Vol. 31 No. 14 · 23 July 2009
pages 13-15 | 4063 words
Wedgism
Neal Ascherson
- BuyConstructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain and International Communism 1945-50 by Marc Selverstone
Harvard, 304 pp, £36.95, February 2009, ISBN 978 0 674 03179 1
Long ago, when I was stumbling through the Malayan jungle in search of ‘Communist terrorists’ (or ‘bandits’, as the British colonial authorities quaintly called them), I heard a story from some other marines. One day, a young marine had left his patrol to wash in a forest stream. He suddenly found himself facing a group of Chinese guerrillas led by a slim woman with a pistol. The woman looked at the naked boy for a moment, and then lowered her gun. She said: ‘My name is Lee Meng. Go and tell your comrades that we do not murder helpless men.’ Then she and her companions vanished back into the trees.
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 15 · 6 August 2009
From David Campbell
Neal Ascherson is unduly modest about his own service, both in the Malayan Emergency – a term which he oddly declines to use – and in attempting to save the life of the convicted terrorist Lee Meng (LRB, 23 July). Ascherson served in a crack unit and commanded a successful ambush. His intervention on Lee’s behalf was extraordinarily courageous, given his conditioning and youth. He implies that he accepted the need to contain Communism uncritically at the time, as ‘almost all of us’ did (myself included). But in fact, after his National Service, and while still a Cambridge undergraduate, he published a semi-autobiographical story in Granta which questioned the right of the state to send out young men to kill. Here again, considering the period, his age and his class, he showed exceptional insight and moral courage.
Ascherson’s analysis of the Malayan Communists is too black and white. In ideological terms, their inspiration was the October Revolution: Marx, Lenin and Stalin were their icons, not the Chinese leadership. The enormous pride in China as a nation was real but by no means universal. Not only was the Chinese community itself deeply divided; long experience of Communist tactics in the labour movement had raised many doubts in Chinese minds. Ascherson makes no mention of the greatest blow suffered by the insurgents: the prompt recognition of the new independent Malaya by mainland China. This happened when I was ‘blundering about in the Malayan jungle’ myself. Massive defection followed, including, within two years, the whole of Johore.
Ascherson’s analysis of Communism more generally is also too didactic. When I joined the Foreign Office in 1960 I inherited an intellectual tradition which had no difficulty in distinguishing between the Soviet Union’s pursuit of its national interests and its broader, ideological ambitions. The issue was whether the former was basically defensive or expansionist; and it seemed reasonably clear that cautious consolidation was almost always the priority. Ideological expansionism was more reckless, carried out without thought for the good of the countries concerned and using whatever stooges the Russians could find. And it had the further, often devastating, effect of provoking counter-measures under the Truman Doctrine. Despite the harm this caused, I have always felt a certain respect for Harry Truman. His determination to defend the ‘American Way of Life’ was no platitude. He saw the defence of the American constitution as his prime duty. In this respect he remains an example to the degenerate populists of today.
David Campbell
Edinburgh
