I: Introduction

When you’re a leftist, one of the painful things you have to deal with is reconciling your political beliefs with the fact that many of the famous people out there whom you like and/or admire for their music, films, acting, writing, art, etc. often, if not usually, have either political stances you find abhorrent, or who have done despicable things in their personal lives. One simple, straightforward thing that one can say in these situations is, “I like their music/movies/acting/writing/art, not their politics…nor do I condone any personal misconduct of theirs.”

Sometimes this is easier to say that at other times.

I love Frank Zappa’s music, for example, yet other than his opposition to the American religious right, I don’t particularly care for his, as I’d describe them, libertarian-centrist views. He was dismissive of socialism and hung out with Vaclav Havel just after the ‘liberation’ of Czechoslovakia. I’m not comfortable with that, but it won’t make me stop listening to his music.

I enjoy listening to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, but his and Jimmy Page‘s screwing of underage groupies like Lori Maddox will never sit well with me, and any references to rockers drooling over underage girls in their lyrics make me uncomfortable, to put it mildly. This can be especially difficult for me if the song has a great musical groove, but questionable lyrics, as with “My Sharona,” or “Sick Again.” To enjoy such songs, I have to have a deaf ear to the words. Talk about your cognitive dissonance!

Similarly, I can admire the genius of Stanley Kubrick and his perfectionistic vision that made The Shining the great film that it was, yet I’m also deeply saddened to know how that very perfectionism drove him to be so abusive to Shelley Duvall and to drive Scatman Crothers to tears, with retake after retake. Kubrick proved you can be a genius and an asshole at the same time.

Then there’s the admirable acting talent of Kevin Spacey, uncomfortably coupled with his aggressive sexual predation on, for example, a boy as young as Anthony Rapp, a year younger than he was as of the release of Adventures in Babysitting, when you can see how young he was then.

I also like some of the writing of Camilo José Cela, and while, to be fair to him, he would eventually become critical of Francoist Spain (how could he not have been, having written novels including such controversial content as matricide, mother-son incest, etc., which surely would have incurred the government’s disapproval?), it’s saddening to know that he’d ever supported Franco’s fascism at all (as he did during the Spanish Civil War, and then became a censor for Franco in 1943).

Similarly, there’s Salvador Dali, whose art I admire, but who also showed some sympathy for Franco and Hitler, getting him duly drummed out of the Surrealist movement for it. All of this sort of thing makes me most uncomfortable.

II: Ozzy

Recently, though, I’ve had to come to grips with another person much of whose music I’ve loved, yet also who had not only awful politics…right up to his death, but who also did some really horrible things in his life.

When Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76 a week or so before the publication of this article, I did what I typically do on Facebook whenever someone famous in the arts dies, someone who impacted my life in some significant way: I did a little tribute in the form of sharing a series of YouTube videos, in Ozzy’s case, old Black Sabbath songs, one from each album from the eponymous debut to Sabotage, then one from Blizzard of Ozz and the title track from Diary of a Madman. I also shared a few Ozzy memes and obituaries.

Now, as I was doing this, it occurred to me that Ozzy, being a rich bourgeois, in all likelihood had at least a number of reactionary attitudes, none of which I’d specifically known at the time, but which surely existed. We also know, of course, that he wasn’t exactly a vegetarian…if you know what I mean. Again, as before, I reconciled myself to these vices in the usual way: my liking of his music has never been, in any way, an endorsement of his politics or a condoning of his moral faults.

Then, I started learning about these faults, and my opinion of Ozzy accordingly began to sink. He claimed he didn’t know that the bat whose head he’d bitten off at a concert was a living one, a claim I find odd. Of course, there were also the doves.

And the animal abuse didn’t end there.

When his alcohol and drug abuse were at their worst, back in the early 1980s, he shot and killed his seventeen pet cats. He confessed to this later, remorseful and realizing he needed to do something about his substance abuse; there were, however, other incidents, including other abused animals thrown up from the audience at concerts during the Diary of a Madman tour, as well as his shooting up a henhouse full of chickens.

Then, there was his almost strangling to death of his wife, Sharon.

Now, as awful as all of these incidents were, we could perhaps forgive him on account of how his extreme substance abuse had addled his brain. There is, however, something else about him that the haze of booze and drugs do not account for in any way, shape, or form…his aggressive Zionism.

