Analysis of ‘Shadow of a Doubt’

Shadow of a Doubt is a 1943 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his favourite of all of his films, and the one he enjoyed making the most. Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, Shadow of a Doubt was based on a story treatment by Gordon McDonell called “Uncle Charlie,” which in turn was based on the true crime story of Earle Nelson, a serial killer, rapist, and necrophile from the late 1920s known as “The Gorilla Man.”

Most of Nelson’s victims were middle-aged landladies, killed by strangulation, and many were raped after death. The writers of Hitchcock’s film changed the victims into wealthy, elderly widows, and Nelson’s charm–as a mild-mannered Christian drifter–was retained in Uncle Charlie. I find the connection between landladies and wealthy widows as victims to be interesting, as I’ll get into later.

The film stars Joseph Cotten (as Uncle Charlie) and Teresa Wright, with Macdonald Carey, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Wallace Ford, and Hume Cronyn. McDonell was nominated for an Oscar for Best Story. The film received universally positive reviews upon release, and in 1991, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Here are some quotes from Shadow of a Doubt.

A crucial theme in this film is the sharp contrast between a man’s charming outer persona and his dark, evil inside. Note what Hitchcock himself once said as an overarching theme: “Love and good order is no defense against evil.” Uncle Charlie has such a good reputation among his own family, the Newtons, whom he’ll visit in Santa Rosa, California (in McDonell’s treatment, the small town the villain will visit is Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley), that the last thing they’d ever suspect is that he’s a serial killer.

Uncle Charlie’s sister, Emma Newton (Collinge), and her husband, Joseph (Travers), named their eldest daughter, Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Wright) after him because he’s idealized so much, an idealization that spreads out to the entire city of Santa Rosa, a location chosen for the film as a paragon of a peaceful, small, pre-WWII American city. Such a nice place for Uncle Charlie to hide out in reinforces this idea of a good, wholesome exterior hiding a shady secret.

On top of all of this is Young Charlie, a sweet, pretty young woman sharing the name of the villain. On two occasions in the film when she and her uncle chat, they speak of themselves as being twins, rather than uncle and niece.

Her wish to have him come over to Santa Rosa, to relieve the boredom and meaninglessness of their lives, coincides with him sending a telegram to her family, saying he wishes to pay them a visit. She imagines that her wish has been mental telepathy, sent to him to make him send the telegram; a Jungian would say this meaningful coincidence, a linking of her inner mental state with the outside world, is a case of synchronicity. In any case, this coincidence is yet another linking of the two Charlies, with her nice-girl Persona and his serial-killer Shadow.

Her adoration of her handsome, charming uncle borders on incestuous desire, a kind of transference of her Electra complex from her father to her uncle. Indeed, she beams at her Uncle Charlie, with a grin from ear to ear, thinking he’s “wonderful.”

So she’s transferring her idealization from the parental imago to her uncle. The idealized parental imago is one of two poles of the self, as Heinz Kohut conceived it, a self rooted in narcissism. Since the Oedipus complex is a narcissistic trauma, and she’s transferring hers to her uncle, then her love of him is really a narcissistic projection from herself to him. When she realizes his murderous nature, her heart is broken, and now she must split off and project what’s really her Shadow self onto him, hence, “Shadow of a doubt.”

So, on a symbolic level, both Charlies can be seen as two halves of one person, the good and bad sides of Two-Face‘s coin, if you will. Uncle Charlie’s being pursued by the two detectives at the beginning of the film causes us to sympathize with him for the moment, since we don’t yet know of his crimes, and so we believe, as his niece does, in how “wonderful” he is, until that shadow of a doubt comes with her growing suspicions of him.

A paralleling of the good outer Persona vs the dark, inner Shadow can also be seen in her father, Joseph, having ongoing discussions with a neighbour, Herbie Hawkins (Cronyn), of how one might commit the perfect murder. This little bit of black comedy between them is a light subplot for the dark main one, yet it also reminds us of how the dark sides in us, however seemingly slight, are on a continuum with those who commit actual crimes. The real difference is in how the hell of the real world has a way of pushing people over the edge to commit criminal acts…an issue I’ll deal with in more detail later.

Young Charlie’s suspicions of her uncle begin upon having received the gift of a valuable emerald ring from him…one that has the initials of another owner on it. He also gets upset to find a newspaper article about the pursuit of him as a suspect in the murder of the wealthy widows, and even Young Charlie’s naming of Lehár‘s Merry Widow Waltz must be interrupted by him at dinner. Indeed, the theme of this waltz is given numerous, often dark and eerie, variations by the composer of the film-score, Dimitri Tiomkin.

I’ll now give a political interpretation of the film as an allegory, one that some readers will no doubt find controversial, but please, hear me out. While Hitchcock was no friend to fascism, as can be seen in films like The Lady Vanishes and Notorious, and while he promoted progressive ideas in a subtle fashion in his stretching of the limits of movie censorship over the years, as well as in the gay subtext in Rope, he was also a reactionary in other ways, as I’ll go into soon in Shadow of a Doubt.

Indeed, Hitchcock can in some ways be compared to George Orwell, who on the one hand, as he said in Homage to Catalonia, went to Spain in the mid-1930s to fight fascism and was impressed with the revolutionary achievements, however short-lived, of the anarchists there, yet on the other hand, he was so bitterly opposed to the ‘totalitarian’ communists (whom he caricatured in his two famous fictional allegories) that he had a snitch list of ‘crypto-communists’ that he used to thwart the careers of those on the list. Hitchcock, as a bourgeois who was making quite a name for himself (and a lot of money, no doubt) in Hollywood as of the early-1940s, when this film was made, would have had his own class interests to protect.

At the beginning of 1943, when the film was released, the Tehran Conference–with the origins of the Cold War associated with it–was far away from happening, as was the Second Red Scare of 1947. The tide turning against the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad was still a month away from happening, too. There seems to have been little fear of communist revolution in January 1943.

The hardships that the working class had suffered during the Great Depression, however, caused them to rise up in an unprecedented way, forcing FDR’s hand in the legislation of the National Labor Relations Act and the New Deal. Many on the political right see little if any difference between the moderate and hard left, and between propagandistic nonsense, like the ‘Holodomor,’ and the truth of the killing of the Tsar’s family, there would already have been much bourgeois fear of leftists idealizing communism.

To get back to the film, and to tie all of these historical digressions to it, there is a crucial scene in which Uncle Charlie discusses what is actually his motive for strangling the rich widows. He refers, with a scowl, to how their husbands worked hard to make all that wealth and then died, leaving all their money to their “silly wives…these useless women”, whom he doubts are even human. In a later discussion with Young Charlie, her uncle describes the world as “a hell.” Given the neoliberal reality we’ve been in for the past forty years, I’d say it’s even more of a hell now.

In these hard-working husbands, I see an allegory of the working class; in their wives, I see the ruling class who take the fruits of their workers’ labour and live in luxury after the men have died from overwork and hazardous accidents. Killing the widows, therefore, allegorizes socialist revolution, but an allegory from the point of view of the frightened bourgeoisie, who want to propagandize against such revolution and call it cruel and violent, hence the representation of the capitalist class as vulnerable, helpless women, to inspire the audience’s sympathy for them.

Young Charlie, too, is concerned–towards the beginning of the film–with the struggles of her family (there is a similar sense of her family’s struggles in McDonell’s treatment), including how her mother works like a dog. Life seems meaningless to her, just a lot of going along with everything, eating and sleeping and nothing else. There’s talking, but little real communication. She seems to sense modern-day alienation. These grey days immediately turn sunny on the arrival of her uncle (who in my allegory represents communist ideals), but she, being liberal-minded like Hitchcock, would never espouse the violent overthrow of capitalism that her uncle’s murders represent.

If my anti-capitalist interpretation seems far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, consider how odd Uncle Charlie’s motive for killing the widows sounds, taken at face value. Misogyny, directed at women merely for being rich and not working, building in a flame of hate strong enough to want to strangle several of them and risk being charged with murder? The world is a hell just because of the widows’ indulgence? Earle Nelson, on whom Uncle Charlie was based, recall, was a sex offender, with a motive straightforward enough to see, but one that for obvious reasons couldn’t be presented on the screen at the time.

That the screenwriters changed the murder victims from being, of all people, landladies to wealthy widows adds to my argument. Landlords, male or female, are capitalists, owning private property–the apartments they make money off of renting them to tenants. The screenwriters changed the victims from one kind of capitalist to another, one whose wealth, unmistakably associated with the exploitation of the poor, is all the more obvious.

A few other things about Uncle Charlie can be associated with communism. He’s come out west from the east. Now, by the east in the film, it’s meant to be the east coast of the US, of course–New Jersey, to be exact. But one can associate “the east” with Russia. There was a growing fear of communist ideas coming to the west–to Western Europe and North America, allegorically represented in the film as California.

One reason I find it useful to link Uncle Charlie’s murders with anti-capitalism, even though he is no communist, is how his story can be paralleled with that of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting and killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Mangione has right-leaning political sympathies, but they weren’t enough to stop his rage against an American health insurance system that gets rich off of denying coverage for people who desperately need it, and often die without it. Mangione is regarded as a kind of working-class hero (despite him being from a well-off family), and Thompson’s murder is dismissed by the masses as a case of someone who got what was coming to him.

As for Shadow of a Doubt, though, the bourgeois moviemakers would have us booing at anyone who dares to kill the wealthy. Uncle Charlie’s charm and good looks are meant to be seen as superficial and nothing more.

When Uncle Charlie gives gifts to all the family members, including Young Charlie’s emerald ring, we could see such largesse as representative of a socialist redistribution of wealth. Since this film is actually an anti-communist allegory (as I see it), though, we are reminded, through such things as the initials of the previous owner on the ring, that this redistribution is actually to be understood as a theft from the rightful owners, the capitalist class.

When Uncle Charlie cuts out of Joseph’s newspaper an article about the widow murders, and later gets mad at Young Charlie for inquiring too much about the missing article, we can see in this a representation of an anti-communist accusation of Soviet media censorship. Now, such censorship surely did happen, as with Orwell’s two polemical tales being banned in the USSR, but right-wing, anti-Soviet propaganda (such as I suspect this film to be, allegorically) was a real danger: the “Holodomor” myth, as mentioned above, was originally Nazi propaganda that has persisted to this day, and all such propaganda has led to the counterrevolution that Stalin not only warned against, but also correctly predicted the outcome of, the turning-back of social progress.

Another change from McDonell’s story treatment to the screenplay that I find interesting is that of Young Charlie’s love interest. McDonell had him as a “ne’er-do-well” that she is engaged to, someone who is assumed by all in her town to be guilty of any crime committed there, including a hold-up.

In the film, this love interest becomes one of the two detectives pursuing Uncle Charlie. He is Detective Jack Graham (Carey). Just as with the switch from landladies to wealthy widows as Uncle Charlie’s victims, the switch from a criminal ne’er-do-well to a cop as Uncle Charlie’s rival seems to confirm my anti-communist allegory. Let me explain.

Fascists are fanatical anti-communists known for using violence to achieve their ends. Now, neither Detective Graham nor his colleague, Detective Fred Saunders (Ford) show any violence in the film, but other detectives out east, when pursuing another suspect in the widow stranglings, cause the suspect, whom we’ll know to be innocent, to run into and be sliced to pieces by the propellor of an airplane. Fascists have also demonstrated a peculiar charm to inspire the sympathies of the masses, as Hitler did with his speeches about ‘saving Germany’ from the Jews and communists.

Detective Graham, smitten with Young Charlie as soon as he and Saunders arrive at her house to pretend to survey a typical American family (actually to get photos of her Uncle Charlie as a suspect in the stranglings), puts on the charm to win her heart. His actions to this end allegorically represent fascism trying to charm liberals (whom she represents) into joining the far-right.

What we actually have in this film is a kind of perverse love triangle of him, her, and Uncle Charlie (recall the incestuous, Oedipal transference I discussed above between the latter two). Ideologically, it represents how the left and right vie for the liberal centre (the petite bourgeoisie that we see in Young Charlie’s family) to join them. We’re meant to believe that she should go for the detective who represents the right.

That her initial attraction to her uncle is incestuous is meant to make us abominate the adoption of leftist ideas, however charming they may be about sympathizing with the poor. That the violence of the far right is more or less completely excised from the detectives (that propellor death mentioned merely in passing) is meant to make us believe that the right is harmless.

Graham and Saunders are very interested in getting a photo of Young Charlie’s bedroom (Since her uncle, as a guest, is sleeping there, the detectives hope to get closer to him.). Apart from the detectives’ continued pursuit of her uncle, this getting into her bedroom has obvious sexual overtones.

When Young Charlie learns that the two men are detectives and not surveyors of a typical American family, she’s furious with Graham for lying to her, and she’s even more upset with him when he claimed her “wonderful” uncle could be a murderer. Graham has to put on some extra charm to win her over to him.

My associating of the detectives with fascism, again, as far-fetched as it sounds on the surface, might begin to make sense to you, Dear Reader, when we consider this film as an anti-communist allegory. While liberals, of whom Hitchcock can be counted as one, may publicly abominate fascism, secretly they will feel drawn to it if their class interests feel in danger from crisis or an organized working class.

If there’s one thing fascists are useful for, it’s fighting communism: one need only look into Operation Paperclip, Gladio, and the underground activities of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers during the Cold War years, among many other examples, to see my point. Their violence and subterfuge are typically hidden or downplayed by the liberal media, as has been the case with the years since the US/NATO-backed coup in 2014 that replaced democratically-elected Yanukovych with a Ukrainian government and military that includes neonazis.

Such a hiding of violence and conspiracy can be seen allegorically in the activities of Graham and Saunders. One must wonder how detectives chasing a suspect in the eastern US, as it turns out, an innocent suspect, escalates to him running into an airplane propellor and getting sliced up. How is this just an unfortunate accident? There must have been considerable aggression on the part of the detectives to have led to that bloody end.

Fearing that Young Charlie will inform on him sooner or later, her uncle makes several attempts on her life. First, he sabotages the porch steps so she’ll fall down them. Then, he leaves the family car idling in the garage–whose door is stuck, making it almost impossible to get out–so when she goes in to use the car that night, she almost dies from inhaling the exhaust fumes. Finally, on the train to leave Santa Rosa with her there, he tries to throw her off as it’s going; but in the struggle, he falls off and dies under the tracks of an oncoming train.

A funeral is given to honour Uncle Charlie, whose crimes will never be known for fear of the crushing disgrace it would do to her family, surely causing her mother Emma to die of a broken heart. Only Young Charlie and Graham, still wooing her, know the truth.

According to my allegory, the film seems to be saying that the ‘truth’ about socialism would be too hurtful for the working class to know if bluntly stated, hence the telling of that ‘truth’ in this indirect manner, to soften the pain of its revelation.

Graham and Young Charlie doubt her uncle’s characterization of the world as a hell. When one is a member of the petite bourgeoisie (as she is) or higher up, it is fairly easy to suppose that the world has more than enough good in it to offset the bad. The global proletariat–especially those in the global south, as well as so many of us experiencing the neoliberalism of the past forty years (even well-off Luigi)–tend to have a less rosy image of the world.

Leftist Fundamentals

I: Introduction

We leftists tend to be our own worst enemies, far more so in many ways than the ruling class are. Instead of banding together in solidarity and planning how to overthrow the ruling class, we far too often would much rather bicker and argue over relatively minor issues of doctrine or political analysis.

We tend to forget, it seems, that the ruling class are far more united in the implementation of their agenda than we are. Sure, liberals currently are all in a dither over the recent reelection of Trump, wringing their hands and acting as though the world is about to come to an end, just as they did in November of 2016. I’d say, however, that all of this rending of garments is more of a media melodrama, meant to distract us all from how it’s more the political system is just continuing down the same neoliberal trajectory it’s been going along for the past forty years than it is some kind of imminent Night of the Long Knives.

We know the media is manipulating us, yet we don’t know. Each new outrage that gets thrust into our faces, be it the latest Israeli atrocity, updates on the Ukraine war, or Project 2025, is presented to us in a way meant to rile our anger, though not to unite us–rather, to get us to fight with each other over the ‘correct’ way to interpret what’s happening. The ruling classes laugh at us as we fight each other instead of fighting them, because the attempt to get ego gratification over ‘winning’ an argument with another leftist is far easier than setting aside our petty differences and fighting the real enemy.

None of this is to say, however, that there are no legitimate differences of opinion among leftists that can be safely disregarded. Unity on these fundamental points, the subject of this article, must be respected if we’re to move ahead and organize to overthrow the capitalist class. As for the petty issues so often bickered about, those can be dealt with once the revolution has been successfully achieved, and a socialist society is being built.

II: The Fundamentals

The following are the basic points we leftists should all agree on. There may be variation on how to interpret what these points exactly mean, or how they should be put into practice, but here they are, and they are not negotiable:

The complete replacement of capitalism with a state-planned, socialist economy. No social-democratic compromises with the market, please. We’ve tried that before, with the welfare capitalism of the post-war period, 1945-1973; when attempts like this are made, so that capitalism is ‘more comfortable’ for the working class, it’s only a matter of time before the ruling class gets sick and tired of paying higher taxes and negotiating with unions. Then they start seducing the public with the allure of ‘small government’ and the ‘free market,’ which will lead us right back down the Reaganite/Thatcherite path to the neoliberal nightmare we’re in now.

The only scenario in which a socialist state can tolerate a market economy is when a developing country needs to pull itself out of poverty by building up its productive forces, as countries like China and Vietnam have done. Once these productive forces have been fully built up, though, the left-wing factions of their communist parties should regain their preeminent influence, and guide the nation beyond the primary stage of socialism.

Now, I know any anarchists reading this will wince at my advocating a socialist state. As a former anarchist myself, I can understand how they feel. My suggestion to them is to use dialectical reasoning to resolve the contradiction between having and not having a state. A sublating of this contradiction would be to have the kind of state that withers away. I also recommend reading this.

