was the most powerful Marxist exponent of under-consumptionism since Rosa Luxemburg. Keynes himself later embraced this as his analysis of the 1930s depression. Under-consumptionism is the tendency in capitalist economies for the capitalists to produce more things than the people can afford to buy. Capitalism could solve this problem through more income equality, and more social control over investment spending. But capitalists don’t like that solution. Therefore, as Sweezy and Baran argued in Monopoly Capital, they come up with alternative means of getting buyers for the things monopolist firms decide to produce: they get the military to spend, they induce spending through advertising, and they ride the wave of epoch-making innovations like the automobile (which brought public highway construction and government subsidized construction of the suburbs).
Read Sweezy’s books and you can understand why we have US Marines presiding over the continuing enslavement of Haiti, why we have John Kerry proclaiming his doctrine of progressive interventionism, why we have Alan Greenspan calling for a renewed onslaught on Social Security. Sweezy taught generations how to understand these things, how not to be surprised. Like all great teachers he gave us the consolations as well as the burden of such knowledge. If you know what’s happening you’re in a position to figure out how to do something about it, and that’s always uplifting.
March 31
Michael Newdow, a California doctor with a law degree, has been arguing to the US Supreme Court that the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance uttered daily by millions of school children is unconstitutional. The Pledge was originally written by a former Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, in 1892 to promote the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas.
In 1954, amid the freezing gusts of the cold war, the Rev. George M. Docherty, pastor at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, preached to a distinguished congregation including President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Pledge should contain a reference to God, thus distinguishing it from kindred pledges by “little Muscovites” similarly pledging their loyalty to the hammer and sickle. Living “under God,” Docherty thundered, was “a definitive fact of the American way of life.” He conceded that “honest atheists” might disagree, but added that in his opinion the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression “is not, and was never meant to be, a separation of religion and life,” and that, honesty notwithstanding, “an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms.”
America was in the midst of a tumid uptick in religious pietism at the time, powered in part by the need to display America’s Biggest Ally in the fight against Communism. In fact the tremendously popular Eisenhower had had an unconventional spiritual upbringing, with his father’s faith stemming from the Mennonite Baptist River Brethren, who had moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas. His mother Ida was a Jehovah’s Witness. Eisenhower was the first President to join a church (Presbyterian) after being elected President. (Lincoln is the only American President to have steered clear of churches altogether.)
Eisenhower and Congress rushed to implement Docherty’s call. Congress was unanimous and the only religious group that objected was that of the Boston Unitarians. “One Nation Under God” was added to the Pledge, and when the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it unconstitutional last year and that school children didn’t have to recite it if they didn’t want to, Congress once again exhibited unanimity in reproving the uppity judges.
April 12
Today brings us the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claud Cockburn, father of other Cockburns—the brothers Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick; Claudia Flanders, Sarah Caudwell; grandfather of Daisy Cockburn, Chloe Cockburn-Scheff, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Cockburn, Henry Cockburn, Alexander Cockburn, Laura Flanders, Stephanie Flanders.
Claud was the greatest radical journalist of his age, an inspiring influence not only on CounterPunch, but on many other seditious journalistic enterprises, such as the UK’s Private Eye, the fortnightly at whose helm he stood at a crucial moment in the early 1960s, or the National Guardian founded by Cedric Belfrage, James Aronson, and John McManus.
Claud was a child of empire, born in the British legation in Peking, son of Harry Cockburn, the British minister there during the Boxer rising, who had spent twenty years in Chungking and was on friendly terms with the Empress Dowager of the Middle Kingdom. Claud grew up mostly in Budapest, and went to Berkhamsted school, run by his friend Graham Greene’s father. Just young enough to escape slaughter in the Great War, he went to Oxford, lived in Paris, wrote for Ezra Pound’s Dial, worked for the London Times in Berlin, saw the rise of Hitler, and went to New York to describe the Crash.
He turned left, quit the Times, joined the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the British Communist Party, founded his famous anti-fascist newsletter The Week, and fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, joining the Republic militia before the International Brigades were formed. His superiors ordered him back from the front lines to assume the propaganda duties alluded to in the piece below. 1947 saw him quit The Worker and the CP, move to Ireland, and start a whole new life as a novelist and freelance commentator. His first book, Beat the Devil, written under the name James Helvick, was turned into Huston’s well-known film of the same name. He wrote other novels, including Ballantyne’s Folly and Jericho Road, and three volumes of masterly memoirs, collected in I, Claud.
He wrote fast, with a beautifully easy style. His prose could be light, ironic, also savage. He was learned but never overbearing, cultivated but never patronizing. He respected and enjoyed people at all social levels and ages. He loved dogs. Under the force of his example who could resist the lure of journalism? None of his sons did, to the initial gloom of our mother Patricia, who knew first-hand that freelance journalism doesn’t always bring home regular slabs of bacon.
