Remembering the witch hunts

Remembering the Witch Hunts

This year marks 50 years since the height of the Hollywwod witch hunts. From today’s perspective it is difficult to imagine that the USA once had a powerful progressive and left-wing movement and a strong Communist Party that attracted numerous prominent figures to it. Before the poisonous paranoia spread by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), followed by McCarthyism had infected the country with its deadly fever, the United States was widely respected for its political freedom and progressive spirit.

            Despite the rise of fascism in Europe and right-wing gangsterism in the USA, the period during the thirties and early forties, shortly before the blacklist, was also a time of left-wing optimism and successes. Although Hollywood was not dominated by left-wingers, they were not without clout. The Communist Party had, at an estimate, around 300 members and at least double that in terms of sympathisers, many in well-paid and respected positions. But, it wasn’t all serious politics; the parties and fun that was had by these Lefties is perhaps surprising under the circumstances, and the invitation lists read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities.

            The leadership provided by the Communist Party of the USA in combating fascism, its commitment to anti-racism and minority rights and success in building the trade union movement unleashed the hatred of the capitalist class and right-wing politicians. The infamous HUAC hearings were used to suppress and make illegal not just the Communist Party but anyone associated with it as well as any organisations in which it avowedly had influence. As a result, tens of thousands were blacklisted, careers and lives were destroyed and families broken. The country was plunged into a nightmare of fear, hysteria and red-baiting from which it never properly recovered. Party officials were, under the Smith Act, deemed to be foreign agents and subject to draconian sentences; in Texas they even faced the death penalty.

            Because of their prominence, celebrity status and ability to articulate ideas, those film workers in Hollywood who became the focus of attention for the witch hunters are the ones most talked about. Many books have been written about the Hollywood blacklist, but Tender Comrades by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle is one of the best. Such books are a chilling reminder of just how neo-fascism and the emergence of a totalitarian security apparatus can lurk just below the surface in an apparently open and democratic society.

            Many of those who became leading figures in the motion picture industry in Hollywood during the thirties and forties and were also members of the Communist Party or fellow travellers, came from poor, immigrant Jewish backgrounds. This experience gave them an understanding of ordinary people, of their struggles and of life as lived ‘at the bottom of the pile’. It gave many a strong sense of solidarity, of sympathy with the underdog and with discriminated minorities. It is also one of the chief reasons why such people were so sought after in Hollywood as writers, because they could turn in believable dialogue that encapsulated the tragedies, humour and resilience of ordinary people. They were able to endow what were often banal original stories with the necessary human interest, drama and social relevance that would make them successful box office hits. 

            Most of the big picture moguls of the time – who ruled their studios with the iron fist of feudal lords – had little idea of how to make films, but had the money to hire those that did. They invariably had clichéd outlooks, right-wing politics and strong Puritanical moral pretensions, but ironically, they employed many Communists or left-wingers who knew how to write and create the films that made them their money.

            The well-known character actor Lionel Stander, commenting on life in thirties America, said: ‘To paraphrase Dickens, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times – the best of times because you were young, and the worst of times because of the actions of Hitler and Mussolini, etc. Hollywood was the Mecca for nearly every worthwhile intellectual in the 1930s from all over the word. You saw a lot of what was happening through the eyes of the German refugees – actors, writers, directors, technicians, and artists – who came here and through the activity of mass organisations like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, etc. The power of the left existed because it said all the things that everybody believed in and wanted to hear; it represented every person who believed in human decency, justice, and equality and was against racism and bigotry. And the Communist Party always took the frontal position.’

            Betsy Blair Reisz, a dancer and actress, married first to Gene Kelly and later to the British film director, Karel Reisz, has an unusual biography in that she tried to join the US Communist Party after the war but was told by the leadership that she could be more effective outside, and if she were to join it could harm Gene’s career. Gene Kelly was, and remained a solid left-winger, who supported many progressive causes -  a ‘social democrat’ Betsy called him. She won critical acclaim for her film roles and a Best Actress Award at Cannes. Once blacklisted she left the USA first to France and then the UK. In Europe, she acted in films made by leading progressive directors like Antonioni, Tony Richardson and Costa-Gavras.

