Portia Podsnap

Michael Malice

The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

Independently Published, 2022

 

Margot Metroland

What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand. It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. I’m sure it meant a lot to people who came of age in the late 60s and were getting tired of Randianism by 1971. But you may find it dreary and overly granular today

Anyway, now we have Michael Malice, literally beginning the book with Ayn Rand! She disappears from view for long sections of the book, but she keeps bouncing back into the story. Her keen insight comes through in one of the early passages, when she’s asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about Communist-tainted Hollywood films, and they want to focus mainly on Song of Russia (an anodyne movie with Robert Taylor, set at the period of the German invasion). But AR goes no sir; explicit pro-Soviet propaganda is not the issue here. The real problem is subtle, almost undetectable nuances in theme, plot, even set design. This is vintage Ayn Rand, as anyone who’s read her criticism (e.g., The Romantic Manifesto) can sense. Smoking cigarettes defiantly, enjoying illicit sex, breaking the rules for the hell of it—everything in the Rand universe is fraught with serious meaning.

The persistence of Ayn Rand in popular (and high) culture is impressive. About 15 years ago a relative of mine, a history professor, wrote a well received biographical study of Rand, her Objectivist movement, and their effect upon conservatism and libertarian economics. I go to her website now, and by gosh and by golly, she’s still plugging AR on her website. “The leading independent expert on Ayn Rand” she boasts…and then farther down the page…she mentions she’s a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution! She knows what she’s doing. “Ayn Rand” continues to be eye-candy for an awful lot of people.

And me. I went through my Randian period many many years ago, gradually coming to the realization that her didactic manner served to hide the fact that her philosophy and precepts were pretty much flapdoodle. Oh, I still remember The Fountainhead fondly, Atlas Shrugged not so much (her idea of a heroic industrialist is a guy who runs a railroad), and I still hold fast to some of the crackbrained notions about economics that I learned from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And I will still defend Rand against all comers, while yet admitting her wacky errors in logic and literary criticism.

The White Pill has the look and feel of a YA nonfiction read (“Young Adult” literature being books actually aimed 12-year-olds). However it is not dumbed down in any way. What it’s largely about is the politics of terror, as utilized by the Bolsheviki. I emphasize this because a few years ago i was reading James Burnham’s The Struggle for the World (1947), and therein Burnham identifies and skewers that aspect of Communism. Terror is not some expedient, some short-term solution to simplify operations; no, it’s the whole deal. And Communism is not some theory of economics—or, Lord knows, an idealized “humanist” plan to give people free healthcare and borscht.

George Orwell read and reviewed Burnham’s book just as he was struggling with the early chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It gave him the golden key to the plot and backstory of his book. He practically puts Burnham’s words into O’Brien’s mouth. A boot stamping on a human face—forever. Of course, then and now, the Reds sell themselves to the gullible masses by denying Communism is a system of institutionalized cruelty; oh no, it’s a way or providing you with free healthcare, and, uh…kasha varnishkes! [1]

Terror and torture figure bigly in The White Pill. When I was still in grade school there was a scary book that was sometimes required reading. The Bridge at Andau (1957) by James Michener. It’s about oppression and atrocities in Communist Hungary during the postwar era, and I’ll tell you it is a real horrorshow. Fortunately it’s very un-Michener in one respect: it’s not a ten-pound doorstop, in fact it’s quite slim. Persistent rumor hath it that the CIA hired Michener to crank it out as slick hackwork, based on some light research and heavy interviews from the November 1956 refugees. Much in the same way that Dr Tom Dooley and ghostwriters were supposedly ginned up to knock out torture-and-mutilation bestsellers about Indochina during the same era. I just don’t know. I do know the characters in the book are mainly composites, so much so that Wikipedia used to list the book as fiction.

Less terrifyingly…the book has the oddest endnoting apparatus I’ve ever seen. Lower-case roman numerals are used. Like, you know, lxxiv instead of note 74. I’ve been reading the Kindle version, so they really stand out on the page, in bright orange. One of the advantages of Kindle editions and some other e-books is that you can flip back and forth from the page you’re reading to the notes in the back, then click again to go back to the text.

Villains in the book include many of the famous apologists for the Stalin era, including Walter Duranty, who spent years denying the famines and death squads. Harold Laski is here too, crueler and snider than he’s usually portrayed. He has to be there, after all he was Ayn Rand’s model for Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. [2]

Upton Sinclair makes an appearance as a “democratic socialist” who loathes totalitarianism but praises Soviet Union because, “I say that its record is pretty nearly perfect.” This is truly cognitive dissonance, or fear of being a contrarian, like people who sign onto the Global Warming hoax today because they don’t wish to be stigmatized as concave-brain weirdos. Like most of these villains, Sinclair pooh-poohed the idea that defendants in the Stalin Purge Trials were innocent.

Another “democratic socialist,” George Orwell, is a Good Guy who recognized the Trials for what they were. His eyes were opened for good when he went to fight in Spain in 1937, and found that Stalin’s Red brigades were more interested in shooting their “allies,” the socialists and Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalists, than in fighting the “fascists” (as the Reds liked to refer to the Nationalist forces). Now Orwell goes back to England and tries to publish his new memoir of that war, Homage to Catalonia, but his usual publisher, Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club, won’t touch it. You see, Orwell’s criticism of the Reds in Spain went against the ideal of Popular Front-style solidarity: socialists and communists united against the “fascist” foe. [3]

But there are minor Bad Guys too, including the Algonquin wit Dorothy Parker, and novelist-critic Granville Hicks, who were among the signatories of a notorious 1938 letter published in The Daily Worker and New Masses. The subject was the Stalin Purge Trials of the previous two years, and these literary lights wished the world to know (or at least the world of literary fellow-travelers) that those culprits who had been tried and tortured, and imprisoned, and often shot—yes indeed, they were arch-criminals, guilty as hell.

A noticeably absent Bad Guy in the text is Joseph Davies, a lawyer and Federal bureaucrat who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union 1936-1938, about which he wrote a pro-Stalin memoir called Mission to Moscow. Davies had been a prosperous corporate attorney and Democrat Party fundraiser when he married the rich fabulously rich Marjorie Merriwether Post (General Foods and Post Cereals) in 1935. You don’t need to read Davies’ book, just look at the film version starring Walter Huston. Joe goes all goofy and goggle-eyed when he’s talking to Stalin, and Stalin explains why he was executing all his old Bolsheviks and trusted generals. Basically, these miscreants were plotting against the state, they were sabotaging factories, they were taking the food out of the mouths of innocent babes. The film shows us vignettes of these arrests: people seized on the street, or at the factory they’re sabotaging. The important aspect of the Davies narrative is that he was not being devious or following some Communist Party discipline.