His body simply wore out when he was seventy-seven though his mind stayed sharp till his last breath.
The day before he died in St. Finbarr’s hospital in Cork he dictated a column for the Irish Times to Patricia. He never soured on his ideals, never lost faith in humanity’s nobler instincts, never failed to see the humor in life.
Shortly before Claud died, amid one of the periodic uproars about upper-class British spies, my friend Ben Sonnenberg asked him to write a piece for Ben’s literary quarterly Grand Street. Claud turned in a masterly essay, full of astute observations about Guy Burgess and spy mania, but also with a wonderfully tragic-comic memoir about the strange death of Basil Murray in Valencia. I include it here because Grand Street is not easily available.
Spies and Two Deaths in Spain
by Claud Cockburn
Before he was revealed as a central figure—perhaps the mastermind—of the Burgess-Maclean-Philby spy scandal, the rapscallion Guy Burgess used sometimes to join me at a table in one of the bars of the House of Commons and, in the course of conversation, proclaim that he was an agent of the Soviet government. This would come out in a drink-slurred roar, clearly audible to, for example, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, towering massively at the bar, as well as to any other politician or newspaperman in the place.
He would usually, somewhere in the talk, make another emphatic assertion. This was to the effect that he was the illegitimate son of the then Lady Rothschild. It was, he implied, a fact which accounted for his expert knowledge of international finance.
The claim about his illegitimacy was entirely false and quite a number of people who ought to have known better believed it. And his claim to be an agent of the KGB was true and no one believed it. It was a crude and entirely successful example of the double bluff. If anyone—and I suppose there were some such in British counter-intelligence—were to report a suspicion about Burgess’s role, his superior was likely to reply with weary contempt, “I know, I know, he keeps saying so himself.”
The ploy about Lady Rothschild appealed to people as a fairly titillating piece of gossip. It was useful to Burgess and he employed it for the same reason that his cont
emporary Brendan Bracken, Britain’s Information Minister throughout the war and an immensely successful political and financial pirate, used to claim that he was the illegitimate son of Winston Churchill. Reading the excitingly simplistic accounts of successive spy scandals in British publications, I find it useful to recall these facts about Burgess, which indicate in their own simple way how complex the detection of spies in our midst can be. We have had spy scares every few years, and I have no doubt, are going to have more of them. In the same way, scares about terrorism—together with more or less fraudulent analyses of the supposed activities and motivations of terrorists—will certainly proliferate as the nervous system of the general public increasingly demands sedation in the face of horrifying phenomena.
The public nervous system may be soothed by false explanations. But unless people are encouraged to look rather more coolly and deeply into these same phenomena of espionage and terrorism, they will make no progress towards any genuine self-defense against either.
At this point, it may be wise to remember that there are those whose hysteria on these subjects leads them to believe that any cool analysis amounts almost to a condonation. Such hysteria is of obvious help to spies and terrorists. Let us also note that nobody in any country can truly and totally evaluate the harm an enemy’s spies may have done. The real experts in anti-espionage are a great deal more ready to admit this than the horrified public. Even the outstanding Russian dissident, Andrei Sakharov, “father” of their hydrogen bomb, is reported as saying that the secrets betrayed by Klaus Fuchs were of minimal importance in the development of the weapons in the Soviet Union.
A constant element among the facts and fiction about espionage is what we may call “Belief in the Spy as Superman.” All intelligence agencies have a vested interest in convincing the world of their machinelike efficiency. Particularly in wartime, but at other times too, the notion of the spy successfully uprooting our secrets, like a pig uprooting truffles, is alarming in itself, and also because it fits and extends the idea which almost everybody has, that the enemy is not only wickeder but also cleverer than we are. Malcolm Muggeridge once told me how, while working for MI6 during the war, he became for a time profoundly depressed by what appeared to him the ineptitude and even clownish folly of some of our intelligence procedures. His gloom lifted when, after the Allied landings in Italy, his German opposite numbers scampered out of Naples without even burning their vital documents. To his relief he saw from them that the Germans had been proceeding with an ineptitude and folly at least equal to our own.
A frequent element in spy-alarm, notably in Britain and France, is the belief that spies belong to, and are protected by, a higher social and financial class than the common citizenry of the country on which they are spying. An awkward bit of this last element is that it often chances to be true, as is apparent to students of the relationships between certain members of the German and British nobility not only before the outbreak of World War II, but in the intrigues directed particularly against Churchill during the autumn and winter of 1939–1940.
The most insidious of the bases for fear of spies is subtler than the others, yet quite as dangerous. It is rarely formulated but runs roughly, and often subconsciously, like this: if some of our best educated citizens who have had every advantage our society can offer are nonetheless prepared to dedicate themselves to an ideology destructive to that society, may it not be just possible that there is something dangerously wrong with our own philosophy of life?
