Can the Gods Cry?
Page 21
Like so many movements of the twentieth century, communism tended towards dogma – although it did embrace a range of ideas. Because it believed in the perfectibility of mankind and its need to be homogenised under the aegis of a pseudo-scientific credo, it committed crimes against humanity. All the other movements, including liberal democracy, committed crimes against humanity, but only communism had a vision that had humanity and grandeur. That was its power, and everything else was a reaction against it – an attempt to overcome it in part by adopting its methods and ways of being, even some of its demands. Lochrie feels that communism lacked one important element: religion. And by religion, he means not any particular religion or dogma of the afterlife, but humility and bewilderment in the face of humanity’s complexity, creativity, diversity, kindness and, yes, immense brutality. Communists did not deserve to be shot like dogs by the Krays of this world and they fought not for themselves, their nation or for somebody else’s oil – they fought for a universal ideal of equality. And their dead go unremembered: the half a million killed in Indonesia by Suharto have no memorial. The millions of Soviet dead, who did not all fight for communism, but rather to rid their land of the Nazi hordes, have their memorials removed from the lands they freed. When they are not thought of as intellectuals, Communists are usually thought of as workers, but globally they were more likely to be peasants, always susceptible to a utopian idea that promises release from their millennial oppression. Their generosity and ability to suffer turned them into formidable soldiers; their victories exposed their lack of political judgement and formal education.
The rebels of Dhofar were just such peasant communists. In the 1950s the people of the Sultanate of Oman had risen against their brutal Sultan to follow their Iman (who had the backing of the American oil company Aramco), but the power of the Royal Air Force initially seemed to have made short work of them. Then they counterattacked, this time equipped with American mines, which were to cause casualties on the imperial side. When a British soldier was killed by a mine near Muti, his officer had the village destroyed: “We set fire to one house after another, using paraffin. When we left, there was nothing but smouldering ruins.” In the long run, the rebels had no hope against the Venom jets and Shackleton heavy bombers which, according to an Air Chief Marshal, “carried out a heavy programme of attacks on cultivation and water supplies. So effective was this form of harassment that cultivation and movement by daylight in the villages under attack came virtually to a standstill.” But the peasant army was not lacking in bravery against this technological behemoth, and it took artillery, night-time bombing and the SAS to finally break their will.
There was almost unanimity amongst the British warriors that Sultan Said was a vicious tyrant, although many seemed to justify him as a medieval tyrant for a medieval country, which was a disservice to the Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly he was more typical of neo-colonial puppet dictators of the second half of the twentieth century, and his military advisors could be quite explicit: “The evidence of my own eyes suggested the British were bolstering a corrupt regime where the Sultan and his chosen few lived sumptuously, enjoying the first fruits of oil wealth whilst the mass of Omanis lived out their lives in squalor and illness benefiting not at all from the culling of their country’s riches. And here I was volunteering my services to the military machine that upheld the old man in denying eight hundred thousand Omanis their rightful inheritance: the benefits of human progress, hospitals and schools,” wrote a famous British military man and no one on the Left could have put it better.
The “old man” had said, “If you are out walking and meet a Dhofari and a snake, crush the Dhofari.” So it should not come as any surprise that the peasants of Dhofar were the next to rebel against him. Equally it should come as no shock that, in the following decade of internationalism and anti-colonial breakthrough, these new rebels started to identify with communism, although in practice their guerrilla war differed little from the previous one. This novelty, however, came as a great relief to the imperial warriors, who now dressed themselves up in the cant of the Cold War. Or at least it was a great relief when they later decided to write their memoirs. Even though one of the most common criticisms of communism is its supposed use of “ends to justify the means”, a British commander declared that the adoo’s conversion to communism was a “comfort to an uneasy conscience” – a conscience, it has to be said, that had been lying dormant up to time of this comfort’s convenient arrival. This was the self-righteous drivel that Kray is still mouthing over thirty years later. The communist guerrillas, on the other hand, were fighting for their own land against a contemptuous Omani sultan, British advisors with all the military equipment, and two Iranian battalions. Although forced into war out of oppression and misery, and not to prove their mettle, these men and women surely fought with the greatest courage and tenacity, and suffered the miseries of losing their fellow fighters and their families on a scale that their enemy would not have been able to sustain. The Cold War warriors expressed their surprise on finding dead women fighters, for a British officer never wanders too far away from his prejudices and this scene did not fit with their stereotype of Islamic society.
