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 blasé 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 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.
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” from the right, that kind of thing), but there are t-shirts to be sold after all.
8 Comments
The uniquely evil nature of the Holocaust was that it was aimed at a particular people, a people let’s not forget that hadn’t done anything to anyone – not that a “people” actually can, by the way.
Nazism had genocide as one of its aims and the swastika is representative of that. Communism doesn’t necessarily have this end. Of course, totalitarianism always has the end of total control, and, of course, the kulaks as a class were liquidated rather than co-opted, which lesser evil would have been fascist anyway. At the end of the day, there isn’t much to choose between fascism and communism, as one can see from the art which was used to promote them, but even though there were fewer people killed by Hitler than by Stalin, I think Nazism is a more evil ideology than communism.
I think if you were to look at Spain and Italy, you might find that fascism is looked on similarly to communism as not completely offensive. And I think its fair to distinguish fascism from nazism as degrees of virulent nationalism.
In continental Europe, communism and fascism are still fairly current political stances – the new President of the Italism Senate is a total commie of the old stripe and Diana of the backseatdrivers recently took a look at a pretty establishment fascist of the Spanish right.
You’re absolutely right about Che of course, but I wonder if he’s views on violence aren’t part of his glamour? Young people are pretty fascist as a matter of reaction I think and that glorification of violence and the will is what makes icons like Che so potent. He did whatever he wanted to do, people admired him and if his mum asked him to clean his room, he would have said “Joda te” and gunned his motorcycle in the direction of Bolivia.
Now, where did I put that t-shirt.
Is truth the first casualty of political ideology? And then thousands of human beings? Quote us some lines from W.H.Auden’s poem about the dictatorial 1930s and “the necessary murder”, Simon.
Hi there Gareth.
I’m afraid that Fergal is the resident poetry reader here.
Though some lines from the ’30s might be a good illustration of artist’s reactions to totalitariansim.
Just to pick up on, or extend, Copernicus’ point concerning fascism’s continued respectablity on the continent. On holidays in Italy last year, shops – large and small – sold Mussolini calenders, pencil cases and, of course, pencils to fill the said cases. I purchased the calender the first time I saw it, thinking it a rare and unusual find. However, I saw such merchandise nearly every one of those 10 or 14 remaining days.
I agree with the post though, fashionable eateries in 21st century Dublin probably shouldn’t (morally, not legally) be called Mao, even if they are taking the piss a little.
My God, I’d forgotten about Cafe Mao! I wonder how Dublin’s many Chinese ex-pats feel about it?
Of course, time is an element in these things too. Should I also be apalled at the name “Little Caesar’s”?
They still haven’t opened a little Caligula’s.
And in fairness you can’t take it that Julius Caesar was a monster, by the standards of the time. Augustus was pretty impressive too, if something of a workaholic. He was so loath to stop working that he used to have two barbers cut his hair at the same time so it wouldn’t take as long.
I grant you, you might not want them in charge of the place now, but you could have done worse. As we saw from the guys who came after them. Though I’m told that there is a move on to rehabilitate Nero.
Well, he has given his name to CD copying software. Though I don’t know whether the programme fiddles while the CD burns.
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