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01 July 2018
23 April 2018
Literary Meanderings, Part Three: Michael Moorcock's "Starship Stormtroopers"
Here is the last literary excerpt I was able to salvage after all my postings were deleted from The Education Forum in the early summer of 2013.
(Originally posted at The Education Forum on 9 August 2008.)
https://issuu.com/skateraw/docs/starshipstormtroopers
There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them: a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants; a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence; a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another -- as well as being predominantly dull -- since it began. Most of it warns the world of "decadence" in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club, and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.
Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hard-line Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary -- claiming to be "apolitical" but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to "have a point." I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among SF enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes; but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest -- bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists -- were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist, or at very best a spoil-sport who couldn't enjoy good SF for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.
During the sixties, in common with many other periodicals, our New Worlds believed in revolution. Our emphasis was on fiction, the arts and sciences, because it was what we knew best. We attacked, and were in turn attacked in the all-too-familiar rituals. Smiths refused to continue distributing the magazine unless we "toned down" our contents. We refused. We were -- they said -- obscene, blasphemous, nihilistic, etc, etc. The Daily Express attacked us. A Tory asked a question about us in the House of Commons: why was public money (a small Arts Council grant) being spent on such filth. I recount all this not merely to establish what we were prepared to do to maintain our policies (we were eventually wiped out by Smiths and Menzies) but to point out that we were the only SF magazine to pursue what you might call a determinedly radical approach -- and SF buffs were the first to attack us with genuine vehemence. Our main serial running at the height of our troubles was called "Bug Jack Barron," written by Norman Spinrad, who had taken an active part in radical politics in the US and used his story to display the abuse of democracy and the media in America. He later went on to write a satirical sword-and-sorcery epic, The Iron Dream, intended to display the fascist elements inherent to the form. The author of this novel existed, as it were, in an alternate history to our own. His name was Adolf Hitler. The book was meant to point up the number of SF authors who were, in a sense, "unsuccessful Hitlers."
Many Americans came to use NW as a vehicle because they couldn't get their stories published in the US. Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Harvey Jacobs, Harlan Ellison and others published a good deal of their best and at the time most controversial work in NW -- and Heinlein fans actually attacked us for "destroying" science fiction. Escapism this form might be, but it posed as a "literature of ideas" -- and that, we contended, it wasn't (unless "The Green Berets" was a profoundly philosophical movie).
Another example: in 1967 Judith Merril, a founder member of The Science Fiction Writers of America, an ex-Trotskyist turned libertarian, proposed that "this Organisation would buy advertising space in the SF magazines condemning the war in Vietnam." I was around when this was proposed. A good number of members agreed with alacrity -- including English members like myself, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison were keen, as were Harlan Ellison, James Blish and -- to be fair -- Frank Herbert and Larry Niven. But quite as many were outraged by the idea, saying that the SFWA "shouldn't interfere in politics." Okay, said Merril, then let's say, "The following members of the SFWA condemn American involvement in the Vietnam War etc." Finally the SF magazines contained two ads -- one against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support included Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Ann MacCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye, Keith Laumer and as many other popular SF writers as were against the war. The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular SF writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many SF readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity -- but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning!
Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the SF writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left -- who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of "good leadership"; there is Tolkien and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly-disguised working class agitators -- fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) -- the answer is always leadership, "decency," paternalism (Heinlein in particular strong on this), Christian values...
What can this stuff have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry etc) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image and can be employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or "genre" fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality -- and that of course is what propaganda does.
The bandit hero, the underdog rebel, so frequently becomes the political tyrant -- and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves; what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their "charm." Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives, and whom we sometimes try to be -- because we fail to distinguish fact from fiction. In reality it is too often the small, fanatical men with the faces and stance of neurotic clerks who come to power while the charismatic heroes -- if they are lucky -- die gloriously, leaving us to discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new Tsar has manipulated himself into the position of power, and Terror has returned with a vengeance while we have been using all our energies living a romantic lie.
Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. The heroes of Heinlein and Ayn Rand are forever competent, forever right: they are oracles and protectors, magic parents (so long as we obey their rules). They are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not bear. They are "leaders." Traditional SF is hero fiction on a huge scale, but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes completely pernicious. At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology (invented by the SF writer Ron Hubbard and an authoritarian system to rival the Pope's). To enjoy it is one thing. To claim it as "radical" is quite another. It is rather unimaginative; it is usually badly written; its characters are ciphers; its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative -- good old-fashioned opium which might be specifically designed for dealing with the potential revolutionary.
In a writer like Lovecraft a terror of sex often combines (or is confused for) a terror of the masses, the "ugly" crowd. But this is so common to so much "horror" fiction that it's hardly worth discussing. Lovecraft is morbid. His work equates to that negative romanticism found in much Nazi art. He was a confused anti-Semite and misanthrope, a promoter of anti-rationalist ideas about racial "instinct" which have much in common with Mein Kampf. A dedicated supporter of "Aryanism," a hater of women, he wound up marrying a Jewess (which might or might not have been a sign of hope -- we haven't her view of the matter). Lovecraft appeals to us primarily when we are ourselves feeling morbid. Apart from his offensively awful writing and a resultant inability to describe his horrors (leaving us to do the work -- the secret of his success: we're all better writers than he is!) he is rarely as frightening, by implication, as most of the other highly popular writers whose concerns are not with "meeping Things" but with idealised versions of society. It's not such a big step, for instance, from Farnham's Freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum.
I must admit I'm not following a properly-argued critical line. I'm arguing on the assumption that my readers are at least familiar with some of the books and authors I mention. I attack these books because they are the favourite reading of so many radicals. I attack the books not for their superficial fascination with quasi-medieval social systems (a la Frank Herbert). Fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction. As a writer I have produced a good many fantastic romances in which kings and queens, lords and ladies figure largely -- yet I am an avowed anti-monarchist. Catch 22 never seemed to me to be in favour of militarism. And just because many of Heinlein's characters are soldiers or ex-soldiers I don't automatically assume he must therefore be in favour of war. It depends what use you make of such characters in a story and what, in the final analysis, you are saying.
Jules Verne in The Masterless Man put some pretty decent sentiments in the mouth of Kaw-djer the anarchist and his best characters, like Captain Nemo, are embittered "rebels" who have retreated from society. Even the aerial anarchists of The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffiths have something to be said for them, for all their inherent authoritarianism, but they are essentially romantic "outlaws" and the views they express are not sophisticated even by the standards of the 1890's.
H.G. Wells was no more the "father" of science fiction than Jules Verne. He inherited a tradition going back some thirty or forty years in the form he himself used and several centuries in the form of the Utopian Romance. What was unusual about Wells, however, is that he was one of the first radicals of his time to take the trappings of the scientific romance and combine them with powerful and telling images to make Bunyanesque allegories like The Time Machine or The Invisible Man. Wells didn't have his characters talking socialism. He showed the results of capitalism, authoritarianism, superstition and other evils, and because he was a far better writer than most of those who have ever written SF before or since, he made his points with considerable clarity. Morris had been long-winded and backward-looking. Wells took the techniques of Kipling and preached his own brand of socialism. Until Wells -- the most talented, original and intelligent writer of his kind -- almost all SF had devoted itself to attacks on "decadence" and military unpreparedness, urging our leaders to take a stronger moral line and our armies to re-equip and get better officers.
