ISSN 0014-1690 n REP© I Record

ISSN 0014-1690

n REP© I RecordThe Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society

Vol 101 No. 7 E1

EDITORIAL -BEING NEGATIVE AND BEING POSITIVE

Polly Toynbee (Independent , 15/7/96) satirised theCharity Commission's vacillations over whetherthe Pagan Hospice and Funeral Trust is or is notreligious. The 'nation's official theologian' has toperform the similarly ludicrous task of gauging the'religious' content for all the myriad sects andorganisations in the UK. This absurdity should beended, says Polly Toynbee, by simply abolishing theautomatic charity status accorded to religion.

Polly, who was a guest speaker at the 1995joint humanist dinner, included in her article atwo-sentence summary of SPES's own charity saga.(We remember how fortunate SPES was in 1980 tobe judged charitable NOT as a religion, thankgoodness, but for education and the public's mentaland moral benefit.) Referring to our members as'atheists, humanists and agnostics', which is surelytrue, Polly said that our 'aim has always been todemolish belief in a God or a hereafter' and thatnow we 'do public good by debunking superstition.'

July/ August 1996

POLITICALCORRECTNESS VERSUSENLIGHTENMENTDennis O'Keefe 3

THE RACE AND IQCONTROVERSYGrahgm Richards 7

THE RISE AND FALL OFCOMMUNISM INYUGOSLAVIAJasper Ridley Ii

EDITING THE INTIMATEREVIEW AND THEFORTNIGHTLYJohn Ray 21

VIEWPOINTSE Frankel, R. Awbery,T Liddle, D. McDonagh 22

MANY QUESTIONS (ITV)Jennifer Jeynes 24

Nicolas Walter replied in the next day's Independent by denying that either of thesewere our charitable objects. Of course, formally, Nicolas is correct. Our final objectivescannot be expressed negatively as demolition and debunking. We believe it to be the casethat in all our activities - including 70 public lectures annually, evening courses and themarvellous chamber music - we display the positive attributes of the humanist ethos.

Nevertheless, is there not some truth in Polly Toynbee's robust characterisation of ourfunction? Do we not also sneak a soupçon of delight in being regarded in that way by anintelligent observer? Your views on this would be welcomed.

RUSHDIE APPEARANCE ANNOUNCEDIt was surprising but encouraging to see Time Out carrying notice that Salman Rushdiewas to sign copies of his novel The Moor's Last Sigh at a Dillon's book shop in London on4 July. This event may have been the first where advance notice of an appearance byRushdie had been so publicised.

I duly queued up with my copy of The Satanic Verses which Salman cheerfullysigned. He remembered that seven years ago, on 2 July 1989, when he was in hiding, theEthical Society and Larry Adler had staged a public reading of the book in Conway Hall,with extracts read by Martin Amis, Michael Foot M.P, Mark Fisher M.P., Hanif Khur-eishi, Gita Sahgal and others. Perhaps the Dillons book signing presages an easing of therestrictions forced on Rushdie by that notoriously vicious fatwa. N. Bacrac

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETYConway Hall Humanist Centre

25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Telephone: 0171 831 7723

Appointed Lecturers Harold Blackham, T.F. Evans, Peter Heales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker,

Harry Stopes-Roe. Officers

Honorary Representative: Barbara Smoker. General Committee Chairman: Terry Mullins. Hon. Treasurer Don Liversedge. Hon. Librarian: Jennifer Jeynes. Hon. Registrar: Vacancy

Editor, Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac. SPES Staff

Secretary to the Society: Nina Khare. Tel: 0171 831 7723 Fax: 0171 430 1271 (Office: 2nd Floor, Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobalds Road, WCIX 8SP)

Hall Manager Stephen Norley. 0171 242 8032 for Hall bookings. Head Steward: David Wright

NINA !MARE TO LEKIE SPESThe Ethical Society's Secretary, Nina Khare, will unfortunately be leaving us on 21 August1996 in order to take up work as the Finance and Administration Manager at REFUGE -an organisation, based in Chiswick, which provides support for women seeking refugefrom domestic violence.

During the five years in which she has been our Secretary, Nina has dealtcompetently not only with routine matters but also with a number of special events,including the ambitious Bicentenary programme of 1993, the move of the Secretary's officeto Bradlaugh House in 1994 and the change of the start of our financial year from I Marchto 1 June.

Nina, who has a family tradition of work for secular causes, brought a new level ofefficiency to the administration of the Society. We wish her all the best in her new career.

APPOINTMENT OF SECRETARY TO THE ETHICAL SOCIETYApplications are invited for the above full-time post, for which computer-literacy isessential. Include a short c.v. and 'a resumé of past and present activity in the broadhumanist movement. Please write to: The Honorary Representative, SPES, 47 TheobaldsRoad, London WCIX 8SP.

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETYRegistered Charity No. 251396

Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are the study anddissemination of ethical principles based on humanism, the cultivation of arational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and educationin all relevant fields.

We invite to membership all those who reject supernatural creeds and find them-selves in sympathy with our views.

At Conway Hall there are opportunities for participation in many kinds of cultur-al activities, including discussions, lectures, concerts and socials. The Sunday EveningChamber Music Concerts founded in 1887 have achieved international renown. A refer-ence and lending library is available, and all members receive the Society's journal,Ethical Record , eleven times a year. Funerals and Memorial Meetings are available.

Please apply to the Secretary for membership, £10 p.a.

Ethical Record, July/August, 1996

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS VERSUS ENLIGHTENMENT

Dennis O'KeefeSenior Lecturer in Sociology of Education. University of North London

Lecture to the Ethical Society, 23 June 1996

To what extent has the Enlightenment Project now to be considered as having definit-ively failed? The core of my remarks this morning will be to the effect that theheadway made by political correctness (henceforth PC) implies just such a failure.

I take it that the Enlightenment aimed at the rule of reason. It wanted the cob-webs of history all swept away. It had a universal understanding of humanity. This istrue of its most ambitious version, Marxism, which believed that socialism would bethe rule of reason and science, in which the alienation plaguing all societies hithertowould be dissolved.

What PC isPC is a set of sometimes very specific but more often rather amorphous conventionsgoverning what people can or cannot say or write or generally do, including even suchissues as the clothes we wear, the looks we allow on our faces, or even the body-language — as human gesture and posture are now called — which we present to others.

PC overlaps with other bodies of opinion and with other structures of adrninist ra-five practice. Ideologically it is very close to multiculturalism, so close indeed that thetwo are almost coterminous. Multiculturalism, in turn, has much in common with in-tellectual relativism. Given these ideological links, it is simply inevitable that as a

praxis PC also connects with Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunities.

As I shall try to show in this talk, PC is a runaway version of socialist progressiveideology. Within PC the equality cult, in all its variety, is on show. Antiracism, antisex-ism, antielitism etc., are parts of the same movement as PC, steps on the way so tospeak. Or, if a different metaphor is preferred, these cults are the indispensable build-ing blocks of the PC edifice.

No one really predicted PC, though its language certainly reminds one quite a lot

of the "Newspeak" in Orwell's 1984. PC is not an intellectually coherent or consistentideology and indeed on inspection turns out to be vary far from singular. It is actuallyan heterogeneous set of ideas, some of which clash with each other, often violently.

The Core Concerns of PCThe essential concern of PC can be specified easily enough, whatever the contradic-tions which weigh it down: the dynamics of sexual, racial and cultural power. Thegeneral underlying assumption is that societies like ours are riddled with prejudicesagainst women, minority races and cultures and homosexuals. Furthermore, they aremarked by ill-treatment of the people within these categories. Indeed, our society mustbe conceived as a power-structure which upholds and enforces the prejudices in ques-tion, specifically through oppression, exploitation and other ill-treatment. The wrongswhich PC claims to oppose it also alleges to be the defining wrongs of our way of life.

Ethical Record, July/August, 1996 3

I believe that PC is a Marxist heresy. Two earlier ones were Fascism and Nazism.While Communism and Nazism and to a lesser extent Fascism aspired to achieve tota-litarianism, understood in practice as a murder system, PC is a surrogate of totalitar-ianism, substituting hatred for murder.

What distinguishes these heresies from Marxism and also cuts them off from En-lightenment, is precisely the way they repudiate universalism. They explicitly espousean ascriptive view of the human race.