Stalin was committed to the idea of advancing socialism to the point of a centralized state eventually dying out…when it would be possible to do so (not when there was the threat of a Nazi invasion, and not when the Americans had the atomic bomb). The obstacle to such an end goal was not his ‘tyrannical lust for power,’ contrary to imperialist propaganda (Stalin asked to resign from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Union no less than four times, but was refused, contrary to the myth that he was a dictator with absolute power; for further reading of a defence of state socialism, anarchists can go here); that obstacle was imperialism’s relentless attempts at sabotaging socialism. This leads me to my next point.

Photo by Travel Photographer on Pexels.com

Commitment to opposing imperialism in all of its forms. The wish to free ourselves from capitalist exploitation must not be limited to the Anglo/American/NATO-allied countries of the First World. The entire globe must be liberated. No one is free until all of us are free.

The modern stage of capitalism, coming to reach a zenith from around the mid-to-late-19th century in such forms as the Scramble for Africa, has been imperialism. This consists of, as Lenin observed, the concentration of production and monopolies, the new role of the banks, finance capital, the export of capital to other countries, the division of the world among the capitalist powers, and competition between the great powers over which will dominate and be the greatest exploiter of the world.

A crucial element of imperialism is colonialism. One starts with the idea that one supposedly has the right to move into the land where someone else–the indigenous community–has lived for many, many generations, if not centuries, then supposedly has the right to take over and kick the indigenous population out. If they don’t like that, one can simply kill them. This is the basis of the imperial problem: that one can steal the land from those who lived there first.

This is the settler-colonialist foundation of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and many other countries. From this dubious foundation, the settler-colonialist imagines he has the right to go into other sovereign states and steal their natural resources to enrich himself from them. So from settler-colonialism, one proceeds to imperialism.

Just as the boss imagines he has the right to exploit his workers and steal the fruits of their labour to enrich himself, so does the imperialist, a natural outgrowth from the settler-colonialist, imagine he has the right to exploit the indigenous peoples and steal their natural resources. He can achieve this exploitation and theft militarily or through neocolonialism–an indirect control of the dependent country by such methods as financial obligation through international borrowing (think of the IMF and the World Bank).

Other forms of imperialist control include interfering with the political process of the dependent countries by fomenting coups d’état to remove democratically-elected heads of state to replace them with leaders who will be puppets of the empire. There are many examples of this slimy tactic: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1973; and Ukraine, 2014 are just a few examples.

Yet another form of imperial control is the manufacturing of consent for war to further the interests of empire; this manufacturing of consent is achieved through the deceitful media that works for empire, which leads to the next point.

One must recognize imperialist propaganda for what it is, never trust it, and always oppose it.

The managers of empire are relentless in their efforts to teach us who they want us to love, who they want us to hate, who to despise, and what we’re supposed to dismiss as ideas thrown into the dustbin of history. Hence, TINA and the “end of history.”

Imperial propagandists are fond of telling us of those heads of state regarded as ‘evil dictators’ who must be removed from power for the sake of preserving ‘freedom and democracy.’ Examples of such undesirables from the recent and more remote past include Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yanukovych, the Kims, Putin, Xi Jinping, etc.

This is not to say that all of the names above are completely beyond reproach. It is just that we should not feel antipathy towards them merely because the Anglo/American/NATO-allied empire says they are all bad men. For whatever wrongdoing these men are…or are not!…guilty of, the Western empire is guilty of much more wrongdoing.

A detailed discussion of the sins of capitalism is beyond the scope of this article, but if you want to delve deeper into that, Dear Reader, you can look at this and this, the latter being something I wrote back in my then-naïve anarchist phase, but scroll down to the fourth section, marked “Capitalist Crimes.”

The point to be made here is that the Western imperialists always need to have an enemy, a political scapegoat on whom they can project all of their vices. Starting around seventy-five years ago (as of the publication of this article, of course), that enemy was communism, which the imperialists were desperate to discredit out of a fear of leftist revolution.

The last great taboo to be broken in leftist thinking is the defence of Stalin, who–thanks to decades of having our heads pounded in with anti-communist propaganda–is portrayed as a kind of left-wing version of Hitler. The idea is as absurd as it is offensive, given that Stalin’s leadership of the Red Army–who did most of the work fighting off the Wehrmacht, with a sacrifice of about 27 million Soviets–was crucial in defeating the Nazis. One is normally called a hero for doing that.

Apart from the fact that the deaths under Stalin are wildly exaggerated and taken out of context (and imperialist propaganda is so pervasive that only Marxist-Leninist sources will offer a different perspective), one should consider how even in recent years, large percentages of Russians, who haven’t lived under a socialist government in decades, still have a high regard for Stalin and look back on the Soviet years with nostalgia. If people are worried about the admiration of dictators, they should worry about all the people out there who still admire Hitler.

But more importantly, what is the real reason Stalin is so vilified? The fact is, his leadership demonstrated that one really can stand up to the imperialists, successfully fight off a vicious fascist invasion, and build socialism in one’s country (i.e., provide free education, healthcare, housing, full employment, etc.). He took a backward society made up mostly of illiterate peasant farmers and transformed it into a modern, industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower by the time of his death. This all was achieved within the space of about twenty-five years. That is nothing short of impressive. The capitalist West felt nothing short of threatened.

The Western media couldn’t let such achievements be spread around freely, inspiring Western leftists to want to bring about socialism in their respective countries. So a propaganda Blitzkrieg had to be unleashed all over the capitalist West, terrifying people with a narrative that communism not only ‘doesn’t work,’ but also leads to brutal totalitarian dictatorships, even though the CIA secretly knew that the Gulag was nowhere near as bad as the media were claiming it was.

Of course, the western propagandists had a lot of help from ‘dissident leftists,’ like George Orwell, Milovan Djilas, Noam Chomsky, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nikita Khrushchev, the last of whom denounced Stalin and his ‘cult of personality’ in a secret speech in 1956. Such traitors as these have given us leftists the “unkindest cut of all.”

After the counterrevolution was complete by the early 1990s, and the imperialists as the only superpower could do anything they wanted to any other country with impunity, it was time to look for a new enemy to draw attention away from the discontents felt in the imperial core, and in the 2000s, that enemy became Islamic terrorism. Though there was considerable opposition to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to steal from the country, the notion of regime change to remove ‘brutal dictators’ and further the cause of ‘freedom and democracy’ has been the accepted rationale–thanks to the corporate media–for all the banging of the war drums since.

Of course, having Democrats in the White House has made it a lot easier to manufacture consent among liberals, hence the Obama administration’s destabilizing (with France’s help) of Libya–with virtually no protest from those who’d protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq–to remove Gaddafi, all because–apart from Sarkozy’s financial entanglements–the Libyan leader wanted to establish an African currency, based on gold, that would free Africa from being chained to the IMF and World Bank, something the Western imperialists would never abide.

Then the imperialists went after Assad, their real reason being, again, to steal their oil, while using the media to lie to us about Assad ‘gassing his people’ and other such nonsense. They‘re still stealing Syrian oil (and wheat), by the way.

Yanukovych wanted to partner with Russia to help Ukraine deal with its financial problems without having to be dependent on the IMF, but such a decision was unacceptable to the West, hence his ouster, to be replaced with a government and military including Russophobic Neo-Nazis. This anti-Russian attitude leads us to the next enemy of the empire.

Russia is reviled not because ‘Putin helped Trump win’ in 2016, a baseless accusation that just fueled the fire and helped manufacture consent for the needlessly bellicose attitude that has led to this awful war in Ukraine, taking away billions of dollars that could be used to help the American poor and fix their country’s crumbling infrastructure. The recent Russophobia and Sinophobia are really because Russia and China, as objects of American hate, are getting stronger (i.e., the BRICS alliance) while the Western empire is deservedly dying.

Still, the Western media, mostly owned by the top oligarchs and, as capitalists, have interests fully entwined with those of imperialism, have convinced a huge swathe of the Western population into believing that Russia and China are our latest enemies, as well as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. For us to believe such nonsense is, of course, far more convenient than to believe the far more uncomfortable truth, that it’s our leaders, both conservative and liberal, who are the problem.

We must stop hating only one half of the ruling class. It’s the entire system–DNC and GOP, Tory and Labour, Tory and Liberal, etc.–that must be opposed. We must give up on such things as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s so ridiculous–and hypocritical–that liberals are up in arms whenever Trump does something admittedly awful, such as rounding up ‘illegals,’ putting them in cages via ICE, and kicking them out of the country, but when Obama or Biden did more or less the same thing, liberals largely ignore or rationalize the problem.

On the other side of the coin, Biden and Harris are rightly despised for their support of Israel and its ‘right to self-defence’ (translation: its apartheid, genocidal policies), but little thought is given to the fact that Trump will be every bit as supportive of those policies when he comes back into office in 2025.

Enough of the black-and-white thinking! In the larger scheme of politics, the ideological differences between conservative and liberal are petty. Both sides are capitalist and imperialist: that’s what matters, not the minutiae that they disagree about. That their squabbles are mere right-wing infighting is especially true in a neoliberal world in which income inequality is at an extreme, homelessness is an epidemic in many parts of the world, most mainstream politicians, conservative or liberal, support the US/NATO proxy war of helping Ukrainian Nazis to fight Russians, thereby provoking the danger of a possibly nuclear WWIII, and most of these politicians support Zionism.

We cannot expect real change when we get upset if a party representing one side of the capitalist class, the side we don’t personally like, wins, but we rest on our laurels when the party representing the side we do like wins. The entire system must be dismantled. The only way to achieve this dismantling is through revolution, not through voting, which is meaningless and only perpetuates the system.

As Mao said, “Revolution is not a dinner party.” Revolution isn’t ‘nice.’ It is violent, it is forceful, it is difficult, and it requires planning and organization. People like voting because it is easy; the ruling class likes voting because it takes the people’s minds off of revolution.

A true left-wing revolution, as opposed to mere liberal, social-democrat reforms, will guarantee such things as these:

–the means of production are controlled by the workers
—private property is abolished
–commodities are produced to provide for everyone
—elimination of class differences, leading to…
–…no more centralized state monopoly on power, and…
–…no more money (i.e., replaced with a gift economy)
–an end to imperialism and all the wars it causes
–an end to the huge gap between the rich and the poor
–an end to global hunger in the Third World
–free universal health care
–free education for all, up to university, ending illiteracy
–housing for all
–equal rights for women, people of colour, LGBT people, disabled people
–employment for all, with decent remuneration and hours
–a social safety net in case of job loss

Conservatives abominate such changes. Liberals speak of gradual, gentle nudging in the left-wing direction without ever really delivering. When some progress has been made in the leftist direction, the right-wingers complain, liberals tend–in varying degrees–to cave in, and we move back in the rightist direction, as we have for the past thirty to forty years. Small wonder Stalin once said, “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.”

Does that quote sound too extreme to you, Dear Reader? Consider how the Social Democratic Party of Germany opposed the failed communist German Revolution of 1918-1919, favoring instead the Weimar Republic, upon whose foundation it took only a decade and a half thereafter to lapse into Nazism. Consider how the Democratic Party, about five years after the dissolution of the USSR, gutted welfare, created the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (merging the American media into six corporations), and interfered with the 1996 Russian election to keep pro-US Yeltsin in power. Finally, there’s of course the Biden administration’s pouring of money into Ukraine.

Photo by Alexander Popovkin on Pexels.com

III: Conclusion

That list you saw a couple of paragraphs ago–those are the leftist fundamentals, right there. I just had to expand on some of them, and make a few more important points to show how indispensable these ideas are to eliminate capitalism and imperialism once and for all.

The point is that once a revolution has been achieved, that isn’t the end of the struggle. The forces of reaction will do everything in their power to restore capitalism, and we have to have a strong defence against that. This is why a socialist state is needed: not only to implement the transition (the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a workers’ state–true democracy) from capitalism to full communism, but also to protect the gains of the revolution; otherwise, our efforts will all be in vain.

Whenever a socialist state was either weak or non-existent, the revolution was short-lived. The Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution of 1936 are noteworthy examples of such nobly lofty, but ultimately failed, revolutions.

In today’s perilous times, we can’t afford to be soft leftists (translation: liberals); we have to be HARD leftists, always wary of backsliding into liberalism. That means that in today’s imperialist stage of late capitalism, we can’t stop at being Marxists: we have to be Marxist-Leninists.

To be this way, we must advocate a state-planned socialist economy; we must oppose all forms of imperialism, but especially in its current Anglo-American-NATO form as the contemporary, primary contradiction (though if, in the future, any of the emerging powers from BRICS grow to be substantially imperialist, they must then be opposed, too); we mustn’t trust the mainstream, corporate media and its pro-empire propaganda; and we must oppose the entire system of capitalism/imperialism, not just get upset if, for example, the GOP wins, but be content if the Democrats win (or vice versa).

There are no quick and easy answers. Our enemies are far too well-equipped militarily, and far too adept at using the media and modern tech to play mind-games on us and surveil us, to keep us compliant. We must similarly undergo training–that is, our young and able-bodied comrades–and we must learn to organize and plant seeds of revolution in the minds of as many fence-sitters out there as we can. This latter is what I try to do here on this blog.

Let’s do it, comrades.

‘African scholar on trial in Paris for “genocide denial” while the West turns a blind eye to the present genocide in Palestine,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

African scholar on trial in Paris for “genocide denial” while the West turns a blind eye to the present genocide in Palestine

Scholar Charles Onana is being falsely accused of genocide denial, with regards to the tragedy in Rwanda, while his Western accusers look the other way as the genocide in Palestine continues.

Analysis of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

I: Introduction

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play by Tennessee Williams, premiered on December 3rd of that year. It’s considered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, and is Williams’s most popular, being among his most performed and adapted in many forms, including notably the 1951 film.

The original cast of ASND was made up of almost all the same actors as in the film version, except for Blanche DuBois having been playing by Jessica Tandy onstage, and by Vivien Leigh in the film.

Here’s a link to the entire play.

II: Famous Actors for the Roles

Apart from Tandy and Leigh, other notable actresses who have played Blanche are Tallulah Bankhead (for whom Williams actually wrote the character, though she hadn’t played the role until 1956, because she was felt to be too strong for it), Ann-Margret, Cate Blanchett, Blythe Danner, Uta Hagen, and Rachel Weisz. Every actress Williams saw performing the role he loved, feeling that each of them brought something different to Blanche.

Apart from the most famous portrayal by Marlon Brando, Stanley Kowalski has been played notably by Anthony Quinn, Treat Williams, Alec Baldwin, Rip Torn, Aidan Quinn, and Christopher Walken.

Apart from Kim Walker, Stella–Blanche’s younger sister and Stanley’s wife–has been played by Beverly D’Angelo and Diane Lane.

Karl Malden played Harold “Mitch” Mitchell in the original stage production and in the 1951 film.

III: Themes

A central theme of ASND is narcissism, with the whole spectrum of pride/vanity to humility/shame expressed at many different points at the extremes and in between them. Blanche is vain, insufferably so to Stanley, who has a fierce pride of his own. Stella is much more submissive, forgiving of her husband’s brutality, giving in to his demand to put Blanche in a mental institution, and believing his denials of a rape of her sister that he’s obviously guilty of. Mitch is most gentlemanly to ladies, but when he learns of Blanche’s waywardness, he loses his sensitivity almost immediately.

Blanche’s narcissism is of the covert variety, expressed in a passive-aggressive form, her often seeming to play the victim. Her narcissism is a defence against psychological fragmentation, a defence that apish Stanley will break through, causing her to have a nervous breakdown at the play’s end. Her very name, meaning ‘white,’ suggests her narcissistic False Self of sweetness, purity, and ladylike sense of culture, but it also hides her True Self of promiscuity, snobbishness, and ethnic bigotry (i.e., against the Polish).

Stanley is her diametrical opposite, making hardly the slightest attempt to hide his harshness (or so it would seem). His wish to break through all of Blanche’s masks and disguises and reveal the truth in no way redeems him of his cruelty. He is perceived as an ape, and rightly so, for he rids us of all doubt by the end of the play.

So along with the spectrum between narcissism/pride/vanity and humility/shame, there’s also a spectrum between social artifice/fakery and brutal honesty in ASND. In the case of this latter spectrum, it should be obvious which character personifies social artifice, and which brutal honesty. A character like Mitch falls somewhere in between the extremes, as we’ll see later on.

IV: Scene One

A verse by Hart Crane (the fifth from “The Broken Tower”), which is put before the beginning of Williams’s play, seems to express Blanche’s situation when she arrives in New Orleans. She’s looking for a building on a street called “Elysian Fields,” whose heavenly associations are ironic given what a hell-hole she finds her new home to be.

She is a Southern belle used to a life of dainty clothes, perfume, comfort, and culture in Belle Reve (“sweet dream,” loosely translated), the old home she’s lost to creditors, forcing her to live with Stella and Stanley, or else face homelessness. Living in such a shockingly poor home will be a crushing humiliation for Blanche.

To get to Elysian Fields, she’s taken a streetcar named Desire, then transferred to one called “Cemeteries” (Williams, page 3). The streetcar named Desire was inspired by an actual streetcar with the same name, which ran a half-block away from Williams’s apartment on Toulouse Street in the New Orleans’s French Quarter, where he wrote the play.

The names of the streetcars, as well as the name of Stella’s and Stanley’s home, have been chosen as more than just names of places in the real world, though. Desire leads to cemeteries…rather like, the wages of sin is death…and death leads to an afterlife that may seem like heaven, but is actually hell. It should be easy for anyone who has read or watched a performance of ASND to see how these names are points on the trajectory of Blanche’s life, just as the verse from Crane’s poem reflects her life.

She has led a life of desire–from her marriage to a husband who, it turns out, had homosexual feelings he acted on, then killed himself after knowing her shocked reaction to this acting-on them (recall that Williams himself was gay, and therefore his sexuality rubbed off in some of his plays), to her own promiscuity, which included a sexual relationship with one of her teen students. This inappropriate relationship led to the bad karma of her being fired as a high school teacher. We see how desire has led to the cemeteries of her husband and her job.

And now she has to live in the hellish ‘heaven’ of her sister’s shabby home, to be shared with a man whose bestial nature will be soon apparent to her.

When Blanche sees her sister for the first time in a long time, she addresses her as “Stella for Star!” (page 6). Since this is the literal meaning of her younger sister’s name, Blanche’s imagined poetic pointing-out of that meaning demonstrates her literary pretensions early on in the play.

