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每日一贴之九:自由派和斯大林的爱情故事(转载)

每日一贴之九:自由派和斯大林的爱情故事(转载)

作者:Robert Conquest @ 1999-7-30
来源: Hoover Institution
关键词:历史, 政治
@海德沙龙:【雄文巨献】自由派最奇特的表现是,一方面倡导自由、平等、博爱、和平,一方面却对现代史上最无自由、最具压制性、最残忍、最崇尚暴力的镇权或明或暗的报以同情、加以辩护,甚至施以援手,历史学家 Robert Conquest 为我们呈现了这一奇特现象的来龙去脉。

How Liberals Funked It?
自由派是如何可耻遁匿的?

A liberal is, by definition, one whose aim is the furtherance of ever greater political liberty, freedom of thought, and social justice. A number of those who thought of themselves as, and were thought of as, liberals became apologists for Stalinist or similar regimes whose most notable characteristics were extreme terror, narrow dogmatism, social oppression, and economic failure. That is, they were all that the liberal tradition opposed.

按定义,一个 “自由派” 理应是以推进政治自由、思想自由与社会公正为其目标。但是,许多自认为且被大众认为是自由派的人,却成了斯大林主义及类似政权的辩护士。这类政权最昭著的特征是极度的恐怖,僵化的教条主义,社会压制,以及经济失败。显然,所有这些都是自由派最应当反对的东西。

How, and why, did a number of liberals explicitly, and a large swath of liberaldom implicitly, overcome this objection? How did this apparent paradox come to pass? Why in the 1930s and later do we find a sort of general infection of the atmosphere in which much of the intelligentsia moved? Even apart from those who became more or less addicted to communism, there was also a stratum that usually gave the Soviet Union and such regimes some moral advantage over the West.

那么,那些明确这么做的自由派,以及更多默认其做法的泛自由派人士,为何能够克服这种显而易见的自相矛盾?它们又是如何做到这一点的?为什么会出现一个如此明显的悖论?为什么自 1930 年代起,整个知识界都感染了这种气氛?即使不算那些多少痴迷于共产主义的人,知识界里还有一大批人乐于认为:与西方相比,苏联及类似政权具有某种道义优势。

First, of course, we should say that there were many liberals—and in general many on the left—who kept their principles unsullied and were often among the strongest opponents of the communist despotisms. Liberal is, indeed, a vague term. Many of us would take a “liberal” position on some issues, a “conservative” one on others—as most of the American or British people in fact do (an attitude shared by the present writer).

首先应当指出的是:许多自由派——以及一般而言,许多左派——还是保持着他们的原则未受玷污的。他们时常还属于共产暴政最坚决的反对者之列。“自由派”这个词的意义本身就是相当含糊的。大多数人都在一些问题上抱着 “自由派” 的看法,而在另一些问题上持 “保守派” 观点,多数英国人或美国人——含笔者在内——都是这样。

These two vaguely differentiated attitudes are the poles within the normal development, or balance, of a civic or consensual society. But all those with a reasonably critical intelligence, whether “conservative” or “liberal” on other issues, were hostile to the USSR. Those who supported it unreservedly were Communists; those who excused it may have thought of themselves as liberals, but to that extent they degraded the term.

在一个平衡发展的公民社会或协约社会(consensual society)里,出现 “自由派” 和“保守派”这样两种各居一极但分野并不明确的观点,是再正常不过的了。但是所有具有适当批判思维能力的人,不管他在其它问题上自认为是保守派还是自由派,都是对苏联怀有敌意的。明确表态支持苏联的人无疑是共产主义者,而那些对苏联抱有心怀体谅的人,或许自认为是自由派,但他们这么做时,正是在给 “自由派” 这个词抹黑。

The phenomenon we deal with here is what Orwell called “renegade liberalism.” He defined these renegade liberals with characteristic felicity, in the unused preface to Animal Farm, as those who hold that “democracy” can only be defended by discouraging or suppressing independent thought.

本文要讨论的,是被乔治 · 奥威尔称为 “变节的自由主义” 的现象。奥威尔在《动物庄园》的一篇未发表的序文中,以他标志性的精妙笔触,定义了这些变节的自由派:这些人认为保卫他们眼中的 “民主” 的唯一方式,就是阻止或压制独立思考。

His immediate concern was that “where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions.”

当时,最令奥威尔感到担忧的现象是,“即使并未受到什么迫使他们说假话的直接压力,自由派作家或记者们在讨论苏联及其政策时,也难以指望他们表现出一点批判性智慧,许多时候他们甚至都不肯说句实话。”

Elsewhere (in “The Prevention of Literature”), he comments, “When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness.” And, he felt obliged to add, “it is the liberals who fear liberty and intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.”

