And then there are the themes of misplaced confidence in figures of the old and new lefts whose devotion to various Marxist sides, especially the Stalinist side, did so much to damage and discredit the rest of the left who, foolishly, didn't just kick them out and have nothing to do with them. I would count myself among those fools, by the way, up through the first years of this century. The history of communism in the United States, as elsewhere, contains the story of the most idealistic of people with the best of intentions, frustrated by the glacial pace of progress against injustice and evil in the United States and elsewhere, going for the promises of a speedy and magical change through communist revolution. It was, of course, as we know now, a complete delusion, the greatest proof of that what happened in those places which had that revolution. The number of lies that were required to dupe those good people who bought those lines might constitute a test of how many someone can endure before the burden of lies breaks that delusion. For a lot of people, even today, that number has not been reached. I'm hesitant to judge those who bought those lines way back in the history of that campaign, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, before the truth of the reports about Stalin were confirmed, even by the Soviet Government.
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The most troubling thing in Aaron Copland's professional work is his involvement in a piece of wartime propaganda, the movie The North Star, purported to be the story of Ukranian resistance to the Nazi invasion, which is such a mix of truth and massive lies that it is best seen, today, as being the kind of convenient lie that comes with the evil that war is. The hard fact that the Allies needed to work with the Soviet Union to defeat their common enemy, the Nazis, when they were hardly natural allies.
I will admit I have been unable to sit through it, knowing about the mass murder of the Ukrainians in the 1930s, I can't bear to watch it, though I've watched entire clips of it. Just Dana Andrews in Soviet uniform air-playing a balalaika as a group of Hollywood actors play a bunch of young Ukrainians singing Copland's music with Ira Gershwin's lyrics about the generation gap almost proved too much to take. It is more surreal than Springtime for Hitler if you've read about the reality of it. But this was wartime propaganda, having little to do with actual truth and everything to do with political exigency and expediency.
The hard truth is that Stalin was as evil as Hitler, an even more accomplished mass murderer by most reckonings, one whose grip on power was even tighter than Hitler's. That makes any handling of Ukraine in the hands of the Nazis as opposed to the Soviet Union fraught with the most awful of choices.
The fact is that by the time Hitler invaded Ukraine as part of his invasion of the Soviet Union, that nation had already undergone its own mass murder campaign under Stalin in which many millions of people were purposefully starved to death or outright killed. It was a planned, purposefully carried out slaughter that could match anything the Nazis did and it was reported in the West in the early 1930s by fairly reliable reporters. The planned famine was known about, it was certainly something that the author of the script, Lillian Hellman, a Stalinst, would have read about in the American press, no doubt dismissing those reports - quite accurate in some cases, we now know - as anti-communist propaganda. Though I'm not an indepth scholar of that matter, I don't know of how anyone who wasn't totally depraved could remain a Stalinist if they had read those reports. Though, on some cases, I think total depravity is, actually, the most likely explanation.
Certainly Franklin Roosevelt knew what Stalin had done and was doing when he made the horrible and necessary choice of working with him to defeat Hitler, not that he had much of a choice. As we are finding out in the Middle East broken by George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, you sometimes have to work with really evil people to defeat a greater evil or just an evil which might be defeated as opposed to one which won't be or whose defeat could lead to even worse. There was no prospect that the West could have deposed Stalin, there was every prospect of deposing Hitler. Beside that, it was the Nazi government that declared war on the United States in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war against the Nazi's ally Imperial Japan.
In the messy and seldom cited things I've read about the production of The North Star, I've seen people who say that the Roosevelt administration was aware of and approved of its being made. I don't have any way to know if that were the case, thought apparently the resources put into the movie were large for a movie of that type. Another thing I read is that Lillian Hellman got into a snit over the production turning into more of a Hollywood movie musical than she had envisioned and she tried to pull out of the thing, though they used her script. One thing I read said that the hiring of a choreographer was the final straw. It would be nice to know how such intellectuals as Hellman and Copland saw what they were doing but I wasn't able to find anything much about them saying that in the brief time I've had to research this post.
From some accounts the Soviets and, especially, Ukrainians thought the piece of American propaganda was ridiculous. But they wouldn't have been the intended audience for the movie, it was Western war propaganda. One of Aaron Copland's reported means of achieving a measure of authenticity, of using actual folk music as thematic material, went wrong when he used Russian folk music which the Ukrainians and the Russians would have distinguished from Ukrainian folk music.
