Portugal to Poland
IN RETROSPECT IT seems to have been more conscious on my part than perhaps it was at the time, but there came a stage where I took refuge in travel. To adapt what Cavafy says about the barbarians, this was a solution of various kinds. It removed me from a London that was often dank and second-rate. It kindled in me a resolution which I have tried to keep ever since: to spend at least once every year a little time in a country less fortunate than my own. (If this doesn’t stop you getting fat, it can at least help prevent you from getting too soft.) And, in the period I am writing about, it allowed me to continue seeing the Left as a force that was still struggling for first principles against the traditional foes.
I would be indignant if anyone were to describe this as “romantic”—a term that we were especially educated to despise in the International Socialists, even though I now think that there may be more reprehensible words. But, if you exempt a solidarity trip that I took to express support for the Icelandic socialists who were fighting to stop British trawlers from hoovering up all their fish (and Iceland is an exotic locale all of its own, with its moonscape interior and geyser-supplied hot water with the ever-present diabolical whiff of sulphur), it is true that the impulse generally led me to the south and to the Mediterranean and to the Levant.
One of the many great hopes of 1968 had been to complete the unfinished business of the Second World War and cleanse Spain and Portugal of their antique fascist regimes. Not only had this ambition not been realized, but another dictatorship of the Right had been imposed on Greece and then spread, with calamitous results, to the independent republic of Cyprus. The drama extended across both sides of the Pillars of Hercules: Franco’s Spain made a free gift of its Western Sahara colonial possession to the absolutist monarchy in Morocco, leaving the population voiceless in its own destiny. It also extended to the extreme opposite end of the Mediterranean, where an Israeli Jewish opposition to the occupation of Palestinian land was beginning to take shape, and where in Lebanon an alliance of secular and Palestinian forces was emerging to challenge the old confession-based hierarchy.
A whole anthology of images survives vividly in my mind from this time. A spontaneous riot on the broad Ramblas of Barcelona, after the last-ever use of the hideous medieval garrotte for the judicial murder of a Catalan anarchist named Salvador Puig Antich: the illegal Catalan flag proudly flown and a shower of gasoline bombs falling on Franco’s military police. A journey to Guernica—a place name that I could hardly believe corresponded to an actual living town—to rendezvous with Basque activists. A weekend in the Latin Quarter in Paris, complete with telephone “passwords” and anonymous handshakes in corner zinc bars, so that I could meet a Portuguese resistance leader named Palma Inacio who was engaged in organizing an armed battle against the dictatorship in Lisbon. Some long, hot, and fragrant days in Tyre and Sidon and points south of Beirut, meeting with militants of the “Democratic Front” who, over lunch in the olive groves, would patiently explain to me that Jews and Arabs were brothers under the skin and that only imperialism was really the problem. Standing in Freedom Square in Nicosia among a roaring crowd of demonstrators, many of whom had recently fought with gun in hand against the Greek junta’s attempt to annex Cyprus, but whose voices could also be heard over the impermeable wall that the invading Turkish army had built right across a free city.
I liked all this for its elemental headiness (it seemed to go so well with different blends of wine and raki) but also for its seriousness—politics in these latitudes being a game played for keeps—and for its immediate and intense connection to history. I felt I knew the Ramblas from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: in Algiers after returning from an expedition with the Polisario guerrillas fighting in the Sahara, I thought I also had at least a vicarious glimpse of the continuation of an old struggle for the soul of North Africa that had once involved Camus and Sartre. As for Cyprus, where I fell so hard in love with the island and the people—and with the very place names: Famagusta, Larnaca, Limassol, Kyrenia, and with one very dramatic and life-altering Cypriot—was not the philhellenic tradition the very one that had helped revive British radicalism more than a century before? (Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.)
The alteration of perspective was the most useful thing. In northern Europe it was, roughly speaking, a case of the free West versus the “satellite states” of the East. In Cyprus, though, the illegal occupying power was a member of NATO. In Portugal, the fascist regime itself was a member of NATO. Likewise in the case of Greece. In Spain, the main external relationship of the system was with Washington. Thus it was possible to meet Communists who, in these special circumstances, not only made sense but had heroic records and were respected popular figures. In Cyprus, at a very red-flag rally where I was among the platform speakers, I had the distinct honor of shaking the hand of Manolis Glezos, who had given the signal for revolt in Athens in 1944 by climbing up the Parthenon and tearing the swastika flag from the pediment. Not a bad day’s work, I think you’ll agree.*
However, of Comrade Glezos it also had to be said that he had once run a bookstore in Athens that largely featured the work of Enver Hoxha of Albania, possibly the most Aztec-like of all Europe’s remaining Stalinists. And I hadn’t forgotten the second great promise of 1968, which was that of solidarity with the forces of dissent in “the other Europe,” the nations of the East and the Baltic who had been stranded and frozen in time ever since the Yalta agreement permitted the partition of the continent. Thus for me the three most important episodes from this epoch are the stirrings of revolution in Portugal and in Poland, and the experience of counter-revolution in Argentina.
