Hate Mail

My rule for judging governments, judging political ideologies, parties and their members begins with their willingness to divide the murderers in the world into the bad, evil murderers who are "theirs" and the good murderers whose murders are OK because, well, because they're "our" mass murderers. Harry Truman might have judged Stalin as being "our SOB", but, then, Truman was the one who OKed dropping two nuclear bombs, especially the second one.   The pretense that it is the variety or economics which is asserted by an ideology places it on an objective line of political identity is one of the stupidest ideas ever pushed by academics.  That lie leads to the fervent superstition that slavery under a communist government is, somehow, different from slavery under a fascist or a merely capitalist or a feudal or whatever political system when the violence which is an intrinsic part of enslavement is all the same.   That economic babble was asserted as the measure of political ideologies is merely a confirmation that those who did that valued money over human lives, over life, in general.  It is political economy as if money matters, not people.  That some of those doing that were more pretentious about caring for the welfare of those enslaved counts for little, in the end, as can be seen when their fervent pronouncements became the foulest of politics and their lofty statements turned to state terror.

I don't take back anything I said about Brecht who was at best a dupe and at most a hypocrite and a liar.  I think that the clue to his real nature can be seen in some of his more attractive and popular works, the ones that make him the most produced of 20th century playwrights, pieces like Happy End, Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny.  His cynical, humorous and romanticized presentation of gangsters, thugs, pimps, etc,and those who are used by them makes you wonder how someone could have such a nasty view of life and be considered some kind of a humanitarian.   His dramatic theories are bull shit.  His ideological distortions of the real lives of Galileo and his daughter, not to mention just about all of the historical figures in his Life of Galileo are certainly not realistic and are certainly there to misrepresent what happened in real life and its ultimate meaning.   Since his theater is meant to be didactic he should have started by not lying about real lives and real historical events.

I used to really like Brecht's things but, with the experience of watching the events of the past half a century and more, reading the events of the century before that, they are worse than a dead end, they are a road to depravity.  That his was a Marxist depravity doesn't really signify much.  How it differs in its message from fascist nihilism is something that becomes less instead of more clear.   Marxism failed, it started failing as soon as it took power in Russia, Emma Goldman saw that, soon after Trotsky found out, too.  As can be seen in China, Marxism can lead to a really regressive form of 19th century capitalism under a totalitarian police state, one which is quite accomplished in economic imperialism.  If that turns out to be an improvement over military imperialism or if it doesn't also lead to that has yet to be determined.  I don't expect it will turn out well.  China, interestingly, could prove that both Marxism and capitalism are fully compatible with the most oppressive of total police states, a mixture of 1984, Ferenheit 415 and Brave New World, only worse.  In the end, liberalism has to reject his view of life because liberalism is politics as if people, their lives, the lives of others, really matter.

Your being romantic about Brecht is hilarious in that he was about as cynically and brutally unromantic about life as could be.  It was his shtick, what attracts adolescents to his work.   Mounting an angry response to a non-romantic view of him only adds to the irony of the situation.

Update:  Simels is so vain he thinks this post is about him when he didn't even comment on my post yesterday.   Hate to make you feel jealous, Sims, but I have other enemies whose comments I won't post.

Update 2:  And now he's denying that I wrote this in response to someone else even though he didn't post a comment on yesterday's piece.  Simile dementia.

Update 3:  And now he's still insisting that this is all about Sims when it wasn't until Simels insisted it was.  Oh, and, he's saying I'm the one who is "straight jacket worthy" over this.