在另一篇文章(《对文学的阻碍》)中,奥威尔评论道:“当一个受过高等教育的人对他眼前的压制和迫害熟视无睹,我真不知道是更应当鄙视他的冷漠还是他的短视。” 可能是觉得自己有义务说得更明白一些,他又写道:“害怕自由的恰恰是那些自由派,而抹黑智识的正是知识分子。”

THE SLIPPERY CONCEPT OF EQUALITY
平等:一个难以捉摸的概念

We can trace the roots of this aberration a long way back. Even before the First World War, L. T. Hobhouse in his classic Liberalism had written, “liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid meaning.” “Equality” is a slippery word. In a general sense we may allow that genuine liberals—and others—are committed to a society of equal citizens.

自由派的这种错乱由来已久。在第一次世界大战前,L.T. 霍布豪斯在其经典著作《自由主义》中已然写道:“如果不讲平等,那么自由只是个表面好听而含义令人作呕的名词。”“平等” 是个不大好定义的词。往大里说,我们可以认为那些真诚的自由派——也算上其他自由派好了——希望建成一个由平等公民组成的社会。

The liberal state may have a legitimate role in redressing poverty, making health care available, and so forth, but after a point we find that the liberté and égalité that proved incompatible in the 1790s are still awkward companions.

一个秉承自由派理念的国家,或许可以合法地在消除贫困,普及医疗保健等方面发挥作用。可是当自由派理念进一步延伸到社会生活的其他方面时,我们将会发现,在法国大革命时曾被证明不能无限相容的 “liberté” 和“égalité”依然会起冲突。

And, as the liberal attitude became more and more concerned with the use of political power to promote equality, it tended to become less and less concerned with the liberty side; even domestically (in Thomas Sowell’s words), “the grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood—and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same actions.”

并且,当自由派们越来越重视使用政治权力来推进平等的时候,他们会渐渐倾向于无视他们理念里的 “自由” 部分,即使这自由是他们同胞的自由。用托马斯 · 索维尔的话讲:“当代自由派陷入了一个巨大的幻觉:他们觉得他们既有权利也有能力像搬动木材一样随意指挥他们的同胞们。而且在他们指挥下,最终结果就跟人们最初自发选择同样的行动没什么差别。”

And when these liberals looked abroad they found a regime that claimed to have the same aims—and used the same, or much the same, vocabulary. If anything, from a skeptic’s point of view, the Communists overdid it (with the result that any country nowadays calling itself a People’s Republic or a Democratic Republic is known at once to be a ruthless dictatorship).

当这些自由派们放眼海外,他们看到了一个号称和他们追求同一个目标的政权——而且这个政权也说着和他们大体相同的一套话。不,从一个怀疑者的眼里看来,共产主义者甚至可以说是把自由派的理想做过了头(其结果是现在人们看到一个 “某某人民共和国” 或者“某某民主主义共和国”,就立刻知道那是个残忍无情的专制政权)。

ROTTEN LIBERALS—AND THE VAST KLEPTOCRACY
腐臭的自由派——及广泛的盗贼统治

Communists in fact despised liberals, even if not quite as much as they despised social-democrats. It was in his procommunist period that W. H. Auden wrote:

共产主义者们实际上是鄙视自由派的,当然可能没有他们鄙视社会民主党人来得那么厉害。W.H. 奥登在他支持共产主义的那段时期写下过这样的诗句:

Because you saw but were not indignant

The invasion of the great malignant

Cambridge ulcer

That army intellectual

Of every kind of liberal,

Smarmy with friendship but of all

There are none falser.

你看到了那恶心的剑桥脓疮,

看到了它入侵我们的国度,

却并不感到愤怒。

那支诸种自由派知识分子组成的侵略军,

表演着种种虚假的好意,

实际上,没人比他们更加虚伪卑鄙

“Rotten liberalism” was, of course, the conventional charge made by the Soviet Communists against those insufficiently ruthless in the repression of enemies of the people.

当然,“腐臭的自由主义者” 这个词也是苏维埃共产主义者创造出来的。他们时常拿这个词来鄙视那些在镇压人民的敌人方面做得不够狠辣到位的家伙们。

Moreover, Lenin’s own interest in the overthrow of the existing order was so intense that he did not spread his progressivism into any other fields and had nothing but contempt for modern art, free love, unorthodox medicine, and all the other paraphernalia. Communist artistic principles—socialist realism and so forth—remained overtly hostile to all the modernisms dear to many liberal hearts.

此外,列宁本人是如此醉心于推翻现有秩序,以致他只有在这一方面才表现出了那么一点进步派倾向,而与此同时彻底无视了其他领域。对于现代艺术、自由恋爱、非传统医学,以及其它种种现代事物,列宁的态度只有鄙视。共产主义艺术的准则——社会主义现实主义等等——始终全面敌视各种形式的现代艺术,而这些现代艺术正是许多自由派们全心珍爱着的。

The Communists’ attitude to homosexuality, at least after its criminalization in the USSR in 1935, was contrary to an important component of the liberal worldview—but Moscow did not lose the allegiance even of homosexuals such as Guy Burgess. The Soviets suppressed and maligned all the psychological views, Freudian and other, dear to Western intellectuals. And Stalin’s extreme anti-Semitism in the post–World War II years ran against anything describable as liberal.