Bad Guy? Actually just a naïve simpleton, a stooge, of a sort that was not unknown in those days. Like another woolly-headed fool that we’re coming to shortly, Henry Wallace.

Generally Michael Malice and I are on the same page when it comes to Good Guy/Bad Guy rankings. But there are some strange, surprising exceptions. Malice calls author Roald Dahl “one of the vilest people who ever lived.” Is this because of the sadistic violence and little brown Oompa-Loompa “pygmies” in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Not on your tintype.

A giant of a man, [Dahl] was quite vocal throughout his life about his racist and anti-Semitic views. Claims that “Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” paled in comparison to his personal behavior.

Malice then goes on to suggest that Dahl pestered wife Patricia Neal for sex when she was partially paralyzed after suffering a series of strokes and a three-week coma. What he leaves out is that Roald enabled a near-100% recovery by forcing Pat through a rigorous physical therapy protocol at a military base. He also resurrected Pat’s career, getting her roles in films and TV commercials. (Ayn Rand sighting here! Pat’s role in the film of The Fountainhead gives us another opportunity to see the AR bobble-head bounce up again.)

As for those “racist and anti-Semitic comments,” they consist mostly of critical remarks about Israel. Dahl and “anti-semitism,” if that’s what you want to call it, ranks somewhere south of Taki Theodoracopulos. The Forward, a very lively Jewish publication, listed a few of what are ostensibly the five most rancid remarks, but these are pretty tame lot. I’ve known Jews who routinely said much more mordant or vitriolic things. Self-hating? As Larry David said, “Yeah I hate myself but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.” Move over, Ron Unz.

There are some valid criticisms that can be made about Roald Dahl, but Malice sort of drops the ball in this regard. While enjoying the hospitality of generous American friends in Manhattan, Washington DC, Virginia, and Hyde Park, NY (wink wink), he was working as a spy for William (“Intrepid”) Stephenson of British Security Coordination, headquartered in Rockefeller Center. Malice tell the story of how Dahl purloined and copied a secret document prepared by Vice-President Henry Wallace, regarding postwar global strategy (and also control of international airline routes). This had a beneficial outcome, for both Britain and America. Churchill was made aware of Wallace’s planned skullduggery, and America got to give the woolly-minded Wallace the boot as VP, thereby narrowly avoiding having him succeed FDR in April 1945. But still, Dahl’s actions were dirty tricks, literally crimes.

And not to be overly long-winded on the subject of Roald Dahl, Malice writes that Dahl was mainly known in 1944 for having been an RAF pilot who got shot down and badly burned by a crash in Libya early in the war (not in Greece, as Malice says). But no, he had been publishing short stories that were well received, and he wrote a popular kiddy book called The Gremlins, which Walt Disney planned to make into an animated film (but didn’t, because of RAF oversight restrictions). [4]

The second half of The White Pill is mainly about the last few decades of politics in Great Britain and America. I’m not quite sure what the theme is here, but it appears to be a big cheer for libertarian-conservative politics. Yay, Maggie Thatcher!(Cursed in the press a few years earlier as Milk Snatcher, when as Education Secretary she axed free milk at school for 11-year-olds.) Go, Ronald Reagan! Malice seems to like Thatcher more, and disapproves of the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth, but America clearly had a more vested interest there even if (as I vaguely recall) the Americans were mainly medical students who couldn’t get into a med school at home.

In discussing detente in the Reagan/Thatcher/Gorbachev years, Malice skips over an essential motivating geopolitical factor at work in the early 1980s. America was supplying Pershing II nuclear missiles to NATO, to be positioned in West Germany, and Yuri Andropov (briefly General Secretary at the Kremlin, 1982-1984) pushed the story that Ronald Reagan intended to commence nuclear war.

Actually, for some years Soviet propagandists had been trying to sell the world a chimera called a “Nuclear Freeze.” The propaganda boys gave this campaign a full-court press, something we hadn’t seen since the Popular Front days, or perhaps the immediate postwar years. In America people were encouraged to write SINCERELY, NO NUKES! for the complimentary close of serious office correspondence. You’d see people throughout Western Europe (and even America) wearing cartoon-sun pinbacks that said “Atomkraft? Nej Tak!” (For some reason I remember the one in Danish; readers are more likely to remember the German one, with “Nein Danke!”) And then there was the whiny German girl singer Nena, singing “Neunundneunzig Luftballons,” because helium toy balloons, you see, signify nuclear fallout. Or something. An animated cartoon from Britain, “When the Wind Blows,” about living in the aftermath of nuclear war. And some long, lugubrious essays by Jonathan Schell in The New Yorker called things like “How the World Ends” or “The Fate of the Earth,” all trying to scare you to death about the prospect of nuclear war, or even the use of nuclear energy!

This mad fad all needs to be reviewed, sifted, eviscerated, by someone who has the time and funds. But it’s significant that this propaganda campaign is nearly always ignored by present-day writers. We get maudlin drama and memoirs about po’ widdle commie writers in Hollywood 70+ years ago, as though the time between the Hollywood Ten and the height of the Blacklist was 50 years rather than 5. Nothing on the Nuclear Freeze campaign.

And intelligent people actually bought this Nuclear Freeze nonsense back in the day. My cousin in England was one of the originators of the Greenham Common Women’s Camp in the early 1980s, in a protest which pretended to be about encouraging a Nuclear Freeze. (American military, with nuclear weapons, perhaps, had taken over part of an RAF installation.) Actually it was more of a kumbaya feminist encampment, along the lines of the late, lamented Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. My friend Andrew Paulson would have dinner with me and ask if I’d read the latest Jonathan Schell screed in The New Yorker. “It’s really serious. You must read it! Nuclear war is a clear and present danger!”

