The Confession of a Political Pilgrim

The author at the Bay of Pigs.

3,130 words

Cynicism is something which has become symbolic of imperial policy. — Fidel Castro

A book that deserves the encomium of “classic” in the study of the totalitarian mindset is Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims. Hollander died in 2019. He was a Hungarian-born Jew who as a child survived Nazi-occupied Budapest, and with his family fled to the West in 1956 to escape the brutal repression that followed Hungary’s failed uprising against their Soviet overlords.

“Go West, young man,” Horace Greely once advised, and it worked out well for Paul Hollander.

Unfortunately, nowadays the “West” isn’t what it used to be, because, well, the priestly class, or intellectuals, abandoned it decades ago for seductive, yet fake, religions.

Hollander’s book, which was first published by Oxford University Press, went through four editions. The first (1981) edition carried the subtitle Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 1928–1979. That somewhat anodyne phrase was changed in the fourth (1998) edition to the more provocative Western Intellectuals in Search of a Good Society. The revision responded to the seismic changes in international politics that had occurred with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The revision also speaks to a broader, incisive grasp in Hollander’s understanding of the paradoxical irrationality of the intellectual class in its long, passionate embrace of Left-wing dictatorships for their imagined moral superiority. “Western Intellectuals in Search of a Good Society,” writes Hollander, “reaches further and reminds the reader that political pilgrimages are part of a broader and more timeless quest.”[1] That “timeless quest” would seem to be motivated by powerfully negative feelings about Western society and its history. More on that later.

A pilgrim by definition is a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons. “Political pilgrims” thus brilliantly captures the religious enthrallment that seized so many good-thinkers from the United States, England, and other countries for the Bolshevik experiment in group-think and mass-murder that was going on in post-First World War Russia. Moscow for decades was the Mecca for these pilgrims, who were seeking to bolster their faith in a new order that promised both prosperity and equality for the downtrodden. Some of the more illustrious of the travelers were George Bernard Shaw (playwright), Simon de Beauvoir (writer/feminist), Pablo Neruda (poet), Theodore Dreiser (journalist/novelist), and Paul Robeson (singer/actor/football star) — quite a spectrum of talent. Though he never went himself to the Soviet Union, the “brain trust” president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was quite smitten with Stalin. He dispatched his philo-Communist emissary, Harry Hopkin, to the Kremlin to curry the Communist Party Chairman’s favor and facilitate the supplying of extremely generous amounts of material support to him in his battle against Hitler.[2]

The American journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from his 1919 pilgrimage, but was no longer a journalist and instead a prophet as he famously uttered, “I have seen the future and it works.” It aptly captures the abandonment of the critical, skeptical instincts typically associated with intellectuals for a religious enthusiasm akin to that of William Miller’s Seventh-day Adventists readying themselves for their ascension from America into heaven in 1844. In 1932, the Fabian socialist luminary duo, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, returned from a Potemkin tour of Ukraine, where Stalin was in the process of launching a terror famine that would kill several million peasants. They went on to publish a two-volume Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1935) in which they showered praise on the USSR as “the most inclusive and equalized democracy in the world.”

Bertrand Russell went to Russia in 1920 with the British Labour delegation and even had a one-on-one with Lenin, but unlike many sojourners, he kept his skeptical spectacles in place. Upon his return to England he wrote a summary and analysis of his visit entitled The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. Bolshevism, he recognized immediately, was a religion:

Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible,by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. Early on, he could also see where the scam was headed. In Chapter VI, “Why Russian Communism Has Failed,” he writes: Out of all this has grown a system painfully like the old government of the Tsar — a system which is Asiatic in its centralized bureaucracy, its secret service, its atmosphere of governmental mystery and submissive terror. Russell remained a Leftist throughout his long life, but at least with the Soviets he refused to drink the Kool-Aid.

