Scholar Norman Finkelstein is currently the subject of a politically motivated drive to prevent him from getting tenure at DePaul University in Chicago, a place that he's taught at since 2001. Because of this I decided to track down a copy of his controversial book "The Holocaust Industry", which was published in 2000 and is about corruption on the part of organizations getting and distributing compensation to holocaust survivors. I'd meant to do it before but it was one of those things you just forget about.
Anyways, although the focus of the book is Chapter 3, which deals directly with the organizations, Chapter 2 is probably the one that got people the most mad, because in it Finkelstein talks about how the Holocaust has been framed in contemporary society, in a way that's not exactly truthful. The contention isn't about the Holocaust itself but about the analysis of what significance it has. Specifically, whether or not it was a unique incident in human history; whether or not its cause was anti-Semitism going back hundreds of years, whether or not there was something unique about Jews that caused it. And finally what is the significance of the Holocaust in relation to Israel.
I'm going to preface this by saying that the rhetoric surrounding the Holocaust is so overwrought at this point that any criticism of how it's presented is, at the start, possibly going to sound like Anti-Semitism, but I'd ask the reader to bear with me, because looks can be deceiving. If you look at the entire argument you'll see it has nothing to do with anti-semitism.
Ok, so the idea that the Holocaust happened because of something unique to Jews. This is not to say that jews weren't expressly picked out for the Holocaust but rather that, yes, there was some quality, identified as positive in the case of those who propose it, on the part of Jews that made them candidates for the Holocaust. They were smarter and more successful than the majority, for instance. This is tied up with jewish notions of specialness and the sense that the two thousand years previous to the holocaust had been an arching crescendo of anti-semitism that ended in those horrible events.
What's wrong with this is that, to be blunt, it confuses the result with the intent. The result of the Holocaust was millions murdered, but does that mean that the motivations of those who murdered them had anything to do with the reality of jewish life? And was the holocaust really the end point of a rising anti-semitism, over the centuries, or were the jews chosen because they had been a minority that had been discriminated against in the past, which resonated with people's need for a scapegoat?
My take is that if jews and gypsies hadn't occupied the place they did in the popular consciousness of Europe and that instead a totally different set of people's shared the same sort of status, that it would have been them that would have been sent to camps. The holocaust was against the jews but it didn't have anything to do with jews as jews any more than stereotypes of blacks as rapists in the pre-civil rights era actually had anything to do with blacks as blacks.
The holocaust was a unique event in the history of the jewish people but it wasn't a jewish event: it was the product of social forces that used jews as a convenient target. Other minority communities have suffered similar kinds of discrinimation, although not taken to the extremes of the holocaust, such as Asians in Africa or Chinese in Indonesia. Both groups were/are considered to be separate from the societies in which they live and because of their economic position to be suspect. If the holocaust happened in Africa it probably would have been South Asians that would have been the victims. See what I mean?
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory Chapter 1: Introduction
(by Cali Ruchala)
Chapter One: Introduction
Somewhere on the outskirts, between Stalinville and Mao Valley, there is a special place in hell reserved for Enver Hoxha.
It's not exactly prime real estate, to be sure. He has a modest house there, perhaps a duplex. Down the block lives Todor Zhivkov. Around the corner are Nick and Elena Ceausescu. Janos Kadar and Ho Chi Mihn are frequent dinner guests; sometimes they get a little tipsy and swap wives. Together, they form a special club: inherently evil, they lacked the power, resources and sheer numbers of potential victims to commit murder on a truly genocidal scale. They are abandoned by scholars who flock to the statistical sexiness of Stalin and Mao.
Unable to top Auschwitz or the Gulag Archipelago, all that is left of them now is half-forgotten memories of the more bizarre aspects of their rule. Ceausescu forbade private ownership of typewriters, and held back colour television until the early 1980s for fear the little pictures would be too much distraction to the exhausted Romanian proles. Zhivkov is chiefly remembered for asking Leonid Brezhnev if Bulgaria could join the Soviet Union. Enver Hoxha banned bearded visitors, Americans and God.
This is the little hell made for little men, little dictators of tin-pot kingdoms. While Chairman Mao and Uncle Joe sip blood at the right hand of the beastmaster, Satan sees the residents of dreary Hoxhatown as boorish, uninvited houseguests. There's little he can learn from them, unless he has a taste for really kick-ass goulash.
Such is the fate of mass murderers with few morals but even fewer bodies. These dictators are like British cops: they snarl and sneer but everyone knows they don't carry guns. All they can do is go home at the end of the day and take out their frustrations on the wife, kids, and any small animals that get in their way.
Chapter One: Introduction
Somewhere on the outskirts, between Stalinville and Mao Valley, there is a special place in hell reserved for Enver Hoxha.
It's not exactly prime real estate, to be sure. He has a modest house there, perhaps a duplex. Down the block lives Todor Zhivkov. Around the corner are Nick and Elena Ceausescu. Janos Kadar and Ho Chi Mihn are frequent dinner guests; sometimes they get a little tipsy and swap wives. Together, they form a special club: inherently evil, they lacked the power, resources and sheer numbers of potential victims to commit murder on a truly genocidal scale. They are abandoned by scholars who flock to the statistical sexiness of Stalin and Mao.
Unable to top Auschwitz or the Gulag Archipelago, all that is left of them now is half-forgotten memories of the more bizarre aspects of their rule. Ceausescu forbade private ownership of typewriters, and held back colour television until the early 1980s for fear the little pictures would be too much distraction to the exhausted Romanian proles. Zhivkov is chiefly remembered for asking Leonid Brezhnev if Bulgaria could join the Soviet Union. Enver Hoxha banned bearded visitors, Americans and God.
This is the little hell made for little men, little dictators of tin-pot kingdoms. While Chairman Mao and Uncle Joe sip blood at the right hand of the beastmaster, Satan sees the residents of dreary Hoxhatown as boorish, uninvited houseguests. There's little he can learn from them, unless he has a taste for really kick-ass goulash.
Such is the fate of mass murderers with few morals but even fewer bodies. These dictators are like British cops: they snarl and sneer but everyone knows they don't carry guns. All they can do is go home at the end of the day and take out their frustrations on the wife, kids, and any small animals that get in their way.
Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory chapter 2: The Geek
(by Cali Ruchala)
Chapter Two: The Geek
The reign of Enver Hoxha over Albania is distinguished by only two things: its length and its oddities. He was, any way you cut it, a very strange man even by Communist standards, obsessed with invisible enemies, poison germs and the facial hair of mysterious visitors. He never had any impact outside of the Balkans, and even there it'd be stretching it to call him influential. Surrounded by larger powers, he could only turn inward, and take out his frustrations on his own people.
Enver's reign of weirdness lasted forty years - longer than any other comrade in Europe, and behind only to Kim Il-Sung of North Korea and Fidel Castro in the world. The next closest is Hoxha's next-door neighbour and former mentor, Tito of Yugoslavia, who held his title as the South Slavic Dapper Don for thirty-five years.
Albania under Enver Hoxha was a state based upon a rigorously-enforced ideology with brutal consequences for subversion. However, it doesn't pay to look at him as a Marxist ideologue, or even a dictator at all. If one pulls away the shielding cobwebs of his hardcore isolationism, his manner of statecraft seems closer to a game of treehouse. It's almost as if a simpering, lonely child were given a chance to make a reality out of his delusions of grandeur, take vengeance on his tormentors and put into place a schizophrenic plan to remake an entire nation in his own, pathetic image. His accomplishments - once given grudging respect by even Western commentators, and which have taken on a nearly mythic, though completely untrue, stature - are roughly that which one can expect from a five-year old sissyboy placed in charge of the Gestapo. Not one part of Albania escaped from this deranged "renewal" project - the people, the cities, even the physical shape of the land bore the paranoid and sterile stamp of Enver Hoxha. He made himself God in a godless land, demanding human sacrifice and taking away what would not be voluntarily surrendered.
Somehow, despite his brazen brutality and avarice, the destruction he wrought on his beloved subjects was either downplayed or buried beneath trivia about improved literacy rates and net electricity supplies by historians who really should know better. At least today they can see for themselves the true legacy of Enver Hoxha. After ninety days and ten thousand sorties flown by NATO jets, the average yearly wage of Serbian worker in Belgrade is still twice that of his Albanian counterpart in Tirane.
* * *
Enver Hoxha was born on October 16, 1908 in Gjirokaster, the pre-eminent city of the Albanian interior. His father was a cloth merchant and landowner, though it would later be a treasonable offense to insinuate that he was anything but a tough-as-nails working-class Hercules. The Gjirokaster Hoxhas already had a formidable reputation: Enver's uncle Hyen was a prominent politician, landowner and Gjirokaster's representative at the 1912 assembly that proclaimed Albania's independence from the Ottoman Turks.
Despite being such a righteously impoverished proletarian scrub, the elder Hoxha had the means to send his son to the French School in Korce. Albania at the time had no national educational system and zero universities. A few years later, his father sent him - and his doctrinaire biographers had a really hard time explaining this one - to the American School in the Albanian capital, Tirane. It would appear that his father was preparing him for service in the class-enemy royal government of the almost-as-strange-as-Enver monarch of Albania and namesake of that extraterrestrial supervillian from Krypton, King Zog.
For his post-secondary education, Hoxha took a national scholarship in Natural Sciences to continue his studies in France. At Montpellier, he was an uninspiring student and boring to the point of invisibility. Years later, when following some leads for a newspaper article on the New Stalinist on the Bloc, a French journalist named Jean-Louis Franchot was faced with a biographer's nightmare: none of Enver Hoxha's classmates could remember him. When pressed, they invoked a student who sat quietly, never spoke (possibly for fear of mockery of his rustic accent) and kept his nose buried in his books. We can be certain that, like the Unibomber, he remembered each and every one of his classmates. His student days, so filled with alienation and other attributes of a 1930s science geek, had no shortage of hatred either. It began to incubate in the black earth of his being, fertilized a few years later by a political philosophy that has so often become the very incarnation of hate.
After his year-long scholarship to Montpellier expired, Enver moved to Paris. Having discovered the universal truth that science nerds don't get chicks, he moved on to the Sorbonne where he studied philosophy. We can assume that this is the period in which he developed a fondness for a fashion sense later forced upon millions of Albanians called "Beatnik chic".
It was in Paris, though, that Hoxha met an otherwise useless rake named Valliant Couturier. The Frenchman was editor for a Communist journal with the ironic title of l'Humanité. He took young Enver under his wing. Never before and not again until Pol Pot bit into his first croissant would Western assistance be so malevolent. Couturier thoroughly indoctrinated Enver in the 69th variety of Marx's ideas, called Stalinism. The ideas of sweeping terror and the cult of the leader meshed well with Enver's personality. He soon began writing in the name of Stalinist Humanity under the unlikely pseudonym of "Loulou".
