I have recently been reading the “History of Witchcraft and
Demonology,” by Mr. Montague Summers, and various utterances upon the
Soviet Government of Russia by supporters of the present enlightened
Government of the British Empire, and I find a curious confusion in
my mind between the two. Mr. Summers, like all good Catholics, is a
believer in witchcraft; and he hates witches as soundly and sincerely
as the British county families hate the “Reds”; and he believes as
freely and fiercely about the detested breed. Here is a passage, and
I will leave the reader to guess whether it is from the pages of Mr.
Summers or the columns of a Conservative newspaper on the eve of a
general election:
The witch or the Red (as the case may be) is “an evil liver; a
social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed;
an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and all creeping crimes; a member
of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State; a
blasphemer in word and deed; swaying the villagers by terror and
superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes, a...”--here I censor
my authority--“an...”--the censorship is really imperative; “a minister
of vice and inconceivable corruption; battening upon the filth and
foulest passions of the age.”
The doubts the simple, honest reader of the British Conservative Press
will feel--whether this is the more accurate description of Mother
Shipton, Gilles de Rais, any Knight Templar, the late Mr. Krassin,
Mr. Lunacharsky, or Lenin--will do much to carry out the interesting
views of that great historical writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, that modern
Communism is the lineal descendant of the black traditions of medieval
sorcery, Manichean heresies, Free Masonry, and the Witch of Endor. Be
that as it may, modern Communism is certainly heir now to the estate of
fear and terror which descends to us from the past.
Perhaps mankind has a standing need for somebody to tar, feather,
and burn. Perhaps if there was no devil, men would have to invent
one. In a more perfect world we may have to draw lots to find who
shall be the witch or the “Red,” or the heretic or the nigger, in
order that one man may suffer for the people. Mr. Summers’ book
makes interesting, disagreeable reading of the sort that enhances
its excitement here and there by a coy resort to transparent Latin;
and it shows Popes and prelates and Puritans, kings and judges, all
manner of respectable people, succumbing to exactly the same sort
of emotional disturbance that now makes membership of the Communist
Party so dangerous, exciting, and attractive to the light-minded young
of Western Europe and America. Nothing was too dreadful for belief
about witches and warlocks, and, alas for the feebleness of the human
imagination, most things, it is felt, were not nearly dreadful enough.
They made mischief, they fostered strikes, and they raised storms and
insurrections in such scanty leisure as a constant round of Witches’
Sabbaths allowed. They were drowned, tortured, beaten, and burnt alive,
and still the kindly righteous had a baffling sense of inadequate
retort to all the bestial cruelty and wickedness charged against them.
As one turns over the record of Mr. Summers’ book, it is fairly plain
to any one not under a conscientious necessity to believe in witchcraft
that all these waves of inquisition and cruelty were a sort of pooling
of the normal indignation of mankind against the orgies and queer and
vile acts that lurk at the roots of our animal nature, and of our fear
of the tricks and malicious resentments of inferior and unhappy people,
and a direction of this pooled force of disapproval and hostility
against heresy, sedition, and unpopular opinions generally. Gilles
de Rais was an insane murderer, guilty of almost incredibly bestial
cruelties, but his wickedness was pinned to heresy and made an excuse
against the gentlest and purest of unbelievers. Evil men, you said were
heretics, and then when some one ventured to differ from your high
orthodoxy you charged him promptly with organized association with
filth and every form of evil. If any one questioned your theology,
well, manifestly he was a second Gilles de Rais. Mr. Summers, for
instance, has no doubt that great epidemics of witchcraft followed
doctrinal disputes; that religious doubt and a flirtatious alliance
with the devil were in the sequence of cause and effect.
To-day there are many signs that the “Red” has a good chance of
playing the part of the witch of older times in a new world mania. The
examination of Sacco and Vanzetti, charged with ordinary murder and
robbery, upon their political opinions, in the Massachusetts courts,
was quite in the vein of the old witch trials. “Tell me what you
think,” said the prosecution, “and what you did may be judged by that.”
It is wonderful how witch-hanging Massachusetts has kept true to its
old traditions.
This tendency to associate unpopular opinions with murderable offences
seems to be an increasing one on both sides of the Atlantic. I am sure
it needs only a very slight Press campaign to convince any number of
people in London that when Sir W. Joynson-Hicks made his preposterous
raid on the Soviet business headquarters in search of an alleged
stolen paper, members of the Arcos staff escaped on broomsticks from
an upper window with that wonderful confidential document the police
sought and never found. When I came back from Russia in 1920 and wrote
that Lenin seemed an intelligent little man, who was rather at a loss
what to do with the great country that had fallen so wonderfully into
his hands, I pleased nobody. The Communists and Left Labour people
wanted extravagant praise and a glorification of a state of affairs
that seemed to me to be a frightful muddle, and the anti-Bolshevik
witch-hunters wanted yarns about orgies in the Kremlin, Mme. Lenin
dressed up in the Russian Crown jewels, drinking champagne out of
cups of gold in the worst possible taste, and aristocratic babies
being tortured and murdered after dinner just for fun and devilry by
commissars. They wanted to excite themselves about Moscow, just as the
mediæval witch-hunters excited themselves with wild imaginations about
the Witches’ Sabbaths.
Failing “hot stuff” of that sort, the anti-Bolsheviks were convinced I
was in the pay of Moscow. They wanted their Bolsheviks not small and
bothered, but horrible. They wanted me to make their blood run cold.
They wanted to work themselves up into a frenzy of indignation, terror,
and violence.
