Plus ca change.... Intellectuals losing the plot is nothing new

I was recently struck by an amusing (but quite depressing tbh) passage in the autobiography of the Northern Irish 30's poet Louis MacNiece "The Strings Are False" (Faber & Faber, 1965) where he comments on the febrile political atmosphere in England before the war when many of the intellectual class fell over themselves to condone and excuse Russian communism :

"Take the case of Stephen Spender. [In his book] Forward fr­om Liberalism, chosen by the Left Book Club and so under the aegis of Mr. Gollancz dumped upon thousands and thousands of men of good will for whom the Left Book Club was Church... S. argued (accepting the dialectic), liberalism had played its part ; once the vanguard, was now reaction; the man of good will today must acknowledge the Third International. ...   

Then, after he had joined the Party, came S.'s play Trial of a Judge... The intended moral of the play was that liberalism today was weak and wrong, communism was strong and right. But this moral was sabotaged by S.'s unconscious integrity; the Liberal Judge, his example of what-not-to-be, walked away with one's sympathy.  

The Comrades observed this and, at a meeting arranged by the Group Theatre to discuss the play, a squad of them turned up to reprove S. for his heresies. It was an exhilarating evening. There was a blonde girl, pretty and ice-cold, who got up and said that the play had been a great disappointment to herself and others in the Party; they had gone to the play expecting a message and the message had not been delivered; and yet, she said, there was a message to be given and they all knew what it was. She spoke precisely and quietly (you could see her signing death warrants). Certainly, S. answered, there was a message and they all knew what it was;  an artist had something else to do than to tell people merely what they knew and give them just what they expected. The heckling went on. ... And another thing—the Comrades went on — this play gives, expression to feelings of anxiety, fear and depression; which is wrong because . . . S. said if they felt no anxiety themselves, well he felt sorry for them.  

Then there was the strange — but typical—case of Goronwy Rees. Goronwy's father was a Welsh minister; Goronwy was academically brilliant, a Fellow of All Souls, a novelist, an editor of the Spectator, a playboy... One evening there was a gathering of some fifty people—mainly writers—to oppose Fascism. [Cecil] Day-Lewis and Goronwy were the speakers. Day-Lewis spoke first, questioning in his tired Oxford accent, qualifying everything, nonplussed, questioning.  

Then Goronwy who was just as Oxonian as Day-Lewis, took over .... Writers today, Goronwy said, had a function, they were there only to take orders, orders from the Proletariat, no writer of today could do anything at all of value unless he laid down his personality, made himself a mouthpiece and nothing more than a mouthpiece, made himself a living trumpet for the Working Classes to blow through; the truth was not in us - not qua writers, the truth was in the Proletariat, the truth and also the victory.  

After the meeting Goronwy suggested that one or two of us should go to P's; he said he felt like oysters. Oysters at P's are very expensive."

Its amazing but perhaps not surprising that "people of good will" are still being taken in and misled by absurd and rancid ideas like the virtue signalling vapidity of Identity Politics. And isn't there a clear parallel between the requirement to "take orders from the Proletariat" and the spectacle of white celebrities and politicians abasing themselves by "taking a knee" and their confessions of guilt like this nonsense from Julienne Moore and others ?