Though she affects refinement, her own vulgarity and ignorance also come out early in the play as she and Stella discuss Stanley, whom Blanche not only refers to as one of those “Polacks,” but also imagines as being “something like Irish,” but “not so–highbrow?” (page 9) His friends are “a mixed lot,” according to Stella, and are therefore “heterogeneous–types” to Blanche, which suggests a quite racial categorizing of them; after all, there’s Pablo (Nick Dennis in the original production and the 1951 film).

After Blanche has sorrowfully told Stella about the loss of Belle Reve, being so ashamed of its loss that she imagines her sister’s questioning about it to be a judgement on her for losing it (pages 11 and 12), she meets Stanley. It’s so fitting that Brando exemplified Stanislavski‘s Method Acting in the role of Stanley, his name almost sounding like a pun on Stanislavski, since there’s no affectation whatsoever to be seen in Kowalsky; while Blanche’s character seems to require the technique of the classical acting style, with its “saw[ing of] the air too much with [one’s] hand,” and its “tear[ing of] a passion to tatters.”

A cat screeches near the window, startling sensitive Blanche. In the film, Brando’s Stanley imitates the cat’s screeching, a kind of foreshadowing of how upsetting he’ll soon be to her. In fact, he is upsetting to her already by the end of this first scene, when he brings up her marriage (page 15). Bringing this up triggers painful memories for her that will be brought up in full later.

When I referred to Blanche as narcissistic and fake, neither of these faults necessitate our lack of empathy for her. She’s suffered terribly, and she’s about to suffer even worse by the end of the play, thanks to Stanley’s merciless cruelty. Her narcissism and maintaining of illusions are the only things that are keeping her from falling apart completely.

V: Scene Two

When Stanley learns from Stella of Blanche’s loss of Belle Reve, he starts worrying that his wife has been cheated of the family property, for the “Napoleonic Code” (which, contrary to what Williams believed, did not exist in Louisiana at the time) states that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa (though Stanley doesn’t seem too concerned with the vice versa). If Blanche has lost the family property, then so has Stella…and so has Stanley.

The point is that Stanley is a very domineering husband, and he believes he has the right to extend the patriarchal dominance of his home onto Stella’s sister. He doesn’t even like his wife’s leaving him “a cold plate on ice” for dinner while she and Blanche go out to eat, then to a show, so he and his friends can play poker in his home without any women disturbing them (page 16).

His utter lack of respect for a woman’s rights is on full display when he starts pulling out Blanche’s dresses from her wardrobe trunk in search of any documents to tell him what happened to Belle Reve. He imagines Blanche’s fancy-looking clothes are all expensive, too much so for a teacher’s salary, so he says he’ll have an acquaintance in a jewelry store do an appraisal of her “diamonds,” “pearls and gold bracelets” (pages 18-19). Stella insists that the “diamonds” are just rhinestones. Stanley still thinks he has the right to Stella’s ‘wealth.’

Stanley’s borderline, if not outright, misogyny is to the point of bluntly telling Blanche that he has no interest in complimenting women on their looks, since in his opinion, they either already know they’re beautiful and therefore don’t need to be complimented, or they’re so vain that they “give themselves credit for more than what they’ve got.” (page 21) Blanche, in her thirties and with fading beauty, has an already fragile self-concept and therefore doesn’t need Stanley’s kind of bluntness.

He doesn’t take it as well as he dishes it out, though. When she responds to his bluntness by calling him “a little bit on the primitive side,” and says she could tell no more about him than that he’s a man her sister married, he throws a brief tantrum (pages 21-22). In his brutal honesty, he should not be confused with men like Alceste the misanthrope, who sincerely hated social hypocrisy in spite of his continuing attraction to the flirtatious coquette Célimène, who had eyes for him as well as for other men. Stanley, on the other hand, is simply an ape.

His brutish demanding that Blanche show him legal papers connected with the DuBois plantation leads to him grabbing love letters from her husband. Stanley’s insensitivity to her husband’s letters is a touch that insults them, meaning she’ll need to burn them (page 23). He has again triggered painful memories about a husband with the opposite personality of Stanley’s, a sensitive poet, not a growling gorilla.

Her saying she’d not have him touch her letters “because of their–intimate nature…” (page 23) is a foreshadowing of the horrible thing that Stanley will do to her at the play’s–pardon the expression–climax. She surrenders to his looking through her legal papers, just as she’ll surrender to him in a more physical way later.

It’s interesting how his use of legality to persecute her parallels his use of physicality to persecute her. Feminists would have a field day analyzing these parallels, as I’m sure they already have. In this connection, I also find it interesting how the Napoleonic Code didn’t exist in Louisiana at the time of the story: Stanley’s imagined authority over Stella and Blanche is as fake as Blanche’s pretensions to culture and high breeding. As I said above, he has no business pretending to be any more honest than she does.

VI: Scene Three

Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, and Steve (Rudy Bond in the original production and the 1951 film) are playing poker while Stella and Blanche are out. Poker night is an all-boys club in which women are persona non grata, of course. It’s bad enough when people in high positions of political, economic, and religious power and authority use sex roles and the patriarchal family to divide the sexes and keep women down; when working-class men reinforce these divisions and discriminatory attitudes, it makes proletarian solidarity all the more difficult to cultivate.

Another example of this lack of solidarity, but from a racial angle, is Pablo suggesting going to get some chop suey from the “Chinaman’s” (page 27), this being a term which, by the time of the writing of the play, must have already begun to acquire derogatory overtones in the US. Pablo, as an Hispanic and therefore surely someone familiar with being on the receiving end of ethnic slurs (Stanley will have called him a “greaseball” by the end of the play, and I suspect it won’t be the first time), should have at least some sensitivity to how inappropriate “Chinaman” sounds, as should Stanley, as a Polish-American who is infuriated with Blanche saying “Polack.”

Of the poker players, Mitch is the only unmarried one (page 28), and he has a sick mother at home, so he worries about her and must leave the poker game. His duty to her gives off the impression that he’s a ‘mama’s boy,’ and that he’s ‘sensitive.’ Blanche will soon pick up on his “superior” manner (page 30), and see in him the hope of a husband. Stanley shows his contempt for Mitch’s devotion to his mother by saying the guys will “fix [him] a sugar-tit.” (page 28)

Mitch is pleased to meet Blanche when she and Stella have returned and he has stepped away from the poker game for the moment, so he is playing the role of the gentleman while the other boys continue with their all-boys-club card game. Stanley, predictably, feels the most invaded by the feminine presence.

He assures Blanche that none of the men are interested in standing up when she enters the room. He’d have her and Stella go up to Steve’s place and sit with Eunice, Steve’s wife (Peg Hillias in the original stage production and the 1951 film), whom he treats with a shabbiness comparable to how Stanley treats Stella and Blanche. Though it’s nearly two-thirty in the morning, Stanley sees the poker game as not finishing any time soon, and he spanks Stella on the thigh…or is it the ass?…to discourage her and Blanche from staying; this only angers her.

Gentlemanly Mitch, however, will repeatedly insist, “Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women” (pages 36 and 37). Stanley is annoyed that Mitch, more interested in Blanche than the game, won’t come back to it. He’s particularly angry when Blanche turns on the radio (page 35). He rushes over and smashes it.

Stella, furious, calls Stanley an animal and tells his friends to go home immediately. He goes wild at her ending his sacred card game and goes after her. His friends try to calm him down, but it’s no good.

Both husband and wife go offstage, and we know that he hits her (page 35). Both she and Blanche scream. Stella is taken upstairs to Steve’s and Eunice’s place while Stanley’s friends try again to calm him down by pouring shower water on him, but he just gets angrier, curses at them, and hits them. They all leave with their poker winnings (page 37).

With Stella gone, Stanley finally realizes he’s screwed up. Now we have the famous moment when he screams out “Stella!” repeatedly. Without her, he’s no longer the dominant male, but he’s been reduced to a weepy little boy.

Perhaps his weepiness in part has triggered her maternal instinct, but in any case, she goes back to him and forgives him, a shocking thing for Blanche, Eunice, and any reasonable person to see. Stella is letting him manipulate her with that helpless little boy routine, a classic page out of the narcissist’s playbook.

Eunice would get the law on him for hitting his wife and making such noise so late at night. Just as the men demonstrated by trying to calm him down, there is no social acceptance of violence against women, though that doesn’t mean men never get away with it.

Blanche comes out, horrified that her sister, with child, went back to the man who hit her. Mitch is there to talk with Blanche, since he’s still interested in pursuing her. What should be a bad omen for her is how, in spite of how Mitch is still acting the gentleman, he trivializes this moment of domestic violence.

VII: Scene Four

The next morning, Blanche wants to talk Stella out of remaining in her relationship with Stanley after having seen how bestial he is capable of being. As with Mitch, Stella trivializes what happened the night before, which of course is all the more disturbing.

Stella thinks that Stanley’s having felt ashamed of himself for his barbaric behaviour is enough to forgive him, when she knows full well that he’ll do such things again, and soon.

Stella was as much of a Southern belle as Blanche, but the former being taken off the pedestal didn’t upset her the way the latter was forcibly removed from it. Blanche cannot conceive how Stella is willing to tolerate living with such a man as Stanley.

Part of the difference in the two women’s attitudes is how Blanche, unlike Stella, still believes in romantic notions of gallantry, illusions to protect her–it would seem–from the brutality of reality. When Stella speaks of how Stanley, on their wedding night, went around their home with one of her slippers smashing all the light-bulbs with it, instead of being terrified, as Blanche would have been, Stella admits to having been thrilled by his wildness (pages 41-42).

Blanche feels there’s a desperate need to get herself and Stella away from Stanley. She remembers a wealthy oilman named Shep Huntleigh, who she imagines could use his money to get her and Stella away from that brute of a husband. She imagines she’ll get Western Union through the telephone operator to contact Shep and tell him that she and Stella are in a desperate situation and need his help (pages 43-44). This urgent attempt to get Western Union and contact Shep will be repeated in Scene Ten (page 95), at the climax of the play, when Blanche is sure that Stanley, alone with her at home while Stella is in the hospital to have her baby, won’t have anyone there to hold his leash.

This Shep Huntleigh represents, in another way, the diametrical opposite of Stanley. He’s not only wealthy, but he’s also a gentleman, Blanche’s gallant, romantic ideal. According to Heinz Kohut‘s conception of the bipolar self, the two poles that give a person a stable sense of self are ones based on someone to idealize (in childhood, the idealized parental imago) and someone to mirror the grandiose self. When both of these needs are met, one can live with a healthy, restrained, and moderate sense of narcissism. If one of the poles fails, or is thwarted, the other can compensate. If both fail, one is at best in an extremely fragile position (as Blanche is, already at the beginning of the play), and at worst, one experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break with reality (as happens to Blanche at the end of the play).

Blanche is hoping that a courtship with Mitch will lead not only to a husband who can ‘make an honest woman of her,’ so she can put her promiscuous past and reputation behind her, but also to a satisfying of her narcissistic need for someone to mirror back her grandiose self to her. His gentlemanly routine of putting her up on a pedestal will satisfy that need.

When Mitch learns, through Stanley’s merciless probing into her past, of her promiscuity when she lived in Laurel (living in The Flamingo, a hotel known for prostitution, her sexual relationship with one of her underage students), and he refuses to marry her, she uses her idealization of Shep Huntleigh, a kind of Oedipal transference of the idealized parental imago, to keep her fragile self hanging on. Of course, Stanley tears that compensatory fantasy apart, and she goes mad in the end.

The psychiatrist (played by Richard Garrick in the original stage production and the 1951 movie)–who, with the matron (Ann Dere), comes to take Blanche to the mental hospital at the end of the play–temporarily destroys her ever-so-faint hopes to be taken away by Shep; but he wisely humours her, putting on the gentlemanly act to make her cooperate, and revives for the moment her hope to have the idealizing pole satisfied.

Anyway, Blanche continues trying to convince her sister that Stanley is not worth keeping. When Stella speaks of the “things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” making such things as Stanley hitting her “seem–unimportant” (page 46), we’re reminded of how “thrilled” she was at his smashing of the light-bulbs. A nasty man is often exciting to a woman, where a nice guy finishes last. As the Chinese say, “男人不壞，女人不愛” (“If men aren’t bad, women won’t love them.”) Bad boys are sexy, and in this observation come so many of women’s problems with men. Recall, in this connection, how good-looking young Brando was in the 1951 film, with his muscle tone and his shirt off. I’ll bet the girls were swooning with ecstasy at the sight of him on the screen.

Blanche responds to what Stella says by pointing out what I said above about the title of the play–that it’s not just inspired by the name of a streetcar near where Williams was writing his play. Stella is talking about her “brutal desire,” a streetcar that brought Blanche to this Godforsaken home of Stella’s and Stanley’s. A streetcar named Desire, then one named Cemeteries…Blanche imagines that Stella’s desire will lead to her death at Stanley’s hands.

As Blanche goes on condemning him as “common,” he’s approaching home and overhearing her words. He is fuming inside as she speaks of how his wife should be with a better man than “an animal,” someone “subhuman” and “bestial” (page 47).

Since Blanche has been bad-mouthing him so much to his wife, he’ll get his revenge on her by learning the gossip about how “common” she is, making all of her pretensions to art and culture seem utterly hypocritical.

VIII: Scene Five

Stella and Blanche can hear Steve and Eunice fighting upstairs, the latter accusing the former of fooling around with some “blonde,” which Steve denies (page 49). The fight escalates, she throws something at him, then he hits her, and she wants to get the police (page 50). She runs off, and he goes after her. We sense that domestic violence in the ‘heavenly’ Elysian Fields is not limited to Stella and Stanley.

Stanley comes by, and Blanche–in her usual ‘ladylike’ voice–taunts him by saying he must be an Aries, since he’s so “forceful and dynamic,” and he loves “to bang things around” (page 51). Naturally, he’s annoyed at these words. Stella tells her that Stanley was born just after Christmas, making him a Capricorn. Blanche comments, “the Goat!”, annoying him all the more.

When she mentions that her birthday is the following month, in mid-September, making her a Virgo, which is the Virgin, Stanley–already knowing a few things about her scandalous reputation in Laurel–has an opportunity to insult her back. He mentions a man named Shaw, a name common enough that she can pretend this is not someone she knows in particular, a man she apparently met in Laurel, at a hotel named the Flamingo, the place where prostitution goes on (as I mentioned above), so naturally, Blanche denies any association with it.

When Stanley leaves, though, Blanche asks Stella, in a state of great anxiety, if she’s heard any dirty gossip about her (page 52). Stella denies having heard anything nasty about Blanche. Around this time, Steve and Eunice have returned in each others’ arms, fully reconciled; their making-up parallels the making-up of Stanley and Stella that happened so soon before.

Blanche explains to Stella the reason for her bad reputation in Laurel. The loss of Belle Reve, on top of her husband’s suicide and the scandal surrounding her sexual relationship with her teen student, put her into a situation so desperate that she had “to be seductive,” to “put on soft colours” (page 53). She’s needed to do this with men “in order to pay for–one night’s shelter!”

She’s found that “men don’t…even admit your existence unless they are making love to you. And you’ve got to have your existence admitted by someone, if you’re going to have someone’s protection.” So she’s got to “put a–paper lantern over the light”, something she habitually does so people won’t see her aging and fading beauty, something she’s terrified of, just as she’s terrified of the light revealing the truth of her scandalous behaviour, something she’s feen forced into because of her losses…but the cruel, judgemental world will never be understanding to her about that.

And Stanley is the epitome of that cruel and judgemental world, not that he’s any better, of course.

She senses that Stanley wants to throw her out of his and Stella’s home, so she doesn’t want to be a burden to her sister, something she promises she won’t be in the most hysterical of words. Stella is shocked by how emotional Blanche is getting. Blanche is placing all of her hopes on Mitch, with whom she is having a date at seven that very night (page 54).

In anticipation of Stella learning, through Stanley, about Blanche’s reputation in Laurel as a ‘woman of loose morals,’ she frantically insists that on dates with Mitch, he’s gotten only “a good night kiss” from her (page 55). She wants his respect, yet she’s terrified of losing him, hence she’s so sensitive about her age. She wants him to think of her as “prim and proper.”

Of course, Mitch wants her to think of him as a gentleman. He has his social mask, and she has hers, symbolized by that paper lantern over the light, to hide the aging on her face.

Stanley returns, and he leaves with Stella, with Steve and Eunice accompanying them. Blanche is alone in the apartment.

Just before Mitch is to show up for his date with her that night, Blanche sees a handsome young man (played by Wright King in the 1951 film), who appears at the door. He says he’s “collecting for the Evening Star,” a newspaper. She jokes about him as a star taking up collections because she finds him so attractive, but he is so innocent and sweet (just the way she likes her boys), he doesn’t understand her joke.

I suspect that she, in her fragile, unstable mental state, is imagining this boy’s presence. He can easily be seen as reminding her of not only the boy she had the affair with, but also her husband back when she first knew him, when the couple were both very young. Her student/lover presumably reminded her of her husband, too.

The boy collecting money is so perfect to her. He’s polite, he calls her “ma’am,” and he’d never treat her like a whore. He’s shying away as she makes her advances to him.

Finally, she gives him a kiss on the mouth (page 57), but not wanting to go any further, as with Mitch, she sends the boy off. And fittingly, just after he disappears, Mitch arrives for their date.

IX: Scene Six

At 2:00 a.m. of the same night of their date, Mitch notes that Blanche is getting tired. After he drops her off at home, it seems that he’ll take “that streetcar named Desire” back home, for we can see just how much they desire each other. Still, he’s sad because he thinks he hasn’t entertained her much tonight.

Though she still wants him to think of her as a lady who isn’t cheap, she still likes tempting him. She’d have him come into Stella’s and Stanley’s place, since the husband and wife aren’t back home yet. She also wants to give Mitch a drink, and she even asks him, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” She also says in French that it’s a shame he doesn’t understand the question, but of course she’s happy he doesn’t (page 61). They actually go into the bedroom, her carrying the drinks.