• "[G]roup identity being the core determinant of all experiences, different racialand ethnic groups (as well as men and women) are epistemically alienated fromone another". (Steven Yates Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With AffirmativeAction ICS Press,1994 p.84)

This seems to suggest that different groups are quite irredeemably remote fromeach other. On inspection, this proposition turns out to be another version of our oldfriend, relativism. It is subject, therefore, to the standard rebuke. In this case, it is hardto see how anyone could propose that these gulfs are, as alleged, without systematiccomparison. Identification of the root differences at issue presupposes a degree ofmutual intelligibility between the categories, i.e. whatever differences there arebetween them, it is possible for someone from one to penetrate the situation andoutlooks of someone from another.

PC misunderstands the human situation in ways linked closely to its relativismand separatism. It sees our particular, collective, formative experiences, our beingmale, female, white, black, etc. as leading to mutually exclusive epistemological cate-gories. The exponents of PC quote Hilary Putnam to the effect that there is no God'seye view of reality — only a variety of ways of being in the world, ways which inexor-ably shape our understanding and response.Barbara Herrnstein Smith says:

"Minorities and women perceive and experience the world differently. Theseperspectives now collide with those of white males". (Yates).

Sandra Harding claims that there are:"... no contemporary humans who escape gendering... (and that) gender is afundamental category within which meaning and value are assigned to every-thing in the world". ( The Scknce Question in Feminism Cornell University Press1986 p.57).

Africanism makes similar claims. It seems black children are genetically programmedto "process information differently" from white children. (Robert Hughes Culture ofComplaint Harvill, p.126). Hughes discusses the "African-American Baseline Essays" whichoriginate from the Portland Oregon Public Schools, which he says are influencing secondaryschools all over the US. (pp.111-125). He also relates the strange thesis of Leonard Jeffries tothe effect that Africans are sun people, whites are ice people (p.126).

The most extreme PC factions preempt argument in a devious posture allowing PC tocondemn its target freely and yet ward off comparative analysis. They claim that PC'sconcerns — womanhood, blackness, non-European culture, homosexual love etc. — are notavailable to outside scrutiny, i.e. can be understood only by those within them. We reflect ourparticularities, against whose formative powers we have no appeal. Only like understandslike, only blacks blacks, woman woman etc. For PC, each group is sui genesis — separated bycognitive chasms from others.

4 Ethical Record, July/August, 1996

Consider too, the parallel claim that white, male power has written blacks andwoman out of the dominant texts. This is a (perhaps the) central political contentionof PC. It, too, could hardly be alleged except on the basis of some comparisons whichpresuppose mutual intelligibility. Otherwise how could anyone be said to know whatone lot have done to other lots? Yet this is what all the talk of DWEMs (dead, whiteEuropean males) means.

It is a comment on the inadequacy of our school and college life in Western socie-ty that such an incoherent and self-defeating idea as relativism could ever have madethe conquests it has. For all its exotic excesses, however, PC does not spring up fromnowhere, conceptually or politically. Yates links it specifically with philosophicaldeterminism and collectivism, for example. Indeed, insofar as PC is a positive set ofdemands for "equality", as I have already argued that it is, we can link it conceptuallyboth to socialism tout court and even to democracy itself.

This is to stress that PC is not just an intellectual issue. The intellectual or ideolo-gical aspect of the praxis is backed up by resources and by political and administrativestructures and mechanisms. I see the way the administrative side of the praxis isorganised as definitely Leninist. Socialism, by definition, is a matter of public finance.Unfortunately, so is modern democracy.

I would not go along, or anyway not all the way, with those libertarian economistswho think that democracy is unworkable. In the western market economies, however, itis apparent that public spending is partly out of control; and one of the reasons for ourwanting to get public spending under control in the free societies is precisely thatwithin the warm embrace of public resources and public bureaucracy, so many of theideological monsters of the age have flourished and flourish still. PC is merely thelatest and most voracious of these.

No textbooks or single authority or even group of authorities represent PC. Theattacks people have made on it are equally diffuse. Robert Hughes has mounted a bril-liant critique which perversely manages not to notice how intertwined PC is with thehypertrophied welfare state in the USA. The late Christopher Lasch even produces amagnificent chapter on the intellectual atmosphere and special interest group pleadingwhich support PC, without actually mentioning the latter by name.

PC is a Religion of SegmentsPC may be a religious surrogate. If so, it is a feeble one. The Enlightenment was hubris-tic, making mankind a sort of deity. It erred fatally in denying that anything could begreater than we; but at least its self-regard was universal. PC is even more suspect,neurotically inward in its self-preoccupation, worshipping segments of humanity.

Roger Scruton says that PC reflects the vacuum left by our neglect and loss of ourtraditional beliefs:

"It is the deficit of religion that has enraged the modern soul; and into thevacuum that religion left there crowd a thousand superstitions, the mumbo-jumboof disenchantment". ( The Salisbury Review March '92).

In any case we do not live only as men, women, whites, blacks, heterosexuals,homosexuals and so on. The primary form of our ontology in the human form is thepossession of consciousness, language, morals and aesthetics; a facility for independentaction and choice, together setting us utterly apart from any other beings we know of.


People — races, sexes, cultures — can cooperate. Of course they have often quar-relled. They have also combined. All races, languages and cultures are hybrid. Allhumans are the product of the two sexualities, male and female.

PC attaches little importance to humanity as such, the common humanity of oldwisdoms. The real wonder is the gulf dividing humans from anything else, by defini-tion linking us in a common bond. All other species live only in biology and environ-ment. We live there too; but we are distinct. We have culture as well as an instinctualrepertoire, indeed a culture far surpassing that repertoire. We live in history, ourcultural evolution, primed by the gap between our social and spiritual needs and ourtiny inherited instinctual repertoires.

Compared to our fabulous galaxy of powers, sex, race and local culture are sec-ondary forms of presence in the world. The raising of these to primary status revealsPC's deep provincialism and impoverished imagination.

Where does this all leave the Enlightenment?I think the whole project was fatally flawed from the start. It is not original to say so,but I see two errors. The first is the hostility or indifference to religion. We havealready seen what Scruton thinks about that and he is right. Let me say that theChestertonian claim that atheism will turn out to be the supreme superstition seems tome amply confirmed. PC reflects the failure of the most ambitious practical project ofthe Enlightenment: mass education. This is now riddled with absurdities.

Whether or not this or that religion is true, the world has been not one whit ad-vantaged by the collapse of belief.* In any case, I also accept the argument by Laschthat the standard case against religion, that it is the parasite of fear — the Enlighten-ment, Voltaire view, of course — is false. Even in secular terms, asociological/Durkheimian view is hugely more persuasive: religion is social solidarity,the cement of moral order and so on.

The other fault in the Enlightenment is its lack of historic piety. Reason is not en-ough. I am not saying that we have not had intellectual advance. The rise of economicand anthropological theory has hugely expanded our knowledge of the world, forexample. What is wrong is the myth of progress, to which PC is an equally extreme andfalse antithesis and antidote.

Mainstream PC — the extreme factions are different —says that human advance isnot really possible, because all cultures are equal. Enlightenment made the error ofthinking advance is easy. It is not. It is a dense and precarious dialect of reason andhistoric piety. If we see it this way we will see PC as an outcome of Enlightenmenthubris.

*Ed's Note: The author is a Roman Catholic.

ReferencesThe Wayward Elite: A Critique of British Teacher Education Adam Smith Institute 1990Truancy in English Secondary Schools HMSO 1994Forthcoming:The New Pagans: Political Correctness in America and Britain Institute of Economic Affairs/Tran-

saction Press. 0


THE RACE AND IQ CONTROVERSY: SCIENTIFIC OR IDEOLOGICAL?

Graham RichardsStaffordshire University

Lecture to the Ethical Society, 30 June 1996

The so-called Race and IQ Controversy in its modern form has now been rumbling onsince 1969 when A.R. Jensen reawakened the topic after three decades of relativedormancy in Psychology. The publication of Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve in1994 and the recent row over pro-race difference comments by Edinburgh psychologistChris Brand, show that the topic has still, as historians of science would say, "resistedclosure".

Currently nearing completion of a lengthy book on the whole history of Psycho-logy's involvements with race and racism I have most recently reached the point whereI have had to tackle this episode. Having examined the question in some detail myconclusions are as follows: (a) that the pro-race differences case contains so manyconceptual confusions that under normal circumstances it would have been closed as apurely scientific question by c.l980; (b) that its persistence appears to be substantiallydue to funding and support from extreme right-wing, in some cases neo-nazi, organisa-tions such as the US-based Pioneer Fund.