By and large this was the tone of much of the SF which followed Wells, from Kipling's effective but reactionary With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC (paternalistic aerial controllers whose rays pacify "the mob") to stories by John Buchan, Michael Arlen, William Le Quex, E. Phillips Oppenheim and hundreds of others who predominantly were following Kipling in warning us of the dangers of socialism, mixed marriages, free love, anarchist plots, Zionist conspiracies, the yellow peril and so on and so on. Even Jack London wasn't what one might call an all-round libertarian, any more than Wells was when he toyed with his ideas of an elite corps of "samurai" who were actually not a great deal different to how Soviet Communist Party members saw themselves, or were described in official fiction and propaganda. The quasi-religious nature of SF (which I describe in a collection of pre-WWI SF, Before Armageddon) was producing on the whole quasi-religious substitutes (a variety of authoritarian socialist and fascist theories). A few attacked the theories of the emerging dictators -- Murray Constantine's Swastika Night, 1937, seemed to think Christianity could conquer Hitler but is otherwise a pretty incisive projection of Nazism several hundred years in the future. By and large the world we got in the thirties was the world the SF writers of the day hoped we would have: "strong leaders" reshaping nations. The reality of these hero-leaders was not, of course, entirely what had been visualised -- Nuremberg rallies and "Strength Through Joy," perhaps, but Kristellnacht and gas ovens seemed to go a bit too far.
At least the American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were not, by and large, offering us high-profile "leadership": just the good old-fashioned mixture of implicit racialism/militarism/nationalism/paternalism carried a few hundred years into the future or a few million light years into space. (E.E. Smith remains to this day one of the most popular writers of that era). John W. Campbell, who in the late thirties took over Astounding Science Fiction Stories and created what many believe to be a major revolution in the development of SF, was the chief creator of the school known to buffs as "Golden Age SF" and written by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt -- wild-eyed paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists -- whose work reflected the deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a Bolshevik menace in every union meeting. They believed, in common with authoritarians everywhere, that radicals wanted to take over old-fashioned political power, turn the world into a uniform mass of "workers" with themselves (the radicals) as commissars. They offered us such visions, when they attempted any overt discussion of politics at all. They were about as left-wing as The National Enquirer or The Saturday Evening Post (where their stories occasionally were to appear). They were xenophobic, smug and confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe, though they were, of course, against dictators and the worst sort of exploiters (no longer Jews but often still "aliens"). Rugged individualism was the most sophisticated political concept they could manage -- in the pulp tradition, the Code of the West became the Code of the Space Frontier, and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do...
The war helped. It provided character types and a good deal of authoritative-sounding technological terms which could be applied to scientific hardware and social problems alike and sounded reassuringly "expert." Those chaps had the tone of Vietnam twenty years earlier. Indeed, it's often been shown that SF supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a "Waldo" handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut, wise-cracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell's image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone's standard into a crypto-fascist, deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an "alternative" that was, of course, no alternative at all.
Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers, L. Ron Hubbard, and aired for the first time in Astounding as "Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind"); a perpetual-motion machine known as the "Dean Drive"; a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren't "abused"; and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of Cold War thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were "natural" slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery; that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again; that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest; and that the blacks were "against" emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in "leaderless" riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all -- "science-fiction ... psychology ... Jesus Christ!" -- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell's arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views -- an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.
Starship Troopers (serialised in Astounding as was most of Heinlein's fiction until the early sixties) was probably Heinlein's last "straight" SF serial for Campbell before he began his "serious" books such as Farnham's Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land -- taking the simplified characters of genre fiction and producing some of the most ludicrously unlikely people ever to appear in print. In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic -- but equally sentimental -- stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in hundreds of thousands! That middle-America could regard such stuff as "radical" was easy enough to understand. I kept finding that supporters of the Angry Brigade were enthusiastic about Heinlein, that people with whom I thought I shared libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic, bourgeois writer who had ever given me the creeps! I still can't fully understand it. Certainly I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism. But how does it equate with their celebration of writers like Tolkien and Heinlein? The clue could be in the very vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal interpretation; it could be that the ciphers they use instead of characters are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. To me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced, once again, with quasi-religion, presented to us as radicalism. At best it is the philosophy of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the twentieth century: it is Reaganism; it is John Wayne in "Big John Maclean" and "The Green Berets"; it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy; at its most refined it is William F. Buckley Jr. -- who, already a long way more sophisticated than Heinlein, is still pretty simple-minded.
Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier: the chain of command is complex; many adult responsibilities can be left to that chain as long as broad, but firmly-enforced, rules from "high up" are adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism, with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Cogburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office -- but not necessarily himself -- in "True Grit."
An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A "rebel," certainly, he or she does not assume "rebellious charm" in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king. This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular "Star Wars" series, which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious "Force" which unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian "samurai" again?) and upon whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights Templar. "Star Wars" is a pure example of the genre (in that it is a compendium of other people's ideas) in its implicit structure: quasi-children, fighting for a paternalistic authority, win through in the end and stand bashfully before the princess while medals are placed around their necks.
(Originally posted at The Education Forum on 9 August 2008.)
"Starship Stormtroopers" by Michael Moorcock
(From Michael Moorcock's "The Opium General" [Harrap, 1984], reprinted from Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, 1978)
There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them: a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants; a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence; a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another -- as well as being predominantly dull -- since it began. Most of it warns the world of "decadence" in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club, and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.
Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hard-line Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary -- claiming to be "apolitical" but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to "have a point." I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among SF enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes; but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest -- bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists -- were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist, or at very best a spoil-sport who couldn't enjoy good SF for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.
During the sixties, in common with many other periodicals, our New Worlds believed in revolution. Our emphasis was on fiction, the arts and sciences, because it was what we knew best. We attacked, and were in turn attacked in the all-too-familiar rituals. Smiths refused to continue distributing the magazine unless we "toned down" our contents. We refused. We were -- they said -- obscene, blasphemous, nihilistic, etc, etc. The Daily Express attacked us. A Tory asked a question about us in the House of Commons: why was public money (a small Arts Council grant) being spent on such filth. I recount all this not merely to establish what we were prepared to do to maintain our policies (we were eventually wiped out by Smiths and Menzies) but to point out that we were the only SF magazine to pursue what you might call a determinedly radical approach -- and SF buffs were the first to attack us with genuine vehemence. Our main serial running at the height of our troubles was called "Bug Jack Barron," written by Norman Spinrad, who had taken an active part in radical politics in the US and used his story to display the abuse of democracy and the media in America. He later went on to write a satirical sword-and-sorcery epic, The Iron Dream, intended to display the fascist elements inherent to the form. The author of this novel existed, as it were, in an alternate history to our own. His name was Adolf Hitler. The book was meant to point up the number of SF authors who were, in a sense, "unsuccessful Hitlers."
