Forget Philby, Stalin's best agents run our lives today
PETER HITCHENS | 29.04.2003 22:19
Forget Philby, Stalin's best agents run our lives today
by PETER HITCHENS
In the end, the Communists won the Cold War, not with tanks but with ideas.
People who hate Britain and love socialism now run the Government, the schools, the Civil Service and most of our broadcasting.
So no wonder the BBC is about to portray the despicable Cambridge traitors as glamorous heroes.
I once visited the KGB's museum in Moscow - hard by the torture cells of the Lubyanka prison - where these creatures were celebrated, alongside the secret policemen and murderers of Stalin's terror state and his empire of concentration camps.
It was clear to me that Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the rest of this sorry collection had cut themselves off from normal human morality and given their loyalty to a blood-encrusted despotism.
It was clear to them too, but they didn't care, and they blithely consigned unknown numbers of fellow countrymen to hideous deaths, by betraying them to their savage master.
They knew exactly what they were doing. By the time they sold their souls to Stalin in the Thirties, refugees and defectors had already published convincing books about the concentration camps across the USSR.
Malcolm Muggeridge had even persuaded The Guardian to carry his devastating on-the-spot dispatches about Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants were deliberately starved to death because they got in the way of plans to nationalise the land.
You didn't have to wait until the Red Army's joint victory parade with Hitler's Wehrmacht after their co-ordinated invasion of Poland in 1940 to know that the Kremlin was a nest of evil.
You didn't need to see the tanks murdering strikers in Berlin in 1953, or massacring democrats in Budapest in 1956. The evidence was there already.
If the makers of the BBC's £6million new series, Cambridge Spies, understand any of this, I've yet to see evidence.
With the one exception of Angus Macqueen's Gulag, none of our broadcasters has ever come to terms with the truth, that Stalin was at least as bad as Hitler and possibly worse.
Our universities and a lot of other places are still stuffed with people who have a sneaking sympathy with the old USSR and who would forgive an ex-Communist when they would never forgive an ex-Nazi.
These people justify themselves by lying about this country. They refuse to accept that, for all its faults, Britain has been for centuries a free and happy place where people have been left alone to live their lives as they think fit.
They have invented a new history which tells nothing but the black side.
As well as portraying the treacherous Cambridge creeps as a good deal more handsome than they were, the TV drama has invented at least two scenes which might have been scripted by a Soviet propaganda section.
One shows Kim Philby's Jewish girlfriend subjected to anti-semitic abuse. It never happened. Another shows snobbish Cambridge hearties beating up striking college servants. That never happened either.
Everyone else of their generation is portrayed as a wretched appeaser or Nazi sympathiser, an accusation more than disproved by the long lists of names of the honest, loyal dead on the war memorials of every Cambridge college.
What worries me most is this. Just after the Second World War, the leader of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, went to Cambridge to speak to a gathering of highflying young Left-wingers.
He told them: 'Don't join the Communist Party. Work hard, get good degrees, join the Establishment and serve the cause from within.'
No doubt he made a similar trip to Oxford. I suspect that was a much more successful project than the Philby episode, and did more long-lasting damage to this country than any spy has ever done.
by PETER HITCHENS
In the end, the Communists won the Cold War, not with tanks but with ideas.
People who hate Britain and love socialism now run the Government, the schools, the Civil Service and most of our broadcasting.
So no wonder the BBC is about to portray the despicable Cambridge traitors as glamorous heroes.
I once visited the KGB's museum in Moscow - hard by the torture cells of the Lubyanka prison - where these creatures were celebrated, alongside the secret policemen and murderers of Stalin's terror state and his empire of concentration camps.
It was clear to me that Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the rest of this sorry collection had cut themselves off from normal human morality and given their loyalty to a blood-encrusted despotism.
It was clear to them too, but they didn't care, and they blithely consigned unknown numbers of fellow countrymen to hideous deaths, by betraying them to their savage master.
They knew exactly what they were doing. By the time they sold their souls to Stalin in the Thirties, refugees and defectors had already published convincing books about the concentration camps across the USSR.
Malcolm Muggeridge had even persuaded The Guardian to carry his devastating on-the-spot dispatches about Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants were deliberately starved to death because they got in the way of plans to nationalise the land.
You didn't have to wait until the Red Army's joint victory parade with Hitler's Wehrmacht after their co-ordinated invasion of Poland in 1940 to know that the Kremlin was a nest of evil.
You didn't need to see the tanks murdering strikers in Berlin in 1953, or massacring democrats in Budapest in 1956. The evidence was there already.
If the makers of the BBC's £6million new series, Cambridge Spies, understand any of this, I've yet to see evidence.
With the one exception of Angus Macqueen's Gulag, none of our broadcasters has ever come to terms with the truth, that Stalin was at least as bad as Hitler and possibly worse.
Our universities and a lot of other places are still stuffed with people who have a sneaking sympathy with the old USSR and who would forgive an ex-Communist when they would never forgive an ex-Nazi.
These people justify themselves by lying about this country. They refuse to accept that, for all its faults, Britain has been for centuries a free and happy place where people have been left alone to live their lives as they think fit.
They have invented a new history which tells nothing but the black side.
As well as portraying the treacherous Cambridge creeps as a good deal more handsome than they were, the TV drama has invented at least two scenes which might have been scripted by a Soviet propaganda section.
One shows Kim Philby's Jewish girlfriend subjected to anti-semitic abuse. It never happened. Another shows snobbish Cambridge hearties beating up striking college servants. That never happened either.
Everyone else of their generation is portrayed as a wretched appeaser or Nazi sympathiser, an accusation more than disproved by the long lists of names of the honest, loyal dead on the war memorials of every Cambridge college.
What worries me most is this. Just after the Second World War, the leader of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, went to Cambridge to speak to a gathering of highflying young Left-wingers.
He told them: 'Don't join the Communist Party. Work hard, get good degrees, join the Establishment and serve the cause from within.'
No doubt he made a similar trip to Oxford. I suspect that was a much more successful project than the Philby episode, and did more long-lasting damage to this country than any spy has ever done.
PETER HITCHENS
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