By Bogdan Sajovic
With journalist and columnist James Bartholomew we spoke, among other things, about the creation of the Museum of Communist Terror, raising awareness among Western youth about the horrors of communism and the state of mind in the Western world.
What made you decide to set up the Museum of Communist Terror?
About six years ago, I was in Budapest to give a lecture on a completely different subject. My girlfriend, who is now my wife, came with me and we spent extra days there as tourists. We visited the House of Terror – a museum about the terror inflicted on Hungary first by the Nazis and then by the Communists. When I emerged from that museum, it seemed to me that there ought to be a museum of the same sort in Britain. It was not just a matter of documenting history. It was a matter of providing young people with essential knowledge for making up their own minds about whether Communism is a good idea or not. You should remember that at that time, Jeremy Corbyn, who is of the extreme left, was leader of the Labour Party and was being treated as a kind of hero by many young people.
How far along are you in this enterprise?
I should make clear that we do not have a physical museum as yet. That is what we aim to create but we will need to raise more funds to achieve that ambition. In the meantime, we do many things including video-recording interviews with survivors of communist oppression. We put these interviews on our website, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. We also hold events. We have created a booklet and we acquire artefacts.
As far as I know, academia, the media, and even city authorities in Britain are heavily influenced by the political left. Do they cause you any problems?
So far, we have met a few problems but they have been relatively minor. Britain remains a country where there is considerable freedom. Also, if one route has an obstacle, you can try another.
Can you tell us who your main supporters are in setting up the museum?
All our supporters so far are private individuals. We have received donations large and small from a wide range of people. One of the most important donors has been Lord Vinson but I will not name others without being sure that they would be happy to be named.
Do you work with anyone from the former communist bloc countries? Are there any Slovenians among them?
Yes, we work with many people from formerly communist countries. The Museum is a member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience based in Prague. It is a grouping of organisations around Europe which are working to ensure that knowledge of the totalitarian regimes in the 20th century is kept alive. We have been assisted by many people. Memorial, the organisation in Moscow which has now been closed down, arranged for us to do a video interview with one of the last remaining survivors of the Gulag. An individual in Bulgaria contacted us out of the blue and volunteered to contribute his design expertise. He went on to design our booklet: Communism – a little book of facts. There are many others who have assisted us in a wide variety of countries. So far I have not worked with people in Slovenia but I hope to in the future.
Acquiring museum exhibits is not an easy job, and often quite expensive. How do you acquire exhibits for your museum?
In any way we can! The most common thing is for us to buy items at auction. These auctions can be anywhere in the world. We also have received donations of some artefacts.
Do you have any difficulties in transporting museum exhibits across borders? Does anyone deliberately prevent you from doing so?
So far we have had no significant difficulties. We have had to get licences for export when buying in Romania but they have come through eventually. Of course there is no reason for a problem when objects have already been exported from the country where they originated. For example we bought a six foot high statue of Mao Zedong from the United States. The main problem and cost was shipping it to Britain.
Do you have an exhibit of which you are particularly proud?
I was honoured when one of the original members of the Solidarity union in Poland trusted us with copies of the samizdat which he and his colleagues had illegally printed and distributed during the communist era there.
One object that I am particularly pleased to have is a Trabant car. We shipped it over from Germany. It is fun to have a large object which helps to illustrate how communist regimes fell behind economically as well as being politically oppressive.
Recently we have seen a real explosion of left-wing activism all over the Western world. Who do you think is to blame for this surge?
I would not point at any individual. I think that people of my generation in the West, people old enought to have lived through the Cold War, believed in 1990 that we had no reason to worry any more. We thought that communism had comprehensively been shown to be a terrible system that had caused misery and poverty. It had been rejected by those who had endured it. We thought, ‘Thank goodness that nightmare is over!’ But we forgot that the knowledge we had because we had lived through that era would not automatically be shared by following generations. We failed to pass on that knowledge. So the younger generation, through no fault of its own, knows very little of how terrible the communist regimes were. This has meant that the younger generation has little intellectual defence against the apparent appeal of Marxism.
What is the state of left-wing activism in your country?
I can’t give an authoritative answer. I do not study it. However my impression is that there is a core of dedicated Marxists plus a diffuse group of extreme left-wing people. Beyond that, there is a very large number of centre-Left democrats who do not sufficiently realise that their values are completely different from those on the extreme Left.
Do you also feel that cultural Marxism represents the greatest threat to the existence of our civilisation?
I don’t use the term ‘Cultural Marxism’. It is too vague.
How do you think we can prevent the spread of this left-wing plague and preserve Western traditions, culture, way of life, civilisation in general?
I make a sharp distinction between people who are left-wing democrats and those who are Marxists. Left-wing democrats are part of any civilised country and have as much right to be part of the political system as right-wing democrats. All democracies move sometimes towards the Left and sometimes towards the Right. That is normal and fine. The danger which I seek to avoid through education is a revival of Marxism.
As for Western culture and civilisation, yes, I agree that it is under attack. We have to defend it by putting forward our arguments and providing information which will help us win those arguments. Those in government should make sure that the education system explains important aspects of Western civilisation including the difference between totalitarian countries and open, democratic countries with the rule of law. Like generals, we should chose our battles.
Finally, can you share with us some plans for the future?
We have to chose where to put our energies and resources. We need to record more video interviews with survivors of communist regimes and also film more places where atrocities took place. I will make a trip to a few formerly communist countries this year to do this. One of the countries might be Slovenia.
Thank you for talking to us.
Biography
James Bartholomew has been a journalist and author for most of his life. But in 2017, he founded the Museum of Communist Terror and has been working on that project ever since. He read history at Oxford and, at first, went into banking. But he soon decided to switch to journalism working first for the Financial Times and then the Far Eastern Economic Review based in Hong Kong and then Tokyo. The rapid economic growth in Hong Kong made a strong impression on him and formed a vivid contrast with the poverty and political oppression he witnessed when travelling across communist China and the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was an East European consultant for an investment company, travelling to most of the formerly communist countries.
He has been a leader writer for two national newspapers – the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. He has written four books, the latter two being on the subject of the welfare state. The Welfare State We’re In was commended by the Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, and won several awards including the Sir Anthony Fisher Memorial Award from the Atlas Foundation.
James Bartholomew coined the term “virtue signalling” in an article in the Spectator magazine and since then the term has become part of the language across the whole English-speaking world.
He is a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs and of the Adam Smith Institute.