Facing Death (Written 1992)

Denial

There's a scene that plays out in my head every time I hear a certain part of Richard Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration." The music slowly but dramatically builds, crashes with the pounding of a kettle drum, then thundering brasses and weariless strings take over; suddenly the sound is like a soaring jet coming in on a strafing run. A gash opens up in the sky as the plane passes overhead and a flood of emotion sweeps me away, as my flesh rises and my breath feels pulled from my lungs.

In my dreamlike state the music levels off to cruising speed and everything is taken with it. Floating souls of all earthly beings head toward the horizon which has become an amorphous pink depth. All creatures that crawl, walk, fly, or swim swirl into this pink entrancing foam. A vortex sucks up from the sky and I can almost feel the rush of air as the brasses plummet beneath the strings, and I am loosened from myself for that brief instance when it feels like I've taken flight. The whole universe seems to be engaged. It's on a grand scale and it's a gigantic palette. Something is waiting, somewhere above and beyond and all the last images that were cherished diminish in a movie fade out. There is no longer pain, grief, remorse. I am transfigured.

Such is idealized death, idealized as to bode promise not fear, idealized because it is my imagination prompted by Richard Strauss, my Catholic background and nearly 60 years of watching movies. However, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross might, if she were here, call it "denial." The terminally ill as we have learned through her writing first deny when they have been told they are going to die. Art, being emblematic, sometimes seems to me a way to ward off evil, a sort of totemism. Even though I am not ill terminally or otherwise, Kubler-Ross has already uttered it. I am going to die someday. I am terminal. That is why for me creating art is denial.

Anger

I am on a small boat, running on a vein of royal blue, twisting deep into the dense green jungle towards its heart. The destination is a rendezvous point, a small dock on a tiny river village outside of Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic. It's the middle of April, 1965, three days before the U.S. invades, and this can only be a movie that I am in and am about to replay for you.

This morning after the secure from general quarters, the Officer of the Deck instructs me to get ready to put my boat, the PL, in the water. The PL has a super charged, bored

and stroked six cylinder, gray marine, that accelerates so smoothly a nickel can stand on its end on the head cover as the throttle is pulled full open. It's my job to take care of that engine. It's now my luck to go where it goes. My job notwithstanding, I still have to put on full dress whites, wrap my bell bottoms in canvas puttees, and spit shine my shoes. They change their minds about the shoes in the last minute, telling me to put on my tennis shoes.

After the boat is launched, the coxswain pilots it along-side a Jacob's ladder hanging from my ship, The USS Fort Snelling (LSD-30). Two marines climb down with M-16’s and both the Gunnery officer and the XO follow with forty-fives strapped to their sides. They’re in battle fatigues, and without rank identified, they huddle in the cabin with the coxswain who steadies the boat with short revs of the engine. Suddenly we pull away with a jolt.

At about two miles to go to the island the boatswain’s mate (known as the bow hook) and I are made to stand at parade rest in the well of the boat behind the engine compartment. The boat is about twenty-five feet long and six feet wide. It's all battle ship gray, made of wood, but molded and streamlined for speed, looking like a small PT boat. The bow has a six inch high chrome railing, the cabin follows with hand grips on the overhead; behind the cabin in the well the engine roars inside a raised wooden compartment. We stand just behind the engine, grateful we're not made to stand on the space above the rudder assembly, the tail of the boat where an American flag flaps wildly.

We enter the mouth of the river and as the coxswain de-throttles, the supercharger screams then lowers its tune from a shrill whistle to a faint sigh. The Gunnery officer peers out from under the cabin and orders the bow hook to stand on the bow. I can see the shadow of the officer's beard even though it is only about eight A.M.

I stay put and watch the bow hook shimmy his way forward along the cabin, gripping the hand grips then leaping agilely onto the bow. He gets down on his hands and knees, pulls a line pole from its holder, and begins to knock away at the hanging brush as we pass through. The gunnery officer, a little dramatically, I think, loads his forty-five. The XO hunkers himself down behind the coxswain his gun unholstered and the two marine guards each lean their weapons out of both sides of the cabin, the muzzles pointing toward opposite shores. Finally the gunnery officer orders me to jump up on the boat's stern and stand at parade rest. I was scared shit before, now I may have to ask someone to pass me the toilet paper.

