Oops..I thought it was Russian CHICKS...
Posted on 05/08/2004 5:08:16 PM PDT by Davis
Until a few days ago I had no idea that there was such a thing as Soviet chic, a fawning nostalgic bow to the land of the Gulag: elegant cocktail party invitations adorned with Red Stars, nightclubs in New York City named Pravda and KGB and decorated with Soviet flags and crowded with hip customers sporting CCCP t-shirts. I had no idea this was going on until Bernadette Malone, a columnist for the Manchester, NH Union-Leader brought Soviet chic to my attention.
Ms. Malone rightly views with revulsion the 74 year Soviet "experiment" that slaughtered some 60 million of its citizens, is notable for secret trials, confessions extracted by torture, government controlled press, fake elections, the knock on the door in the middle of the night—the whole nine versts—together with famine and pitifully low production of wanted goods.
Why in the world would anyone remember fondly that murderous prison state asks Miss Malone? Good question. A number of answers pop into my head.
Utter ignorance of the nature of the Soviet Union is hardly likely. Hasn't everyone read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Robert Conquest's The Great Terror? Haven't they at least seen the dozens of Hollywood movies devoted to the subject? That's a joke, see, sarcasm. There were no such movies. Nevertheless, it seems to me that people who know enough to invent Soviet chic know at least the outline of the murderous nature of the Soviet Union—and don't give a damn about it.
Most of them, those Soviet chicsters, are proud to issue a pass to the reign of thug/tyrants who salted under the red flag of Marxian Socialism. After all, the intentions of Marx and Lenin and the rest were good, the best. Who can quarrel with a doctrine of peace and plenty and fairness summed up in the adage: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."
One mustn't ask how that works or why it's good. It is self-evidently good, nice, gentle, peaceful, non-competitive. Of course, it means that rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior (or at least not rewarding it) have been abandoned as has, perforce, any notion of justice. The problem of the rules by which your ability and his needs will be determined and by whom hasn't been solved. That nice gentle peaceful rule, from the able-to the needy, conceals arbitrary, brute power.
Ah, say the communist chicsters, the Soviet Union was dedicated to fairness, to equality, not to your capitalist notions of justice. True, there were excesses under Stalin, but the idea of the Soviet Union was splendid. For starters, it made no concession to greed, while your capitalist system is founded on it.
I have heard that particular piece of silliness, that greed is the foundation stone of capitalism, uttered solemnly on innumerable occasions. But greed is a personal characteristic. It didn't disappear when the Bolsheviks took over in November 1917.
Capitalism, the market system of consent and exchange, doesn't care one whit about motivation. It greets the egoist and the altruist with equal indifference. Be as greedy or as charitable (with your own resources) as you choose. Performance, not greed, is rewarded under capitalism. Greed adds not one penny to the bottom line, and, to the extent that greed distorts rational calculation and market-directed behavior, it is counter-productive.
Admirers of the Soviet Union attribute its inability to produce wanted goods, its poverty and misery, to a lack of material incentives, those having been forsworn by communism's noble desire for equality. But the Soviet Union didn't do away with incentives, it distorted them. Do you want a dacha, nylons, Levis, caviar, an orange, an apartment with your own toilet? Step this way. Do you want your poetry published, your music performed, your pictures exhibited? Step this way. It's the only way. There are no different drummers.
This is a free country, so people are free to look fondly on the grossest regimes, to think them chic, to praise the basest societal arrangements. They are free, as well to think themselves morally superior to those of us who see through their absurd pretensions and scorn them.
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Oops..I thought it was Russian CHICKS...
Uhh, no. They don't fit the template for the educational establishment.
A brilliant polemic that immediately springs to mind is the Black Book Of Communism.
Some other interesting books include Richard Pipes' history of the Soviet empire, Darkness At Noon- Bubba's favorite-and virtually any book written by David Horowitz.
If you want to see a few interesting flicks that touch on this subject, go out and get "East-West", "Canary Season"and the stunning Cuban drama "Bitter Sugar."
http://www.cafeshops.com/kncccp/
I know, it's a comedy and it stars Judy Davis, who can be mistaken for Trotsky's wife under the right circumstances; but it's a hilarious send-up of Joseph Stalin's crimes. It's also one of the few farces that actually punctures the myth of a benevolent "Uncle Joe", which we've been force-fed all these years.
It's also one of the best treatments-are there others I haven't yet seen-of the siege of Stalingrad out there. It really explored the different aspects of being a trained sniper, which aren't usually dealt with in a such a serious manner.
The movie was so good that I even suppressed my contempt for Ed Harris. He was great in that role!
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