania and hungary are lost and that the czechs will not long retain their independence. here are my reasons. he gave them and added, 'now if you mow down my arguments and prove me a false prophet, you'll send me to bed a happy man.
i could do nothing to dissipate his gloom, for i shared it and all that has happened since has vindicated the accuracy of his diagnosis, but the fulfilment of his predictions has had little effect on those whose vanity forbids them to admit that they were duped by fussia and who still refue to recognize the truth of burke's warning;
'there is no safety for hones men but in believing all possible evil of evil men and by acting with promptitude, decision and steadiness in that belief.
177 the mischievous effects of that fight from reason which was discussed in an earlier chapter, are not confined to philosophy. when faith in reason and in the power of the human mind to arrive at valid conclusions grows dim, men become increasingly careless about principles and increasingly indifferent to the accusation of inconsistency. it is characteristic of our time that socialists should , as we have seen, alternately condemn and condone armed revolt against a legally elected government according to whether the government in question is socialist or conservative and no less characteristic that those who condemned 'The Men of Munich' as appeasers should take the lead in appeasing soviet russia and red china.
men who rightly denounced tha satanic cruelty of the nazis have carefully avoided any similar condemnation of communist atrocities. sir arthur bryant in the Illustrated London News (march 12, 1955) quote the following horrifying extract from the White paper published by our Ministry of Defence, Treatment of British Prisoners of War in Korea:
there were no beds and no bedding. shoes and clothing, except for underclothes, were often taken away, even in the middle of winter; washing facilities were often denied, sometimes for months at a time, while visits to the latrine would be permitted only once or twice a day, even when the prisoner had dysentery. at camp 1, the chinese built a number of boxes about 5 ft. by 3 ft. for prisoners undergoing sentences of solitary confinement. in one of these one private of the Gloucesters spent just over 67 months. the food was appalling and often stopped for several days at a time...
a favourite trick was to bind the prisoner hand and foot with a rope passed over a beam, fixed as a hangman's noose round his neck. he was then hoisted up on his toes and the other end of
178 the noose rope was tied to his ankles. the prisoner was told that if he slipped or bent his knees he would be committing suicide and that his captors could not be held responsible as his life was in his own hands. another favourite method was to bind a prisoner's wrists and ankles behind his back and to tie a rope which passed over a beam to his wrists. he was then hoisted up until his toes just touched the floor and left in that position for several hours.
yet another form of punishment during solitary confinement was to make a prisoner stand to attention for long periods either in the snow of the severe korean winter or in the heat of a korean summer. one british prisoner, for instance, was made to stand to attention for 30 hours at a time, with a sentry standing by with a fixed bayonet as 'encouragement'. another was made to keel on two small, jagged rocks and hold a large rock over his head with his arms extended. it took days for a man who had undergone this treatment to recover the ability to walk. sometimes the north korean guards at a jail which, though outside camp 5, was used for the internment of some 'reactionaries', pushed a long pencil-like piece of wood or metal through a small hole in the door and made the prisoner hold the inner end in his teeth. at odd times, without warning, the sentry would knock the outer end sideways. this had the dual effect of removing teeth and splitting the sides of the victim's mouth. a variation of this was for the guard to hit the outer end of the rod and so drive the other end against the back of the prisoner's mouth or down his throat. in winter opportunities for torture increased and prisoners are known to have been marched bare-footed on to the frozen yalu river where water was poured over their feet. with temperatures well below 20 degrees of frost the water froze immediately.
'i have quoted this passage in full, writes sir arthur bryant, revolting though it is, because it ought to be read and reflected upon my everyone in the parliamentary West who has a vote and a share in the government of his country. the people who ordered and deliberately applied this treatment to our soldiers, causing the death of many hundreds from torture, neglect, malnutrition and disease, are now clamouring that we should betray our american allies and induce them to had over to them and their sickening cruelty and tyranny Formosa and several more million helpless asiatics. and a good many gullible and , i know, otherwise sensible and kindly people in this country are arguing that because we are vulnerable to atomic
179 attack and most of us would be killed by it, we ought- in order to avert such a contingency- to wash our hands completely of all affairs but our own and bury our heads in our own domestic sand in the hope that the communists, however many others they enslave will pass us by or, if enslave us they must, leave us in peace'.
