{"id":251,"date":"2006-05-18T16:56:10","date_gmt":"2006-05-18T15:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/05\/18\/join-the-cultural-revolution\/"},"modified":"2006-05-19T17:39:43","modified_gmt":"2006-05-19T16:39:43","slug":"join-the-cultural-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2006\/05\/18\/join-the-cultural-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Join the Cultural Revolution?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I alluded, in a comment on my post below<\/a> on Langston Hughes, to the minor political row which was prompted by John Kerry quoting him a few times in his speeches. Hughes was a commie for a while, you see, so John Kerry must be one too (though to follow this logic any further, one would have to conclude that Kerry is also a dead black poet). The more temperate criticism, though still utterly wrong-headed insofar as it applied to Kerry, focussed on the fact that erstwhile Stalinists and Maoists are far more easily rehabilitated than former fascists. Now I’m willing to give Hughes a pass on this. Given that he was a black man in Depression America, when he looked around and saw that only the Communist Party was prepared to make a no-apologies, no-reservations stand for him, why wouldn’t he have signed on? And if they told him that all was well in Mother Russia, that the Show Trials were no such thing, well, they seemed by their actions to be decent folk, so like many others, he believed them, for a time. But what about those who came later, when the information was there, if they chose to read it, that Russia was a prison state? It’s easy from a distance to dismiss liberties like freedom of speech as bourgeois luxuries, but when you start hearing stories back from the gulags or re-education camps, it takes a curiously sclerotic imagination to dismiss them as Western Propaganda. When Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao biography<\/a> was reviewed on the BBC’s Late Review, Rosie Boycott said it was a sobering draught, having marched in Mao’s favour in the sixties. That she was prepared to admit this at all rather amazed me, as did her lack of even embarassment, let alone shame. How many English Blackshirts of the thirties could be similarly blas\u00e9 by the late 1940’s?<\/p>\n

Now, I’m aware that there’s an argument that says that while Nazi-ism was a sui generis <\/em>evil, Stalinism and Maoism were a mere corruption of the true faith, a went-too-far version of Democratic Socialism, and that those who supported them were misguided but well-meaning. I can’t agree. Stalin had more in common with Hitler than with any democratic Socialist party, because totalitarianism is always an end in its self. By the time of say, the late forties, when the war was over, the fate of the Spanish Republic was a matter of record and word of the show trials and purges was out, good intentions were no longer enough. That apologists now are given such an easy time may be a reaction to McCarthyism, but it’s still a double-standard.<\/p>\n

It’s a double-standard that I pondered, as is so often the case with my ponderings, as I looked at a beer-mat. It was in a pub in Cork, and the beer-mat, generously provided by Murphy’s Stout, of that same city, was promoting the City Of Culture programme. In the graphic style of Communist China, it exhorted drinkers to “Join The Cultural Revolution”. Now, interest in Mao had been running high at the time, the above mentioned biography having just been published, so it was more than a matter of arcane interest that Mao had been responsible for the deaths of more people than Hitler. And yet I cannot imagine many brewers putting their name to a be-swastikaed mat which boasted, in gothic script of a “Cultural Reich That Will Last A Thousand Years”. Fascist regalia, except where used to shock, is simply not acceptable currency in popular culture. The trappings of communist totalitarianism still retain a certain chachet. I wonder how many of those who wear Che Guevara T-shirts, for example, know much about his views on violence and martyrdom, let alone the plight of dissidents in modern Cuba. I wonder if they think of it at all. Probably not. Where fascist insignia retain an air of evil, the iconography of communism has lost all meaning other than as a vaguely lefty fight-the-power vibe. If the Swastika is an insult, the Hammer And Sickle is a mere exclamation mark. This is a shame, as a little more historical awareness might lead to more grown-up politics (less Castro Worship from the left, less “go back to russia”<\/a> from the right, that kind of thing), but there are t-shirts to be sold after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I alluded, in a comment on my post below on Langston Hughes, to the minor political row which was prompted by John Kerry quoting him a few times in his speeches. Hughes was a commie for a while, you see, so John Kerry must be one too (though to follow this logic any further, one would have to conclude that Kerry is also a dead black poet). The more temperate criticism, though still utterly wrong-headed insofar as it applied to Kerry, focussed on the fact that erstwhile Stalinists and Maoists are far more easily rehabilitated than former fascists. Now I’m willing to give Hughes a pass on this. Given that he was a black man in Depression America, when he looked around and saw that only the Communist Party was prepared to make a no-apologies, no-reservations stand for him, why wouldn’t he have signed on? And if they told him that all was well in Mother Russia, that the Show Trials were no such thing, well, they seemed by their actions to be decent folk, so like many others, he believed them, for a time. But what about those who came later, when the information was there, if they chose to read it, that Russia was a prison state? It’s easy from a distance to dismiss liberties like freedom of speech as bourgeois luxuries, but when you start hearing stories back from the gulags or re-education camps, it takes a curiously sclerotic imagination to dismiss them as Western Propaganda. When Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao biography was reviewed on the BBC’s Late Review, Rosie Boycott said it was a sobering draught, having marched in Mao’s favour in the sixties. That she was prepared to admit this at all rather amazed me, as did her lack of even embarassment, let alone shame. How many English Blackshirts of the thirties could be similarly blas\u00e9 by the late 1940’s? Now, I’m aware that there’s an argument that says that while Nazi-ism was a sui generis evil, Stalinism and Maoism were a mere corruption of the true faith, a went-too-far version of Democratic Socialism, and that those who supported them were misguided but well-meaning. I can’t agree. Stalin had more in common with Hitler than with any democratic Socialist party, because totalitarianism is always an end in its self. By the time of say, the late forties, when the war was over, the […]","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[160,161,155],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-communism","tag-iconography","tag-langston-hughes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}