Many Americans came to use NW as a vehicle because they couldn't get their stories published in the US. Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Harvey Jacobs, Harlan Ellison and others published a good deal of their best and at the time most controversial work in NW -- and Heinlein fans actually attacked us for "destroying" science fiction. Escapism this form might be, but it posed as a "literature of ideas" -- and that, we contended, it wasn't (unless "The Green Berets" was a profoundly philosophical movie).
Another example: in 1967 Judith Merril, a founder member of The Science Fiction Writers of America, an ex-Trotskyist turned libertarian, proposed that "this Organisation would buy advertising space in the SF magazines condemning the war in Vietnam." I was around when this was proposed. A good number of members agreed with alacrity -- including English members like myself, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison were keen, as were Harlan Ellison, James Blish and -- to be fair -- Frank Herbert and Larry Niven. But quite as many were outraged by the idea, saying that the SFWA "shouldn't interfere in politics." Okay, said Merril, then let's say, "The following members of the SFWA condemn American involvement in the Vietnam War etc." Finally the SF magazines contained two ads -- one against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support included Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Ann MacCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye, Keith Laumer and as many other popular SF writers as were against the war. The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular SF writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many SF readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity -- but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning!
Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the SF writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left -- who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of "good leadership"; there is Tolkien and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly-disguised working class agitators -- fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) -- the answer is always leadership, "decency," paternalism (Heinlein in particular strong on this), Christian values...
What can this stuff have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry etc) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image and can be employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or "genre" fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality -- and that of course is what propaganda does.
The bandit hero, the underdog rebel, so frequently becomes the political tyrant -- and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves; what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their "charm." Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives, and whom we sometimes try to be -- because we fail to distinguish fact from fiction. In reality it is too often the small, fanatical men with the faces and stance of neurotic clerks who come to power while the charismatic heroes -- if they are lucky -- die gloriously, leaving us to discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new Tsar has manipulated himself into the position of power, and Terror has returned with a vengeance while we have been using all our energies living a romantic lie.
Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. The heroes of Heinlein and Ayn Rand are forever competent, forever right: they are oracles and protectors, magic parents (so long as we obey their rules). They are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not bear. They are "leaders." Traditional SF is hero fiction on a huge scale, but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes completely pernicious. At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology (invented by the SF writer Ron Hubbard and an authoritarian system to rival the Pope's). To enjoy it is one thing. To claim it as "radical" is quite another. It is rather unimaginative; it is usually badly written; its characters are ciphers; its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative -- good old-fashioned opium which might be specifically designed for dealing with the potential revolutionary.
In a writer like Lovecraft a terror of sex often combines (or is confused for) a terror of the masses, the "ugly" crowd. But this is so common to so much "horror" fiction that it's hardly worth discussing. Lovecraft is morbid. His work equates to that negative romanticism found in much Nazi art. He was a confused anti-Semite and misanthrope, a promoter of anti-rationalist ideas about racial "instinct" which have much in common with Mein Kampf. A dedicated supporter of "Aryanism," a hater of women, he wound up marrying a Jewess (which might or might not have been a sign of hope -- we haven't her view of the matter). Lovecraft appeals to us primarily when we are ourselves feeling morbid. Apart from his offensively awful writing and a resultant inability to describe his horrors (leaving us to do the work -- the secret of his success: we're all better writers than he is!) he is rarely as frightening, by implication, as most of the other highly popular writers whose concerns are not with "meeping Things" but with idealised versions of society. It's not such a big step, for instance, from Farnham's Freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum.
I must admit I'm not following a properly-argued critical line. I'm arguing on the assumption that my readers are at least familiar with some of the books and authors I mention. I attack these books because they are the favourite reading of so many radicals. I attack the books not for their superficial fascination with quasi-medieval social systems (a la Frank Herbert). Fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction. As a writer I have produced a good many fantastic romances in which kings and queens, lords and ladies figure largely -- yet I am an avowed anti-monarchist. Catch 22 never seemed to me to be in favour of militarism. And just because many of Heinlein's characters are soldiers or ex-soldiers I don't automatically assume he must therefore be in favour of war. It depends what use you make of such characters in a story and what, in the final analysis, you are saying.
Jules Verne in The Masterless Man put some pretty decent sentiments in the mouth of Kaw-djer the anarchist and his best characters, like Captain Nemo, are embittered "rebels" who have retreated from society. Even the aerial anarchists of The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffiths have something to be said for them, for all their inherent authoritarianism, but they are essentially romantic "outlaws" and the views they express are not sophisticated even by the standards of the 1890's.
H.G. Wells was no more the "father" of science fiction than Jules Verne. He inherited a tradition going back some thirty or forty years in the form he himself used and several centuries in the form of the Utopian Romance. What was unusual about Wells, however, is that he was one of the first radicals of his time to take the trappings of the scientific romance and combine them with powerful and telling images to make Bunyanesque allegories like The Time Machine or The Invisible Man. Wells didn't have his characters talking socialism. He showed the results of capitalism, authoritarianism, superstition and other evils, and because he was a far better writer than most of those who have ever written SF before or since, he made his points with considerable clarity. Morris had been long-winded and backward-looking. Wells took the techniques of Kipling and preached his own brand of socialism. Until Wells -- the most talented, original and intelligent writer of his kind -- almost all SF had devoted itself to attacks on "decadence" and military unpreparedness, urging our leaders to take a stronger moral line and our armies to re-equip and get better officers.
By and large this was the tone of much of the SF which followed Wells, from Kipling's effective but reactionary With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC (paternalistic aerial controllers whose rays pacify "the mob") to stories by John Buchan, Michael Arlen, William Le Quex, E. Phillips Oppenheim and hundreds of others who predominantly were following Kipling in warning us of the dangers of socialism, mixed marriages, free love, anarchist plots, Zionist conspiracies, the yellow peril and so on and so on. Even Jack London wasn't what one might call an all-round libertarian, any more than Wells was when he toyed with his ideas of an elite corps of "samurai" who were actually not a great deal different to how Soviet Communist Party members saw themselves, or were described in official fiction and propaganda. The quasi-religious nature of SF (which I describe in a collection of pre-WWI SF, Before Armageddon) was producing on the whole quasi-religious substitutes (a variety of authoritarian socialist and fascist theories). A few attacked the theories of the emerging dictators -- Murray Constantine's Swastika Night, 1937, seemed to think Christianity could conquer Hitler but is otherwise a pretty incisive projection of Nazism several hundred years in the future. By and large the world we got in the thirties was the world the SF writers of the day hoped we would have: "strong leaders" reshaping nations. The reality of these hero-leaders was not, of course, entirely what had been visualised -- Nuremberg rallies and "Strength Through Joy," perhaps, but Kristellnacht and gas ovens seemed to go a bit too far.