I will take these in turn. The conceptual confusions are legion. We may beginwith the concept of 'race' itself. This now has no clear scientific meaning. Geneticistsoccasionally still use it to mean a large, long-isolated (in reproductive terms), in-breeding population or gene-pool. In this sense few humans any longer belong to dis-tinct races, including the subjects of US 'race' & IQ research.

Global distribution of gene frequencies varies enormously for different genes andthese do not systematically map onto traditional 'racial' distinctions. The geneticcomposition of a 'gene pool' may change fairly rapidly anyway, for a variety of reasons.Most importantly, however, any 'essentialist' or 'typological' concept of race has longbeen aboadoned as genetic nonsense.

A more technical difficulty has been the meaning of the 'H' or 'Heritability'score. For a long time the controversy was understood as hanging on the heritability ofintelligence and, on the basis of twin-studies, it was claimed that intelligence (asmeasured by IQ tests) had a H score of 0.8 (1.00 being the maximum). 'H' howeverrefers to the causes of variance in a trait within a single population at one time. Sincehuman leg number variance is almost all due to environmental effects the H of this isactually zero.

Most crucially here, however, we can infer little from knowing the H score aboutcauses of population differences - the usual example is height: this has a high II in allhuman populations but two populations may differ in mean height due to differencesin e.g. diet. 'H' refers to relative position within the population (the taller parents havetaller children), not the absolute value.

The nature of IQ tests themselves is highly problematic. Factors other than intel-ligence (as commonly understood) affect performance (e.g. tendency to check) and

Ethkal Record, July/August, 1996 7

some forms of intelligence (e.g. social skills) are not included. The 'general intelli-gence' notion is rejected by many psychologists and may just be a statistical artefact asS.J. Gould argues.

The cultural bias question is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of simplymaking sure items in the test are culturally appropriate but that the very notion of IQtesting is a product of white western modernist culture. To perform well involvessharing a number of underlying psychological characteristics typical of the culturewhich produced them (e.g. that one solves problems on one's own rather than collect-ively, that it is okay to show oneself superior to one's peers, that answering hypotheti-cal questions is a meaningful exercise etc).

The so-called 'Flynn effect' - that measured IQ scores have risen significantly al-most everywhere (including among African Americans) since first obtained, suggeststhat these characteristics are becoming more globally widespread. In a nutshell, therecannot be a culturally unbiased psychological test because psychological testing isitself a product of a specific culture (and reflects that culture's 'psychology').

The last confusion I will mention here is the 'heredity vs environment' polaritywhich many people still accept as meaningful. If these are conceived of as Indepen-dent Variables (IVs) affecting a Dependent Variable (DV) (intelligence) we are facedwith some serious paradoxes. Environment is a catch-all term for everything which isnot heredity - so how can it be an 'independent' variable? Intelligence must (howeverdefined) refer in some sense to individuals' sensitivity to their environment - so howcan 'environment' be a factor determining 'sensitivity to the environment'?

In fact geneticists such as Lewontin have shown that it is impossible, even in prin-ciple, to differentiate in any general way between the contributions of heredity andenvironment. Moreover of course, if genes determine capacity, environment deter-mines how near to fulfilling it rach individual gets: so ironically, a 'perfect' environ-ment would result in the I-1 of intelligence being 1.00 - all the variance would be geneticand none due to environment! So if a brick drops on your head and causes braindamage which lowers your IQ this-is an 'environmental' effect, but if you were wearinga protective helmet the maintenance of your existing level of intelligence would notapparently be due to the environment!

This may seem to be getting away from 'race' and IQ but the meaningfulness ofthe entire pro-differences case depends on accepting (i) that 'race' is a scientificallyvalid concept, (ii) the simple 'heredity vs environment' polarity, (iii) that IQ testsunambiguously measure a unitary entity called 'intelligence'. None of these any longerpossesses credibility among geneticists, anthropologists or most psychologists.

At a more rhetorical level, the plausibility of the pro-differences case is of ten en-hanced by exploiting lay misunderstandings of technical concepts (like the notion of'heritability' as expressed by the H score) and the idea that 'genetic' means'unchangeable' - hence spending money on trying to improve performance is under-stood as useless if intelligence can be shown to be genetically determined.

Nor is it widely appreciated that as far as individuals are concerned, rather thanpopulations, there is no conceivable way in which, excepting clearly pathological cases,the roles of genes and developmental circumstances can be unravelled. Having genesand having an environment are both necessary conditions for existing at all, and thus

8 Ethical Record, kly/August, 1996

both are 100% implicated in their own way. Whatever IQ I currently possess is due tothe fact that my circumstances have not yet proved fatal.

In a brief account it is perhaps impossible to elaborate these points sufficientlyfully to allay suspicions that mere sophistical tricks are being played. Surely, when allis said and done, there really are quite obviously white, African, Indian and FarEastern (Chinese, Japanese etc) people? And this being so surely it is at least possiblethat taken overall they may differ in how intelligent they are? Statistically speaking itwould indeed be pretty remarkable if every sample of human beings showed preciselythe same mean intelligence (assuming it to be measurable).

Why this common-sense view is misleading is (a) that it implicitly assumes thatthis particular way of classifying people (according to a combination of skin-colourand ancestral geographical origin) is an especially significant one - as opposed to, say,classifying them by blood-group, hair-texture, height, hairiness or indeed religiousbelief; (b) that everyone can actually be unambiguously assigned to a single one ofthese groups. In the latter case, the huge population movements and levels of globaltravel which have emerged over the last century and a half, and continue to intensify,are resulting in a constant, irreversible, erosion of the clarity of the boundaries.

While 'race' membership is socially assigned on the basis of whether or not an in-dividual has any detectable skin pigmentation (or, perhaps oriental almond eyes) thismay be genetic nonsense. In some US states, one thirty-second 'Negro' ancestry wasonce enough to get somebody legally classified as 'Negro'. Among people from theCaribbean, the permutations of African, European, indigenous Indian, Asian Indianand Chinese ancestry are vast. Finally one might ask, why does it matter anyway? Whythis obsession with IQ score as some symbolic badge of social worth and value? Andwhat is supposed to follow in practice from proving that 'race differences' currentlyexist?

Before answering these we should turn to the second part of my argument. I willdiscuss this more briefly, referring the reader to W.H. Tucker (1994) for a fulleraccount. The situation we are faced with is that Tucker, and a variety of journalists,have identified and documented in considerable detail, the funding and publishingrelationships between many leading pro-differences psychologists (notably Jensen,Richard Lynn of Belfast, J.P. Rushton and even H.J. Eysenck on occasion) and thenetwork of extreme right-wing, avowedly racist and white (often Nordic) supremacistorganisations.

The central factor in this appears to be the Pioneer Fund, a US organisation es-tablished in the 1930s by a pro-Nazi textile millionaire, Wickcliffe Draper. After thewar this organisation funded the establishment and operation of a purportedly anthro-pological academic journal called Mankind Quarterly; this has constantly publishedpro-race differences papers of many kinds. Those involved in running it includedRoger Pearson, founder of the Northern League for ex-SS and German Nazi partyveterans and self-proclaimed rescuer of Josef Mengele, the notorious concentrationcamp doctor. Richard Lynn is a sometime editor of this journal.

Ever since the late 1950s in the US, the Ku Klux Klan and a variety of neo-Naziand right-wing militia type outfits have published and publicised pro-differencePsychological work. Another figure involved has Been William Shockley, the wealthyNobel Prize-winning physicist who is obsessed with a eugenic vision and talks of


humans being 'colour coded' for intelligence. Jensen, Eysenck, Lynn and Rushton have

all received large sums, often into six-figures, for their research from the Pioneer

Fund.

When tackled the pro-differences camp typically espouse a pose of scientific

martyrdom; they are pure scientists, political innocents, simply stating the facts, beingharassed by bigoted forces of political correctness and naive egalitarians. Moreover,

they are not responsible for what others do with their findings; if racists use them it isnone of their concern. At the same time, these people are apparently happy to take

funds from and socially consort with people known to be avowed neo-nazis and racists.

These are circles in which most psychologists do not move, and would avoid like

the plague. Even as psychologists, it is of ten seemingly difficult for them to grasp why

people should be upset by being told they are of inferior stock. Quite frankly, this does

not, psychologically speaking, add up. It is inconsistent and contradictory.