The script, as well, made use of some of the horrific stories of what the Germans did to people in the places they occupied. There is an evil German doctor played by Erich von Stroheim bleeding Ukrainian children to death in transfusions to German soldiers - he gets shot by a Russian doctor played by Walter Huston. I find it as satisfying as anyone to see a Nazi get their due in a movie and wouldn't have been troubled by that satisfaction, which is, probably, a character flaw. The Nazis were a massively evil bunch and I'm prepared to believe anything evil about them was at least possible if not probable. The problem is that I also know the same was true about the Soviet apparatus under Stalin, and especially in Ukraine where he had rivaled Hitler as a mass murderer and before Hitler had even consolidated his power. What Walter Huston says before he shoots the Nazi in that scene was as true of many of the civilized people who supported Stalin and other communist mass murderers.
I doubt that Hitler was unaware of the slaughter happening one country away from Germany and the failure of anyone to do anything about it. That he took that as encouragement, as he is reported to have taken the mass murder of Armenians earlier in the same century and as the German government and aslo committed in their colony in Africa is, I think, a reasonable conjecture.
I wonder what Aaron Copland thought of any of these issues. Some of the biographical material I've read of him said that he was most influenced by his reading of Andre Gide, who, during those same years, and unlike Copland, joined a Stalinist Communist party. Gide was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a celebrity guest of the government, the experience of seeing what he saw horrified him and, on his return he became very strongly anti-communist, even saying that under Stalin communism was worse than the Nazi state. He was one of the six former-communist intellectuals who wrote in The God That Failed in 1949,
It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief.
Copland was and remains, in many ways, frustratingly silent about his thoughts about anything but music. The composer, Ned Rorem, said he was "the most circumspect person I've ever known". In no other issue is that taciturnity more frustrating than in this one because it is the most morally exigent issue of his lifetime. The mass murders of the 20th century are a huge issue in any thinking person's life, even all of these decades later. If he hadn't written the music for this movie it might not feel like such an urgent matter in thinking about him and his music. What did he think about it, what did he know about Stalin's mass murder of the Ukrainians, by some estimates as large in numbers of millions, perhaps more, than Hitler's mass murder of Jews?
Maybe he quite fully understood the exigencies of the war that made the immoral relatively moral, lies, while unable to be transmuted into truth, at least temporarily necessary.
With all of the evil that the Nazis did that a script could have been made from, I have to believe the choice of using Ukraine had to have had some really intentional intent behind it. Perhaps they understood that in making an alliance with Stalin that his mass murder of Ukrainians could be brought up and so it needed to be glossed over for at least the duration of the war. I don't know, I'm speculating. That wartime alliance certainly didn't last for about two minutes after the final surrender of the Nazi state, There is some speculation that the moral atrocity of the atomic bombing of two cities instead of uninhabited land by the United States military was as much a warning to Stalin as it was a means of forcing the Imperial Japanese war machine to surrender.
Even the "good war" is a gigantic collection of moral catastrophes, there is always a huge price to be paid, even by the less evil side of it.
I look at the pattern of his compositions in the next years and wonder if his choices of texts to set and themes indicates anything, the Canticle of Freedom, In the Beginning, etc. But, unless he wrote about his thoughts, specifically - and I haven't found any indications he did - it's likely to remain a mystery. I have to believe that Aaron Copland had some kind of reaction against Stalinism with the revelations of the coming years, when even the Soviet apparatus began to admit that some of those pre-war stories of atrocities and horror were, in fact, true. He was enough of a lefty to have gotten hauled before Senator McCarthy but, without naming names, he escaped in ways that someone with more of an official communist past couldn't have. The extent of his support for communism is, I believe, sometimes exaggerated. But those are all details out of which surmise about his real thoughts can be constructed. I would love to know what he really thought about those things in depth.
Update: It just occurred to me that Walter Huston, playing the good Russian doctor looks remarkably like Stalin in some pictures. Which is creepy, even if they didn't do it intentionally.
Certainly Franklin Roosevelt knew what Stalin had done and was doing when he made the horrible and necessary choice of working with him to defeat Hitler, not that he had much of a choice. As we are finding out in the Middle East broken by George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, you sometimes have to work with really evil people to defeat a greater evil or just an evil which might be defeated as opposed to one which won't be or whose defeat could lead to even worse. There was no prospect that the West could have deposed Stalin, there was every prospect of deposing Hitler. Beside that, it was the Nazi government that declared war on the United States in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war against the Nazi's ally Imperial Japan.
In the messy and seldom cited things I've read about the production of The North Star, I've seen people who say that the Roosevelt administration was aware of and approved of its being made. I don't have any way to know if that were the case, thought apparently the resources put into the movie were large for a movie of that type. Another thing I read is that Lillian Hellman got into a snit over the production turning into more of a Hollywood movie musical than she had envisioned and she tried to pull out of the thing, though they used her script. One thing I read said that the hiring of a choreographer was the final straw. It would be nice to know how such intellectuals as Hellman and Copland saw what they were doing but I wasn't able to find anything much about them saying that in the brief time I've had to research this post.