A little later, she has him pick her up to see how light she is. Still, she’d have him let her go and be a gentleman while her sister and Stanley are still away (page 63). She fears Stanley exposing her bad reputation in Laurel, but he can’t resist continuing her coquettishness.

Almost immediately after Mitch’s picking her up and putting her back down, she brings up how much she doesn’t like Stanley, with her worries that he may have told Mitch some bad things about her (page 64). It’s interesting to see this juxtaposition of her teasing of Mitch with her fears of him learning of her ‘loose’ ways in Laurel. It’s as if her unconscious death drive, her Jungian Shadow, is deliberately sabotaging her date.

She gets nervous when Mitch asks her age (page 65). He asks because of his mother, who has wanted to know more about her. After all, his mother will probably die in a few months, and she wants to make sure her son is settled (page 66).

Next, the conversation turns toward Blanche’s old husband, a sad topic for her. The two married when very young. He was “different.” He had “a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s,” but not at all “effeminate-looking” (page 66). He needed her help.

Eventually, she found him with another man.

They pretended that nothing had happened, then the three of them went to Moon Lake Casino to be drunk and dance, to the music of the Varsouviana in particular. Then her husband broke away from her, ran outside, put a revolver in his mouth, and shot himself.

He ran out and killed himself because, on the dance floor, she’d told him he disgusted her (page 67). So she blames herself for his suicide.

Now, in the 1951 film version, all references to homosexuality in the play–however indirect–were censored for obvious reasons. Instead, the husband is portrayed as simply weak, overly sensitive, weepy, and a poet–all the gay stereotypes without the gay. A similar excising of homosexuality in a Tennessee Williams play was done in the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Empathizing with Blanche, and seeming to be similarly sensitive, Mitch reaches out to her after hearing her tragic story. She needs someone, as he needs someone. He’s seriously considering marrying her.

Except…

X: Scene Seven

In mid-September, it’s Blanche’s birthday, and Stanley has plans of ruining it for her (page 69). He’s found the dirt on her that he needs to prove that she has no business calling him ‘common.’

To add to his irritation, she is “soaking in a hot tub” on a day when the temperature is 100. He can’t stand how Stella serves cokes to “Her Majesty in the tub.” He’s convinced, “from the most reliable sources–which [he has] checked on”, that Blanche is a liar about her past (page 70).

Her singing in the bathtub, like a “canary bird,” is annoying him all the more. He can’t stand her pretense of being some kind of “lily,” all sweet and delicate, when he’s discovered that she, in his judgement, is a common whore.

The sad thing about the animosity between both of them is how it’s based on prejudicial notions of class, ethnicity, and sex. His faults, in her estimation, are because he’s a low-class “Polack.” Her faults, in his estimation, are because she’s a ‘slut.’

His real faults don’t come from his being working-class or Polish. Anyone, of any ethnicity or any social class, can be irascible, crass, rude, or violent, as Stanley is. Her real faults don’t stem from her private sexual life. Any woman, with or without literary and cultural pretensions, can fall the way Blanche has fallen, given the combination of misfortunes she’s had to suffer.

Her promiscuity should be perfectly forgivable if she can find a husband and commit to him. Her questionable relationship with her seventeen-year-old student can easily be forgotten given the same positive change in her fortunes.

What’s more, what he does to her towards the end of the play renders her sins insignificant in comparison to his. This play demonstrates the cruelty of the old double standard between the sexes more vividly than perhaps any story out there. The double standard can be expressed in the metaphorical use of words used in dog-breeding: when a man screws around, he’s a stud; when a woman does it, she’s a bitch.

This cruel double standard can help us to understand why Blanche does the prim and proper routine, why she makes mental escapes into a world of romance, poetry, and gallant gentlemen, and why she sings like a canary bird in the bathtub. It’s all a desperate attempt on her part to survive and stay sane.

Of course, if we had a society that had institutions to care for unfortunates like Blanche, she would never need to sell herself to survive. And if that society gave workers like Stanley the full fruits of their labour, and if that labour was meaningful instead of alienating, he probably wouldn’t be half the ape that he acts like.

But I digress. Back to the story.

Now, while Stanley is telling Stella about Blanche’s lies about only ever being kissed by men, as she’s told Mitch (page 70), and about quitting teaching merely because of her nerves, rather than being fired for sexual misconduct with a minor, Blanche is in the tub singing about such phony things as paper moons, cardboard seas, the Barnum and Bailey circus, honky-tonk parades, and melodies from penny arcades–things that wouldn’t be make-believe if she had a man who believed in her (pages 70-71). Just as I said above: she wouldn’t need to indulge in all the fakery if she had a man to love her…as she once had.

We can’t expect any compassion from merciless Stanley, though, of course. He’s found fault in her, and he has all the reasons he needs to hate her.

Stella tries to reason with Stanley, to get him to understand the misfortunes her sister has gone through to bring her to her current situation. She brings up Blanche’s “degenerate” husband (page 73). Stanley is deaf to all of this: he’d rather hate Blanche than pity her.

In fact, Stanley has told Mitch all about Blanche’s scandalous past, and though he’s infuriated with Stanley for blackening her reputation, he’s checked the sources of Stanley’s stories and has confirmed them. He’s been invited to Blanche’s birthday party, but he won’t show up (page 74).

Stanley has given her some extraordinary birthday gifts. He’s been most thoughtful to her.

Finally, he gets so furious with her holding up the bathroom and singing endlessly that he shouts at her to get out (page 75). She tries her best to hold herself together against his savagery. Still, she worries about what he’s told Stella about her.

XI: Scene Eight

Forty-five minutes later, the three of them are sitting at a dismal birthday dinner (page 76). Blanche is wearing an artificial smile, trying to hide her disappointment at Mitch’s absence.

She asks Stanley to tell them a joke, something to cheer them up without it being vulgar or indecent. In his disgust with her affectations about being the ‘high-class’ lady from Belle Reve, rather than the whore from the Flamingo, he says he knows no jokes “refined enough for [her] taste.” Therefore, Blanche will tell one…a joke that ends with “God damn…!” She’s as capable of rough language as he is (page 77).

When Stella gripes at him for his bad table manners and tells him to help her clear the table, he has another of his temper tantrums, throwing a plate to the floor. He refuses to let himself come anywhere near being dominated by her or Blanche.

He’s infuriated at being called a “Polack” by Blanche, and judged as “vulgar–greasy,” but he sees no injustice in his own dominance as a man over her and his wife. He twists the socialist meaning of Huey Long‘s “Every man a king” slogan, meant to indicate that all people should have access to the plenty that a king enjoys, and instead he uses it to mean that men should be the kings of their women. In this, we can see what I was saying above, that a lack of solidarity between the sexes, as well as between people of different ethnic groups, is bad for the working class.

Blanche is still worried that Stanley has told Stella some dirt he’s learned from Laurel. Stella denies hearing anything, but of course she’s heard plenty. Blanche wants to call Mitch’s home and find out why he hasn’t shown up for her birthday party. She’ll regret making the call (page 78).

Stanley has another ‘gift’ for Blanche: a ticket back to Laurel. She can hear the Varsouviana music. She runs off, coughing and gagging (page 81).

Stella reprimands Stanley for being so cruel to her sister, and he reminds Stella of how he’d pulled her down from the columns of Belle Reve, and she liked it. He’s now pulled Blanche down from those columns, too, and she hates it…therefore, he hates her.

Overwhelmed by stress, Stella is going to go into labour. He has to take her to the hospital.

XII: Scene Nine

Blanche is alone in the apartment again, and Mitch arrives, dressed in his work clothes. He has no more interest in playing the role of the gentleman for her, having confirmed what Stanley told him about her. His coldness to her, and her realization that she has lost him, just as she lost her husband, reminds her of the Varsouviana music she’d heard when he ran off and put a gun in his mouth (page 84).

Mitch doesn’t like how dark it is in the place. He wants to see her in the light, which of course she never wants to be seen in (page 86). She finds the dark comforting, something she can hide in. Just as it hides her age, the darkness also hides her sinful past–it is her Jungian Shadow.

He insists on seeing her in the light even to the point of tearing off the paper lantern from the light-bulb. He wants to see her “good and plain,” which causes her narcissistic injury, for she finds exposure to the light “insulting.”

He wants realism, but she wants “magic.” She wants to hide in romance, to be worshipped by a gentleman. She wants comforting illusions.

When he sees her in the light, he doesn’t mind that she’s older than he thought; but he’s heartbroken to know that she, of supposedly “old-fashioned” ideals, has serviced men in the Flamingo. He at first dismissed Stanley’s accusations as slander, but then he checked Stanley’s sources and he is no longer able to deny the truth about her (page 87).

Blanche tries her best to deny Mitch’s sources, claiming the stories of the men who knew of her promiscuity are slanders to get revenge on her for rejecting their advances, but Mitch won’t believe her. Knowing she can’t get him to sympathize with her, she ironically exaggerates her sin by claiming the hotel she stayed in was not called The Flamingo, but “The Tarantula,” where she supposedly brought all her victims (page 87).

Again, she tries to explain what drove her to promiscuity–the suicide of her husband, Allan, her hopes of finding a man’s protection but never getting it, and the slow fading away of her looks from aging. She still hopes she can win Mitch’s sympathy by appealing to his need for somebody, as she needs somebody, and noting how gentle he seems (page 88)…but all that matters to him is that she lied to him.

As all of this is being said, a Mexican woman outside can be heard saying, “Flowers, flowers, flowers for the dead” in Spanish…some ominous foreshadowing of Blanche’s fate, metaphorically speaking.

Blanche speaks of “blood-stained pillow slips” that need changing, symbolic of her promiscuity. She imagines that “a coloured girl [could] do it,” suggesting a projection of her sin, what makes Blanche “common,” onto blacks, onto common workers. Blanche would continue to use racial and class prejudice as an ego defence mechanism to protect her against judgement for her sins.

Still, not only does Mitch feel no sympathy for Blanche, but he also no longer feels any obligation to play the role of the gentleman for her (page 89). He takes it to the point of wanting sex from her, imagining that she’s owed it to him “all summer.”

As we can see, his gentleman routine is as much of a phony act as is her ladylike routine. So much in this play is illusion and pretense.

Since Mitch has his hands on her waist, and it’s clear that he doesn’t want to marry her, she has no intention of satisfying him like a ‘cheap’ woman. His intention is to have her whether she’ll consent or not…in other words, he’s prepared to rape her.

She screams “Fire! Fire! Fire!” to make him go away, since screaming fire is considered a much more effective way to get help against a rapist than yelling rape. When we consider what’s going to happen to Blanche in the next scene (just after the end of it, specifically), we can see that Mitch is actually a more moderate version of Stanley, or rather, that Stanley is representative of an extreme version of ‘gentlemen’ like Mitch.

XIII: Scene Ten

It’s later that same night. Blanche is dressed in her prettiest of dresses, wearing her rhinestone tiara, and in front of the dressing table mirror. Since Mitch left, she’s been drinking steadily. She imagines she has a number of “spectral admirers” around her (page 90).

As I said above, her loss of Mitch is a loss of the mirror of her grandiose self, one of the two poles that are holding her together. So the group of “spectral admirers” is there in a desperate attempt by her to avoid the psychological fragmentation that is her fate via Stanley.

She’s talking to these imagined admirers: she’s hallucinating their presence. She’s holding a hand mirror to look at herself more closely, the hand holding it trembling. The chasm between who she knows she really is and the Lacanian ideal-I she wants to see in the specular image must be so vast that she smashes the mirror down hard to crack the glass.

Stanley returns from the hospital, and he’s in an uncharacteristically good mood. He is even, for the moment, kind to Blanche. He’s happy because he’s soon to be a father and hoping for a son (page 92).

Blanche has hopes of her own, only hers are completely imaginary. Just as she’s been seeing make-believe admirers in the mirror, for the sake of her grandiose self, she’s also imagining that Mr. Shep Huntleigh, her personified ideal, will take her on a cruise of the Caribbean (page 91).

Only through an escape into fantasy can she hope to keep her bipolar self intact, with Shep at one pole (idealization), and the admirers in the mirror reflection at the other pole (grandiosity). Yet Stanley is about to smash both poles for her, to rid her of her illusions, and traumatize her so severely that her psychotic break from reality will be complete.

Still, though, for the moment, Stanley is being nice to her because of his good mood as an expectant father. He doesn’t believe a word she’s saying about a cruise with Shep, but he’s humouring her all the same, to keep the peace, hence his comment that the rhinestones on her tiara are “Tiffany diamonds” (page 91). In his humouring of her, we can see that he’s as capable of pretense as she is.

Though he’s trying to be generous with her to keep the mood pleasant, she doesn’t want to reciprocate (page 93). She’s annoyed at the continuing lack of privacy, and yearns for her “millionaire from Dallas” to restore it to her. In her swelling narcissism, she boasts of her inner beauty–“beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart”–all of which can replace her fading physical beauty.

This boasting is causing Stanley’s patience to fade, especially when she speaks of “casting [her] pearls before swine!” (page 93) “Swine,” of course, refers not just to Stanley but also to his friend, Mitch, whom she now regards as no less common than Stanley. She lies that Mitch “returned…to beg [her] forgiveness,” which she wouldn’t give.

When Stanley reminds her about the telegram she supposedly got from Shep, and he sees she has briefly forgotten about it, he’s caught her in a lie (page 94). Now his anger comes back in full.

Stanley knows there is no Shep, and he knows that Mitch never came to her asking for forgiveness. It’s all only her “imagination…lies and conceit and tricks!” It was all narcissistic fantasy, which she’s been using to protect her bipolar self from psychological fragmentation.

He is disgusted with her phony charade, but he cannot see the pain she went through that brought her to this. He’s tearing down her fake performance, and he’s about to bring her to that state of fragmentation. But first, he’ll go into the bathroom to change into his pajamas.

Just as before, when she suggested to Stella that their escape from Stanley would be a call to Western Union to contact Shep (Scene Four, page 44), she’s at the phone, trying to do it again for real, to save herself from this beast (pages 94-95).

She hears noises from outside at night. She leaves the phone and, according to the stage directions, she goes to the kitchen. Outside, a drunkard is attacking a prostitute. This is obvious foreshadowing of what’s about to happen to her.

Stanley comes back from the bathroom, having changed into his pajamas, and he’s looking at her lewdly. Part of the problem of being labelled a ‘cheap’ or ‘easy’ woman is, of course, how she becomes prey for lecherous men. Mitch gave Blanche a try; now, Stanley wants to…only he’ll be much more insistent on it.

He hangs up the phone on her, and he’s standing in a place where he can stop her from getting away. She knows what that look in his eyes means, and she needs to protect herself, so she smashes a bottle and points the jagged end at him (page 96).

She tries to fight the good fight, “some rough-house,” but he overpowers her, of course. Now that they’re going to have “this date” (an interesting choice of words on Stanley’s part, reminding us of how her dating Mitch ended), he picks her up and takes her to the bed (page 97). She moans and yields to him in all hopelessness.

XIV: Scene Eleven

A few weeks later, Stella is home with the baby, and she’s packing Blanche’s things. Eunice also comes by.

Stanley is playing poker with Steve, Mitch, and Pablo again at the kitchen table. The atmosphere of this game is the same as the last one (page 98).

Pablo curses at Stanley in Spanish, making the latter call the former a “greaseball.” Once again, the use of ethnic slurs demonstrates the lack of solidarity among the working class.

Blanche has told Stella that Stanley raped her, but Stella refuses to believe it (page 99). Eunice agrees that Stella should never believe it, since she’d never be able to carry on with Stanley. This understanding brings us back to the theme of illusions that keep the pain away, that protect us from fragmentation.

Blanche has finished bathing and is ready to come out of the bathroom. She’s full of anxiety and insecurity, wondering if the coast is clear (i.e., no men to see her), and if she’s failed to rinse all of the soap out of her hair (page 100). Stella and Eunice try to comfort and humour her by telling her how good she looks.

Blanche is still hoping for Shep Huntleigh to call her and take her on that cruise. Again, Stella and Eunice are humouring her with this fantasy, knowing full well that it’s a psychiatrist who is about to take her away. Again, they have to keep her illusions intact, for reality will destroy her.

Blanche imagines she’s going to spend the rest of her life on the sea (page 102). She thinks she’ll die holding “the hand of some nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one…” How ironic that it’s actually going to be a doctor who takes her away…and not a young or handsome one.

The doctor and nurse, or matron, arrive at the door and ring the doorbell. Blanche, of course, is full of hope that it’s Shep who has come to her rescue. How disappointed she’ll be.

As Blanche looks in shock at these two unexpected and unwanted visitors, she can hear the Varsouviana again. This was the music she heard just before her husband’s suicide, which in turn led to the events that have been corroding her whole sense of self. She’s hearing the music again in her mind; it’s a trigger leading to her destruction.

She’s trying to escape from the two visitors, claiming she forgot something (page 104). The nurse goes in after her and calls out to her, her voice echoing in Blanche’s mind, a threatening echo that suggests a recurring pain, a returning trauma.

Stanley, impatient to get rid of her, asks if it’s the paper lantern she wants. He tears it off the light-bulb and gestures to give it to her. According to the stage directions, “She cries out as if the lantern was herself.” (page 105) Of course she’d see it that way: all that Blanche has been, to keep her sanity, is a covering-up of the light, a comforting dimness, her narcissistic False Self. Revealing the light’s brightness exposes her True Self and all the ugliness she perceives it to be.

This is her succumbing to psychological fragmentation.

As the nurse is restraining her, Mitch gets up and tries to hit Stanley for his cruelty to Blanche. Mitch would seem to have a modicum of gallantry after all. Stanley’s denial of guilt shows he’s as fake about his commonality as she is about hers.

It is the Doctor, however, whose gentlemanly act of removing his hat and greeting her, that calms her down, restoring her comforting illusions. Stanley’s raping of her means that he has put his filth and commonality inside her, something she cannot expel. For her, kindness comes from strangers, not from people close to her.

The 1951 film changed the ending by having Stella refuse to be with Stanley anymore, since the old Motion Picture Production Code would never tolerate his rape going unpunished. No divorce, of course, but no easy forgiveness of him, either. Among social conservatives, there can be no acceptance of such violence against women as rape, however much the law may allow guilty men to slip through its cracks.