Lusitania
Mediterranean though it can feel, Portugal is the only European country that has the Atlantic Ocean lapping around the inner harbor of its capital city. Its amazing mariners took its oddly inflected language as far away as East Timor and Macao though King Henry “the Navigator” probably never actually boarded a ship. As soon as I could manage it after the revolution of April 1974, I arrived ordinarily enough by air, and was then told to wait in the customs area. Was I perhaps on some list of undesirables, as I had found myself to be at other airports? A lanky, white-haired official, proffering a card that proclaimed his name to be Viera da Fonseca (just like the delicious port wine), extended a hand. He was to escort me to a hotel. It appeared that I was an honored guest. For the first time in my life, I was on a list of desirables. When the files of the former secret police of the Salazar/Caetano dictatorship had been broken open, it was found that I was listed as a particular foe of the ancien régime. Having imagined myself dossing down happily with my comrades on the floor of some left-wing slum apartment, I was promoted to a fairly elevated floor of the Tivoli Hotel on the Avenida Libertad, with a view of the city’s captivating harbor. It all seemed too much, as if one had suddenly received the profits and dividends of an investment that had barely been made. I formed a private resolution not to become too used to it.
But the fall of fascism in Lisbon in April 1974 was the occasion for an almost perfect storm of radical desires. The overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship was not only part of the long-postponed business of cleansing Europe of pre-1939 fascism, it was also a sort of revenge for the destruction in the preceding autumn (on 11 September to be precise) of the Allende government in Chile. There were other happy convergences at work, also. With the old gang removed, the grip of Portugal on its African colonies was broken, and this meant not only the emancipation of Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau but also an acceleration of the process that would eventually terminate racist rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. Other revolutionary ripple effects might be expected in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, the largest and in some ways the most vicious of the authoritarian military regimes of the Southern Cone of the Americas, while the effect on neighboring Spain surely had to be a demo
ralizing one from the viewpoint of Franco’s military and religious allies. A whole series of fault lines radiated away from this Lisbon earthquake, all of them shivering the structures of traditional order. And this was simply to speak politically. The cultural element made it seem as if the best of 1968 was still relevant. One of the precipitating prerevolutionary moments had been the publication of a feminist manifesto by three women, all of whom were named Maria, and “The Three Marias” became an exciting example of what womanhood could do when faced with a theocratic oligarchy that had treated them as breeding machines not far advanced above the level of chattel. Sex, long repressed, was to be scented very strongly on the wind: I remember in particular the only partly satirical Movimento da Esquerda Libidinosa or “Movement of the Libidinous Left,” with its slogan “Somos um partido sexocratico,” whose evident objective was the frantic making-up of lost time. The best revolutionary poster I saw—perhaps the best I have ever seen—expressed this same thought in a rather less erotic way: it showed a modest Portuguese family in traditional dress, being introduced to a receiving line of new friends who included Socrates, Einstein, Beethoven, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, Louis Armstrong, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. (There are many people in much richer countries who are still putting off this rendezvous.)
As well as being a colonial power, Portugal under fascism had managed also to let itself become a semi-colony, whose main export was cheap labor to the rest of Europe and whose illiteracy rate was about thirty percent. The resulting division of the country, between the boss class and the officer class and the rank-and-file, was very striking. The astounding thing, in the mass demonstrations that thronged the Avenida Libertad and the Rossio Square, was to see the squads of uniformed young sailors and soldiers joining in with the workers and the students: to my eyes an almost literal replay of the scenes from Battleship Potemkin or the storming of the Winter Palace. And, once I had cleared my eyes by drying them, I noticed that the parallel with St. Petersburg could be drawn in other ways, too.
In 1968 the ferment of revolution had taken the ossified French Communist Party completely aback, forcing it in effect to line up with de Gaulle. This it had done, partly to protect its position as “the party of order” and partly to obey Soviet instructions that the anti-NATO and anti-American regime of the Gaullists be left as far as possible unmolested. In Portugal no such inhibitions were in play, because the old order had irretrievably vanished like breath off a razor blade, and there was a good old-fashioned power vacuum or, as we used to say in factional meetings, a “situation of dual power.” Workers’ committees were forming embryo soviets, soldiers’ and sailors’ collectives had whole ships and regiments under their temporary command, landless workers in the countryside were taking over abandoned farms and properties. There were two things to notice about this. One was that hardly a shot was fired: the Portuguese may have exported a good deal of their violence overseas to Africa but in the country itself the rhythms were—when compared to neighboring Spain, say—remarkably gentle. (As a possible metaphor, in Portuguese bullfights the bull is not tortured or killed: the matador tests only his own agility and bravery against the noble beast.) The second thing to absorb was that, behind all the spontaneity and eroticism and generalized “festival of the oppressed” merrymaking, a grim-faced Communist apparat was making preparations for an end to the revels and a serious seizure of the state.
