Conservative History Journal

I have to confess to finding Facebook quite useful and interesting but I don’t know what Tory Historian would think of that. The friends and contacts one makes are more varied and, above all, further flung in the world than they would be in the ordinary course of existence. After all, is it any different from those correspondences so dear to the heart of all intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century? Or the pen-pals of one’s youth?

Then there is all the information other people have found out and posted as their status update: all one needs to do is to follow it up. That is what I did with the poster reproduced above. Produced in 1909, it showed very graphically what the Conservative Party wanted people to think of socialism.

My first reaction was a slight surprise: did the Conservatives view the Labour Party in 1909 as the primary enemy? Surely not. It was not even clear that the upstart movement would get anywhere far in British politics, let alone become one of the two leading parties. In the Lib-Lab pact of 1906, Labour was the junior partner.

Somebody (also on Facebook) suggested that perhaps it was fear of ideas and immigrants coming in from Russia. Hmmm. Those immigrants were not in a position to strangle prosperity in Britain.

There was nothing for it but to trace matters back. First of all, through the Conservative Party Archives, I found an excellent source of material, to wit a collection of political posters. One could spend many hours looking at these and working out the details.

Generously but also sensibly the posters are available for downloading and reproduction, as long as it is not done for commercial purposes and proper accreditation is given. I can safely say that no commercial benefit accrues to me from this or any other blog and I always give proper accreditation. As does Tory Historian.

So there we are: this comes from the Conservative Party Archive Poster Collection, to be found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and is number 1909/10-14

The collection starts with a poster from 1883 but comes into its own in the year 1909. Partly this was the outcome of better printing and lithograph techniques but there was also a political reason. Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon say this in “The Conservative Party – An Illustrated History”:

Radical threats have always galvanised Conservatives to mobilise support through the best means available at the time. The great reforming Liberal administration of Asquith and Lloyd George after 1906 provided one such challenge, with the defeated Conservative Party entering one of its most fratricidal periods in opposition, the new ‘legion of leagues’ spared no time in spreading their message to the electorate through a concerted campaign of leafleting and billboard posters. The Budget Protest League thus waged a fierce war of words against Lloyd George’s far-reaching 1909 budget, as well as launching a series of soften witty cartoon posters.

Tory Historian decided that the best way of celebrating Victory Day is to have a good look at one of David King’s books: “Ordinary Citizens – The Victims of Stalin”. As the Bard said: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now” (from Julius Caesar, as it happens).

Most of the book consists of the last mugshots taken in the Lubyanka, the Moscow prison that was (and is) the headquarters of the Soviet (Russian) secret police in its various manifestations from Cheka to KGB (and now the FSB), though the book goes up to the death of Stalin only. These are the people who were executed very soon after the pictures were taken.

Mr King, who used to be Art Editor at the Sunday Times, explains in the Introduction that the Soviet method of police photography was different from western in that it used natural light. Therefore, the shutter time was longer and the people in those pictures look more human; they have different reactions – fear, hatred, sadness, panache, resignation; the police photographers unintentionally created a series of tragic and sensitive pictures.

There they are, a tiny proportion of all those shot in the years between 1918 and 1953: men and women, young and old, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Jews; most employed in various positions, others not; some Communist party members, others not; some showing signs of torture, others merely fear and duress.

One or two worked for the NKVD themselves, others were related to important officials. One senior NKVD officer’s son was shot at the ripe old age of 17. There are women who may have simply complained about food shortages; there are students who presumably shot their mouths off as young people do; there are workers and engineers who were executed as wreckers and saboteurs because they could not fulfil the hair-raising plans Stalin insisted on. One cannot list them all, and, as mentioned above, this is a very small proportion of those murdered in the various prisons.

David King is an interesting person. He appears to be a somewhat old-fashioned leftie and in this interview he even manages to look like the man he clearly admires, Leon Trotsky. (Though to be fair, he shows no signs of agreeing with the sub-Marxist rubbish that the interviewer spouts.) His fascination with the pictorial falsehood that is Soviet history has produced three books so far, all of them fascinating, as well as his own personal collection that he clearly opens up to historians and researchers as asked. (Tory Historian is meditating an approach.)