We now face a dilemma. Either (a.) these people really are very naive, unable to

grasp the scientific case against their position, and incapable of genuine empathy withthose they claim to be inferior or (b.) they are genuine adherents of a white suprema-

cist ideology in which the world is construed in race-conflict terms and in which all

one's moral efforts should be directed to supporting the white race in its ongoing battle

- if this involves dissembling, so be it. The latter is surely more plausible and at leastgives them some bizarre kind of integrity. Since any profession as large as Psychology

is bound to include a small number of avowed racists, who are they if not the pro-race

differences researchers?

In short, the 'Race' and IQ Controversy has, I believe, long ceased to be a genuine

scientific issue and become an ideological one. It enables the racist camp to retain a

toe-hold in academia by disguising racist propaganda as scientific research. The onlyconceivable uses which the `race'-differences findings can have are racist ones. There is

much more to be said, but I will leave it there. 0

ReferencesGould, S.J. (1984, rep. 1992) The Mthrneasure of Man Harmondsworth: Pelican

Herrnstein, R.J. & Murray, C. (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structurein American Life NY: Free Press

Tucker, William H. (1994) The Science and Politics of Racial Research Urbana &

Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

For a complete bibliography on this subject compiled by Graham Richards, send an

S.A.E. toThe Secretary,

Ethical Society,

47 Theobalds Road,

London WC1X 8SP

The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society.


THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMUNISM IN YUGOSLAVIA

Jasper Ridley Lecture to the Ethical Society, 16 June 1996

A state called "Yugoslavia" only existed in the 20th century, but there was a tribe

called "the Yugoslays" 2,000 years ago. The country until recently called Yugoslavia

was then called Illiricum and was a province of the Roman Empire. In Dalmatia, on

the Adriatic coast, the Romans built cities; one of them, Spalato (Split) was the main

place of residence of the Emperor Diocletian. When the Roman Empire in the West

collapsed, the Eastern Roman Empire continued in Constantinople, and the Emperors

in Constantinople ruled Illiricum; but by 600 A.D. they no longer exercised control

there.

600 miles to the north-east of the frontiers of Illiricum, in what is now the Uk-

raine, between the Rivers Bug and Dniester, there lived a pagan tribe called the

Southern Slays, in their own language the Yugoslays, and by about 635 they had mi-

grated into Illiricum and settled there. Some of the tribe, the Slovenes, the Croats andthe Montengrins, were on the west coast. The Serbs were further east.

The Roman Empire had become Christian, but the Church had split between the

Roman Catholics in the west of the Greek Orthodox Church in the east. After the

Yugoslays came to Illiricum, missionaries came to convert them to Christianity. The

Yugoslays in the west, in Croatia, Dalmatia and Slovenia, were converted by missionar-

ies from Rome and became Roman Catholics; and the missionaries taught the educated

classes to read and write in the Latin alphabet. The Yugoslays in Serbia and Montene-

gro were converted by missionaries from Constantinople, became Eastern Orthodox

Christians, and learned to read and write in the Greek Cyrillic alphabet.

In the 8th century the King of the Franks, Charlemagne, conquered most of the

Central Europe and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in Rome in 800.

Charlemagne's armies occupied Croatia and Dalmatia, but did not go as far as Serbia.

In 1098 the King of Hungary conquered Croatia, which remained part of Hungary for

800 years. Slovenia became part of the lands of the Hapsburg family, who af terwards

became Archdukes of Austria and in the 15th century Holy Roman Emperors. The

merchants of the maritime republic of Venice crossed the Adriatic and colonised

Dalmatia.

So Dalmatia became part of the Renaissance Italy. Croatia and Slovenia became

part of Central European Christian civilisation based on feudalism which extended

from England to Poland. But feudalism was never established in Serbia, where there

was a more primitive and democratic system of military government like the system in

Anglo-Saxon England before 1066.

In the 14th century the Ottoman Turks conquered Serbia, some 40 years before

they captured Constantinople and destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire. In the 1520s

they invaded Hungary and reached the gates of Vienna. Eventually peace was made

between the Sultan and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor. Hungary was divided,

part going to the Hungarian nobleman who was a puppet ruler for the Turks, and part

to Ferdinand von Hapsburg. Croatia went to the Hapsburgs. So the frontier between

Croatia and Serbia remained what it has been for 1000 years, the frontier between


Central Europe and the east.

Belgrade was captured by the great Austrian general, Prince Eugene, in 1717, butwas recaptured by the Turks 25 years later. Across the Danube from Belgrade the littletown of Zemun, which is today a suburb of Belgrade, was in Croatia, Hungary and theAustrian Empire. Today the inhabitants of Zemun still repeat the old saying "The westbegins in Zemun".

In 1789 came the French Revolution and then Napoleon, who conquered Veniceand the Venetian colony of Dalmatia. He set up a Dalmatian Republic. After the defeatof Napoleon, the victorious Allies destroyed the Dalmatian Republic and gave Dalma-tia and Venice to Austria. But Napoleon did not go to Serbia, and the ideas of theFrench Revolution, which had so much impact all over Central Europe, never reachSerbia. When a national revolution broke out in Serbia against the Turks in 1804, therevolutionaries looked, not to France, but to the Tsarist Russia, the most reactionaryautocracy in Europe, for help.

In 1848 revolutions broke out all over Central Europe, including Vienna and Bu-dapest. The Croats played a counter-revolutionary role in 1848; under the CroatianCount Jelacic, a general in the Austrian army, they helped crush the revolution inVienna and Budapest. But the revolutions of 1848 caused no repercussions in Serbia.

Two new doctrines came to the fore during the revolutions of 1848 ---- Pan-Slavism and Socialism. Pan-Slavism, the idea that Slays everywhere, including theAustrian Empire, should unite, was denounced by the German Socialists Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels, as an instrument of Russian Tsarism. Marx and Engels them-selves, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, called on the workers of all countries tounite against their capitalist oppressors. Pan-Slavism and Socialism were the firstdoctrines for 1200 years to take root on both sides of the great divide between Croatiain the west and Serbia in the east. A Social-Democratic Party was formed in Croatia in1894, in Slovenia in 1896, in Serbia in 1903 and in Bosnia in 1909.

There were a series of Balkan wars in the 19th century. Sometimes the GreatPowers intervened, drew a map, and forced the inhabitants of the area to accept it, asthey did at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and were to do at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.Sometimes they allowed the Balkan nations to fight it out among themselves undis-turbed, as they did in 1885,1912 and 1913. As a result of their 19th century wars, Serbiaand Montenegro became independent states. Croatia, including Dalmatia, and Sloveniawere parts of the Austrian Empire; and Austria annexed Bosnia in 1908.

In June 1914 the Austrian Archduke was assassinated by Bosnian Serbs in Saraje-vo. Austria made this the excuse to invade Serbia, and the Great War began. There wasgreat sympathy for Serbia in Britain. It was not until 80 years later, in the 1990s, thatany English writer suggested that the Serbs, by assassinating the Archduke, wereresponsible for starting the First World War. The Serbs were Britain's only ally in theBalkans in the First World War. While Austria and Hungary, including Croatia, Bul-garia and Turkey fought on the German side, "gallant little Serbia" was our ally.Serbian children came as refugees to Britain. English historians and academics wrotebooks showing that the Serbs were the bravest, most intelligent, and trustworthy of allthe Balkan peoples.


When the Allies won the war they created a new state, consisting of Slovenia,Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro under a Serbian king. It was at first called theKingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, but soon the name was changed to Yugoslavia.It was the Great Powers, and public opinion in Britain and the west, that created aunited Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in 1918 as surely as they destroyed it in 1991.

The Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, and the Bolsheviks seized power. ACommunist government was formed in Hungary until it was crushed by Romaniantroops at the instigation of France and Britain. Communist Parties were formed allover the Balkans. In the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Communists won many seatsin the local government elections in 1920. The councillors were required to take anoath of allegiance to the King. The Communist councillors took the oath, but theirnewspaper Borba published a statement that they were only taking the oath as aformality and did not feel bound by it. The government made this the excuse to expelall the Communist councillors; the newly-elected Communist Mayor of Zagreb wasforcibly thrown out of the town hall by the police. The Minister of the Interior issueddecrees banning Communist demonstrations and forbidding Communists to study at'the universities. Soon afterwards the Minister was assassinated by a young man whowas said to be a Communist, though the Communist Party denied responsibility. Thegovernment then passed the Law for the Protection of the State, which suppressed theCommunist Party and made Communist propaganda punishable by death. TheCommunist MPs were expelled from Parliament and their leaders were sentenced tolong terms of imprisonment, though the death penalty provided for in the law wasnever in fact imposed.