共产主义者对同性恋的态度,至少是在 1935 年苏联将同性恋入刑之后,是与自由派世界观的一个重要方面相抵触的。但即使是盖伊 · 伯吉斯【译注:英国情报人员和外交官,著名苏联间谍】这样的同性恋者,也从未放弃过对莫斯科的忠诚。苏联压制和批判所有那些西方知识分子视若珍宝的心理学学说——弗洛伊德主义等等。战后斯大林表现出的露骨的极端反犹倾向,更是和一切能被称为自由主义的思想相对立的。

But, some liberals felt, at least the Stalinists were not capitalists, not motivated by greed, which, taken as the defining quality of the economic system in the West, was thus the most detested of all vices for certain liberals. These were, in general, those who gained their income (and were highly competitive with rivals for it) in academic or media spheres, that is, money derived from, but not directly dependent on, “capitalism.”

但是,一些自由派们还是认为,至少斯大林主义者不是利欲熏心的资本家,而后者在一些自由派看来,是整个西方经济制度的根本特质,因此是所有罪恶中最可鄙弃的罪恶。抱有这样看法的人,通常都是从学术界或媒体业挣得收入(而且是通过与其对手的高强度竞争而挣得),这些钱自然也派生于 “资本主义”,虽然并不直接依靠于它。

Greed, it might be argued, is not as bad as mass murder. But in any case greed was equally prevalent in the mass murder societies. Corruption of every possible type has flourished in all the communist countries. It is not only that the USSR, for example, became a vast kleptocracy but also that even the supposedly pristine early revolutionaries were anything but immune.

或许有人会说,贪欲再怎么也没有大规模屠杀那么坏呀?可事实上,在那些发生大屠杀的国家里,贪欲和西方社会一样盛行。在所有共产主义国家里,一切人类社会中可能发生的腐败活动都大行其道。不仅苏联很快变成了一个巨大的盗贼统治国家,那些据说品行高洁的早期革命家们也都绝非纯洁无瑕。

In fact, with few exceptions the victorious Bolsheviks lived comfortably through the deprivations of the postrevolutionary period. Milovan Djilas, then a Yugoslav communist leader, was shocked at how his victorious partisans, on entering Belgrade, seized villas, cars, women, and so on. The same was noted of the Sandinistas when they entered Managua.

事实上,在革命后的匮乏时期里,得胜的布尔什维克领袖几无例外都过着优裕生活。米洛凡 · 吉拉斯,当年的南斯拉夫共产党领导人,震惊地看到他的同志们获胜进入贝尔格莱德后个个都开始霸占别墅、汽车和女人了。尼加拉瓜的桑地诺武装分子们打进马那瓜后的表现也一模一样。

THE SWING IN LEFTISH OPINION
左派观点的转变

The phenomenon of renegade liberalism arose in the early days of the Soviet regime. Lincoln Steffens, the fearless journalist exposer of American corruption, famously said of the USSR, “I have seen the future and it works.” He had seen nothing and that future didn’t work.

在苏维埃政权的幼年时期,变节的自由主义现象已经出现了。林肯 · 斯蒂芬斯,那位无畏的揭露美国种种腐败现象的名记者,曾说过一句关于苏联的名言:“我看到了它的未来,它行得通。” 当然,实际上他啥也没看到,而那个未来也没行通。

But until the 1930s the Sovietophiles were a minority among liberals. It is in 1933 that we see a real swing in leftish opinion. The terror-famine early that year, in which millions died, had been widely and accurately reported in much of the Western press.

但直到 2ij 如此醉心于推翻现有秩序写下过这样的诗句 191919119130 年代,亲苏分子还只占自由派中的一小部分。西方左派对苏联态度的真正转变发生在 1933 年。在那年初,恐怖的乌克兰大饥荒——数百万人丧生——在西方得到了广泛且准确的报道。

But the Soviet government simply denied that any famine had taken place. President Kalinin, speaking of “political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine,” commented that, “only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements.”

苏联政府则矢口否认曾发生过任何饥荒。最高苏维埃主席加里宁在谈到那些 “号称要帮助饥饿的乌克兰的政治骗子” 时说道:“只有那些最最卑劣的家伙才能编出这种犬儒主义的谎言。”

The Soviet story was supported—as we now know for disreputable reasons—by reporters such as Walter Duranty. Thus two versions were available to the American liberals. But it was Duranty who received the Pulitzer Prize—for “dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia.”

一些像沃尔特 · 杜兰蒂之类的记者支持了苏联方面的说法——我们今天知道,这些支持背后有着不可见人的理由。这样,在美国自由派的面前就出现了两种迥然相异的说法。但是最后得到普利策奖的是杜兰蒂——为他 “就俄国消息作出的冷静的,解读性的报道”。

The announcement of the prize added that Duranty’s dispatches were “marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity,” being “excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.”

