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By Root 1510 0

whose attitudes towards the Soviet Union or China are identical with those of thirty years ago. Someone may remark–wearily, since they have learned the uselessness of it–‘But the Russians themselves are debating the forced collectivization of the peasants, Stalin’s purges.’ ‘Nothing but capitalist propaganda’ comes the prompt reply, with all the self-righteousness of the True Believer. An inaugural address to a new year of students may begin with a set-piece of praise for the achievements of our great brother the Soviet Union, but these do not include the courageous self-examination of the last five years, because the illustrious academic has never heard of them. If some intrepid person remarks, ‘But you can hear the Soviet Union’s criticisms of itself, on the shortwave radio, at most hours of the day or night’–then the faces of these survivors, the Stalinists, put on the shrewd seasoned look of those who have known and seen it all: they aren’t going to be fooled, not they!

One of the bad effects communism has had on the West, perhaps the worst, is that generations of politicoes have learned politics from what is described as ‘the communist style of work’. ‘The Leninist style of work’. This style of work demands a sneering jeering language, based on a moral contempt for opponents, which suffuses the mind and character and prevents any kind of thinking that isn’t on the level of the school playground. I grew up when ‘everyone’ was a communist. (‘Everyone has been a communist; no one remains a communist.’) People like me can recognize from one look at some representative of the ‘hard left’ on television, that scarcely-concealed glitter of mendacity, the pride at cleverness that knows how to outwit opponents with election rigging, or the fixing of statistics, character assassinations, the whole ‘bag of tricks’. This immediately recognizable look, the equivalent of laying a finger against a nose with a slow wink is, unfortunately, not recognized by people who were not young when ‘everyone’ was in ‘The Party’. And that means they have no defence against it.

The upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe send shockwave after shockwave to undermine the old guard, but in more isolated parts of the world, tucked away in university departments and institutes of higher learning, they survive, proud of ‘the bag of tricks’, the ‘style of work’, deliberately refusing to know not only that their great exemplars have self-destructed, but that all the mental attitudes associated with them have gone too. These little crooks can never see themselves as others see them, since they identify with Lenin the pure. They do great damage, because the idealism of young people who learn to see through them goes sour, for they become angry, then cynical and are often turned away from any kind of politics, or even ordinary service to the community.

In Zimbabwe, 1988, the travelled ones know what goes on in the Soviet Union and China, the communist world to which, in theory, they belong, and will discuss it all with sophistication and worldly wisdom. But the ordinary citizens know nothing. Privilege in our world often resides in this: that people have information. Did anyone plan this? Of course not. It just happened, this mental tyranny; and it is perpetuated by Stalinist woodenheads who are fighting to hold their places in the seats of high learning, for they would not get jobs anywhere else. They are infinitely skilled in political intrigue and infinitely unscrupulous. The decent and informed people in their departments succumb to despair, and take their skills elsewhere, when they can, because their energies have to go not on teaching, but on trying to maintain a position against colleagues they despise, but cannot ignore.

Meanwhile, in schools all over Zimbabwe children dream of the distant shores of learning, in the University of Zimbabwe, which they probably will never reach because they are not clever enough.

Research into the workings of the mind shows that a percentage of people are incapable of changing their minds, no matter what