            One interesting tit-bit revealed in the book – which has resonances with the surveillance being carried now - is how the FBI used psychotherapists. Many Americans, even at that time, used psychotherapists the way Catholics use the confessional or others use the bus, so the Party insisted that anyone visiting a psychotherapist leave the Party. One of the chief FBI informers was a ‘lefty’ psychotherapist called Phil Cohen to whom many left-wingers in Hollywood turned.

            Many of those black-listed were talented, humane and fascinating individuals. Their life stories provide a depiction of the Hollywood ‘dream factory’ in its heyday and a historical narrative very different from the mainstream one. They also offer fascinating little vignettes of many of the famous celebrities and villains of that time from John Wayne, James Cagney, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney and Sam Goldwyn among many others.

            Norma Barzman, another Hollywood blacklistee who found refuge in France and Britain wrote the book, The Red and the Blacklist (2003), about that period of blacklisting and exile, also reveals the comic side. Her friend, the blacklisted writer John Barry, responding to her query how things were: ‘It's hell,’ the communist director said of exile. ‘I live in Paris, meet beautiful women and go out to dinner with Jean-Paul Sartre.’ For actors, of course, it was much more difficult than for writers who could use pseudonyms and ‘Fronts’ The actor Zero Mostel noted that, unlike scriptwriters, he couldn't hide from the blacklist by adopting pseudonyms: ‘I am a man of a thousand faces, all of them blacklisted,’ he said.

            Through the words and stories of these individuals it also becomes clear how different the United States could have been if the right-wing had not been successful in suppressing the left-wing and creating such a climate of fear of all things communist or associated with it. It managed to achieve a ‘brain-washing’ of generations of US citizens, imbuing them with an irrational fear and a distorted ideology that enabled capitalism to run rampant and imperialism to wage wars unhindered. Those of us elsewhere in the world who lived through those oppressive decades at the height of the Cold War also paid the costs.

END

1261 Words

John Green

Pay day loan sharks

The greatest hazard to health - loan sharks

Usury – is defined as lending money at unethical interest rates. The practice has been condemned ever since money became the chief means of undertaking transactions.

Some of the earliest known condemnations came from Indian Vedic texts. Similar condemnations can be found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Throughout history, many nations from ancient China to Greece and Rome outlawed loans with any interest. Though the Roman Empire eventually allowed loans with carefully restricted interest rates, the Christian church in medieval Europe banned the charging of interest at any rate. How civilised our forebears were!

Today the Christian churches have little to say on this important issue and the wealthy Islamic states have no qualms about investing globally and profiting from interests on loans. Governments, too, see no need to introduce legislation to protect the most vulnerable from loan sharks and unscrupulous financial operators. Although so called ‘payday loan’ firms, which often lend to those who cannot obtain loans from High Street banks, are currently the subject of a Competition Commission review.

The ubiquitous lending firm Wonga – ‘the payday loan alternative’- recently reported pre-tax profits of £84.5m for 2012, an increase of 35% on the previous year. It is symptomatic of the immoral and unscrupulous times we live in that a company like this can operate and flourish with impunity. This government has made no attempt to curb its predatory activity.

The company has a representative APR of 5,853 per cent - although a typical advance of £200 for 14 days would incur fees and interest of around £34. But the company knows from experience that borrowers can rarely pay back in time, thus incurring high interest rates – that’s how it makes its money.

Its chief victims, of course, are the poor and those who find themselves in temporary financial difficulty ie those least able to repay the loans on time, if at all, so that in the meantime have to fork out horrendous sums in interest. The result is misery, mental health problems, family breakdown and homelessness.

In the old days the local loan shark would do his rounds, knocking on the front doors of those likely to be in need. Today loan companies use the internet – it’s cheaper for them and anonymous.

