A conspiracy against the laity

The title of this blog is a GBS quote, as I have always noted in the margin.

When I first came across GBS, which was in middle or high school years in the old country, of course I had no idea about this quote.  It was a joke about the spelling and pronunciation issues in the English language that first made me aware of a George Bernard Shaw.

For many of us who grew up with a language other than English, and with the native script simultaneously phonetic as well, English was--and continues to be--a pain in the ass.  Or, a "royal" pain in the "arse," for those who prefer the Queen's English!

Thus, it delighted me to no end when I read that a certain GBS had made fun of the English language, by showing how "ghoti" should be pronounced as "fish."  (Much later in life, I would learn that the GBS-ghoti story is a myth!)

Then came GBS in the high school curriculum: An excerpt from his Pygmalion.

Once there was a collection of GBS in real life in the Readers Digest.  Here is how I remember two of them:

At a dinner party, GBS is seated next to a famous stage actress.  She tells him that if the two should have a baby together, it might be a powerful combination of her beauty and his brains.  Without missing a beat, GBS responds that it will be a disaster because the baby will have his beauty and her brains!

Another one:

GBS sent Winston Churchill two tickets to the opening night of his play, along with a note that one ticket was for Churchill and the second for any friend--if Churchill had a friend.
Churchill replied to that with a note that he would attend the second day of the play, if there would ever be a second day.

And then came GBS the Socialist.  Back in my commie days, I got to read about the Fabian Society, which had attracted the likes of GBS and Nehru.

GBS the socialist apparently adored Stalin!

Beneath Shaw’s infatuation with Stalin, moreover, was a force that is still with us: a desire to see in Russia all the qualities that the Western democracies lack.

I can easily relate to what the author writes as the context that lies under GBS' infatuation with Stalin:

But underlying all of this, there was an even stronger impulse: the fantasy of Russia itself. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution gave the dream a very particular political content, Shaw was primed to expect a global spiritual resurrection that would begin in Russia. This hope was not as fanciful as it may now seem: In the late 19th century, when Shaw’s political and artistic consciousness was being formed, Russian music, drama and literature were at the leading edge of modern Western culture. As he later wrote to Maxim Gorky, “I myself am as strongly susceptible as anyone to the fascination of the Russian character as expressed by its art and personally by its artists.”

I didn't know about GBS's Russian literature fixation, but I can relate to it.

By not understanding the tremendous richness of Russia's cultural past, and by equating Russia only with Communism--and putin--we do ourselves a huge disservice.  This tunnel vision is also a reason for why we are at a loss when it comes to understanding the Russian longing for the glory days of the old, which Svetlana Alexievich writes about.

Shaw's infatuation with Stalin is a lesson for all of us, especially in the donald "puppet" trump era:

Shaw’s infatuation with Russia became a full-on love affair with a Soviet autocrat, whereas the Trump bromance with President Putin appears unconsummated. But they share a fatal attraction that both preceded and survived the Soviet Union: the allure of a faraway place where the great leader is obeyed because he embodies a people’s soul.

All I can say is that the trump administration and the republican congress are certainly a conspiracy against the laity!

Stalin: One degree of separation between Russia and Tamil Nadu!

The world remembers Adolf Hitler as a German, though he was born in Austria.  And we think of Beethoven as an Austrian, when he was a German by birth.  And we think that Stalin was one of the worst Russians ever, despite the fact that he was from Georgia. Not Jimmy Carter's Georgia but that other one!

It is now sixty years since Stalin's death, which has triggered a bunch of commentaries.  In a NY Times op-ed, the author, "a Danish journalist based in Washington, was born in Siberia, where his family lived in exile for 16 years," notes:

In 1941, my parents and two siblings were among thousands of Lithuanian citizens deported to the remotest regions of Siberia. After two years, more than 40 percent of the deportees had perished.
Still, the exile offered my parents a better chance of survival than the alternative. Shortly after they were deported the Nazis crossed into Lithuania and all the Jewish families in their town perished. So, paradoxically, my family could say: “Thank you, comrade Stalin for deporting us."