Up on the stern I think of this, this preparation done as though I am the sacrifice. I assume the parade rest position, but then look around trying to hide the look of stark terror I know is on my face. I see blue water, the green jungle, my boat and the automatic weapons. I wonder almost out loud why I don't have one, and grow so angry that I wish I could snatch a weapon and do away with these officers and marines. My God, I am going to die, you mother fuckers. Suddenly, the flag whips between my legs and flaps ominously, wrapping itself around my legs and swathing my genitals, a death shroud.

Bargaining

I am on one of my many early morning walks. It's Sunday. Winter floods all the senses. I walk as usual across Smith Street, down Butler, across Court, along Kane and finally cross over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and onto Columbia Street. I walk south. The neighborhood changes from Carroll Gardens to Red Hook. Buildings are in deserted and collapsed states. Lumber, bricks, garbage are scattered amid oil splotches and dog shit. Abandoned shopping carts look as though they were tossed by a tornado against a rusting chain link fence, and curbs sinking into the gutter blur the distinction between sidewalk and street. It's Beirut, Baghdad, Brooklyn. It's not a movie, but as usual I think I am in one.

It is frigid, but a man, a Rambo styled bandana tied around his head, naked to the waist, sleek and muscular, emerges from under a broken stairway. He stops to watch me. I remind myself, since there isn't another soul on the block in either direction, that I have two six pound weights in my hands. If he takes steps in my direction, it's either him or me. During this rush of terror I have no other thought and just pump my arms like a prize fighter and continue moving. The feeling is the same as taking off in airplane. You can't back up. Mercifully he disappears beneath his stairway like a troll.

By the time I reach Carroll Street to traverse the footbridge back over the BQE to civilization, back through Carroll Gardens, I've convinced myself that I'm just a paranoid. But as I climb the steps of the bridge the incident becomes a message. St. Stephen's church on the other side of the bridge tolls its bell heavily. Blung. Blung. Blung. It repeats for several minutes. Beneath the walkway, the cars and trucks roll thickly and noisily even at this hour, most heading up and out of the blackened pit of the BQE toward the open air Gowanus Expressway. Two large green signs with white lettering point the ways. I'm humbled by the bells and overwhelmed by the traffic noise. I turn around to see the sun's winter brightness, low on the horizon blotting out the distance that the east bound traffic is heading into. I'm praying for forgiveness and salvation, suddenly and I see it as a long take with deep focus.

Depression

I'm in Seward Park High School. This is a famous old school on the lower east side just south of Delancey Street on Essex. I'm there for a civil service exam. All test takers are hustled into an auditorium, a high-ceilinged, arching structure. Sunlight streams in through the sandy colored windows. We're made to sit on peeling laminated seats for nearly an hour, and then given instructions by a bald man who reminds me of Ed Koch. The first question he fields is about toilet availability. He pauses and looks around, beckoning laughter with his wry look. I'm unwilling even to smile as I'm overtaken with my thoughts. I look around; nearly everyone looks between 40 and 50. About forty years ago we would have been in a similar auditorium, acting out our thoughts instead of thinking them.

We're dismissed to our testing rooms, row by row, and in silence, and I'm reminded of church services that I attended when we would get up row by row to receive communion. We follow one another through the hallways, which deepen the mystery for me, up winding dirty gray stairways, worn with a century of foot falls, past the wire meshed windows, up to our rooms on the fourth floor. So this is what it's like, our final hour already passed, I think to myself, as I slide into a seat joined to a desk and feel a millennium's worth of frozen hard gum stuck to the underside. Fade to black.

Acceptance

I am at Shea stadium. What can be here to disturb my imagination? Then it happens, something I have witnessed at least a million times. For both teams it's a meaningless game, both being out of the pennant race and it's the end of September. The game is tied in the bottom of the ninth. There are two out. Runners are on second and third. The batter, not a bad hitter, has a three and two count. The pitcher puts his foot on the rubber, leans forward and looks into the catcher for the sign. All in attendance, about three thousand of us are on our feet. We all should have left a long time ago but they’ll be no more baseball for us until next year. The pitcher takes the sign, and then takes a deep breath. He looks over to the runner at third. Will he forget him and just pitch to the hitter? Anyone who would try to steal home in this game would have to just be crazy. It's not worth it. Or is it?