Like most children of the bourgeoisie who discover radical thinking, Loulou retained a certain ambition which caused him to keep to the old class habit of social climbing. After wasting a year reading Marx, Lenin and Stalin and smoking clove cigarettes, he boarded a train for Brussels, where he took a job as secretary to King Zog's ambassador to Belgium. One can imagine the sluggard of the Parisian brothels in that environment of discipline and protocol, making desultory comments about the Philistines around him and their bourgeois obsession with concepts like work and time. One day the Philistine in Chief found Enver's stack of forbidden Communist literature. Like a father who's happened across his son's stash of nudie pictures, the Consul General gave Enver a severe lecture on the dangers of proletarian revolution (especially for a country like Albania, which had no proletariat) and fired him.
For the first time in his life, Enver's wish of being a persecuted minority (geeks and bohemians don't count) had finally come true. Fortunately for the Consul General, Hoxha didn't yet command a clique of thugs in a Red Star ensemble behind him to act out his fantasies of revenge. Instead he sulked home, returning to Albania for the first time in six years. There he took a job as a teacher at his old school in Korce.
Chapter Two: The Geek
The reign of Enver Hoxha over Albania is distinguished by only two things: its length and its oddities. He was, any way you cut it, a very strange man even by Communist standards, obsessed with invisible enemies, poison germs and the facial hair of mysterious visitors. He never had any impact outside of the Balkans, and even there it'd be stretching it to call him influential. Surrounded by larger powers, he could only turn inward, and take out his frustrations on his own people.
Enver's reign of weirdness lasted forty years - longer than any other comrade in Europe, and behind only to Kim Il-Sung of North Korea and Fidel Castro in the world. The next closest is Hoxha's next-door neighbour and former mentor, Tito of Yugoslavia, who held his title as the South Slavic Dapper Don for thirty-five years.
Albania under Enver Hoxha was a state based upon a rigorously-enforced ideology with brutal consequences for subversion. However, it doesn't pay to look at him as a Marxist ideologue, or even a dictator at all. If one pulls away the shielding cobwebs of his hardcore isolationism, his manner of statecraft seems closer to a game of treehouse. It's almost as if a simpering, lonely child were given a chance to make a reality out of his delusions of grandeur, take vengeance on his tormentors and put into place a schizophrenic plan to remake an entire nation in his own, pathetic image. His accomplishments - once given grudging respect by even Western commentators, and which have taken on a nearly mythic, though completely untrue, stature - are roughly that which one can expect from a five-year old sissyboy placed in charge of the Gestapo. Not one part of Albania escaped from this deranged "renewal" project - the people, the cities, even the physical shape of the land bore the paranoid and sterile stamp of Enver Hoxha. He made himself God in a godless land, demanding human sacrifice and taking away what would not be voluntarily surrendered.
Somehow, despite his brazen brutality and avarice, the destruction he wrought on his beloved subjects was either downplayed or buried beneath trivia about improved literacy rates and net electricity supplies by historians who really should know better. At least today they can see for themselves the true legacy of Enver Hoxha. After ninety days and ten thousand sorties flown by NATO jets, the average yearly wage of Serbian worker in Belgrade is still twice that of his Albanian counterpart in Tirane.
* * *
Enver Hoxha was born on October 16, 1908 in Gjirokaster, the pre-eminent city of the Albanian interior. His father was a cloth merchant and landowner, though it would later be a treasonable offense to insinuate that he was anything but a tough-as-nails working-class Hercules. The Gjirokaster Hoxhas already had a formidable reputation: Enver's uncle Hyen was a prominent politician, landowner and Gjirokaster's representative at the 1912 assembly that proclaimed Albania's independence from the Ottoman Turks.
Despite being such a righteously impoverished proletarian scrub, the elder Hoxha had the means to send his son to the French School in Korce. Albania at the time had no national educational system and zero universities. A few years later, his father sent him - and his doctrinaire biographers had a really hard time explaining this one - to the American School in the Albanian capital, Tirane. It would appear that his father was preparing him for service in the class-enemy royal government of the almost-as-strange-as-Enver monarch of Albania and namesake of that extraterrestrial supervillian from Krypton, King Zog.
For his post-secondary education, Hoxha took a national scholarship in Natural Sciences to continue his studies in France. At Montpellier, he was an uninspiring student and boring to the point of invisibility. Years later, when following some leads for a newspaper article on the New Stalinist on the Bloc, a French journalist named Jean-Louis Franchot was faced with a biographer's nightmare: none of Enver Hoxha's classmates could remember him. When pressed, they invoked a student who sat quietly, never spoke (possibly for fear of mockery of his rustic accent) and kept his nose buried in his books. We can be certain that, like the Unibomber, he remembered each and every one of his classmates. His student days, so filled with alienation and other attributes of a 1930s science geek, had no shortage of hatred either. It began to incubate in the black earth of his being, fertilized a few years later by a political philosophy that has so often become the very incarnation of hate.
After his year-long scholarship to Montpellier expired, Enver moved to Paris. Having discovered the universal truth that science nerds don't get chicks, he moved on to the Sorbonne where he studied philosophy. We can assume that this is the period in which he developed a fondness for a fashion sense later forced upon millions of Albanians called "Beatnik chic".
It was in Paris, though, that Hoxha met an otherwise useless rake named Valliant Couturier. The Frenchman was editor for a Communist journal with the ironic title of l'Humanité. He took young Enver under his wing. Never before and not again until Pol Pot bit into his first croissant would Western assistance be so malevolent. Couturier thoroughly indoctrinated Enver in the 69th variety of Marx's ideas, called Stalinism. The ideas of sweeping terror and the cult of the leader meshed well with Enver's personality. He soon began writing in the name of Stalinist Humanity under the unlikely pseudonym of "Loulou".
Like most children of the bourgeoisie who discover radical thinking, Loulou retained a certain ambition which caused him to keep to the old class habit of social climbing. After wasting a year reading Marx, Lenin and Stalin and smoking clove cigarettes, he boarded a train for Brussels, where he took a job as secretary to King Zog's ambassador to Belgium. One can imagine the sluggard of the Parisian brothels in that environment of discipline and protocol, making desultory comments about the Philistines around him and their bourgeois obsession with concepts like work and time. One day the Philistine in Chief found Enver's stack of forbidden Communist literature. Like a father who's happened across his son's stash of nudie pictures, the Consul General gave Enver a severe lecture on the dangers of proletarian revolution (especially for a country like Albania, which had no proletariat) and fired him.
For the first time in his life, Enver's wish of being a persecuted minority (geeks and bohemians don't count) had finally come true. Fortunately for the Consul General, Hoxha didn't yet command a clique of thugs in a Red Star ensemble behind him to act out his fantasies of revenge. Instead he sulked home, returning to Albania for the first time in six years. There he took a job as a teacher at his old school in Korce.
Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory chapter 3: King of the Stone-Eaters
(by Cali Ruchala)
Chapter Three: King of the Stone Eaters
The Albania that Hoxha returned to had been occupied by Fascist Italy. Though the Hoxhaists would later claim that their master had returned from Belgium to lead the political struggle against Italian rule, he did nothing of the sort. He lived a lackluster life in the provincial city (by scale and size, Korce was little more than a village), regaling bored youths with his tales of bohemian adventures. It was only when the newly formed Albanian Fascist Party demanded that teachers swear an oath of loyalty to Italian duce Benito Mussolini that Hoxha showed the first signs of developing a backbone. Enver refused and, again, was fired on the spot.
At the end of his second broken career, Enver moved to the capital of Tirane. Almost immediately after arriving, he opened "Flora", a retail tobacco shop. It is uncertain if he financed the store with his father's money or with funds from the Communist International. The former is more likely, as the Albanian Communist Party was then considered a lost cause by the internationalists of the Comintern. It was fractured into a dozen factions, none of them very large and most were more hostile to each other than to the Italians. It was not until 1941 that a genuine Albanian Communist Party came into being. Tito of Yugoslavia sent emissaries to Albania in order to coordinate the reorganization and consolidation of the party. He did so both for long term reasons (the eventual incorporation of Albania into either post-war Yugoslavia or an ambiguously defined Balkan Confederation), and to open another front in the guerrilla war against the Germans.
Albanians were ornery subjects to the Italians. The first uprising against Fascist rule in Europe took place in Albania on November 28, 1939, supported by a desperate strike of factory and transport workers in Tirane. They demanded the Italians leave the country and take Sefqet bej Verlaci, the Italians' puppet in Albania and the country's largest slumlord, with them. A year later, the southern and eastern countryside were in full revolt against extraordinary Italian requisitions of grain - food being the most precious resource in the mountainous Balkan state. The rebels were joined by cast-offs and deserters who had fought with the Italians in Greece and Yugoslavia.
Hoxha in his tobacco shop had little connection with these developments. Instead, he held secret Communist Party cell meetings behind the shuttered windows. Verlaci's bloodhounds sniffed out the secret behind the mild-mannered tobacconist and his shop. It was shut down in mid-1941. Hoxha's adventures through the bordellos and union halls of Paris enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary, and he soon become locked in a dispute for party leadership with Mehmet Shehu, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who returned to Albania at about the same time Hoxha was fired in Brussels. They formed an alliance, tenuous until after the war was over and the irrepressible Loulou showed him who was boss. For the time being, the Albanian Communist Party followed the ostentatious Yugoslav "advice" and put Enver Hoxha in charge in spite of his total lack of organizational experience. Shortly after his discovery by the police, Hoxha set out for the Albanian highlands to make a revolution.
The rank-and-file of the Albanian Communist Party was made up largely of students and other city-dwellers, so the image of Hoxha roughing it with other Albanian partisans wasn't too incongruous. However, his transformation from biology nerd to simpering bohemian to Stalinist welterweight contender wasn't yet complete. Nako Spiru, a prominent Albanian Communist versed in, of all things, economics, painted this picture of the new party leader:
Enver Hoxha. Average intelligence. Average attainment both as a student abroad, and later as a teacher. In the period before the formation of the CPA [the Albanian Communist Party] he led a desultory life. He is sectarian within the party. He fancies himself. He has an inferiority complex. The people have no idea who he is, and those who know him do not think highly of him. The party has tried everything to make him popular. But the people are not convinced of his qualities.
This brief note, which Spiru sent to the Yugoslav Party's central committee, is as penetrating as the famed and much more voluminous "Mussolini Dossier" compiled by the Italian secret police before the duce seized power. Here, before any of his outward manifestations of paranoia, persecution, and alienation made themselves known, Spiru shapes a portrait of the future Supreme Comrade in few words but full colour. It shows that the bizarre personality and intense, almost hallucinatory paranoia which characterized Enver Hoxha's forty years of terror were already quite apparent to those around him. It is quite safe to assume that Nako Spiru was not exaggerating Hoxha's faults and judge his motivations above reproach. An ardent nationalist as well as a Communist, he frequently clashed with the fraternal Yugoslav "advisors" Hoxha welcomed, and committed suicide in 1947 when as minister in charge of Albania's economy, he found himself powerless to resist Yugoslav domination of his country.