Ordinary working people and particularly the poor are those who always suffer most in times of crisis. We are not only being made to pay for the incompetence and greed of bankers, but also being ripped off by such so-called loan providers. But the ruling elite doesn’t care. It takes the same attitude as its heroine Margaret Thatcher did when she remarked to the then French president, Francois Mitterand, who was planning to bring in legislation to tax the rich. ‘But, Francois,’ she said, ‘why do you want to tax the rich, there are so few of them, it’s much better to tax the poor as there many more of them.’

Wonga’s South African-born chief executive Errol Damelin is coining it. He set up Wonga in 2007 with business partner Jonty Hurwitz - and now employs 500 people, making 3.5million loans last year totalling £1billion, which was a 40 per cent rise on the previous year. Damelin has a £30million stake in the company, which is based in Camden, north-west London. Damelin was educated at Boston University in Massachusetts and Cape Town University, and founded his first company in Israel.

In a rare public expression of disgust by religious bodies, last year, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called Wonga.com's high interest rates ‘shocking’ and ‘usurious’. He promised to compete it out of existence by setting up a Church of England credit union.

What is equally insidious is the way other companies and organisations who should no better, are jumping on the Wonga bandwagon. Wonga sponsored free travel on the London Underground on New Year's Eve in 2010, and posters were put up on the network with the slogan ‘sometimes you need some extra cash’ and giving the website details. London Assembly member Jennette Arnold said that it was 'shameful' that the Mayor of London had allowed such sponsorship at a time of year when people are most vulnerable financially. Transport for London later banned payday loan companies from sponsoring their services.

In October 2012 Wonga announced a sponsorship deal with Newcastle United for £8m a year. Several MPs spoke out against the deal and the leader of Newcastle City Council told The Guardian he was ‘appalled and sickened’ that the club had signed a deal with ‘a legal loan shark’. In July this year Papiss Cissé courageously refused to wear the kit. In 2012, Wonga.com sponsored ITVs Red or Black, which also evoked wide criticism. In January it was announced that the firm will sponsor the UK showing of American Idol on Channel 5 for Season 12.

Mr Damelin defends Wonga and says: ‘Access to practical and affordable sources of credit is a big issue for our society and Wonga is playing a part by lending responsibly, and at scale, to people who can generally afford to pay us back quickly.’

Thomas Cromwell – a maligned figure of English history

Thomas Cromwell – a maligned figure of English history

Until the success of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, focussing on the life of Thomas Cromwell, few would have recognised his name, and even fewer would have had an inkling of the key role he played in English history. He was one of the leading forces in the English Reformation and laid the basis for the modern state.

His relative eclipse is undoubtedly also associated with the very class-based historical research approach of previous historians who were unsympathetic to the idea of ‘ordinary men’ making history. Cromwell is often described as ‘the most hated man in England’ A recent Guardian piece labelled him ‘the ruthless master politician’. However, a more contemporary evaluation written by Thomas Fuller in his Church History of England in 1655 said: ‘This was the cause why he was envied of the nobility, being by birth so much beneath them and by preferment so high above most of them…’

Cromwell was a poor boy, the son of a Putney brewer and blacksmith, who rose to become one of the most powerful men in England, mixing as an equal with the aristocracy. He was hated by many of the aristocrats as an upstart of low-breeding. They also recognised the danger he posed as an outsider with no tribal interests to defend. He was undoubtedly Henry VIII’s most loyal public servant and rose to become his chief minister, in which role he served from 1532 to 1540, before a conspiracy of his aristocratic enemies persuaded a volatile and increasingly fractious Henry to arrest and execute him.

How did this man of such humble birth become, for a short time, the most powerful man in England?

