Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Writers and Politics

  CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

  FOR OWEN SHEEHY-SKEFFINGTON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Conor Cruise O’Brien: An Appreciation

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  AMERICA

  The New Yorker

  A New Yorker Critic

  Serpents

  White Gods and Black Americans

  Free Spenders

  II

  ENGLAND

  Orwell Looks at the World

  Chorus or Cassandra

  III

  FRANCE

  Michelet Today

  The People’s Victor

  Monsieur Camus Changes His Climate

  Sartre as a Critic

  A Vocation

  Communists and Communisants

  IV

  IRELAND

  1891–1916

  Irishness

  Our Wits About Us

  Somerville and Ross

  The Fall of Parnell

  The Great Conger

  Mother’s Tongue

  Some Letters of James Joyce

  Queer World

  Timothy Michael Healy

  V

  FOUR CRITICS

  Generation of Saints

  Bears

  Re-enter the Hero

  Poetry, Inspiration and Criticism

  VI

  THE COLD WAR

  Critic into Prophet

  Journal de Combat

  Varieties of Anti-Communism

  The Perjured Saint

  VII

  THE UNITED NATIONS

  AND THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

  Conflicting Concepts of the United Nations

  The U.N., the Congo and the Tshombe Government

  Mercy and Mercenaries

  Corruption in Developing Countries

  The Schweitzer Legend

  Two Addresses

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Copyright

  CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN: AN APPRECIATION

  by Oliver Kamm

  The last time – literally the last time, when he had an advanced stage of cancer – I visited Christopher Hitchens, we talked about the books and writers that had influenced him. He told how, in 1967, he picked up a volume of essays called Writers and Politics by Conor Cruise O’Brien in a public library in Tavistock, Devon. Reading it, he formed the ambition to be able to write like that.

  I had a similar experience. I never met O’Brien but he was one of the earliest and most important influences on my political thinking and my wish to be a writer. As an undergraduate at Oxford, I picked up one of his books in the Bodleian Social Science Library. It was a collection of essays and reviews called Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (1978). His arguments throughout the book were a different face of O’Brien’s politics (though he would certainly have claimed they were the same politics in essence) from his volume of the 1960s. In condemning America’s war in Vietnam, he was recognisably a writer of the anti-imperialist Left. In his later volume, encapsulating his experience as a cabinet minister in Ireland’s coalition government in the mid-1970s, he wrote of the destructiveness of absolutism.

  It’s a great book. In it, O’Brien not only denounces IRA terrorism, as you would expect from a mainstream politician, but – in a sense quite different from the rationalisations offered by ideological apologists for political violence – seeks to understand it. I mean, really understand it – not extenuate it by equivocation and non sequitur. And his thinking leads him to attack the republican mythology at the heart of the Irish state. Few writers have analysed terrorism so acutely or been as effective in undermining its ideological justifications. Here is how O’Brien recounts his thinking:

  In the politics of the Republic, I was not quite where I was expected to be. In the Congo time, sections of the British press had assured their readers (quite wrongly) that I was motivated by anti-British fanaticism. My career in America had shown me as opposed to imperialism. So I was expected at least to fall into line with the view that the troubles in Northern Ireland were caused by British imperialism. When instead I said that, in relation to Northern Ireland, it was the IRA who were the imperialists, since they were trying to annex by force a territory a large majority of whose inhabitants were opposed to them, my remarks appeared either incomprehensible or outrageous to a number of people who had liked what they heard about me much more than they like what they were hearing from me.

  As a prophet, O’Brien was fallible. He doubted that the Irish constitution, with its irredentist claims to the whole island of Ireland, could be reformed in order to excise those articles. Yet eventually it was, and politics in Northern Ireland became marginally more normal (or at least less sectarian and violent). What was significant, even brilliant, about O’Brien’s analysis was its lucidity in exposing cant. He realised that it was an untenable position for democratic politics both to condemn terrorism and to rely on a romanticised view of how the state had come into being and won its independence. O’Brien was repelled by the ‘cult of the blood sacrifice’ (expressed most eloquently but chillingly by Yeats in his one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan) which underlay republican thinking. Being O’Brien, he didn’t hold back in saying so. It took courage – raw physical courage, and not only political heterodoxy – to say such things in Ireland in the 1970s.

  O’Brien had many roles in his long and eminent life. He was diplomat, statesman, politician, historian, literary critic, journalist and polymath. But most of all, he was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term. He applied his knowledge and critical intelligence to matters of great public interest, and he expressed his thinking in elegant, spare prose that argued a case with remorseless logic. He was a great man and a great Irishman, and Faber are to be congratulated in reissuing his work.

  O’Brien’s written output is best represented by his historical studies. Three of those volumes stand out in my estimation. First, States of Ireland (1972) remains the finest historical account of how the Troubles in Ireland erupted. It was a seminal revisionist treatment of the myths of Irish republicanism. If, as many of his admirers (including me) thought, O’Brien eventually went too far in embracing the cause of unionism and underestimated the capacity of a constitutional nationalism to reform itself, he did so with an unflinching humane intelligence.