“The Commissar Vanishes” deals with the fascinating story of the altered historic photographs from which people disappeared as they had been purged or their memory expurgated. Some photos started with five or six people and were eventually reduced to two, the only remaining ones being Lenin or Stalin and a. n. other, who was safely dead or, less safely, still in good odour.

Now that the original photographs have been traced the story has become even more fascinating. The picture above shows the disappearance of Yezhov from Stalin's side after his own arrest, torture and execution in 1939.

In 2002 Mr King followed this up with “Ordinary Citizens”, the book under discussion here and this year he produced “Red Star Over Russia”, published amazingly enough by Tate Publications, that traces some iconic Soviet images, the photographs on which they are based but also the changes in those photographs and the images. Again, we have a number of those last mugshots, this time of leading Communists like Zinoviev and Kamenev or important cultural figures like Isaac Babel and Vsevolod Meyerhold (the last two pictures are particularly harrowing - readers can see Meyerhold above).

Given David King’s apparent political stance it is natural for him to try to present the view that it was Stalin who destroyed the great hope of socialism and plunged the country into a bloodbath; given his honesty he cannot avoid making it clear that Stalin inherited the bloodbath, merely making it more intense.

In the Introduction to “Ordinary Citizens” David King is a little too kind to Trotsky, describing him as the “only political figure with a viable alternative to Stalinism”. World Revolution and the continuation of war communism were not only not viable, as Lenin had realized, they were potentially fully as brutal as Stalin’s rule.

As Richard Armour said in his brilliant “It All Started with Marx”: “Some people say that if Trotsky had won, things would have been different. They would, for Trotsky.” Actually, they may have been different for others as well – Trotsky was so brutal and so stubborn that he would not have been able to keep in power and the country and system together as long as Stalin did.

Interestingly, David King never mentions Nikolai Bukharin who really did have somewhat different political and economic ideas, which have fascinated historians ever since. He did not have the basic stamina or cunning to outwit Stalin either.

Nor is the author correct in saying that the Red terror, which he describes accurately as a destruction of all human decency, began with the failed attempt on Lenin’s life in 1918. From the moment the Cheka was formed it was dedicated to revolutionary terror against all and sundry.

But these are political quibbles. David King provides some interesting information and, above all, there are the pictures – those tragic haunting photographs. Tory Historian considers that all those who are convinced that there is no difference between Gordon Brown’s Britain and Communist totalitarianism should spend time studying this book of mugshots.

Tory Historian has written admiringly of George Orwell before (here and here), despite expressing a certain amount of disagreement with some of his pronouncements and writings. But there is nothing more annoying than watching people reduce this hard-headed and strong-minded writer to mush.

The guilty party in this case is the National Film Theatre, an institution Tory Historian is very ambivalent about. It shows many good films from the past and that is good; it also provides notes of unsurpassed silliness that are examples of soggy-left and thoughtless political consensus.

Tory Historian has lost track of the number of times some American producer, director or actor who had a highly successful career in Britain, on the Continent or, even, back in the United States has been described as being a blameless, liberal victim of “McCarthyite witch hunts”, with complete disregard of the difference between the Senate enquiry that was not in the slightest interested in Hollywood and the House Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC) and equally complete disregard of the fact that most of those “innocent” victims were, in fact, Communists who had preferred to lie on orders from the Party.

Now it is Orwell’s turn to be dragged into this morass of half-truths and double-think. (He would have understood it very well and railed against the sogginess and dishonesty.)

In April the NFT will be marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of “1984” with films about Orwell, as well as a showing of the famous 1956 version with Edmond O’Brien, the less well-known 1954 TV play with Peter Cushing and the 1984 film with John Hurt.

Fine. But what do the notes in the recently sent out programme say? [They are not yet on the website.]

2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s classic dystopian vision of Britain.

In Orwell’s re-imagining of British life in the year 1984 the nation has become Airstrip One, a subsidiary of Oceania, one of three global superstates engaged in relentless warfare against one another. London is a fetid, near-derelict metropolis dominated by the monolithic buildings of the ruling Party, its slums battered by rockets fired from enemy states. The collective memory of life before the wars has been all but obliterated by the Party which shapes and monitors the lives of its workers while keeping the disorderly ‘proles’ in a state of controlled ignorance.

