Because we’re all so obsessed with what it was that made the Nazis tick, we tend to overlook the bigger mystery of how hundreds of millions of people, for a period considerably longer than the lifespan of Hitler’s Germany, remained under the spell of communism.
This is a question that Czeslaw Milosz set out to answer in his 1953 classic The Captive Mind. Milosz was a Polish poet, prominent in the underground during the Nazi occupation, who served as a cultural attaché with Poland’s post-war communist regime before quitting in disgust and fleeing to the US, where he taught at Berkeley and achieved eminence as a Nobel-prize-winning dissident exile.
What Milosz particularly wanted to know was how so many of his literary and intellectual contemporaries embraced dialectical materialism — the only permitted way of thinking in the ‘imperium of the East’ — when, being intelligent and cultured and sensitive, they ought to have seen it was a nonsense that bore no relation to observed reality.
He came up with a number of explanations, one of which captures perfectly that preening sense of entitlement you found then and still find now among luvvie types.
Get Britain's best politics newsletters
Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in