普利策评奖委员会的颁奖通稿里继续写道,杜兰蒂的报道表现了 “学术性,洞察力,中立性,优秀的判断力,而且格外清晰明了”,这些报道是 “最佳外国新闻报道的杰出典范”。

The Nation, citing him in its annual “honor roll,” described his as “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.”

《国家》杂志在它一年一度的 “荣誉榜” 里列入了杜兰蒂的名字,说他的报道是“最富启示的公允冷静报道,可读性极佳。来自一个正浮现于全世界所有报章之上的,正在创建中的伟大国家”。

A banquet was given at the Waldorf Astoria in 1933 to celebrate the recognition of the USSR by the United States. A list of names was read, each politely applauded by the guests until Walter Duranty’s was reached; then, Alexander Woollcott wrote in the New Yorker, “the only really prolonged pandemonium was evoked… . Indeed, one got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.”

1933 年,在纽约华尔道夫饭店举办了一场盛大宴会,旨在庆祝美国对苏联的承认。会上宣读了一串名字,每个名字都得到了人们礼貌性的掌声。接着杜兰蒂的名字出现了,亚历山大 · 沃尔科特在《纽约客》上写道:“(杜兰蒂的名字)激发了当晚唯一一次长时间的狂热喧腾…… 的确,当晚来宾都感觉到,仿佛美国出现了一次鉴别力大爆发,同时承认了苏联和杜兰蒂。”

This scene in the Waldorf was clearly a full-dress appearance of the liberal establishment. And all this was before Stalin and his Comintern had given up their overt hostility to social democrats and liberals and moved over to a popular front.

华尔道夫饭店的景象,无疑象征着美国自由派当权集团的正式亮相。而所有这些,都是在斯大林和他的第三国际全面放弃对社会民主主义者及自由派的公开敌视态度、转而采取一种更受欢迎的面貌之前发生的。

THE ACADEMIC FRONDE
学术界的投石党人

From the start, it was not only the occasional corrupt journalist such as Walter Duranty but also a veritable Fronde of academics who were at least equally responsible for mediating the Soviet phenomena for the Western liberal intelligentsia. It would be to present all the horrors of expert academe.

打一开始,在西方自由派知识界面前为苏联洗地的,就不只是杜兰蒂等几个腐败记者。一伙名副其实的学术界投石党人至少要和杜兰蒂之流负相等的责任。从中将揭示出整个专业学界最恶心的事。

Most notorious, of course, were the deans of Western social science, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who went to Russia, saw the system, and produced what purported to be a learned tome on the subject—Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?—which in its second edition, at the height of the terror, dropped the question mark.

最臭名昭著的,当然是当时西方社会科学界掌门人西德尼 · 韦伯和贝亚特丽斯 · 韦伯夫妇。他们前往苏联,看到了苏联体制,然后写出了号称苏联问题权威著作的《苏联共产主义:一种新的文明?》——此书再版时,书名里的那个问号被删掉了,而此时正值苏联政治恐怖的高峰。

Their massive exercise in drivel was largely based on believing Soviet official documents. They were, in effect, taken in above all by Potemkin paperwork—of elections, trade unions, cooperatives, statistics, all the documents of the phantom USSR.

韦伯夫妇之所以表现出如此惊人的愚蠢和幼稚,很大程度上归因于他们对苏联官方文件的盲信。实际上,他们被眼前的波将金式虚假资料彻底蒙骗了。这些资料里描述了选举,工会,合作社,包含各种统计数据,向韦伯夫妇呈现了一个完全虚假的苏联。

Many others followed, such as Harold Laski, professor of political science at the London School of Economics and at one point chairman of the Labour Party. When Sir Bernard Pares, the West’s leading “Russianist,” arrived in Russia, his previous anti-Soviet feelings evaporated.

很多人趋步韦伯夫妇之后尘,比如伦敦经济学院的政治学教授哈罗德 · 拉斯基,他后来曾任工党主席。西方世界的首席 “俄国通” 伯纳德 · 帕雷斯爵士一踏上俄国国土,他之前的反苏倾向立刻烟消云散了。

As his son admiringly put it, he “had not left the Moscow railway station before his mind was flooded with the realization that the Bolsheviks were, after all, Russia.” He, Laski, the Webbs, and others all pronounced the show trials genuine exercises in truth and legality.

就像后来他儿子满怀着敬慕之心写下的那样,他 “在踏出莫斯科火车站之前就已得出结论,布尔什维克就是俄国”。帕雷斯,拉斯基,韦伯夫妇和许多其他人都认为,他们看到的那些审判秀都是真正基于真相与合法性的实践。

These were, indeed, individuals. The academic world, though liberal in a general way, was not as yet a scene of organized error on the communist regime. That came later and in particular in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

以上说到的这些多是个人行为,当时的学术界,虽然总的来说是偏自由派的,还并没有在共产政权问题上表现出后来那种几乎是有组织的错误倾向。那要等到以后,特别是要在二十世纪的最后 1/4 才会大行其道呢。

THE POTEMKIN PHENOMENON
波将金现象

The Potemkin phenomenon proper—the presentation of faked appearances of prosperity or social triumphs—was, of course, widespread in all the communist countries. Anyone who ever visited the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow will know the score. Similarly, when Vice President Henry Wallace, on a flight from America to China, was for a few days in the midst of the frightful Kolyma labor camps, the guard towers and barbed wires were torn down, the miserable prisoners replaced by strong and healthy NKVD men, and so on.