From some accounts the Soviets and, especially, Ukrainians thought the piece of American propaganda was ridiculous. But they wouldn't have been the intended audience for the movie, it was Western war propaganda. One of Aaron Copland's reported means of achieving a measure of authenticity, of using actual folk music as thematic material, went wrong when he used Russian folk music which the Ukrainians and the Russians would have distinguished from Ukrainian folk music.
The script, as well, made use of some of the horrific stories of what the Germans did to people in the places they occupied. There is an evil German doctor played by Erich von Stroheim bleeding Ukrainian children to death in transfusions to German soldiers - he gets shot by a Russian doctor played by Walter Huston. I find it as satisfying as anyone to see a Nazi get their due in a movie and wouldn't have been troubled by that satisfaction, which is, probably, a character flaw. The Nazis were a massively evil bunch and I'm prepared to believe anything evil about them was at least possible if not probable. The problem is that I also know the same was true about the Soviet apparatus under Stalin, and especially in Ukraine where he had rivaled Hitler as a mass murderer and before Hitler had even consolidated his power. What Walter Huston says before he shoots the Nazi in that scene was as true of many of the civilized people who supported Stalin and other communist mass murderers.
I doubt that Hitler was unaware of the slaughter happening one country away from Germany and the failure of anyone to do anything about it. That he took that as encouragement, as he is reported to have taken the mass murder of Armenians earlier in the same century and as the German government and aslo committed in their colony in Africa is, I think, a reasonable conjecture.
I wonder what Aaron Copland thought of any of these issues. Some of the biographical material I've read of him said that he was most influenced by his reading of Andre Gide, who, during those same years, and unlike Copland, joined a Stalinist Communist party. Gide was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a celebrity guest of the government, the experience of seeing what he saw horrified him and, on his return he became very strongly anti-communist, even saying that under Stalin communism was worse than the Nazi state. He was one of the six former-communist intellectuals who wrote in The God That Failed in 1949,
It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief.
Copland was and remains, in many ways, frustratingly silent about his thoughts about anything but music. The composer, Ned Rorem, said he was "the most circumspect person I've ever known". In no other issue is that taciturnity more frustrating than in this one because it is the most morally exigent issue of his lifetime. The mass murders of the 20th century are a huge issue in any thinking person's life, even all of these decades later. If he hadn't written the music for this movie it might not feel like such an urgent matter in thinking about him and his music. What did he think about it, what did he know about Stalin's mass murder of the Ukrainians, by some estimates as large in numbers of millions, perhaps more, than Hitler's mass murder of Jews?
Maybe he quite fully understood the exigencies of the war that made the immoral relatively moral, lies, while unable to be transmuted into truth, at least temporarily necessary.
With all of the evil that the Nazis did that a script could have been made from, I have to believe the choice of using Ukraine had to have had some really intentional intent behind it. Perhaps they understood that in making an alliance with Stalin that his mass murder of Ukrainians could be brought up and so it needed to be glossed over for at least the duration of the war. I don't know, I'm speculating. That wartime alliance certainly didn't last for about two minutes after the final surrender of the Nazi state, There is some speculation that the moral atrocity of the atomic bombing of two cities instead of uninhabited land by the United States military was as much a warning to Stalin as it was a means of forcing the Imperial Japanese war machine to surrender.
Even the "good war" is a gigantic collection of moral catastrophes, there is always a huge price to be paid, even by the less evil side of it.
I look at the pattern of his compositions in the next years and wonder if his choices of texts to set and themes indicates anything, the Canticle of Freedom, In the Beginning, etc. But, unless he wrote about his thoughts, specifically - and I haven't found any indications he did - it's likely to remain a mystery. I have to believe that Aaron Copland had some kind of reaction against Stalinism with the revelations of the coming years, when even the Soviet apparatus began to admit that some of those pre-war stories of atrocities and horror were, in fact, true. He was enough of a lefty to have gotten hauled before Senator McCarthy but, without naming names, he escaped in ways that someone with more of an official communist past couldn't have. The extent of his support for communism is, I believe, sometimes exaggerated. But those are all details out of which surmise about his real thoughts can be constructed. I would love to know what he really thought about those things in depth.
Update: It just occurred to me that Walter Huston, playing the good Russian doctor looks remarkably like Stalin in some pictures. Which is creepy, even if they didn't do it intentionally.
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