Unfortunately we know little about his early life. Mantel imagines a miserable childhood as the son of a violent, drunken father. It is reasonably certain that he ran away as a youth and spent a number of years on the continent, where he learned several languages, diplomatic and financial skills and forged valuable contacts.  He learned about politics, economics and met some of the leaders of the Luther-inspired Protestant revolution then sweeping through Europe. His life-shaping experiences in France, Italy and the Netherlands undoubtedly gave him the necessary credentials for his later career. He had been a soldier, a merchant and an accountant for a Florentine bank. Importantly he had clearly been impressed by the Protestant reformation.
In 1527 he was back in England, a little over forty years old and already a trusted agent of the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. Mantel portrays Cromwell as possessing an all-round competence: ‘at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.’
Cromwell was not only one of the strongest advocates of the English Reformation, he was also in a position to do something about it. His helping to engineer the annulment of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so that Henry could marry his mistress Anne Boleyn, gave him the key to push reform further. He realised before many others that without a break from Rome and a curtailment of the powerful and wealthy monasteries in the country, England would never be a truly independent, powerful and sovereign nation. Supremacy over the Church of England was officially declared by Parliament in 1534. Cromwell, particularly after his experiences in Italy and elsewhere in continental Europe developed a healthy disgust of the waste and superstition of the Catholic Church, and he took a very materialist view of relics and indulgences.

Today, he is largely remembered for the key role he played in Sir Thomas More's conviction and execution for treason in 1535 – he is portrayed as the villain and More the hero in Robert Bolt’s film A Man for all Seasons. But More was rather the victim of his own stubbornness than of Cromwell’s ire – he several times gave More the opportunity to change his opposition to Henry’s marriage annulment. He recognised that More’s intransigence on this issue, if allowed to go unchallenged, would jeopardise the necessary reform of church and state and a break with Rome which he so assiduously sought.

He should be remembered primarily as a remorseless reformer and legislator, unblinkingly opposed to an old religion that ‘keeps simple people in dread’ and that was, moreover, sitting on a fortune that could be put to better use.  He tells More in a key remark that, ‘among the ignorant it is said that the king is destroying the church. In fact he is renewing it. It will be a better country, believe me, once it is purged of liars and hypocrites.’ For the first time in history, Englishmen were able to read the Bible and prayer book in their own vernacular.

Mantel's relatively sympathetic interpretation in her novel owes much to the German-born Tudor historian, Geoffrey Elton, who portrayed Cromwell as the prime mover behind the Tudor revolution in government – the first glimmerings of the modern English state. In Mantel's hands, this picture of Cromwell as a reforming legislator acquires new life, as he meditates on how the state can offer work to the unemployed:

‘We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would have all the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat.’

Its hardly surprising that the England of Mantel's Cromwell, a nation in flux and turmoil, should resonate with our own. It is a world seemingly suspended between an old order past its sell-by-date and a new order waiting to be born. Cromwell was the man for those times. He realises that England will never be great unless it breaks with a corrupt and over-wealthy Roman Church. Given the era he lived in, he could see that the only way to achieve these reforms was by empowering the monarch and winning his support. He was a fervent believer in a well-run state and he set about constructing one on his sovereign's behalf and with the common wealth in mind. He knew what needed to be done and how to do it. To accuse him retrospectively and anachronistically of brutality and scheming, is to use a contemporary yardstick, rather than the bloody and opportunistic measures of Tudor times.
In July 1536, the first attempt was made to clarify religious doctrine after the break with Rome. Bishop Edward Foxe, with strong backing from Cromwell and Cranmer, tabled proposals in Convocation, which the King later endorsed as the Ten Articles. Cromwell circulated injunctions for their enforcement that went beyond the Articles themselves, provoking opposition up and down the country. These widespread clerically-inspired uprisings were successfully suppressed. This success spurred further Reformation measures. In 1537, Cromwell convened a synod of bishops and doctors to prepare a draft document, The Institution of a Christian Man. Cromwell ensured that it was in circulation, even before the King had given his assent.

He was a reformer, not a zealot. He found old practices unsavoury – hairshirts, indulgences for relief from purgatory – but he was also, at times, exasperated by the obstinacy of those such as Tyndale, the translator of the Bible into English, on whose behalf he tried to broker a deal with Henry.