So long as I’ve mentioned Andrew Paulson, I’ll sign off with another insubstantial (but funny) story about our favorite bobble-head, the Divine Ayn. Back in the 70s, my late friend Andrew, later to be a highly imaginative international entrepreneur (at least according to Wikipedia) dined out for months on his story of visiting Ayn Rand. He was about 19 at the time. One day, on a lark, he and a friend dropped by her apartment building (East 35th St., I seem to recall). He buzzed her on the intercom, she answered immediately, and invited the lads up for a drink.

“She’s in pretty good shape…for a chain smoker with one lung,” Andy told me. Then a year or two later I happened to bring up that Ayn Rand visit, and Andy just roared with laughter. It turned out to be just a big fat shaggy dog story that he had almost forgotten about. What actually happened that day was that Andy and friend did indeed buzz Rand’s apartment, and she did indeed answer, but in an angry tone. “Who ARE you?” So they gave their names, maybe their college. AR was having none of it. “Yes but who ARE you?”

Yes indeed, Andy had quite an imagination but I think I like the “true” version better. It just seems to nail Ayn Rand.

Notes

[1] I touched on the Burnham influence in this essay: https://counter-currents.com/2019/06/your-nineteen-eighty-four-sources-in-full/

[2] A moment’s thought: Ayn Rand, who was married to Frank O’Connor, not only gave many of her Fountainhead characters Irish names, she even did that to the “Harold Laski” socialist villain, who was well known to be a Lithuanian-Polish Jew from Manchester in the original model, but now gets renamed Toohey! In fact, I don’t think AR had any Jewish characters in her novels. She was like Louis B. Mayer of MGM, intent on presenting a kind of Andy Hardy America (or perhaps Mickey Rooney America) to her audience. No Jews in Anthem, or in The Fountainhead, or in Atlas Shrugged, unless I missed something.

[3] The Communist ringleader in Barcelona who had Orwell and friends in his sights—and may well have been responsible for Orwell’s being shot in the neck—was Ramon Mercader, a wealthy Spanish communist and NKVD operative. Two years after Orwell’s sojourn in Spain, Mercader went to Mexico City on an even bigger mission. He gradually befriended Leon Trotsky, posing as a sympathizer. After a number of months he murdered Trotsky with an ice axe.

[4] The story of The Gremlins and Dahl’s spy-skullduggery is told in detailed narrative in The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant (2008).

Robert Brasillach & Notre avant-guerre: La Cagoule

Remembering Robert Brasillach, March 31, 1909–February 6, 1945

Preface

Here is another section from Notre avant-guerre (approximately, Our Pre-War Years) by Robert Brasillach. The four earlier installments are here.

Some of the passages in this memoir were lifted from Brasillach’s journalism, mainly from the latter 1930s. I’ve noticed that two were originally written for Revue Universelle or Je Suis Partout. But others, such as the following, are de novo exposition. In this excerpt, Brasillach is mainly discussing the Rightist organizations of the mid-1930s—the nationalist, anti-communist, and monarchist ligues that were suppressed by fiat, by the Popular Front (i.e., socialist and communist) government under Léon Blum in 1936. In their place sprang up new political parties and semi-secret societies. Of the latter, the most significant is La Cagoule (“the cowl,” or “the hood”). If you look it up in old newspapers and magazines, or Google it, you may find it referred to as a terrorist organization. TIME magazine first referred to it (issue of November 29, 1937) as a “fabulous, supposedly extreme Rightist French Ku Klux Klan.” That’s a bit of a stretch, seeing as Cagoulards were largely Catholic alumni of Charles Maurras’s Action Française.

The TIME story I’m looking at is about the arrest of Cagoule members, and seizure of caches of machine guns and rifles by the French Sûreté. It was believed, or suspected—or perhaps merely trumpeted to the popular press—that the Cagoulards were planning a coup. TIME however treats it all as rather a joke, capping the story with:

This week the Duc de Guise, bewhiskered pretender to the vanished throne of France, attempted from his Belgian exile to create an impression that what was afoot was a coup to crown him. “We have decided,” royally manifestoed Guise again, as he often has before, “to reconquer the throne of our fathers.”

 

The attitude toward La Cagoule among French politicians and journalists wasn’t quite so supercilious. As Brasillach tells us, below, fear of Cagoulards was used to demonize and caricature the French Right as a whole, in much the same way that the American Left has demonized Trump supporters (or simply, “Republicans”) as a dangerous mob of gun-toting, terroristic booboisie.

As we return to our story here, we find Brasillach has been talking about another pretender to the French throne, Henri d’Orleans, Comte de Paris (1908-1999) a popular public figure in the mid-1930s. Henri is the direct descendant of a younger brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, Duc d’Orleans (1640-1701). The main Bourbon line, the so-called “Legitimists” (Louis XIV’s descendants) finally died out in the 1880s, leaving their Orleans cousins as the primary claimants to the throne. Action Française and other nationalist and monarchist political factions are watching him with fervent interest. Henri is an aviator, with a very handsome family, Brasillach told us last time, and he publishes a monarchist newspaper, the Courrier Royal.

But as we rejoin the story, there is some disappointing news…

From Notre avant-guerre:

The following year [i.e., 1937] we were astonished to discover that the Comte de Paris had condemned Action Française in the course of a manifesto. No doubt his advisers had persuaded him that his cause would be served by the abandoning this discredited party. What happened, happened: and people on the Left weren’t broken up by it, that’s for sure. And so that old wrestler, Charles Maurras, suffered yet another blow. We consoled ourselves by repeating to ourselves that the character of the king did not matter, that ingratitude is a royal virtue, and that time arranges many things.

And there was other bad news. There was the great [Francois de] La Rocque defamation lawsuit, where the leader of the Parti Social Français [1] was accused of having received funds from Prime Minister Tardieu. [2]

Disgusted with all the political parties, some adventurous young people looked for something else. They organized secret societies, in the style of the Carbonari. The first ones were some dissidents from Action Française who got hosed down by the police, in the usual fashion. This baptism gave them the ironic name Cagoulards. [3] Meantime, out in the provinces, they were founding societies to fight against communism. Everyone knew that there was coordination between the organizations’ commandants and the towns’ civic leaders to prevent a sudden uprising or coup. But otherwise these groups were very different from each other. The police surveilled them all the time, while the marxists did their best to spread lies and confusion. One fine day, supposedly, a vast conspiracy against the Republic would be launched with great fanfare, and only the Cagoulards knew what the next chapter of the story would bring.