It is exactly this element that accounts for the extraordinary outburst of outraged surprise with which the British public greeted the exposure of Anthony Blunt as a KGB agent. As in the case of Philby and Maclean, here was a young man of good family who had enjoyed to the full the educational, cultural, and social advantages of a reasonably affluent student at one of Britain’s two senior universities. He was as far from deprivation as anyone could get. There was no visible cause for him to turn against society. The thought that, despite all this, some extraordinary power of attraction in Communism’s alien and hostile doctrines had seduced him was terrifying. To judge by the tone of many British commentators, it was as alarming as a discovery that a witch-doctor had been secretly at large, exercising black-magical powers over the citizenry.
Such thoughts paralyze the capacity to see and deal rationally with the problem. The true explanation is a great deal simpler. Blunt and the other young men concerned were at Cambridge during the Great Depression. About three million were unemployed, and at that time to be on the dole or in low-paid employment in Britain meant poverty that was often near the starvation line.
John Gunther, in his book Inside Britain, notes the astonishment of American visitors at the docility of the British working class under such conditions and the absence of revolutionary outbursts. In this desert of misery, Cambridge was an ostentatious oasis of civilized comfort. It is not at all surprising that Blunt and others should have, with some deep feelings of guilt, questioned the justification for such a state of affairs. On the contrary, it would have been surprising had any sensitive and informed young man coolly accepted his position as though by divine right. The Communists did not require secret recruiting sergeants; the economics of the time were doing the job quite well enough. By contrast, only a few years earlier at Oxford, when the economic situation was less spectacularly dire, the majority of the student population was almost entirely apolitical. If, as some recent publications have suggested, there were Soviet recruiters at the Oxford of that day, they should have been fired for incompetence. Politics was in the main a replay, more or less histrionic, of the Liberal–Conservative struggles of the years before World War I, with Labour adding no more than flavoring to a familiar stew.
Some who delve needlessly deep into the motivations of international spies, and double and triple agents, have made much of the fact that many of what may be called “The Cambridge Group” of distinguished Soviet agents can be shown to have been homosexual or to have had homosexual connections. But let us note that at Oxford in the mid-twenties, homosexuality was as fashionable and obtrusive as Communism was not. From the London press, which liked to paint lurid pictures of goings-on at the university, you could have gathered that the undergraduates were about evenly divided between flaunting and artistically outré homosexuals and sturdy British “hearties” upholding the values for which the preceding generation had died in the war.
Such nonsense apart, it is certainly true that in the most flamboyant and “trend-setting” intellectual circles homosexuality was in some cases so nearly de rigueur that aspiring writers, artists, and above all actors, actually felt compelled to pretend to be homosexual. The slang word for it was “so.” In reply to the greeting “How are you?” a common reply was: “So so, but not quite so so as sometimes.” A friend of mine who had the most “normal” sexual tastes started a literary magazine which, it was immediately suggested, should have been called Just So Stories. When an undergraduate was actually sent down for homosexual practices, astounded observers held competitions to suggest what amazingly spectacular misbehavior he must have indulged in to merit this extraordinary action by the authorities.
Another odd fact is that at that time “womanizer” was a term of abuse. I knew a normally lusty American Rhodes Scholar who could hardly believe that even among those who vigorously deplored the existence of homosexuality, “womanizing” was worse than immoral; it was unspeakably vulgar. This must have had its historical roots in the long ages when Oxford was so successfully isolated by lack of transport from the outside world that prostitutes were the only women available during term time to all but the richest students who could afford gigs and other horse-drawn vehicles to get them at least as far as Reading. By my day the majority of heterosexual people were able to find ways and means of satisfaction, even in term time, but always under the still somewhat inhibiting fear of being dubbed “womanizers.”
It is a pity that so many who write of Oxford and Cambridge in the rele
vant years are so crassly ignorant of the prevailing atmosphere. They remind me of Mr. Vladimir, the Imperial Russian diplomat in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, as he lectures the title character:
And Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organization where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge.
We find a Mr. Vladimir at every corner today, spouting his confident but dangerously misleading lectures.
Still, in the areas of spying and terrorism, even the best are inclined to leave out from their sapient and (so far as they go) truthful analyses the factor of unpredictability. Or nonsense, if you prefer. Brooding on this situation, I constantly keep in mind my own experience in the field of espionage, or rather, counter-espionage.
Early in the Spanish Civil War I was what, if one were inclined to pomposity, might be called a section leader of the counter-espionage department of the Spanish Republican government dealing with Anglo-Saxon personalities. My job was principally to vet applications by British and Americans for visas to enter Republican Spain.
It was, as I realized rather late, a “no win” situation for me. Either I allowed in some supposed friend of the Republic who turned out to be a secret enemy, in which case I could very well be shot as a saboteur. Or, overcautiously avoiding this risk, I might exclude some character suspect to me who would later turn out to be a loyal friend of the Republic and a potentially powerful propagandist in its cause. Saboteur again.
A Colossal Wreck Page 30