Hollander’s book covers the search for the good society over many decades and across lots of geography. The rapture of Western intellectuals with Stalinism eventually gave way to disillusion with all of the grimness, repression, and squalidness of the USSR and the Eastern bloc. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956 in which he denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality” leaked out and sent shock waves through the Communist true believers around the world. Even long-time Soviet fanboy Jean-Paul Sartre, who had made the Moscow trek in 1954, had seen enough of the Russian version of Karl Marx to experience condign disappointment by 1956:

I condemn the Soviet invasion [of Hungary, October, 1956] wholeheartedly and without any reservation . . . [I]ts current government has committed a crime. . . . It is and will be impossible to reestablish any sort of contact with the men who are currently at the head of the [French Communist Party]. Each sentence they utter, each action they take is the culmination of 30 years of lies and sclerosis.

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s novel Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning here.

For Mr. Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant), after being a parlor Red for many years, he was taking the nothingness of Communist promise-keeping, well, personally. Yet, as we’ll see below, he appeared to be a slow learner.

For the remaining faithful, the next generation of Marxist revolutionary heroes were stepping up to sustain the romance and fill the “revolutionary” void vacated by Comrade Stalin, then moldering away in his tomb on Red Square next to Comrade Lenin. The grey, drab, monotone Communism of Russia, Poland, and East Germany, with their stolid and robot-like white-male leaders, passed out of vogue as more colorful and exotic third-world charismatic Robin Hoods emerged to enthuse over. The fellow travelers shifted their affection and support to the sleeker Stalinist models with brand new tires and fewer miles — Mao, Castro, Ho — a freshly-minted entourage of revolutionaries full of promises and derring-do; hope and change for the oppressed, gulags for the unimpressed.

With the coming of the 1960s and Communism’s international expansion, there were more possibilities for the “search for the good society.” Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, China, and East Germany were among some of the popular travel destinations. Who can forget Jane Fonda in Hanoi?

Havana, however, would become the political pilgrims’ most favored destination. Disappointed with the Soviets, Sartre and his girlfriend-feminista Simon de Beauvoir decamped to Havana, where they partied for a month and then returned to Paris in utter enthrallment with Fidel.[3]

The Fidel mystique persisted for decades as he played host to scores of Hollywood celebrities who came to pay homage. Steven Spielberg in 2002 spent an evening with Castro, afterwards calling it “the eight most important hours of my life.” Call it a “close encounter of an absurd kind.” Meanwhile, the Cubans who could leave did, and those who remained got poorer and hungrier.

Now, here I must pause and make my confession. I myself was a political pilgrim, of sorts — to Cuba. It was Fidel who was calling to me for many years. In my view, he was the smartest, wiliest, larger-than-life player on the twentieth-century, world-historical stage. Castro had showed his middle finger to and outlasted ten — count them, ten — US presidents, at least two of whom conspired to murder him.

Castro’s skill and moxie turned his revolution and Cuba, a former US vassal state and American tourist playground, into symbols of triumph in a never-ending faceoff against imperialism. Scruffy beard and military fatigues, strutting and posturing, El maximum lider was always a frustrating, fury-arousing step ahead of the button-down stiffs from Foggy Bottom and the cloak-and-dagger suits out of Langley.

CIA Director George no-clue Tenet awarding Ana Montes (Cuban mole-spy) the Certificate of Distinction, 1997

For Castro it was win-win. For the Cuban people under his heel, it was a bust. Still, he became a mythical hero in many parts of the world where the US was seen as a bully, but especially in Latin America. He perfectly played the role of David taking on the US Goliath, constantly poking his finger in Uncle Sam’s eye. Fidel also played the high-stakes game of geopolitical brinksmanship with perfection, manipulating and setting the world’s two superpowers against each other, nearly causing World War III in 1962, a mere three years after he ran Batista off the island and shut down the gambling casinos and whorehouses owned by American mobsters.

By 2015 Fidel was retired from public life, with hermano menor Raúl running the show. President Obama had just announced that he was planning to open diplomatic relations with Cuba. I wanted to get there rapido and see what Castro’s 55-year paradise in the making looked like, for better or worse, before it got re-Americanized.