From the very first, the Croats had resented being ruled by Serbs in a united Yu-goslavia, and a strong separatist movement grew up in Croatia, The Communist Partyat first advocated the idea of a united Socialist Yugoslavia, with its allies in the LittleEntente, Czechoslovakia and Romania, were the allies of France against both a resur-gence of Austrian and Hungarian nationalism and against Communist Russia. So theCommunist Party changed its line, and worked to weaken Yugoslavia by encouragingseparatism, and made an unofficial united front with the Croatian separatists.

On 20 June 1928 a Serbian MP rose to speak in the National Assembly in Bel-grade. As he stood speaking on the rostrum he suddenly drew a revolver and shot deadthe Croatian Peasant Party leader, Radic, and two other Croatian MPs as they sat intheir place in the Assembly. The assassin was convicted of murder, but the deathsentence was commuted, and he was released after a few months in prison.

Six months later, on the Orthodox Christmas Day, 6 January 1929, King Alexan-der announced that in view of the disturbances in Parliament he was dissolving Parlia-ment and assuming powers as a dictator. His coup d'etat was supported by thegovernments of Britain and France. The editorial in The Times: wrote: "It is difficultto suggest an alternative or to find fault with King Alexander", because "the mainte-nance of Yugoslav unity is a European interest".

The government's vigorous anti-Communist measures were successful. Commun-ity Party membership, 60,000 when the Law for the Protection of the State was passedin 1921, had fallen to 3,000 by 1929. One of these 3,000 was losip Broz, who laterbecame known as Tito. He was born in 1892, the son of a Croatian peasant in a villagenear Zagreb in Croatia. At the age of 16 he left his native village and became a metalworker, but found it hard to find work and tramped the roads of Croatia looking for


work. He found work in Bohemia and in the towns of Western Germany, where heworked in the new motor-manufacturing industries before working for a year inVienna. When he was 21 he was called up into the Austrian army, where he did well,and was soon promoted to be a sergeant-major, the youngest sergeant-major in theAustrian army. When war broke out in 1914 he was sent to the Russian front, and inApril 1915 was severely wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians. He was sent to aprisoner-of-war camp in the Urals. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917 hemade his way to St Petersburg (Petrograd) and took a small part in the abortive Bolshe-vik insurrection of July 1917. He was arrested, but soon released, and went to Omsk inSiberia. He was there when the Bolsheviks seized power and when the civil war began.When the White armies captured Omsk he went to the country and lived quietly in asmall village in Siberia, taking no part in the civil war. In 1920 he returned to Yugosla-via and joined the Communist Party.

There is really no doubt about all this, though millions of people in the formerYugoslavia do not believe it. They think that Josip Broz died as a prisoner-of-war inRussia, and that the Communist International (the Comintern) gave his documents to aCommunist agent whom they sent to Yugoslavia in 1920, and that it was this Commun-ist agent, not Josip Broz, who later became Tito. Is there any reason for believing thatTito was not Josip Broz; and if he was not Josip Broz, who was he? It is true that theComintern were in the habit of giving their agents the name and documents of peoplewho had died, and if Josip Broz had died in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia theymight well have sent an agent to Yugoslavia telling him to use the name Josip Broz. Itis true that Tito spoke Serbo-Croat with a Slovene, not a Croatian, accent; but hismother was a Slovene --- his native village of Kumrovec is only 5 miles from theSlovenian border --- and he spent some years as a child with his grandfather in Slove-nia. When Tito was President of Yugoslavia his favourite relaxation was to play thepiano; and people ask, how did a peasant's son learn to play the piano? He himself saidhe learned to play on a beautiful white piano when he was a child; perhaps this was inhis grandfather's house.

If Tito was not Josip Broz, who was he? One story is that he was the illegitimateson of a Slovenian nobleman. Another story, which was widely believed by the Catholicclergy during the Second World War, was that he was a Hungarian Jew. Today inBelgrade many people believe that he was the illegitimate son of Winston Churchill,and that this explains why Churchill supported Tito during the Second World War. Iwas often told this when I was in Belgrade in 1993.

All these people who say that Tito was not Josip Broz tell you that when he re-turned to Kumrovec in 1920 no one there recognised him; but this is quite untrue. Infact, he was recognised by all his Broz cousins, including those who strongly disap-proved of his Communist politics. I myself met two of his cousins, one of whom hadlived in the same house with Tito when they were young, and who met him again onhis visits to Kumrovec when he was president of Yugoslavia.

The illegal Communist activity in Yugoslavia in the 1920's took two main forms.At Belgrade University students took part in violent demonstrations, attacking reac-tionary professors and throwing stones at the police. In the more industrial regions ofCroatia, the Communist Party took part in trade union activities, because although theCommunist Party was illegal, trade unions were not. Broz organised strikes in variousindustries in Croatia, including the shipbuilding yards on the Adriatic coast. He wasblacklisted by employers, and unable to get work; but the Communist Party then made


him a full-time paid trade union organiser. He was very efficient, both in organisingstrikes and illegal Communist demonstrations. After evading the police for some time,he was arrested in 1928 and sentenced to five years in prison. On his release in 1934 hebecame one of the leaders of the Communist Party; it was now that he took the nameof Tito. IN 1935 he was sent to Moscow and became an official of the Comintern.

It was just at the time of the change of policy by the Comintern, when Stalin,who for two years had thought that Hitler would be preoccupied with France, realisedthat he was a great threat to the Soviet Union. The Comintern began their policy of thePopular Front, of building an anti-Fascist anti-German alliance. The Communist Partyof Yugoslavia now broke with the Croatian separatists and advocated a strong unitedYugoslavia allied to France against Germany. At their illegal Communist demonstra-tions they shouted "Long live the Army". When the French Foreign Minister came toBelgrade they organised pro-french demonstrations.

It was the period of the Spanish Civil War. After Tito had become the Partisanleader in Yugoslavia in the Second World War, it was widely believed that he fought inSpain in the International Brigade. In fact Tito never went to Spain. He opened anoffice in Paris to organise the transport of Yugoslav volunteer§ to fight in Spain, butdid not go there himself.

It was also the period of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union. The leaders of theforeign Communist Parties in Moscow were badly hit by the Purge. They all lived inthe Hotel Lux in Moscow, and nearly every night the NKVD came and arrested one ofthem. The inmates heard the steps in the passage outside their room in the night andwondered who was being arrested; they only found out next morning when they sawwho was missing at breakfast. The Secretary-General of the Yugoslav CommunistParty, Gorkic, was arrested and executed by the NKVD in 1937, and most of the Yugo-slav Party leaders were also executed. It has sometimes been suggested that Tito wasresponsible for the liquidisation of the other Party leaders, but this does not appear tobe the case, and nothing in the recently-discovered files of the NKVD in Moscowsuggests this. Tito was not in the USSR in 1937 when the top leadership was purged; hewas in Paris. It was after nearly all the old leadership had been executed, and newleaders had to be found, that the Comintern turned to the second-rank of the leader-ship and promoted Tito to be the Secretary-General of the Yugoslav Party.

It is a mystery how Tito survived the Purge. He was certainly lucky. He managedas far as possible to stay out of the Soviet Union by persuading the Comintern that theleadership of the Party should be in Yugoslavia and not abroad in Moscow, because hefelt safer in Yugoslavia, on the run from the government police, than as a sitting targetfor the NKVD in the Hotel Lux. But he was in Moscow from August 1938 to January1939, when more of the Yugoslav Party leadership were purged. Tito's first wife, aSiberian girl whom he married in Ornsk in 1920, was arrested during the Purge. So washis second wife, an Austrian Communist whom he met in the Hotel Lux. During hisresidence in Moscow he and two other Yugoslav Communists were given the duty oftranslating the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into Serbo - Croat,

and both his fellow-translators were arrested and executed. In later years Tito attri-buted his survival to his personal friendship with Dimitrov, the Secretary-General ofthe Comintern, and with a member of the NKVD; but there is no doubt that he waslucky.


After the outbreak of the Second World War, the Comintern sent Tito back toYugoslavia, where he built up the illegal Community Party. By the beginning of 1941Party membership had risen from 3,000 in 1929 to 12,000, despite the fact that many ofthe Party members had been killed fighting in Spain. In October 1940 Tito managed toorganise a secret congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party in Zagreb, attended byseveral hundred delegates, without the police finding out. After the Pact betweenGermany and the Soviet Union in August 1939 and the outbreak of the Second WorldWar, the Comintern denounced the war on the Allied side as an imperialist war whichmust be opposed by the workers in every country, and Tito and the Yugoslav Commun-ist Party carried out this policy.