Hoxha's flight to the highlands was probably the best thing that ever happened to him, which is the worst thing that ever happened to his country. That's even taking into account Albania's enormously sad history, in addition to recent events. Up in the mountains, he found a few hundred ardent Communists already encamped. Their ranks swelled following the entreaties of Dusan Mugosa, Tito's envoy, to unite all factions of the party against the Fascists. By the end of 1941, the Italian high command estimated that Hoxha had 3,000 troops behind him.
But factionalism dies hard in the Balkans, and in Albania in particular. Following Stalin's orders and Tito's example, the Albanian Communists formed a coalition with other groups fighting the Italians, gathered together under the banner of the LNC, or National Liberation Movement. The LNC was under Communist control but had a few non-Marxists placed in prominent positions as window dressing. Although officially a part of the LNC, groups such as the republican and anti-Communist force called Balli Kombetar continued to fight against their Leninist "allies". As in Yugoslavia, within days of agreeing to fight together, the two factions were at each other's throats. Balli Kombetar fought sometimes with the Communists against the foreigners, sometimes with the foreigners against the Communists. Their leader, Mithat Frasheri, even signed an agreement with the commander of Italian forces in Albania to coordinate their activities against Hoxha's LNC forces.
All of it, we can say today, had little effect. For all his conspiring, Frasheri only proved the obvious: that proletarians kick white bread ass. His troops fought disastrously, pining in vain for an American or British invasion to save them from their unenviable fate.
* * *
Like Pol Pot, whose sinful thoughts took on the concentrated power of Clorox Bleach when forced to subsist on lizards in the jungles of Cambodia - crawling around on his belly and eating boiled gravel for three years did horrible things to Enver Hoxha's already warped personality. The Germans replaced the Italians in Albania after Mussolini was deposed in 1943, but the gravel-eaters were becoming terrific guerrilla fighters. In fact, the Germans had to delay their deployment in Albania because Hoxha's troops had seized Tirane's main airfield, preventing their landing. An entire division of Italian troops defected to the Albanian side, forming the Antonio Gramsci Battalion, named after the imprisoned chief of the Italian Communist Party.
By 1944, after a failed attempt by the Nazis to crush the LNC in a vicious campaign through the countryside, the partisans expanded the territory under their control to almost 75% of the country. They worked closely with Both Tito's Yugoslav partisans as well as the Greek Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), coordinating their activities to smash the Aryan balls on the Balkan anvil. On November 29, 1944, the last Fascist soldier had withdrawn. The LNC marched into Tirane with Hoxha at their head.
Enver followed Stalin's advice and Tito's lead again when he legitimized his power with horrible farcical elections in December 1945. Former leaders from the Italian occupation, followers of King Zog -- even those who were believed to be potential rivals - were arrested and given a predictably fatal sentence in Stalinist show trials. In a personal touch to rub elbows with the People, the show trials were presided over not by a pedantic prosecutor but by the Interior Minister himself, the gleeful hangman Koci Xoxe. All parties outside of the Democratic Front (the successor to the LNC) were outlawed. In this environment, it's almost incredibly that 7% of the population didn't vote for the Communists. Loulou was congratulated by his inner-circle, and Albania was declared a People's Republic the very next day.
It was a glorious moment in the history of nerds, and a touchstone for every embittered beatnik languishing away in the obscurity of flophouses and getting roughed up in alleys behind working class taverns. With no training, little experience and a bourgeois past, Enver Hoxha had created a whole new identity for himself as Albania's very own Supreme Comrade.
Chapter Three: King of the Stone Eaters
The Albania that Hoxha returned to had been occupied by Fascist Italy. Though the Hoxhaists would later claim that their master had returned from Belgium to lead the political struggle against Italian rule, he did nothing of the sort. He lived a lackluster life in the provincial city (by scale and size, Korce was little more than a village), regaling bored youths with his tales of bohemian adventures. It was only when the newly formed Albanian Fascist Party demanded that teachers swear an oath of loyalty to Italian duce Benito Mussolini that Hoxha showed the first signs of developing a backbone. Enver refused and, again, was fired on the spot.
At the end of his second broken career, Enver moved to the capital of Tirane. Almost immediately after arriving, he opened "Flora", a retail tobacco shop. It is uncertain if he financed the store with his father's money or with funds from the Communist International. The former is more likely, as the Albanian Communist Party was then considered a lost cause by the internationalists of the Comintern. It was fractured into a dozen factions, none of them very large and most were more hostile to each other than to the Italians. It was not until 1941 that a genuine Albanian Communist Party came into being. Tito of Yugoslavia sent emissaries to Albania in order to coordinate the reorganization and consolidation of the party. He did so both for long term reasons (the eventual incorporation of Albania into either post-war Yugoslavia or an ambiguously defined Balkan Confederation), and to open another front in the guerrilla war against the Germans.
Albanians were ornery subjects to the Italians. The first uprising against Fascist rule in Europe took place in Albania on November 28, 1939, supported by a desperate strike of factory and transport workers in Tirane. They demanded the Italians leave the country and take Sefqet bej Verlaci, the Italians' puppet in Albania and the country's largest slumlord, with them. A year later, the southern and eastern countryside were in full revolt against extraordinary Italian requisitions of grain - food being the most precious resource in the mountainous Balkan state. The rebels were joined by cast-offs and deserters who had fought with the Italians in Greece and Yugoslavia.
Hoxha in his tobacco shop had little connection with these developments. Instead, he held secret Communist Party cell meetings behind the shuttered windows. Verlaci's bloodhounds sniffed out the secret behind the mild-mannered tobacconist and his shop. It was shut down in mid-1941. Hoxha's adventures through the bordellos and union halls of Paris enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary, and he soon become locked in a dispute for party leadership with Mehmet Shehu, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who returned to Albania at about the same time Hoxha was fired in Brussels. They formed an alliance, tenuous until after the war was over and the irrepressible Loulou showed him who was boss. For the time being, the Albanian Communist Party followed the ostentatious Yugoslav "advice" and put Enver Hoxha in charge in spite of his total lack of organizational experience. Shortly after his discovery by the police, Hoxha set out for the Albanian highlands to make a revolution.
The rank-and-file of the Albanian Communist Party was made up largely of students and other city-dwellers, so the image of Hoxha roughing it with other Albanian partisans wasn't too incongruous. However, his transformation from biology nerd to simpering bohemian to Stalinist welterweight contender wasn't yet complete. Nako Spiru, a prominent Albanian Communist versed in, of all things, economics, painted this picture of the new party leader:
Enver Hoxha. Average intelligence. Average attainment both as a student abroad, and later as a teacher. In the period before the formation of the CPA [the Albanian Communist Party] he led a desultory life. He is sectarian within the party. He fancies himself. He has an inferiority complex. The people have no idea who he is, and those who know him do not think highly of him. The party has tried everything to make him popular. But the people are not convinced of his qualities.
This brief note, which Spiru sent to the Yugoslav Party's central committee, is as penetrating as the famed and much more voluminous "Mussolini Dossier" compiled by the Italian secret police before the duce seized power. Here, before any of his outward manifestations of paranoia, persecution, and alienation made themselves known, Spiru shapes a portrait of the future Supreme Comrade in few words but full colour. It shows that the bizarre personality and intense, almost hallucinatory paranoia which characterized Enver Hoxha's forty years of terror were already quite apparent to those around him. It is quite safe to assume that Nako Spiru was not exaggerating Hoxha's faults and judge his motivations above reproach. An ardent nationalist as well as a Communist, he frequently clashed with the fraternal Yugoslav "advisors" Hoxha welcomed, and committed suicide in 1947 when as minister in charge of Albania's economy, he found himself powerless to resist Yugoslav domination of his country.
Hoxha's flight to the highlands was probably the best thing that ever happened to him, which is the worst thing that ever happened to his country. That's even taking into account Albania's enormously sad history, in addition to recent events. Up in the mountains, he found a few hundred ardent Communists already encamped. Their ranks swelled following the entreaties of Dusan Mugosa, Tito's envoy, to unite all factions of the party against the Fascists. By the end of 1941, the Italian high command estimated that Hoxha had 3,000 troops behind him.
But factionalism dies hard in the Balkans, and in Albania in particular. Following Stalin's orders and Tito's example, the Albanian Communists formed a coalition with other groups fighting the Italians, gathered together under the banner of the LNC, or National Liberation Movement. The LNC was under Communist control but had a few non-Marxists placed in prominent positions as window dressing. Although officially a part of the LNC, groups such as the republican and anti-Communist force called Balli Kombetar continued to fight against their Leninist "allies". As in Yugoslavia, within days of agreeing to fight together, the two factions were at each other's throats. Balli Kombetar fought sometimes with the Communists against the foreigners, sometimes with the foreigners against the Communists. Their leader, Mithat Frasheri, even signed an agreement with the commander of Italian forces in Albania to coordinate their activities against Hoxha's LNC forces.
All of it, we can say today, had little effect. For all his conspiring, Frasheri only proved the obvious: that proletarians kick white bread ass. His troops fought disastrously, pining in vain for an American or British invasion to save them from their unenviable fate.
* * *
Like Pol Pot, whose sinful thoughts took on the concentrated power of Clorox Bleach when forced to subsist on lizards in the jungles of Cambodia - crawling around on his belly and eating boiled gravel for three years did horrible things to Enver Hoxha's already warped personality. The Germans replaced the Italians in Albania after Mussolini was deposed in 1943, but the gravel-eaters were becoming terrific guerrilla fighters. In fact, the Germans had to delay their deployment in Albania because Hoxha's troops had seized Tirane's main airfield, preventing their landing. An entire division of Italian troops defected to the Albanian side, forming the Antonio Gramsci Battalion, named after the imprisoned chief of the Italian Communist Party.
By 1944, after a failed attempt by the Nazis to crush the LNC in a vicious campaign through the countryside, the partisans expanded the territory under their control to almost 75% of the country. They worked closely with Both Tito's Yugoslav partisans as well as the Greek Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), coordinating their activities to smash the Aryan balls on the Balkan anvil. On November 29, 1944, the last Fascist soldier had withdrawn. The LNC marched into Tirane with Hoxha at their head.