At least the American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were not, by and large, offering us high-profile "leadership": just the good old-fashioned mixture of implicit racialism/militarism/nationalism/paternalism carried a few hundred years into the future or a few million light years into space. (E.E. Smith remains to this day one of the most popular writers of that era). John W. Campbell, who in the late thirties took over Astounding Science Fiction Stories and created what many believe to be a major revolution in the development of SF, was the chief creator of the school known to buffs as "Golden Age SF" and written by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt -- wild-eyed paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists -- whose work reflected the deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a Bolshevik menace in every union meeting. They believed, in common with authoritarians everywhere, that radicals wanted to take over old-fashioned political power, turn the world into a uniform mass of "workers" with themselves (the radicals) as commissars. They offered us such visions, when they attempted any overt discussion of politics at all. They were about as left-wing as The National Enquirer or The Saturday Evening Post (where their stories occasionally were to appear). They were xenophobic, smug and confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe, though they were, of course, against dictators and the worst sort of exploiters (no longer Jews but often still "aliens"). Rugged individualism was the most sophisticated political concept they could manage -- in the pulp tradition, the Code of the West became the Code of the Space Frontier, and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do...
The war helped. It provided character types and a good deal of authoritative-sounding technological terms which could be applied to scientific hardware and social problems alike and sounded reassuringly "expert." Those chaps had the tone of Vietnam twenty years earlier. Indeed, it's often been shown that SF supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a "Waldo" handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut, wise-cracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell's image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone's standard into a crypto-fascist, deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an "alternative" that was, of course, no alternative at all.
Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers, L. Ron Hubbard, and aired for the first time in Astounding as "Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind"); a perpetual-motion machine known as the "Dean Drive"; a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren't "abused"; and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of Cold War thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were "natural" slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery; that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again; that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest; and that the blacks were "against" emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in "leaderless" riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all -- "science-fiction ... psychology ... Jesus Christ!" -- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell's arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views -- an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.
Starship Troopers (serialised in Astounding as was most of Heinlein's fiction until the early sixties) was probably Heinlein's last "straight" SF serial for Campbell before he began his "serious" books such as Farnham's Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land -- taking the simplified characters of genre fiction and producing some of the most ludicrously unlikely people ever to appear in print. In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic -- but equally sentimental -- stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in hundreds of thousands! That middle-America could regard such stuff as "radical" was easy enough to understand. I kept finding that supporters of the Angry Brigade were enthusiastic about Heinlein, that people with whom I thought I shared libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic, bourgeois writer who had ever given me the creeps! I still can't fully understand it. Certainly I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism. But how does it equate with their celebration of writers like Tolkien and Heinlein? The clue could be in the very vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal interpretation; it could be that the ciphers they use instead of characters are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. To me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced, once again, with quasi-religion, presented to us as radicalism. At best it is the philosophy of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the twentieth century: it is Reaganism; it is John Wayne in "Big John Maclean" and "The Green Berets"; it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy; at its most refined it is William F. Buckley Jr. -- who, already a long way more sophisticated than Heinlein, is still pretty simple-minded.
Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier: the chain of command is complex; many adult responsibilities can be left to that chain as long as broad, but firmly-enforced, rules from "high up" are adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism, with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Cogburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office -- but not necessarily himself -- in "True Grit."
An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A "rebel," certainly, he or she does not assume "rebellious charm" in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king. This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular "Star Wars" series, which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious "Force" which unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian "samurai" again?) and upon whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights Templar. "Star Wars" is a pure example of the genre (in that it is a compendium of other people's ideas) in its implicit structure: quasi-children, fighting for a paternalistic authority, win through in the end and stand bashfully before the princess while medals are placed around their necks.
"Star Wars" carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o'clock in the morning) and has all the right characters. It raises "instinct" above reason (a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.
It was Alfred Bester who first attracted me to science fiction. I'd read some fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs before that, but I thought that if The Stars My Destination (also called Tiger! Tiger!) was SF, then this was the fiction for me. It took me some years to realise that Bester was one of the few exceptions. At the ending of The Stars My Destination the self-educated, working class "scum of the spaceways," Gully Foyle, comes into possession of the substance known as PyrE, capable of detonating at a thought and probably destroying the solar system at very least. The plot has revolved around the attempts of various powerful people to get hold of the stuff. Foyle has it. Moral arguments or forceful persuasions are brought against him to make him give PyrE up to a "responsible" agency. In the end he scatters the stuff to "the mob" of the solar system. Here you are, he says, it's yours. It's your destiny. Do with it how you see fit.
This is one of the very, very few "libertarian" SF novels I have ever read. If I hadn't read it, I very much doubt I should have read any more SF. It's a wonderful adventure story. It has a hero developing from a completely stupefied, illiterate hand on a spaceship to a brilliant and mature individual taking his revenge first on those who have harmed him and then gradually developing what you might call a "political conscience." I know of no other SF book which so thoroughly combines romance with an idealism almost wholly acceptable to me. It is probably significant that it enjoys a relatively small success compared to, say, Stranger in a Strange Land.
....[I]t often astonishes me how cleverly Kipling influenced generations of writers by disguising his authoritarian notions in that superb, matter-of-fact, faintly ironic prose. Many writers, not necessarily of Kipling's views, have used it since. We find a debased version of it in the right-wing thrillers and SF novels of our own day. It is probably this "tone" -- employed to suggest the writer's basic decency and common sense -- which enables many people to accept ideas which, couched differently, would revolt them. Yet what Heinlein or Tolkien lack is any trace of real self-mockery. They are nature's urbane Tories. They'll put an arm round your shoulder and tell you their ideas are quite radical too, really; that they used to be fire-eaters in their youth; that there are different ways of achieving social change; that you must be realistic and pragmatic. Next time you pick up a Heinlein book, think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower, or -- if that image isn't immediate enough -- some chap in early middle-age, good-looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-piece suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in yours. And then you might have some idea of what you're actually about to read.
Michael Moorcock, May 1977, Ladbroke Grove
22 April 2018
Literary Meanderings, Part Two: Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch"
Here is another literary excerpt I was able to salvage after all my postings were deleted from The Education Forum in the early summer of 2013.
For anyone unfamiliar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, these excerpts are from The Autumn of the Patriarch, a satire of a Latin American dictator who never seems to die. Translation by Gregory Rabassa.