波将金现象——伪造出虚假的繁荣或社会成就用于展示——当然在所有共产主义国家中都广泛存在。随便哪个看过莫斯科的经济成就展的人都知道那是怎么回事。与此相似,当美国副总统亨利 · 华莱士自美国飞往中国时,他曾在那恐怖的科雷马劳改营中待过几天。在华莱士停留期间,所有的守卫塔和铁丝网都拆掉了。可怜的囚犯们被换成了身强力壮的内务人民委员部人员。诸如此类。

Many such stories could be told. Yet the most extraordinary are those representing the Soviet penal system as humane and progressive. The facts about the Gulag were already available in a number of firsthand accounts. But, entirely for deceiving the Western liberals, the Stalinists maintained some “model prisons”—in particular one at Bolshevo where J. L. Gillin, a former president of the American Sociological Society, noted that:

这样的故事还有很多,其中最为卓异的,无疑是那些把苏联刑罚系统包装为 “人道” 和“进步”的体制。当时,已经有一些有关古拉格实情的第一手记述出现了。然而,斯大林主义者们为了蒙骗西方自由派,特意设置了一些“模范监狱”。比如设在波尔谢夫的模范监狱。曾任美国社会学学会主席的 J.L. 季林在访问波尔谢夫监狱后写道:

In accordance with the spirit of the Revolution the terms current in capitalist penology are discarded. There are no “crimes”; there are “wrongs.” … There is no “punishment,” only “measures of social defence.”

根据革命精神,资本主义刑罚学说里的词语都被抛弃了。不再有 “犯罪” 了,只有“错误”…… 再也没有“惩罚”,有的只是“社会防卫措施”。

One liberal visitor, Jerzy Gliksman, a progressive member of the Warsaw City Council, was thus deceived but later experienced the real Soviet penal behavior—described in his striking memoirs of the Gulag.

一位自由派访问者乔治 · 格利克斯曼当时是华沙市议会的一位进步派成员,他也上了当。不过后来他亲身体验了真正的苏联刑罚,并在回忆录中记下了自己令人发指的古拉格体验。

As Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes of Havana two generations later, there were delegates living “in the hotels for foreigners who had no idea that the energy and water supply in the working quarters had broken down during the afternoon, that bread was rationed, and that the population had to stand for two hours in line for a slice of pizza; meanwhile the tourists in their hotel rooms were arguing about Lukacs.”

就像汉斯 · 马格努斯 · 恩森斯伯格在几十年后描写的哈瓦那一样,很多访问者住在 “外国人专用的旅馆里。这些外国佬根本不知道当天下午工人居住区曾经断水断电,不知道面包是按配给定额发放的,不知道他们在旅馆房间里争论有关卢卡奇的问题时,群众们在外面为领一块比萨饼要排两个小时的队。”

Even the actual optic nerves of Western viewers seem to have become distorted, with falsehood coming from both outside and inside. As Malcolm Muggeridge noted:

在内外夹攻的假话冲击之下,这些西方访客的视神经似乎都被扭曲了。正如马尔科姆 · 穆格里奇写到的:

There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of the OGPU with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town planning specialists who stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: “If only we had something like this in England!” The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even Soviet officals used to handling foreign visitors.

“望见国家政治保卫总局总部的宏伟大厦时,一些真诚主张人道屠宰牲口的活动家流下了感激的热泪;听完苏联的无产阶级专政是如何必要的说教后,一些真诚主张比例代表制的活动家热切地表示着同感;真诚的教士们满怀敬意的走在反上帝主题博物馆里,翻阅着宣扬无神论的著作;真诚的和平主义者们高兴地观看开过红场的坦克和遮天蔽日的轰炸机;真诚的城市设计专家们站在拥挤失修的居民楼外,嘴里嘟囔着:‘我们英国要是也有这个就好了!’这些几乎都受过高等教育的访客们表现的这种令人难以置信的轻信,甚至把那些专职糊弄外国来客的苏联官员都惊呆了。”

GOGHDZE IS A FINE MAN
贡加泽是个好人

It was not only the facts about communist regimes that received such treatment but even Stalinist personalities. The French progressive novelist Romain Rolland described secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda (later shot) as sensitive and intellectual. Harold Laski had a long discussion with Vyshinsky, faker of show trials, whom he found “a man whose passion was law reform… . He was doing what an ideal Minister of Justice would do if we had such a person in Great Britain.”

