Rebecca West - Politics

Politics

West grew up in a home filled with discussions of world affairs. Her father was a journalist who often involved himself in controversial issues. He brought home Russian revolutionaries and other political activists, and their debates helped to form West's sensibility, which took shape in novels such as The Birds Fall Down, set in pre-revolution Russia. But the crucial event that molded West's politics was the Dreyfus Affair. The impressionable Rebecca learned early on just how powerful was the will to persecute minorities and to subject individuals to unreasonable suspicion based on flimsy evidence and mass frenzy. West had a keen understanding of the psychology of politics, how movements and causes could sustain themselves on the profound need to believe or disbelieve in a core of values—even when that core contradicted reality.

It would seem that her father's ironic, sceptical temper so penetrated her sensibility that she could not regard any body of ideas as other than a starting point for argument. Although she was a militant feminist and active suffragette, and published a perceptive and admiring profile of Emmeline Pankhurst, West also criticized the tactics of Pankhurst's daughter, Christabel, and the sometimes doctrinaire aspects of the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).

The first major test of West's political outlook was the Bolshevik Revolution. Many on the left saw it as the beginning of a new, better world, and the end of the crimes of capitalism. West regarded herself as a member of the left, having attending Fabian socialist summer schools as a girl. But to West, both the Revolution and the revolutionaries were suspect. Even before the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, West expressed her doubts that events in Russia could serve as a model for socialists in Britain or anywhere else.

West paid a heavy price for her cool reaction to the Russian Revolution; her positions increasingly isolated her. When Emma Goldman visited Britain in 1924 after seeing Bolshevik violence firsthand, West was exasperated that British intellectuals ignored Goldman's testimony and her warning against Bolshevik tyranny.

For all her censures of Communism, however, West was hardly an uncritical supporter of the Western democracies. Thus in 1919–1920, she excoriated the U.S. government for deporting Goldman and for the infamous Palmer raids. She was also appalled at the failure of Western democracies to come to the aid of Republican Spain, and she gave money to the Republican cause.

A staunch anti-Fascist, West attacked both the Conservative governments of her own country for appeasing Adolf Hitler and her colleagues on the left for their pacifism. Neither side, in her view, understood the evil Nazism posed. Unlike many on the left, she also distrusted Joseph Stalin. To West, Stalin had a criminal mentality that Communism facilitated. She was outraged when the Allies switched their loyalties in regards to Yugoslav resistance movements by deciding in 1943 to start backing the Communist-led Partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, thus abandoning their support of Draža Mihailović's Chetniks whom she considered the legitimate Yugoslav resistance. She expressed her feelings and opinions on the Allies' switch in Yugoslavia by writing the satirical short story titled "Madame Sara's Magic Crystal", but decided not to publish it upon discussion with Orme Sargent, Foreign Office's Assistant Under-Secretary of State. Writing in her diary, West mentioned Sargent persuaded her that "the recognition of Tito was made by reason of British military necessities, and for no other reason" and following Sargent's claim, she described her decision not to publish the story as an expression of "personal willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of my country". After the war, West's anti-Communism hardened as she saw Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Eastern and Central European states succumb to Soviet domination.

It is not surprising in the context that West reacted to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy differently from her colleagues. They saw a demagogue terrorizing liberals and leftists with baseless accusations of Communist conspiracy. West saw an oaf blundering into the minefield of Communist subversion. For her, McCarthy was right to pursue Communists with fervor, even if his methods were roughshod, though her mild reaction to McCarthy provoked powerful revulsion among those on the left and dismay even among anti-Communist liberals. She refused, however, to amend her views.

Although West's anti-Communism earned the high regard of conservatives, she never considered herself one of them. In postwar Britain, West voted Labour and welcomed the Labour landslide of 1945. But she spoke out against domination of the Labour Party by British trade unions, and thought leftwing politicians such as Michael Foot unimpressive. She had mixed feelings about the Callaghan government. West admired Margaret Thatcher, not for Thatcher's policies, but for Thatcher's achievement in rising to the top of a male-dominated sphere. She admired Thatcher's willingness to stand up to trade-union bullying.

In the end, West's anti-Communism remained the centerpiece of her politics because she so consistently challenged the Communists as legitimate foes of the status quo in capitalist countries. In West's view, Communism, like fascism, was merely a form of authoritarianism. Communists were under party discipline and therefore could never speak for themselves. And West was a supreme example of an intellectual who spoke for herself, no matter how her comments might injure her. Indeed, few writers explicitly acknowledged how much West's embrace of unpopular positions hurt her on the left. A whole generation of writers abandoned West and refused to read her, as Doris Lessing suggested.