Degrees of treason
Recent exposures of left-wingers in Britain who passed on information to the Soviet Union and its satellites have led to a whole spate of newspaper articles and TV programmes on the subject of treason and what constitutes it - with focus again on the activities of notorious comsymps like Burgess, McLean, Philby, Blunt, Blake, Cairncross and numerous others. What made these people tick? Just how contemptible was their behaviour? Should we try to see their actions through their own eyes rather than in accordance with conventional criteria of patriotism, loyalty and duty?
It is of course true that these things - and their opposites - can be subject very much to personal interpretation. In the climate of post-war Britain, 'loyalty', for instance, came to mean allegiance, not just to the nation itself, but to the wider concepts of the 'Atlantic Alliance', the 'Free World', 'Democracy' and whatever other collectivity or abstraction to which it was assumed, often quite unthinkingly, British interests must be aligned. From such assumptions grew the converse view: that any action which helped Soviet Russia, whether in large or small ways, constituted treachery and stood, axiomatically, to be condemned.
But perhaps it was this very vague and somewhat ideological picture of where duty stood, and where consequently treason stood in relation to it, that led a number of highly intelligent people to become confused over their loyalties and to commit actions that earned them the condemnation of the vast majority of their fellow Britons. Were patriotism and loyalty to have remained simple concepts - a matter of allegiance to the nation-state of which one was part - such confusion might have been avoided, or at least greatly reduced; and such acts earning the epithet of treason might have been reduced correspondingly. But because 'patriotism' in the second half of the 20th century came to mean something vastly more complex, requiring as it did allegiance to entities extending far beyond the nation-state, and to ideas and institutions manifestly full of flaws, the automatic authority it should enjoy became diluted, and men and women - particularly the more intelligent - underwent struggles of conscience which in clear times of clear thinking would most probably never have arisen.
As just one instance of the moral dilemma, many, faced with a choice of allegiance between the liberal-capitalist West and its supposed communist adversary, undoubtedly decided the former, in all its decadence and corruption could make no automatic claim on them. When it came to the latter, on the other hand, the strictly superficial perception of the Soviet World which was the only one allowed in so-called 'democratic' circles - a perception which strictly excluded any understanding of the true origins of communism, let alone a discussion of the identity of its architects - could easily seduce the idealist by the simple formula of the grass always being greener on the other side of the hill!
It must also be remembered that the people succumbing to this seduction grew up and were educated in an environment, which taught them to reject all the old certainties on which patriotism was based. The major universities in the Thirties and thereafter-preached the 'out-of-dateness' of national loyalty pride, sovereignty and identity - even that those things were positively 'evil'. Remember that the obsession of the intelligentsia of those times was, first, 'stopping fascism' and later, when that objective had been achieved, making sure that it never rose again. With 'fascism' becoming the label slapped on every expression of healthy national feeling, what country was left to which progressively minded young ladies and gentlemen could be loyal? And what betrayal of country could there be which might act as a barrier to ideological indulgence by these mostly spoilt brats of the bourgeois classes?
Finally, when all is said and done, can we assert without fear of contradiction that favours, many quite small, done to the Soviets constituted worse crimes against Britain than policies carried out at the level of government, in perfect legality, which have opened our borders to massive Third World immigration and ensnared our nation in the tentacles of European Union? Has the passing of secrets to the Kremlin done more damage than the gutting of British manufacturing industry and the selling out of what's left of it to foreign capital? Were, and are, the Burgesses, McLeans and Philbys greater practitioners of national treachery than the men and women we have elevated and honoured for their part in these developments?
And considering the whole role of the United States over the past half-century, a world which has at many points been antipathetic to British interests, can we say that those Britons who have served the Soviets have betrayed their country to any greater degree than those politicians who have jumped obediently through the hoops held by whoever might be the current occupant of the White House.
This is not to cast any halos round the heads of our squalid and rather pathetic Soviet agents; it is only to get their misdeeds in accurate perspective.
Webmaster's note: This article was originally published in 'Spearhead' magazine No.368, October 1999.
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