  O’Brien’s history of the Zionist movement and Israel, The Siege (1986), is also a fine work of scholarship whose analysis stands up well in the light of later events. O’Brien was a friend to and admirer of Israel and often a lonely voice in media circles in explaining the Jewish state’s security dilemmas. His downbeat but realistic conclusion was that Israel could not be other than it is, a Jewish state, which merited the sympathy of liberals in maintaining its democratic and secular character in spite of being in a state of permanent siege. Devoutly as he wished for a peaceful solution to the conflict in Palestine, O’Brien believed that a solution was not available. On his analysis, conflicts don’t have solutions: they have outcomes. I hope he is eventually proved wrong, and that a two-state solution between a sovereign Palestine and a safe Israel comes into being. But O’Brien’s pessimism seems historically well-grounded.

  Probably O’Brien’s greatest achievement of historical scholarship is his biography of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody (1992). Burke is much cited by modern conservatives, and not necessarily accurately. The ‘little platoons’ that they celebrate aren’t what Burke meant by the phrase; he was instead appealing to a notion of a fixed social order, in which each man knew his place. It is far removed from the modern ideals of social (and sexual) equality. Yet O’Brien retrieved the idea of Burke as a Whig of
unrivalled historical farsightedness. On O’Brien’s telling, Burke foresaw the bloody degeneration of the French Revolution even while celebrating the potential of the American Revolution. Among the gems in the paperback edition of the book is his respectful and affectionate exchange with Isaiah Berlin. O’Brien, as a confirmed Rousseau-basher, will have no quarter with any romantic idealisation of ‘the general will.’

  O’Brien’s was a tough-minded version of liberalism, which stressed the dangers of untrammelled reason. In that respect, he was a worthy inheritor of the tradition of Burke. In his late collection On the Eve of the Millennium (1995), he noted that the worst crimes of the twentieth century had been committed by forces that considered themselves thoroughly emancipated from superstition – Nazism and Communism. O’Brien was a man of the Enlightenment, who believed its greatest enemy was absolutism.

  His contrarian streak sometimes led him to mistaken and even perverse positions: against European integration; against intervention to stop the aggressive designs of Slobodan Milosevic; opposition in principle, and not merely pragmatic objections, to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland; and most notably a deep hostility to the American ‘civic religion’ that celebrates Thomas Jefferson. His book The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution (1996) depicts America’s third president as (and I don’t exaggerate) an ideological precursor of Pol Pot.

  It’s an extraordinary argument and not, I think, O’Brien’s finest. His historical revisionism, so valuable a tool, tended to overreach itself. The strict taxonomy that O’Brien set out – the American Revolution extended liberty, the French and Russian revolutions negated it – was, in reality, fuzzier than he allowed. But, again, O’Brien arrived at his conclusions with an intellectual honesty that caused him not to shirk unfashionable sentiments. The reforms enacted by the Constituent Assembly in France from 1789 to 1791 were quite limited, but went in the direction of secularism and the removal of the hereditary principle. Those who believe, crudely, that the American Revolution was good and the French Revolution bad do have the problem of explaining why Jefferson, as ambassador to Paris, saw these causes as consistent. O’Brien provides his own answer, which may be mistaken (I think it is), but it is an answer: Jefferson’s politics were more French than American.

  The French revolution of 1789 was admired throughout Europe, including Britain and particularly in Germany, for good reason. It was, like the American Revolution, a historic moment for the cause of reform, secularism and (I use the term without irony) progress. The turning point was war with Austria and Prussia in 1792. This precipitated a second revolution and all that followed: regicide, terror, and the reassertion of autocracy and nationalism. There was no reason that European governments should have sought to undermine the movement of 1789, and in doing so they became steadily more authoritarian at home. The Enlightenment tradition is perhaps more consistent than O’Brien allowed for. But he was brilliant at seeing its darker side. There were idiosyncrasies in his outlook but his was fundamentally an advocacy of a humane and liberal politics. He richly deserves a new generation of readers.

  September 2014

  Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist for The Times.

  INTRODUCTION

  “Are you a socialist?” asked the African leader.

  I said, yes.

  He looked me in the eye. “People have been telling me,” he said lightly, “that you are a liberal …”

  The statement in its context invited a denial. I said nothing.

  I knew what the leader meant when he used the word “liberal,” and I understood why a charge of “liberalism” was felt to be damaging. In relation to Africa, Asia and Latin America, the European and American liberal has too often been—and is perhaps increasingly—a false friend. Typically, in welcoming the new independence of, say, the African countries, he has warned them lest they fall under the far greater tyranny of communism, and he tends to identify communism with indigenous left-wing movements, thereby consciously or unconsciously identifying liberalism with, for example, the Emirs of Northern Nigeria. He deprecates, or even condemns, the apartheid regime in South Africa but advises that any form of sanction against it—for example economic sanctions—is premature, impracticable or otherwise undesirable. His moral worries about forms of government in African countries are unevenly distributed along the political spectrum. His press will have very much more to say about political detentions in “left-wing” Ghana than about the liquidation of entire villages in “democratic” Nigeria or “conservative” Cameroon. The Western liberal, of the kind most often and most widely heard from, uniformly displays acute myopia in face of the various forms of Western puppet government which cover so large a part of Africa, Asia and Latin America; to the sparse news which filters through from these parts he responds with calm agnosticism, in marked contrast to the spasms of moral anguish provoked by the slightest reported misdeed of an African, Asian or Latin American government which follows an independent line.

