The Wish That Distorts
The Western left's recurring failure to tell the difference between opponents of power and agents of it.
In April 1932, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: “All I know is that I wish Soviet communism to succeed — a wish which tends to distort one’s judgement.”
She wrote that sentence while touring the Ukrainian famine. She wrote it during the months when Stalin’s grain requisitions were converting the breadbasket of the Soviet Union into a charnel house. She wrote it as a Fabian socialist of impeccable credentials — co-founder of the London School of Economics, pillar of the British intellectual left, serious thinker.
The diary entry records the exact mechanism of her failure. She knew the wish was distorting her judgment. She named it. She continued.
The result was Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, published in 1935 — two volumes of elaborate argument that the famine did not exist, that the show trials were fair, that the one-party state was a working democracy under the enlightened guidance of a vanguard. The question mark was later removed from the title. She was by then certain.
She was wrong about everything. She was wrong in the way that people are wrong when they have decided in advance what the answer must be and then go looking for reasons. The reasons came. The reasons always come.
Every generation of the Western left produces its own version of this failure. It has happened so many times, across so many decades, with so many different authoritarian regimes cast in the role that the Soviet Union once played, that the pattern has earned a name. I am going to use the term neo-campism going forward. It is back. It is back with China.
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We should walk through the pattern with some degree of care, because it is a repeating pattern and learning to recognize malignant social patterns is the first step to building our collective resistance to them.
Step one: correctly identify a real Western failure. Imperialism, racial violence, economic exploitation, the military-industrial complex, the hypocrisy of liberal power — all real, all worth naming, all properly the targets of serious leftist critique.
Step two: find an authoritarian alternative positioned as the enemy of that Western power. Stalin’s Soviet Union. Mao’s China. Castro’s Cuba. Chávez’s Venezuela. Now Xi’s China.
Step three: attribute the alternative’s apparent successes to its ideology. Soviet industrialization. Chinese economic growth. Cuban healthcare. Venezuelan poverty reduction. The high-speed rail, the cheap solar panels, the absence of billionaires on visible corporate boards.
Step four: minimize or deny the human cost. The Ukrainian famine did not happen. The Cultural Revolution did not kill intellectuals. The Khmer Rouge reports are CIA propaganda. The Venezuelan opposition is a coup attempt. The Uyghur camps are vocational schools.
Step five: frame credible criticism as serving imperial interests. Anyone pointing out what is happening is a Cold Warrior, a propagandist, a dupe.
Step six: go silent when the evidence becomes undeniable. The Webbs did not update. Western Maoists went quiet after Deng. Chomsky qualified and reframed but never directly accounted for his Cambodia writing. Corbyn and Owen Jones simply stopped mentioning Venezuela when the shelves emptied.
Step seven: find a new authoritarian alternative and repeat.
None of this is Republican cartooning about the left. The pattern I have described has caught up serious left intellectuals — Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Chomsky and Herman, Corbyn, Owen Jones — across the better part of a century. The pattern does not require stupidity. It requires a prior commitment that overrides evidence. The Webbs knew this. They named it and continued.