To get a US Treasury Department, Office of Foreign Assess Control-approved visa — another part of this confession — I had to join a delegation of about 20 people representing a far-Left organization called Witness for Peace. This entourage was composed of white, mostly older, middle-class, affluent professionals from places such as Portland, Oregon; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Berkeley, etc. You get the picture: a Potemkin tour. We were put up in a compound in a Havana suburb with a dormitory, cafeteria, and conference room that was called — I’m embarrassed to mention — “the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center.”

Of my fellow political pilgrims, I would say that with a couple of exceptions they were devout “liberal progressive” types completely self-isolated from the kind of books, ideas, cultural influences, and people that might disrupt their vision of the “good society” and violate their jealously-guarded sense of moral superiority. Though mostly quiet, compliant, and respectful during my sojourn, I could not help but be viewed with suspicion by my colleagues.

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

My stay in Havana lasted ten days, every one of them dedicated by our hosts to impressing all of us with — to put it in the most abstract, comforting way possible — Fidel’s heroism and the continuing glory of “the Revolution.” We toured the main hospital, the medical school, a day care center, a grade school plastered with Che posters, an arts and music high school, the University of Havana, and — the highlight for me — the Bay of Pigs beach. I tried to imagine the American-supported invading force wading ashore and being decimated under machine-gun fire, but the bikini-clad tourists made that effort a challenge.

The Bay of Pigs Museum, which was actually fascinating, did not appear to get much traffic.

The travel log I kept of my Cuban stay goes on for many pages, but what impressed me the most were three things. First were my fellow pilgrims, with their naïve, romanticized view of Cuban-style Communism and their inclination toward self-laceration for being associated with Yankee imperialism. Here were those powerfully negative feelings about Western society and its history at work. Our Cuban hosts knew how to manipulate these guilt-ridden, Left-wing Americans and make them understand that Fidel and Raúl’s failure to make Cuba into a paradise of equality and prosperity after 55 years was entirely the fault of American politicians. There was a lot of shaming going on. For my fellow pilgrims, it felt so good.

Second was the vacuity of the hype to bolster the ruling class’ legitimizing ideology. In spite of the many signs and posters I saw lauding Fidel and Che, no one in Cuba seemed to care anymore about Fidel,[4] and the “Glorious Revolution” was a tired phrase mocked by the physical decay and neglect I saw everywhere. Downtown, the once-magnificent Havana architecture had crumbled. With the exception of the posh hotels and restaurants that were exclusively for foreign tourists, the look of shabbiness and ruin dominated the landscape. Nothing worked — such as the sewers. You could not flush soiled paper down the toilets. There were periodic electricity blackouts, and no air conditioning. Refrigeration was always iffy; one often drank warm beer on hot, humid evenings. Houses were falling down; once-beautiful neighborhoods looked like slums. I also sat in the back seat of a taxi one evening while the driver summoned his friends to push the car so he could pop the clutch to get it started.

Shopping for the basics in Havana.

Third was the utter cynicism of the Cuban ruling class, that clearly no longer believed in anything other than keeping its hold on power. Prostitution for the tourists, I noted, was back. The economy was built on tourism with a two-tiered currency that, contrary to the socialist religion of equality, maintained a harsh economic caste system. The Peso Cubano Convertible (CUC) that I used was fixed to the US dollar. It exchanged at a rate of 0.97 CUC per $1.00 USD, and the government took 10% of my CUC as a tax. The government uses the Peso Cubano (CUP) to pay the Cuban workforce. The CUP was not exchangeable directly into foreign currency, and was fixed at a rate of 24 to 1 of the CUC. The Cuban people were paid with a monetary unit worth a small fraction of that used by the tourists.

And so:

The dual currency system has acted as a powerful disincentive for citizens to work for state enterprises or institutions, since workers are paid in national currency, but obliged to purchase certain needed goods and services in CUC. . . . To illustrate the everyday financial landscape: a typical citizen may purchase a coffee for 1 CUP, bus fare for less than 1 CUP, and a basic lunch for 10 CUP — but then have to save up a month’s salary for a new pair of shoes sold in CUC [or a meal with his family in a tourist restaurant], or hundreds of CUC for home repairs.