...of course, the double standard is no monopoly of the Left. Rightists in our country who condoned the evils of nazism while condemning the evils of communism were as inconsistent as the Pekin pilgrims, but marxism fosters cynicism about consistency, for the only consistency which the true marxist recognizes is a readiness to adapt standards and propaganda to the ever-changing requirements of the political situation.
there is a decreasing interest in principles and concern for consistency in the polemics of the Left. Socialists, as we have seen, have never formulated the conditions under which they are prepared to support an armed revolt against a legally elected government, but content themselves with applauding such revolts against conservative governments and denouncing them against Left-Wing governments (pp. 132-143)
between the wars the socialists opposed rearmament and conscription and the New Statesman probably expressed the secret hopes of most socialists when it announced, just before Munich, that 'the strategic value of the Bohemian frontier should not be made the occasion of a world war', but none of this prevented the vocal apostles of appeasement from attacking the Tories as appeasers. most of the Socialists who had rightly denounced the surrender to nazi germany of a great area of czechoslovakia, are apparently ready for a deal with red chine, the effect of which would be to surrender to a dictatorship as vile as hitler's the citizens of democartic formosa.
180 now it would be logical, but very foolish, to confine diplomatic recognition to democratic governments and it would be both logical and intelligent to accept as the sole criterion for diplomatic recognition the possibilities of furthering our own national interests in the counties concerned, but it is neither logical nor intelligent nor honourable to allow our diplomatic relations to be determined by selective indignation.
on the eve of the allied landings in north africa in 1942 the american ambassador in madrid delivered to general franco a letter from mr. roosevelt, couched in the friendliest of terms, assuring franco of the president's sincere desire for good relations with spain and by implication with general franco himself; the letter was signed 'your sincere friend'. general franco made no attempt to interfere with the american landings. the american president had invited him to adopt an attitude of benevolent inaction and this was precisely the attitude which he adopted to the allied landings in north africa.
now to profess friendship when you need help and to proclaim enmity when all you asked has been granted and when the man whose friendship you sought can no longer be of use to you, is not the act of a gentleman. it was dishonourable for a government whose head had signed himself 'your sincere friend' in writing to general franco to withdraw the american ambassador, leaving mission in charge of a lower ranking diplomat. it was dishonourable for Great Britain, whose prime minister had expressed in the house of commons his appreciation of general franco's benevolent neutrality, to follow the american example. this foolish episode did not last very long. i happened to be in spain shortly after the british and american ambassadors were once more accredited to the spanish government. few things can have done more to enhance franco's prestige. the Great Powers who had tried to humiliate him had themselves been humiliated.
181 be it noted that none of those who demanded the withdrawal of ambassadors from spain advocated a similar withdrawal of ambassadors from counties such as soviet russia in which there is infinitely less freedom than in spain. once again our policy was shaped by selective indignation. we withdrew our ambassador from spain and went out to the way to give diplomatic recognition to red china. spain had been helpful in the second world war, red china fought against us in korea, treated our prisoners barbarously and held to ransom those of our business men who wished to leave china, extorting large sums of money before they would grant exit visas.
182 ..(speaking of Lunn's involvement with international skiing) in 1946 the Ski Club of Great Britain proposed to restore the original rule. the actual wording of our proposal was as follows;
national associations or national clubs which discriminate against their own nationals on religious, racial or political grounds shall be ineligible for membership of the FIS...
183 ...in 1949 the russians applied for membership of the FIS. they made three conditions, first that russian should be recognized as an official language at FIS Congresses, secondly that russia should be give a seat on the Council and thirdly that the spanish ski association should be expelled.