But communism did bring changes – far-reaching changes in tactics. With a dazzling display of British common sense and pragmatism that forgets each word as soon as it is said or written, one warrior explains the problems with the Dhofari rebellion, “However daft or outrageous the restrictions the Sultan imposed upon his people might appear to us, he was not an inhumane man, and he always had his reasons. … He was monumentally ill-equipped to lead his country in a modern war against Communist-inspired guerrillas. … Moreover, there had increasingly been concern that Britain was supporting a regime which was imprisoning its people in disease, squalor, hunger and ignorance.” It all ended with British officers running around the palace exchanging fire with the Sultan and his few remaining supporters, and during this exchange, the callous autocrat inexplicably and quite literally shot himself in the foot. The British replaced him with his son, the British-educated Qaboos who had served in their own army. After this imperial farce, the total war against civilians would continue, but now the villages that switched sides would be rewarded with funds and new facilities. The carrot joined the stick, and it was communism that brought about this change of heart.
Throughout the history of communism, exceptional men and women filled the prisons of the world and were hounded by anti-communist and communist regimes alike. Communism, the ultimate stage in the process of rationalist humanism, was not so much an extreme idea as the generator of extreme reactions – for which its aggressive rhetoric was in part to blame. “A spectre is haunting Europe” is a dramatic opening line, but it hardly reflected the resources of the two eccentric, bearded authors – an odd couple whose differences were as instructive as their similarities. Communists, supporters of collaborative communities, were likely to die penniless and alone with only a stubborn idea to sustain their last moments of lucidity. To be a communist meant to suffer and be rejected, even in countries where communism was victorious. When they remained loyal to the idea of communism, communists ended up in labour camps or exile communities in the West where they became either pariahs or, worse, anti-communists – the righteous tormentors and persecutors of their former selves.
Lochrie remembers an elderly Romanian couple who in the mid-sixties lived permanently in a rundown hotel on the west coast of Scotland. He was a child full of his parents’ prejudices and in the cramped hotel foyer said something dismissive about communism. The old man broke into the conversation in his laboured English, “To say that, you must first know the ideals of communism. The ideals of communism are great, but maybe humanity is not ready for them yet.” And then perhaps a little angrily, suggesting that he felt Lochrie had not understood him, he added even more firmly, “First you must understand what communism stands for. Then you can criticise the bad things communists have done – have certainly done.”
“I think he should know,” replied the man sullenly. “They don’t teach the children anything; they just fill them with hate.”
“What is he doing?” she seemed to plead with the gods who had struck her so low, “Now he is trying to convert the children. Come on. Stand up.” The tired old man stood up and meekly left after a meaningful half-smile to Lochrie, which intimated that in any case he had said all he wanted to say. They crossed the room as she berated him in Romanian. Lochrie now feels he can reconstruct those events: the man was an exiled communist official, while his long-suffering wife had probably lost almost everything because of his loyalty to ideas instead of himself and his family, and did not want to lose what little dignity had been left her. But Lochrie has always felt that the wife was wrong: if anyone sowed the seed, it was her. Would he not have forgotten the whole episode of the eccentric old man, if the man had not been martyred by his wife? Initially Lochrie felt liberated by her intervention, but then empathy took over. Besides it was her behaviour and her hidden fears that most aroused his curiosity.
The history of communism is the history of an ideal that has died. And that tragic death, which has brought great wealth for the few and great misery for the many, has at least freed us to pursue a different kind of egalitarianism in which difference is allowed. The task ahead of us is once again immense and the possibilities of more brutal repressions innumerable. We must think as pessimists and act as optimists – but Lochrie knows that optimism will never be for him, because his only act will be to write, and that’s the act of chloroforming thoughts and pinning them in the display case we call a book. His life was once one of movement and hope. Now his physical confines have been reduced to a small flat, while his intellectual confines have all been removed, so his agitated thoughts wander the planet unable to find interlocutors. What else could he do but chase after them lethargically and place them in some kind of order, however tired and dead. The pain he felt in Middleton Military School was one of physical containment; the pain he now feels is one of intellectual dispersal – a kind of loneliness of the mind he no longer wants to cure. Cary is still in Lochrie’s mind, getting at him with that rasping voice and weasel expression, “Just my luck to be chosen by a loser like yourself. Look at you sitting there feeling sorry for yourself and drinking your whisky! Have you ever thought what a pathetic figure you cut?”
“You wouldn’t understand. I don’t feel sorry for myself. Not at all. If anything I feel sorry for mankind,” says Lochrie.
“You take a lot on yourself. Do you think mankind cares whether you, holed up in a shabby little flat in one of the wettest and most windblown parts of a wet and windblown island off the north-west coast of a continent whose greatest times are now in the past, feel sorry for it or not? Who are you and what have you done? You publish a few third-rate novels and think that gives you the right to go around with your heart on your sleeve.”
“I don’t go around anywhere. I stay here, remember.”
“Yes indeed, fine behaviour for a writer. You should be out there observing, feeling, responding and getting it all down. Writing is about living, not moping about here and reflecting on politics of all things – who takes that seriously these days? Where’s the fun in that? Listen, if you want to criticise the powerful, then go ahead, but once you’ve rattled them, you have to switch to their side. The literary world is full of those who have gone over to the other side, and the powerful love such people more than their favoured sons.