....Previously, during the occupation by the marines, he would shut himself up in his office to decide the destiny of the nation with the commandant of the forces of the landing and sign all manner of laws and decrees with his thumbprint, for in those days he did not know how to read or write, but when they left him alone with his nation and his power again he did not poison his blood again with the sluggishness of written law, but governed orally and physically, present at every moment and everywhere with a flinty parsimony but also with a diligence inconceivable at his age, besieged by mobs of lepers, blind people and cripples who begged for the salt of health from his hands, and lettered politicians and dauntless adulators who proclaimed him the corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and other errors of God, dragging his great feet of an elephant walking in the snow all through the house as he resolved problems of state and household matters with the same simplicity with which he gave the order take that door away from here and put it over there for me, they took it away, put it back again for me, they put it back, the clock in the tower should not strike twelve at twelve o'clock but two times so that life would seem longer, the order was carried out, without an instant of hesitation, without a pause, except for the mortal hour of siesta time when he would take refuge in the shade of the concubines, he would choose one by assault, without undressing her or getting undressed himself, without closing the door, and all through the house one could hear his heartless panting of an urgent spouse, the craving tinkle of his gold spur, his dog whimper, the surprise of the woman who wasted her time at love in trying to get rid of the squalid stares of the seven-month runts, her shouts of get out of here, go play in the courtyard, this isn't for children to see, and it was as if an angel had flown across the skies of the nation, voices were muffled, life came to a halt, everybody remained stone-still with a finger to his lips, not breathing, silence, the general is screwing, but those who knew him best had no faith even in the respite of that sacred moment, for it always seemed that he was in two places at once, they would see him playing dominoes at seven o'clock at night and at the same time he had been seen lighting cow chips to drive the mosquitoes out of the reception room, nor did anyone harbor any illusions until the lights in the last of the windows went out and they heard the noise of the three crossbars, the three locks, the three bolts on the door of the presidential bedroom, and they heard the thump of the body as it collapsed from fatigue onto the stone floor, and the breathing of a decrepit child that grew deeper as the tide rose, until the nocturnal harp of the wind silenced the cicadas and their fiddling and a broad big sea wave swept through the streets of the ancient city of viceroys and buccaneers and poured into government house through all the windows like a tremendous August Saturday that caused barnacles to grow on the mirrors and left the reception room at the mercy of the sharks and it rose higher than the highest levels of prehistoric oceans and overflowed the face of the land and space and time, and only he remained floating face down on the lunar water of his dreams of a solitary drowned man, in his denim private soldier's uniform, his boots, his gold spur, and his right arm folded under his head to serve as a pillow.... (pp. 13-15)
The second time he was found, chewed away by vultures in the same office, wearing the same clothes and in the same position, none of us was old enough to remember what had happened the first time, but we knew that no evidence of his death was final, because there was always another truth behind the truth. Not even the least prudent among us would accept appearances because so many times it had been a given fact that he was prostrate with epilepsy and would fall off his throne during the course of audiences twisting with convulsions as gall froth foamed out of his mouth, that he had lost his speech from so much talking and had ventriloquists stationed behind the curtains to make it appear that he was speaking, that shad scales were breaking out all over his body as punishment for his perversions, that in the coolness of December the rupture sang sea chanties to him and he could only walk with the aid of a small orthopedic cart which bore his herniated testicle...but the more certain the rumors of his death seemed, he would appear even more alive and authoritarian at the least expected moment to impose other unforeseen directions to our destiny.... [H]e knew that he was a man without a father like the most illustrious despots of history, that the only relative known to him and perhaps the only one he had was his mother of my heart Bendicion Alvarado to whom the school texts attributed the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male...a strange woman of uncertain origins whose simpleness of soul had been the scandal of the fanatics of presidential dignity during the beginnings of the regime, because they could not admit that the mother of the chief of state would hang a pouch of camphor around her neck to ward off all contagion and tried to jab the caviar with her fork and staggered about in her patent leather pumps...nor could they bear the fact that at a diplomatic party she had said I'm tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you'll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother. That lack of a sense of history would have its night of splendor at the formal banquet with which we celebrate the landing of the marines under the command of Admiral Higginson when Bendicion Alvarado saw her son in dress uniform with his gold medals and velvet gloves...and she could not repress her impulse of maternal pride and exclaimed aloud in front of the whole diplomatic corps that if I'd known my son was going to be president of the republic I'd have sent him to school, yes sir.... (pp. 45-49)
[H]e visited her every day while the city sloshed in the mire of siesta time...he lamented that the other day the captain of the battleship came to the presidential palace with some kind of land astronomers who took measurements of everything and didn't even say hello but put their tape measure around my head while they made their calculations in English and shouted at me through the interpreter to get out of here and he got out, for him to get out of the light, and he got out, go somewhere where you won't be in the way, God damn it, and he didn't know where to go without getting in the way because there were measurers measuring everything down to the size of the light from the balconies, but that wasn't the worst, mother, they threw out the last two skinny concubines he had left because the admiral said they weren't worthy of a president, and he was really in such want of women that on some afternoons he would pretend that he was leaving the suburban mansion but his mother heard him chasing after the maids in the shadows of the bedrooms, and her sorrow was such that she roused up the birds in their cages so that no one would find out about her son's troubles, she forced them to sing so that the neighbors would not hear the sounds of the attack, the shame of the struggle, the repressed threats of quiet down general or I'll tell your mama, and she would ruin the siesta of the troupials and make them burst with song so that no one would hear his heartless panting of an urgent mate, his misfortune of a lover with all his clothes on, his doggish whine, his solitary tears that came on like dusk, as if rotting with pity amidst the cackling of the hens in the bedrooms aroused by that emergency love-making in the liquid glass air and the godforsaken August of three in the afternoon, my poor son. That state of scarcity was to last until the occupation forces left the country frightened off by an epidemic...they broke down the officers' residences into numbered pieces and packed them up in wooden crates, they dug up the blue lawns in one piece and carried them off all rolled up like carpets, they wrapped up the rubber cisterns with the sterile water sent from their country so that they would not be eaten up inside by the water worms of our streams, they took their white hospitals apart, dynamited their barracks so that no one would know how they were constructed...but before bearing off that portable paradise of war in their flying trains they decorated him with the medal of the good neighbor, rendered him the honors of chief of state...but they left, mother, God damn it, they've gone, and for the first time since his head-down days of occupation ox he went up the stairs giving orders in a loud voice and in person through a tumult of requests to reestablish cockfights, and he so ordered, agreed, that kite-flying be allowed again, and many other diversions that had been prohibited by the marines, and he so ordered, agreed, so convinced of being master of all his power that he inverted the colors of the flag...because after all we're our own dogs now, mother, long live the plague. (pp. 50-52)
(pp. 105-108)