受到这种对待的不止是共产主义政权的方方面面,还包括斯大林主义者的品格。法国进步小说家罗曼 · 罗兰把秘密警察头子亨利希 · 亚戈达(后被枪毙)描述为一个敏感聪慧的人。哈罗德 · 拉斯基在和维辛斯基——一系列审判秀的策划者和执行者——长谈之后,觉得他是 “一个全心投入法律改革事业的人…… 如果他生在英国,他做的就是一个理想的司法大臣所做的事。”

Vice President Henry Wallace later described Beria’s terror henchman in the Soviet Far East, Goghdze, as “a very fine man, very efficient, gentle and understanding with people.” Owen Lattimore saw I. F. Nikishov, the head of the most murderous camp system in the Gulag, as having “a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility.”

在亨利 · 华莱士副总统口中,贝利亚在远东的忠实走狗贡加泽是 “一个非常好的人,效率很高,待人温和,善于理解他人。” 欧文 · 拉铁摩尔认为 I.F. 尼基绍夫——他管辖的集中营系统即使在古拉格中也是最凶残致命的一个——拥有“在音乐和艺术上训练有素且趣味敏锐,同时对于公民责任的深刻认知”。

H. G. Wells arrived in Moscow in 1934 full of hostility to communism and to Stalin. An interview changed that. Stalin, it is true, “looked past me rather than at me” but “not evasively.” He asked Wells’s permission to smoke his pipe and in this and other ways soon allayed Wells’s hostility.

H.G. 威尔斯在 1934 年满怀着对共产主义和斯大林的敌意来到了莫斯科。和斯大林的一次会面完全改变了他的态度。斯大林,当真的,“把目光投向了我的身后而不是看着我”,但 “并不是为了躲开我。” 在点燃烟斗前,斯大林特意征得了客人的同意。这样那样的小姿态很快就把威尔斯的敌意消解于无形了:

I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him.

“我从没见过一个更加直率、公正且诚实的人。正是由于他的这些品质,而非什么神秘或卑劣的因素,他才能得到他在今日俄国的伟大且无争议的统治地位。在见到他之前,我曾认为他是由于别人对他的恐惧才得到今天的地位的。我现在才明白,他的地位正是来源于这一事实:没有人害怕他,相反所有人都信赖他。”

Even Franklin Roosevelt—deceived indeed by Harold Ickes—was charmed by Stalin into speaking of his being above all “getatable”: the great British Russianist Ronald Hingley commented that “ungetatability” was one of Stalin’s central characteristics.

即使富兰克林 · 罗斯福——其实他是被哈罗德 · 伊克斯骗了——也被斯大林的魅力打动,以致他评论斯大林首先是个 “易于亲近的人”:伟大的俄国通,英国人罗纳德 · 辛格利对此评论说,“不易亲近” 正是斯大林性格的核心特征之一。

Among the most egregious of what I hope I may be excused as calling the Kremlin creepers was a number of those who would have been called liberal Christians. One might have expected a certain alienation from communism by any of them that had read Lenin’s virulent condemnation of all religion but particularly of sophisticated religion. The active persecution of religion in the communist countries might, you would also think, have also had an effect.

在所有那些 “克里姆林宫的小爬虫”——希望大家原谅我使用这个词——中,最令人震惊不解的,就是那些曾被称作自由派基督徒的家伙。一般人都会认为:宗教人士只要读过列宁对宗教,特别是繁琐神学的那些恶毒攻击,总会对共产主义有所疏远。共产主义国家对于宗教的现实迫害也应该会加深这种排斥。

But to take only one example—the World Council of Churches Central Committee’s meeting in 1973 passed a resolution deploring oppression in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the United States, and elsewhere. An attempt by a Swedish clergyman to add the communist countries was defeated ninety-one to three, with twenty-six abstentions.

但让我举一个例子吧:世界基督教协进会在 1973 年的中央委员会上通过了一项决议,谴责中东、非洲、拉丁美洲、美国和其他一些地方对宗教的压迫。会上一位瑞典教士试图把共产主义国家加入谴责范围,对这一提案的投票结果是:三票赞成,九十一票反对,二十六票弃权。

We might say that there are two sorts of liberal, as there are two sorts of cholesterol, one good and one bad.

或许可以这么说:正如胆固醇有两种,自由派也有两种:好的和坏的。

Here again, the commitment has often been so strong that it is hard to imagine that complete conversion to communism has not taken place. A Communist once told me his method. First you explain to a Christian sympathizer that communism is compatible with Christianity. That accomplished, you explain that Christianity is not compatible with communism.

在这里我们也看到,他们对共产主义的支持是如此强烈,以致人们很难想象他们居然还没有完全改宗共产主义。一位共产主义者曾经跟我说过他的妙法:首先,对一个同情共产主义的基督徒解释共产主义与基督教义可以相容,完成这一步之后,你再向他解释基督教义和共产主义不能相容就行了。

BUT WHY?
为什么?

I started by advancing a general reason, or context, for these phenomena. I argued that they arose from an excessive regard for equality as against liberty. That is, people thought they saw a system, superior to our own, in which the abhorrent profit motive had been eliminated (in a sense so it had, but there are other ways of robbing the population). It was rather as if they would rejoice to find that a slum landlord had been replaced by a gangster extortionist.