“The USSR is the sun in our universe,” proclaimed Alvaro Cunhal, leader of the Portuguese Stalinists, who had returned from exile in Moscow to direct operations. The tactics were more those of 1948 in Prague than St. Petersburg in 1917, consisting of the slow acquisition of positions in the army and the police, and the application of what used to be called “salami tactics” against other parties. The Portuguese Socialist Party enjoyed the support of a majority of the people, so it was not by coincidence that one of its main newspapers, La Repubblica, became the target of a “spontaneous” takeover by the print-workers, which their Communist union bosses endorsed as if butter would not melt in their mouths. Nor was it by coincidence that the Chemical Workers’ Union, which had a latent socialist majority among its membership, found some of its Communist officials oddly reluctant to hold a ballot. The emergency nationalization of the banks meant opportunities, in a state that had formerly been corporatist and monopolistic, for the bureaucratic “new class” to become the owners of large tracts of Africa, and the proprietors of seats on the boards of newspapers and television stations. The leader of the Socialist Party, Mario Soares, a man whom I would normally have regarded as a pallid and compromising Social Democrat, summarized the situation with some pith. I still have the question he put to me, double-underlined in my notebook from Lisbon. “If the army officers are so much on the side of the people, why do they not put on civilian clothes?” It was a question not just for that moment.
I began to be extremely downcast by the failure, or was it refusal, of my International Socialist comrades to see what was staring them right in the face. Intoxicated by the admittedly very moving attempts at personal liberation and social “self-management,” they could not or would not appreciate how much of this was being manipulated by a dreary conformist sect with an ultimate loyalty to Russia. Thus I found myself one evening in late March 1975 at a huge rally in the Campo Pequeno bullring in Lisbon, organized by the distinctly cautious Socialist Party but with the invigorating slogan: “Socialismo Si! Dictatura Nao!” The whole arena was a mass of red flags, and the other chants echoed the original one. There were calls for the right of chemical workers to vote, a banner that read “Down With Social Fascism” and another that expressed my own views almost perfectly in respect of foreign intervention in Portugal: “Nem Kissinger, Nem Brezhnev!” I took my old friend Colin MacCabe along to this event. For his numberless sins he was at the time a member of the Communist Party, and at first employed an old Maoist catchphrase—“waving the red flag to oppose the red flag”—to dismiss what he was seeing. But gradually he became more impressed and as the evening began to crystallize he unbent so far as to say: “Sometimes the wrong people can have the right line.” I thought then that he had said more than he intended, and myself experienced the remark as a sort of emancipation from the worry, which did still occasionally nag at me, that by taking up some out-of-line position I would find myself “in bed with,” as the saying went, unsavory elements. It’s good to throw off this sort of moral blackmail and mind-forged manacle as early in life as one can.*
The sequel takes very little time to tell: the Communists and their ultra-Left allies hopelessly overplayed their hand by trying for a barracks-based coup, the more traditional and rural and religious elements of Portuguese society rose in an indignant counter-revolution, a sort of equilibrium was restored and—e finita la commedia. The young radicals who had come from all over Europe to a feast of sex and sunshine and anti-politics folded their tents and doffed their motley and went home. It was the last fall of the curtain on the last act of the 1968 style, with its “take your desires for reality” wall posters and its concept of work as play. For me, it was also the end of the line with my old groupuscule. I had developed other disagreements, too, as the old and open-minded “International Socialists” began to mutate into a more party-line sect. But Portugal had broken the mainspring for me, because it had caused me to understand that I thought democracy and pluralism were good things in themselves, and ends in themselves at that, rather than means to another end.
In his superb collection of essays Writers and Politics, which influenced me enormously when I first found it in a public library in Devonshire in 1967, Conor Cruise O’Brien had phrased it better than I could then hope to do:
“Are you a socialist?” asked the African leader.
I said, yes.
He looked me in the eye. “People have been telling me,” he said lightly, “that you are a liberal…”
The statement in its context invited a denial. I said nothing.
And yet
, as I drove home from my interview with the leader, I had to realize that a liberal, incurably, was what I was. Whatever I might argue, I was more profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom—freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgment and independent judges—than I was to the idea of a disciplined party mobilizing all the forces of society for the creation of a social order guaranteeing more real freedom for all instead of just for a few. The revolutionary idea struck me as more immediately relevant for most of humanity than were the liberal concepts. But it was the liberal concepts and their long-term importance—though not the name of liberal—that held my allegiance.
One can read such things and understand and even appreciate them, and one can undergo experiences that recall one to the original text as if in confirmation. I cite O’Brien not as an argument from authority, for I was to have many disputes with him down the years, but as a man of considerable mind who brilliantly summarized the contradictions with which I had been living, and with which in many ways I was condemned to go on coexisting for some time to come.*
Liberté à la Polonaise
I was to have the same contrasts emphasized for me in a different way at the opposite end of Europe over the Christmas of 1976. The previous summer I had been very intrigued by reports of a small-scale but suggestive workers’ revolt in Communist Poland, where Party property and several stretches of railway line had been extensively damaged in rioting against a sudden announcement from on high of a steep rise in the price of food. Some protestors had been killed and the rest dispersed and several put on trial—nothing exceptional in that—but a new element had intruded itself. Petitions had been circulating in Warsaw, soliciting money for a legal defense of the accused workers. Voices had been raised, demanding an inquiry into the conduct of the police and militia during the disturbances. Was it possible that, twenty years after the Polish “spring” of 1956, the Germinal of another movement from below was under way?