Some very good people got arrested, and even authentic heroes. For example, General Duseigneur [4], who would disappear at the beginning of the coming war; or Sergeant Darnand [5], thanks to whom a forthcoming German offensive in July 1918 was revealed. And yet, personally I never knew any Cagoulard, of any kind whatsoever.

Nevertheless one knew that these these enigmatic and varied organizations were shot through with police informers, scoundrels, fanatics, and dimwits—even if the majority were just brave young men driven by a need for virtuous activism. The end result was that everything on the nationalist side looked confused—defensive organizations got lumped in with Carbonari—while meantime the strongly disciplined and ordered communist cells were themselves accumulating caches of armaments and plotting intricate conspiracies. So for two or three years La Cagoule functioned as a scarecrow of the Popular Front, with the Left blaming it for everything.

But that was just an indication of how mixed up people were in those years, caught in a kind of romantic despair that seized many patriots. At the same time, André Tardieu abandoned politics entirely and published books about the parliamentary regime’s incompetence.

One encouraging development, however, was the emergence of Jacques Doriot. [6] I’d always been curious about his character, this skinny, hairy little devil of whom the bourgeoisie were so afraid, and also the most outstanding leader of the Communist Party. He had founded the Communist network of Saint-Denis (there were some splinter groups, the most important of which was in the Chamber of Deputies as the P.U.P. or Party of Proletarian Unity). In that old royal town of Saint-Denis, we knew he was well liked, and took care of the people; also that he was hated by the Muscovite Communists. Doriot’s people had a song:

Forward, Saint-Denis,
For revolutionary unity!

Notes

[1] François de La Rocque (1885-1946) was the leader of a nationalist and Catholic “league” in the 1920s and 30s, the Croix de Feu. When the Léon Blum’s Popular Front government banned all the Rightist leagues in 1936, La Rocque founded the Parti Social Français (P.S.F.). During the Vichy years, 1940-1944, La Rocque remained in France but opposed close collaboration with the Germans, and formed his own Resistance network, in contact with British intelligence. He and his followers were arrested by German security in Clermont-Ferrand in 1943, and interned with other French officials until freed by American forces in early 1945.

[2] André Tardieu (1876-1945) was premier of France for three brief periods between 1929 and 1932. Brasillach speaks of a «grand procés», literally a 1937 trial in which La Rocque and an old follower of his were accusing each other of defamation. The ex-colleague had been told by Tardieu that he, Tardieu had made payments to La Rocque in 1932 out of secret government funds. La Rocque lost the case.

[3] It literally means the hooded men, but there doesn’t seem to have been an actual uniform, in the manner of today’s Gilets Jaunes.

[4] Édouard Duseigneur (1882-1940), military officer and leader of the Cagoule. He died in the Ardennes in early 1940. According to Wikipedia, he was arrested 25 November 1937 with other leaders of this secret society. (See also introductory notes about the TIME magazine article.)

[5] Joseph Darnand (1897-1945), member of the Cagoule, later leader of the Milice française during the Vichy years. A sergeant in the Great War, he got behind enemy lines and found the plans for a new Ludendorff offensive in July 1918. During the 1939-1940 war he was a lieutenant. Executed in 1945 by firing squad.

[6] Jacques Doriot (1898-1945), sometime Communist, later quasi-fascist, founder of the Parti Populaire Français. During the Second World War he volunteered to fight with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and was there visited by Robert Brasillach. He died in early 1945 while he was driving to Sigmaringen and his car was strafed by Allied planes.

On April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin collapsed and died of a heart attack in a friend’s Manhattan apartment. He was 74 and had done nothing more strenuous that day than take a stroll through Central Park. At this time Teilhard was known mainly as a paleontologist and geologist, albeit one who also produced some odd and controversial theological writings.

However, in the decades since his death, the controversies surrounding Teilhard have reshaped themselves. Now he’s usually described as a French Jesuit who wrote some speculative theology incorporating human evolution; while also promoting some dangerous, rather verboten, scientific theories. He believed in eugenics. He persistently wrote about the natural inequality of the races. Unfriendly writers today describe him as a racist, a Nazi apologist, a transhumanist, a believer in sterilization of the unfit.

The reason for this redefinition is very simple: different eras come with different political biases. When Teilhard was doing scientific expeditions in China and elsewhere in the 1920s, race differences were a perfectly acceptable field of investigation. No scientist—surely no anthropologist or paleontologist—could blot his copybook by discussing them. Such discussion went with the territory.

But that was then. Nowadays the anti-Teilhard crowd get the vapors over a little anodyne remark he put in a letter in 1929, around the time he was helping to excavate the various skeletal remains that became collectively known as Peking Man:

Do the yellows [«les jaunes» i.e.,the Chinese] have the same human value as the whites? Licent [a fellow  paleontologist] and many missionaries say that their present inferiority is due to their long history of Paganism. I’m afraid that this is only a “declaration of pastors.” Instead, the cause seems to be the natural racial foundation… Christian love overcomes all inequalities, but it does not deny them. [1]

By “declaration of pastors” he meant sweet-nothing mutterings of missionaries: empty words, groundless explanations. Teilhard the Man of Science wasn’t having any of it. As he saw it, it was almost certainly due to race, genetics, evolution.

In 1951, when he was living in New York and working for the Wenner-Gren Foundation [2] (because the Jesuits had exiled him from France and then wouldn’t let him accept an appointment at Columbia University), Teilhard was raging against UNESCO. In 1950 UNESCO had issued an utterly vapid declaration, “FALLACIES OF RACISM EXPOSED: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists.” No scientists are quoted, no cogent explanation given. They’re trying to lay down political correctness by fiat. (Read it here.)[3]

A modern pearl-clutching critic of Teilhard comments, aghast:

In his letter [to UNESCO] Teilhard argued against “the scientific uselessness as well as the practical danger” of this document, noting that “it’s not a question of “equality,” but of “complementarity in convergence”…which does not exclude the momentary prominence of certain of its branches over others.” Such a public argument points to a deeply held and seriously considered belief in inequality among humans. [4]

Then, in 1953, we find Teilhard similarly taking on the poltroonishness of the Roman Curia:

Why is it that in Rome, along with a “Biblical Commission” there is no “Scientific Commission” charged with pointing out to authorities the points on which one can be sure Humanity will take a stand tomorrow—points, I repeat, such as: 1) the question of eugenics (aimed at the optimum rather than the maximum in reproduction, and joined to a gradual separation of sexuality from reproduction); and 2) the absolute right (which must, of course, be regulated in its ‘timing’ and in its conditions!) to try everything right to the end—even in the matter of human biology. [5]

There’s another controversy that followed Teilhard for most of his career: the suspicion that he was a paleontological fraudster. He was present at the digs for two of the most famous hominid fossils of the 20th century: Piltdown Man (c. 1912) near Uckfield, Sussex, England; and Peking Man (1929-1930) in China.