Why would any sane person want to remember Stalin as anything but prominent poster in the lineup of historical monsters?  

Although Russians know more about Stalin’s crimes than they did ever before, many politicians and historians want to pull him out of the shadows and celebrate him for his role in the industrialization of the young Soviet state and the victory over Nazi Germany.
Communists have collected 100,000 signatures on a petition to give Volgograd back the name Stalingrad; others are seeking a referendum to this end. If there is a Metro station in Paris called Stalingrad, they argue, why should the name be banned in Russia?

Are you thinking what I am thinking? Paris has a Metro station called Stalingrad? 

The Russians--that is right, the Russians, and not the Georgians--who so badly want to resurrect Stalin's image have so conveniently forgotten the millions killed by Stalin and banished by him to Gulags?  What the hell is wrong with people!

Caption at the source:
A communist supporter holds a portrait of Stalin as she marks the 60th anniversary
of his death near Red square, Moscow, March 5, 2013.

Not all the Gulag prisoners are dead and gone either for that dark chapter of Russian history to be airbrushed off:

 VORKUTA, Russia -- Anna Krikun can barely read the yellowing papers that show she was sentenced as a young woman to hard labor in one of Stalin's cruelest Gulag camps.
At 90, her eyesight is fading. But she remembers everything as if it happened yesterday. She recalls the name of the investigator who tortured her with a sleep-deprivation technique known as the "conveyor" until she confessed to betraying the motherland and agitating against the Soviet Union.
It was 1946, the throes of the Stalinist terror, and Krikun was sent to Vorkuta - a labor camp-cum-city built from nothing on an icebound wasteland by political prisoners from 1931 to 1957.
Today, the city is still a byword for the suffering of the ill-equipped labor brigades that were effectively sent to their death as Stalin used his enemies - both real and imagined -- to tap into vast natural resources in the uninhabited Far North.
And yet here, in this inhospitable outpost, Krikun has remained all these years. 

Reading about the Gulags in Solzhenitsyn's writings was a transformative experience for me, who had until then surrounded himself with readings and people who were uber-sympathetic towards anything Communist.  It is simply bizarre that instead of tossing out forever the ghost of Stalin, more than a few in Russia continue to venerate him. Years ago, I watched quite a funny, satirical, Australian movie about Stalin's son.  I wonder if that movie was banned, and continues to be banned in Putin's Russia.

So, what is the connection with Tamil Nadu?  Stalin is the name of one of the most prominent--notorious--politicians there.  Yes, it was politically fashionable those days to name kids after such Communist "heroes":

The leader of the Dravidian movement Periyar E.V.Ramaswamy was greatly fascinated by the communist ideals after his visit to the Soviet Union. It soon caught on in Tamil Nadu and people started naming their children after the great leaders of the Soviet Union. The most popular were Lenin and Stalin and the communism wave even led to children, being named after Moscow and Russia. Consequently, the leader of the DMK party Dr.Kalaignar bestowed the name Stalin

I suppose this is also one of those only-in-India stories; there aren't very many places on this planet where middle-aged men named Stalin can not only proudly walk around but even contest in democratic elections!

Caption at the source:
DMK leader M.K. Stalin being arrested during a protest
against Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Chennai on Tuesday. Photo: M. Vedhan 

This Stalin from Tamil Nadu was born on March 1, 1953.  The original Stalin died on March 5, 1953.  What a devotion to a mass killer it must have been in order to name a kid after that dying monster in a land far, far away :(

Oh those Tamils, er, Russians!

        

Why is Michele Bachmann a Communist? A Stalinist? Here is why

Some among the OWS group are the latest in a long line of commentators who point out that socialism is more consistent, than inconsistent, with biblical teaching. 