In March 1941 Hitler pressurised the Yugoslav government into signing a Pact un-der which German troops could enter Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia joined the Axis inthe Second World War. There was a spontaneous popular rising in Belgrade; the peoplecame out into the streets shouting "Death rather than the Pact". The Communistsjoined in the demoi.stration, although it was against the Party line. Hitler's reply was tobomb Belgrade and invade Yugoslavia.

In Croatia, the Fascist party, the Ustase, under Ante Pavelic, took power, pro-claimed the independence of Croatia, and began to massacre Serbs, Jews gypsies andCommunists. Before the end of 1941 they had probably killed 330,000 Serbs; the Serbsgive the figure as 700,000, and the Croat writers as 70,000, but impartial writers thinkthat 330,000 is the correct figure. Tito was in Zagreb when the Germans marched in.He was warned that the Gestapo was on his track, and on 22 May left Zagreb forBelgrade.

On 22 June 1941 the German army invaded the Soviet Union. The Comintern sentinstructions to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to begin immediately a campaignof attacks on German soldiers to assist the Soviet Union, emphasising that the time wasnot opportune for them to attempt to make a Communist revolution in Yugoslavia,At asecret meeting in Belgrade on 4 July 1941, Tito and the Party leadership issued a callfor attacks on German troops. The Germans responded by shooting 100 Serbs for everyGerman soldier killed. Many Serbs, fearing that they might be shot as hostages, fled tothe mountains near Uzice, some 60 miles south of Belgrade. In Croatia the Serb minor-ity fled to the resistance to avoid being massacred by the Ustase. Colonel Mihailovic,an officer in the royal Yugoslav army, also set up a resistance group near Uzice. InSeptember Tito left Belgrade and joined the Communist resistance groups near Uzice.

Tito had several meetings with Mihailovic to discuss joint action against the Ger-mans, but the negotiations broke down through mutual suspicion. Some British officerswere sent from Cairo to contact Mihailovic and Tito to see if they were worth helping.They recommended that arms should be sent to both Mihailovic and his Chetniks andto Tito. But the British Foreign Officer persuaded the British government not to sendarms to Tito, because his Partisans were Communists, and they thought that the moreBritain was associated with the Communists, the most likely it was that anti-Communist neutrals, particularly General Franco in Spain, would enter the war onHitler's side. The British only sent a few arms to Mihailovic, and none to Tito.

In November 1941 the Germans launched an offensive against both the Partisansand the Chetniks at Uzice, and they retreated into Bosnia. The Muslims in Bosnia werevisited by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had been banished from Palestine by theBritish for having led a revolt in Palestine against Jewish immigration. He persuaded


some Bosnian Muslims to join the German Waffen SS and fight for Hitler againstBritish imperialism and the Jews. These Fascist Muslims killed Bosnian Serbs. Mihai-lovic and his Chetniks in retaliation killed Muslims and also killed Croats to avengethe massacres of Serbs by the Ustase. The Chet niks also fought against Tito's Partisans.

The Partisans told the people that they supported all races against Fascists, thatSerbs, Croats and Muslims could live happily together as brothers in a SocialistYugoslavia. They said they would protect Muslims and the Croats against the SerbianChetniks, and would protect the Serbs against the Ustase and the Muslim Fascists. ThePartisans gained many supporters from Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

Not only the BBC in London, but Radio Moscow, praised the Chetniks for fight-ing against the Germans, and did not mention the Partisans. Sometimes the BBC gaveMihailovic the credit for blowing up bridges that had in fact been blown up by thePartisans. But in September 1942 Radio Moscow began to praise the Partisans and tosay that Mihailovic was collaborating with the Germans. In fact, Mihailovic did notcollaborate with the Germans, but he did collaborate with the Italians.

In October 1942, just before the Battle of El Alamein, the British asked Mihailo-vic to blow up a railway bridge that the Germans were using to send supplies toRommel in North Africa. Mihailovic did not blow up the bridge; he afterwards saidthat he did not have the explosives. In February 1943 Mihailovic took the Britishliaison officer who was with him to a christening party in a village, at which every-body got rather drunk. Mihailovic then made a speech in which he condemned theBritish for wishing to fight to the last drop of Serbian blood, and said that the enemiesof the Chetniks were, in order, the Ustase, the Communists, the Muslims and then theGermans; they would deal first with the Ustase, the Communists and the Muslimsbefore fighting the Germans. The British officer reported this to Cairo, where it madea very bad impression.

In May 1943 Churchill decided to send his old friend Captain Deakin to Yugosla-via to see if it was true that the Partisans were fighting the Germans more efectivelythan the Chetniks were fighting them. Deakin landed by parachute in the middle ofthe Battle of the Sutjeska, when the Partisans were being attacked by 70,000 Germantroops and 30 aircraft. He and Tito were wounded by the same German bomb, and onlyjust managed to escape from being encircled by the Germans. Deakin's report toChurchill made it clear that the Partisans were a very effective anti-German fightingforce. Churchill then sent Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, M.P., to see Tito in September1943. Maclean was very anti-Communist, but he became friends with Tito. He reportedto Churchill that Tito was fighting the Germans much more effectively than Mihailo-vic was, and that when the Red Army, who were advancing against the Germans on theRussian front, reached Yugoslavia, they would certainly support Tito, and that it wouldcause great difficulties between the Allies if the British were then to support Mihailo-vic. Fitzroy Maclean therefore advised that the British should send massive aid to Titoand withdraw all support from Mihailovic, and Churchill followed his advice.

In May 1944 the Germans, on Hitler's personal orders, made a paratroop raid onTito's headquarters at Drvar in an attempt to capture Tito. Tito escaped, but a few dayslater, as his position was surrounded by the Germans, the British sent a plane to flyTito to Italy, and from there to the Yugoslav island of Vis, which had been occupied byBritish troops.


Churchill now thought out a plan; Tito would publicly announce that he did notintend to establish Communism in Yugoslavia and that he accepted the government ofKing Peter, and King Peter would dismiss Mihailovic and appoint Tito as Commander-in-Chief of his army. Tito and Churchill had a very friendly meeting in Naples inAugust 1944, and Tito, after stalling, agreed to issue a public statement that he did notintend to establish Communism in Yugoslavia. But Tito in fact intended to do just this,and was anxious that if the British landed in Yugoslavia, they would prevent theestablishment of a Communist government there. A Russian plane landed in Vis andflew Tito secretly to Moscow, where he saw Stalin and persuaded him to send the RedArmy to capture Belgrade at once. Tito and the Red Army entered Belgrade in October1944. Stalin and Churchill had made an agreement that Soviet influence would beparamount in Romania, that British influence would be paramount in Greece, and thatthey would share influence on a 50-50 basis in Yugoslavia. But Tito persuaded Stalinthat he could do better than this and could establish a Communist dictatorship inYugoslavia. Churchill accepted this; he crushed the Communists in Greece but surren-dered Yugoslavia to Tito and Stalin.

For three years af ter the end of the Second World War, Tito appeared to the westto be Stalin's most faithful lieutenant; but anyone who realised the great differencesbetween the Partisan movement in Yugoslavia and the Communist Parties elsewherewere less surprised at the split between Tito and Stalin in 1948. The Soviet Uniondemanded not only loyalty but complete submission by the Yugoslav Communist Partyto the Soviet Union, which Tito was not prepared to give. Stalin demanded that Yugos-lavia should sign trade agreements with the Soviet Union without discussion whichwere unfairly biased against Yugoslavia; that Tito would not make any public statementon foreign policy without first submitting the text to Stalin; and that the Yugoslaysshould withdraw all the criticisms they had made about the conduct of the Red Armyin Yugoslavia. When Tito discovered that two members of the Central Committee ofthe Yugoslav Communist Party were Russian spies, he arrested them and refused theSoviet demand for their release. Yugoslavia was then publicly denounced and expelledfrom the Com in form in June 1948.

At first Stalin took no action beyond verbal recrimination against Yugoslavia.When the Czech Communist Prime Minister, Gottwald, visited Stalin on the Black Seain September 1948 he asked him why he did not send in the Red Army to crush Tito.Stalin replied that he did not wish to crush Tito, but hoped that Tito would recant andsubmit. When Stalin discovered that Tito was not going to recant, he imposed econo-mic sanctions against Yugoslavia in the Summer of 1949, and began a purge of so-called Titoists in the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe. Tito then drew closer tothe United States and NATO, who gave him economic and military help in return forTito abandoning his support for the Communist Partisans in Greece.