The Piltdown find was always suspect, although tentatively accepted by authorities at the Natural History Museum in London and the Geological Society. Piltdown Man was conclusively declared a hoax in 1953. It was fabricated out of a Cro-Magnon skull and an orangutan jawbone, by Teilhard’s friend and neighbor Charles Dawson. Dawson was lawyer and amateur paleontologist apparently over-eager to find some “missing-link” pre-human fossils in his very own corner of England.

Doubts about Peking Man are more elusive. Teilhard was with a large group of scientists from research foundations, and a skull he found was identified as a specimen of Homo erectus, from about 500,000 years ago. Eventually there were other skulls, and 200 bones in all. However, the collection never made it out of China, and was lost in the early 1940s. [6]

Ergo, we have no Peking Man bones to examine. Some people doubt they ever existed, and it’s just Teilhard doing another Piltdown hoax. A current theory is that the box of bones is buried under a Peking—that is, “Beijing”—parking lot. [7]

Early-Life Check

Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born the fourth of eleven children on 1 May 1881 at his family’s country house in the Auvergne, just outside Clermont-Ferrand, in the dead-center of France. (“Chateau de Sarcenat, par Oreines, Puy-de-Dôme,” is the address he later provided for the family manse.) During the winter they lived with relatives in a townhouse in Clermont-Ferrand. Land of volcanos and Michelin tires; where in 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, and where, in the late 1960s, Marcel Ophuls collected wartime stories from locals for The Sorrow and the Pity.

The family’s complicated double-barreled surname (pronounced, more or less: TAY-yahr duh shar-DAHN) is the legacy of two lines of ennobled ancestors. His father’s family had lived in the area at least since medieval times. His mother, though, was from Picardy; she was the great-grandniece of François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. [8]

At 12 young Pierre was sent off to boarding school in Villefranche-sur-Saone, north of Lyons, after which received his baccalauréat in mathematics, before entering the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence. [9] The Jesuits were expelled from France in 1901-1902. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, France was going through another of its radical-Left, anti-Catholic fits. Teilhard would have to complete his seminary education on the island of Jersey, just off the coast of Brittany, and then in Hastings, Sussex, where he was ordained in 1911.[10]

1905-1908, he taught physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo. He also went fossil-hunting and discovered an unknown ancient species of shark, which was later named for him (Teilhardia). Back in England, he finished seminary, crossed paths with Piltdown Man, then went to Paris to study at the Museum of Natural History. In the Great War he was a stretcher-bearer. Then, more studies at the Sorbonne, and finally the chair of geology at the Institut Catholique in Paris, where he infused his lectures with discussion of evolutionary thought.

Off to China

Presumably Teilhard would have stayed in France most of his life, apart from occasional expeditions. But the Jesuits were discomfited by all his talk of evolution. Simple minds might possibly imagine that all this evolution talk somehow fitted into Christian Doctrine; that seems to have been the concern.[11] For the Jesuits, this was not the time to stir up trouble with the Curia. The Society of Jesus was once totally dissolved, and banned entirely, for 40 years (1773-1814). On top of that, the Jesuits had been expelled from France 20 years ago and only been let back in, in 1914, for the sake of morale and the so-called “Union sacrée” during the Great War.

Teilhard attracted too much attention and speculated too openly. He needed to cultivate a lower profile.

The easiest solution to this was to send him far, far away. And so he went to China, and spent most of the next 23 years there, joining another Jesuit paleontologist named Fr. Emile Licent, who kept a fossil museum in Tientsin. One reads that Teilhard didn’t really like the Chinese, didn’t like the poor—I assume that means poor Chinese—and in all that time he never bothered to learn the language. This last part beggars belief; surely he picked up a little kitchen Chinese here and there?

Racist eugenic practices! Nazi experiments!

A recently minted PhD in theology at University of Notre Dame, one John P. Slattery, has carved out a kind of academic specialty in his takedowns of Teilhard. These began with a lurid attack on him in the Philosophy and Theology journal in 2016. Writes Slattery in the article’s abstract:

[F]rom the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed “imperfect” humans. These ideas explicitly lay the groundwork for Teilhard’s famous cosmological theology, a link which has been largely ignored in Teilhardian research until now. [12]

Quite an aggressive opening sortie there. Racism! Eugenics! Nazi experiments! Imperfect humans!

Slattery kept these salvos up for another few years, with online debates and articles. One in particular quotes offending passages at length, from Teilhard letters and biographies. I will quote one more passage here, beginning with Slattery’s commentary:

Besides their obvious objectionable nature, Teilhard’s views withstand two troubling tests: first, he defends them boldly in the face of his respected Christian colleagues who disagree; second, he persists in such views despite the shocking revelations of what took place in the concentration camps and death camps of Nazi Germany. One of Teilhard’s early biographers recounts a 1947 public debate with Gabriel Marcel, the famous French Catholic existentialist, where Teilhard persists in arguing for forced eugenical practices:

“Once in a debate with Gabriel Marcel on the subject of ‘Science and Rationality,’ [Teilhard] shocked his opponent by refusing to permit even the appalling evidence of the experiments of the doctors of Dachau to modify his faith in the inevitability of human progress. ‘Man,” [Teilhard] asserted, ‘to become full man, must have tried everything’ …He added that since the human species was still so young…the persistence of such evil was to be expected. ‘Prometheus!’ Marcel had cried…’No,’ replied Teilhard, ‘only man as God has made him.’” (From Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, Teilhard (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977: pp. 237-8.) [13]

I don’t know what the doctors of Dachau are supposed to have done. But Teilhard’s response is admirable: The human species is young, so the persistence of evil is to be expected. This makes sense within the schema of Teilhard’s cosmogony: the Universe, or Creation, is continually evolving, continually perfecting itself.

Anti-Dysgenics = Transhumanism?

