Odious figures of the totalitarian regimes are not objects of the cultural heritage of either national or local significance
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Samizdata quote of the dayJanuary 15th, 2015 |
 20 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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But didn’t Mussolini make the trains run on time? We could do with lots of that, here in Australia!
Che? He may have personally authorised the slaughter of journalists and gay men while in charge of a prison but he lhas been part of student aesthetics because he was photogenic. Mao and his thoughts caused the deaths of thirty million but Mao shirts were once the highest statement of righton-ness. Never underestimate the willful blindness of the cultural avant garde.
@Ljh, wearers of Mao shirts are not “blind”, they know exactly what they are wearing. They are essentially and deliberately saying “You’ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes”.
Mr Putin is not a Marxist (he actually less faith in this belief system than Mr Obama does)- Mr Putin is just a criminal thug.
However, the drunken scum Mr Putin has organised to attack the Ukraine dance round the statues of “Lenin” and the other Soviet vermin who murdered millions of Ukrainians.
Destroy these statues of evil doers – destroy them all.
Note well who countries honour.
China honours Mao – the worse mass murderer of all time.
Mao’s regime murdered a lot more than 30 million – see “Mao: The Untold Story”, or see the historical works of Frank Dikotter.
And the present regime still honours his name – his face is everywhere, including on the Chinese money that we are all being told to love so much.
This does matter.
While a nation honours great evil doers – including the worst evil doer of all time, it should not be trusted.
Can’t disagee with the quote.
But I’m never sure whether “Mao and his thoughts caused the deaths of thirty million” & “Mao’s regime murdered a lot more than 30 million ” is much help to anything.
Neither Mao, nor Hitler for that matter, seem to have sought personal aggrandisement. They seemed to have genuinely believed, by their own criteria, that they were leading their people towards a better future. There’s not much evidence they ever killed anyone, personally. There’s a degree of “ends justifies the means” in most things. Great generals in the best of causes have to deal with “acceptable casualties”.
It’s the ideas do the damage. Maybe if Mao had used his talents at Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, he’d now be the revered architect of Chinese capitalism. Hitler as an inspirational liberal.
Over demonisation of the leaders leads to “Well, the idea was sound but the implementation was faulty. It needs another chance”. Pretty much the standard excuse, by communists, for the repeated failure of communism. No?
I dunno. I think there are a lot of useful idiots. The sort of idiots who will go on a Gay Pride march wearing a Che shirt. I have met them. They just think socialism = good and look no further. Paul, the thing is you are politically and historically smart and maybe you ascribe these traits to others. It is possible (very easy) to do evil without knowing. And that is not me excusing or being utopian. Quite the reverse. It is terrifying. Horrific things can be done by otherwise good people. Scary but true.
@Nick “It is possible (very easy) to do evil without knowing. ”
And there’s the ” I was only following orders” mob who know it’s evil & positively delight in it. But you don’t often find them running things. Unless it’s departments in the UK Welfare State.
The quoted extract from Mr. Kirilenko’s comment completely misrepresents its meaning. As presented, the meaning is rather ambiguous. Is it that such odious figures aren’t “objects of cultural heritage” or that they shouldn’t be? If the former, it would be simply wrong and obviously contrary to objective reality (see some of the comments above). If that latter, well I suppose that’s a noble aspiration but see the previous sentence. Either way, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
But his actual quote was that monuments to odious figures aren’t objects of cultural heritage. And that makes perfect sense; a statue of Lenin is of no cultural significance in Ukraine. But by editing out the word “monuments” the quote as presented changes “odious figures” from the object of a preposition to the subject of the sentence, and thus completely changes the meaning. (Sort of like saying “money is the root of all evil” when the actual quote is “love of money is the root of all evil”.)
That is why the quotes of the day almost always have links, Laird.
And I appreciate those links, Perry, but even so the quotes as presented shouldn’t be edited so as to materially alter their meaning.
P.S.: Do you like my new gravatar?
It does nothing of the sort and yes respectively.
I find that I end up imagining that contributors’ gravatars are in fact their faces. It helps to keep track of people and build an image.
Well I look eerily like mine, Ed!
I can attest that Laird looks nothing like Muhammad, and Perry bears very little resemblance to a hippo. If any, really.
(No need to thank me).
I’m not sure I can continue to frequent a site with non-representative avatars. If I knew how to do one, mine would be a hammock, even though the few times I tried one I quickly found myself on the ground wondering what happened.
Cultures at various times and places have adopted and venerated all sorts of grotesque monstrosities, human or spiritual, and believed any number of gruesome ideas, usually in the pursuit of power over others.
It is the love of power that is the true golden calf, the actual root of much of the evil in the world.
But the monuments to power-lust are mass graves, not pretty statues.
I have a Che shirt. There’s a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. 😀
Bloke and Nick.
Yes the people who actually the doing the murdering deserve blame – no “I was only obeying orders” defence.
But the people giving the orders (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao…..) deserve the blame also.
As for “I did not know what I was doing was wrong”.
Bleep, bleep, bleeping bleep.
I was not arguing that they weren’t culpable. All of them. What I was saying is quite a few probs think they are doing good. Seriously. If you wanna tackle this you need to understand it. That is not to condone it but these folks think they are doing good. An awful lot of evil is done by people through ignorance, idiocy and cowardice.
Yup. Wot NickM said. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are many very nice people I like who set out to ‘do good’. But Dunning-Kruger and a complete lack of self-awareness yields spectacularly destructive hubris. These people are genuinely contrite when they do harm but will latch on to any narrative that allows them to avoid accountability and pin the consequences on somebody else.