Human behavior cannot be comprehended in the concept of enlightened self-interest.” Men are better and worse than that.

The Mind of the Ideologue

by ANTHONY ESOLEN

On February 16, 1979, a secular leftist professor of politics, Richard Falk, enjoying in the security of France a sabbatical for international meddling, wrote an editorial for The New York Times, entitled “Trusting Khomeini.” When the history of the collapse of western civilization is written, that editorial should merit more than a footnote. The pro-western Shah of Iran, no saint, but no ayatollah either, had been on the throne of Iran since he was a boy. He had guaranteed freedom of religion to Jews and Christians. He had bankrolled Great Britian only a few years before, when the English had nearly spent themselves to death. He was a buffer against radical Muslims in the Middle East. But he had a secret police, and they did the atrocious things that secret police do. And Iranians were growing impatient to see a broader distribution of the wealth from the oil fields. So the Shah had to go.

Professor Falk was no mere commentator on the coup d’etat. He was an important player in it, a fact that he does not reveal in his editorial. He writes to reassure everyone, though, that it was absurd to believe that Khomeini was a dangerous man. Khomeini was not, says Falk, a promoter of “theocratic fascism.” He was not motivated by “virulent anti-Semitism.” Khomeini has said that non-religious leftists would be welcome in Iran, so long as they do not “commit treason against the country,” a qualification which Falk brushes aside. He seems to have forgotten about all of the “traitors” murdered or sent to concentration camps in every ideologically defined state in the twentieth century.

“To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling,” he concludes, “seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.”

That was a few months before the Shah of Iran, dying of lymphoma, was finally admitted for medical care in the United States. Then the moderate, progressive individuals in charge of Iran smiled moderately and progressively, and political agitators, called “students” by the western press, seized the American embassy and held American citizens hostage.

Everybody makes mistakes. Tris Speaker predicted that the Yankees would regret turning Babe Ruth into an outfielder. But Falk’s colossal mistake, which has cost countless lives and which still bids fair to overwhelm the west in violence, seems to be more than a case of professorial naiveté. There is something mysterious going on here.
 Malcolm Muggeridge mused all his life long about the same sort of thing. What explains the phenomenon of the “fellow traveler,” the man who follows a movement that would destroy people like him first of all? What explains the bishop Talleyrand who associated himself with the haters of the clergy? “There have been Jewish anti-Semites, and male feminists,” says Muggeridge, “and brewers who were total abolitionists. The fact is that human behavior cannot be comprehended in the concept of enlightened self-interest.” Men are better and worse than that.

Muggeridge saw them in their various species, which are with us still: “These millionaires … who identified themselves with forces unmistakably destructive of their wealth; these pious clergymen who lent themselves to propaganda which made a mockery of the faith they professed; these admirable scholars who contentedly swallowed the most monstrous perversions of historical scholarship.” He recalled the mild-mannered socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who wrote their learned tome,Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, after Stalin had starved some millions of his citizens to death and turned the Ukraine into a weed-infested waste. The Webbs knew of this. Muggeridge himself had reported what Stalin was doing, while Walter Duranty of The New York Times, whom Muggeridge liked personally and called the most accomplished liar he had ever met, was writing puff-pieces on overflowing silos and Russian boys in love with their tractors. Muggeridge for his pains won the inveterate enmity of the left. Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize.

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