[lbo-talk] Re: How Americans would respond

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun May 1 12:29:06 PDT 2005


Turbulo at aol.com wrote:
>
>
> There's an old story about a Communist recruiting pitch, delivered
> before a meeting in the 1930s. The speaker says something like:
>
> "Our Italian comrades languish in Mussolini's dungeons! Our German
> comrades are working their lives out from dawn to dusk at Buchenwald,
> under the unrelenting gaze of brutal Nazi kapos! Our South African
> comrades are being stangled to death with chicken wire in their cells!
> Brothers and Sisters, join the Communist Party!

(I had a response written to this yesterday when suddenly my monitor gave out.)

This is/was a good joke, but also perhaps a useful point taken without irony I think. (From the same era, another remark of similar tone: "A Communist is a dead man on leave.") Consider a somewhat analogous context, that of pacifist propaganda. Such propaganda -- I'm using the word neutrally, in the sense it had for the 2d international, not the sense given it by goebbels -- such propaganda traditionally emphasizes the horror and misery of war. In a superb essay from the 1930s reprinted in _Philosophy of Literary Form_, Kenneth Burke questioned that perspective. Archibald MacLeish had attacked anti-war propaganda for not showing the "human side" of war, for being oversimplified. Burke comments:

****MacLeish may be confusing two issues. He seems to take it for granted that the new book, edited by Stallings, is about the last war [WW ONE]. Hence, recalling by personal experience that the War had its profoundly human side, he complains that the new book is an incomplete record, artistically dishonest. . . .Thus, a picture of the War should also include its noble and adventurous side. . . .Yet it is highly questionable whether the true subject of _The First World War_ is an actual war at all. The very title would suggest that it is about an anticipated war. And I think that Cowley is more nearly correct on this point, since he is concerned with our responses to the possibility of war rather than with our responses to a war already gone into history. Now: anticipated events are quite properly idealized in art. It is a commonplace of psychology, human and universal enough for any poet to draw upon, that we expect things to be either much better or much worse than they turn out to be. . . .

Is there a kind of naive realism lurking at the bottom of MacLeish's exhortation? Though at one point he complains against Marxian "absolutism," does he not himself grow absolutist in assuming that the War possesses one definite, absolute character which must remain unchanged throughout history? To the people on Morgan's preferred lists, Morgan has a different "character" than he has for the people not on his preferred list. . . .And if our relationship to war is different now from what it was in 1916, why must we attempt to uphold, by strange canons of "truth," the "1916 character" of war?

Are not wars what we make of them -- like stones and trees, like Napoleon and the history of Greece? ANd might we very humanly want to make a different thing . . . ?

Hence, I hold that MacLeish has been discussing a poet's response to a past actual war whereas the question is really about an audience's response to a future anticipated war. Yet strangely enough, when we consider the matter from this point of view, MacLeish's plea for a total picture of war has much to be said in its favor. There are some reasons for believing that the response to a _human_ picture of war will be socially more wholesome than our response to an _inhuman_ one. It is questionable whether the feelings of horror, repugnance, hatred would furnish the best groundwork as a deterrent to war. They are extremely militaristic attitudes, being in much the same category of emotion as one might conceivably experience when plunging his bayonet into the flesh of an enemy. And they might well provide the firmest basis upon which the "heroism" of a new war could be erected. The greater the horror, the greater the thrill and honor of enlistment. I can imagine an upstanding young fellow, when _Der Tag_ is again upon us, pointing to photographs of mutilated bodies, and saying quietly but firmly to his sweeheart, who adores him: "See those? That is what war is. Dearie, this day I have enlisted in the service of my country." (_The Philosophy of Literary Form_ [Louisiana SUP, 1941], pp. 236-39)******

It is even possible, I would add, that recruitment to almost anything (that requires active involvement rather than passive acceptance) works best when it centers the possibility (even probability) of defeat. The evacuation of Dunkirk (or the horror of the Australian experience at Gallipoli) are remembered and celebrated more than most victories. And do not we celebrate the Paris Commune?

Carrol

P.S. The question in the subject line is not a very gripping one. No one really ever has a very good idea of how large masses of people would respond to any particular event in the future. I really like Mao on this. "Marxists have no crystal ball."



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