Political commentary
They've got such nice habits
Ferdinand Mount
'You wouldn't think it, but personally he's a terribly nice chap to meet, very friendly and polite, a surprisingly gentle type of person.' Time and again, people come away from their first meeting with some notorious revolutionary, amazed by his moderation and courtesy. Instead of breathing fire, he oozes the milk of human kindness. He is thoughtful and considerate. Another cup of tea? A glass of something? A taxi to the station? A helpful introduction to another firebrand? If the visitors are journalists, their first reaction may be that this gentility is purely tactical; the firebrand is putting it on to con the capitalist press. But further meetings often only confirm first impressions. Those revolutionaries who are not knotted up with paranoia do tend to have a serene and courteous manner which seems to be a truly international trait. Mr. George Gale, for example, tells us that Tariq Ali is an engaging fellow to meet. You will hear similar things said of Dany le Rouge, Rudi Deutschke, the Tupamaros, the Weathermen, many black militants, almost any politically motivated hijacker, kidnapper, Angry Brigadier, or IRA ideologue. You will even hear it said of our own dear Paul Foot. As a matter of fact, Paul is the only sort of revolutionary I know and he is very nice. There you are.
The far left activist often seems to confront the 'bourgeois' world in a kind of naive, blinking way. The Red Mole spends his life tunnelling under existing society. When he puts his dear little velvety snout above ground, it twitches in the sunshine. He cannot see very far or indeed make much sense of the bright, noisy scene on the surface, but for him it has the garish charm of a funfair. Observe the man in jeans smiling quietly into his glass in the corner of the radical chic Kensington drawing-room: a Red Mole on an observation trip. There seems no harm in him. If he is on the make, it is not the usual kind of make he is on. He may even have something of the unworldy about him like Flanagan and Allen's 'Nice People' who had such nice habits and kept rabbits but had no money at all.
The charming terrorist is not a new figure. Bakunin was a sweetie. Kropotkin was a poppet. Sometimes it seems as if the more violent and venomous his professional diatribes, the more hideous his schemes, the more lovable the revolutionary's private disposition. Hugh MacDiarmid must be one of the few men to have combined a passing enthusiasm for Nazism and a later granitic Stalinism with a life-long addiction to the most ferocious variety of Scottish nationalism. After being thrown out of the Communist Party in the Thirties for nationalist
deviation, he rejoined it at the time of Hungary. MacDiarmid can hate as well as any man alive. His poem on the imprisoned and much loved Scottish Leninist John Maclean is a string of Stalinoid abuse that reads as if translated by the Azerbaijani News Agency: 'craven bowels. . . thugs of police
. hulking brutes of police, fat bourgeoisie.' And yet some of MacDiarmid's love lyrics are as original and fresh-sprung as anything written in this century.
We must make some allowance for exaggerated expectations of villainy. Nobody could be quite as unremittingly evil as an evil theory can be evil. Even Hitler was said to be kind to animals. To expect him not to have been kind to anyone or anything is to avoid the problem of how Hitler became Hitler by mentally constructing a mechanical monster. But what was and is important about Hitler is that he was unkind to Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others. His kindness to animals is relevant only as a reminder of his ineluctable membership of the human race.
But the split between the two sides of the charming terrorist's character is more significant particularly when it is set against other political characters. Active 'moderates', social democrats, liberals or Tories do not seem to be split in anything like the same way. They are irritable, rude and inconsiderate in more or less the same proportions as most people are. If they share any family resemblance at all, it is that of the professional politician.
Revolutionaries are different and the way in which they are different is hinted at by Ascherson's suggestion that it was less the Communist Party which attracted MacDiarmid than 'dialectical materialism itself, its faustian claim to comprehend the universe, living and inanimate, into a single hard philosophy of revolution.' The attraction is the single explanation. The simplification of revolutionary thought may be terrible in its political effects; but upon the life of the individual revolutionary it often confers an altogether happier kind of simplicity.
His simplicity is the simplicity of the man
who believes that the Secret lies in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid or the siting of the roundabouts on the A40. Monomania is a great comfort, It reduces to a minimum the number of things you are obliged to worry about and to consider as essential to salvation. Indeed, the wh°Ie notion of salvation presupposes a certain simplification of life. Among the attractions of all forms of total commitment are the trivial duties that you will no longer he expected to perform if you will only take your vows, take the Queen's shilling or join the Party. Other far more arduous duties may be substituted, but they will be feet, newer and simpler. Nuns too are often observed to have the serenity of people wit° have simplified their life. The question thrown up by these winparisons is whether the influence of this serenity may eventually soften the revolutionary will. Is there any seepage between the two compartments of the revolutionary mind? Individual acts of clemency are reported in almost all revolutionary leaders; some may be genuine. Sorne revolutionary leaders obviously do undergo a genuine internal struggle to stay hard, t° resist the sentimental calls of old loyalties. Even some of Lenin's much advertised agonies about saving former friends Mg well have gone deeper than the play-acting of the school-master's claim that thi5is-going-to-hurt-me-more-than-it-hurts-Y°,11. But there is more likely to be an en"' perhaps greater seepage in the other diree" tion. A soft, playful manner of private life, may drain off the revolutionary's occasional impulses to be soft in his political activitY; Lenin certainly regarded the comparting °Jr his life as serving this purpose. The scenes ci; his private life in exile, brief enough, and obviously much retouched by later hagiog: raphers, do have a certain soft, almost feminine quality. His walk-out with loess! Armand, whether they were lovers or nobt has that kind of ring to it; Robert Conclue!, rightly calls it a tendresse. This contra dramatically, as Lenin meant it to, With t; brutality of his conduct towards old ctiss leagues at party congresses, the ruthlessile.,,_ with which he got hold of the Schmitt s2o'r ters' fortune for the party, byarranging them to be seduced or married by Outo sheviks and his readiness to use bandits
and
rob banks for party funds. His rest re_ recreation periods are in fact rather dePro ssing to contemplate, as they rePreseLtther genuine humanity but rather one ess; aspect of Lenin's striving for ruthless° iite Hitler's tea parties — little cakes and P°'ake conversation with refined ladies — 111„es equally ghastly reading in Albert Sne;rs diaries. Far from making the owns the human, they demonstrate more clearlire to terrible efforts that humans can roa using become monsters by compartineilt the their feelings. The refined ladies ail`' for women comrades are merely hankies his the tyrant to blow his nose on, wiPe al his tears and conceal any other evidence ° humanity.
Previous page