The pitcher works from the set position anyway then releases the pitch. It's an outside fastball, but too close to the hitter’s zone to let it blow by. He swings. The ball is fouled up to his right into an empty upper deck. The ball bounces among the empty seats, rolls down the stairs and disappears. I stare after it lost in thought. No one goes chasing the ball. I turn back to the game but too late to see the batter strike out. The game goes into extra innings, but I've suddenly lost interest. Where has the ball disappeared to? No one has pursued it. Clearly it was only a foul in an unimportant game. Even the baseball maniacs who would show up for a game like this don't want it. For that minute I see it as the long and final take before the end.

But it’s not a satisfactory end. What is wrong with that foul ball that it should be ignored and shunned as it was except for my eyes that followed it? As a ball it started out pretty much the same as all the others. It had a cork center, surrounded by two layers of rubber. It was wrapped in gray and black twine and dipped in a gluey substance. The two halves of horsehide, looking like figure eights, had been hand-sewn with ninety-six stitches. And at its beginning it was a brand new spanking baseball, snowy white, with raised red stitches and a black logo, weighing in at 5 1/4 ounces and nine and a quarter inches of spherical circumference. An auspicious beginning, its chance come round, a misguided then forgotten hit.

Unfortunately after writing this, I'm facing death left with one nagging almost childish question: What is the relationship of one ordinary baseball, that goes foul, to that of the entire universe? So I am brought back to Strauss, to art. Deny. Deny. There's no money in accepting the inevitable.

Is climate change causing hurricanes

I am not a climate change denier. The planet overall gets warmer every year. Wild animals are dying as a result. The Oceans are becoming saturated with carbon dioxide.  It is happening according to science inquiry and proof, but it is still a theory. But like any scientific theory it must be proven to be falsifiable. Statements and theories that are not falsifiable are unscientific.  In other words an outlier can determine that a scientific theory is false. For example, at one time it was believed that all swans are white therefore all swans will always be white. That is until black swans were seen. Hence, this outlier turned that theory on its head and forced some new inquiry and theory. The scientific philosopher Karl Popper claimed that in order for a theory to be scientific there must be limits to theory and that it must be part of the logical cornerstone of scientific inquiry. Otherwise a theory that is considered ironclad and unchanging is pseudo science. 

So to my main point.  It's not as if catastrophic weather events hadn't occurred before in human history. We can go back to some horrid events before climate change had a scientific basis and fostered theories that became part of the public imagination.  Yet these days somehow every miserable death dealing, excessive rebuilding cost weather event is casually attributed to climate change by many. Are these events more frequent?  No they are not. Some years have always been worse or better than others.  For example in 1839 it was estimated that a cyclone killed up to 300,000 people in India. The nine of the ten worst U.S. hurricanes occured before global warming was added to our list of woes.

1900 Great Galveston Hurricane
1928 OkeeChobee Hurricane
2005 Hurricane Katrina
1893 Chenière Caminada Hurricane
1893 Sea Islands Hurricane
1881 Georgia/South Carolina Hurricane
1967 Hurricane Audrey
1935 Great Labor Day Hurricane (Islamorada)
1856 Last Island Hurricane
1926 Great Miami Hurricane)

These disasters these days certainly cost more to fix their destruction.   In terms of hurricanes more people are building and living along coasts than ever before. So naturally it will be awful for them. How much can be attributed to the media and their experts constantly saying "we can't say definitively that it is caused by climate change," thereby leaving the door open to speculation. Yet no hurricane historically has ever exceeded 190 mph, a category 5. Are they getting worse? Consider that a no.  And what of the reporters standing in the blasting wind and pouring rain with ocean breakers behind them ---what is the point? To entertain us? It's bad! But these days you've had ample opportunity to know a hurricane is coming your way. Prepare. Seek shelter. Stay indoors where it is safe.  And for God sake will the media stop giving us second by second reports that don't change second by second. This is why the National Weather Service gives a new report only every three hours and that usually coincides with a hurricane hunter plane flying through the storm. Sure one could change the channel except all your friends are talking about it with the surety that they are just as knowledgeable as climate scientists. 