Williams’s play, however, exposes the ugly side of society by granting no justice or satisfaction to the long-suffering marginalized: ‘fallen’ women, ‘degenerate’ gays, ‘mama’s boys,’ ‘Polacks,’ ‘Chinamen,’ and ‘greaseballs.’ Williams would not whitewash cruel reality.

XV: Conclusion

You see, the cruel irony of “depend[ing] on the kindness of strangers” is twofold for Blanche. On the one hand, those strangers who were ‘kind’ to her were the Johns who solicited prostitution from her in exchange for money so she could survive–in other words, total exploitation. On the other hand, those she’s known well have hurt her the most: her husband, whose suicide was an abandoning of her; Mitch, who abandoned her out of a refusal to forgive her for her shady past; Stanley, for obvious reasons; and even Stella, for refusing to believe her accusation of Stanley (her relationship to her oaf of a husband being more important to her than her loyalty to her sister), and for allowing Blanche to be taken to a mental institution, her final humiliation.

In a world of alienation, only strangers can be kind.

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, London, Penguin Books, 1947

Analysis of ‘Commando’

I: Introduction

Commando is a 1985 action film directed by Mark L. Lester and written by Steven E. de Souza, after a story by Joseph Loeb III, Matthew Weisman, and de Souza. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rae Dawn Chong, with Alyssa Milano, Vernon Wells, Bill Duke, Dan Hedaya, James Olson, and David Patrick Kelly.

The music score, noted for its use of steel drums, was by James Horner, and the film ends with a song by The Power Station called “We Fight for Love,” when Michael Des Barres replaced Robert Palmer as lead singer.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film.

Giving the film a rating of 67% based on reviews from 36 critics, Rotten Tomatoes aptly describes Commando in its consensus as having a “threadbare plot, outsized action, and endless one-liners.” In other words, it’s a crowd-pleaser with all the gratuitous violence, swearing, and cheesy puns that a movie-going philistine could ever want.

So, Dear Reader, you’re probably wondering why I’m wasting my energy with this Hollywood schlock. Well, apart from the fact that the philistine in me finds this mindless entertainment amusing (the nostalgic memories of watching it as a teen in the 1980s being a big part of that amusement), the flash and excitement that Commando delivers is a distraction from the political undertones that I feel should be discussed.

II: A Brief Digression, If You’ll Indulge Me, Please

As should be obvious to anyone watching the film with his or her brain turned on, Commando contributes to the mythology of the US as the great saviour of other countries from tyranny and despotism. I’m not saying this as if it were a great revelation to you, Dear Reader: I bring this up because I want to discuss the social effects of movies like this, and how they brainwash Westerners, Americans especially, into cheering for US/NATO imperialism.

I was trying to do such commentary on another film aptly starring right-leaning Schwarzenegger, Conan the Barbarian. The reader response to that analysis was mixed: while one positive responder understood my intentions, to alert people to the hypnotizing danger of passively accepting Hollywood action films as US imperialist and right-wing libertarian propaganda (an example of the kind of thing Michael Parenti analyzed in his book, Inventing Reality), two others blasted my Conan analysis for seemingly opposing reasons.

The first negative responder was a woman who went out of her way to be as insulting as possible, saying my analysis was ‘so superficial as to be silly,’ and that during the Reagan era, pretty much all movies reflected a right-wing ideology, so apparently there’s no insight to be gained from describing Conan the way I did. First of all, many 1980s movies did obviously reflect a right-wing stance, but many others didn’t–take They Live, for instance, as an anti-Reagan film. Secondly, only someone with a right-wing bias (as I suspect she has) would see no value in critiquing Conan‘s right-wing agenda, since a left-wing sympathy would see that value. I’d say it was her reading of what I wrote that was “superficial” and “silly”: I suspect she read only the first few paragraphs, snorted and called it ‘stupid!’, then jumped to conclusions and made her snarky comments without bothering to read any further.

The second commenter took the opposite view, seeing my discussion of a right-wing libertarian, anti-communist allegory in Conan as “the most half-baked review” of a movie that he’d ever read. Then he ‘corrected’ me by pointing out something I myself stated, however briefly, in my analysis: that the film is about determination in rising up against one’s obstacles (speaking of pointing out the obvious, hence my brevity in stating it). Never mind that I flooded the analysis with links to prove my point about the allegory (i.e., the director’s right-wing leanings as well as those of Schwarzenegger’s, a link stating that Nazi salutes were done on the set, etc.). And what I wrote wasn’t a review (my saying whether or not I liked the film), but an analysis, stated plainly in the title (a discussion of themes, symbolism, allegory, etc.). So, was I stating the absurdly obvious, or was I going off on some “half-baked” tangent? I’m not sure.

My point in bringing up the Conan analysis and its negative responses is to say that this one of Commando is one of many articles in which I’m not just saying what I like or dislike about a film. The film analyses are about relating the content of the films with either political issues (typically from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint) or with psychoanalytic ones (usually Freudian and post-Freudian, but recently, more and more Jungian).

That kind of analysis is what I do here on this blog; so if that’s not your thing, please read no further (I gave just such a warning at the beginning of my Conan analysis, which as I explained above, went unheeded at least twice). If, however, you do like how I relate film, literature, and music to leftist politics and psychoanalysis, then by all means, read on, Dear Reader.

III: Some Rather Needless Killing

The film begins with three men assassinated, all former members of the unit of US Army Special Forces Colonel John Matrix (Schwarzenegger). The first victim is shot by two men posing as garbagemen; the second of these two killers, Cooke (Duke), then kills a car salesman by running him over right in the dealership with the car he’s supposedly interested in buying; and the third victim, Bennett (Wells), is supposedly blown up in a boat, though we later learn that his death has been faked.

Matrix, it seems, is next to be assassinated.

As it turns out, though, he isn’t to be killed, but rather to be forced to assassinate the president of a fictional Latin American country, Val Verde, this man being someone Matrix originally helped put in power there, having ousted Arius (Hedaya), a brutal dictator who wants to be reinstated. If Matrix doesn’t cooperate, Arius will have his men kill Matrix’s pre-teen daughter, Jenny (Milano), whom they’ve kidnapped.

Here’s my point: why were those two men killed at the beginning of the film, with Bennett’s death faked? Apparently, Arius’ men (including Bennett) mean to agitate General Franklin Kirby (Olson) and get him to go to Matrix’s home to warn him personally that he’s probably next to die, and in the process Kirby will unwittingly help the bad guys know where Matrix lives.

This is an absurd way to get to Matrix, whose address (somewhere in upstate California, in the mountains) is presumably private for his and Jenny’s protection. Would Kirby be stupid enough to go there personally, risking leading the assassins right to Matrix? Couldn’t the killers just find another way to find him (e.g., paying someone in the army a handsome sum to disclose the address, etc.)? Wouldn’t it be better to catch Matrix off guard in a surprise attack?

It’s obvious that the killings at the beginning were just an excuse to have excitement for its own sake, to lull the audience in, to make them passive recipients of more pro-US propaganda.

IV: Matrix and Jenny

Of course, Schwarzenegger as tough guy Matrix is supposed to personify how ‘indestructible’ the American empire is (an empire that, incidentally, failed to defeat North Korea, lost against Vietnam, and similarly left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs). The liberals, however, can’t have their big hero be just a cold-hearted killer; we have to see his sensitive side, so during the opening credits and before Jenny’s kidnapping, we see some father/daughter quality time between Matrix and her.

While they’re eating sandwiches at home, he makes a cliché joke about gender-bending Boy George. Then he refers to his life as a boy in East Germany, and how the communists said that rock ‘n’ roll is “subversive.” While communists back in the 1950s and 1960s were probably much more socially conservative (as were, obviously, at least half of Americans back then) than in recent years (a lessening of conservatism that can’t be reasonably be said of those half of all Americans!), we’re meant to deem this old judgement of the communists as an example of how ‘repressive‘ they were and are. Matrix’s later quip that “Maybe they were right” is meant to be flippant, yet it tells us which people still have the repressive attitude…still by the 1980s and since then. Putin may not be sympathetic to LGBT people, but he hasn’t been a communist in decades.

Now, we’ve acknowledged that Matrix is of German background (presumably to rationalize Austrian Schwarzenegger’s undeniable accent), yet his name sounds utterly English, since we don’t want our American hero to seem inordinately Teutonic (shouldn’t his name be more like ‘Johann Meetrichs’?).

Given the film’s obvious agenda to glorify Anglo/American/NATO imperialism as comprising the ‘good guys,’ as against anyone who would dare defy said imperialism (Arius et al), the idea of having a German-American hero fighting those defiant of that imperialism (who, in real life, tend to be left-wing) strongly suggests the enlisting of fascists, at least symbolically. Matrix would have defected from East Germany early on, and the real purpose of the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as the East Germans called it, was just that: to keep the West German fascists out (i.e., those ex-Nazis who, rather than be punished for their war crimes, were given cushy jobs to fight the ‘commies’), as well as to keep East Germany from losing needed skilled workers.

Matrix’s leaving of the socialist state would have stemmed from an ideological hatred of socialism. Germans who hate socialism have historically leaned towards fascism as a protection against Marxism. The capitalist class has always used fascism to protect themselves against left-wing revolution, as have the petite bourgeoisie. The film’s negative portrayal of Latin Americans reinforces the idea that there’s a Nazi racist undertone here, as there was in Conan, as I argued in my analysis of it (see link above).

So what we see in German-American Matrix is a personification of the continuum between liberalism and fascism. He’s the sensitive father, as I discussed above in his relationship with Jenny at the beginning of the film, but she can be seen as personifying his threatened class interests when she’s kidnapped, making him ruthless in his lawless, bloody, and murderous quest to get her back. The fact that she’s a sweet, helpless, and sympathetic girl shouldn’t deflect us from seeing that cynical reality. Her sweetness, taken from an allegorical perspective, is being used as propaganda to justify all of his killing. More on that later.

My point is that liberals, seeming progressive in their goals on the surface, will betray that progressive agenda in a heartbeat if their class interests are at stake, and that’s what’s represented in Matrix’s quick switch from sensitive father to unflinching killer, thief, destroyer of property, kidnapper (however briefly, of Cindy [Chong]), etc.

Stalin once said that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” (Note that social democracy is the furthest left of liberalism.) His words may, on the surface, seem extreme, but put in their proper historical perspective, they are clearly understood. He said them in 1924, just five years after the social-democratic Weimar Republic had used the right-wing Freikorps to crush the Spartacist Uprising‘s attempt at a communist revolution in Germany, murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Weimar Republic’s soft and ineffective rule would lead to great dissatisfaction on both the far left and far right, one thing would lead to another, and by the early 1930s, you-know-who would rise to power in Germany.

If the ‘far left’ of liberalism can lead to fascism, so can more ‘moderately left’ versions of it. We easily backslid from the welfare capitalism of the era of post-WWII economic prosperity to the ‘free market’ capitalism of the Reagan/Thatcher years, and thence to the far-right nightmare of recent decades, all thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which meant that a large welfare state was no longer needed to ward off the danger of proletarian revolution in the West. We’d reached ‘the end of history,’ and the ruling class no longer felt threatened by the working class.

That liberals today are supporting literal fascists in Ukraine and Israel should help you see the truth in Stalin’s words, Dear Reader.

V: Making Matrix Aid Arius’ Revolution

We never learn of Arius’ political ideology; we only know that he’s a brutal dictator, who’s “tortured and killed” those who have resisted him. But is he on the left, or the right?

He’s a Latin American, a former ruler of Val Verde, as I mentioned above. We know that Matrix helped overthrow Arius and put a new president, Velasquez, in power. Here’s the funny thing, though: the US army, CIA, etc. like putting brutal right-wing dictators in power in Latin America.

Indeed, the American government has a history of intervening in other countries’ political affairs, typically replacing democratically-elected heads of state with ones that further the capitalist/imperialist interests of the US/NATO countries. Examples include Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973…and more recently, Ukraine in 2014, and Bolivia in 2019, as well as attempted coups in places like Venezuela. One should look into US support for Operation Condor, too.

Of course, the Western corporate media likes to portray these interventions as ‘triumphs of freedom and democracy,’ when actually they were anything but. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see the ousting of Arius and replacement of him by US-backed Velasquez in Commando as portrayed as a good thing. It’s all just part of the propaganda used to make the US look like the good guys, while men like Arius are vilified.

So the very idea of the American military, as represented by Matrix, as not wanting to help spearhead a coup and install a dictator is ludicrous. Pinochet was the Arius of Chile in the 1970s, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of dissident Chileans, including dropping some of them from helicopters. The CIA helped put Pinochet in power, a “scumbag” who “tortured and killed” many, yet I doubt that any in the US military would have applied Matrix’s words to Pinochet the way Matrix applied them to Arius.

So Matrix not wanting to overthrow a Latin American government and replacing it with that of a brutal right-wing dictator is sheer denial on the part of the propagandists making this film. Moviegoers who see this film, knowing little if anything about the true political state of affairs in the world, will just eat up this propaganda uncritically, absorbing it and imagining that what the film portrays more or less corresponds with what the US government’s role in world affairs really is: the ‘policemen’ of the world, fighting tyranny and oppression everywhere, rather than the cause of so much of it.

This is a dangerous message to send to Western audiences, reinforcing a myth of our supposed superiority, which in turn is used to justify more and more imperial conquests, killing more and more innocent people. This urge to impose ‘freedom and democracy’ has led to possibly a million Iraqi deaths, and the destruction of Libya, changing it from a prosperous nation that took care of its people to a failed state with a slave trade. The current wish to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to Russia and China could lead to a very nuclear WWIII, killing everyone on the globe.

Since Commando was made in the mid-1980s, I wonder why the film didn’t portray Arius as a left-wing dictator, but just as a generic one. Surely portraying him as a ‘commie’ would have made for effective Cold War propaganda, wouldn’t it have? Perhaps they didn’t specify his ideology because they knew enough left-wing critics still existed in the 1980s to trash the film for being even more obvious right-wing propaganda than it was and is. Still, for the reasons I’ve given above, it makes more sense for Arius to have a left-wing, rather than right-wing, ideology, so we’ll just go with that, remembering that his vilification, as well as the dehumanizing of his troops, is all part of Commando‘s obvious right-wing agenda.

VI: The Female Factor

Getting Cindy, an off-duty flight attendant, to help Matrix without there being any sexual chemistry between these attractive male and female leads seems as if this film is an example of the emerging kind that is trying to show more respect to female characters (her firing a rocket launcher correctly…on the second try; her flying a seaplane, etc.), especially since she’s a POC. Still, there’s plenty of sexism against women to keep Commando far behind more recent action films, which are sure to include women kicking lots of ass.

Poor Cindy is frequently treated like a whore, even explicitly called one by predatory Sully (Kelly, whom you’ll recall clinking those bottles together at the climax of The Warriors), leaving her in a huff for not letting him have his way with her. Later, without asking for her consent, in Sully’s motel room and waiting for Cooke, Matrix opens her top to make her look easy, that is, having indeed let Sully have his way with her. Even a cop, who’s later helped apprehend Matrix for trying to rob an army surplus store, sees her in a car next the cops’ truck and assumes she’s a “hooker.”

Earlier, Sully–asshole that he is–jokes in the airport about having “a little more time with” kidnapped Jenny. At the end of the film, Matrix carries her on his shoulder as if this damsel-in-distress were a prize he’s won after killing everyone else.

But the crowning piece of sexism in the film is the gratuitous display of a woman’s large, shaking breasts in a motel room next to Sully’s during Matrix’s fight with Cooke. It’s a completely unnecessary moment of titillation mixed with humour, meant as one of many examples of Commando‘s use of visuals to dazzle and distract the viewer as he or she absorbs the pro-US propaganda without thinking.

(By the way, Ava Cadell, who played the woman in the motel scene, has since become a therapist with a doctorate from Newport University, California. She has written a number of books on sexuality, has done lectures, and given counseling to couples on personal issues. Here’s her website. As we can see, she’s risen far above doing mere cheesecake roles in schlocky Hollywood movies.)

VII: Rescuing Jenny

Rescuing a damsel in distress is more acceptable in the modern world, of course, if she’s a child. Our sympathy for her is what makes the wiping out of everyone else on the island where she’s being held hostage seem perfectly justified.

Commando, however, is just a movie. It isn’t reality. As a piece of American propaganda, it causes us to transfer our desensitizing of the brutal killing of all the dehumanized Latin American soldiers to the killing of any other people in the world, be they soldiers or civilians, who in any way stand between the US/NATO empire and the achievement of its goals.

Part of ensuring the audience’s desensitizing to the deaths of the soldiers is a showering of contempt on them and their worth. Bennett tells Arius that his “little pissant soldiers…are nothing.” This sort of devaluing of them makes it all the easier for the audience to watch them all die.

On the other side of the coin, Matrix’s killing of them all comes with nary a scratch on his body, for he personifies the invincibility of the American empire. Indeed, one of the particularly ludicrous aspects of Commando is how Matrix can single-handedly wipe out so many dozens of soldiers, and not even one of them can get a lucky shot and give him a significant wound, let alone kill him.

The tool shed scene, apart from showcasing gratuitous violence for the sheer fun of it, demonstrates that shaving off the top of a man’s head with a small buzzsaw blade thrown like a Frisbee (in the director’s cut, a second buzzsaw blade hits a guy in the neck), the stabbing of an axe into a soldier’s balls, and the hacking off of a man’s arm with a machete are not horrifying sights to see, but exciting ones.

The message given throughout the film is that, since Matrix can break one law after another with impunity to save Jenny, and since he personifies American military might, then the US government, military, and intelligence are free to disregard international law, UN Security Council Resolutions, etc., to achieve their objectives and maintain their global hegemony.

Let’s see how these issues translate into the politics of the real world. Israel, properly seen as an extension of Western imperialism into the Middle East, has been given carte blanche by the US government to kill and maim as many Gazans as they like. The rationalization?…to rescue a number of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th of 2023, rather like the kidnapping of Jenny. Where all those killed in Commando are soldiers, most, if not almost all, of the Gazans being killed are innocent civilians, including women and children.

