Telegraph

The Left blinds itself to the truth about bin Laden By Robert Harris (Filed: 18/12/2001)

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW went to Russia in 1931 with his mind made up. Soviet Communism was a wonderful thing and nothing would convince him otherwise.

When a junior British diplomat, Reader Bullard, made "some disparaging remark" about one of Stalin's show trials, he later noted in his diary how "Shaw grew quite indignant and said: 'But they confessed.'

"I replied: 'Yes, one of them confessed that he lunched with Colonel Lawrence at the Savoy in London on a date when we know he was in India,' but Shaw waved the argument away."

At a subsequent banquet in Moscow, "Shaw waved his hand at the excellent food and said 'Russia short of food? Look at this!' "

I thought of Shaw the other day when I read some of the reactions to the latest incriminating videotape of Osama bin Laden, gleefully reliving the collapse of the World Trade Centre.

"It is impossible not to think that something about it is a put-up job," declared an editorial in the Guardian. "It provokes all kinds of sceptical questions It should not be taken wholly at face value."

This disbelief was duly reflected the following day, both on the news pages ("Bin Laden video: as Muslim doubts grow over authenticity, special effects experts say fake would be relatively easy to make") and, inevitably, in the readers' letters ("May I be the first to nominate for an Oscar the actor who played bin Laden?").

Well, let us concede at once, it is possible that the bin Laden tape is a fake; that America, on the very brink of victory in Afghanistan, should somehow feel so unsure of its case against bin Laden that it would take the seemingly insane risk of hiring actors and technicians, and then release a fabrication for world scrutiny.

Yes: it's possible. But is it likely? And the answer, of course, is no, just as no one seriously could have believed that the hapless Communist tried in Moscow in 1931 really had had lunch at the Savoy with an officer of British intelligence (in a top hat, no doubt) who was, in any case, in India on the date mentioned.

But Shaw, a brilliant man, did believe it. Or, at any rate, he brushed away the arguments of those who didn't. He wanted to be convinced. And this syndrome - this stubborn refusal to accept what is plainly obvious - has, it strikes me, been the hallmark of many Left-wing intellectuals over the past three months.

Anyone who ever wondered about the extraordinary blindness of clever people towards the Soviet Union 70 years ago - all those Shaws, and Wellses, and Webbs, and G D H Coleses; all those subscribers to the Left Book Club - anyone, indeed, who thought we would never see such naivety again, has been able to enjoy a little trip down memory lane since September 11.

This syndrome has nothing to do with scepticism, which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a disposition to doubt or incredulity". On the contrary: it is scepticism's antithesis.

The Left made fools of themselves in the 1930s precisely because they weren't sceptical. They reasoned on the basis of their emotions: they wanted to believe in Stalin, therefore they convinced themselves that Stalin was worth believing in.

What we have seen this autumn has been a variant on the same theme: a desire that a villainous America should come a cropper in Afghanistan has led to a series of false predictions that a villainous America would indeed come a cropper. It has been founded on wishful thinking, not scepticism.

We all make mistakes, so let us spare those concerned the embarrassment of reciting here in detail the solemn prophecies that were made at various times - of the imminent collapse of the Pakistan regime, of the impossibility of capturing Kabul, of the uselessness of the Northern Alliance as fighters, of the historic inability of the various factions to agree on an interim government, of the invulnerability of the Tora Bora cave complex with the "fearsome Afghan winter" coming on - and observe only that they all stemmed from the same root: the fatal assumption that, because the writer wanted it to be so, it would be so.

And just as the old Left intellectuals were led by the remorselessness of this syndrome to defend the indefensible - the Stalinist show trials, the purges, the mass deportations - so, in a minor key, we have lately seen a repeat of the same old sophistry: the feminist who proclaims that the burqa is "a liberation" and who equates the lot of a woman under the Taliban with her Western sister who has to put up with page three girls; or the rationalist agnostic who defends the existence of a repressive, medieval theocracy (under which he would never dream of living), contrasting it favourably with the materialistic values of global capitalism.

Nothing changes. Back in 1931, having tried to put Shaw right about the show trials, the admirably persistent Mr Bullard then raised "the propaganda that is pumped into the children" by the Soviet regime. What did Shaw say to that?

"He said that was the same in England, where children at church schools are taught the Apostles' Creed - as likely as not by people who don't believe it themselves. I said there is this difference. That when English children grow up, they can meet people with other beliefs and read books etc of opposing tendencies, whereas in this country there is no alternative to communist propaganda, but he waved that away, too."

Substitute Islamic fundamentalism for Soviet Communism and you will hear exactly the same argument being made today - with this one difference. At least Shaw and the Western sympathisers for Stalin believed in something: for all their folly, they had a kind of intellectual grandeur about them, a coherent philosophy to defend.

Today, the Left doesn't even offer an alternative - just endless nit-picking raised to the level of an ideology.

-- Anonymous, December 17, 2001