Enver followed Stalin's advice and Tito's lead again when he legitimized his power with horrible farcical elections in December 1945. Former leaders from the Italian occupation, followers of King Zog -- even those who were believed to be potential rivals - were arrested and given a predictably fatal sentence in Stalinist show trials. In a personal touch to rub elbows with the People, the show trials were presided over not by a pedantic prosecutor but by the Interior Minister himself, the gleeful hangman Koci Xoxe. All parties outside of the Democratic Front (the successor to the LNC) were outlawed. In this environment, it's almost incredibly that 7% of the population didn't vote for the Communists. Loulou was congratulated by his inner-circle, and Albania was declared a People's Republic the very next day.
It was a glorious moment in the history of nerds, and a touchstone for every embittered beatnik languishing away in the obscurity of flophouses and getting roughed up in alleys behind working class taverns. With no training, little experience and a bourgeois past, Enver Hoxha had created a whole new identity for himself as Albania's very own Supreme Comrade.
Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory chapter 4: Soul Force
(by Cali Ruchala)
Chapter Four: Soul Force
Never the trusting sort, Enver took so many positions in the government for himself that the introductions at a state dinner - if he had any - would have required a naptime. His official name and title was now "Comrade-Chairman-Prime Minister-Foreign-Minister-Minister of War-Commander-in-Chief of the People's Army Enver Hoxha". Later he would add the word "Supreme" in front of "Comrade" and adopt atrocious epithets such as "Great Teacher" and the more mysterious handle of "Sole Force".
In those years after the war, almost forgotten today by new, more pressing tragedies (and never learned in America to begin with - World War II was about fighting Nazis, right?), East and West were balancing on a precipice above a landscape devastated by war. In Italy and Austria, Yugoslav Communists were fighting the kind of battle that men with brass on their chests define as a "low-level insurgency", taking on Allied troops and Italian partisans. The battle for the Italian city of Trieste, which Tito stubbornly refused to let go of, was especially ominous for a continent still smothered in ashes, though it was to be the amateur architecture in Berlin that got all the attention.
Sole Force wasted no time in making new enemies. The only "imperialists" in the Balkans at the time were the British who had been refused access to Albania. They settled instead on the Greek island of Corfu which lies just a few kilometers off Albania's southern coastline. Hoxha repeatedly warned against Allied incursions into Albanian territorial waters. He then mined the waters off the coast of Corfu and a British vessel was sunk.
After this international incident, the Brits and the Americans finally paid attention. Albania had scant importance to anyone during the war; about the only people who paid her any mind had been Tito and Mussolini, two leaders obsessed with prestige more than strategy, and both of these jackals merely wanted to annex it. At the Allied conferences in Tehran and Yalta, Albania was not even mentioned. Stalin himself - later to become Hoxha's greatest role model - advocated the country's outright disappearance by absorption into Yugoslavia. In 1946, Stalin asked a Yugoslav delegation in Moscow, "And what about Hoxha, what is he like in your opinion?" When they answered evasively, Koba winked. "He is a petty bourgeois, inclined towards nationalism? Yes, we think so too."
In 1946, with the Cold War "cooling up", the United States Senate passed a resolution recognizing Greek claims to southern Albania, including Hoxha's birthplace in Gjirokaster. Hoxha would eventually come to fear Greek claims on Albanian territory so much that he would make it illegal to name a child Christos, Nicholas or Alexander.
Later in the same year, the British for the first time met with the deposed King Zog and began training some of his supporters on the island of Cyprus. They were soon joined in their drills by refugees and broken Balli Kombetar fighters who forced a massive exodus below the folds of the descending Iron Curtain.
In 1947, a small group of these exiles, supported by American weaponry and intelligence, made their first incursion into Albania with the goal of sabotaging the Communist Party - and assassinating the multi-portfolio'ed Comrade, Enver Hoxha, if the opportunity presented itself.
In all, seven landings were made by Albanian anti-Communists. Each time, the party was immediately apprehended, tortured and executed. The infiltration programme had been compromised by a British double agent working in the Pentagon named Kim Philby. He passed on sensitive information about the landing sites, the composition of the parties and their ETAs to his Soviet paymasters, who in turn informed Loulou.
All this did nothing to assuage the persecution complex recognized by Nako Spiru in 1943. We cannot say what Hoxha would have been like without this agitation, but it certainly didn't help. Certifiably insane or at least blinding drunk on a cocktail of white-hot ideology and paranoia, he began to transform the country into a gigantic army bunker. The next few years were spent sealing the cracks.
In honour of his hero Uncle Joe, the state that Hoxha began to build had its inspiration in the Stalinized Soviet Union. As such Albania reaped a few of the benefits of Communism and centralized control. Hoxha undertook a massive literacy campaign and after forty years, Albania had a 90% literacy rate (identical to the United States). Life expectancy for males in 1939 was thirty-eight years old. Hoxha immediately banned the gjakmarrje or blood feud which would devour entire communities over the most trivial disagreements, and the life expectancy jumped to a high point of seventy-three years during the last years of Loulou's life. He also banned the medieval Canon of Lek, a code of unwritten laws which essentially relegated women to a status lower than that of a healthy steer and regulated the violence of feuding. In the new Albania, everyone would be healthy steer subject to regulated violence, man and women alike. That's called equality.
Of course, not even the indefatigable Comrade Loulou could hurl Albania into the 20th century in all respects. Nepotism and Communism go together like shit on a shoe. In the case of the Albanian Communist Party, it was very much a "family business", moreso than any other state, including Romania. The following description of the blood ties between members of the Party comes from Moscow, broadcast during a relatively poor time in the two countries' relations. While it is easily identifiable as propaganda, the sad part is that it was also true:
Half or more of the 53 members of the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labour [the Communist Party] are related. First, we have four couples: Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije Hoxha; Mehmet Shehu and his wife Fiqrete Shehu; Hysni Kopo and his wife Vito Kopo; and Josif Pashko with his wife Eleni Terezi. The wives of Manush Myftiu, Politburo member, and of Pilo Peristeri, candidate-member of the Politburo, are sisters. Kadri Hasbiu, candidate-member of the Politburo and Interior Minister, is the husband of Mehmet Shehu's sister. The brother of Hysni Kopo's wife is Piro Kondi, also a member of the Central Committee.
Chapter Four: Soul Force
Never the trusting sort, Enver took so many positions in the government for himself that the introductions at a state dinner - if he had any - would have required a naptime. His official name and title was now "Comrade-Chairman-Prime Minister-Foreign-Minister-Minister of War-Commander-in-Chief of the People's Army Enver Hoxha". Later he would add the word "Supreme" in front of "Comrade" and adopt atrocious epithets such as "Great Teacher" and the more mysterious handle of "Sole Force".
In those years after the war, almost forgotten today by new, more pressing tragedies (and never learned in America to begin with - World War II was about fighting Nazis, right?), East and West were balancing on a precipice above a landscape devastated by war. In Italy and Austria, Yugoslav Communists were fighting the kind of battle that men with brass on their chests define as a "low-level insurgency", taking on Allied troops and Italian partisans. The battle for the Italian city of Trieste, which Tito stubbornly refused to let go of, was especially ominous for a continent still smothered in ashes, though it was to be the amateur architecture in Berlin that got all the attention.
Sole Force wasted no time in making new enemies. The only "imperialists" in the Balkans at the time were the British who had been refused access to Albania. They settled instead on the Greek island of Corfu which lies just a few kilometers off Albania's southern coastline. Hoxha repeatedly warned against Allied incursions into Albanian territorial waters. He then mined the waters off the coast of Corfu and a British vessel was sunk.
After this international incident, the Brits and the Americans finally paid attention. Albania had scant importance to anyone during the war; about the only people who paid her any mind had been Tito and Mussolini, two leaders obsessed with prestige more than strategy, and both of these jackals merely wanted to annex it. At the Allied conferences in Tehran and Yalta, Albania was not even mentioned. Stalin himself - later to become Hoxha's greatest role model - advocated the country's outright disappearance by absorption into Yugoslavia. In 1946, Stalin asked a Yugoslav delegation in Moscow, "And what about Hoxha, what is he like in your opinion?" When they answered evasively, Koba winked. "He is a petty bourgeois, inclined towards nationalism? Yes, we think so too."
In 1946, with the Cold War "cooling up", the United States Senate passed a resolution recognizing Greek claims to southern Albania, including Hoxha's birthplace in Gjirokaster. Hoxha would eventually come to fear Greek claims on Albanian territory so much that he would make it illegal to name a child Christos, Nicholas or Alexander.
Later in the same year, the British for the first time met with the deposed King Zog and began training some of his supporters on the island of Cyprus. They were soon joined in their drills by refugees and broken Balli Kombetar fighters who forced a massive exodus below the folds of the descending Iron Curtain.
In 1947, a small group of these exiles, supported by American weaponry and intelligence, made their first incursion into Albania with the goal of sabotaging the Communist Party - and assassinating the multi-portfolio'ed Comrade, Enver Hoxha, if the opportunity presented itself.
In all, seven landings were made by Albanian anti-Communists. Each time, the party was immediately apprehended, tortured and executed. The infiltration programme had been compromised by a British double agent working in the Pentagon named Kim Philby. He passed on sensitive information about the landing sites, the composition of the parties and their ETAs to his Soviet paymasters, who in turn informed Loulou.
All this did nothing to assuage the persecution complex recognized by Nako Spiru in 1943. We cannot say what Hoxha would have been like without this agitation, but it certainly didn't help. Certifiably insane or at least blinding drunk on a cocktail of white-hot ideology and paranoia, he began to transform the country into a gigantic army bunker. The next few years were spent sealing the cracks.
In honour of his hero Uncle Joe, the state that Hoxha began to build had its inspiration in the Stalinized Soviet Union. As such Albania reaped a few of the benefits of Communism and centralized control. Hoxha undertook a massive literacy campaign and after forty years, Albania had a 90% literacy rate (identical to the United States). Life expectancy for males in 1939 was thirty-eight years old. Hoxha immediately banned the gjakmarrje or blood feud which would devour entire communities over the most trivial disagreements, and the life expectancy jumped to a high point of seventy-three years during the last years of Loulou's life. He also banned the medieval Canon of Lek, a code of unwritten laws which essentially relegated women to a status lower than that of a healthy steer and regulated the violence of feuding. In the new Albania, everyone would be healthy steer subject to regulated violence, man and women alike. That's called equality.
Of course, not even the indefatigable Comrade Loulou could hurl Albania into the 20th century in all respects. Nepotism and Communism go together like shit on a shoe. In the case of the Albanian Communist Party, it was very much a "family business", moreso than any other state, including Romania. The following description of the blood ties between members of the Party comes from Moscow, broadcast during a relatively poor time in the two countries' relations. While it is easily identifiable as propaganda, the sad part is that it was also true:
Half or more of the 53 members of the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labour [the Communist Party] are related. First, we have four couples: Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije Hoxha; Mehmet Shehu and his wife Fiqrete Shehu; Hysni Kopo and his wife Vito Kopo; and Josif Pashko with his wife Eleni Terezi. The wives of Manush Myftiu, Politburo member, and of Pilo Peristeri, candidate-member of the Politburo, are sisters. Kadri Hasbiu, candidate-member of the Politburo and Interior Minister, is the husband of Mehmet Shehu's sister. The brother of Hysni Kopo's wife is Piro Kondi, also a member of the Central Committee.
Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory Chapter 5: The anti-Beardist revolution
(by Cali Ruchala)
Chapter Five: The Anti-Beardist Revolution
One of the first unusual laws enacted was a complete ban on automobiles. No one without a permit was allowed to own one, and only two permits were ever issued outside of the Party. Public transportation was existent, though hardly extensive. On the one hand, bizarre laws prohibiting common things kept people from longing for consumer goods that Hoxha and the Party couldn't possibly provide. On the other, the poor communications structure (and with no cars, there wasn't much use in keeping roads smooth and repaired) necessitated a mastodon of a police state to keep an eye on everyone. The Sigurimi thus came into being.
The Sigurimi is one of the most shadowy secret police organizations in Eastern European history. They had little presence outside of the country (except in the doomed land of Kosovo), but so thoroughly did they penetrate Albanian society, no one could be sure that even your kindly grandfather wasn't filing reports over your preference for Barbie over Kobi, Official Doll of the Albanian Revolution™. After 1993, the Sigurimi made the transition from secret police force to mafia faster than any other organization of its kind, including the prodigious boys of the KGB. They are still implicated in frequent contract killings, and those who tried to furiously stomp out the fires of the gjakmarrje are the greatest agents of its revival.
The Sigurimi were not long in waiting for an opportunity to strut their stuff. In 1948, the Tito-Stalin break occurred, and Yugoslavia was thrown out of the Eastern Bloc. Albania, which had previously been little more than a client state of Yugoslavia, fell into the Stalinist line. Hoxha's parakeet press cursed the plague of Titoism and the Sigurimi swept down on all suspected Yugoslav sympathizers. Koci Xoxe, who as Interior Minister had lived up to his epithet as the Butcher of the Bourgeoisie, was the first to fall. In 1949 he was tried for treason and executed. Former "nationalist Communists" who had been removed at Tito's insistence for their supposed anti-Yugoslav leanings, such as Hoxha's former rival and collaborator Mehmet Shehu, were rehabilitated. Nako Spiru, whose suicide in 1947 has already been described, was rehabilitated posthumously as a national martyr. His widow Liri Belishova, who had been expelled from the Party for no other reason than that her husband killed himself, was given a position in the Politburo. All the excesses and "errors" of the post-war period were dumped upon the shoulders of Koci Xoxe and his evil puppeteer, Tito.
The infamous scribes of the Tirane Marxist-Leninist Institute, headed by First Lady Nexhmije Hoxha (kind of a Red Hillary Clinton when you think about it. "I didn't vote for a co-dictatorship!") went overboard attempting to disassociate themselves from Tito. They were hard put to eliminate the fawning statements from Enver's pen, such as this ditty published just after the war:
I've never felt stronger in my life before, when I saw beside me a Yugoslav brother, a comrade, prepared to sacrifice his own life like a hero for the sake of my own people.
Two new Commandments in the Canon of Enver were born after the break with Yugoslavia. The first was the national myth mentioned earlier - the idealization of Hoxha as a romantic, fiercely independent leader willing to die before he ceded an inch of his country's sovereignty to a foreign aggressor.
The second (not unrelated) part of the Catechism of Loulou was the pattern which Hoxha would use to prolong his existence far beyond most speculations. He balanced one power off of another, and broke with one completely just in time to reap maximum benefit. He broke with Italy and Greece (Albania's natural partners) for the Yugoslavs; sacrificed the Yugoslavs for the Soviets; and denounced the Soviets in favour of the Chinese.
Though even his opponents would laud his accomplishments in preserving the borders from allegedly hostile, aggressive neighbours, not a single imperialist bent on crushing Albanian "independence" ever fell in this forty-year battle. The Sigurimi never shot an enemy soldier. They did shoot many, many Albanians, thousands more than could by any stretch of principles be considered "necessary" for the country's centralization and survival. Hoxha used these constant upheavals in his country's foreign policy to eliminate rivals, purge the Party (Liri Belishova and Mehmet Shehu had the notable distinction of being purged twice, the second time fatally) and consolidate power in the hands of the Hoxha Family. Except for the break with Tito, all of these foreign confrontations could have been avoided, as they had much more to do with peculiar Communist fetishes than any really threatening actions. The smoke from the secret incinerators in Sigurimi headquarters was black and thick with the fumes of dead bodies, billowing with a greater profusion with each radical realignment in foreign relations. Proportionately, the slaughter was enormous, though with only three million rather wretched subjects to harvest corpses from, the prisons in the mountains would never challenge Siberia or Auschwitz (or even Goli Otok, Tito's floating gulag on the Adriatic) as a metaphor for man's capacity for satanic crime.
* * *
An extreme, amusing yet tragic example of the value of the ordinary Albanian to Comrade Loulou was the saga of one Ali Raxhedi. Ali was born under a bad sign and suffered from an incurable malady: he was a dead ringer, physically, for Enver Hoxha. It was humourous to some, and Ali liked to play practical jokes by donning the Maoist cap worn by Hoxha and making surprise "inspections" at local facilities. It was mostly harmless fun, and he never reaped any benefit from his genealogical accident.
One day the Sigurimi abducted Ali and demanded that he answer for his crimes. He was guaranteed a better life if he simply confessed to aping the Supreme Comrade. He did, and the Sigurimi delivered on their promise: he was not thrown in jail or executed. Instead, he was taken to Tirane, given powerful anesthesia and wheeled into an operating room. He woke up to discover that his face had been surgically altered to make his resemblance to Enver Hoxha into an exact likeness. He spent the next ten years living like a troll in a dungeon of the presidential palace. Hoxha's plan was to keep Ali around in case of an invasion, whereby he would be sacrificed to enemy soldiers. Hoxha would then retreat to the mountains to relive his glory days of partisan warfare.
But it was during his alignment with China that Hoxha's true derangement bloomed in full flower. Following Mao's lead, Albania in 1967 - on the eve of the great uprisings of 1968 when Europe burned like a torch - began a great Cultural Revolution. The party ranks were purged for the umpteenth time. Young intellectuals were dragged from their beds and forced to undergo a humiliating public "self-criticism". Some were merely abducted by the young red mobs and denounced to the Sigurimi. Children who informed on their parents were championed in newspapers. Hoxha smiled contentedly as his "grandchildren" performed every act of crime and blasphemy. The whole programme, he said, had been put forth by students at a school he visited in the city of Durres. It was not his idea, but the grand plan of the Socialist Youth, untainted by their parents' capitalist history.
As a part of the Cultural Revolution, Hoxha made all foreign travel illegal. Albania from this point forward became an enormous penal colony. Huge iron gates with the double-headed eagle of Skanderbeg were lengthened until they stretched into the sky. Only with government permission, and only when guarded by several trench-coated agents of the Sigurimi, would people be allowed to leave the country.
But the proclamation of 1967 which earned Enver Hoxha his own miserable dacha in Hell was the decree with the seemingly banal title of "The Religion of Albania is Albanianism".
The Supreme Comrade was unable to sleep at night, plagued by the suspicion that even his most loyal subjects swore an oath to One even greater than himself. Said Supreme Comrade thus adopted the rather capitalistic strategy of eliminating the competition. He informed Albania and the world that the opiate of the masses, God Himself, was now illegal. While the Soviet Union had confiscated church property, shut down monasteries, harassed clerics and made a very prominent show of recording each and every person to enter a church, synagogue or mosque, no state in the world had gone so far as to ban a believe in a power higher than the infallible Supreme Comrade. High-ranking priests were attacked and tortured until they either renounced their belief in God or were broken. Mosques, cathedrals, and village churches (Albania, though predominantly Islamic, still has considerable Catholic and Orthodox Christian minorities) were sometimes demolished, but more often turned into barns or warehouses. Young proletarians armed with hammers and chisels disappeared inside ancient buildings and didn't emerge until all medieval frescoes on the church walls - in some respects the only evidence that Albanians lived here at all in those times - were blown away by the wind. It's shocking to think that at this very moment, Czechs were dying in Wenceslas Square, and young students elsewhere in Europe were rising against the politics of their fathers. In Albania, meanwhile, they were attempting to demolish the one facet of life that Enver Hoxha couldn't regiment: Hope.
The Albanian Cultural Revolution didn't wind down for several long years. In 1973, Albanians rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and awoke to a fractured landscape, bleak as anything that could be imagined. The whole country and everyone in it had become Ali Raxhedi. Every vestige of pre-Enver history had been erased. The void was filled with an intense Cult of Loulou, the likes of which one would have to go to North Korea to emulate.
A futuristic, ziggurat-like structure known as the Enver Hoxha Museum opened for business, and the media proclaimed it a landmark which rivaled the Sphinx among the glories of human civilization. Gigantic statues of Enver were everywhere, including a settlement called Stalin City. In an obvious though unintentional nod to Orwell, it was impossible to escape the disapproving gaze of Enver Hoxha. Where Albania's mountainous geography prevented his likeness from being erected, just his name was sufficient. From the city of Berat one looked out at a skyline of ENVER! crafted from stone and stretching across the peaks like a pep rally banner for a high school football team, or a crude parody of Hollywood.
The changes were not just aesthetic in nature. During the Cultural Revolution, Hoxha had become convinced that Albania would be the place where the battle between Good and Evil would be fought. To prepare his hunk of rock on the fringes of Europe for the final conflagration, he ordered the construction of a great multitude of enormous and ugly concrete bunkers built throughout the country. No one is sure exactly how many of these bunkers exist, but the estimate of about 300,000 is usually cited. Inside was room for about twenty soldiers, and the structure peeked above ground a few feet like a cement mushroom, with a slit for a carbine to slide through and mow down the imperialist enemies.
Chapter Five: The Anti-Beardist Revolution
One of the first unusual laws enacted was a complete ban on automobiles. No one without a permit was allowed to own one, and only two permits were ever issued outside of the Party. Public transportation was existent, though hardly extensive. On the one hand, bizarre laws prohibiting common things kept people from longing for consumer goods that Hoxha and the Party couldn't possibly provide. On the other, the poor communications structure (and with no cars, there wasn't much use in keeping roads smooth and repaired) necessitated a mastodon of a police state to keep an eye on everyone. The Sigurimi thus came into being.
The Sigurimi is one of the most shadowy secret police organizations in Eastern European history. They had little presence outside of the country (except in the doomed land of Kosovo), but so thoroughly did they penetrate Albanian society, no one could be sure that even your kindly grandfather wasn't filing reports over your preference for Barbie over Kobi, Official Doll of the Albanian Revolution™. After 1993, the Sigurimi made the transition from secret police force to mafia faster than any other organization of its kind, including the prodigious boys of the KGB. They are still implicated in frequent contract killings, and those who tried to furiously stomp out the fires of the gjakmarrje are the greatest agents of its revival.