Not as emotional as Slattery, but much more far-fetched, is the anti-Teilhard diatribe that appeared in the “Strategic Culture Foundation” blog. In a 2021 essay, a writer named Matthew Ehret describes Teilhard as a “racist” and a founder of “transhumanism.”

If the latter term had a father, it wasn’t Teilhard but his friend Julian Huxley, and Huxley certainly did not intend it in the deviant sense with which the word is bandied about today. It meant improvement of the race, avoidance of dysgenics. Teilhard is quoted discussing it in 1951:

So far we have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we have given too little thought to the question of what medical and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we suppress them. In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and developed. Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to society. [14]

Well, that looks quite reasonable. What’s not reasonable is the way Ehret makes hash of the salient facts of Teilhard’s life. He astoundingly claims that Teilhard himself concocted the “Piltdown Man” hoax in 1912 in England, and then pulled a similar hoax with “Peking Man,” which he calls Piltdown Man 2.0. Then, switching tracks, he implies Teilhard is to blame for such degeneracies as “Liberation Theology” and the absurd declarations of the current pope:

When he died in 1955, Chardin’s works were still largely banned as heresy by the Vatican. His work continued to spread as a sort of Soviet-era samizdat recruiting ever more converts to his particular “new and improved Christianity.” [15]

Who is Chardin? If you mean Teilhard, his writings were never “banned” by “the Vatican” or ever even placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. As a Jesuit priest, he was required to have approval from superiors before publishing (a particularly sticky problem with the Jesuits, as they often had friction with the Curia). Yes, Teilhard was prohibited from publishing some of them, just as he was prohibited from teaching—in Paris, in New York, and elsewhere—because that’s what sometimes happens when you become a soldier in the Society of Jesus. Or the Trappists, for that matter. Maybe the Carmelites. Never mind the specific, arbitrary reasons.

Ehret’s basic facts are all wrong, to the point where I suspect he’s just ginning us up with a fun conspiracy theory. He claims Teilhard was on “holiday” from schoolteaching in Cairo when he conjured up Piltdown Man in Sussex in 1912. In reality Sussex is where Teilhard lived; he hadn’t been to Cairo for four years. He’d been in England or Jersey for most of the past decade, ever since being expelled from France.

And of course Teilhard did not concoct Piltdown Man or promote it to the Geological Society, or the Natural History Museum in South Kensington; that presenter was his friend Charles Dawson. As for Peking Man, several research institutes and foundations participated in those excavations in the 1920s and 30s. Teilhard was just one of maybe a dozen prominent scientists who had a hand in them.

In the matter of Stephen Jay Gould

I suspect Ehret has fallen prey to the pixie dust scattered by Stephen Jay Gould many years ago, claiming that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the prime instigator in the Piltdown hoax, with Dawson merely his sideman.  Prof. Gould wrote several essays, with follow-up commentary on the matter, collected in his books, The Panda’s Thumb (1980), and Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983), arguing that Teilhard was at the very least complicit in the perpetration of the Piltdown hoax. [16]

Stephen Jay Gould (son of Leonard S. Gold and Eleanor Rosenberg) was a first-generation Jewish-American, a paleontologist and historian of science who worked at both the American Museum of Natural History, by the west side of Central Park in New York City, and Harvard University, where he spent most of his career as professor of geology. With this background he had a particular interest in the story of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was also affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History when Gould was a kid. Perhaps the adult Gould had personal agenda against someone who advocated eugenics and the study of racial differences. Regardless, the Teilhard issue became an obsession with him for many years.

Gould’s main argument for Teilhard’s guilt is that he didn’t talk or write much about it once the hoax was suspect. Gould gives evidence that Teilhard even rewrote an autobiographical essay, deleting a reference to his early association with Eoanthropus dawsons (Piltdown Man). Rather than empathizing with a potentially embarrassing association, Gould’s peculiar mindset insists that Teilhard was just afraid of getting caught.

I doubt many people today (excepting perhaps Matthew Ehret) still buy Gould’s confusing argument in favor of Teilhard’s guilt. Since his death in 2002, Gould himself has turned out to be a most unreliable narrator. He based an entire book (The Mismeasure of Man), in which he accused a 19th century physical anthropologist of “racism,” on false data. As so often happens, the person who’s quick to accuse others of bias turns out to be heavily biased himself.

 

Notes

[1]  Matthew Ehret, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Transhumanism,” October 2021.

[2] “The Wenner–Gren Foundation is a private operating foundation dedicated to providing leadership in support of anthropology and anthropologists worldwide,” says a current website. Founded in 1941 by Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish Electrolux tycoon, philanthropist, and longtime friend of both Hermann Goering and King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor. When the Duke was exiled to the Bahamas as Governor, 1940-45, Mr. Wenner-Gren was a steady friend, with his Southern Cross yacht anchored nearly. This immediately attracted the scrutiny of British intelligence, as both the Duke and Wenner-Gren were regarded as Nazi sympathizers. Source: the hyper-sensationalistic Traitor King by Andrew Lownie, 2021. Needless to say, none of this Andrew Lownie scandal-mongering reflects on the Wenner-Gren Foundation, but it’s curious that the anti-Teilhard crowd haven’t yet homed in on this piquant connection.

[3] Despite this lamebrain document, UNESCO cannot have been all bad. After all, its co-founder and first director-general was Teilhard’s good friend Julian Huxley. However, he was gone well before 1950. It appears Huxley was given the heave-ho for public relations reasons, inasmuch as he openly supported birth control and eugenics. (Wikipedia link.)

[4] John P. Slattery in Religion Dispatches, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored.”

[5] Teilhard letter, quoted in Slattery, Ibid.

[6] The loss and various theories are described in The Jesuit and the Skull, by Amir C. Aczel (Riverhead Books, 2007).

[7] Smithsonian Magazine, 2012. “Mystery of the Lost Peking Man Fossils Solved?”

[8] American Teilhard Association, “Biography of Teilhard de Chardin.”

[9] Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin, 1967.

[10] Miscellaneous tie-in to George Orwell: Around the time Teilhard was in seminary in Hastings, little Eric Blair was starting primary school in Henley-on-Thames, 80 miles to the northwest, being taught by French Ursuline nuns. The Ursulines were in England for the same reason Teilhard was: they’d been thrown out of France.