Israel has made incursions into the West Bank, and the detonating of pagers in Lebanon–as well as airstrikes on several buildings in Beirut–has killed and injured many there, too, though there’s a similar rationale…the need to wipe out Hezbollah. The UN has, by the way, acknowledged that the armed resistance of fighters like Hamas is legitimate against an occupying force like Israel, but to the Zionist apologist, Hamas and Hezbollah are ‘terrorists’ whom he or she would surely sneer at as “little pissant soldiers” who “are nothing.”

Elsewhere, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up by the US, with the help of Norway–an act of ecoterrorism practically confessed to by the American government. Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre back in 1968, found conclusive, detailed evidence of how this crime was committed, yet the mainstream, corporate, imperialist media absurdly blamed the attack on Russia. How predictable. The motive behind this terrorist act, apart from the usual Russophobia/anti-Putin agenda (their ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine), was to stop Germany from buying cheap Russian oil and forcing the country to buy American oil.

Needless to say, the US government hasn’t been punished, nor will be, for this crime any more than Israel will be for her crimes against humanity. We, the general public, shrug these crimes off, or at least are expected to, just as we do the excesses of Matrix’s violence, all to rescue one little girl, who personifies his threatened class interests as I said above, and who is carried on his shoulder at the film’s end as a kind of trophy.

When Kirby, who has arrived with his army at that time, asks Matrix what he’s left for them, he callously says, “Just bodies.” Matrix then refuses to resume working for Kirby as a soldier, wanting instead to be the nice, sensitive father to Jenny; but as with any liberal, being the nice guy comes only when one’s class interests (symbolic ones in Matrix’s case) aren’t being threatened.

VIII: Confession, Projection, and Denial

In a conversation with Cindy in Sully’s car on the way to the motel to confront Cooke, Matrix explains why he has to rescue Jenny. In the process, he goes into a kind of confession of guilt, not only about how he, constantly on assignment as a Special Forces man somewhere on the other side of the world (Laos, Angola, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc.), has never had time to be with Jenny, but also about how he did “things you don’t want to know about,” and which he wishes he didn’t know he’d done.

Bennett, we learn, was kicked out of Matrix’s unit for being excessively violent (and this is why he, wanting to get revenge on Matrix for his expulsion, is willing to help Arius “for nothing,” to get a chance to get at Matrix). Yet given what we know Matrix has implied in his confession to Cindy, and what we know of his brutal killing of so many in this film…including his killing of Bennett, to get him to “let off some steam,” it’s hard to imagine Bennett being all that much more violent.

It should be obvious that, Matrix representing American militarism and seeing Bennett and Arius as far worse than he, the film’s pro-US propaganda tries to excuse American violence by projecting it out to other countries. Bennett, significantly, is Australian–just listen to his accent. Arius is Latin American. These latter two are so awful, apparently, that Matrix, and therefore the US, can’t be all that bad.

So in giving his brief confession, implying the awful things he’s done, while projecting far worse guilt onto people from other countries, Matrix–in spite of his constant violence and lawlessness, like that of the US, as I’ve explained above–can still be regarded as the liberal ‘good guy,’ as politicians like the Clintons, Obama, Biden, and Harris can be seen. One can safely deny being as bad as the antagonists are, and the protagonists’ guilt will be ignored and forgotten about by moviegoing lovers of action films.

Another thing that will be ignored and forgotten in Commando is the political ideology that Arius must have, as is typical of any Latin American head of state that opposes American imperial hegemony and ends up being ousted in a coup d’état. Such an ideology is glossed over and disregarded: all we know is that Arius believes the people of Val Verde need “an understanding of discipline,” which sounds unsettling coming from a generic ‘dictator,’ whom many in the audience would imagine to be a left-wing one, as I’m assuming Arius is.

Now, Marxism-Leninism does have an understanding of party discipline, but it isn’t anything brutal, as Arius is implying in Commando‘s propagandistic script. It’s about organizing the working class to rise up in revolution and defeat the ruling class, thus liberating the people from oppression, not subjecting them to oppression, the latter of which is what US puppets like Pinochet did to their people. As for how “extremist” a left-wing political ideology is, just read the <<<link. You won’t know the truth of the matter by watching Arius’ caricature of it.

IX: Conclusion

I hope, Dear Reader, that if you’ve read this far, that you understand my intentions in writing this analysis of Commando. I know it’s no Earth-shattering revelation that the film has a right-wing agenda: my purpose is to explore the political ramifications and social effects of said agenda, to warn of its dangers on a public not aware of how consent is manufactured for war and its atrocities.

The ‘tangents’ I went off on in elucidating these political and social implications, far from being “half-baked,” are the whole point of the article. People need to be conscious of the political wool being pulled over their eyes, not to be told, “Oh, come on, it’s just a movie. Lighten up!”

Analysis of Anton Webern’s ‘Zwei Lieder,’ Op. 19

I: Introduction

“Zwei Lieder,” or “Two Songs,” op. 19, is a short piece for mixed choir and five instruments by Anton Webern, set to two poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was composed in 1925-1926; the five instruments are celesta, guitar, violin, clarinet, and bass clarinet, with a choir of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses.

Webern, along with Alban Berg (who composed the opera Wozzeck), was one of the most famous pupils of Arnold Schoenberg (who composed Pierrot Lunaire), these three composers being the most famous members of the Second Viennese School, who used Schoenberg’s twelve-note compositional technique. This technique involves taking the twelve semitones and rearranging them in any order to produce a tone row, or basic set. This tone row becomes the thematic, melodic, and harmonic basis of a composition.

Because the twelve-note system eschews the major-minor system, the resulting music is atonal, and therefore it is an acquired taste, to put it mildly. One must get used to the ’emancipation of the dissonance,’ which is no longer required to be resolved quickly back to consonance, and so the music sounds ‘harsh’ to the uninitiated listener.

When it comes to Webern’s music, I usually prefer to listen to his instrumental works, such as the Symphony, op. 21 (1927-1928), the Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5 (1909), the Piano Quintet (1907), the Concerto for Nine Instruments, op. 24 (1931-1934), and the Quartet, op. 22 (1928-1930), for clarinet, tenor saxophone, violin, and piano. However, since when it comes to my doing analyses of music here on my blog, I prefer to have programmatic content along with the music, I’ve chosen a Webern composition with a text, among his music that I don’t listen to all that often.

Therefore, I’ve chosen to analyze his “Zwei Lieder,” among his least-performed, and therefore least-known, compositions. The reason that this otherwise superb piece of music is so rarely performed is that Webern’s choice of instrumentation is, sadly, impractical from the point of view of setting up performances of it. A choir, combined with the odd assembly of five instruments I mentioned above, all to perform a piece that lasts about two minutes, will be too much trouble for most organizers of concerts to put together.

Such a piece is best performed as a recording, and here is a link to a recording of the piece. Here is a link to the first poem in the original German and in English translation (which I will not be quoting here!); and here is a link to the second poem in the original German and in French translation (which I wouldn’t be quoting here even if I had permission to!).

The text of the two poems, in the original German as well as in English and French translations, can be found also in the booklet (pages 142-143) for the Complete Works of Webern, Opp. 1-31, conducted by Pierre Boulez for Sony Classical. I’ll be using these texts as the basis of my interpretation of the poetry; the websites linked in the previous paragraph are just there for your information, Dear Reader.

II: The Music

The tone row that Webern uses for the setting of both poems is G, B-flat, F-sharp, F-natural, E-flat, A, G-sharp, C-sharp, D, B-natural, E-natural, and C-natural. The “Zwei Lieder,” op. 19, is Webern’s first work to use the same tone row all the way through the entire composition.

A tone row can be played out in four ways: the original order, inversion (upside-down), retrograde (backwards), and retrograde-inversion (both backwards and upside-down). Furthermore, the tone row can be transposed to any key other than the original set of pitches. In the case of the “Zwei Lieder,” Webern transposes the tone row by a tritone, the diabolus in musica.

Now, as Samuel Andreyev demonstrates in his musical analysis of Webern’s piece (and my analysis owes a great debt to Andreyev’s analysis of the piece), one would find it impossible to hear the tone row played out in a clear, linear fashion because Webern breaks up the tone row among the instruments and choir in a way that the ear could never follow, certainly not without reading the score as one is listening.

For a precise demonstration of how the tone row is manifested in the piece, I’ll leave that to Andreyev to explain, since I lack his technical expertise. Instead, I’ll just make some more general remarks about the music.

Instead of the traditional kind of melody, which flows and is linear, having a singing quality, Webern’s concise musical style tends toward punctualism–an isolating of the successive notes through wide leaps, unorthodox uses of duration, dynamics, and attacks that are divorced from conventional ‘expressivity’–and Klangfarbenmelodie, or an assigning of the successive notes of a melody to different instruments. Therefore, melody isn’t perceived as musical lines, but rather as musical ‘dots,’ if you will.

Because of these kinds of innovations in Webern’s music, he has been associated, in retrospect, with the postwar total serialism of composers like Boulez (i.e., his Le Marteau Sans Maître) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (i.e., his Gesang der Jünglinge). Webern’s puncualism and Klangfarbenmelodie have been seen as anticipating the 1950s serializing of not only pitch, but also all the musical parameters as listed in the previous paragraph.

III: The Text

Goethe’s poems are both sets of two four-line verses in trochaic tetrameter (a line has four feet, each of which has a stressed, then unstressed, syllable), with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD. They are vignettes of the beauty of nature, of flowers in bloom or soon to be in bloom. Images or scenes of natural beauty were something Webern always loved, and I understand that even among his instrumental works, there was the inspiration of nature.

His choice of having a mixed choir sing these verses–as opposed to, say, having just one singer–what must have been the main factor in causing the logistical difficulties in having op. 19 performed, must have been of such insistent importance to him, overruling the practical problems that would have forbidden frequent performances of the piece. I’m guessing that the choral singing was meant to give the verses a sense of holiness. For Webern, nature is sacred.

These poems are inspired by Chinese literature; in fact, these two poems are part of a cycle Goethe composed, called Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (“Chinese-German Seasons and Times of Day”). Chinese literature, all things Chinese, actually, had been quite popular in Europe at the time of his writing, ever since Voltaire‘s time.

The first poem describes narcissus flowers blooming in a garden in rows. The first verse gives us a vivid sense not just of the flowers’ beauty, but also of their ‘innocence,’ ‘purity,’ and ‘modesty.’ Since when is a narcissus modest, I wonder?

Indeed, one thing to keep in mind when interpreting poetry, or literature in general, is that things often aren’t as they seem. We may be reading a beautiful description of nature, but what the imagery is meant to represent may not be all that beautiful…once we have looked beneath the surface.

The narcissus flowers are as white as lilies; they have the purity of candles. Candles may give light, which is inherently a good thing, but the light comes from fire, the fire of the passions, which are anything but pure. Goethe’s word for pure is reine, the same word Heinrich Heine used in “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a flower”), “So hold und schön und rein” (“So lovely, fair, and pure”), a poem about a woman whose ‘purity’ broke Heine’s heart. ‘Purity’ isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Goethe would have been perfectly aware of the Echo and Narcissus myth, in which the latter broke the former’s heart, and the latter was punished for his vanity by being made to fall in love with the image of his own reflection in a pond, meaning that the handsome youth, in a sense, broke his own heart. In his grief over never being able to have what he saw, Narcissus died and turned into the flower of Goethe’s poem.

Now, obviously neither Webern nor especially Goethe would have known anything about narcissism in the modern psychiatric sense that people today would know of it. The seeds of the personality type, however–the vanity, haughtiness, and pitiless rejection of others–would have been intuited in the mythic character of Narcissus, intuited especially by a poet of Goethe’s stature. So on at least an unconscious level, Goethe must have used the flower as a symbol of sinful pride; Webern must have picked up on this idea–again, at least unconsciously, and reflected it somehow in his music.

Similarly, while Webern would never have consciously thought of the music he’d arranged for the poems as ‘harsh,’ he certainly knew, from the conservative public’s reaction to his atonal works (and those of his modernist contemporaries, like Schoenberg and Berg), that they were perceived that way. And even though his “Zwei Lieder” use softer sonorities, their atonality, dissonance, and wide melodic leaps are all clear signs of musical tension, deliberately used. Therefore this tension, set to these poems, suggests a sensitivity in his mind to Goethe’s expression of an undercurrent of tension in otherwise surface idyllic verses.

Now, I’m about to do a kind of ‘retrospective’ interpretation of these verses, applying a modern meaning to writing that’s showed no knowledge of contemporary ideas. Some of my readers, such as one who commented on my analysis of the Echo and Narcissus myth (link above), would balk at my ‘projecting of modern ways of seeing’ onto old texts, insisting instead that whatever the original meaning there was of the old text is the only ‘correct’ way of thinking about it.

I beg to differ. Just because the writing is old doesn’t mean the interpretation has to be old. The arts are not STEM fields: they don’t have only one correct answer, like 2 + 2 = 4, and an infinitude of incorrect answers. Artists often are reticent about what they’ve created because they want to allow us to find our own meaning in their works. Insisting that the work means only what the artist had originally intended takes all the fun and joy out of experiencing the work.

Another justification I have for interpreting the meaning of a work of literature, film, or piece of music, drawing on elements that came into being long after the work was created, is to give the work a new meaning and relevance for us now, so we can relate to it in our own way and therefore enjoy it far more. Insisting that the work’s ‘ancient meaning’ is its only meaning makes the work dead to us now.

Besides, some themes and ideas are so universal that they apply to all times of history, including those times when people knew nothing of the modern concepts. Just because narcissism wasn’t known as a personality disorder in, for example, ancient Greece, doesn’t mean that narcissists didn’t exist back then, let alone cause pain and suffering to the Echoes of their day.

With this understanding in mind, I can begin to do my interpretation of these verses. We should also keep in mind when Webern set the poems to music: in the mid-1920s, when certain…politically tempestuous…things were going on in Europe, in Germany and Austria in particular. As of the piece’s composition, Hitler would have been released from prison after having served just over eight months of his sentence for the crime of high treason after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The Nazi Party may not have achieved their immediate goal of taking over the German government, but they did gain national attention and their first propaganda victory, which surely would have gotten Webern’s attention.

As an Austrian patriot, Webern did, for a while at least, have some sympathy for Nazism. By the time the Nazis had come to power in the early 1930s, though, he was growing in opposition to them. He even gave a public speech in 1933, publicly denouncing the Nazis for calling his music, as well as that of Schoenberg and Berg, “cultural Bolshevism” and “degenerate music.” (He was lucky the Nazis didn’t arrest him for this.)

He was certainly never an antisemite. His musical mentor, Schoenberg, was a Jew. He resigned from a position as chorus master for the Mödling Men’s Choral Society in 1926 (the year he finished his “Zwei Lieder”) over his controversial hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. So his attitude towards Nazism was complicated.

I’ll now relate these political issues to how I imagine Webern could have read Goethe’s poems. To think that Goethe would have intended the interpretation I’m about to make would be absurd, and I admit I’m stretching things when I make speculations about Webern interpreting them in the way I’m about to describe. But in making this interpretation, I’m hoping not only to make the poems relevant for our time, but also to show that there’s more to them than just a pretty painting of nature in words–there’s a deeper meaning.

These narcissus flowers, white and pure, like stars, are as pretty as lilies. They bow with a modest demeanour. Since, as I noted above, the associations one makes of this flower with vain Narcissus are so obvious, then the flowers appearing so modest must be mere affectation on their part.

The white flowers have a yellow centre with a red rim circling it, glowing love, as the first verse points out. This red around the yellow middle is thus the loving heart of the flowers. This love, affection, and affinity of the flowers is thus a personifying of them…and an idealizing of them.

This idealizing of the narcissus flowers is significant, for as is associated with such flowers, narcissism is all about an idealizing of the self. As is indicated in the second verse, these early narcissus flowers have bloomed in the garden in rows. They are a group symbolizing beautiful and idealized, but also vain, self-important people. They are thus representative of group narcissism.

Now Freud, who discussed how groups of people living in the same community may look down on those outside their circle with contempt, was writing about this issue as an example of group psychology in 1922, which was just a few years before Webern composed his “Zwei Lieder.” I’m not suggesting that Webern read Freud’s work and was influenced by it in setting the poems to music. What I am saying is that we’ve all–at any point in history, even back to Goethe and earlier–sensed the arrogance of the in-group toward outsiders. Parochial, chauvinistic attitudes have existed since time immemorial.

So, is Webern’s choral setting of the poems meant to suggest a holy beauty in these flowers, or a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude? Webern surely would have been aware of the hyperinflation of Germany in the early 1920s and its effect on the German psyche. This pain is the kind of thing that can drive people to have nationalistic feelings, to looking for a leader who will ‘save the nation’ from its ruin. As we know, some Germans looked to Hitler in the hopes of such a saviour.

I suspect that Webern could have read such a meaning in the poem’s hope that the narcissus flowers know for whom they’re waiting. As they stand in their rows waiting for their idealized leader, they are described in the original German as “so spaliert erwarten,” or “so trellised in expectation.” They’re being held up, as if by a trellis, which implies that they’re “stand[ing] at attention,” as the translation in my CD booklet (page 143) has it.

Narcissism involves an idealizing of another–an idealized parental imago who may mirror back one’s grandiosity, as Heinz Hohut described the relationship, or an idealized political figure–who reflects back one’s own narcissism. This is the true meaning of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection in the pond: the ideal is oneself, yet it’s also out there, another, as Lacan spoke of the ideal-I in the mirror stage. One sees oneself in the idealized other, and hopes to attain that ideal oneself.

So the narcissus flowers, standing at attention in their neatly-arrayed rows in the garden…a kind of Garden of Eden in its idealization?…are like the SA standing at attention before Hitler, whom they wait for, in hopeful expectation, ‘to save’ their nation, while looking down with scorn and contempt for foreign nations and other ethnic groups.

Webern could have made these associations in his mind–consciously or unconsciously–as he read Goethe’s poem, and written the music the way he did in accordance with such a meaning–with the dissonance, atonality, and wide melodic leaps to express his own inner conflicts (should he, in his Austrian patriotism, support fascism, or oppose its antisemitism and rejection of his art?) about the political direction he saw Europe going in at the time.