“But come to think of it, you do not have enough talent. That system is strictly for the most brilliant. If you really must persist with this left-wing silliness, write for the powerful until you are at least partially established and then switch to your real self. They will leave you a little place for partial success as a symbol of their supposed liberalism. But I’m not sure you have even the mediocre talent for that second solution. Have you ever thought of churning out a series of hack articles in which it looks like you’re going to say something very radical and then in the last few lines, you twist it all around and end up projecting the status quo as the least worst option. It looks very intelligent, and is the surest route for a political writer of limited talents.”
“Chris Cary, you really are a mean bastard. I almost hate to throw you on the reject pile.”
“Damn it, Lochrie, what’s this with the reject pile? I have energy, I have personality and, above all, I have a great desire to be. You’re not going to get any decent characters out of namby-pamby do-gooders. Christ, you should know; you went to Middleton, and surely that must have taught you that ‘mankind’ or ever-so politically correct ‘humanity’ is almost entirely made up of shysters and all the rest are just a bunch of suckers. The guys who get to the top are the guys who know how to kick everyone else in the teeth. Come on, don’t you get it: writing is about the truth. It doesn’t matter if you come at it from the left or the right, or from the top or the bottom, it has to be the truth. Not the big truth – you should leave that to the philosophers and those political ideologues you’re so fond of,” he waves his hand in contempt. “No, it’s the little truths that count – the things you can nibble at. Go get them; don’t waddle about this moth-eaten flat of yours in a state of eternal angst – a flat that a fucking tramp wouldn’t stay in. Sit down, take a deep breath and then go after them – those little truths. Yes, yes, and I know you want to do something about power, and you think that a supposedly amoral shit like myself is the appropriate vehicle for your high-minded ideas. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well, okay, then I’m your man. I’ve got no problem with that. I’m absolutely up for it.”
A knock at the door announces Kevin’s weekly visit. Garry Lochrie opens the door and waves him to a chair in the understated manner that befits a regular and ritual meeting. “Have a seat,” Garry says as he goes to pour him a whisky, but Kevin is already seated.
“Fine, I’ve had a good week actually. We clinched the deal for building the new housing scheme. It’s very exciting,” Kevin loves to talk about his packed week, and possibly thinks it gives Garry some vicarious pleasure.
“You mean it’s going to make you rich.”
“That too. It was easy. Increase the units and everything looks better. So we have made each house as thin as a piece of string. You can sit down on one side of the room and bump your nose on the other,” he laughs at his own brilliance, and then remembers who he is talking to. The moralist. The man who shuts himself up with his impractical ideas that take no account of human nature – of human weakness.
“That must be good for families that want to talk to each other. But presumably there is room for the television?”
Kevin only half understands the jibe and wearily replies, “Of course there is. I exaggerate. They are actually very well-designed and comfortable homes for our people. Energy-efficient too, so we’re protecting the planet. I don’t want to sound pompous, but I really am very proud of our homes.”
Houses have become homes, and Lochrie winces at “our people”. He hates it when New Labour slips in a token fragment of “Old Labour” values, but with an even greater portion of patriarchal worthiness.
“So what have you been up to today?” says Kevin forcing himself to sound interested while fully expecting that nothing of any possible interest could have happened in Garry’s life.
“I think I am about to kill off a character.”
“Really?”
“Actually, he was a bit like you.”
“Me? I’m flattered. You have based a character on me? So he’s energetic, good-looking, and fatally attractive to women?”
“He’s a bit of that, but he isn’t based on you.”
&n
bsp; “Really,” Kevin repeated, this time with a trace of irritation, rather than a pretence of interest. “So who was he based on?”
“No one. He came from my imagination and events of long ago. But the imagination often wanders too far from the truth. He was not believable.”
“Am I not believable then?”
Garry understands that Kevin is not in any way a bad man – he is simply incapable of standing up to the idiocies of his own times, even though he is at one level quite aware that they are idiocies. This is why he finds political discussion so difficult: it is an exercise in evasion. And in this he exudes normality and the self-confidence of normality. He survives and is damaged by doing so. The poison of this self-deception is crueller than the excessive alcohol Garry Lochrie pours down his throat. Garry’s defeat brings rewards that Kevin could never understand.
Superficially there were parallels between Kevin’s life and Garry’s. When they met casually in the eighties at one of Kevin’s parties, Kevin was a secret socialist or perhaps a socialist taking a well-earned rest from politics. He was concentrating on his career as a chemist in a large corporation, and his Labour Party membership had lapsed mainly because it did not seem to be leading anywhere.
“So you’re an ex-Trotskyist!” were Lochrie’s first words.
“How did you know?” said Kevin, taken aback.
“Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky’s life and the total absence of any other books of the left. Where are they? In the attic?” “They are!” Kevin was astounded and amused, and from such encounters great friendships can be formed, even between people who have little in common.
“Which means you have not yet cut yourself free from youth’s ideals – you have merely shifted them to the back of your mind.”