[11] Simple and not-so-simple minds sometimes imagine that Teilhard’s difficulties with the Jesuits and the Holy See recurred because he was thought to be propounding heresy. Amir C. Aczel, in his otherwise enjoyable The Jesuit and the Skull (2007), keeps repeating this misapprehension. The real issue was politics and public relations, as well as maintenance of discipline.

[12] John P. Slattery, “Dangerous Tendencies of Cosmic Theology: The Untold Legacy of Teilhard de Chardin.” Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 29, Issue 1, 2017:

[13] John P. Slattery in Religion Dispatches, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored.”

[14] Ehret, Ibid.

[15] Ehret, Ibid.

[16] Stephen Jay Gould’s confused and convoluted screeds on this subject remind me of those partisan writers of 30 or 40 years ago who kept cranking out books arguing, against all common sense, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone. A brief dip into “The Piltdown Conspiracy,” and “A Reply to Critics,” at the beginning of Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, will reveal an academic controversialist desperately spinning his wheels.

 

Lynching stories hold a central place in the history of American race politics. They are a genre of folklore, occupying a place somewhere between “urban legends” and tales of atrocities in wartime. When we see references to Emmett Till, or Ahmaud Arbery, or George Floyd, or Willie McGee [1] as “lynching victims,” it’s easy to dismiss the hyperbole as just one more tiresome invocation of victim culture.

But I am going to argue that there is a deeper significance here. Narratives that describe extreme cruelty meted out to a black victim—torture, immolation, mutilation—have really been the main driver behind American race politics of the past century. “Justice,” “equality,” “Civil Rights”—those goals are merely the noble-sounding face of black activism, a movement that will never be satisfied (there’s never enough justice; never enough equality). Because what the movement is really all about—what it’s always been about— is anger and destructiveness, fueled by a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle of Lynching Porn.

In calling it “porn” I don’t mean to imply that there’s an erotic component to lynching stories (though for some people, who knows?). Rather I’m comparing the genre to such things as “snuff films” and “torture porn.” As you’ll see in grisly examples below, the resemblance is striking. And now let me make another analogy. From a financial angle, pornography in general was the main driver of the World Wide Web 20 years ago and probably is even now. (Here’s an amusing and informative BBC business story from 2019.) Meanwhile, even a cursory survey of the past 160 years finds Lynching Porn as the main fuel for race politics and Civil Rights agitation. Anyone who doubts this needs only to stroll over to the prurient-minded Equal Justice Initiative. The EJI is one more organization full of cant about fighting “racial injustice” and “racial inequality.” Yet to judge by its website, it’s mostly obsessed with celebrating violence and victimhood.

Lynching Porn as a phenomenon first occurred to me in early 2020, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill was before the House of Representatives. I thought I’d do a little research on the past century of failed anti-lynching legislation. I ran across a really lurid little book that came out in 1962, called 100 Years of Lynchings. But what really stood out for me was not the garish “bloody America” cover on my Kindle version, but the author’s name: Ralph Ginzburg. Because Ginzburg was a man of many interests and careers, but what he’s mainly remembered for is being a—well, a pornographer.

Ginzburg was even sentenced to five years in Federal prison for “obscenity” (specifically, sending an erotically themed magazine through the U.S. Mail, usually postmarked from places like Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or Middlesex, New Jersey). He ended up serving only eight months in 1972, at the minimum-security Allenwood prison farm, soon to be home to Watergate co-conspirators. Ginzburg turned his experience there into a memoir, charmingly titled, Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison. Ginzburg loved the sensationalistic and suggestive, and it’s no surprise that he was successfully sued for libel by Senator Barry Goldwater, after his “satirical” investigative magazine Fact described Presidential candidate Goldwater as a raving paranoid. (“1189 PSYCHIATRISTS SAY GOLDWATER IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT!”)

But before all his erotica and freewheeling libel, Ginzburg came up with 100 Years of Lynchings, a messy little cut-and-paste number that he published and distributed himself. In sixty years it’s never been out of print, but as the material has been mostly in the public domain (cuttings from old newspapers) we’ve seen several publishers and many editions and typefonts. Ginzburg’s 1969 reissue put a photo of an armed, afro’d black man (a model) on the cover and plugged the book as “The Shocking Record Behind Today’s Black Militancy.”

The news clippings are often highly exaggerated or downright implausible. We’re shown sessions of torture, mutilation, immolation that surely would kill anyone within a few minutes, but somehow go on for an hour or two. Sometimes you get reports from two or more papers, and it becomes clear that the scribes were competing with each other to come up with ever-more-gruesome descriptions. For example, in early 1904 a wealthy Mississippi planter named James Eastland was shot in cold blood, along with his negro field-hand, by a black couple. The miscreants were eventually captured by a posse of 200 men and two packs of bloodhounds, chasing across several counties. Wire-service reports merely reported that the two were “burned at the stake…by a mob of 1,000 persons” in Doddsville, Mississippi. (“Negro and Wife Burned,” New York Press, February 8, 1904.) But the down-home Vicksburg Evening Post did the story up proud:

An eye-witness to the lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife, negroes…today gave the Evening Post the following details concerning retribution exacted from the couple prior to their cremation yesterday:

“When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees and…forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off… Some of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore into the flesh of the man and woman. It was applied to their arms, legs and body, then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.” (“Lynched Negro and Wife Were First Mutilated,” Vicksburg Evening Post, February 8, 1904.) [2]

That “quivering flesh” is an interesting touch, a 19th century phrase from the days when newspaper wags called whores “nymphs of the pave,” while well-dressed negresses were “notorious colored courtesans.”  Some people evidently believed that hunks of severed flesh would twitch and squirm like a wiggly-worm. Strangely, this “eye-witness to the lynching” does not tell us whether he got a body-part souvenir to take home. I’m joking, of course. Such stories are reminiscent of the pulp-fiction and newspaper tales about the so-called New York Draft Riots of 1863, when white people supposedly caught hundreds of negroes and subjected them to diabolical tortures before hanging them from lamp poles. [3]

When Ginzburg started to compile these newspaper stories in 1960, little original research was necessary. Most of the negro-lynching reports had long since compiled and annotated by black writers Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, and DuBois’s colleagues at the NAACP, for whom lynching stories were the main expression of Civil Rights activism. Wells rode to fame in the 1890s by telling America, and the world, that lynching of negroes was epidemic throughout the South. She hunted down reports of alleged lynchings of negroes, and published them in a book called A Red Record[4], meanwhile haranguing editors, politicians and rapt audiences with her findings. People might not care to listen to a colored woman banging on about segregated railroad cars or literacy tests…but what about tales of hangings, burnings, horrendous torture and mutiliations? That got their attention, and they came in droves to hear more.