( being rebuffed by the council the russians then tried to strongarm. Lunn's reaction ...'as i did not choose to serve under a president who had ignored the unanimous resolution of the Council or on a council which had acquiesced in the election of a russian to the council which he had defied, i had no course open to me but to resign..I was prepared to acquiesce in the election of the russian to the FIS (Federation Internationale de Ski), but not to the council.
nobody will follow your example, a colleague remarked. what good will you do by resigning? i replied by a quotation from Epictetus, arrogant and unfair to my colleagues but not wholly inapt.
'what good then did Priscus do being alone? only the good that the purple thread does in the toga, showing up the commonplaceness of the rest of the toga'. priscus was the solitary senator to defy Vespasian.
my club, under the predieency of colonel sturmy cave, d.s.o. supported me and we sent no delegation to the next congress which was held at venice. major kaech, the new secretary elected at venice, summed up what most of the FIS delegates felt in an article in der schnee-hase:
no new addition to the FIS can compensate for the withdrawal of the ske pioneers from england. with the characteristic inventive talent of this nation of sportsmen they gave sli-ing a new face, but more serious than this loss of expert knowldege to the FIS is the fact that england, this old and proud and free nation, no
184 longer raises her voice in the FIS deliberations. her withdrawal has weakened all those for whom sport only makes sense and indeed is only conceivable in an atmosphere of freedom.
...the russians despise those who appease them and respect those who stand up to them. it is a pity that this fact was not more generally realized in matters of infinitely greater importance than sport.
191 few autobiographies in recent years have interested me more than (stephen) spender's World within World, fascinating both as a self portrait and as a study of a society in revolt agains traditional standards. and apart from its personal and sociological interest, i enjoyed the may poetic phrases scattered throughout its pages, phrases which evoke a picture by the skilful use of the apt analogy or metaphor, as for instance, 'from Fiesole we see the dome of the Cathedral like a shield made of just coloured petals guarding the city.'
few more honest autobiographies have ever been written. Spender confesses, for instance, to 'thirst for publicity. it often disgusts me to read a newspaper in which there is no mention of my name'. again it takes courage to admit that Hemingway told him during the Spanish Civil War that he was 'too squeamish, bu which i suppose he meant yellow'. spender was asked to stay for 2 or 3 days at the front and refused, 'saying i was expected back at madrid. the fact is that i was frightened and wanted to get away as soon as possible'.
during the second world war, S was in the fire fighting service, which was not a job a man would choose who lacked courage.
the essential weakness of the left wing secularism has perhaps never been summed up more concisely than in S's comments on the effect of Auden's conversion to christianity: 'social criticism had taken the place of scrupulous self-criticism, but now he accepted a dogma which criticized him and which was not simply an instrument for criticizing others'.
192 ...towards the end of the spanish civil war the Independent Labour Party proved that they were independent not only in name but in fact by publishing a pamphlet on the communist terror in barcelona. integrity was james maxton's outstanding quality and both he and john mcgovern, who were mainly responsible for this pamphlet, courted great unpopularity, for they infuriated the overwhelming majority of socialists by their exposure of communist atrocities. john mcgovern's primary objective was to investigate the disappearance of certain socialists, who in point of fact had already been liquidated by the communists. he extracted from the non-communist mninister of justice permission to visit the cheka secret prison in barcelona, where he was met at the entrace by russian guards. the russian governor of the prison finally emerged and firmly refused to allow mcgovern to visit the prison.
'if there was civil war raging in england, he said, do you suppose a russian would be allowed to visit a prison in which the enemies of the people were imprisoned?
'perhaps not, replied mr. mcgovern, but i'll tell you one thing. the refusal would be conveyed to him by an englishman and the governor of the prison would not be a russian.
mcgovern had not only the courage of his opinions but he is also generously endowed with physical courage. scores of people were being bumped off every night in barcelona and nobody could have been called to account had a trigger happy communist, incensed by mcgovern's co8ustice remarks to the prison governor, shot him on his various wanderings, on all of which he was shadowed.