The Sigurimi were not long in waiting for an opportunity to strut their stuff. In 1948, the Tito-Stalin break occurred, and Yugoslavia was thrown out of the Eastern Bloc. Albania, which had previously been little more than a client state of Yugoslavia, fell into the Stalinist line. Hoxha's parakeet press cursed the plague of Titoism and the Sigurimi swept down on all suspected Yugoslav sympathizers. Koci Xoxe, who as Interior Minister had lived up to his epithet as the Butcher of the Bourgeoisie, was the first to fall. In 1949 he was tried for treason and executed. Former "nationalist Communists" who had been removed at Tito's insistence for their supposed anti-Yugoslav leanings, such as Hoxha's former rival and collaborator Mehmet Shehu, were rehabilitated. Nako Spiru, whose suicide in 1947 has already been described, was rehabilitated posthumously as a national martyr. His widow Liri Belishova, who had been expelled from the Party for no other reason than that her husband killed himself, was given a position in the Politburo. All the excesses and "errors" of the post-war period were dumped upon the shoulders of Koci Xoxe and his evil puppeteer, Tito.
The infamous scribes of the Tirane Marxist-Leninist Institute, headed by First Lady Nexhmije Hoxha (kind of a Red Hillary Clinton when you think about it. "I didn't vote for a co-dictatorship!") went overboard attempting to disassociate themselves from Tito. They were hard put to eliminate the fawning statements from Enver's pen, such as this ditty published just after the war:
I've never felt stronger in my life before, when I saw beside me a Yugoslav brother, a comrade, prepared to sacrifice his own life like a hero for the sake of my own people.
Two new Commandments in the Canon of Enver were born after the break with Yugoslavia. The first was the national myth mentioned earlier - the idealization of Hoxha as a romantic, fiercely independent leader willing to die before he ceded an inch of his country's sovereignty to a foreign aggressor.
The second (not unrelated) part of the Catechism of Loulou was the pattern which Hoxha would use to prolong his existence far beyond most speculations. He balanced one power off of another, and broke with one completely just in time to reap maximum benefit. He broke with Italy and Greece (Albania's natural partners) for the Yugoslavs; sacrificed the Yugoslavs for the Soviets; and denounced the Soviets in favour of the Chinese.
Though even his opponents would laud his accomplishments in preserving the borders from allegedly hostile, aggressive neighbours, not a single imperialist bent on crushing Albanian "independence" ever fell in this forty-year battle. The Sigurimi never shot an enemy soldier. They did shoot many, many Albanians, thousands more than could by any stretch of principles be considered "necessary" for the country's centralization and survival. Hoxha used these constant upheavals in his country's foreign policy to eliminate rivals, purge the Party (Liri Belishova and Mehmet Shehu had the notable distinction of being purged twice, the second time fatally) and consolidate power in the hands of the Hoxha Family. Except for the break with Tito, all of these foreign confrontations could have been avoided, as they had much more to do with peculiar Communist fetishes than any really threatening actions. The smoke from the secret incinerators in Sigurimi headquarters was black and thick with the fumes of dead bodies, billowing with a greater profusion with each radical realignment in foreign relations. Proportionately, the slaughter was enormous, though with only three million rather wretched subjects to harvest corpses from, the prisons in the mountains would never challenge Siberia or Auschwitz (or even Goli Otok, Tito's floating gulag on the Adriatic) as a metaphor for man's capacity for satanic crime.
* * *
An extreme, amusing yet tragic example of the value of the ordinary Albanian to Comrade Loulou was the saga of one Ali Raxhedi. Ali was born under a bad sign and suffered from an incurable malady: he was a dead ringer, physically, for Enver Hoxha. It was humourous to some, and Ali liked to play practical jokes by donning the Maoist cap worn by Hoxha and making surprise "inspections" at local facilities. It was mostly harmless fun, and he never reaped any benefit from his genealogical accident.
One day the Sigurimi abducted Ali and demanded that he answer for his crimes. He was guaranteed a better life if he simply confessed to aping the Supreme Comrade. He did, and the Sigurimi delivered on their promise: he was not thrown in jail or executed. Instead, he was taken to Tirane, given powerful anesthesia and wheeled into an operating room. He woke up to discover that his face had been surgically altered to make his resemblance to Enver Hoxha into an exact likeness. He spent the next ten years living like a troll in a dungeon of the presidential palace. Hoxha's plan was to keep Ali around in case of an invasion, whereby he would be sacrificed to enemy soldiers. Hoxha would then retreat to the mountains to relive his glory days of partisan warfare.
But it was during his alignment with China that Hoxha's true derangement bloomed in full flower. Following Mao's lead, Albania in 1967 - on the eve of the great uprisings of 1968 when Europe burned like a torch - began a great Cultural Revolution. The party ranks were purged for the umpteenth time. Young intellectuals were dragged from their beds and forced to undergo a humiliating public "self-criticism". Some were merely abducted by the young red mobs and denounced to the Sigurimi. Children who informed on their parents were championed in newspapers. Hoxha smiled contentedly as his "grandchildren" performed every act of crime and blasphemy. The whole programme, he said, had been put forth by students at a school he visited in the city of Durres. It was not his idea, but the grand plan of the Socialist Youth, untainted by their parents' capitalist history.
As a part of the Cultural Revolution, Hoxha made all foreign travel illegal. Albania from this point forward became an enormous penal colony. Huge iron gates with the double-headed eagle of Skanderbeg were lengthened until they stretched into the sky. Only with government permission, and only when guarded by several trench-coated agents of the Sigurimi, would people be allowed to leave the country.
But the proclamation of 1967 which earned Enver Hoxha his own miserable dacha in Hell was the decree with the seemingly banal title of "The Religion of Albania is Albanianism".
The Supreme Comrade was unable to sleep at night, plagued by the suspicion that even his most loyal subjects swore an oath to One even greater than himself. Said Supreme Comrade thus adopted the rather capitalistic strategy of eliminating the competition. He informed Albania and the world that the opiate of the masses, God Himself, was now illegal. While the Soviet Union had confiscated church property, shut down monasteries, harassed clerics and made a very prominent show of recording each and every person to enter a church, synagogue or mosque, no state in the world had gone so far as to ban a believe in a power higher than the infallible Supreme Comrade. High-ranking priests were attacked and tortured until they either renounced their belief in God or were broken. Mosques, cathedrals, and village churches (Albania, though predominantly Islamic, still has considerable Catholic and Orthodox Christian minorities) were sometimes demolished, but more often turned into barns or warehouses. Young proletarians armed with hammers and chisels disappeared inside ancient buildings and didn't emerge until all medieval frescoes on the church walls - in some respects the only evidence that Albanians lived here at all in those times - were blown away by the wind. It's shocking to think that at this very moment, Czechs were dying in Wenceslas Square, and young students elsewhere in Europe were rising against the politics of their fathers. In Albania, meanwhile, they were attempting to demolish the one facet of life that Enver Hoxha couldn't regiment: Hope.
The Albanian Cultural Revolution didn't wind down for several long years. In 1973, Albanians rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and awoke to a fractured landscape, bleak as anything that could be imagined. The whole country and everyone in it had become Ali Raxhedi. Every vestige of pre-Enver history had been erased. The void was filled with an intense Cult of Loulou, the likes of which one would have to go to North Korea to emulate.
A futuristic, ziggurat-like structure known as the Enver Hoxha Museum opened for business, and the media proclaimed it a landmark which rivaled the Sphinx among the glories of human civilization. Gigantic statues of Enver were everywhere, including a settlement called Stalin City. In an obvious though unintentional nod to Orwell, it was impossible to escape the disapproving gaze of Enver Hoxha. Where Albania's mountainous geography prevented his likeness from being erected, just his name was sufficient. From the city of Berat one looked out at a skyline of ENVER! crafted from stone and stretching across the peaks like a pep rally banner for a high school football team, or a crude parody of Hollywood.
The changes were not just aesthetic in nature. During the Cultural Revolution, Hoxha had become convinced that Albania would be the place where the battle between Good and Evil would be fought. To prepare his hunk of rock on the fringes of Europe for the final conflagration, he ordered the construction of a great multitude of enormous and ugly concrete bunkers built throughout the country. No one is sure exactly how many of these bunkers exist, but the estimate of about 300,000 is usually cited. Inside was room for about twenty soldiers, and the structure peeked above ground a few feet like a cement mushroom, with a slit for a carbine to slide through and mow down the imperialist enemies.
Comrade LouLou and the Fun Factory chapter six: Paradise
(by Cali Ruchala)
Chapter Six: Paradise
After the break with China in 1978 and the accompanying purge, Hoxha entered into a sort of semi-retirement. He emulated the paternalism of the hated Tito, whose grandfatherly demeanor was holding his country together and keeping the young from complaining too much. Before anointing a successor (and thus guaranteeing that the country would continue to develop in his own image - a Stalinist afterlife, you could say), he took care of some unfinished business.
The first item on the agenda was Mehmet Shehu. As old as Hoxha (who was then 73), Shehu had been his second-in-command since his rehabilitation in 1948. The rumoured story (and it is impossible to verify) has it that Hoxha and Shehu were having a drink of cognac when the chief of the Sigurimi and two burly lieutenants burst in. The thugs held Shehu down, but the chief refused to pull the trigger on a man who was an icon deferential only to Stalin and Hoxha himself. Thus Hoxha was the one who pulled the trigger on the closest thing to a friend this cloistered troll could ever have.
Dreaming of one last grasp for glory in his twilight, Hoxha gave serious consideration to a plan to invade Yugoslavia and take Kosovo and other lands inhabited by Albanians. It would have required an invasion force of about a million men (a full third of the total population), his Chief-of-Staff Veri Llakaj estimated. It was madness, but no more than any of the other ornaments and slogans of Hoxha's megalomania. Eventually, though he got cold feet. The plan was scrapped, and Llakaj was thrown in jail for having the audacity to know about it.
With Shehu out of the way, Hoxha spent his last few years in seclusion. There was almost no doubt who was in charge, but he liked to give the impression that he had sacrificed his life for his country and now wanted to spend his dotage reliving his youth. The former bohemian thus surrounded himself with lackeys and secretaries and began outlining the Holy Commandments of Hoxhaism in book form. Indeed, he left guiding instructions on just about every facet of Albanian life and wise statecraft, not unlike Marlon Brando giving Superman advice from beyond the grave long after the destruction of Krypton. He began with a denunciation of Titoism in Yugoslav Capitalism: Theory and Practice and The Titoists. To those with questions about his other former friends, there was Reflections on China, With Stalin, and The Khrushchevites (Loulou fondly remembered Koba as "warm and generous"; Khrushchev as a "manipulating blackmailer" and "blackguard for the bourgeoisie"). Enver then moved into a more geopolitical mood with Reflections on the Middle East and The Superpowers. He left a final warning to his xenophobic kingdom with the masterpiece, The Dangers of Anglo-Americans in Albania, which "recommended" to the new leaders that all men with beards be prohibited from entering the country, as beards were crafty devices the clever American and British agents used to conceal their shiftiness.