Although Tito had taught the members of the Yugoslav Communist Party to wor-ship Stalin, very few of them supported Stalin against Tito. Tito dealt very severelywith the few who did. He opened a concentration camp on the island of Goli Otok inthe Adriatic for the supporters of the Cominform. Conditions in the camp were verybrutal. Communists who had been imprisoned in King Alexander's prisons in pre-warYugoslavia and in the Ustase concentration camp of Jasenovac during the SecondWorld War said that conditions on Goli Otok were worse than in any of these otherprisons and camps.


After Stalin died, his successor Khrushchev decided to be reconciled with Tito.He went to Belgrade and apologised to Tito for the campaign that the Soviet Union hadconducted against Yugoslavia. Tito told Khrushchev that he would have to repudiateStalin more decisively if the world was to believe that there had been a change in theSoviet Union, and it was at Tito's suggestion that Khrushchev made his anti-Stalinspeech in February 1956.

In October 1956 the Communist government of Hungary decided to rehabilitateRajk, who had been executed as a Titoist in 1949. His funeral in Budapest started apopular revolution, and the crowds attacked and killed Communists. Khrushchevdecided to send in the Red Army to crush the rising, but before acting he wished toconsult Tito. A few hours before the Red Army crossed the Hungarian frontierKrushchev flew to Tito's holiday home on the island of Brioni. and discussed thesituation in Hungary with Tito in talks which lasted all night. Tito said that the policyof Stalin and his Communist agents in Hungary was responsible for the rising there,but that the situation in Budapest had now reached the point where a counter-revolution was developing which was threatening the stability of the Socialist regimesall over Eastern Europe, and he strongly urged Khrushchev to send in the Red Army tocrush the counter-revolution in Budapest. He also urged Krushchev to appoint theCommunist Kadar, who had been imprisoned as a Titoist, as the new Prime Minister ofHungary.

But although Tito thought that the Hungarian Prime Minister, Nagy, had allowedthe situation in Budapest to get out of hand, he did not think that he was a traitor whodeserved to be punished and he gave Nagy and his colleagues refuge in the Yugoslavembassy in Budapest. Russian troops then surrounded the embassy and fired at it,killing one Yugoslav diplomat. The Yugoslays negotiated an agreement with the Rus-sians that if Nagy left the embassy, he would not be harmed; but the Russians broke theagreement, and hanged Nagy. These events soured relations between Tito andKhrushchev. But Tito also condemned the policy of the United States, and whenAmerican-Soviet relations deteriorated and the Third World War seem imminent in1961, Tito adopted a neutralist position. Tito took the initiative in forming the associa-tion of Non-Alligned States, who held their first international congress in Belgrade in1961, and several more congresses in other parts of the world. In the association of Non-Alligned States, Tito formed particularly close relations with Nasser of Egypt, Nehruof India, and the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.

Inside Yugoslavia, the Communist leadership formed into a Liberal and a Hard-line wing. Djilas, who had been one of the most intolerant and pro-Russian Commun-ists, advocated a sort of Parliamentary democracy, and eventually repudiated Marxism.In the end, Tito imprisoned him. But the Communist leadership was deeply divided asto whether to relax the rigour of the dictatorship and over economic policy, whether toallow some degree of free market economy, and to encourage foreign tourism, or toadhere strictly to planning. These divisions tended to be on regional grounds, with themore prosperous north, Croatia and Slovenia, favouring more economic freedom, andresenting the planners who wished to assist and develop the backward south from thetaxes paid by the Croats and Slovenes.

For some years Tito refused to commit himself between the Liberals and theHardliners, and appointed an equal number of both factions to his government and letthem argue it out among themselves; but eventually in 1966 he came down on the sideof the Liberals, and dismissed the Minister of the Interior and Chief of the Security


Police, Ran kovic. The years from 1966 to 1971 were the freest in Tito's Yugoslavia.

Tito strongly condemned the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; but healso condemned the United States' intervention in Vietnam and their support of Israelin the Middle East. He therefore continued his neutral policy in association with theother Non-Alligned States.

In 1971 a strong separatist movement developed in Croatia, and many of theyounger members of the Croatian Communist leaders supported it and took over theleadership of it. Tito tolerated it for a year, but then clamped down on it and sup-pressed it. But he strengthened the position of the Muslims in Bosnia in a number ofways to offset Serbian influence in Yugoslavia. In his last years he worried about thefuture of Yugoslavia.

When Tito died, his funeral in 1980 was attended by more foreign representativesthen had ever gathered for any head of state's funeral; 4 Kings, 6 Princes, 31 Presidentsof Republics, 22 Prime Ministers and 47 Foreign Ministers. Yugoslavia held togetherfor 10 years after his death; but in 1990 civil war broke out, and the Western powers,especially Germany, ensured the destruction of Yugoslavia when they recognisedSlovenia and Croatia as independent states. In these wars, some 300,000 people werekilled in four years until peace was at last dictated by the United States in Dayton,Ohio.

Two months after the end of the Second World War, Tito, in a speech, asked hisaudience to think what would have happened if the Partisans had not won in theSecond World War. "We should have been in a state of terrible chaos, in a fratricidalwar, in a country which would no longer be Yugoslavia, but would only be a group ofpetty little states fighting among themselves and destroying each other". And at thetime of the separatist movement in Croatia in 1971, Tito said "Do you realise that ifdisorders take place, others will at once be there? I would prefer to restore order withour own army than allow others to do it". He was probably thinking at the time aboutintervention by the Soviet Union, but he would not have been surprised to know the"others" who would be there to restore order would be the bombing planes of NATOand the intervention of the United States.

It was not Tito's death but the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe thatcaused the break-up of Yugoslavia. All during Tito's 35-year rule, the Yugoslav consti-tution always allowed the states to secede; but as long as they were all governed byCommunists who wished to live in an ununited Communist Yugoslavia, none of thestates wished to secede. But once Communism was discredited, there was nothing tohold Yugoslavia together, and nationalist hatreds took over.

Today the memory of Tito is discredited in Serbia; the Croats feel more ambig-uously about him. But some inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia think like theMuslim from Bihac who wrote in the visitors book at Tito's birthplace in Kurnrovec inSeptember 1993: "When you were alive I walked on two legs, and now I walk on oneleg". 0

SPES ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, 2.30 pm 29 SEPTEMBER 1996See lune ER for the details of motions and nominations. Note that there will now be 8(not 7) vacancies for the GC owing to the resignation of Yvonne Bracken.


THE FORTNIGHTLY EDITINGTHE

INTIMATENo.2. A REVIEW of LIFE & LITERATURE=9D

REVIEW

Contributors: ANDOliver Bernard Ahm Owen THE FORTNIGHTLYTom Blackburn John Rely IN THE 1950sAnthony Carson Alan RicidelJ. Heath-Stubbs Bums SingerDoris Leasing Elizabeth Smart John Rety*

Summarivof a Talk to the Ethical Society, 26 May 1996

I was a young man and interested in writing. I was inspired by a vague idea that 'outthere' might be a few interested readers. I did not know then that the best way for awriter to proceed is to abide by whatever his public likes. Sooner or later the buddingwriter will discover that most writing is re-writing other people's ideas. There are noforms of writing which are not ruled by what exists already. So the difficulty for theodd poet, then, is that of balancing fervour with originality. The rules do not allow thecomplete rewriting of somebody else's work - plagiarism plus a new signature.

I became the editor of several very unusual magazines in a period just after thesecond world war, when a generation wanted to put all those horrors behind it. Literaryand artistic ambitions and a bohemian life-style characterised us in that short-livedperiod, the time of the Festival of Britain, when cockney voices still abounded inLondon. Here was a young crowd, wedded to the idea of utopian democracy, confidentand fair, as the poet says. There were many who wanted that world to continue forever.However, just as now cockney is rarely spoken in the streets of London, this crowd ofidealists, together with the magazines and the one daily newspaper we started, failedentirely; those opinions, respected and widely held in the fif ties, have fallen silent. Thiscomplete rout of the idealists should be a lesson to all future generations.