A note at the Economist shows how much an idea that Michele Bachmann cherishes was an integral part of, gasp, Joseph Stalin's Soviet constitution!

BIBLICAL aphorisms are famous for meaning different things to different people. The one I'm most fond of these days for being cited with extremely different valences by people of differing ideologies is one that I first encountered without knowing it was a biblical aphorism. Apparently Michelle Bachmann referenced it the other day in a speech to the Family Research Council, in which she criticised government social assistance: "Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat." The citation is from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "If any would not work, neither should he eat." (H/t Dave Noon, who notes that it was cited by Captain John Smith, the leader of Jamestown colony, in 1609 to justify banishing lazy or unskilled colonists across the river to starve.)
Not having grown up as a Christian, I encountered this aphorism first while studying Russian history, as a Communist slogan embraced by Vladimir Lenin in his 1917 work "The State and Revolution": "Кто не работает, тот не ест." Mrs Bachmann might correctly note that this is one Christian precept that actually is explicitly incorporated into the constitution—but it's the wrong constitution: it figures in Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution adopted by Josef Stalin. My impression that the saying's main contemporary fame comes from its centrality to the Soviet project seems to be shared by Wikipedia, which provides the Lenin citation:

The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
This is a “defect”, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law.

I love how Lenin tosses in that little injunction not to "indulge in utopianism" here. In every society, the most ludicrous and ruinous projects are constantly being justified as hard-headed, practical realism by the very serious people who run them. Anyway, as late as 1962 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party published a pamphlet entitled "The struggle of the Communist Party to implement the principle 'He who does not work, does not eat'". Here's the slogan figuring as the centrepiece of a beautifully designed constructivist-era poster from the 1920s that I had sitting around on my hard drive:

I wonder if Bachmann and her people read the Economist and the blogs there; I am guessing not because, after all, all the wisdom one wants has already been recorded in the bible, right?  Including "if anyone will not work, neither should he eat."

Quote of the day: TSA and Stalin

Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” The T.S.A. seems to operate on the basis of an adapted maxim: “Show me the security check and I’ll find you the excuse.”

That was Roger Cohen in his NY Times column (ht).

I can't understand how such a madness called the TSA can continue despite all the protests.  I suppose if the ACLU can't stop the madness, then ... hey, join the ACLU

This just gets better, er, worse:

There are now about 400 full-body scanners, set to grow to 1,000 next year. One of the people pushing them most energetically is Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security.

Oh crap!
Why stop at the airports?  We can start installing them in malls, government buildings, and in the classrooms too!

And, of course, the dark irony here that the company behind these TSA porn scanners is Rapiscan!
Cohen writes:

Rapiscan: Say the name slowly. It conjures up a sinister science fiction. When a government has a right to invade the bodies of its citizens, security has trumped freedom.

Stalin in the Russia-Georgia war

Russia has now full control of the city of Gori in Georgia, according to reports. Gori's other notoriety comes from Stalin--"Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis Dzhugashvili in Gori, ", says Wikipedia.

So, where were some of the Soviet leaders born? (all from Wikipedia)
Lenin: (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) Born in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk after its most famous son), in the Russian Empire
Trotsky: born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (alternative English spelling: Bronshtein) on November 7, 1879, in Yanovka, Kherson Province of the Russian Empire (today's Ukraine)
Khrushchev: born in Kalinovka (Russia/Ukraine border)
Brezhnev: born in Kamenskoe (now Dniprodzerzhyns'k) in Ukraine
Andropov: born in Stavropol --way southwestern tip of Russia
Chernenko: born in the village of Bolshaya Tes (now in Novosyolovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai).
Gorbachev: born in Stavropol. (hey, the same place as Andropov, or are these two different Stavropol?)
Yeltsin: born in the village of Butka, in Talitsky District of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia.
Putin: born in Leningrad (well, St. Petersburg now)

Now you know :-)