....and with that conviction he called together the high command...he took his time scrutinizing the eyes of each one, one by one, and then he saw that he was alone against them all, so he kept his head erect, hardened his voice, exhorted them to unity now more than ever for the good name and honor of the armed forces, absolved them of all blame pounding his fist on the table so that they would not see the tremor of uncertainty and ordered them as a consequence to continue at their posts fulfilling their duties with the same zeal and the same authority as they had always done, because my supreme and irrevocable decision is that nothing has happened, meeting adjourned, I will answer for it. As a simple means of precaution he took the children out of the harbor fort and sent them in nocturnal boxcars to the least-inhabited regions of the country while he confronted the storm unleashed by the official and solemn declaration that it was not true, not only were there no children in the power of the authorities but there was not a single prisoner of any type in the jails, the rumor of the mass kidnapping was an infamous lie on the part of traitors to get people stirred up, the doors of the nation were open so that the truth could be established, let people come and look for it, they came, a commission from the League of Nations came and overturned the most hidden stones in the country and questioned all the people they wanted to and how they wanted to with such minute detail that Bendicion Alvarado was to ask who were those intruders dressed like spiritualists who came into her house looking for two thousand children under the beds, in her sewing basket, in her paintbrush jars, and who finally bore public witness to the fact that they had found the jails closed down, the nation in peace, everything in place, and they had not found any indication to confirm the public suspicion that there had been or might have been a violation by intent or by action or by omission of the principles of human rights, rest easy, general, they left, he waved goodbye to them from the window with a handkerchief with embroidered edges and with the feeling of relief over something that was finished for good, goodbye, you horse's asses, smooth sailing and a prosperous trip, he sighed, the trouble's over, but General Rodrigo de Aguilar reminded him no, the trouble wasn't over because the children were still left general, sir, and he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, God damn it, he'd forgotten completely, what'll we do with the children. Trying to free himself from that evil thought while a drastic formula was taking shape in his mind he had them take the children out of their hiding place in the jungle and carry them off in the opposite direction to the provinces of perpetual rain where there were no treasonous winds to spread their voices...he ordered them taken to the Andean grottoes of perpetual mists so that no one would find out where they were...he sent them quinine tablets and wool blankets when he found out they were shivering with fever because for days and days they had been hidden in rice paddies with mud up to their necks so that the Red Cross airplanes wouldn't discover them...he had them fumigated from the air with insecticides so that fat banana lice would not devour them, he sent them showers of candy and snowstorms of ice cream from airplanes and parachutes with loads of Christmas toys to keep them happy while a magical solution could occur to him, and in that way he was getting out of the reach of their evil memory, he forgot about them, he sank into the desolate swamp of the uncountable nights all the same of his domestic insomnia, he heard the metal blows strike nine o'clock, he took down the hens who were sleeping on the cornices of government house and took them to the chicken coop, he had not finished counting the creatures sleeping in the scaffolding when a mulatto servant girl came in to collect the eggs, he sensed the sunlight of her age, heard the sound of her bodice, he jumped on top of her, be careful general, she murmured trembling, you'll break the eggs, let them break, God damn it, he said, he threw her down with a cuff without undressing her or getting undressed himself...he slipped, he fell into the illusory vertigo of a precipice cut by livid stripes of evasion and outpourings of sweat and the sighs of a wild woman and deceitful threats of oblivion, on the fallen woman he was leaving the curve of the urgent tinkle of the shooting star that was his gold spur, the trace of saltpeter from his wheeze of an urgent spouse, his dog whine...but at the bottom of the precipice there was the shitted slime again, the hens' insomniac sleep, the affliction of the mulatto girl who got up with her dress all smeared by the yellow molasses of the yolks lamenting now you see what I told you general, the eggs broke, and he muttered trying to tame the rage of another love without love, write down how many they were, he told her, I'll take it out of your wages, he left, it was ten o'clock, he examined one by one the gums of the cows in the stables, he saw one of his women quartered by pain on the floor of her hut and he saw the midwife who took from out of her insides a steaming baby with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, it was a boy, what name shall we give him general sir, whatever you feel like, he answered, it was eleven o'clock, as on every night during his regime he counted the sentries, checked the locks, covered the birdcages, put out the lights, it was twelve o'clock, the nation was at peace, the world was asleep, he went to his bedroom through the darkened building across the strips of light from the fleeting dawns of the beacon turns, he hung up the lamp for leaving on the run, he put up the three bars, ran the three bolts, closed the three locks, sat down on the portable latrine, and while he was passing his meager urine he caressed the inclement child of a herniated testicle until the twist was straightened out, it fell asleep in his hand, the pain ceased, but it returned immediately with a lightning flash of panic when in through the window there came the lash of a wind from beyond the confines of the saltpeter deserts...........
For anyone unfamiliar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, these excerpts are from The Autumn of the Patriarch, a satire of a Latin American dictator who never seems to die. Translation by Gregory Rabassa.
....Previously, during the occupation by the marines, he would shut himself up in his office to decide the destiny of the nation with the commandant of the forces of the landing and sign all manner of laws and decrees with his thumbprint, for in those days he did not know how to read or write, but when they left him alone with his nation and his power again he did not poison his blood again with the sluggishness of written law, but governed orally and physically, present at every moment and everywhere with a flinty parsimony but also with a diligence inconceivable at his age, besieged by mobs of lepers, blind people and cripples who begged for the salt of health from his hands, and lettered politicians and dauntless adulators who proclaimed him the corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and other errors of God, dragging his great feet of an elephant walking in the snow all through the house as he resolved problems of state and household matters with the same simplicity with which he gave the order take that door away from here and put it over there for me, they took it away, put it back again for me, they put it back, the clock in the tower should not strike twelve at twelve o'clock but two times so that life would seem longer, the order was carried out, without an instant of hesitation, without a pause, except for the mortal hour of siesta time when he would take refuge in the shade of the concubines, he would choose one by assault, without undressing her or getting undressed himself, without closing the door, and all through the house one could hear his heartless panting of an urgent spouse, the craving tinkle of his gold spur, his dog whimper, the surprise of the woman who wasted her time at love in trying to get rid of the squalid stares of the seven-month runts, her shouts of get out of here, go play in the courtyard, this isn't for children to see, and it was as if an angel had flown across the skies of the nation, voices were muffled, life came to a halt, everybody remained stone-still with a finger to his lips, not breathing, silence, the general is screwing, but those who knew him best had no faith even in the respite of that sacred moment, for it always seemed that he was in two places at once, they would see him playing dominoes at seven o'clock at night and at the same time he had been seen lighting cow chips to drive the mosquitoes out of the reception room, nor did anyone harbor any illusions until the lights in the last of the windows went out and they heard the noise of the three crossbars, the three locks, the three bolts on the door of the presidential bedroom, and they heard the thump of the body as it collapsed from fatigue onto the stone floor, and the breathing of a decrepit child that grew deeper as the tide rose, until the nocturnal harp of the wind silenced the cicadas and their fiddling and a broad big sea wave swept through the streets of the ancient city of viceroys and buccaneers and poured into government house through all the windows like a tremendous August Saturday that caused barnacles to grow on the mirrors and left the reception room at the mercy of the sharks and it rose higher than the highest levels of prehistoric oceans and overflowed the face of the land and space and time, and only he remained floating face down on the lunar water of his dreams of a solitary drowned man, in his denim private soldier's uniform, his boots, his gold spur, and his right arm folded under his head to serve as a pillow.... (pp. 13-15)
The second time he was found, chewed away by vultures in the same office, wearing the same clothes and in the same position, none of us was old enough to remember what had happened the first time, but we knew that no evidence of his death was final, because there was always another truth behind the truth. Not even the least prudent among us would accept appearances because so many times it had been a given fact that he was prostrate with epilepsy and would fall off his throne during the course of audiences twisting with convulsions as gall froth foamed out of his mouth, that he had lost his speech from so much talking and had ventriloquists stationed behind the curtains to make it appear that he was speaking, that shad scales were breaking out all over his body as punishment for his perversions, that in the coolness of December the rupture sang sea chanties to him and he could only walk with the aid of a small orthopedic cart which bore his herniated testicle...but the more certain the rumors of his death seemed, he would appear even more alive and authoritarian at the least expected moment to impose other unforeseen directions to our destiny.... [H]e knew that he was a man without a father like the most illustrious despots of history, that the only relative known to him and perhaps the only one he had was his mother of my heart Bendicion Alvarado to whom the school texts attributed the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male...a strange woman of uncertain origins whose simpleness of soul had been the scandal of the fanatics of presidential dignity during the beginnings of the regime, because they could not admit that the mother of the chief of state would hang a pouch of camphor around her neck to ward off all contagion and tried to jab the caviar with her fork and staggered about in her patent leather pumps...nor could they bear the fact that at a diplomatic party she had said I'm tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you'll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother. That lack of a sense of history would have its night of splendor at the formal banquet with which we celebrate the landing of the marines under the command of Admiral Higginson when Bendicion Alvarado saw her son in dress uniform with his gold medals and velvet gloves...and she could not repress her impulse of maternal pride and exclaimed aloud in front of the whole diplomatic corps that if I'd known my son was going to be president of the republic I'd have sent him to school, yes sir.... (pp. 45-49)
