Freda Utley

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Winifred "Freda" Utley (born January 23, 1898 - January 21, 1978 in Washington, DC ) was a British-American writer and political activist .

Life and activity

Early life

Utley was the daughter of a lawyer and journalist close to the Fabians and the family of Karl Marx . The climate in her parents' home was free-thinking , liberal and socialist.

In her childhood, Utley attended boarding school in Switzerland . She then studied in England , where she earned a BA and then an MA in history from King's College , London . From 1926 to 1928 Utley worked as a researcher at the London School of Economics . Her research focus during these years was the investigation of work and production issues in industrial manufacturing, especially the textile industry.

Utley's Communist Phase and Life in the Soviet Union (1926–1936)

After the great general strike in Great Britain in 1926, Utley saw the behavior of the Labor Party and the union leadership as betrayal of the working population during the strike, and began to develop strong sympathies for the communist movement. The following year she went on a study trip to the Soviet Union as Vice President of the University Labor Federation . In 1928 she became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain . In 1928 she married the Russian economist Arcadi Berdichevsky, whom she had met while working on the Soviet trade mission in England. She had a son with him.

Together with Berdichevsky, Utley traveled to Siberia , China and Japan on behalf of the Communist International in the following years . The result of these trips was the book Lancashire and the Far East , published in 1931 , in which she proved to be an expert in the field of international competition in the cotton trade.

From 1930 to 1936 Utley lived with her husband in Moscow . During these years she earned her living as a translator , editor and research assistant at the Institute for World Economy and Politics of the Academy of Sciences. During this time she internally distanced herself more and more from communism , as she came to the conviction that Soviet reality in no way corresponded to the results she had originally hoped the implementation of the communist idea would produce. So it came up against the corruption and rigidity of the communist party system and the inability of the Soviet state to ensure medical care and accommodation for the population.

During her "Russian" years, Utley published the book Japan's Feet of Clay , written from a Marxist point of view, an examination of the Japanese textile industry, which she combined with harsh criticism of the support of the imperialist policies of the Japanese state by the Western powers. She characterized Japan as a police state ruled by a machine-like bureaucracy in the service of a plutocratic upper class. The book became a bestseller and was translated into five languages.

In April 1936, Utley's husband Berdichevsky, who was now head of the government's import / export group, was arrested by Moscow's secret police in the wake of the Stalinist purges . Utley then fled to England with her son. Her husband was sentenced to five years in prison in a gulag by the Arctic Sea in a show trial . The reason given was that he was close to Trotskyist groups . Attempts by Utley to secure his release through a petition to Josef Stalin and through the involvement of friends like George Bernard Shaw and Harold Laski were in vain. He died in the Vorkuta camp on March 30, 1938, when he was shot by prisoners on a hunger strike against their prison conditions because of his ringleadership. Utley did not receive positive confirmation of her husband's death until 1956. In 1961 this was posthumously rehabilitated as part of the de-Stalinization. The exact circumstances of Berdichevsky's death were only disclosed by the Russian government in 2004, so they never came to their knowledge.

Return to Great Britain and World War II (1936–1945)

Her experiences and observations in the Soviet Union, especially the fate of her husband, caused Utley to develop into a sharp anti-communist in the second half of the 1930s. In 1938 she supported the Munich Agreement between the Western Powers and National Socialist Germany because she was convinced that the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to peace in Europe than Germany. However, she took a sharply negative attitude towards Japanese military fascism: After the News Chronicle had given her a three-month trip to China as a war correspondent in 1938, Utley published two books in 1938 and 1939 on Japan's military actions against China since 1937, which published the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) initiated: Japan's Gamble in China and China at War (1939). The last book idealized the Chinese communists of Mao and Enlai and helped fuel the anti-Japan sentiment in the United States in the last few years before the outbreak of American-Japanese hostilities in 1941. The Japanese government saw Utley for the boycott of Japanese goods beginning around 1939 in the United States to be jointly responsible and banned the distribution of her book in Japan and put Utley himself with an entry ban.