He and Sharon (née Levy) opposed a BBC documentary just months before his death, being among 200 public figures signing a highly publicized letter calling for an inquiry into the documentary on the Gaza genocide. The letter accused the broadcaster of “systemic bias against Israel” because of the film’s use of a child narrator with family links to Hamas. If anything, though, the BBC, as is the case with all mainstream media, has a pro-Israel bias. From time to time, there are liberal concessions showing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but during the extremities of the ongoing genocide, even liberal supporters of the b.s. ‘two-state solution’ have no choice but to admit the truth occasionally. Such occasional concessions are not “systemic bias against Israel.”

Elsewhere, Sharon voiced opposition to a Coachella concert that featured pro-Palestinian Irish hip hop band Kneecap. Ozzy and Sharon have supported doing live shows in Israel, going against BDS. (Ozzy has also supported, in its war against Russia, the Ukrainian side, a side that is known to have Nazis in their army and government; in this connection, Ozzy also admitted to having admired Hitler–Nazism, or Zionism? It doesn’t matter when it comes to bourgeois support of fascism.)

Such support of Zionism is especially disturbing at a time when an Israeli-caused genocide is occurring, with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children, brutally murdered, displaced, children made amputees and orphans, and now, starved to death. This is not to be trivialized on account of Ozzy being one of our favourite rock stars. If you like a lot of his music, as I do, you can only feel the most grating of cognitive dissonance.

Now, I find it reasonable to assume that most, if not all, of Ozzy’s Zionism was Sharon’s influence, her being half-Jewish, and with Jewish Zionism being thickly linked with Jewish identity…hence, all the unfortunate confusion of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. (One should never forget that many of the most passionate anti-Zionists are Jews, and many of the most passionate Zionists are non-Jews.)

I find it hard to believe that Ozzy, a man whose brain was so fried by drugs and alcohol over the years, could have had any coherent set of political beliefs. He certainly claimed to be apolitical (translation: liberal). Still, his going along with Sharon does not excuse him; he may have been a druggie and a drunk, but he was also an adult, and therefore responsible for his choices.

Now, for those leftists who like neither Black Sabbath’s music, nor the music of Ozzy’s solo career, they’re free to hate him from head to toe as much as they like. For those of us who do like his music, though, and who wanted to eulogize him when he died, learning these awful things about him is painful, even heartbreaking. What can I say? The devil has the best tunes. Ozzy truly was the Prince of Darkness, in more ways than one.

Apart from his distinctive voice (including the expanding of his vocal range through the acquiring of mixed and head voice by the time Black Sabbath recorded Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), he didn’t contribute all that much to the music. Super-riff-man Tony Iommi created most of the music, as did guitar ace Randy Rhoads during Ozzy’s early solo years, those that I liked. Geezer Butler essentially wrote Sabbath’s lyrics, not Ozzy; as for his early solo career, bassist Bob Daisley wrote the lyrics. Ozzy’s musical contributions, therefore, tended to be just arranging a vocal melody, which was often just a doubling of the guitar riff (e.g., “NIB,” “Iron Man,” “Electric Funeral,” and “After Forever”).

As for his ‘crazy man’ stage persona, a lot of that was outright clownish, especially in the 1980s. Still, I’ll always enjoy all that music he sang that I grew up with as a teen. It’s just so saddening that all this other baggage, personal and political, has to be associated with him.

III: China

Well, so much for the fallen idols of Western pop culture. If it’s fair to judge the faults of a rock star for helping the Zionists out, though, it’s also fair to judge the faults of a supposedly socialist country for, in its own way, also helping Zionism.

Now, before I go into that, I want to start by pointing out that I’m not acting out of an ulterior Western imperialist motive. As a resident of Taiwan, I couldn’t be more opposed to the attempted American provocations of China to fight a war over this island in order “to liberate” it the way Russia was provoked into war with Ukraine. I don’t want to see the Communist Party of China overthrown; I want to see it purged of its dominance by its right-wing faction, the allowing of private business owners and bourgeois elements into the CPC under Jiang Zemin in the 2000s.

It’s one thing to allow the market back into China, under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, in order to build the productive forces and bring the country out of its former Third World status as the ‘sick man of Asia’ and make it into the truly impressive economic state it is in now, a rival of the US. It’s another thing entirely, once that transformation has been fully achieved, to maintain this economic way of doing things indefinitely, with extreme income inequality and the existence of a huge number of billionaires…in a socialist country? Any socialist worth his salt knows that billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, yet many Marxist-Leninists are still willing to give China a free pass.

I’m perfectly aware of the good that the Chinese government has done over the years: lifting millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty, punishing corrupt Chinese businessmen (which has included the death penalty), using much of the amassed wealth for the benefit of all Chinese (including the high-speed rail system), etc. That’s all fine and commendable, but it’s also supposed to be standard in a socialist state.