Looking back on it, it puzzles me - where did we find the energy to publish allthose magazines and to find a very large audience for them? In the f if ties we were readby a large cross-section of society. Since then, this bohemian crowd has disappeared.The failure of the existentialist life-style meant that those who wished to enhancecommunal life withdrew to stay marginalised and silent. Some, though, of that crowdknew instant fame and were swallowed up by the conventional papers. Our work was astepping stone, inevitably; most of the angry young men dropped our life-style in-stantly once they had achieved recognition.

A Window Seat in a Coffee HouseMy editorial office, where I received contributions, was a window seat in a coffee house,long closed down. It did not take long to put an issue together. Nobody was paid except theprinter. The price was strictly 3d. I haven't been able to keep a complete set of issues, aconcomitant of along, insecure life of moving books and papers. Most of them have becomeuntraceable, although each issue was distributed in many thousands. Some of the titles were:Intimate Review, Cheshire Cat, London Broadsheet and The Fortnightly.

*John Rety has recently published in conjunction with Menard Press/Hearing Eye:AC JACOBS COLLECTED POEMS & TRANSLATIONS


There was a very large readership but then everything finished as suddenly as itstarted. The crowd grew up, dispersed, came to its senses and took up the responsibili-ties of job (later joblessness) and family. We all fell in line. Nobody helped any more.Real people turned into phantoms. There was a great success rate, but like the beech orthe elm, the spirit of the fifties has also perished. However you look at it, those days ofbohemian life have gone with the wind and it is no use distressing ourselves about it.

The bohemian philosophy is certainly not suited to the present situation. It ap-peals to that circle of society who consider it futile to wreck themselves mentally andphysically to achieve wealth, but finds the greatest enjoyment they obtain from life tobe self-generated. Tell that to the Labour Exchange. To study literature, music, art andphilosophy is, for us, the greatest enjoyment of existence. An old definition ran that thedifference between the bohemian and the conventional person is that the former fol-lows his or her own inclination, whereas the latter does what everybody else wants himto do. An exquisite drawing by Franciszka Themerson in an Intimate Review sums upthe prevailing mood and humour of the epoch: a society woman at a party: 'I am soromantic! I could live on poetry alone.' Poet: 'I can't. I write it.'

Somewhere I wrote that I do not want to become the historian of my own life.Looking round here in the library at Conway Hall, I was hoping to meet some of thepeople from the fifties, but there is nobody here of that vast crowd. As if the whole erahad not existed and it is nothing else but the trick of imagination, an implanted traceof memory and a few tattered copies of old magazines which still, after all these years,look remarkably brave and splendid and futile.

VIEWPOINTS

Advice to Intellectual RadicalsSadly, Ivor Catt's experience (ER, June 96) is not unique. From Socrates' hemlock to moderndictators murdering opposition voices - the latest being Ken Saro-Wiwa - the ruthless sup-pression of independent thought And action continues.

Of course, it is, as Ivor Catt points out, often done with subtlety. I recall meeting a Por-tuguese radical who had managed to flee to Britain to escape being murdered by the thenmilitary dictatorship. He said to me: 'In Portugal, the secret police hunt and kill us revolutio-naries. In England, they quietly see that you are blacklisted.'

But what's the answer? Unfortunately, Catt provides none. As a former trade union of-ficial, now retired, who has himself experienced difficulty in getting his scientific/philoso-phical views in print, I would urge intellectual radicals not to stand on the sidelines but toget involved in and try to get the backing of their appropriate dissident organisations. Forexample, there are the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, the Manufacturing, Science andFinance Union, and the Scientists for Social Responsibility. Pioneers must cease to think thattheir problems are unique. They are not - and they must fight collectively.

Hyman Frankel - London, SW4.

Evolution as FactI would support the Editor's claim (ER, June 96) that evolution has moved from theory tofact. Practical examples include: bacteria resistant to anti-biotics, rats resistant to poisons andweeds resistant to pesticides. There is also a new, popular-styk book on evolution - Evolutionand Healing: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine by G. Williams and R. Nesse.

Robert Awbery - Reading.

Ethical Record, July/August, 1996

Negating SpiritualityIt seems that without knowing me or having read much of what I have written, R.G. Silson(ER, June 96) has dipped his pen in vitriol to polemicise against me. Bigotry, prejudice,dogmatism and fundamentalism, I stand accused of nearly every philosophical and intellect-ual error in the book. Furthermore, he speculates that my views stem from fear of beingwrong and a need for certainty.

As a scientific materialist, I take as my starting point the maxim doubt everything'. Soit is on the basis of the evidence to hand that I have reached my conclusions on the questionof spirituality. I have no need for certainty, but at present I am certain that spirituality is areligious concept and that as a materialist I must oppose it. R.G. Silson refers to research,studies and 'one lecturer' supporting his views. If he can give his sources, I'll be happy tolook at them and, if needs be, reply.

Yes, religious leaders do exploit human emotions, fear in particular, to increase theirpower. But 'human nature' is not something static; it changes with changes in society other-wise we would still be in the stone age. This process of change is one in which humans, usingtheir reason, can intervene. If it is agreed that spirituality is a religious concept and thathumanism is the antithesis of religion, then rather than integrate such concepts into OUr

culture, we should be doing all we can to demystify and negate them.I know little about MENSA but suspect that it consists solely of people who are good at

doing the tests it produces. However, I would refer readers to the pamphlet Racism, Intelli-gence and the Working Class (Party for Workers' Power, Boston, Mass.) which exposes therace and class bias of so-called IQ tests.

Terry Liddle - Eltham, London.

Debating ReligionWhat are spiritual feelings? It looks like poppycock to me. There is no spirit. It is anothermyth. We are physical entities. One good thing about humans is that they are objects. Allthought in statements will be either true or false. We have only trial and error and we need totest as well as we can.

There are no religious believers, for religion is about values rather than belief, thoughbased on some belief. This is why refutations often do not shock religious propagandists butthey will tend to hit them in the long run. Roy Silson (ER June 96) gets it wrong for thebrighter the person, and the deeper the study they have made, the easier it is to get them tocomprehend refutations. Arguments are like judo tricks in that they work best on the strong.You cannot beat a fool in debate.

David McDonagh - Birmingham.

SUPERSTITION SUPPER

On Friday the thirteenth of September 1996 the British Humanist Association is hold-ing a Supper on the theme of Superstition. 6.30 pm, Small Hall, Conway Hall, WC1

* a talk on superstition* a demonstration of casting the runes and* a debunking of how this is done* an exhibition of superstitions and their origins*a supper chosen for its superstitious significance

Prepayment essential - places limited. £6.50, includes a glass of wine. Tel: BHA 0171 430 0908


THE 'MANY QUESTIONS' SERIES, ITV, SUNDAY MORNINGS, JULY/AUGUST

Jennifer Jeynes*

The first of these religious/moral discussion programmes on 14 July was on NorthernIreland, with an RC priest and an Orange Lodge chaplain. The third panellist, BrianMcClinton, Secretary of the Ulster Humanist Association, was asked the first questionby Olivia O'Leary. At once the screen went blank for two minutes - obviously divineintervention. When transmission resumed, Brian gave a most eloquent depiction ofhumanism:

'Though it [humanism] is a very small movement in N. Ireland, ... it em-phasises the good qualities of human beings, -. the importance of reason and scienceand compassion and truth; it is an exciting philosophy ... it liberates us from tribalismand enables us to think for ourselves, find truth in our own way and reject the label-ling of people.'

*Jennifer was in the audience the following week when columnist Janet Daley arguedfor Hell as a deterrent to crime. Calling herself an ethical humanist, Jennifer re-sponded by telling of the baleful effect of Hellfire teaching on her when she was asensitive three year-old. [Ed].

PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETYThe Library, Conway Hall Humanist Centre,

25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1Tel: 0171 831 7723

SEPTEMBERSunday 152.30 pm ANNUAL REUNION OF THE KINDRED SOCIETIES

*Keynote Speaker:Celia Fremlin*Musical Entertainment: Graham Lyons*Refreshments

Sunday 2211.00 am JOHN STUART MILL & FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

Jonathan Wolff, Department of Philosophy, UCL.

Sunday 29.2.30 pm AGM of The Ethical Society (Members only).

HUMANIST WORLD CONGRESS — MEXICO CITY 14 - 19 November, 1996 GLOBAL HUMANISM FOR THE CYBER-AGE

Congress information: HTTP://WWW.CODESH.ORG or send SAE to Secretary of SPES

Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square. London WCIR 41iL

Printed by LG. Bryson (Printer) Ltd.156-162 High Road, London 512 9A5.

Documents

ISSN 0014-1690 n REP© I Record