Revisiting the BBC's 2003 Cambridge Spies. Four privileged insiders in Britain, two gay, two straight, caught up in their high-minded sentimental Communist trance, spending their careers damaging their own country. Dead set against fascism, pulling instead for Stalin's Moscow and its soul-destroying illusion that killed 100 million people. Loving the masses and classes of the common people without ever really knowing any of them.
Although it formally condemns them, the series also wants us to care about them, understand them, sympathize with their hatred of privilege and poverty. They were Communists. Can you imagine the BBC ever producing something asking us to take a similar attitude toward fascists. Or even --or especially-- the contemporary British Right? The BNP? Enoch Powell? In the conventional piety of our time, Marxism is ambiguous, but anything Right Wing is simply known to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Evil.
Yet eros drives these men, too. Friendship, very much. And sex. The mixing pros and cons thereof. Perhaps it is a weakness of mine, but it mitigates, humanizes their treason a little. But only just a little.
I am reminded of other Brits, of the exchange in Man For All Seasons, when Thomas More discovers that Richard Rich betrayed him in order to become attorney general for Wales.
For Marx? For Marx?
Although it formally condemns them, the series also wants us to care about them, understand them, sympathize with their hatred of privilege and poverty. They were Communists. Can you imagine the BBC ever producing something asking us to take a similar attitude toward fascists. Or even --or especially-- the contemporary British Right? The BNP? Enoch Powell? In the conventional piety of our time, Marxism is ambiguous, but anything Right Wing is simply known to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Evil.
Yet eros drives these men, too. Friendship, very much. And sex. The mixing pros and cons thereof. Perhaps it is a weakness of mine, but it mitigates, humanizes their treason a little. But only just a little.
The winged god Eros rules
ruthlessly
throughout the earth,
inflaming
Zeus himself,
wounded
with unquenched fires.
Ares the war god has felt those flames.
Hephaistos, too,
he who forges the three-forked thunderbolts,
and Apollo, the divine sun,
sure archer himself,
is pierced by a younger god
of surer aim,
the bane
both of heaven and earth.
Seneca, Phaedra
1st century AD
I am reminded of other Brits, of the exchange in Man For All Seasons, when Thomas More discovers that Richard Rich betrayed him in order to become attorney general for Wales.
It profiteth a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world...but for Wales, Rich? For Wales?
For Marx? For Marx?
2 comments:
I thought you'd find this interesting:
Death by Utopia
http://www.mostlyodd.com/death-by-utopia/
and this:
The German-Jewish critical theorist Herbert Marcuse is referred to as the "Father of the New Left". He rejected the theory of class struggle and the Marxist concern with labor, instead claiming, according to Leszek KoĊakowski, that since "all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant." He regarded the realization of man's erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, which inspired the utopias of Jerry Rubin and others.[10] Another prominent New Left thinker, Ernst Bloch, believed that socialism would prove the means for all human beings to become immortal and eventually create God.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
Why does all of the shittiest academic theorization that I hate the most come from Germany? Why are all of the thinkers that I hate the most, every single thinker who I wish had died before they reached adulthood, German, German-Jewish, or anti-cathoic secularist-French (Luther, Marx, Hitler, Marcuse, Bloch, Foucault, etc, etc, et fucking cetera). Germany is the center of the world's problems, starting with its destruction of the Roman Empire (and the protestant revolution, the Franco-prussian war, ww1, ww2, the post-war Liberalism, and the COMPLETE AND UTTER DISASTER that german 'theologians' have turned Catholic theology into - I literally refuse to read german-catholic theology now, I can't even explain how fucking schizophrenic and completely ungrounded it it).
Oh, and more British multicultural idiocy
http://www.autoblog.com/2013/01/02/bentley-fires-staff-priest-before-christmas/
Post a Comment