  To those, outside the rich countries, who are sickened by the word “liberalism,” the liberal voice par excellence is that of Mr. Adlai Stevenson—the voice that explained to the world that the United States had had nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs invasion; the voice that justified the exclusion of China from the United Nations on moral grounds; the voice that expounded the humanitarian reasons for supporting Belgian policy in the Congo. From this viewpoint Mr. Stevenson’s face, with its shiftily earnest advocate’s expression, is the ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs: “liberalism” is the ideology of the rich, the elevation into universal values of the codes which favoured the emergence, and favour the continuance, of capitalist society.

  To be taxed with liberalism by one who saw—and had had some cause to see—liberalism in such a light was a serious matter. What was even more serious was not to be able to deny the charge. The country in which I was living at this time was one which was trying to build a socialist society; its spokesmen and its press vehemently rejected Western liberal thought, seen in the light I have described. The country was progressing rapidly, in the development of its economy and in education. Its government showed, as it seemed to me, a greater sense of responsibility to the people—not in a formal sense but in a profound one—than did neighbouring states with more apparently liberal constitutions. I admired the boldness, the seriousness and the single-mindedness with which this government had set about doing what it thought best for its own country, in its state of development, without very much regard for the prejudices or the slogans of its former rulers and their rich and powerful friends. The contrast with the neighbouring countries showed, I believed, that this government had been right to reject a façade of liberalism, masking internal and external exploitation, in favour of a national and popular form of that “plentiful governance” for which mediaeval Europe had longed, from beneath the terrible freedom of the barons.

  And yet, as I drove home from my interview with the leader, I had to realize that a liberal, incurably, was what I was. Whatever I might argue, I was more profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom—freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgment and independent judges—than I was to the idea of a disciplined party mobilizing all the forces of society for the creation of a social order guaranteeing more real freedom for all instead of just for a few. The revolutionary idea both impressed me and struck me as more immediately relevant for most of humanity than were the liberal concepts. But it was the liberal concepts and their long-term importance—though not the name of liberal—that held my allegiance.

  When the leader’s question forced me to think rather more clearly than I had been doing about my relation to liberalism and to socialism, I did not feel altogether happy about the result. Liberal values, tarnished by the spurious tributes of the rich world’s media, today make the rich world yawn and the poor world sick. For my own part I had had so little enthusiasm for
them in theory that I was surprised and disconcerted at the depth of commitment to them experienced when, in practice, I met challenges to them.

  Not that the experience was altogether new. The Ireland in which I was brought up stood in a peculiar relation to liberal thought and practice: a relation comparable, but by no means identical, to that prevailing among Spanish or Polish intellectuals between the wars. In these Catholic and time-lagging countries the liberal tradition, the tradition of 1848, got less lip-service, and was taken more seriously, than was the case in the industrially advanced countries. This was because the battle of 1848 had not been won. In Ireland the liberal current of the national-revolutionary tradition met the original Rock, the Catholic Church as a social force. Freedom of speech? Politicians, businessmen, trade-union leaders possessed this freedom, in relation to the government, in undiminished measure. In relation to the Church, and areas—such as education—which the Church claimed as its own, they abstained from using this freedom. The thing to be avoided at all costs, one durable politician had pointed out, was “a sthroke of a crozier.” Most politicians were nimble in this regard; in a debate a senator from Trinity College drew attention to the fact that, contrary to a Department of Education regulation, children were being beaten in the primary schools for failure at lessons. This was a notorious fact but—since the management of primary schools is in the hands of the clergy—senators chose to deny it and the critic found no support at all. Freedom of the press was subject to similar unacknowledged constraints. The liberal paper was “the Protestant paper,” with an entirely urban middle-class circulation; the two national papers competed in displays of orthodoxy, as in other methods of promoting circulation. Both press and radio reported at astonishing length the funerals of bishops: possibly a mechanism for releasing over-suppressed aggression. As for academic freedom, the National University of Ireland, in theory a secular organism, was in practice a clerical domain, and the Archbishop of Dublin proclaimed it a mortal sin for Catholics to attend the only university in the Republic of Ireland which is not under the control of the Catholic clergy. The very word “liberal” was—as in parts of the United States—a suspect one. Here, indeed, two currents joined. Certain elderly Irish ecclesiastics, brought up to think of liberalism as Pio Nono did, were pleased to find, on their American fund-raising tours, that important potential contributors, men of the world and of business, saw liberalism as a pressing contemporary danger.