Scribes (Used to be USA/USSR)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Wojtek wrote:
>>Ditto!  Without the media, this "union" would not survive to the next
>>winter.
>>
>>A related thought: the production of propaganda hinges on the cooptation of
>>the scribbling class.
>>Stalin and Co. made a grave mistake by antagonizing the scribbling class,
>>and they paid for it dearly - by having a significant segment of opinion
>>makers against them.  The US ruling class made no such mistake, and with
>>the brief interlude of the McCarthy era, they coopted the scribling class
>>to their propaganda project.  That may explain not only the enormous
>>success of the US propaganda machine - after all it employs the best minds
>>money can buy - but the unusual hostility of the US intellectual
>>establishment to the x-Block or China (as compared to much more brutal
>>fascist regimes in S. America and Asia).  It was a genuine expression of
>>the scribbling class international solidarity with the "oppressed"
>>breathern in E. Europe, or now in China and Tibet.  At the same time, the
>>US Brahmin class did not show proportional concern about slaughtered
>>workers  or peasants in S. America or Indonesia.
>
>Hmmm. Co-optation of intellectuals: my very favorite subject.
>
>I'm not sure, though, how far I go with you as to Stalin and Co. The 
>conditions I remember in Romania is that any intellectual who was 
>willing to play the game had a pretty great life: in particular, 
>they got better housing, almost free meals, nice vacations, and, 
>best of all, the chance to ply their craft/art/discipline full time. 
>The cost: no complaints about the system; no solidarity with the 
>working class; support for the party hacks.
>
>My mother was a writer (children's books, screenplays, novels). Most 
>of what I remember about her and her equally privileged friends is 
>that while they wrote poems, stories, performed plays, wrote lit 
>crit, etc., professed at the university, they constantly carped 
>about their "repression"--this, literally, from villas and castles 
>that had been expropriated from the former ruling class and reserved 
>expressly for the use of artists/intellectuals. They gathered in the 
>evenings to play bridge or listen to illegal tapes of Charles 
>Asnavour and other West European artists, and fantasized about the 
>fame and riches that were denied to them because they were prevented 
>from travelling to or moving to the West. They talked a lot about 
>freedom of expression, but what they wanted to express mostly was 
>their solidarity with the fashionable artists and thinkers of the 
>west. Some of them were able to obtain special grants from Western 
>institutions and universities and were able to travel and 
>teach/perform abroad. This was almost always a limited stay: just 
>long enough to give them a taste of life in the west, the life, they 
>inferred, which would be waiting for them if they could manage to 
>emigrate. The reality, of course, was otherwise: for when they got 
>here, became citizens, and were no longer representatives of 
>oppressed intellectuals, they got to line up for the jobs/grants 
>same as everyone else. A rude shock to be sure.
>
>And, as Doug mentions, a carrot was thrown on this side of the 
>curtain as well. No need for it any more though. What WAS 
>accomplished on both sides of the curtain was that intellectuals 
>were persuaded that their interests were opposed to those of the 
>working class. It was like those ninteenth century novels, where the 
>tutor sometimes gets join the aristocracts for dinner, but the 
>gardner never does. In this regard, I don't know that the hostility 
>of western intellectuals toward ex-communist countries was about 
>solidarity with their  oppressed intellectual counterparts. I think 
>it was more a question of the safety the anti-communist position and 
>their innate fear of the kind of revolution that might potentially 
>dissolve the boundary between the work of the mind and the work of 
>the body.
>
>Though I was brought up to worship intellectuals and to believe that 
>no status in life could be higher than that, I still fail to see why 
>the work of the mind is superior to the work of the body--why one 
>must always suffer at the expense of the other and why we are never 
>allowed to imagine them joined in their work. For some reason the 
>conditioning did not take.
>
>Joanna Bujes

Have you (Joanna & Wojtek) ever thought about leaving your thoughts 
on life under formerly existing socialism & especially roles of 
intellectuals in it as historical documents?  As an essay, an 
autobiography, a documentary film, a scholarly article, or whatever 
form you see fit for the subject?

Yoshie