Tory Historian took advantage of the NFT’s Laurence Olivier season in which “Henry V” has been given pride of place with a certain number of disclaimers by critics who, over the years, have had to acknowledge with pursed lips that, despite its heroism and emphasis on patriotism, the film is superb. Some of us might think that contrariwise, the heroism and patriotism add to the quality of the film but that is probably why we are not film critics.

Made during the war, with Olivier taking time out from his service with Fleet Air Arm, it does emphasise patriotic ideals, in particular ideals of England. As it happens, none of that was invented by the film-makers – the lines, the images, the concepts are there in Shakespeare’s play, which is what makes them so interesting.

Cinematically the film is mesmerizing, beginning and ending with a panorama shot of Elizabethan London, carefully recreated from contemporary prints. Famously, Olivier accepted and incorporated into the film the sheer theatricality of the play. We start with a raucous performance of “The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France”, during which the Chorus, played by Leslie Banks, urges us to expand the play in our imagination to take in England and France, and opens out first into the Boar’s Head Inn, where Falstaff is dying, then the two courts, the armies and the battles themselves. William Walton’s music spreads through the film.

The opened up scenes are not realistic in any sense, showing the castles, the fields, Princess Katharine’s enclosed garden and everybody’s costumes as illustrations from the Book of Hours. The faint artificiality of Technicolour adds to the imagery’s beauty.

There is, throughout the play, an image of England and of the English King that is essentially different from France. The French King is not an unattractive personality but he is weak and has been buffeted by history. The Dauphin is a fool and a braggart, a man who causes trouble through his thoughtlessness. The French nobles have no link with the people. The only truly attractive character is the Herald as he becomes more and more impressed by Henry.

England, on the other hand, is its people; the King is the King of all and the yeomen are as important if not, indeed, more important than the nobles. Although, the core of the play is England as reality and as idea, there is a kind of a proto-Union in the delightful vignette of the four captains: Gower, Fluellen, Jamy and McMorris, representing the four parts of it. They dispute, quarrel and drink together and there is an undying link between them.

In the night before the battle, the French nobles and the Dauphin sit in their own tent and alternate between dismal premonition and braggadocio. The Dauphin, spends not a minute of his time on his troops – they are there to serve him and the nobles. If anything is mourned it is the destruction of its flower at Crecy, though the lesson of that has not been learnt by anyone except the King of France. The heavy and heavily decorated armour in which the knights have themselves mounted onto their unfortunate horses symbolizes France in the same way as swiftness, lightness and, above all, ingenuity symbolize England.

In the night before the battle, Henry leaves his nobles without a single complaint from them, puts on a cloak and walks through the camp, making sure he visits every tent (“a touch of Harry in the night”). He talks to soldiers as well as captains; he listens to their complaints and to their fears; he meditates on the duties and responsibilities of kingship, in some ways echoing his own father’s thoughts on the head that wears the crown lying uneasily. Of course, he does not have his father’s bad conscience, having inherited rather than usurped his position. Nevertheless, he acknowledges his responsibility for whatever horrors might come in the morning.

There is an interesting discussion between two soldiers in which one expresses the view that if the King’s cause be wrong (the very fact that an ordinary soldier can think such a thing is astonishing) he will pay a heavy price for the battle and its outcome:

I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing when blood is their argument?

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.

O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposèd numbers
Pluck their hearts from them.

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:

Today is the anniversary of the Duke of Gloucester, ascending the throne no more legitimately than his immediate predecessors or his successor, as Richard III.

The details of his reign are less important than the propaganda that has blackened his name since the sixteenth century on. He is regarded as a usurper (as were Henry IV, Edward IV and Henry VII) and a man who disposed of all his opponents (as did all the Lancastrians, Yorkists and, particularly, the two first Tudors). In particular, he is seen as the murderer of his two nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Available evidence on that deed (again, hardly unusual for the period) points as much to Henry VII as the villain as to Richard III.

Ah but Henry VII, who had no rights to the throne whatsoever and he knew it, won the war, had himself crowned and, just as his son, systematically disposed of anybody and everybody who might have had a better claim and who simply opposed him. The two Henrys were considerably more efficient than Richard in this respoect and they and their dynasty, consequently, survived.

It is not the various political innovations that were truly the Tudors' achievement, as much of that had been started by the Yorkist kings, but by the efficient and skilful use of propaganda.