Other than employees in the tourist industry, the government keeps its people in a state of permanent serfdom. There is little incentive for ordinary Cubans to work, since their wages are at subsistence level. I was struck by how many people I saw out during the day, not working: a socialist workers’ paradise where no one works.

This failed Communist state then takes us back to Hollander and his observations about political pilgrims. The fourth edition of Political Pilgrims was published 25 years ago, and I believe it is safe to say that there are no longer destinations — “good societies” — anywhere on the planet to entice disillusioned Western intellectuals to visit. Hollander himself suggests as much in the Introduction to the last edition:

Even if the pilgrimages have greatly diminished, the impulses behind them are still with us as are the enclaves of what I called earlier the adversary culture, especially in and around colleges and universities”[5]

The pilgrims have stopped traveling, and the reason is that the by the end of the twentieth century Marxist dictatorships had failed everywhere. There was no place left to visit that delivered the goods, no society that had attained the ultimate desideratum of the good society: equality. Thus, the intellectuals in the West reluctantly had to give up on Marxism, though they retained some of its superficial trappings: its heroes (Che t-shirts) and the lingo of “exploitation and oppression.”

In the search for the “good society,” the good thinkers concluded that the origins of inequality had nothing to do with who owns “the means of production.” It turned out that it resides in the advantages — the “privilege” — of European-heritage (white) people. “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” The inequality that appears as a permanent fixture of Western society is really the outcome of Western society’s primal malignancy: racism. The “fix” for inequality, then, is the dismantlement of Western institutions and the marginalization or replacement of white European peoples. Eliminating the racists will eliminate inequality.

Since the last publication of Hollander’s book, Leftist-Marxism has folded and given way to Leftist-wokeism (anti-racism), an ideology of primitivism whose spokespeople enthusiastically reject empirical reality and logic because contemplating reality hurts their feelings and logic doesn’t end racism. A “good society,” where the chosen people can finally feel good, is one where they, not white people, are in charge. It worked out so well for the folks ruled by the non-whites who took over Rhodesia, after all.

Zimbabwe was the “bread basket of Africa” when it was Rhodesia.

The intellectually-fostered “adversarial culture” that Hollander speaks of has given way to a rabid, anti-intellectual culture. Karl Marx was at least a worthy and formidable adversary who offered a sophisticated philosophical and moral vision of a good society.[6] Now, we have anti-racist “intellectuals” — the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, the favored shamans of the ruling class — dispatched to engage in grievance-mongering and mine the deep veins of collective guilt in the psyches of white, liberal progressives.

To return to Fidel Castro and his quote at the beginning of this article: “Cynicism is something which has become symbolic of imperial policy.” With the rise and domination of wokeism, I would paraphrase Fidel’s observation to say: “Cynicism is something which has become symbolic of public policy.”

The cynicism of the ruling class, much like what prevailed in the Soviet Union’s final days, is what drives the religion of wokeism, that force being a collusion of government, higher education, mass media, and corporate America. It is a top-down instrument of power that uses the anointed grievance-mongers and their virtue-signaling followers to demoralize normal, decent Americans and advance the elite’s interests.

Its failure to comport with reality signals that we can anticipate its collapse.

*  *  *

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Notes

[1] Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of a Good Society, 4th edition (London & New York: Routledge, 1998), p. xiii.

[2] See Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013) for a detailed study of FDR’s astonishing naïveté regarding Stalin, and how his emissary to the USSR, White House live-in Harry Hopkins, shuttled back and forth to Moscow during the Second World War, intent on helping FDR to keep Stalin happy.

[3] Sartre published a lengthy account of his stay in Cuba, “Ouragan sur le sucre,” in Les Temps Modernes 2008/3 (No. 649), pp. 5-155.

[4] I asked a taxi driver where Fidel was then living, given that he was retired. He shrugged, said, he didn’t know, and looked at me as if to say, “Who cares?”

[5] Hollander, Political Pilgrims, p. liii.

[6] See “Is Wokeism Marxist?”, a collection of essays in the April 2023 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.