I told you so!
Reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker: "To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency." Like so many left-wing intellectuals (American and European), Steiner was in denial and could not bear to read the message that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote when he presented the "Worker's Paradise" as it really was: a hideous lie. Solzhenitsyn robbed the anti-West of its most cherished illusions and he cruelly exposed the moral equivalency of the Eric Hobsbawms and lesser-know Stalinist sympathizers and fellow travellers. In The Gulag Archipelago, the USSR functionary was revealed as being every bit as evil as his Third Reich counterpart. It would take another 25 years after George Steiner's review for the Berlin Wall to come down and the enslaved peoples of the Soviet Block to be set free. A moral indecency had ended.
Which brings us to Kingsley Amis and his Memoirs. He recalls the equally hostile reaction of the intellectual class to Robert Conquest's historic indictment of Stalin's tyranny, The Great Terror. "For many years," Amis wrote, the book was "ignored where possible or dismissed as propaganda. Then, in 1988, favourable references to it began to appear in the Soviet media... An American publisher suggested a new edition of the book. 'What about a new title Bob? We won't pretend it's a new book , but a new title would be good...'"
Conquest replied, "Well, perhaps, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. How's that?"
Comments
Steiner came from a very wealthy Viennese Jewish family and fortunately for Georgie-boy his father recognised threat when he saw it and moved the family first to Paris and then to New York in 1940, one month before the Germans took the city.
There was little war experience for him, nor little direct experience of Uncle Joe Stalin.
Money insulates the Steiners of the world from the realities of the Gulag .
Posted by: Larry May | August 7, 2008 12:04 AM