Throughout 1538, Cromwell pursued an extensive campaign against idolatry by the followers of the new religion. Statues, roods, and images were attacked, culminating in the dismantling of the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. He also completed a new set of injunctions declaring open war on ‘pilgrimages, feigned relics, or images, or any such superstitions’, and commanding that ‘one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English’ be set up in every church. Moreover, following the surrender of the remaining smaller monasteries during the previous year, the larger monasteries were now also ‘invited’ to surrender throughout 1538.
As the reforms progressed, and despite the riches pouring into Henry’s coffers, he grew increasingly worried about the extent of change, and with the conservative faction at court gaining strength, he began to resist further Reformation measures. The King's anger at being forced to marry Anne of Cleves was the opportunity Cromwell's conservative opponents, most notably the Duke of Norfolk, needed to topple him. Cromwell had thought this marriage to a German would help cement Protestant reforms.
His life and legacy have aroused enormous controversy. However his effectiveness and creativity as a royal minister cannot be denied. During his years in power, he skilfully managed Crown finances and extended royal authority. In 1536, he established the Court of Augmentation to handle the massive windfall to the royal coffers occasioned by the dissolution of the monasteries. Two other important financial institutions, the Court of Wards and the Court of First Fruits and Tenths, owed their existence to him. He strengthened royal authority in the north of England through reform of the Council of the North, extended royal power and introduced Protestantism in Ireland, and was the architect of legislation, the Laws in Wales Acts, which promoted stability and gained acceptance for the royal supremacy in Wales. He also introduced important social and economic reforms in England in the 1530s, including action against enclosures, the promotion of English cloth exports, and the poor relief legislation of 1536. By master-minding these reforms, Cromwell was said to have laid the foundations of England's future stability and success.

Despite his widespread reputation as a cold-bloodied opportunist, he showed considerable generosity towards friends fallen on hard times and to the poor. He carried out a ritual distribution of food and drink to 200 poor Londoners twice daily at the gates of his residence. In his will he left monies to ‘penniless maidens on their marriages, money to be distributed to the poor and to prisoners of several prisons within the area where he had lived for much of his life. His accounts are littered with divers donations to the poor and needy.

He was a close friend and supporter of Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury and was a reformer like Cromwell himself.  He published the first service in the vernacular and actively promulgated the new (Protestant) doctrines through the Book of Common Prayer and other publications.

Henry was never really interested in the ideas behind a modernised religion, but was happy to go along with Cromwell’s reforms as they helped consolidate his own power, brought him considerable wealth from the dissolved monasteries and, of course, allowed him to annul his several unsuccessful marriages.

Josephine and I - fabulous, bravura performance by Cush Jumbo

Josephine and I

Bush Theatre, Shepherds Bush

Until 17 August

The name Josephine Baker will mean very little to today’s generation, but her life provides a colourful and fascinating subject for a one woman show.

Born into a poor black family in Missouri, she is forced to leave home, aged 13, and via work in nightclubs and chorus lines, she is serendipitously spotted by a producer taken with her precocious talent who offers her a job in a new show in Paris: La Revue Nègre. From there she quickly progresses to the Folies Bergère. Her exotic and sensational dance routines transform her into a star of the twenties. She soon owns her own cabaret, and becomes the muse of artists like Picasso and his circle. Working and living in Paris has set her free from the oppressive racism of the USA, and on visits back home, she is again and again confronted with discrimination despite her worldwide fame. She works as a courier for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, and sets up her own ‘united nations’ by adopting 12 children from around the world who she houses in her magnificent chateau. She was a vociferous civil rights campaigner and was invited to speak at Martin Luther King’s mass rally in Washington in 1963. She died, aged 68, in 1975 only four days after a final sell-out performance, attended by the likes of Mick Jagger, Sophia Loren and Shirley Bassey .

Cush Jumbo gives a bravura, fast-paced performance interweaving episodes of Baker’s life with her own as a black actress today. She is, like Baker, a multi-talented performer – dancer, actress, singer and comedienne. And she wrote the script! She takes us on an emotional roller-coaster, from comic stand-up, through pathos, to political comment and euphoric joie de vivre. Her final personal rendering of Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a Changing’ is an apt coda to an uplifting, informative and entertaining evening. Phyllida Lloyd’s tight and imaginative direction, with only sparse props, provides the ideal framework for Cush Jumbo’s very personal take on Baker’s life. The Bush’s cabaret style seating provides the ideal setting.