As for Goethe’s intention, he could have imagined the narcissus flowers standing in an orderly group awaiting a leader of a more general sort, but one who has the same demagogic qualities. This ‘follow the leader’ mentality has always existed, of course, so his poem has a universal relatability in this regard.

Now, the second poem describes sheep leaving a meadow, revealing a pure green of grass. There’s that word, “reines,” or “pure” again: recall what I said above about both the positive and negative feelings that can come from the use of this word.

So, who are the sheep? Are they those who are timid and easily led, as the word is commonly used today to describe people who blindly believe all the nonsense in the mainstream media and follow mainstream politics uncritically? Such a meaning could be too contemporary and too English to be fitting in a reading of such an old, German poem.

Or are the sheep the followers of the Church? Certainly Goethe, as a freethinker, wasn’t fond of the more dogmatic aspects of the Church, and so he probably wouldn’t have thought much of the simple-minded, unthinking flock. The sheep’s leaving the meadow, to reveal the purity of the green, could be indicating an improved world once we’ve been rid of the uncritical believers.

Or are the sheep those who truly abide by the spirit of what it means to be a Christian, as opposed to the mere conformist churchgoers? Not those who say “Lord, Lord,” but those who do good works without regard of reward (Matthew 7:21)? Their leaving the meadow could reveal a grass whose purity is of a more ironic sort.

In any case, the sheep’s absence will result in the glorious blooming of the flowers. This blooming is described as a “paradise” (recall my reference to the Garden of Eden in its idealization). Again, is Webern’s use of a choir to sing these verses in earnest, or is it ironic? And whichever answer may be correct, for which is it in earnest, and for which is it ironic…for the sheep, or for the paradise?

Note that there are parallel themes going on in both poems. There’s an idealizing of the beauty of the flowers, with an ironic undercurrent. By the end of each second verse, there’s a hope or expectation of good which may end up being its opposite.

Hope, in the second verse, spreads a light mist in front of us, implying that what we see is no longer clear because of that hope. What will be true and what we want to be true are often very different from each other.

Similarly, a parting of the clouds should give us clear, sunny skies (‘the fire of the sun’), and therefore clear vision. Just as one hopes that the leader the narcissus flowers are waiting for will be a good one, so does one hope that one’s unobstructed vision will reveal happiness and the fulfillment of one’s wishes.

IV: Conclusion

Among all of the German and Austrian nationalists, like Webern, there was a growing feeling that fascism might fulfill their wishes and give them happiness by restoring glory to their countries. While he felt that national pride and hoped that leaders like Hitler would fulfill those wishes, his continued friendship with Jews, going all the way to the Anschluss and beyond, would have been a source of great conflict for him, not to mention a potential danger.

He surely would have felt that conflict as early as the mid-1920s, when he composed the “Zwei Lieder,” for Hitler had made no secret of his antisemitism, of course, just as he was putting his nationalism on broad display. I believe the second poem’s expression of hope as a mist obscuring one’s vision put Webern’s conflict into words.

Similarly, as I said above, the atonality, dissonance, and wide melodic leaps at least unconsciously expressed his psychological conflict about the growth of European fascism in the 1920s. This musical expression of that conflict extends to the transposition of the tone row by the tritone interval…known significantly as the ‘devil in music.’

So Goethe’s poems teach us that we need to be careful as we look through the mists of hope, as well as to know who we are waiting for. Will we get that happiness, or will we get horror? Are we waiting for a hero, or a villain? In Webern’s case, he got shot and killed by an American soldier in the end, after having been disillusioned by fascism’s bloody failure. Be careful what you hope for…and for whom you are waiting.

‘Six Ways from Sunday,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

Six Ways from Sunday

When it comes to the assassinations of presidents, past or current, attempted or successful, conspiracy theories aren’t as nutty as they seem to be.

‘Frank assessment of France and Macron by Maria Zakharova, June 8, 2024,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

Frank assessment of France and Macron by Maria Zakharova, June 8, 2024

Macron is a careerist and a lackey of US imperialism. As with so much of Europe, France is, in essence, a colony of the US.

Analysis of ‘Kin-dza-dza!’

Kin-dza-dza! is a 1986 Soviet film directed by Georgiy Daneliya, and written by him and Revaz Gabriadze. A dystopian science fiction black comedy, it stars Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze, Yury Yakoviev, and Yevgeny Leonov.

In 2016, the British movie magazine, Little White Lies, described Kin-dza-dza! as a cross between Mad Max, Monty Python, and Tarkovsky, saying the film is still relevant. The same year, Russia Beyond said that Russians still love the film. Three years earlier, an animated remake of the film was done by Daneliya, called Ku! Kin-dza-dza! The cartoon won Best Animated Feature Film in the 2013 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here‘s a link to the complete film with English subtitles.

I see this film as not only relevant for our times, but also prophetic in how the planet Pluke, in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy–to which the Russian and Georgian protagonists, respectively Vladimir Mashkov, or Uncle Vova (Lyubshin), and Gedevan Alexandrovitch Alexidze, or the Fiddler (Gabriadze), are teleported–is representative of the capitalist world, as contrasted with the Soviet world from which the two originate.

Now, as of the making and release of Kin-dza-dza!, which had been achieved by December of 1986, Mikhael Gorbachev had not yet implemented his policies of perestroika and glasnost as an attempt to put an end to the ongoing economic stagnation that had begun during the Brezhnev years; but he had spoken of the two reform concepts in his report to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, which occurred from late February to early March that same year.

Gorbachev had given a speech the previous year about the slowing economy, and the perestroika reforms that would come by the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s included the return of “free market” economics and private property. When Yeltsin took over, not only were these reforms all the more aggressively and brutally implemented, plunging millions of Russians–hitherto used to a planned economy that had provided for their basic needs–into poverty, but attempts to resist the reforms were ruthlessly suppressed.

I bring up this history to show how the film can be seen to have predicted, in allegorical form, the economic and political disaster that the bringing back of capitalism would cause. Despite the economic problems that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly going through in the mid-1980s, most Russians wanted to keep the Soviet system intact; indeed, majorities of Russians since the dissolution of the USSR have consistently said that life was happier then than it’s been since the return of capitalism, and a referendum had been held in 1991, the results of which said that the majority of Russians had wanted to keep the Soviet system.

So, when Russians in the mid-1980s were hearing Gorbachev’s talk of economic, market reforms, the instincts of many of them must have been warning them of the danger of his reactionary talk. Recall Stalin’s words in this connection: “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.”

Such is the political background in which we should understand what Kin-dza-dza! is trying to say to us. Uncle Vova’s thoughtless tapping of a button on the teleportation device of the barefoot, alien stranger is like Gorbachev and his followers foolishly allowing themselves to be influenced by the Western capitalists and bringing about the “new world order” that has led to all of our economic and political problems today. For it is that very pressing of the random button on the teleportation device that sends Uncle Vova and the Fiddler from the city centre on Kalinin Prospect in Moscow to the dystopian, desert wasteland of planet Pluke, with its glaring class inequalities.

The story begins with Uncle Vova returning home from work as a construction foreman. He chats with his wife, Lucya (played by Galina Daneliya-Yurkova), about mundane troubles at work. She asks him to go out and buy some bread and noodles, which she earlier forgot to buy, so he goes out to do that.

He arrives at the city square to buy he food, and there he meets the Fiddler, who tells him about the unshod alien traveler with the teleportation device. What should be noted is that, up until our two protagonists’ unwitting teleportation to Pluke, that the world we see around them, Moscow, is a perfectly normal society, without Pluke’s deprivation. Furthermore, the alien traveler, barefoot, scruffy, and as lost as a fish out of water, makes one think of a homeless man, which is fitting given that, as an outsider to the Soviet Union, he is representative of the capitalist world.

Now, the sight of our two protagonists stuck in a strange desert, actually a desert planet, reminds me of R2-D2 and C-3PO on Tatooine. The arrival of Uef (Leonov) and Bi (Yakoviev) in their flying vehicle suggests the Jawas, though these latter two have little, if anything, in common with the short, hooded droid thieves.

I’m not saying that the filmmakers intended these similarities with the early scenes of the first Star Wars movie, but the coincidental parallels between Pluke and Tatooine are meaningful in how they illustrate that the two desolate, desert planets are reflective of how capitalism sucks the life out of a place’s ecology. On Tatooine, Luke helps his uncle and aunt use moisture vaporators to produce water; on Pluke, fuel is called “luts,” and it’s made from water, so drinking water is a rare and valuable commodity.

The two droids unwittingly land on Tatooine to escape from the Galactic Empire, and they’re chased by imperial stormtroopers. Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have been thrust upon Pluke, and they’ll have to deal with the planet’s “ecilopps” (police, spelled backwards), whose bullying nature reminds one of the skeletally-armoured stormtroopers (after all, ACAB). Not yet knowing where he and his Georgian friend are, Uncle Vova comments that they must be in “a capitalist country” when they meet Uef and Bi for the first time, seeing the two Pluke inhabitants do their customary squatting and opening-out of their arms in an act of obeisance to say “ku” (“good”).

This act of obeisance is the first of many signs of a society structured around class lines, hence Uncle Vova’s assumption that it’s “a capitalist country” is not far off the mark. Money, known on Pluke as “chatls,” is hard to come by (note how chatl sounds virtually identical to chattel).

There are two kinds of people who live on Pluke–Chatlainians, and Patsaks; Uef is one of the former, and Bi is one of the latter. A hand-held device called a “visator” determines which of the two kinds of people you are: an orange dot of light on the visator indicates a Chatlainian, or a person of higher social status; green indicates a lower-status Patsak, of whom Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are also determined to be by the visator. Our two Earth visitors consider this discrimination to be outrageously racist; but had they all been on a Patsak-dominated planet, the Chatlainian/Patsak discrimination would have been reversed.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are hoping for a ride in Uef’s and Bi’s vehicle, and they offer some of their things (coats, a hat) in exchange for it, since they lack money, chatls in particular. But Uef and Bi begin to fly away in their vehicle without our two protagonists, until Uncle Vova uses a match to light a cigarette, making Uef and Bi want to return. We learn that matches, called “ketse” on Pluke, are among the most valued of commodities.

Since the society of Pluke is a dystopian one, it’s interesting to note that it, as being also a capitalist one, has a number of things in common with the society as depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The people of Pluke have a limited vocabulary, typically saying “ku” for whatever is good, or saying “kyu,” a mild swear-word for whatever is bad. These two words, as well as such words as have already been discussed above, make up the bulk of their vocabulary. Similarly, in Orwell’s dystopia, the development of Newspeak involved eliminating words in order to limit thought, including ideas potentially dangerous to the Party, such thoughts as being revolutionary. (On Pluke, though, this limited vocabulary seems unnecessary as such, for a plot device in the film gives the planet’s inhabitants telepathic abilities that, conveniently, allow them to converse in Russian and Georgian with our two protagonists!)

Furthermore, where the world of Orwell’s hell is led by Big Brother, a mysterious figure we never directly encounter in the story and who, for all we know, may not even exist, the leader of Pluke, named “Mr. P-Zh,” or “PG” (played by Nikolai Garo), is harmless and simple-minded, as it turns out. The film thus seems to be predicting such incompetent, ineffectual heads of state as Biden.

Now, such comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four are useful, since many in the capitalist West would dismiss Kin-dza-dza! as mere Soviet propaganda, while conveniently ignoring Orwell’s novel, as well as the deluge of such things as late twentieth-century Western movies, like Rocky IV, as blatant Cold War anti-communist propaganda. Western propaganda is “the truth,” apparently, not Eastern. How convenient.

That something as mundane and non-extraordinary as “ketse,” or match-like sticks, are among the most valuable commodities on Pluke is a satiric comment on the absurdity of our slavery to pieces of paper that, in essence, are IOUs. Furthermore, “luts,” fuel made from water, which makes drinking water so valuable, sounds like a comment on the petrodollar, as well as one on the ruthless destruction of the environment for the sake of profiting off of fossil fuels. In a fully communist society, there would be products as use values without exchange for money.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler, however, have no choice but to exchange commodities–their ketse–with Uef and Bi if the former pair are to get the help of the latter pair to get back to Earth. Our protagonists try to exchange ketse for drinking water from some people who run off with the ketse, cheating them.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler eventually get the idea to perform music in order to earn chatls. Though he’s referred to as “the Fiddler,” he doesn’t actually play the violin he carries around with hm. He was originally trying to find the violinist who’d forgotten to take his instrument when leaving. When the two perform their music, it’s actually Uncle Vova who ends up playing the violin…worse than a child violinist with no ear for music at all. In the Fiddler-as-non-fiddler, we see a satiric comment on Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker from his labour.

The song that the two men sing, which sounds like some simple Russian folk song of some sort, includes such lines as, “Mama, Mama, what is to be done?” as well as “Winter is no fun,” “I don’t have a coat to keep warm,” and “How shall I live?” The song is all about a needy child asking his Mama for help, like a proletarian making a clamour about his needs.

The performing is typically done in small cages, or, on one occasion, on one’s knees, which should tell you something. The worker struggling to make enough to survive is, essentially, putting on an absurd performance, being an actor trying to please those who pay him, a wage slave caged in the world of capitalism, brought down to his knees. And the acting is all fake, and often it’s not performed very well, as we see of Uncle Vova and his scraping violin bow and his and the Fiddler’s bad singing. The alienation referred to above is enough to explain the poor, insincere ‘performances’ of the working class.

A physical indicator of lowly Patsak status is the wearing of a small nose-bell called a “tsak.” (Note in this connection that “Patsak” is backwards for “katsap,” a derogatory term for a Russian.) Bi would have Uncle Vova and the Fiddler each clip a tsak on his nose, which the two of course do with the utmost reluctance. The wearing of a tsak looks like the film’s commentary on the Nazis making the Jews wear the Yellow Badge, or German gay men wear the pink triangle.

Another indicator of class differences on Pluke is the wearing of differently colored pants: yellow, pink, etc. Uef covets them because, if he can wear those of the higher social classes, Patsaks and Chatlanians will have to do the “Ku!” squat of obeisance for him, the ecilopps can’t beat him up, etc. These colored pants are a social commentary on one’s preoccupation with social status as attained through high fashion.

At one point in the story, when Uef and Bi have enough ketse in their vehicle to buy what they need to get to Earth, they fly away and leave Uncle Vova and the Fiddler with nothing in return. Furious, our protagonists want to send the ecilopps after the two cheats; but they don’t have forty chatls to pay the ecilopps, so Uncle Vova lies that Uef and Bi failed to “ku” in obeisance to P-Zh’s image.

In these acts of dishonesty, we see how a world where money talks results in alienation. When Uef and Bi are apprehended, though, Uncle Vova quickly repents of his false accusation and hopes Uef and Bi won’t be imprisoned, which is particularly unpleasant, since instead of being put in a cell, they are locked up in a small metal box with barely enough room to hold the two of them inside. Given the dreadful state of prison life in the US, especially now, when corporations make practical slaves of the inmates, whose population outnumbers that of the Gulag (and even the CIA back then acknowledged that Gulag conditions weren’t anywhere near as bad as Western propaganda portrays them), we can see Pluke’s form of imprisonment as a comment on life in prison in a capitalist country.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are reunited with the barefoot alien they first met on Earth, the one with the teleportation device; he gives our two heroes a chance to return home immediately. Uncle Vova, however, feels guilty about causing Uef and Bi to be incarcerated, and he wants to pass up his chance to go back to Earth in order to help those two unfortunate ones.

Even though Uef and Bi double-crossed Uncle Vova and the Fiddler and made them wear those ridiculous bells on their noses, our two heroes want to help them, even to the point of giving up their chance to go home. While the capitalist world of Pluke teaches selfishness and alienation, leading to Uef’s and Bi’s double-crossing, the socialist world of the Soviet Union taught selflessness and solidarity. Though Kin-dza-dza! might be considered Soviet propaganda, it doesn’t teach its viewers to loathe and despise the citizens of capitalist societies (it may portray them as buffoonish and silly, but Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have their own foibles, too). In contrast, consider the malevolent scowls you see, for example, on the faces of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), his wife (Brigitte Nielsen), and his trainer and promoter (Michael Pataki) in Rocky IV.

Indeed, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler postponing their return to Earth–even returning to Pluke after a brief trip to other planets on the way home, and going back in time–to rescue Uef and Bi both from their incarceration, and later their fate on planet Alpha to be turned into plants is a kind of selflessness that would remind one of that of the bodhisattva, who postpones entering nirvana upon attaining Buddhahood and returns to samsara to help all other living beings, however unenlightened they may be, to attain nirvana together, a liberation for the entire Earth. Such is the selflessness of the true socialist, who would ultimately share liberation from capitalism with the whole world, not just hog it in his own country.

The planet Alpha is an interesting topic in itself. The people of Alpha have a method of dealing with Uef and Bi–whom they consider miscreants–that may seem cruel (turning them into cacti). Still, since Uef and Bi are governed by “vile desires,” rather like those of us caught up in samsara, then perhaps being transformed into plants, without human sense perceptions and the pain associated with them, is a kind of nirvana for them.

That buffoonish pair might be best left not to decide their own fate (as Uncle Vova would have it), since if left to do so, they’d choose foolishly; still, bodhisattva Vova would leave the nirvana of Alpha and postpone his return to the Pure Land, so to speak, of the USSR and help those two Pluke bumpkins.

After going back in time and back to Pluke, and helping those two, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler reunite with the barefoot man and his teleportation device, and our two heroes finally get sent back to Moscow. We see a repeat of the beginning of the movie, as if their time on Pluke never happened: Uncle Vova comes home from work again, and his wife sends him out to buy groceries.

Back in that city square, he meets with the Fiddler again, but the latter doesn’t tell the former about the barefoot alien this time, because he isn’t there. Our two protagonists don’t even recognize each other: it’s as if they’d never met, let alone got stranded in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy. As we soon learn, though, what happened is really just a repressed memory.

They see a tractor with a flashing orange light pass by. This triggers their by-now-instinctive attitude of submission to the Chatlainian colour, and the two men do their “ku” squat of obeisance.

Their return to the socialist world of the Soviet Union does not render them immune to the classism of the capitalist world as represented by Pluke. This is why reactionary instincts must be guarded against; old attitudes have a way of coming back if we aren’t careful. Just recall how those former Soviets became Russian oligarchs.