Ramiz Alia, Hoxha's hand-picked successor, approved this law and added it to the others. He had grown up in the wacky world of Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory as the chief of ideology from the 1960s onward, overseeing most aspects of the Cultural Revolution. While the old man was alive, Alia was as meek as a sheep.
No reliable record is available of Hoxha's last hours. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies put out a touching story of his serenity and confidence in the fidelity of his children to the Hoxhaist Way. In any case, on April 11, 1985, Enver Hoxha breathed his last. The Party issued a press release announcing that the Great Teacher had passed and invited the Albanian people to share in the loss. Long lines formed outside the Enver Hoxha Museum, weeping openly and saluting the memory of the only leader most of them had ever known.
* * *
Ramiz Alia attempted to keep a steady hand on the prow, but events soon spiraled out of his control. There was that Berlin Wall thing, sure, but more than that, the tightly controlled society that Hoxha had built as a shrine to his ego was disintegrating. The economy was collapsing, shrinking by roughly 50% from 1985 to 1990. Wages were set at $300 to $700 per year but were quickly falling. The lek currency was untradable on any foreign exchange, and the country had no foreign export markets to speak of. In addition, for the first time in forty years there were street demonstrations. The Sigurimi reacted brutally, beating protesters savagely, killing several and chasing the rest over the walls of foreign embassies in Tirane which Alia, in an unprecedented concession, had allowed to open just a few months before.
The inevitable collapse of Loulou's Utopia would not take long, especially since Alia was proving far less bloodthirsty than his predecessor. Eight years after Hoxha become wormfood, more extensive and sophisticated protests forced Alia out of power in favour of Enver's former physician, Sali Berisha. Albanians, so grateful to Hoxha for having preserved their Albanianness, celebrated not by dancing in the streets but by trying to escape from his devastated Elysium. They constructed homemade rafts like so many Cubans, which proved more sea-worthy than the sinking ship of their country. Thousands washed up on the beaches of Greece and Italy in the largest exodus in Europe since the closing days of World War II.
Hoxha's descendants did not make out well in the Brave New Enverless World. His widow, Nexhmije, was arrested for having done an Imelda Marcos with the resources of the country. Their daughter's spouse Klement Kolaneci was also arrested for corruption, accused of having stored millions of dollars laundered by corrupt Sigurimi in his home. All in all, it wasn't much by Marcos or Ceausescu standards, but the Hoxhas didn't have a very fallow field to pilfer from.
Enver himself didn't do much better than his heirs. His tomb in Gjirokaster was a prestigious joke in the Socialist Realist manner. In early summer, 1992, it was destroyed. Newly planted grass now marks the spot where the grandest of the stone Envers looked down sternly from on high. His body was disinterred and buried in a commoner's grave with the downtrodden masses he so loved.
The Kombinat, the industrial quarter of Tirane, such a symbol of one of Enver's few successes, is in ruins. Power plants throughout the country are collapsing for lack of obsolete Chinese parts. The power plant in the Kombinat is inhabited by squatters more miserable than any seen on late-night infomercials. They live by selling copper filaments and whatever else they can scavenge from the wreckage around them. They too are grateful for having been saved from the Titoists, Khrushchevites and the decadent Gang of Four.
Hoxha's mushroom bunkers still cause problems in the countryside. For the nation to become self-sufficient in foodstuffs, it needs more grazing lands, and the bunkers take up a whopping 10% of all arable land. The transportation infrastructure is falling apart, not only the roads but also the ports on Albania's extensive coastline, used now mainly for the country's main export of desperate human beings.
But there's no greater symbol of Enver's destroyed legacy than the hideous Enver Hoxha Museum in Tirane. The catastrophic poverty of the country and the desperation of its citizens made the New Sphinx a hot commodity in certain industries, and a new tenant appeared immediately after Alia's fall from power.
Yes, this hideous landmark dedicated to Enver Hoxha's megalomania is now the local headquarters for the United States Department of Aid and Internal Development, providing handouts to the people Comrade Loulou raised to self-sufficiency.
Chapter Six: Paradise
After the break with China in 1978 and the accompanying purge, Hoxha entered into a sort of semi-retirement. He emulated the paternalism of the hated Tito, whose grandfatherly demeanor was holding his country together and keeping the young from complaining too much. Before anointing a successor (and thus guaranteeing that the country would continue to develop in his own image - a Stalinist afterlife, you could say), he took care of some unfinished business.
The first item on the agenda was Mehmet Shehu. As old as Hoxha (who was then 73), Shehu had been his second-in-command since his rehabilitation in 1948. The rumoured story (and it is impossible to verify) has it that Hoxha and Shehu were having a drink of cognac when the chief of the Sigurimi and two burly lieutenants burst in. The thugs held Shehu down, but the chief refused to pull the trigger on a man who was an icon deferential only to Stalin and Hoxha himself. Thus Hoxha was the one who pulled the trigger on the closest thing to a friend this cloistered troll could ever have.
Dreaming of one last grasp for glory in his twilight, Hoxha gave serious consideration to a plan to invade Yugoslavia and take Kosovo and other lands inhabited by Albanians. It would have required an invasion force of about a million men (a full third of the total population), his Chief-of-Staff Veri Llakaj estimated. It was madness, but no more than any of the other ornaments and slogans of Hoxha's megalomania. Eventually, though he got cold feet. The plan was scrapped, and Llakaj was thrown in jail for having the audacity to know about it.
With Shehu out of the way, Hoxha spent his last few years in seclusion. There was almost no doubt who was in charge, but he liked to give the impression that he had sacrificed his life for his country and now wanted to spend his dotage reliving his youth. The former bohemian thus surrounded himself with lackeys and secretaries and began outlining the Holy Commandments of Hoxhaism in book form. Indeed, he left guiding instructions on just about every facet of Albanian life and wise statecraft, not unlike Marlon Brando giving Superman advice from beyond the grave long after the destruction of Krypton. He began with a denunciation of Titoism in Yugoslav Capitalism: Theory and Practice and The Titoists. To those with questions about his other former friends, there was Reflections on China, With Stalin, and The Khrushchevites (Loulou fondly remembered Koba as "warm and generous"; Khrushchev as a "manipulating blackmailer" and "blackguard for the bourgeoisie"). Enver then moved into a more geopolitical mood with Reflections on the Middle East and The Superpowers. He left a final warning to his xenophobic kingdom with the masterpiece, The Dangers of Anglo-Americans in Albania, which "recommended" to the new leaders that all men with beards be prohibited from entering the country, as beards were crafty devices the clever American and British agents used to conceal their shiftiness.
Ramiz Alia, Hoxha's hand-picked successor, approved this law and added it to the others. He had grown up in the wacky world of Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory as the chief of ideology from the 1960s onward, overseeing most aspects of the Cultural Revolution. While the old man was alive, Alia was as meek as a sheep.
No reliable record is available of Hoxha's last hours. The Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies put out a touching story of his serenity and confidence in the fidelity of his children to the Hoxhaist Way. In any case, on April 11, 1985, Enver Hoxha breathed his last. The Party issued a press release announcing that the Great Teacher had passed and invited the Albanian people to share in the loss. Long lines formed outside the Enver Hoxha Museum, weeping openly and saluting the memory of the only leader most of them had ever known.
* * *
Ramiz Alia attempted to keep a steady hand on the prow, but events soon spiraled out of his control. There was that Berlin Wall thing, sure, but more than that, the tightly controlled society that Hoxha had built as a shrine to his ego was disintegrating. The economy was collapsing, shrinking by roughly 50% from 1985 to 1990. Wages were set at $300 to $700 per year but were quickly falling. The lek currency was untradable on any foreign exchange, and the country had no foreign export markets to speak of. In addition, for the first time in forty years there were street demonstrations. The Sigurimi reacted brutally, beating protesters savagely, killing several and chasing the rest over the walls of foreign embassies in Tirane which Alia, in an unprecedented concession, had allowed to open just a few months before.
The inevitable collapse of Loulou's Utopia would not take long, especially since Alia was proving far less bloodthirsty than his predecessor. Eight years after Hoxha become wormfood, more extensive and sophisticated protests forced Alia out of power in favour of Enver's former physician, Sali Berisha. Albanians, so grateful to Hoxha for having preserved their Albanianness, celebrated not by dancing in the streets but by trying to escape from his devastated Elysium. They constructed homemade rafts like so many Cubans, which proved more sea-worthy than the sinking ship of their country. Thousands washed up on the beaches of Greece and Italy in the largest exodus in Europe since the closing days of World War II.
Hoxha's descendants did not make out well in the Brave New Enverless World. His widow, Nexhmije, was arrested for having done an Imelda Marcos with the resources of the country. Their daughter's spouse Klement Kolaneci was also arrested for corruption, accused of having stored millions of dollars laundered by corrupt Sigurimi in his home. All in all, it wasn't much by Marcos or Ceausescu standards, but the Hoxhas didn't have a very fallow field to pilfer from.
Enver himself didn't do much better than his heirs. His tomb in Gjirokaster was a prestigious joke in the Socialist Realist manner. In early summer, 1992, it was destroyed. Newly planted grass now marks the spot where the grandest of the stone Envers looked down sternly from on high. His body was disinterred and buried in a commoner's grave with the downtrodden masses he so loved.
The Kombinat, the industrial quarter of Tirane, such a symbol of one of Enver's few successes, is in ruins. Power plants throughout the country are collapsing for lack of obsolete Chinese parts. The power plant in the Kombinat is inhabited by squatters more miserable than any seen on late-night infomercials. They live by selling copper filaments and whatever else they can scavenge from the wreckage around them. They too are grateful for having been saved from the Titoists, Khrushchevites and the decadent Gang of Four.
Hoxha's mushroom bunkers still cause problems in the countryside. For the nation to become self-sufficient in foodstuffs, it needs more grazing lands, and the bunkers take up a whopping 10% of all arable land. The transportation infrastructure is falling apart, not only the roads but also the ports on Albania's extensive coastline, used now mainly for the country's main export of desperate human beings.
But there's no greater symbol of Enver's destroyed legacy than the hideous Enver Hoxha Museum in Tirane. The catastrophic poverty of the country and the desperation of its citizens made the New Sphinx a hot commodity in certain industries, and a new tenant appeared immediately after Alia's fall from power.