Red Love - GDR family saga

Red Love – the story of an East German Family

Maxim Leo

Pushkin Press £16.99 Pbck

264pp

This is a much praised family documentation and winner of the European Book Prize.

Leo was only 19 when the Wall came down, so hardly experienced it as an adult, but like many of those who grew up and lived in the GDR, he can’t get it out of his system. In order to (re)discover what life was really like in the GDR he interrogates his parents and grandparents about their experiences. Theirs was a generation fractured by war and its aftermath. His parents, however, grew up in a privileged environment, as one grandfather, although German-Jewish, was a veteran of the French Resistance and a top Party journalist. His daughter, Leo’s mother, was a member of the Party and imbued with a belief in the socialist system, until she becomes completely disillusioned. Ironically, the author’s father – an anarchistic artist who chafes under the GDR’s ‘provincialism’, becomes equally disillusioned, but by the consumerism and materialism of the new united Germany.

Leo’s portrait of the GDR is like an exercise in describing someone by beginning with their every little wart and scar, detailing every failing and weakness, to end up unsurprisingly, with a very ugly portrait. His is a description of a 1984 dystopia, in which nothing relieves the oppression of state and Party interference in everyday life apart from fleeting escape into one’s personally-carved niche. Even a truth can become an untruth if there is deliberate and serious omission. As with the film ‘Life of Others’, which was shot almost entirely at night time, as if the GDR never experienced sunshine; this book, too, is entirely in negative colours.

It is as if the author suddenly realised after almost 20 years since the GDR’s demise, that he didn’t really know the country in which he’d spent his youth. It is clear from his own comments that although he spent his boyhood in the GDR, his head was always in the West: he loved western music, clothing and flashy cars and despised everything at home, so he hasn’t really taken a full cognisance of that society, only noted its shortcomings and frustrations. He thus felt the urge to ask his parents and grandparents questions he’d never bothered to ask before, but he has filtered out anything positive they might have said and only listed the negatives. Did his parents not experience some episodes of fun, relaxation and enjoyment? It is as if Leo instinctively knew that publishers would only be interested in a book that confirmed all the prejudices and clichés. In this context, it is interesting when he tells the story of his six weeks in hospital after a car accident. The car that hit him apparently had a false number plate, so it must have been a ‘Stasi car’. While in the hospital the doctors only allow his parents to visit him once a week “to prevent his becoming over-excited”. The room he is in is on the ground floor and the windows are barred. ‘Westerners,’ he tells us, in a very revealing sentence, ‘loved that story because it was exactly the way they imagined the GDR.’

Virtually all small children in the GDR went naked when swimming outdoors and relished the freedom of such naturalness, but Leo was ‘forced’ by his parents to do so. The children’s Young Pioneer groups become, in translation ‘troops’ and it’s ‘no fun’; ‘there are constant appeals [a mistranslation of ‘roll-calls’] and processions’. This is a caricature; most children, in my experience, loved the Young Pioneers because they could do all sorts of exciting activities with their mates, outside the parental or school remit.

By relating his grandfathers’ tales of the Nazi period, alongside that of his parents in the GDR, he also tacitly accepts the present German establishment narrative of the ‘two totalitarianisms’, as bad as each other. In fact, the stories told by his grandfather, Werner, who was a member of the Hitler Youth, makes the Nazi period sound more fun for a young boy than the GDR was for Leo himself. 

His two grandfathers, one Jewish, the other ex-Nazi, both became firm supporters of the GDR state, but in an example of Leo’s invariably snotty and patronising attitude even to his close relatives, he writes that they ‘could never unmask the great dream as a great lie because the lies they needed to live would have been exposed at the same time’. And later, he is amazed that they never became disillusioned with their failed paradise because, ‘They [his grandparents and parents] saw the poverty, the lies, the claustrophobia, the suspicion’. One wonders if Leo has ever seen real poverty in his life. It was internationally verified that the GDR had the highest standard of living within the socialist world and while few could be described as ‘extremely well off’ there was certainly no poverty as compared with that in the Third World or in many parts of the materially well-off West.