[H]e visited her every day while the city sloshed in the mire of siesta time...he lamented that the other day the captain of the battleship came to the presidential palace with some kind of land astronomers who took measurements of everything and didn't even say hello but put their tape measure around my head while they made their calculations in English and shouted at me through the interpreter to get out of here and he got out, for him to get out of the light, and he got out, go somewhere where you won't be in the way, God damn it, and he didn't know where to go without getting in the way because there were measurers measuring everything down to the size of the light from the balconies, but that wasn't the worst, mother, they threw out the last two skinny concubines he had left because the admiral said they weren't worthy of a president, and he was really in such want of women that on some afternoons he would pretend that he was leaving the suburban mansion but his mother heard him chasing after the maids in the shadows of the bedrooms, and her sorrow was such that she roused up the birds in their cages so that no one would find out about her son's troubles, she forced them to sing so that the neighbors would not hear the sounds of the attack, the shame of the struggle, the repressed threats of quiet down general or I'll tell your mama, and she would ruin the siesta of the troupials and make them burst with song so that no one would hear his heartless panting of an urgent mate, his misfortune of a lover with all his clothes on, his doggish whine, his solitary tears that came on like dusk, as if rotting with pity amidst the cackling of the hens in the bedrooms aroused by that emergency love-making in the liquid glass air and the godforsaken August of three in the afternoon, my poor son. That state of scarcity was to last until the occupation forces left the country frightened off by an epidemic...they broke down the officers' residences into numbered pieces and packed them up in wooden crates, they dug up the blue lawns in one piece and carried them off all rolled up like carpets, they wrapped up the rubber cisterns with the sterile water sent from their country so that they would not be eaten up inside by the water worms of our streams, they took their white hospitals apart, dynamited their barracks so that no one would know how they were constructed...but before bearing off that portable paradise of war in their flying trains they decorated him with the medal of the good neighbor, rendered him the honors of chief of state...but they left, mother, God damn it, they've gone, and for the first time since his head-down days of occupation ox he went up the stairs giving orders in a loud voice and in person through a tumult of requests to reestablish cockfights, and he so ordered, agreed, that kite-flying be allowed again, and many other diversions that had been prohibited by the marines, and he so ordered, agreed, so convinced of being master of all his power that he inverted the colors of the flag...because after all we're our own dogs now, mother, long live the plague. (pp. 50-52)
(pp. 105-108)
....and with that conviction he called together the high command...he took his time scrutinizing the eyes of each one, one by one, and then he saw that he was alone against them all, so he kept his head erect, hardened his voice, exhorted them to unity now more than ever for the good name and honor of the armed forces, absolved them of all blame pounding his fist on the table so that they would not see the tremor of uncertainty and ordered them as a consequence to continue at their posts fulfilling their duties with the same zeal and the same authority as they had always done, because my supreme and irrevocable decision is that nothing has happened, meeting adjourned, I will answer for it. As a simple means of precaution he took the children out of the harbor fort and sent them in nocturnal boxcars to the least-inhabited regions of the country while he confronted the storm unleashed by the official and solemn declaration that it was not true, not only were there no children in the power of the authorities but there was not a single prisoner of any type in the jails, the rumor of the mass kidnapping was an infamous lie on the part of traitors to get people stirred up, the doors of the nation were open so that the truth could be established, let people come and look for it, they came, a commission from the League of Nations came and overturned the most hidden stones in the country and questioned all the people they wanted to and how they wanted to with such minute detail that Bendicion Alvarado was to ask who were those intruders dressed like spiritualists who came into her house looking for two thousand children under the beds, in her sewing basket, in her paintbrush jars, and who finally bore public witness to the fact that they had found the jails closed down, the nation in peace, everything in place, and they had not found any indication to confirm the public suspicion that there had been or might have been a violation by intent or by action or by omission of the principles of human rights, rest easy, general, they left, he waved goodbye to them from the window with a handkerchief with embroidered edges and with the feeling of relief over something that was finished for good, goodbye, you horse's asses, smooth sailing and a prosperous trip, he sighed, the trouble's over, but General Rodrigo de Aguilar reminded him no, the trouble wasn't over because the children were still left general, sir, and he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, God damn it, he'd forgotten completely, what'll we do with the children. Trying to free himself from that evil thought while a drastic formula was taking shape in his mind he had them take the children out of their hiding place in the jungle and carry them off in the opposite direction to the provinces of perpetual rain where there were no treasonous winds to spread their voices...he ordered them taken to the Andean grottoes of perpetual mists so that no one would find out where they were...he sent them quinine tablets and wool blankets when he found out they were shivering with fever because for days and days they had been hidden in rice paddies with mud up to their necks so that the Red Cross airplanes wouldn't discover them...he had them fumigated from the air with insecticides so that fat banana lice would not devour them, he sent them showers of candy and snowstorms of ice cream from airplanes and parachutes with loads of Christmas toys to keep them happy while a magical solution could occur to him, and in that way he was getting out of the reach of their evil memory, he forgot about them, he sank into the desolate swamp of the uncountable nights all the same of his domestic insomnia, he heard the metal blows strike nine o'clock, he took down the hens who were sleeping on the cornices of government house and took them to the chicken coop, he had not finished counting the creatures sleeping in the scaffolding when a mulatto servant girl came in to collect the eggs, he sensed the sunlight of her age, heard the sound of her bodice, he jumped on top of her, be careful general, she murmured trembling, you'll break the eggs, let them break, God damn it, he said, he threw her down with a cuff without undressing her or getting undressed himself...he slipped, he fell into the illusory vertigo of a precipice cut by livid stripes of evasion and outpourings of sweat and the sighs of a wild woman and deceitful threats of oblivion, on the fallen woman he was leaving the curve of the urgent tinkle of the shooting star that was his gold spur, the trace of saltpeter from his wheeze of an urgent spouse, his dog whine...but at the bottom of the precipice there was the shitted slime again, the hens' insomniac sleep, the affliction of the mulatto girl who got up with her dress all smeared by the yellow molasses of the yolks lamenting now you see what I told you general, the eggs broke, and he muttered trying to tame the rage of another love without love, write down how many they were, he told her, I'll take it out of your wages, he left, it was ten o'clock, he examined one by one the gums of the cows in the stables, he saw one of his women quartered by pain on the floor of her hut and he saw the midwife who took from out of her insides a steaming baby with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, it was a boy, what name shall we give him general sir, whatever you feel like, he answered, it was eleven o'clock, as on every night during his regime he counted the sentries, checked the locks, covered the birdcages, put out the lights, it was twelve o'clock, the nation was at peace, the world was asleep, he went to his bedroom through the darkened building across the strips of light from the fleeting dawns of the beacon turns, he hung up the lamp for leaving on the run, he put up the three bars, ran the three bolts, closed the three locks, sat down on the portable latrine, and while he was passing his meager urine he caressed the inclement child of a herniated testicle until the twist was straightened out, it fell asleep in his hand, the pain ceased, but it returned immediately with a lightning flash of panic when in through the window there came the lash of a wind from beyond the confines of the saltpeter deserts...........