197 'votes, as disraeli said, should be weighed as well as counted'. general franco, if he decided to re-introduce parliamentary government, could give additional votes to those in more responsible positions; or alternatively parliament might be elected partly on a basis of adult suffrage and partly on a vocational basis, the different professions and trade unions each electing their representatives. in brief, general franco could demonstrate to the world that there are other alternatives than the dictatorship of an individual or the dictatorship of the ill informed. aristotle said that democracy was only an interim phase between oligarchy, which he regarded as the most stable form of government and dictatorship.
in the past, the process of plundering the thrifty for the benefit of the thriftless has often produced financial bankruptcy and the demand for a dictatorship. we are moving in england towards that camouflaged form of dictatorship which de Tocqueville described as 'democratic despotism'. 'power, said samuel johnson, is always gradually slipping away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and less persistent' and because there is so little we can do to check this process we find it less disturbing to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the immediate foreground than on the distant edge of the precipice.
but as we approach the precipice therre is a slight increase in the number of influential people who have the courage to protest against servile and uncritical praise of pure democracy. lord percy in england and mr. russell kirk in america are not the only distinguished writers who insist on the folly of equating parliamentary government with pure democracy, a comparatively modern heresy which the great parliamentarians of the early 19th century would have repudiated. maculay, for instance, hated despotism and entertained for parliamentary government an almost religious reverence, yet it was macaulay, writing many years before the masses had been enfranchised, who warned his readers against the dangers of pure democracy.
'i have long, he wrote, been convinced that institutions purely
198 democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty or civilization of both. in europe where the population is dense the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous...either the poor would plunder the rich and civilization would perish or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government and liberty would perish'.
204 (in the section, 'palestine on the eve of civil war) i waited for somebody at the club to make the obvious point that the case for zionism rested on the right of conquest. the british liberated not only palestine but also the neighbouring countries from the turk and, thanks to us, there are today 6 arab states. we, who drove out the Turks, were surely entitled to set aside one portion of this liberated territory for the Jews. but 'the right of conquest' is a reactionary phrase detested by progressive minded people and the palestinians were reluctant to base their rights on a claim which implied a debt to the british.
213 (in the section 'with the americans in germany) the german are not good propagandists, but there are signs that they are at last working up for a fairly effective counter attack which i am sure is going to take some such form as this - to judge by stray remarks made to me during this journey.
'there are innumerable Dachaus and Belsens in Russia and communism is every bit as vile as nazism, but who are you people to criticize germans for not taking steps to get rid of hitler? what steps have you taken to liberate the millions enslaved by stalin and his successors? you handed over poland, for whose independence the West nominally made war, to the russians in 1945. we admit, of course, that during the war your first objective had to be victory, and that it would have been as ridiculous to criticize the Allies for keeping quiet about russian atrocities during the war as to criticize the Spanish Nationalists for accepting help from anti-catholic hitler in the civil war. but what is your post-war policy? your armies deliberately withdrew from lines they had occupied and deliberately refrained from invading south-eastern europe, masterpieces of appeasement which handed over millions of human beings to the Soviet tyranny. you criticize germans for their failure to protest against Dachau, but the position of a german who knew that such protests would mean death is morally more defensible that that of the Western Allies who condoned the horrors behind the Eastern Curtain in the interests of friendly relations with Russia and the trade which would be the reward of such relations'.
235 ..(in the sectin on cyril joad -the progress of a hedonist)
a few weeks before russia was invaded by germany, Joad invited me to address an undergraduates' club in the unv. of london. my theme was Spengler's these that religion and culture are coincident and that culture declines as secularism (def - rejects all forms of religious faith/worship) advances. and this decline is not confined to the arts, for religion is the only enduring safeguard of the dignity and freedom of ma. man, as Penn said, must be governed either by God or by tyrants. the revolting cruelties of the nazi and the communist regimes were the logical consequences of the fact that
236 the governments of germany and russia were apostate governments who had repudiated God. i for one had no hope of a rebirth of genuine humanism (def. interest in humans and their values and dignity are present) without a great religious revival and of such a revival there was for the moment no evidence.