The author is very much, one feels, an egotist, someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t attempt to fit into a collective or identify with collective endeavour. He betrays a singular lack of sympathy with those who sacrificed and devoted their lives to this attempt to build a new, anti-fascist and socialist Germany.

When his grandfather, as a privileged pensioner, manages to wangle things so that his grandson can accompany him on a memory trip to France, instead of sympathising with those who have no such relatives with the right connections and who are unable to travel to France, he despises them. He takes the Mickey out of his compatriots, as rather stupid provincials, by pretending to be a rich Western visitor to their country.

And adds: ‘Even the photographs of France that I hand in to be developed at the stationery shop in Karlshorst look somehow bleached on the East German paper. I find everything stupid and ugly, and I quite enjoy playing the part of the global traveller, letting the hicks back home feel a little of my contempt.’

His schooling in the GDR is summed up as, ‘Listless teachers wrote the tables [for rote learning] on the board, listless pupils wrote them in their notebooks, listless parents signed off the classwork. That was socialism as it reached me. Phrases in table form.’

And again: When he is not selected by the school to take his A-levels [he admits his grades are not the best] he says: ‘For the first time I felt the power of this state, which could simply determine what path one’s life could take.’ Wish I’d thought of that argument when I wasn’t allowed to go to a grammar school (my IQ grade in the 11+ was apparently not sufficient).

At times it is not just a one-sided and jaundiced perspective, but downright inaccurate. He talks about ‘the boundless hatred of Israel in East German propaganda…’ I challenge him to produce any examples of this. While the GDR made no secret of its support for the Palestinians in their struggle for justice, it was scrupulous in its reticent and fact-based criticism of Israel.

Not even the GDR’s greatest supporters would suggest that the country was a paradise or that there weren’t serious problems and shortcomings, but it was country attempting, in a hostile world environment, to build a different type of society. If Leo had focussed his attacks on the bureaucracy, the intolerance of petty officials or the party’s dominance of so many areas of life that would not be contentious, but his dystopic portrait, plus the obligatory Stasi tales, hardly give the reader a fair or holistic picture of the GDR. The ubiquitous Stasi state demonisation is also a coarse distortion as most ordinary people would have had no contact at all with the Stasi during their lives. The fact that around a third of ex-GDR voters have successively voted for the successor party to the old GDR’s SED, indicates that many of his compatriots would not share Leo’s picture.

Many have talked and written about the ‘Schere im Kopf (‘scissors in the head’ or self-censorship) that existed in the GDR, but in this book we have, I would argue, a prime example of the same phenomenon.

The translation, by Shaun Whiteside, while commendable, reveals at times an ignorance of the era, e.g. the 1951 World Youth Festival in Berlin becomes a ‘World Fair’. Markus Wolf is described as ‘head of espionage’, when he was in fact the head of the GDR’s counter-espionage unit.

It is unsurprising that the book has won widespread praise in the West because it reiterates the uni-dimensional image of a totalitarian regime, constantly peddled by the victors. Many other, much more differentiated, life stories have been published but are not translated. However, one that is in English is Edith Anderson’s ‘Love in Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin’ (Steerforth Press). It is no rosy-tinted view but a much more accurate picture of a complex reality.

Bolivia in transformation

Bolivia: Processes of Change

By John Crabtree and Ann Chaplin

Zed Books

Pbck. £14.99

This is another extremely useful contribution by Zed Books to our understanding of the recent transformations sweeping Latin America.