Still, one good thing has come from Uncle Vova’s and the Fiddler’s relapse: they now recognize each other, and exchange smiles like good old friends. Uncle Vova then looks up at the sky and hears the voices of Uef and Bi saying “ku” and singing the “Mama” song. They feel united, if only in spirit, with their Chatlainian and Patsak friends once again. Whatever good or ill may happen to us, being reunited with friends is above all else in importance.

Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

Synchronicity is a concept that CG Jung wrote about in 1960. Literally, “unified time,” synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences that have no causal connection. Because of this acausality, there’s no scientific way of testing the idea by way of falsifiability; one either believes in synchronicity, through personal, subjective experience, or one doesn’t believe in it.

Jung’s belief in this idea was part of his interest in spirituality, myth, and religion in themselves, not just for their psychological meaning, as atheistic Freud would have used them. This difference of opinion is essentially why Freud and Jung had a falling-out.

There are dozens of YouTube videos out there on synchronicity, describing it all too often in a sentimentalized way, linking it with ideas like the “law of attraction.” To be honest, I’d rather stay away from this kind of rose-tinted glasses interpretation.

To be even more frank, I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether or not I believe in synchronicity. As of this writing, I’ve recognized one distinct synchronicity that’s occurred over the past fifty-one years: three incidents occurring on September 11th–one in 1973, one in 1990, and one in, of course, 2001.

Notice how none of these three dates, assuming you know the history of all three incidents, are in any way ‘positive’ or sentimentalized. These three are the Chilean coup d’état of 1973, George HW Bush’s 1990 speech about us moving into a new world order (I’ll go into what is so unsettling about the speech below), and of course the terror attacks of 2001.

What these three incidents have in common beyond all sharing the same date–and this is the deeply meaningful part–is how all three tie in with US imperialism.

II: The Three September 11th Years

The Chilean coup d’état, backed by the CIA, ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, a socialist who wanted to nationalize Chilean industries and thus thin the wallets of the American capitalists who wanted to be able to continue exploiting the country. Allende was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator and puppet of the Western imperialists. Allende’s socialist economic policies would be replaced by the “free market” ones of the Chicago Boys. Any leftist resistance resulted in imprisonment, violent punishments, killings, and being ‘disappeared,’ which included being thrown out of helicopters.

While Bush’s 1990 speech tried to present the coming new world order as a positive change in the political climate of the time, properly understood, the president was heralding a post-Soviet world, in which the “free market” had triumphed over ‘Big Brother’ government and socialism. The USSR hadn’t yet been dissolved as of the speech, but its demise was coming soon, and no one knew better that this dissolution was coming than the very people who’d been scheming about it. The fall of communism allowed the capitalists to do anything they wanted…to everyone.

As for the terror attacks in 2001, it really doesn’t matter if we go with the official narrative that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda masterminded the attacks, and that George W Bush’s administration was too careless and incompetent to have prevented the attacks; or if you believe it was an inside job with controlled demolitions, and that it was all blamed on Al Qaeda and, by extension, the whole Muslim world. What matters is how the attacks were used by the American ruling class to manufacture consent for war after war in the Middle East, not only to steal the oil and enrich themselves with it, but also to exercise their dominance over the whole region, being the capitalist imperialists that they are.

Indeed, as far as all three of these incidents are concerned, it isn’t so much what happened on September 11th as it is the aftermath. What happened on that day, these three times, was more about the warning of what was to come than the inciting event itself. For another part of this synchronicity is, how 911 can signify an emergency telephone number you ring when an urgent situation comes up.

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

All three of these incidents could be, and should have been, seen as dire warnings that matters were about to get much worse. The replacement of a socialist government with a right-wing dictatorship using “free market” economic policies was a kind of ‘laboratory experiment,’ if you will, to see how well it would go…from the point of view of the global capitalist class, of course. They never cared that the Chicago Boys’ economic policies were a disaster for poor Chileans; what mattered was the huge amassing of wealth for the rich, known as the “miracle of Chile.” As of the 1980s, this “free market” experiment would be tried in the US under Reagan and in the UK under Thatcher.

So the immiseration of the poor Chileans would be extended to Americans and the British. The lie would be propagated that the “free market” would involve minimal state intervention in the economy, when a) there’s always at least some state intervention in it, and b) state protection of private property, especially when the capitalist class accumulates a huge amount of private property, necessitates a particularly intrusive form of government…capitalist government–hence, Pinochet’s brand of fascism, hand in hand with the “free market.”

And still, right-wing libertarians and ‘anarcho’-capitalists continue to be duped by the idea that “true” capitalism is antithetical to an intrusive state. One shouldn’t be surprised in the least that Reagan‘s ‘small government’ (translation: war on the poor) would be accompanied by a great increase in military spending as part of a scheme to bring the USSR to an end. Since imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, requiring the expansion of markets and capital into other countries, an expanded military will be needed to protect the interests of capitalist globalization.

Now, where plunging people into poverty hits you immediately, and scathingly, when you live in Third World Latin America, as was the case with Chileans in the 1970s, hitting us in the First World with poverty is more insidious and gradual in its effects. Problems like homelessness certainly increased under Reagan in the 1980s, but it’s grown worse since then, and now in the 2020s, there’s an epidemic of homelessness in many cities in the US and elsewhere.

This is all why I see a synchronistic meaning in these three September 11th dates and the emergency number 911. The Chilean coup d’état was an urgent warning not to let the “free market” counter-revolution spread to other countries. It was a warning left unheeded.

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

As I said above, Bush’s new world order speech was presented in rosy, optimistic language about a new era of triumphant liberal democracy, since it was understood that the Cold War was over. There would be a greater commitment to US strength as the leader of that promotion of liberal democracy. Translation: US imperialism would reign supreme, and every other government in the world was expected to do whatever the US government told them to do.

There would be a Soviet-American partnership in promoting world democracy, as Bush expected. Again, translation: Russia was expected to do American bidding as everyone else was. Gorbachev‘s compliance with all of this was further proof of his weak, treasonous leadership.

Of course, nothing like Bush’s rosy vision came to be since September 11th, 1990. The advancement of American imperialist ambitions certainly did, though. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989, it was already known that communism was out, and that Russia’s days, in their Soviet form, were numbered.

But while the mainstream Western media of the time were hailing the end of the Cold War as a triumph for democracy and the “end of history,” it would be foolish to assume that most Russians, and indeed many in the former Soviet Bloc, were holding their arms up, ready to embrace ‘capitalist freedom.’ Most people in the USSR wanted to keep the Soviet system; Boris Yeltsin and his ilk forcibly took it away.

In fact, since then, poll after poll has been done in Russia, indicating that majorities of Russians have consistently said life in Soviet-era Russia was happier than it has been since the era’s end. Since they were provided with free healthcare, education, housing, full employment, and other government benefits, it isn’t hard to see why the Soviet system was preferred.

While the Soviet system surely had its faults, it was also an effective counterweight to Western imperialism. The USSR aided anti-imperialist liberation movements in the Third World, and its example pushed the postwar capitalist West to adopt welfare systems and public healthcare. With the USSR’s demise, though, the West has had less and less incentive to keep these social services going. Accordingly, we’ve been losing them, bit by bit, over the years.

The signing of NAFTA not only took jobs away from American workers, but also gave those jobs, at lower pay, to Mexicans. The corporate tax rate, cut way down by the Reagan administration, stayed low (and was cut even lower by the Trump administration…it’s unlikely that Biden or anyone will raise it significantly any time soon).

Clinton killed welfare in the mid-1990s. His signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 led to the mergers and acquisitions in the media that, in turn, has led to 90% of American media being owned by only six corporations, meaning that the vast majority of our access to information is controlled by the rich. (This American near-oligopoly on information, incidentally, is also internationalized.) The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act led, as many believe, to the 2008 financial crisis. And the government bailed the big banks out.

All of these forms of government intervention were clearly in the interest of capital…and yet there are still political idiots out there who think that the government and capitalism are musically exclusive opposites. Long live the “free market”!

The above are but a few examples of what Bush’s new world order resulted in for the US. Now we must take a brief look at what the ideas of his September 11th speech led to for Russia.

Part of the reason we should regard with skepticism Bush’s claim to greater Soviet-American cooperation (at the time, in the context of a united response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and therefore Gorbachev’s compliance with Western imperialist interests) is that, when the Berlin Wall fell, and East and West Germany were to be reunited and thus a part of NATO, it was promised to Gorbachev, most mendaciously, that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

Note how much farther eastward NATO has advanced to the East since then. A number of former SSRs and Warsaw pact members–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania–joined NATO. Russia has NATO armies right on her borders now! Attempts have been made to have Ukraine join, too.

Anybody who knows anything about NATO realizes that the organization is an extension of US imperialism. These members of NATO do the bidding of the American empire, even when it’s against their own national interests to do so.

The debacle that has been the Russia-Ukraine war is squarely the fault of the US/NATO empire…but you wouldn’t know that to read the lies and propaganda of the Western media, who routinely call it “Russia’s war” and “Putin’s war.” Indeed, so much effort has been made to call Russia’s intervention “unprovoked” that in fact such a lie has been told precisely to cover up the fact that it was most definitely provoked.

Collaboration of the capitalist West with ex-Nazis, from the end of WWII to the present, has included the recruitment of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers the whole time. Knowledge of this exposes the lie in the current capitalist mainstream media that there is no major Nazi menace in Ukraine.

Ever since a CIA-assisted coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, removing democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with US puppets (recall Chile in 1973 and see these coups as part of a pattern), Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers have been part of their government and military, including far-right organizations like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, and other admirers of Stepan Bandera.

These Russophobic extremists were, for the eight years between the coup and the beginning of the Russian intervention, discriminating against the use of the Russian language and terrorizing ethnic Russians in the Donbass. Putin, branded an “imperialist” and a “fascist” in a shameless act of projection by the Western establishment media, tried everything he could to find a peaceful resolution over those eight years, including the Minsk accords.

All the US and NATO have wanted to do is to keep sending weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, including weapons that can be fired into Russia, which could provoke a wider war–WWIII, which in turn could go nuclear and bring about the end of the world. Since all of these events stem ultimately from the hypocritical words and secret schemes of Bush et al when he spoke on September 11th, 1990, we can see the 911 emergency that also went largely unheeded.

V: The Terrorist Attacks

That the terrorist attacks of 2001 were ringing the 911 emergency number is so obvious that I hardly need to explain how, but going through its consequences can remind us of the gravity of this emergency. Right from George W Bush’s statement that the attacks were “acts of war,” the red flags were waving.

Not only did the attacks give his administration a pretext for perpetual war (a “war on terror” isn’t directed at any country in particular, so there’s no clear way of ending the war), but they were also used to justify a number of restrictions on American civil liberties (the Patriot Act, which was extended during the Obama administration; racial profiling; NSA surveillance).

This authoritarian stripping-away of civil liberties is all too often assumed by propagandized right-wing idiots to be a form of socialism, since these politically illiterate morons assume that socialism is just “anything a government does.” These people are so ignorant of the political history of their own country that they’ve paid no attention to the removal of workers’ rights over the years (some of which I describe above), the cutting of taxes for the rich, and union-busting, none of which would happen under a socialist government.

These right-libertarians refuse to acknowledge the existence of authoritarian right-wing governments (recall again Pinochet). The Democratic Party–and the Labour Party in the UK–moved to the right because, as I said above, the demise of world communism meant that the West was no longer pressured into accommodating the working class.

US/NATO imperialism thus has been able to do anything it wants to any country, and to anyone within its own countries, with complete impunity. Endless war is in the interest of capital because war is a business–all those weapons manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc., have been laughing all the way to the bank profiting off of human death and suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Ukraine, the Palestinian Territories, and potentially Russia, China, and Iran. The American military is all over Africa, the rationale being that they’re fighting terrorists.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) means that these weapons manufacturers, in order to remain competitive and survive as businesses, must keep their profits up. The only way they can do that is by either having actual wars all the time or at least sustaining a constant threat of war. No war, no sale of weapons–it’s as simple as that. The “war on terror” has given these companies a most convenient excuse to keep banging the war drums.

The scapegoating of the many heads of state around the world who refuse to kow-tow to US imperialism–starting with Milošević and Saddam, then continuing with Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and whoever comes up in the future–has led to a desensitizing to the idea of war and its horrors. There was a time when people in the West were instinctively anti-war, regardless of whether they were leftists or mere liberals/hippies; not so much now…though a ray of hope has been seen in some who oppose US support of war in Ukraine and American support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The point is that we’re seeing not just a resurgence of cold-blooded capitalism, but also a resurgence of its extreme…fascism. We’ve seen it in the anti-immigrant policies of Obama the deporter-in-chief, continued by the “anti-establishment” Trump/à la ICE and the caging of Latin Americans, and again continued with no-less-right-wing Biden. We’ve seen fascism in the excessive surveillance online. We see it in militarized cops. We’ve seen fascism in the support of Ukraine, as I discussed above. Indeed, all of the totalitarian things we were told would happen to us under communism have actually happened to us under neoliberal capitalism.

People complain about the supposed lack of human rights in Cuba. To those people, I’ll say two words: Guantanamo Bay. This is a form of contemporary fascism and authoritarian government.

People on the right complained about intrusive government during the Covid pandemic. I’m a skeptic about its dangers, too, but I never saw a “communist plot” to establish a “one-world government.” I saw a group of pharmaceutical companies make huge profits while millions of poor people got poorer–many became homeless. I saw the fascist, authoritarian government that grew out of this problem as a threat of capitalism, not communism.

VI: The Collective Shadow

I hope, Dear Reader, that you can now see the deep meaning behind this triple 9/11 synchronicity. It’s not just three identical dates when something…political…happened. They all share common themes: the intrusion of imperialism, a shift to the political right, violent consequences, the taking away of basic civil rights, and the promotion of fascist, authoritarian government.

Now, part of synchronicity is how the inner psychic life is connected with these meaningful coincidences in the external world. For me, it’s how I saw the deeper meaning in these three September 11th dates and their aftermaths. As for those behind the three events, I’d say that the connection between the inner and outer worlds is based on the Collective Shadow.

Just as there’s a collective unconscious, a large reservoir of all of the unconscious feelings of all of humanity, going back to the earliest of us in prehistory, so is there also an accumulation of all of our worst, most hateful, most bigoted, and most destructive thoughts. This accumulation is the Collective Shadow, an amalgam of the personal Shadow of each and every one of us.

Erich Fromm, in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, would have called this dark part of all of us “the necrophilous character.” He wasn’t referring to the paraphilia; he described “necrophilia” as “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (Fromm, his emphasis, page 369)

Consider in this connection all that resulted from all three September 11th events: the death resulting from Pinochet’s repressions, the terrorist attacks and the imperialist wars that ensued, but also the violence done to Russia as a result of the dissolution of the USSR: Yeltsin bringing out the tanks on the Russian protestors in 1993; his re-election, as a result of American interference in the vote in 1996; the impoverishment of the Russian masses (as a result of privatization) as the elites snapped up most of the amassed Soviet wealth to make themselves the Russian oligarchs; and as I mentioned above, the Western enabling of Ukrainian Nazis to attack ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

Now, please be careful with my use of the the expression “new world order”: I’m not using it in the sense of many right-wing conspiracy theorists who fantasize about a “one-world government” run by Freemasons, “the Jews,” and other members of an imagined elite of people in some kind of secret society of Devil-worshippers (“the Illuminati”). Those who run the world are capitalists and imperialists; they aren’t of any particular ethnic or religious group. They don’t need to have formal meetings, they don’t twirl their mustaches or laugh “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”, as in some badly-written B-movie. They simply share similar interests, and have social get-togethers where they discuss how to further their interests as the ruling class–how to get more for themselves and less for the rest of us.

I don’t believe in the Devil because I don’t need to. Human greed, aggression, and selfishness–spawned by, and a distortion of, the evolutionary drive to survive–sufficiently explain the problem. The Devil as a metaphorical concept, though, the Collective Shadow, might be believed in.

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

I don’t necessarily believe in any of these ‘supernatural’ ideas; I just want to explore some possibilities, and show how, regardless of whatever the real explanation is for these coincidences, there have been some most disturbing patterns.

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

Incidentally, just as there is the 911 emergency phone number and the three September 11ths, so is there a 119 emergency phone number in parts of Asia (including where I live) and in Jamaica. Furthermore, just for fun, we can, in this connection, look at three dates for November 9th: 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was published in The Times newspaper; 1938, when Kristallnacht happened; and 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Anyone who cares about the Palestinians will see the publication of the Balfour Declaration as, in a way, a kind of declaration of emergency of the oppression to come. Anyone who cares about Jews and worries about the spread of fascism will see the obvious state of emergency in Kristallnacht. And anyone who knows that the real purpose of the Berlin Wall (the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as it was called in East Germany) was to keep bad people out, not to keep good people trapped in (the real resistance against defectors was to prevent brain drain; most of the East German workers and others in the former Soviet states were happy to stay and enjoy the government benefits that were soon to be gone by the 1990s), will see its fall as the beginning of NATO enlargement to the East, which has ultimately culminated in the Ukraine Nazi problem.

Now, you can criticize me, Dear Reader, for being selective about bad events on September 11th and on November 9th, while ignoring many good things that surely also happened on those dates, in different years. The point about synchronicity, though, is not to say that those two dates are “evil” ones; they simply represent, on these six occasions, coincidences that I find highly meaningful. I might consider these synchronicities a manifestation of two of what I call The Three Unities–that is, The Unity of Action and The Unity of Time.

Forget about the coincidental dates, though. The point is that fascism (Nazi or Zionist), and authoritarian, imperialist capitalism, along with its government and endless wars, are on the rise. None of the events of the earlier of those six dates directly caused those that succeeded them; but all of the events I discussed of those dates are disturbingly meaningful.

	Mawr Gorshin on What Is Feared of Communism Is…
	D. Jay on What Is Feared of Communism Is…
	delicioustree190bd43… on Underwear
	delicioustree190bd43… on Placards
	The Tanah–The Preach… on The Tanah–The Preaching,…