Literary Meanderings, Part One: Orwell, Camus, Dostoevsky
Here are some literary excerpts I was able to salvage after all my postings were deleted from The Education Forum in the early summer of 2013. The first came from a discussion that John Simkin, Stephen Turner and I had in a thread on George Orwell. The second is my transcription of passages from Fedor Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov in a thread about the best excerpt in a novel.
In a lucid moment John Simkin had posted the following:
Education Forum member Stephen Turner then replied:
I then replied with the following:
(Originally posted at The Education Forum on 10 July 2008)
"...A well-educated, cultured man and his wife beat their own child with a birch rod, a girl of seven. I have an account of it. The father was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. 'It stings more,' said he, and so he began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact that there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps, 'Daddy! daddy!' By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court. A lawyer is engaged. The Russian people have long called a lawyer 'a conscience for hire.' The lawyer protests in his client's defense. 'It's such a simple thing,' he says, 'an everyday occurrence. A father punishes his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into court.' The jury, convinced by him, give a favorable verdict. The public roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn't there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honor!... Charming pictures.
"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and kindly, like cultivated and humane Europeans. But they are very fond of tormenting children. It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets the tormentor's vile blood on fire....
"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement. It was her mother, her mother who did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, Alyosha, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! ..."
..................................
"....For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I've only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony, what have children to do with it? Tell me, please. It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it really is true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension...........
"...I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what troubles me is that I can't accept that harmony.... You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer: 'Thou art just, O Lord!' But I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I want to protect myself and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.... I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong...."
Statements made by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha in Fedor Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov (PART TWO, Book V, chap. 4 "Rebellion"), translation by Constance Garnett.
In a lucid moment John Simkin had posted the following:
The most important political influence on me during my lifetime has been George Orwell. This is a passage that has motivated me to write for a living. (I am more concerned with points 3 and 4).
------------------------
George Orwell, Why I Write (September, 1946)
I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
1. Sheer egotism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in children, etc. etc.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose - using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature - taking your nature to be the state you have attained when you are first adult - I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.-----------------------------------
Education Forum member Stephen Turner then replied:
Orwells "Road to Wigan pier" (along with the ragged trousered philanthropists) were the earliest political works I read as a young man, and both had, and continue to have, a massive, and lifelong effect on my political theory, and practice. The closest we have to Orwell today, IMO, is John Pilger, the great Australian journalist, anyone who can read "hero's and not burn with indignation, and a sense of pride in one's class is, indeed, a sad individual. The later attempts to frame Orwell as a class traitor, and collaborator reek of ruling class attempts to blacken the name of a true Socialist, and great writer.----------------------
I then replied with the following:
Orwell's writing was also my earliest influence, and the impact has been the same as Stephen has expressed. I was impressed that much of his writing was based on his own experience or first-hand knowledge as much as in an observer/journalistic sense. He wrote from personal experience about poverty, working in coal mines, and fighting in the Spanish Civil War. I was even more influenced by his attitude and approach towards the political component of writing and use of language and critique of totalitarianism and the dishonesty inherent in ideological thinking. I found similar things in the writings of Albert Camus. It's interesting that both were criticized in the way Steve mentions, but I'm less likely to see these as instances of ruling class attempts to blacken their names. I believe those most committed to ideological thinking just don't like the idea they're being called dishonest (in many ways) and can't accept that their own fanatical tendencies are in any way similar to those of the fanatics and ideologues of the right.
So writers like Orwell and Camus, more humanistic-oriented than ideological, were criticized as not "committed" or "pure" enough. I notice we see the same phenomenon in these forums, particularly in speculation about what happened in historical situations: it's very easy to stand back from where we are now and say, "X should have done this, this should have happened that way, etc." Real life circumstances don't play out so tidily, but there's a definite advantage in assuming they do for those making the arguments.
From "The Artist and His Time," Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays.
III. The Marxists and their followers likewise think they are humanists. But for them human nature will be formed in the classless society of the future.
Camus: To begin with, this proves that they reject at the present moment what we all are: those humanists are accusers of man. How can we be surprised that such a claim should have developed in the world of court trials? They reject the man of today in the name of the man of the future. That claim is religious in nature. Why should it be more justified than the one which announces the kingdom of heaven to come....
IV. Is not that what in reality separates you from the intellectuals of the left?
Camus: You mean that is what separates those intellectuals from the left? Traditionally the left has always been at war against injustice, obscurantism, and oppression. It always thought that those phenomena were interdependent....
...But still, however the question is looked at, the new position of the people who call themselves, or think themselves, leftists consists in saying: certain oppressions are justifiable because they follow the direction...of history. Hence there are presumably privileged executioners... This is about what was said in another context by Joseph de Maistre, who has never been taken for an incendiary. But this is a thesis which, personally, I shall always reject. Allow me to set up against it the traditional point of view of what has been hitherto called the left: all executioners are of the same family.=====================================
(Originally posted at The Education Forum on 10 July 2008)
"...A well-educated, cultured man and his wife beat their own child with a birch rod, a girl of seven. I have an account of it. The father was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. 'It stings more,' said he, and so he began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact that there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps, 'Daddy! daddy!' By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court. A lawyer is engaged. The Russian people have long called a lawyer 'a conscience for hire.' The lawyer protests in his client's defense. 'It's such a simple thing,' he says, 'an everyday occurrence. A father punishes his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into court.' The jury, convinced by him, give a favorable verdict. The public roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn't there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honor!... Charming pictures.
"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and kindly, like cultivated and humane Europeans. But they are very fond of tormenting children. It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets the tormentor's vile blood on fire....
"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement. It was her mother, her mother who did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, Alyosha, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! ..."
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"....For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I've only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony, what have children to do with it? Tell me, please. It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it really is true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension...........
"...I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what troubles me is that I can't accept that harmony.... You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer: 'Thou art just, O Lord!' But I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I want to protect myself and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.... I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong...."
Statements made by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha in Fedor Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov (PART TWO, Book V, chap. 4 "Rebellion"), translation by Constance Garnett.
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