The court historian Polydore Virgil, the courtier (until his coscience got the better of him) Sir Thomas More and the playwright who knew which side his bread was buttered on, William Shakespeare produced a vivid but villainous figure of the evil, monstrous, hunchbacked usurper.

Interestingly enough the whole Shakespearian sequence of the Wars of the Roses is considerably more balanced than the last play in it and it is notable that Shakespeare never managed a play about Henry VII. In fact, the worst episode in the entire cycle is the murder of the Rutland, the Duke of York's youngest son and the witch-like Queen Margaret's taunting of the captured general with a napkin dipped in the boy's blood. Margaret, herself responsible for much of the trouble that undermined Henry VI's reign, is, of course, a Lancastrian.

Once we get to the last play, Richard III, all nuances disappear and one can see why. The Tudors were, rightly, uncertain of their rights to the throne and had to paint their immediate predecessor as a usurper.

The first two Tudor kings were not precisely popular and their memory, even in Elizabeth's day, was far from rosy so the immediate predecessor had to be a double-dyed villain. And so he has remained largely to this day though not for all. In Tory Historian's view the best analysis of the problem of the Princes in the Tower is in a novel, Josephine Tey's "Daughter of Time".

Another dam' long screed, to misquote the Duke of Cumberland's comment to Edward Gibbon. Scribble, scribble.

To continue the saga of the propaganda war waged after the Reichstag fire.

The first aspect of the counter-offensive was “The Brown Book”, followed later on by “The Second Brown Book”. Münzenberg mobilized many of the West’s intellectuals whom he had already enmeshed in his network or the Münzenberg Trust as it was known, to support this endeavour. Names of others, such as Albert Einstein, who protested, were simply added.

“The Brown Book” was probably written largely by Willi’s henchman and probably NKVD agent, the Czech Communist Otto Katz, who may well have been involved later on in Masaryk’s “defenestration”. Subsequently, the grateful Communist government of Czechoslovakia put him on trial together with Rudolf Slánský in the great show trial of 1952. (Incidentally, the trials of the tortured and pressurized accused were filmed and shown. Their self-abasement was made public at the time and later.)

Katz, the ruthless manipulator and brilliant propaganda writer, was accused of Zionism and espionage, confessed to all his “crimes” and begged to be executed as he had no right to live. His masters obliged and he was hanged.

As Stephen Koch, author of “Double Lives” and Sean McMeekin, author of “The Red Millionaire”, Münzenberg’s biography, argued “The Brown Book” so highly praised at the time and so valued by various historians, was largely a pack of lies. In fact, the lies were not really substantiated and only self-imposed hypnosis could have made all those writers and reviewers swoon with praise at the time.

There were three parts to the book. The first one told inaccurately of the Nazi rise to power, blaming largely the Social-Democrats and, naturally enough, being rather reticent about the war the KPD waged on the SD and the Weimar democracy in general.

The second part dealt with Nazi oppression in general and was, as Sean McMeekin puts it, “intuitively correct”, though short on facts. “The Brown Book” emphasised oppression as it affected left-wing parties and individuals not those dreadful people, capitalists, under which rubric came anyone who did not support the KPD.

Nor was there anything about the growing persecution of Jews. Instead of giving examples, the book and its supposed author, merely quoted Lenin’s attack on rich and powerful Zionists, adding quite dishonestly, that rich German Jews had not felt any discomfort under the Nazis. In fact, there was a great deal of indignation that the Nazis accused various non-Jewish left-wing and, above all, Communist activists of being that.

How ironic that the real author of this document should have ended his life as a “Zionist spy”. Communist history is full of ironies of this kind.

The third part dealt with the Reichstag fire and produced the accusations that it was organized by the Nazis, specifically by Göring. To prove this there were fraudulent charts and “photographs” produced that showed a network of subterranean passages through which the Nazis could have entered while Van der Lubbe was torching the place, to give him a hand.

To top the accusations, there were clear innuendos that Van der Lubbe was the SA Chief Ernst Röhm’s catamite, possibly a sexual toy boy to the SA in general.

Even at the time this was thin and has since been disproved quite categorically by, among others, Fritz Tobias in his 1964 book, “The Reichstag Fire”. No other writer has produced any evidence to back the half-baked assertions of “The Brown Book” and “The Second Brown Book”. They have, nevertheless, penetrated into popular psyche to quite an astonishing degree.

