Michael Ignatieff

The media attention accorded to acts of infamy may or may not figure in the motivations of mass killers, but it must certainly count among the compensations of homicide as a moral career. In the wake of his conviction for murdering and dismembering six lonely young men at that dreaded address, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen must have basked in the thought that, even behind bars, he was still free to roam through the darker corners of the minds of all those people who had scorned or ignored him when he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore.

When my father reached Paris from Russia in May 1919, the man who met them at the Gare de Lyon was Uncle Alyosha. My father was six at the time and he has no memory whatever of the tall, soldierly gentleman with a moustache. Instead his memory darts unerringly to the thing which mattered to him at that moment in his life. In Uncle Alyosha’s apartment in Saint Cloud, he was served koulibiaka, a pâté made from salmon. To a little boy who had just discovered what it was like to be hungry in the war zones of the southern Caucasus, where the Whites would capture their town one week and the Reds the next, the koulibiaka must have come dancing before his eyes as a promise of deliverance.

I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed … Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.

It is not easy to make sense of the trade unions. ‘Suicidal’, ‘mindless’ and ‘atavistic’ are, to be sure, epithets of wilful incomprehension, but even those disposed to understand sometimes find it hard to comprehend union behaviour, workers’ interests and the uncertain fit between the two. The first obvious case which baffles even sympathetic onlookers arises when unions strike in apparent disregard of the apocalyptic economic facts in their industry. During the ASLEF strike, even those loyal to the traditions of craft unionism found it difficult to see why the union should have seen fit to push the industry to the brink of collapse. It may be rational, even in a time of recession, to take on a plump multinational subsidiary like Ford’s, but it seems insane to grapple over the rusting hulk of some near-bankrupt nationalised industry. A rational explanation of union behaviour in these cases would have to demonstrate how unions manage to construe the facts of life in their industry in such a way that they can convince themselves and their members that they are defending, not destroying, their own occupation. The second case, which equally baffles outsiders, occurs when even unionised workers are seen to put up with low pay, appalling conditions or both without collective complaint. The cotton workers who have been stoically giving their lungs and their lives to the defence of an industry itself dying on its feet from mismanagement and foreign competition are the most pathetic example. If the first case – ‘suicidal militancy’ – is the bête noire of Conservatives, the second is the eternal puzzlement of Marxists. Neither side produces explanations of these cases which credit workers with the capacity to think for themselves. Conservatives like to emphasise the political and personal ambitions of the leadership – the Ray Bucktons of this world – thus failing to explain why the rank and file seem so regularly to find sound reasons of self-interest to support their leaders’ supposedly selfish causes. The catch-phrases in the Marxist explanation of why workers put up with the unbearable – the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the employers, the ‘co-optation’ of the unions, the weight of ‘dominant ideology’ – likewise assume a passive rank and file, incapable of either speaking or knowing their own minds. It is almost an embarrassment, and certainly a puzzle, that these same numbed and divided workers can, with surprising suddenness, become militants in their own cause. Then, of course, Marxist sociology has to explain that they were secret bearers of revolutionary consciousness all along.

One of the sombre gratifications of war, as we have had recent occasion to discover, is solidarity. War taps a longing to still the quarrels of ordinary life for the sake of something in common. This is a more pervasive longing than we like to admit. Even those who speak out against war are not immune to its lure. ‘Jingoism’ is a word used to condemn the enthusiasms of others, but also to ward off their fatal attraction. Since 1945, the quarrels of peacetime in Britian have been made to seem that much more mean and interminable by the memory of wartime solidarity. Now that we have peace of a sort again, the same nostalgia preys upon the business of taking up the old quarrels.