Much in the same way vast crowds would turn out for horrific lynchings, such as this one in Paris, Texas in 1893. The mangled body of a missing four-year-old girl had been found, “torn limb from limb.” The only suspect was her father’s negro employee, who fled on a freight train before being apprehended:

Curious and sympathizing alike, [the crowds] came on train and wagons, on horse, and on foot…the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him… The child’s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh… Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons… Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat. (From Wells, A Red Record.)

And there’s that “quivering flesh” again, and a body that lives for fifty minutes while being roasted alive.

As for DuBois, he followed Wells’s lead when editing his NAACP journal, The Crisis (1910-1934). He stuffed the magazine with year-by-year enumerations of “extrajudicial killings” of blacks, often reprinting gory newspaper accounts of burnings and mutilations, including the one with the corkscrews from the Vicksburg Post.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People officially stood for justice, equality, and the negro voting franchise, but those abstract causes would never have the drawing power of Lynching Porn. Conveniently enough, the NAACP made passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill their premier political cause from the 1910s through the 1930s. The campaign accomplished nothing, of course (lynching was already illegal everywhere) and can’t have aided the Advancement of the Colored People, but it provided an excellent excuse to keep publishing grisly tales.

Like Wells, DuBois and his editorial staff preferred to emphasize the most violent and repulsive accounts, preferably where one or two black individuals—people with names and histories—were set upon by a white crowd. This personalized the victims, while making the white mob into a nameless, pullulating mass. The cruelty had to be heinous in the extreme; average lynchings wouldn’t do. As Prof. Dwight Murphey pointed out in his 1995 monograph, Lynching: History and Analysis, most lynchings were simple hangings, with no mutilations or body-roasting, and perhaps a quarter to a third of people lynched in the 19th and early 20th century were white. (The book was reviewed here in 2019.) But the NAACP wouldn’t bother describing those; it wanted sensationalism and outrage.

Besides their dubious details, a bigger weakness in the DuBois/NAACP version of lynching history is that they fudged and padded the numbers. For 1917, for example, The Crisis magazine claimed 222 negroes were killed by lynchings and “mob murders” (e.g., race riots). But the breakdown is 178 “mob murders” and only 44 cases of anything that could truly be called a lynching. Further, the “mob murder” numbers are mere guesstimates. If there was a race riot in Philadelphia or Chicago or Houston or Tulsa—and there were many more in the Teens and Twenties—any negroes not accounted for afterwards were thrown into the “mob murder” totals, regardless of whether there was ever a body found. The same thing continues today, with the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative both playing fast and loose with their numbers. The EJI claims about “4,000 victims of racist terrorism” at their lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, but close scrutiny of that count shows that many of the victims are nameless, and the vast majority are said to have actually died in a riot or “massacre“—or “mob murder” as The Crisis would say.

My argument, that black Civil Rights activism was never really an constructive initiative for Justice, Equality, etc., may look radical to some people, or unnecessarily antagonistic. (Was not Doctor King sincere? Did he not say, “I have a dream”?) But it is merely noticing the obvious. For most people it constitutes a paradigm shift. We’ve seen political paradigm shifts before. Up until the late 1940s, it was very difficult to attack Communism directly, because in the Stalinist era propagandists had so successfully positioned it as a well-intentioned, if sometimes badly managed, economic system. Repression, terror, torture—these were explained away as unfortunate byproducts of the coming Utopia, when there would be Freedom and Democracy for all.

The person who finally cracked that nut was political philosopher James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, Suicide of the West, etc.). In his 1947 book, The Struggle for the World, he stated the obvious. The torture and terror we saw in Communist regimes were not growth pains or temporary discomforts, they were the essence and purpose of the regimes themselves. The insight had enormous impact on Burnham’s Partisan Review colleague George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the New Leader, just as he was settling in to complete the dystopian novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had no trouble depicting the oppressive atmosphere of a Big Brother society, but as a good socialist he could not find an explanation for the cruelty and oppression. Burnham provided him with the answer. Bolshevism never was about Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, or Freedom & Democracy. No, none of that window-dressing. It was a self-perpetuating terror regime, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

 

Notes

[1] None of these were actual lynchings, but they’re often described that way provocatively. The Till incident (1955) was a bawling-out and beating that got out of hand. Arbery (2020) was shot while “jogging” away from a burglary scene. The heavily drugged Floyd (2020) died of heart failure while under arrest, while Willie McGee’s “lynching” (1951) was a legally ordained execution in an electric chair for the crime of rape.

[2] Planter Eastland was uncle and namesake of U.S. Senator James O. Eastland, who in the 1950s and 60s had a decided point of view on racial matters. Senator Eastland was born nine months after his uncle was killed.

[3] (As I pointed out a few years ago, only a handful of blacks were killed in the “riots,” usually after shooting firearms at crowd of white people.)

[4] A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings In the United States. Online here.

I’ve read and heard the story of Kim Philby and his young fox, Jackie, many times. But there’s a lot of backstory and filler that usually gets left out. Linked below is a reminiscence from a photographer/zoologist named Tony Morrison who was traveling with a documentary team in 1962, under the production aegis of David Attenborough.

It appears one of the doco gang was an old acquaintance of Kim and met him again in Beirut. The crew had been keeping the baby fox in their hotel room, and now handed her off to Kim. Maybe Kim was well lubricated (not unimaginable) and came out with something Wodehouseian, as, “Oh I say, I rather f-f-fancy a p-pet f-fox at the mo’. Let’s do!” Anyway, the author provided advice on the fox’s care and treatment, based on his experience with raising the fox in the hotel.

Actual transfer of fox must have occurred in April or May of 1962, and the fox died from misadventure in August. Kim was heartbroken and wrote about Jackie in Country Life. 

Key points to keep in mind are that Jackie the fox lived with Kim and Eleanor Philby for only three or four months. And five months later, Kim skipped to Moscow, having been rumbled as a longtime KGB operative, the veritable “Third Man” in the Burgess-Maclean affair—something that he’d spent much of the 1950s denying.

Read the whole thing here.