In 1939 Utley moved with her son and mother to the United States , where she became a leading anti-communist activist and writer . Because the United States refused to participate in the war, she became involved in the America First Committee , and in 1941 she spoke out in favor of a peace of understanding between Great Britain and the German Reich. In the later years of the war she criticized the demand for an unconditional surrender of the German Reich. Efforts by leftists in the United States to evict Utley from the country have not been successful. The support she received from sympathizing congressmen, which she explicitly excluded from the Alien RegistrationAct of 1940, was particularly beneficial to her. Instead, Utley was naturalized as an American citizen even after the war (1950).

Post-war period (1945–1978)

In 1945 Reader's Digest magazine sent Utley to China as a correspondent for several months . She recorded her impressions of China in the work Last Chance in China .

1948 traveled Utley that after the Second World War allied Germany occupied. The product of this trip was The High Cost of Vengeance , a critical study of the Allied war and occupation policy towards the German Reich . For controversies various ensured Statements of Utley in this work, such that there was no crime that the Nazis had committed during the war or after the war that the Allies had themselves not committed. So Utley turned critical against the bombing of the population of the Axis Powers by the Allies, the forcible expulsion of the population of German descent from the East Elbe provinces of the German Empire (Silesia, Posen, East Prussia, Western Pomerania) and the Sudeten areas to the west due to their descent, the plundering of the population the areas occupied by the Allies by occupation soldiers and the exploitation of German prisoners of war and forced deportees as workers in France and the Soviet Union in the post-war years. Critics have characterized Utley's line of argument in this work as questionable, mostly taking the view that it relativizes German war crimes . In order to justify their criticism of Utley, authors such as Deborah Lipstadt have asserted various differentiating criteria that distinguish the Allied acts of war scourged by Utley from certain National Socialist crimes, such as the systematic murder of Jews in the context of mass shootings and in concentration camps . Lipstadt, for example, pointed out that the Allied bombing of German cities - unlike the measures taken by the National Socialists against European Jews as part of the Holocaust - was not intended to completely exterminate the population of these cities, but "only" to break the morale of the war the German population was based on the intention.

Utley's 1951 book The China Story , which reconstructed the development of China until the Communists came to power in 1949, became a bestseller . The work helped convince large parts of the American population that unwise politics in the years after 1945 had resulted in the West losing China to Soviet communism ("[We] lost China" idea), a Belief that would have a major impact on American foreign policy in the decades that followed. After the Suez crisis, she went on a study trip to the Middle East. The fruit of this was the book Will the Middle East Go West? , in which she warned against the West becoming too closely aligned with Israel, as this could lead to the Arab states becoming part of the communist camp.

During the 1950s Utley assisted the well-known anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in the "witch hunt" he instigated of alleged communists in the American state apparatus and in the public life of the United States by providing him with data for the lists he had drawn up high-ranking people he suspected of being communists used. In hearings in committees of the US Congress, Utley stood as a witness against alleged communist sympathizers such as the writer Edgar Snow and the Asia expert John K. Fairbank .

In 1970 Utley published the first volume of her memoirs, Odyssey of a Liberal , which reproduces her experiences up until 1945. The planned second volume was never finished and published.

Utley died in 1978. Part of her estate is kept as a collection ("Freda Utley collection") at Stanford University.

In 2005, the Freda Utley Prize for Advancing Liberty was founded (Freda Utley Prize to promote the principle of freedom). The award is given annually by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to foreign think tanks that advocate economic liberalism and the reduction of government interventionism in the economy.

In 2005, the Freda Utley Prize for Advancing Liberty was founded (Freda Utley Prize to promote the principle of freedom). The award is given annually to foreign think tanks that advocate economic liberalism and a reduction in governmental interventionism of the state in the economy.

Fonts

• Lancashire and the Far East , Allen & Unwin, 1931.
• From Moscow To Samarkand , Hogarth Press, 1934. (under the pseudonym YZ)
• Japan's Feet of Clay , Faber & Faber, London 1937.
• Japan's Gamble in China , Faber & Faber, London 1938.
• China at War. John Day Company , New York 1938.
• The Dream We Lost: The Soviet Union Then and Now , John Day Company, New York 1940.
• The High Cost of Vengeance , Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1948.
  • published in German as Kostspielige Rache
• Last Chance in China , Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 1948.
• Lost Illusion (revision of The Dream We Lost) , George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1948.
• The China Story , Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1951.
• Will the Middle East Go West? Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1956.
• Odyssey of a Liberal. Memoirs , Washington National Press, Inc., 1970.