I’m also aware of the argument that, despite the bringing back of capitalism into China, it’s still legitimate socialism because the government controls the capitalists, and not vice versa, as is the case with the US. But with actual capitalists in the CPC over the past twenty years, and their resulting influence on party policy, I find it hard to believe that the government has all that much control over the country’s capitalists, with their billionaires.

China is supposed to be in an early stage of socialism, during which time capitalism is not yet fully defeated…or so the rationalization goes. Yet the CPC has been in control of the country since 1949–surely the ‘early’ stage has passed by as of now! Backward, agrarian Russia had its state capitalist NEP in the 1920s, and had gone past that by the 1930s, when Stalin came to power and pursued the achievement of socialism with the aggressiveness that we all know he pursued it with. What is slowing China down so much, when its material conditions are so much better than Russia’s were at the time?

Now, when China enables capitalism, particularly in our contemporary world, it will also, to at least some extent, enable imperialism and settler-colonialism, since in our world of late-stage capitalism, such enabling is inevitable. The enabling may not be on the scale of that of the Anglo/American/NATO empire (it’s easy not to be that bad!), but it’s bad enough, especially when a live-streamed genocide in Gaza has been going on since October of 2023.

Yes, China has had a healthy business relationship with Israel, particularly over the past two decades. This is all in spite of the CPC’s critical rhetoric against Israel’s brutal occupation and ongoing massacres of Palestinians. Note that Bernie Sanders and AOC are also critical of Israel…yet they continue to support Zionism’s ‘right to defend itself,’ which, interpreted correctly, means Israel is free to keep killing. Judge these ‘critics’ not by their words, but by their actions.

This healthy business relationship that China has with Israel helps the latter to make the money and have the electronics and machinery to function better, therefore facilitating the Zionist entity’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. In 2023, China’s exports to Israel reached $11.2 billion, and imports from China reached a record high of $13.53 billion in 2024. Key exports include electrical equipment, machinery, vehicles, and chemicals.

Israel has also recently managed to make a lot of money through exports to China. In 2023, Israel’s exports to China totaled $3.44 billion. In 2024, Israeli exports to China amounted to $2.81 billion. China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner. None of this reflects a sincere attitude of Chinese solidarity with the Palestinians.

When a state gets enmeshed with global capitalism, it tends to think first in terms of dollars and cents (or in China’s case, renminbi), and in terms of socialist principles second. China under Mao had firm solidarity with the Palestinians; ever since the reforms of Deng and Jiang, though, that solidarity has been, to put it gently, dwindling. China’s critical rhetoric against Israel seems to be more about saving face as the contemporary embodiment of socialism; amassing more and more wealth has been the priority.

Perhaps the worst, and most egregious, example of China’s colluding with Israel for money has been the sending of Chinese construction workers to Palestine to build homes for Israeli settlers! Private Chinese firms have invested, directly or indirectly, in Israeli settlements or companies operating with them. Yes, China has been helping Israel to colonize Palestine! Shame on China!

All of those leftists out there who, on the one hand, self-righteously condemn this or that rock star for this or that transgression, yet on the other hand sing the praises of ‘socialist’ China need to do a similar soul-searching and humbling of themselves as I’ve had to do about Ozzy. For as bad as Ozzy’s and Sharon’s support of Israel undoubtedly is, the support of a country, which is supposed to be socialist, for Zionism is much, much worse.

IV: Conclusion

It is saddening, truly heartbreaking, to learn that someone or something you once thought of as great was actually, in many ways, quite awful. You have come upon fallen idols. The cognitive dissonance in both loving and hating the idol simultaneously is stinging.

Something we Marxist-Leninists do is engage in dialectical thinking, which involves confronting contradictions. One sees opposing aspects in people and things: artists like Ozzy, Page, Bowie, Kubrick, Spacey, Cela, and Dali made great music, films, writing, and art that we love; they also did some pretty dreadful things, including having despicable politics. The same applies to the governments of countries that have done objectively both good and bad things.

Analogous to dialectics is something discussed in Kleinian psychoanalysis, namely, the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. In the former position, one splits the good and bad sides of an object apart and, never attempting a reconciliation, projects and discards the object, originally, a baby’s mother when she frustrates it by not, for example, breastfeeding it. In the latter position, one goes through the painful process of integrating the good and the bad, reconciling the one with the other, as for example when a baby comes to terms with a mother who sometimes satisfies and, at other times, frustrates a baby.

Can we do such integrating with our idols’ good and bad aspects? Hmm…