And then there's the politicians. And the climate deniers and the climate absolutists. So much of it makes an unschooled largely ignorant public go in circles. There will always be sides. Maybe that's human nature. There are people who still believe the earth is flat, that the moon landings were all staged, that some super being created the earth, the solar system, the galaxies and the universe in 7 days, that the Judeo-Christian bible is the only law, that white is the superior race, that taking vitamin supplements will make up for the nutrition we don't get in processed food, that vaccinations cause autism, that might makes right and so on. (Not to mention "the check is in the mail")

We rely on truth to help us through our lives. An interesting quote from a classic 1958 science fiction movie called "The Fly" was uttered by a character played by Vincent Price. He said "The search for truth is our most important endeavor yet it is our most dangerous." I'll take the danger in seeking the truth because that is all I can believe.   

Here's some of the problems as I see it.

According to an essay written by Jacob Levy, McGill professor of Political Theory, Donald Trump's words are doing far more damage to the political institutions of the United States and the institutions outside of government not just in the United States but countries in which the U.S. has a partnership. Further, those countries' governments take those words in and know that they have to set policies based on what is being said as well as the actions taken because Donald Trump is President of the United States. 

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/the-weight-of-the-words/

Consider though that both right and left, the more moderate of those extremes, believe that it is possible that once Trump is gone that everything will go back to where it once was. The attitudes being that Trump's words are merely distractions and that the institutions remain. Checks and balances are working and that the country has survived worse events and periods in the past. But in fact words matter and ideas have consequences. Among conservatives, "Tear down this wall" "Radical Islamic Terrorism"  have had its effects. Go back to the end of WWII and Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech had an effect on the entire world for decades.  

For example if Trump survives his administration or even if it is aborted, his words have created situations within ICE that would allow more anti-immigrant agents latitude to be abusive towards their captives. Other ICE agents who may not agree with these actions may leave and even worse behaving agents will be hired.  An entire culture will be in place that will take a very long time to be undone. Currently the State department is losing good diplomatic corps individuals and no one is replacing them.  It's the same in the Justice department. Eventually only the worst elements will rise to the top and set in place a culture that can't be undone even in the same time that it took to get them there. 

We expect comedians to lead the way by making fun of Trump.  They pick on his hair. They pick on his marital situations, They make jokes about his family. They make fun that Trump doesn't read, that he watches Fox news, that he walks around in a bathrobe, that maybe he suffers from Alzheimer's, that he tweets ridiculous things and they are called distractions. There is no end to editorial cartoons getting in on the action. And lots of money is being made as well by this form of entertainment.  But leading can't be done by comedy.  By exposing these matters as jokes our sophisticated selves are in on the joke and that the damage that has been done by Trump's words and actions, ridiculous as some might be, has been exposed and has now gone away.  We can not entertain ourselves out of this morass that the country finds itself in. There is real damage that is being done to institutions and the culture is being radically altered by Trump's words. We can not take these things as distractions or as matters to tickle our fancy any more.  His words attack the Justice Department.  His words cause fears of nuclear conflict to be a threat. His words encourage attacks by extreme right wing actors. His words help to legitimize racism.  It is a slippery slope from demagogic expressions to autocracy to dictatorship and the subjugation of almost two and half centuries of law as the governmental institutions roll themselves up and roll over time and time again.  

What has been done since the election campaign, the elections and the year plus that Trump has been in office can not be undone in the same amount of time. We will not go back overnight to the way things were. It could take decades.        