''we've listened, said J, to a profoundly pessimistic talk. Lunn has put into words some thoughts which i have tried to keep below the level of my conscious mind. i cannot at the moment see the weak point in his argument, but perhaps some of you can refute it. some years ago L and i exchanged argumentative letters about Catholicism. shortly afterwards L committed intellectual suicide by throuing himself over the cliff into the Catholic sea'.
this produced a laugh.
'you've laughed too soon. do you know the story of the elderly gentleman who saw a young man just about to hurl himself over a cliff? 'stop, stop, exclaimed the elderly gent, you may have been crossed in love, but there are lots of beautiful women in this world to console you. you may have lost money, well, you're young enough to make a fortune. at any rate before you throw yourself over that cliff let's at least talk things over first' so they talked things ovder and as a result they both threw themselves over the cliff.
the discussion that followed it was the last speaker who made the most interesting contribution. 'you're obviously disappointed, said he, by our mild reaction to your challenging thesis, but if you'd given this same talk before Molotov and von Ribbentrop swopped decorations, you'd have had a very different reception. as things are, many of us are inclined to suspect that you may be right.
i never lost hope of J's ultimate conversion. he had proved in our correspondence that he was ready to concede a point which seemed to him to have been proved and his vanity, though inordinate, never seriously undermined a cedrtain basic intellectual integrity. he was vain but honest. he did not rationalize his own failings. if one were invited to adjudicate as to the most honest passages in the literature of the Left i should find it difficult to decide between stephen spender's confession quoted on page 191 and the following passage from J's autobiography:
if i gave evidence of a certain eager goodwill which led me to devote myself to causes which aimed at the emelioration of the lot of my least fortunate fellow-countrymen, it was the approal of my neighbours and perhaps of myself rather than the welfare of mankind that i sought. moreover, i was a good speaker and
237 public work fed the flames of my complacency with the applause which my many appearances on the platform brought me...but though pervaded by a vague humanitarianism in public, in private i was selfish, possessive and predatory. when they conflicted i was never prepared to sacrifice my interests to those of other people, nor does my memory embrace many occasions on which i seriously put myself out to aid my fellows. it does, however, remind me that when occasion arose, i could be as malicious and as cruel as the best , or rather the worst of them. there were certain virtues, chastity and humility, for example, to which i was almost a complete stranger.
not to humility, for no man could write in this strain unless his vanity was qualified by humility. few of the intellectuals who attributed the communist reaction in spain to the selfishness of spanish aristocrats, wrote with equal candour about their own 'selfish, possessive and predatory' qualities. cyril J's basic difficulty in committing himself wholeheartedly to the defence of christianity was moral rather than intellectual.
his marriage had broken up before we met. i am told that his wife did not divorce him, perhaps because here feminine esprit de corps made her reluctant to expose any other woman to the vagaries of marriage with J. the arrangement suited J and saved him from the trouble of reconciling protestations of affection with a firm refusal to commit himself again to matrimony. he was more happily placed than another literary friend of mine who approached me during world war II on advice about joining the church of rome. 'i approve very strongly, he said of the catholic attitude to divorce. you see i've parked my wife in america, but the girl i'm having an affair with is becoming a repetitive bore. 'if you love me, why don't you get your wife to divorce you and marry me?' if i were a catholic my answer would be so simple. 'i could not love thee, dear, so much loved i not popery more'. do you think my strong approval of your church's attitude to divorce would be accepted as an adequate qualification for joining your club?
j with characteristic candour not only practised by preached amoralism. in one of his published letters to me he wrote:
birth control increases the possibilities of human pleasure. in enabling the pleasures of sex to be tasted without its penalties (?) it has removed the most formidable deterrent not only to regular
238 but to irregular sexual intercourse...the average clergyman is shocked and outraged by the prospect of shameless, harmless and unlimited pleasure which birth control offers to the young and if he can stop it, he will
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