Isaac Deutscher 1967
1. G M Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne, Blenheim, London: Collins, 1930, Chapter III.
2. G M Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England, Book Four, London: Longmans, Green, 1941, Chapter II.
3. Differentia specifica — essential or defining feature — MIA.
4. This was the prevailing attitude, even though the peasantry itself was divided between rich and poor, and small groups of enlightened peasants formed, of their own accord, cooperatives and communes soon after the revolution and in the early 1920s.
5. Locum tenentes — place holder, someone who stands in on a temporary basis for another person in a specific job — MIA.
6. ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
7. The American Civil War appears to be an exception. This, however, was a civil war which did not divide the nation as a whole or set class against class all over the United States. The North was virtually united in its determination to prevent the secession of the Southern states; its superiority and preponderance were never in danger; and there was no armed foreign intervention.
8. Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History, London: Bell, 1949, p 143.
9. This is, for instance, what The Times correspondent in Delhi wrote on 3 February 1967 under the title ‘Bihar Villagers Now Slowly Starving’: ‘Reports from the districts worst affected suggest that slow starvation has marked the poorest of the village communities already.’ In effect ‘perhaps twenty million landless labourers in the afflicted areas of Eastern Uttar Pradesh as well as Bihar’ are threatened by famine, unless they are fed by the administration until the autumn. The horror was aggravated by a simultaneous threat of water famine: ‘... once the village wells dry up, the people will set off in search of water. Large numbers of people on the move in search of water must greatly complicate the task of giving then food.’ Simultaneously, Le Monde reported that fifty per cent of the children of Senegal were dying before the age of five because of malnutrition and disease. These facts were reported, as small news items, on one day only.
10 .They can, however, deposit money with savings banks at a very low interest rate. In 1963 nearly fourteen million people had savings accounts; and the average deposit was 260 roubles. The average conceals discrepancies between amounts of money deposited by various individuals. But as few people are likely to put into a bank savings smaller than 260 roubles, the discrepancies are not likely to be socially important. In the USSR people with high incomes prefer to spend on durable consumer goods such as cars and dachas rather than keep accounts in government controlled banks.
11 .In 1966, sixty-eight million pupils received instruction in schools of all grades, compared with ten or eleven million before the revolution. For demographic reasons (the low birth rate of the war years) the number of pupils was, at between forty-six and forty-eight million, stationary in the two decades of the 1940s and 1950s. In the last seven years, however, it has grown by twenty-two million. Forty-seven million were at primary and secondary schools; 3.6 millions at the universities; 3.3 millions at technical colleges; thirteen million received instruction at adult educational classes, among them about two million workers and technicians who took university courses without interrupting their normal work. Since 1950 the number of university students has trebled.
12 .A reviewer of an essay on Maoism, included in my Ironies of History, recalls, in The Times Literary Supplement, that excerpts from the Manifesto had been translated into Chinese, and apparently published in a small periodical, in the first decade of this century. The fact remains that Chinese readers of Mao Tse-tung’s generation, and Mao himself, could not read the Manifesto in extenso until 1921.
13 .This was why Mao, cultivating a diplomatic friendship with the government of General Sukarno for many years encouraged the Indonesian Communist Party to accept Sukarno’s leadership and to renounce all independent revolutionary action in favour of a coalition with the ‘national bourgeoisie’. Mao’s role vis-à-vis Indonesian Communism was thus very similar to Stalin’s role vis-à-vis Chinese Communism in the 1920s; and the results have been even more disastrous.
14 .Ultima ratio — the final argument — MIA.
15 .Vanitas vanitatum et vanitas omnia — Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity — MIA.
16 .The quotations are from Professor Galbraith’s Reith Lectures as published in The Listener, 15 December 1966.
17 .Herbert Butterfield, International Conflict in the Twentieth Century: A Christian View, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, pp 61-78. My criticism of Professor Butterfield’s analogy does not detract from the soundness of his courageous pleas for an international détente which he addressed to American audiences in the 1950s.
18 .Tua res agitur — This concerns you — MIA.