在本文开始时,我试图为这些现象提出一个总体原因或情境。我提出:这种现象出现的根源是过分注重平等而不惜放弃自由。也就是说:这些人认为他们看到了一种比我们的体制更优越的体制,这种体制消灭了追逐利润这一可怕动机(一定意义上它确实做到了,当然与此同时,搜刮民脂民膏的办法还多得很呢)。事实上,他们更像是乐于看到一个黑帮勒索者取代一个贫民窟房东。

But even this is hardly enough to explain how the mind of the liberal intelligentsia became so much a subject of deception and self-deception. We must inquire further.

但是就算这一原因也不足以解释,为什么自由派知识分子的心智沦落至此,以至让他们成为如此程度的欺骗和自欺的牺牲品。还有必要向更深处找寻原因。

That is so even when we consider the attraction of anything “noncapitalist”—even when we consider domestic resentment against “conservatives” on home soil—for, as Macaulay writes of British politicians in the eighteenth century, “it is the nature of parties to retain their original enmities far more firmly than their original principles.”

即使我们考虑到任何 “非资本主义” 事物对自由派的吸引力,即使我们考虑自由派对本国 “保守派” 的忿恨——正如麦考莱在论述 18 世纪英国政治家时写下的:“政党总是把它的最初之敌而非最初宗旨记得更牢”——,也无法解释这种现象。

But pas d’ennemi à gauche—the idea that the far left, even if wrong in some respects, when it came down to essentials was against the real enemy, the right—cannot sustain the procommunist liberal case.

“敌人永远在右”——也就是说,极左即使某些方面是错的,本质上也还是在反对真正的敌人,也就是右派——即便这句格言也不能解释为什么会有亲共产主义自由派这一现象。

For not all on the far left were covered: Trotskyites, the POUM in Spain, Anarchists. If we ask why this did not affect some “liberal” minds, it seems that in the first two cases, at least, the Stalinist version (that these were not “left” at all but secret agencies of Hitler) had some distractive effect.

因为并非所有极左翼都得到自由派的亲近,托派、西班牙的马克思主义统一工人党(POUM)或无政府主义者都无此幸运。为什么这些组织没有打动自由派的心呢?看来,至少托派和 POUM 可能受害于斯大林主义者的宣传,后者坚持这些组织都不是真左派,而是希特勒的特务。

Then again, the Trotskyites lacked the huge propaganda funding available to Stalinists everywhere, though the pervasiveness of a notion has traditionally not been the key point for critical minds. Where issues of fact were in question, the anti-Stalinist left was not only truer but also far more plausible.

另外,托派没有斯大林主义者那么多的宣传资金,尽管对于具有批判性头脑的人来讲,一种思想的传播力度不该影响它的说服力。实际上,当涉及事实问题时,那些反斯大林左派的说法不仅更加真实,还更有说服力。

We can list, in addition to utopianism and parochial partisanship, a number of other characteristics to be found, if not in all, than in many of the Stalinophiles (and Mao-ophiles, Castrophiles, and Ho-ophiles): in some cases vanity, in others pleasure at adulation, in others yet an adolescent romanticism about “revolution” as such.

除了乌托邦情结和狭隘的党派偏见外,在很多斯大林粉(还有毛粉,卡斯特罗粉,胡志明粉等等)身上通常都可以找到一些其他特性:一些人的共同点是求名的欲望;另一些人的共同点是爱听奉承话;而其他一些人的共同点是有一种对 “革命” 的青春浪漫主义。

Nor should mere boredom be omitted, as Simone de Beauvoir once confessed, which may remind us of the attitudes of a certain type of French intellectual, different, but not all that different, from his American or British counterparts, as given by Herbert Luthy in the early 1960s.

当然,单纯的无聊也是个不能不提的因素,正如西蒙 · 德 · 波伏娃曾经坦白过的那样,这或许能使我们想起赫伯特 · 卢蒂曾于 1960 年代初描述过的那类法国知识分子的态度,这种态度与他们的英美同行有所不同,但其实也相去不远:

For ten years the French intellectuals have discussed the big issues of the day so to speak in front of the looking-glass,in search less of facts and knowledge than of an attitude befitting their traditional role—of the “correct pose.”

“十年来,法国知识分子们一直在镜子前讨论着所谓的‘当前重大问题’,他们的讨论与其说是为了寻求真相或知识,不如说是为了找到一种适合他们传统角色的态度——所谓的‘正确姿态’。”

THE HEROES OF THE ARGUMENT
论争中的英雄们

Nevertheless, it might be argued that the true heroes of the long argument were not so much the committed anticommunist conservatives (who were, of course, right, and fully deserve the verdict in their favor as against the procommunist liberals) as those within the liberal intelligentsia who not only were not deceived but also fought for the truth over years of slander and discouragement.

