>>On the other hand when he let the politics dominate
>>the result was awful. That Lehrstucke where they kill
>>a guy for the good of the party (can't remember the
>>name. Its set in China) for example. Lovely stuff.
>
>Au contraire. Die Massnehme (The Measures Taken) is actually a great
>little play, very moving in a Noh drama sort of way, raises all
>sorts of hard questions about the choice between discipline and
>inchoate impulses to do good that also quite apposite today, with
>the antiglobalization movement. Ohe language is pure and beautiful,
>better German has never been written, it's crystalline. One needn't
>agree with Brecht's "solution," but it's not a simple justification
>for the purges. The Young Comrade isn't shot because he disagrees
>with the line. but because he's blown the other comrades' cover and
>they're fleeing in hostile territory. Moreover, the play is cast in
>the form of an inquiry into his death; he wasn't "disappeared" or
>treated as a nonperson or indeed as an enemy of the people, and his
>killing is presented as something that has to be looked into and
>justified to a reviewing authority. You could in fact takethe play
>as a criticism of the Stalin terror. Brecht has some poems from
>around that time that suggest that he was very uncomfortable with
>the terror.
In _A Dying Colonialism_ (pp. 24-26), Frantz Fanon raises a question similar to the one examined in _The Measures Taken_:
***** The National Liberation Front, at the time when the people were undergoing the most massive assaults of colonialism, did not hesitate to prohibit certain forms of action and constantly to remind the fighting units of the international laws of war. In a war of liberation, the colonized people must win, but they must do so cleanly, without "barbarity." The European nation that practices torture is a blighted nation, unfaithful to its history. The underdeveloped nation that practices torture thereby confirms its nature, plays the role of an underdeveloped people. If it does not wish to be morally condemned by the "Western nations," an underdeveloped nation is obliged to practice fair play, even while its adversary ventures, with a clear conscience, into the unlimited exploration of new means of terror.
An underdeveloped people must prove, by its fighting power, its ability to set itself up as a nation, and by the purity of every one of its acts, that it is, even to the smallest detail, the most lucid, the most self-controlled people. But it is all very difficult....
...No, it is not true that the Revolution has gone to the lengths to which colonialism has gone.
But we do not on this account justify the immediate reactions of our compatriots. We understand them, but we can neither excuse them nor reject them.
Because we want a democratic and a renovated Algeria, because we believe one cannot rise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed.
The people who condemn us or who blame us for these dark aspects of the Revolution know nothing of the terrible problem faced by the chief who must take disciplinary action against a patriot guilty, for example, of having killed a notorious traitor...without having received orders to do so. This man who must be judged in the absence of a code, of any law, only by the conscience that each one has of what is allowable and what is forbidden, may not be a new man in the combat group. He may have given, over a period of months, unmistakable proofs of abnegation, of patriotism, of courage. Yet he must be judged. The chief, the local representative of the ruling body, must apply the directives. He must sometimes be the accuser, the other members of the unit having been unwilling to accuse this brother before the revolutionary court.
It is not easy to conduct, with a minimum of errors, the struggle of a people, sorely tried by a hundred and thirty years of domination, against an enemy as determined and as ferocious as French colonialism.... *****
If works like _The Measures Taken_ look to some like "awful works" rather than works about awful problems to which there is no easy solution, it may be because, today, we have no audience for such works in the West; such works demand an audience who can appreciate the difficulty of the problems examined, because they have or may in the future confront the same problems. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>