Paul Thomas: Time can blur your recollection of historic events

Opinion

The phone rang. "You?" shrieked an hysterical male. "Heavily involved in the anti-nuclear movement? Give me a break." Derisive cackling ensued.

I recognised the speaker as one of my oldest, if not necessarily dearest, friends. Not for the first time, I had no idea what he was talking about.

It transpired that he was talking about a recent column in which I'd claimed to have been an anti-nuclear activist back in the 1980s. His recollection of me from that time was rather different.

My recollection of me was rather different, too, so I logged onto the Herald website to see what had appeared under my byline.

I'd written: Dr Caldicott is even more devastated by Bush's re-election than she was when Ronald Reagan won a second term - "which was pretty devastating for me as I was so heavily involved in the anti-nuclear movement in those days."

However, at some point in the editorial process the speech marks had gone walkabout making it appear as if I - rather than Dr Caldicott - was the anti-nuke peacenik of yesteryear.

Producing a newspaper is neither an art nor a science; nothing that's done in a hurry every day is. These things happen and as long as no one gets defamed (and I didn't feel as if I'd been exposed to hatred, ridicule or contempt) they're not worth getting your knickers in a twist over.

But my cackling friend was broadly correct: while not a Reaganaut, I was certainly more of a hawk than a dove in '84.

That was mainly because I loathed the Soviet Union and believed it had to be resisted, whether it was trying to bully Western Europe - where I lived at the time - into a posture of cringing, under-defended neutrality or the Solidarity movement out of existence.

Dr Caldicott certainly wasn't the only person who thought otherwise. In Western intellectual circles, it was still perfectly respectable to be a communist, even a Moscow-aligned one. That didn't mean one agreed with everything the USSR did - shooting down that Korean airliner, for instance, was most regrettable but then it was a "well-known fact" that the CIA used civilian flights to spy on Soviet military installations.

Below the card-carrying level, there were many others who subscribed to the doctrine of moral equivalence which basically held that the United States and the USSR were as bad as each other, therefore expansionist Soviet communism posed no more or less of a threat than imperialistic American capitalism.

In 2002 the celebrated English writer Martin Amis published Koba the Dread, a meditation on the stupefying horror of Stalinism and the paradox that, while the Holocaust has been burned into our collective consciousness as the defining image of man's inhumanity to man, Stalin's 20 million victims often seem to have no more emotional force than the death tolls of some medieval plague.

There are various explanations for the unwillingness of successive generations of Western intellectuals to be outraged and remain outraged by what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953.

The intelligentsia's weakness for Marxism and the old leftist catchcry "No enemies on the left" has a lot to do with it. So does the dubious proposition that the concentration camps were nazism's logical and inevitable conclusion whereas the Gulag Archipelago was the result of the hijacking of a fundamentally benign ideology by a single monster.

Stalin's aphorism that while the death of a single person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic has some validity. The same could be said for Mao. The lesson, it would seem, is that if you're going to be a mass murderer, make sure you have Marx on your side.

Not surprisingly, since many of the reviewers were the spiritual heirs of the very people Amis had fingered, the critical reaction was hostile.

Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it; perhaps people simply don't like Amis.

In his Private Eye diary entry for October 28, 1977, Auberon Waugh commented that very few people are any good at sex or writing and those who are good at both are likely to be the objects of poisonous envy.

"It explains," he wrote, "the almost universal loathing for that degenerate dwarf Martin Amis, who seems to have scored more beautiful women in the past four years than I have had first courses."