尽管如此,我们依然可以说:在这场漫长的论争中,真正的英雄与其说是那些坚定反共的保守派,不如说是那些虽身在自由派阵营却不仅不受蒙蔽,还常年冒着中伤和挫折而努力寻求真相的自由派们。当然,反共的保守派是正确的,他们在与亲共自由派论争中做出的功绩也完全值得肯定。

We might in fact say that there are two sorts of liberal, as there are two sorts of cholesterol, one good and one bad. The difficulty is, or has been, that good liberalism implies a good deal of mental self-control.

实际上,我们可以说,正如胆固醇有两种,自由派也有两种,一种好,一种坏。如今的困难在于——或者说一直如此——好的自由主义必然要求强大的精神自律。

AND NOWADAYS?
今天呢?

Kenneth Minogue, the Anglo-Australian political scientist, has observed that “as radicals have lost plausible utopias of one kind or another—from the Soviet Union to Cuba—they have become more ferociously intolerant of the society in which they live.”

英裔澳大利亚政治学家肯尼思 · 米诺格观察到,“当激进派失去一个又一个曾经具有说服力的乌托邦——从苏联到古巴——时,他们对自己身处其中的这个社会变得越来越不宽容了。”

There are plenty of up-to-date insane absurdities, such as John Le Carré writing (in a letter to the Washington Post) that capitalism was today killing many more than communism ever had; such as Nigel Nicolson in Britain saying that Solzhenitsyn had betrayed his country just as Anthony Blunt had his.

时至今日,疯狂的荒谬论调依然层出不穷。比如约翰 · 勒卡雷投书《华盛顿邮报》,声称今天资本主义正在杀死的人数比共产主义曾经杀掉的还要多的多;比如英国的奈杰尔 · 尼科尔森声称,索尔仁尼琴正像安东尼 · 勃朗特【校注:英国艺术史家、苏联间谍】一样,无非是个叛国者。

And in academe we still find noisy cliques working to lower the Soviet death roll, to prove the West as the villain of the Cold War, and to call for “dispassionate” study of Stalin and Mao.

在学术界,我们也可以发现一些吵闹的小集团努力降低苏联时期的死亡数字,以便证明西方才是冷战中的那个恶棍,并呼吁对斯大林和毛泽东进行 “公允不偏” 的研究。

Such notions are, of course, not confined to campuses. We now get an allegedly historical film series sponsored by Ted Turner, which, with some concessions to reality, in effect tilts the balance against the West, Stalin offset by McCarthy, Castro better than Kennedy.

这种思潮当然不只存在于大学校园之内。现在出现了泰德 · 透纳赞助的一些所谓历史影集。虽然在一定程度上承认事实,这些影集事实上在把天平翘向反西方的那一侧。在这些影片中,麦卡锡主义被拿来抵销斯大林的罪恶,而卡斯特罗被塑造成了一个比肯尼迪更好的人。

A WORD TO YOUNG LIBERALS
对年轻自由派们的赠言

Can one offer any advice to the current generation of liberals? Well, one can advise them not to let passions provoked by the internal politics of their homelands go too far. Rhetoric of party faction is part of democratic life, but do not project it into your assessment of alien regimes and mentalities and do not accept accounts of these cultures provided by partisan sources without a critical assessment (a point that applies, indeed, to the acceptance of supposed facts in any field in which strong emotions prevail).

我们能对现今一代的自由派提出什么建言吗?当然,我们可以建议他们控制头脑里被本国政治斗争挑起的激情。党派话语是民主政治生活的一部分,但不要让这些话语影响了你对外国政权或思想的评价。此外,不要照单全收有党派偏见的来源所提供的各种关于外国文化的材料(这一点还适用于接受各种可能受到强烈感情因素影响的领域的材料)。

As to the academics criticized above, it seems that nothing is to be done. They are committed to their misconceptions. One can only urge their younger colleagues (even if hardly able to speak out frankly in an atmosphere of academic persecution, denial of tenure, and so on) that they should work at least at thinking independently, while biding their time.

至于上文中批判到的那些学者们,看起来无可救药了。他们虔诚于自己的错误信念。我们只能呼吁他们的年轻同事们(当然,在目前的大学空气里充斥着学术迫害,否决终身教职等等威胁,要直率说出自己的想法并不容易),至少努力做到独立思考,等着属于他们的时代到来。

Above all, as Granville Hicks, himself temporarily deceived, put it: “It is no defence whatever for an intellectual to say that he was duped, since that is what, as an intellectual, he should never allow to happen to him.”

毕竟,正如自己也曾一度受到蒙骗的格兰维尔 · 希克斯所说的:“知识分子是不能用一句‘我上当了’来为自己辩护的。因为一个知识分子有不受蒙骗的义务。”

Excerpted and adapted from the New Criterion, February 1999, from an essay entitled “Liberals and Totalitarianism.”
摘编改写自《新标准》(The New Criterion)1999 年 2 月号刊登的《自由派与极权主义》一文。

翻译:Yuncong Yang
校对:Marcel ZHANG(@马赫塞勒张),沈沉(@你在何地 - sxy)
编辑:辉格 @whigzhou

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