An immigrant's life was no walk in the Park

An immigrant's life is not easy. Everyone believes or so it seems there was some golden time when it was simple, easy and good.  It wasn't.  It certainly was less than easy street for my 4 grandparents. My Father's parents came from Sicily. My grandmother hardly spoke English but was incredibly sweet and caring. She cooked wonderful meals.  Even during WWII she never worked a job outside of raising 5 kids and her first died before he was one. I don't think she was ever a citizen.  My grandfather became a legal citizen almost 50 years after he came to the U.S., spoke 3 maybe 4 languages, Italian, French, Spanish and English and ultimately worked for the IRT (before it was the TA) at a power station. (He framed his citizenship paper and hung it on the wall in their parlor).  When he first came to the U.S. he was a stevedore and worked at different ports along the Mississippi. When he first lived in NYC  he made 75 cents a day shoveling coal for Con Ed. He could speak English quite well except he normally wouldn't unless he had to do business with some anglo. I don't know if either my Father's Father or my Father's Mother ever went to school.  I wasn't very close to either of them so I never found out that much about them. They were both hardworking people as was my entire extended family.  

My Mother's Mother lived with us. She spoke 4 languages too, English, Hungarian, German and Yiddish.  She never finished the Hungarian equivalent of 8th grade but she taught herself to read English as well as speak it.  I remember how she used to read the Daily News with a magnifying glass. In her dotage she wore glasses for nearsightedness but didn't have reading glasses.  She came to the U.S. when she was 13 and worked as a servant for her "aunt" in Pittsburgh. She came from a large family but I think she was sold as an indentured servant. I'll never know for sure. She ran away to NYC when she was 15, got married when she was 16 to a Hungarian who worked as a window washer. They lived in small apartments, on the lower East Side, raised 4 children, actually she raised them by herself because my grandfather left them. And she also worked factory jobs to support her and her children.  I met him once on a street corner when I was with my grandmother and he gave me a dollar. I was only about five then but I remember that.  I think he would give my grandmother money when he could hang on to it and wasn't drinking it away. She wasn't more than five feet tall but she was tough as nails and as mean as a billy goat when she had to be and she wasn't afraid of anything or anyone. But when it came to me I could do no wrong. It was from her that I learned what unconditional love meant.    

When my grandfather died he was already eligible for Social Security so my Grandmother could collect his Social Security when she became eligible except she wasn't a citizen. I don't know if she needed to be one but she wanted to do it.  She filled out the forms or actually I helped her, I was 11 by then, and she had to go to some court in Mineola and I went with her on the train and ultimately she was made a citizen. There was no big ceremony.  She was just sworn in. That was April 12, 1955. Why do I remember that date? She said it was the same day FDR died 10 years earlier and she adored FDR.  That was over 40 years after she arrived in the U.S. She was more my Mother than my actual Mother and she is the one from whom I got all my attitude. 

Comment on Social Media shaming

"If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion." --George Orwell. "The Freedom of the Press"

My Comment. Yes it is still true for publishers and editors but today with the advent of the internet and of course social media, there are many people who take to social media to rub the noses in the dirt of those speaking or writing what they believe to be the truth or the heart of a matter or to take an unpopular position and it has now become our most savage freedom of speech attack, that not even the first amendment can protect. It becomes a matter of social shaming to the point where individuals lose jobs, lose friends and if they are lucky only ostracized by the "offended" communities and their supporters. The truth whatever it may be is unimportant. We live in a society (the USofA) that is supposedly proud of speaking the truth, even has an amendment to its constitution that guarantees the right to speak, to write, to believe, to protest, but we find that the only important matter is to be on the "right or correct side" of an issue, a cause, and/or a belief. We have become a society of one way streets and at some point the end of a one way street is often a dead end or possibly an unplanned trip into a river, a lake or an ocean.

The Freedom of the Press George Orwell (Original preface to Animal Farm)

THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, but was not written down until about the end of 1943. By the time when it came to be written it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it published (in spite of the present book shortage which ensures that anything describable as a book will ‘sell’), and in the event it was refused by four publishers. Only one of these had any ideological motive. Two had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political colour. One publisher actually started by accepting the book, but after making the preliminary arrangements he decided to consult the Ministry of Information, who appear to have warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it. Here is an extract from his letter:

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. [It is not quite clear whether this suggested modification is Mr … ‘s own idea, or originated with the Ministry of Information; but it seems to have the official ring about it – Orwell’s Note] I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand.

The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Every-one knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own.

Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.

The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky.

This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans.

This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich’s supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were simply kept out of print. In July of 1943 the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press ‘splashed’ the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich: and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued. Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war.

Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libelled in the English leftwing press, and any statement in their defence even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the USSR considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin.

One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print – I believe the review copies had been sent out – when the USSR entered the war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not a word about this has ever appeared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.

It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ‘vested interests’. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket. Again, the Catholic Church has considerable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent. A scandal involving a Catholic priest is almost never given publicity, whereas an Anglican priest who gets into trouble (e.g. the Rector of Stiffkey) is headline news.

It is very rare for anything of an anti-Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film. Any actor can tell you that a play or film which attacks or makes fun of the Catholic Church is liable to be boycotted in the press and will probably be a failure. But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understandable. Any large organization will look after its own interests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect the Daily Worker to publicize unfavourable facts about the USSR than one would expect the Catholic Herald to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking person knows the Daily Worker and the Catholic Heraldfor what they are.

What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed. This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realized, for ten years earlier than that. Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives.

On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and ‘played into the hands of’ this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and the urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalization.

The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicize famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now.

But now to come back to this book of mine. The reaction towards it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: ‘It oughtn’t to have been published’. Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book ‘ought not to have been published’ merely because it is a bad book.

After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are. The success of, for instance, the Left Book Club over a period of four or five years shows how willing they are to tolerate both scurrility and slipshod writing, provided that it tells them what they want to hear.

The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ‘Yes’. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ‘How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?’, and the answer more often than not will be ‘No’. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure.

But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it’. If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion’. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of. but by holding heretical opinions they ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.

These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen’s college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals – the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me:

Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake?

When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves!

Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.

The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?

It is important to realize that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition. Had the MOI chipped in and definitely vetoed the publication of this book, the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the USSR happens to be the current orthodoxy, and where the supposed interests of the USSR are involved they are willing to tolerate not only censorship but the deliberate falsification of history. To name one instance. At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World – a first-hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution – the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist Party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it.

Some years later the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was there was little or no protest. To many English intellectuals it seemed quite a natural thing to, do.

And this tolerance or [of?] plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech – the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

By the known rules of ancient liberty.

The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism.

According to those pacifists, all violence is evil and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain.

I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country – it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France,  and it is not so in the USA today [i.e. 1945(!)] – it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.

 

The Dictatorship of the Populists

On this day June 14, 2019, flag day, it has become fully evident that we, the U.S., is ever so moving  towards dictatorship. More than 1/3 of this country supports that, probably prefers it in their heart of hearts. We have the diehard Trumpians, and we have other Republicans who prefer to be loyal to their party and hence the President because Trump has been doing everything they like and want. So they are supporters as well. They believe that if they remain on his side that he will remain on theirs.

Trump's main thrust in these matters is to show that he can be a strong man like Putin, like Duterte, like populists in Europe, The UK (though there is still an EU, it is the plan by these populists to destroy the EU, Brexit being the first break). There is also Kim Jung Un. How Trump loves Kim Jung Un. And then there's China. He may seem to be doing battle with China, but there is no doubt in my mind that he loves what Xi Jinping has achieved in terms of control and is now dictator for life. (oh excuse me, President for life, as there are no more term limits). 

I am by nature a pessimist and in my pessimism I see the 2020 election not occuring. Some manufactured crisis will push Republicans and yes some Democrats will join to suspend these elections. During WWII presidential elections were not suspended nor any other elections were suspended. In fact not in any war the U.S. has been engaged in has an election been suspended. Even during the Civil War the worst it got in terms of executive control was to suspend habeas corpus.

The populist madness has taken hold in the world and its aim is chaos and destruction of whatever government claims to be "democratic" while destroying current rules of law. The laws that will eventually emerge will be in the guise of "military control" after populists will have had enough of the chaos and know they have complete control. In the U.S. the President is the Commander in Chief of military forces. That's the one part of the U.S. Constitution that will remain. There will be no need for a "Seven Days in May" attempt by the generals. The stage has been set, the actors know their lines and the audience awaits. And then where will be?