Bright Young Things

Here's what can happen when kids learn to hate their country.

Since patriotism is a theme of this week, I’m going to post last week’s column from Law & Liberty, “The Young Oikophobes.” It’s on the Cambridge 5, a group of starry-eyed, fancy-free college students who got recruited by the Soviets, betrayed their own country, and spent years passing industrial quantities of top-secret information to communists. Kim Philby is the most notorious, and with reason. He was a sociopath who probably got hundreds of people murdered by Stalin. Creepily enough, he’s still something of a hero in Russia. The Soviets showered him with honors, and Putin has resurrected his cult once again.

I read Stalin’s Apostles partly just as a bit of a break from heavier, more theory-laden books. I loved spy stories as a teen, so I guess this is my version of a beach read. But one shouldn’t take it too lightly, because considering the gravity of what these men did, it was truly a terrible thing, which happened in part because a generation of young Brits grew up casually loathing their own nation and legacy.

The worst of it, as I note, is:

The Cambridge Five are harrowing not because their actions are inexplicable, but because they are explicable. They were young, vain, and bored. They were disillusioned with their own society, and eager for a new mission that felt purposeful and exciting. They found, at least initially, that it was quite thrilling to live high, dupe their elders, and meditate happily on their immense historical consequence.

Do we have any young people like that?

Yes, it’s possible for nationalism to run amok and motivate some horrifying things. Oikophobia isn’t pretty either, though.