And they wanted to do so because, as I say, there seems to be in the
dark, tortuous, and dangerous heart of man a real craving for vehement
self-righteous persecution and enthusiastic and irrational punishment.
I know. I have felt it in me. If I have never killed and massacred in
the waking day, I have known all these bright reliefs and excitements
in dreams. And in reveries.
To any one who can think about Bolshevism and retain a normal
temperature the facts are as plain as daylight. Russia has been, is,
and must remain for some time to come a largely barbaric country.
Large areas of Russia are still as backward as England was in Tudor
times, and few of its towns have a social life much in advance of
early nineteenth-century conditions in Great Britain. It was in the
days of the Czar, and it is to-day, a backward land of hardships and
intense discomforts, a land of rough methods, frequent crimes, and
much sporadic cruelty. Until ten years ago it was ruled by a stupid,
disorderly, and tyrannous autocracy--superstitious and hostile to
education--which collapsed through sheer inherent rottenness under the
stresses of the Great War. The resources of Russia were so wasted,
and its army so ruthlessly handled in that war, as to wreck the whole
social system. Those Bolsheviks are in possession of the wreck. They
are in possession because they were the only people with sufficient
faith, discipline, and determination to hold together in the general
chaos.
But they are neither gods nor devils. They are limited, conceited, and
as liable to witch panics and suspicion mania as the most enlightened
citizens of Middlesex or Massachusetts. Their “reprisals” for the
Arcos raid and for the various recent murders of their members would
have disgraced a lynching State in the American Union. They cling to
the old theories and dogmas of Marx, half a century stale. They seem
as little capable of modern industrial organization as the British
coal-owners, and their need is far more urgent. They have a percentage
of cads, roughs, and scoundrels hanging to them which may or may not be
higher than the similar percentage of any political party in Britain or
America. They are as a whole just a band of worried, rather incompetent
doctrinaires, some able and sympathetic, some obtuse and dangerous, and
they have an empire on their hands. There they are, the only possible
Government for Russia, and if they are submerged, nothing will be left
of Russia but a wilderness of warring brigand armies and barbaric
peasants. Failing them Russia will repeat on a larger, more dreadful
scale, and without the same substructure of civilized urban tradition,
the Germany of the Thirty Years’ War.
They will probably resent my conception of them as muddled,
overstrained men with an old-fashioned and inapplicable social theory
to guide them in an overwhelming job, far more than the current
idea of them as a crew of super-devils. Like the mediæval witches,
they threaten and boast to keep up their self-respect, and so they
bring down upon themselves the cowardly violence of the timid.
Whatever happens abroad to the discomfort of the American or European
capitalists they claim as the result of their marvellous machinations.
It is a pitiful posturing.
I do not believe that the coal muddle and that dismal strike of last
year would have happened any differently if Russia had never existed.
They have a conceit of ordering about the labouring classes of the
earth. It is touching. I found poor Lenin in the Kremlin swallowing the
stuff in Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’s “Dreadnought” as the current opinion
of the British “proletariat.”
As a matter of fact, in all the world from end to end outside Russia--I
am not forgetting China--the Communist Party cannot count upon the
services of twenty thousand men or raise half a million pounds. It is
always poking into gatherings and claiming to have called them, jumping
on coaches driven by other people and pretending to run them. The only
advantage of this sort of rubbish to the Bolsheviks is to give the
simple Russian worker a good conceit of himself and his rulers, but
it is disastrous to the friends of the worker everywhere. It supplies
the witch-finder and the hunter of radicals with just the “’orrible
’orrible” evidence he needs.
When I visited the House of Science in Petrograd in 1920, there was
a Communist Party representative who had poked in among the men of
science to explain how different and superior “Marxist” chemistry and
astronomy were to the bourgeois teaching, and Fülop-Miller’s “Geist
and Gesicht des Bolshewismus” (which has recently been translated into
English) collects, with destructive malice and deadly illustrations,
flagrant examples of the nonsense about new philosophy, new science,
new art, new religion, new everything, newer and better than ever
before, with which the Bolsheviks console themselves in their grim and
from many aspects amazingly plucky struggle to keep a strained and
damaged civilization going and even progressing, in the face of the
extravagant hatred and hostility of the outer world.
If only people would recognize, first, that Russia is, and must be for
some decades, a very backward country, and that, whatever Government
rules there, rough and barbaric things are bound to happen; second,
that the whole of the Bolshevik propaganda is about as injurious to
modern capitalism as the brews and spells of those poor old women our
ancestors found such satisfaction in burning alive were to the people
against whom they were aimed; third, that panic, violence, brag,
bad manners, and petty irritations towards foreigners are not the
monopoly of the Bolsheviks; and, fourth, that the existing Government
of Russia is the only possible Government there at the present time;
and that the only hope of saving the vast areas and resources of
European and Asiatic Russia for civilization lies in getting to some
working compromise with that Government and co-operating in its
development--if, I say, people would bear these fairly obvious things
in mind, I should be able to look forward with more confidence to the
immediate future of the world than I feel at the present time. But with
Britain in the hands of a Government suffering from witch mania with
regard to Russia and the ruling powers of America in little better
case, with the liberalism of the world leaderless, misrepresented, and
confused, there is a very considerable probability that that ailing
State will be, as a potential modern State, ruined and destroyed
in the next few decades. Nothing will be achieved by the overthrow
of Bolshevism in Russia as the result of this witch mania but the
completer desolation of a great area of the old world.
_21 August, 1927._