Bolivia is Latin America’s poorest country, despite possessing a wealth of raw materials, from silver, tin and hydro-carbon deposits. These resources have been exploited over centuries by first the Spanish colonialists, then by multi-nationals with the connivance of local oligarchs, leaving the overwhelmingly indigenous population barely surviving in dire poverty. It has, like its neighbours, seen numerous governmental changes over the decades: military coups and dictatorships which represented merely a change of exploiting group. However, with the election of the first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2006, real change became possible. He is a former union leader and avowed socialist, determined to radically transform his country, giving indigenous people greater autonomy and control over their lives for the first time and nationalising much of the country’s mineral wealth resources.

Crabtree and Chaplin know the country well and have conducted independent research, including hundreds of interviews with ordinary people, grass-roots leaders, trade unionists and indigenous groups, and have used these as a basis for their illuminating description of what has been taking place under Morales’s presidency.

What the book clearly explains is how the complex ethnic make up of the country, its history of dictatorships, trade union militancy and popular revolt, overlaying class conflict, makes the implementation of effective and democratic change extremely difficult.

  

It is a book which will be of vital importance for those with a deeper interest in Latin America and Bolivia, but for a general reader it conveys a fascinating picture of the historical development and contemporary change in this little-known, land-locked Andean country.

Marxist history of the world

A Marxist History of the World - from Neanderthals to Neoliberals

by Neil Faulkner

Pluto Press

Pbck ₤18

Anyone attempting to write a history of the world is, one might think, either a fool or a Hercules, but Faulkner is neither. He takes the reader on a heady gallop through the epochs, dynasties and empires of history, providing often illuminating insights and valuable aid to comprehending history as an interconnected process. For those looking for a broad grasp of human history in one volume this may be your book. He explains why certain societies or systems were successful or not, how one supplanted another, and how geography, social and economic relations influenced that process.

Sadly, once he reaches the 20th century his Trotskyist blinkers are firmly in place. Predictably, post 1917, the communist parties in the various countries of the world, with their ,Stalinist dogma‘, are the reason for the collapse of the world revolutionary movement. He is at one with right wing historians in quoting Orwell as the authority on the Spanish Civil War, and writes (p. 237) that the PCE played ,an actively counter-revolutionary role‘ in that struggle. The clear implication: without the ,treachery‘ of the CP, there would have been a glorious outcome. In Portugal, too, (p. 278) it wasn‘t Soares and his mis-named ,Socialist Party‘ that frustrated the revolution with the help of the CIA and funding from West German social democracy, but the communists again. I find this treatment of the Portuguese party‘s forty years‘ heroic struggle against fascism a wilful travesty. In the Arab world his analysis is the same: ‘The old Arab Communist Parties, following the Stalinist line, led their supporters to defeat by subordinating working-class movements to treacherous bourgeois-nationalist leaders.’ (p.289)

Allende, the former Chilean president, who was a convinced Marxist is described as a ‘left-reformist’ (p. 276) The Polish Solidarnosc movement is described as ‘a workers‘ revolutionary movement’ (p. 248), ignoring the fact that Walensa and his cohorts were motivated more by a reactionary Catholic-nationalism and certainly not by a vision of a democratic workers‘ state.

He describes how on 9 November 1989 ,hundreds and thousands converged on the Berlin Wall...and began to tear it down‘. No they didn‘t - a few West Berliners, tanked up with alcohol, sat astride the Wall and began chipping at it, but East Germans were more interested in their new freedom to travel to the West, not with dismantling the Wall.

The Soviet system was of course ‘state capitalist’. How the Trotskyists square a Marxist understanding of capitalism and the Soviet economic system takes some mental acrobatics. There was much wrong, but as far as I know, no individuals were salting away vast profits in Swiss bank accounts and no class lived off profits. Call it state socialism if you like or even bureaucratic socialism, but capitalism, no.

Despite covering up to 2012, Faulkner completely ignores the Latin American revolutions and the transformation of that whole sub-continent, surely a watershed moment of modern history?

The author‘s style is readable and clear, but it does at times feel more like an evangelical lecture than a joint enterprise of discovery with the reader. Faulkner concludes his tome with the predictable mantra of how to achieve world revolution in three easy stages, an appeal that only undermines any credentials he may claim as a disinterested historian.

END