Münzenberg’s other ploy was the London counter-trial, the template for many other subsequent “trials”. It was timed to open the day the Leipzig trial of Van der Lubbe, Dimitrov and the others was to start, September 21, 1933.

The counter-trial was chaired by D. N. Pritt KC, barrister and member of the Labour Party, who was also one of the leading fellow travellers. In subsequent years he would use his standing as a barrister and a “silk” to explain why the Soviet show trials were legally entirely correct and how the guilt of the accused had been proved beyond any reasonable doubt.

The other "judges" were Maìtre Pierre Vermeylen of Belgium, George Branting of Sweden, Maìtre Vincent de Moro-Giafferi and Maìtre Gaston Bergery of France, Betsy Bakker-Nort of the Netherlands, Vald Hvidt of Denmark, and Arthur Garfield Hays of the United States.

Here is an interesting question for all our readers? Who burnt down the Reichstag in 1933? Can you recall the name of Marinus Van der Lubbe, the somewhat crazed Dutchman, who actually set it on fire? And even if you can, do you not think that there was somebody behind it all? After all, it could not be just a lone lunatic?

It would be interesting to know how many of those who read the above paragraph nodded and said: “Of course, Hitler ordered and manipulated Van der Lubbe (assuming you can recall the name) and then used the fire to get rid of the opposition and to blame the Communists.”

I am willing to bet that nobody said: “Oh yes, it was the Communists and they managed to get away with it because Dimitrov’s trial was unsuccessful. Hitler merely took advantage of the event.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between good and bad propaganda.

The truth is that Van der Lubbe [pictured here] did act on his own. This has been investigated and proved by a number of historians. No evidence has been found of anybody else’s involvement. (And, please, do not remind me of such things as Kirov’s murder, in December 1934. The evidence for Stalin’s involvement is everywhere.)

Further, Hitler did take advantage of the fire to do what he had always planned to do and destroy the remnants of German democratic parliament. All of that is true.

Now we come to the battle of the propagandists. Everyone, but everyone, quotes Dr Göbbels’s comment about the big lie and compares every would-be spin doctor with him. But who actually believed Göbbels? A large proportion of the German people for a time and some supporters in other countries who wanted to believe him.

As opposed to that, millions of people across the world repeat certain “truths” for which there is “full agreement” without once realizing that it is propaganda first started by that genius of spin doctoring and promoter of the Comintern, Willi Münzenberg [pictured above], without even knowing his name or comparing any tuppenny-ha’penny press officer to him. Now that is propaganda. Sheer genius.

Back to the Reichstag fire. It occurred on the night of February 27, 1933 and the perpetrator was not hard to find. Van der Lubbe, a supposed Communist and an unemployed bricklayer, clearly mentally retarded, was found inside the building.

The following day the recently elected Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, went to see the President, Hindenburg, who signed an order that closed down all non-Nazi parties and banned the Communist one.

A few days later the Gestapo arrested four Communists, intending to try them with Van der Lubbe. Ernst Togler was a senior member of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, German Communist Party), one of those who had not managed to escape. An arrest warrant was issued for him immediately and he surrendered himself to the police, something the KPD would later hold against him.

The other three were Bulgarians: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov, members of the Comintern.

What the Gestapo had not realized that Dimitrov was the head of the West European section of the Comintern and, thus, a close adviser of Stalin’s, one of the few people the latter would make an effort for. Normally Communist parties and their members would be sacrificed without a blink of an eyelid.

In addition, the man who had been charged to promote the cause of the Soviet Union and the Communist International through apparently innocuous publications, Willi Münzenberg was reasonably anxious to become involved.

Münzenberg was a German Communist, one of the few from a working class background. He was a deputy in the Reichstag and the owner of two newspapers and a publishing firm. He was also the most skilled propagandist the Soviet Union and its cause ever had. He did not write propaganda, he organized it, setting up hundreds of committees, using front organizations to run other front organizations, inspiring intellectuals to become fellow travellers and to manipulate other, innocent and ignorant intellectuals. In other words, he was the man who created the atmosphere in which it is considered to be normal to be on the left of the spectrum and intensely moral to support some of the worst tyrants in the world, as long as they seem to be a left-wing cause.

As Stephen Koch, author of “Double Lives” wrote in the New Criterion:

He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.