Yes, this hideous landmark dedicated to Enver Hoxha's megalomania is now the local headquarters for the United States Department of Aid and Internal Development, providing handouts to the people Comrade Loulou raised to self-sufficiency.
It's come to my attention that no version of "Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory" exists on the web
Besides small postings like the one I did and various others. The epic story, about the evolution of Communist Albania is full of surprises and wholesome entertainment for the entire family. So, in the interests of rescuing this series by Cali Ruchala, who I know next to nothing about, from obscurity, I'm going to post the whole thing on this site. That's what those crazy fucking posts that you're going to see above this one are. If Mr. Ruchala objects to this and wants me to take them down---please e-mail me.
The only book worth reading
This, the Ruhnama of the Father of All Turkmen Saparmurat Niyazov. The man who erected statues out of solid gold that follow the sun...are they really following the sun or are they standing still while the sun follows Turkmenbashi?
Now you, yes you, can read the Ruhnama, the part autobiography part history part religious text required for reading in all of Turkmenistan, even for drivers' training, which is held in such esteem that Turkmenbashi requires it to be placed next to the Quran in mosques.
Excerpts::"My Dear Türkmen Nation!
You are the meaning of my life and source of my strength. I wish you a healthy and long life. Our Türkmen ancestors were courageous people and they began to educate their children before they came to life. The Türkmen child reached maturity and bravery, and then has a national education and worldview. For that reason, bodily health, intellectual stability, and integrity, and good manners were the special characteristics of the Türkmen.
In our times, the Türkmen should take care in his eating and drinking to preserve his health and endurance. He should not eat greedily. In order to keep his health, strength and productivity, the Türkmen should remember Allah Almighty’s order: “Eat and drink but do not waste,” and behave according to this order."
"Dear Türkmen!
Be your own ruler. If you succeed in managing yourself, then you can overcome all difficulties.
My Citizens! The Türkmen of today and tomorrow should know himself. He should know his weakness and his strength, through and through! The doctor who knows the problem can easily solve it. The people who can judge their problems can avoid the problems! Ruhnama is the Türkmen’s book about himself.
Ruhnama is not only our book! Ruhnama is also the book of our brothers and other nations that rejoice at our happiness and are proud of our successes and with whom we are together creating our Golden Age in these lands."
Now you, yes you, can read the Ruhnama, the part autobiography part history part religious text required for reading in all of Turkmenistan, even for drivers' training, which is held in such esteem that Turkmenbashi requires it to be placed next to the Quran in mosques.
Excerpts::"My Dear Türkmen Nation!
You are the meaning of my life and source of my strength. I wish you a healthy and long life. Our Türkmen ancestors were courageous people and they began to educate their children before they came to life. The Türkmen child reached maturity and bravery, and then has a national education and worldview. For that reason, bodily health, intellectual stability, and integrity, and good manners were the special characteristics of the Türkmen.
In our times, the Türkmen should take care in his eating and drinking to preserve his health and endurance. He should not eat greedily. In order to keep his health, strength and productivity, the Türkmen should remember Allah Almighty’s order: “Eat and drink but do not waste,” and behave according to this order."
"Dear Türkmen!
Be your own ruler. If you succeed in managing yourself, then you can overcome all difficulties.
My Citizens! The Türkmen of today and tomorrow should know himself. He should know his weakness and his strength, through and through! The doctor who knows the problem can easily solve it. The people who can judge their problems can avoid the problems! Ruhnama is the Türkmen’s book about himself.
Ruhnama is not only our book! Ruhnama is also the book of our brothers and other nations that rejoice at our happiness and are proud of our successes and with whom we are together creating our Golden Age in these lands."
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Now violent movies?
Man, looks like I just can't get any luck on this one. After seeing Grindhouse I tracked down a copy of "Cannibal Holocaust", one of the goriest movies in existence, and it should be here in a couple of days. Damnit, I wanted to find "Last House on Dead End Street", which is supposedly even worse, but it's completely out of print.....Anyways, now a Korean action film is starting to be blamed for Virginia Tech. Specifically, a film called "Old Boy". Now, I'm not sure if the writers at the New York Times and other places are aware of this, but his writings were so disturbing, it's being reported, that 63 people out of a class of seventy stopped going to their creative writing class because of him. You can argue about loners in general, or about violent movies in general, or about violent music in general, but alienating 63 out of 70 from a writing class? That's something that goes far beyond the normal confines of loner-dom and fans of violent horror flicks.
Why Earl Browder and Popular Front Communism?
The short answer is that Popular Front Communism in the United States provides a model of organizing that was effective then and which could be effective today. There are many models of organizing that are available, particularly that of the Spanish Anarchists before and during the Civil War; I'm not claiming that this is in any way more effective than that but instead am offering it as one more tool in the tool box.
So what was the Popular Front? Literally, it referred to a new policy within the international Communist movement put in place after the fall of Germany to the Nazis that emphasized cooperation between Communist parties, Socialist parties, and Liberal parties in order to combat the threat of fascism. In reality, although this strategy was effective in France in electing Leon Blum as prime minister on a popular front ticket, the big advantage of the popular front was that it opened up local parties to be much more independant from Moscow and encouraged innovation in organizing techniques and goals. This was especially true in America, where during this period, under the Communist party leadership of Earl Browder, the size and influence of the Communist party grew to the point where hopeful observers thought it might become a mass party and a permanent fixture in American political life.
The Communist Party at this time was heavily involved with the organization of the CIO, or the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which based itself on the concept of industrial unionism, something that the IWW had pioneered, where industrial unionism meant organizing skilled and unskilled workers in an entire industry, from people working the assembly line to janitors.
The CIO, according to James Ryan's excellant book, used the organizational skills of the Communist Party to help mount campaigns for unionization.
The Communist Party at this time also pioneered civil rights work down in the South, one of the only organizations in the '30s and '40s that was doing this sort of work.
They helped out with Rosevelt's Works Progress Administration on art and theater projects, yes, raised money for the Spanish Civil War, organized support for China--at that time occupied by the Japanese and in any case still in Civil War. Maoism as such had not coalesced yet. Organized Unemployed Councils during the depression, helped elect progressive congressmen like Vito Marcantonio in New York City, who represented a district in Spanish Harlem. In other words they were involved in quite a lot of stuff that would normally be taken as being good.
One of the ways they did this was through fronts. Fronts in this period weren't generally deceptive but were independent organizations that the Communist Party created that were avenues for people to be involved with without actually joining the Party. Additionally, Party members were obligated not only to do Party work but to participate in Front organizations as individuals.
Ideologically, the flexability of the period lead to slogans like "Communism is 21st century Americanism", which was based on a reevaluation of the writings of classical American political authors like Jefferson and Lincoln, with the purpose of finding precedents in their writings concerning social justice that prefigured socialism. This was done in good faith. It was based on the recognition that Communism and Socialism wouldn't get very far if it was portrayed purely as an ideological import from Europe.
The extreme importance of this period comes out when you consider what came directly before and what came after. Before the popular front the doctrine guiding the parties was "Third Period Communism", which was basically pure Stalinism. Third Period communists didn't cooperate whatsoever with other trends and were very ideologically rigid. No surprise then that, unlike in Germany, the American following in Third Period Communism was very, very small. Germany is another story, one that would take us beyond this topic.
Immediately after the Popular Front period, when Browder was deposed for being not enough of a hardliner, the Party did possibly the worst thing it could have under McCarthyism: tell its members to shut up and take the fifth, not explaining their political beliefs and why they participated in these organizations, testimony that could have changed American political life. The theory behind this was that the U.S. was entering a period of imminent Fascism and it would be best to concentrate on building an underground rather than try to sell Communism to the American people at large. Then, after Khruschev's secret speech was published, declaring that, yes, Stalin had committed egregious crimes, there was a mass exodus from the Party after a short battle for political control between the progressives and the hardliners. After this the hardliners came into control of the Communist Party, where they stayed up until very recently...with the difference now being that it's not purely hardliners anymore. I doubt it's a progressive institution. But in practical terms this meant that in the histories and in the propaganda the Popular Front period was demonized as was Browder. In Czechoslovakia after the war, when the USSR was consolidating power over central and Eastern Europe, during one of the rounds of purging the people who were hanged were accused of, among other things, "Browderism".
The main contradiction in the popular front period was that between the relative openness of the local Communist parties and the reality of what was going on in Russia at that time. While local parties were embracing flexable strategies and experimenting with varying the ideology Stalinism still reigned surpreme in the Soviet Union. Not only that but as Stalin's dominance wore on the persecutions continued to get progressively worse. Because of this reality the Popular Front communists were accused of having a secret agenda, of not really in the final analysis being progressive, or, if they really were they were hypocritical in the extreme for taking what was being presented as the reality of Russia issued by Moscow at face value and not questioning it. Interestingly enough, when incontravertable evidence in the form of Khruschev's secret speech came out most of the membership of the Communist Party left. I'll leave it to you to judge the significance of this act in relation to charges of hypocrisy and having a secret agenda.
Nevertheless, during the McCarthy witch hunts a book produced by William Z. Foster, an ultra hardliner who would later become the defacto head of the Communist Party after the mass exodus, produced in the Third Period called "Towards Bolshevik America", was bandied about as 'proof' that the Communists post-Third Period were really not genuine about organizing for social change but were instead conning the public, therefore making them really dangerous, now not just as socialist being part of American society but as infiltrators using front organizations to insidiously push their secret plans.
Beyond the issue of hypocrisy regarding Russia there's also the reality that although people from the International Brigades who went to Spain to fight were genuine idealists, with increased Russian support came other aspects of Russian state organization that weren't quite so positive. The NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, followed the supplies given by the Russians to Spain and went about surveilling Spanish Communist Party members who if suspected of disloyalty were apprehended and tortured and sometimes outright killed by the Soviet Secret police. Documentation for this comes from the book "Stasi", which outlines the evolution of the East German secret police, providing evidence that Mielke, the head of the Stasi, performed this function in Spain after fleeing to Russia to avoid a murder charge against two policemen he assassinated.
So, in summary, a really good time in terms of organizing for social change that could be learned from and applied to today's world.
What happened to the Popular Front? Despite being disbanded, Popular Front politics in Europe lead to the ascendency of the Italian Communist Party, which proved to be the most liberal and most independent Communist Party in Western Europe, actually getting many people elected at all levels and exerting influence in Italy. The French Communist Party benefitted from the Popular Front period two, although their post-war history is that of rejection of those policies and the adoption of hardline orthodox pro-Moscow ways of doing things. The most widespread change that the Popular Front produced was the formation of the Communist state of Yugoslavia, which was largely a product of the grass roots movement of partisan warfare and of basing their support on the people and not on Moscow's influence.
Books: The Earl Browder book is the most comprehensive in respect to these matters. "Being Red" is a personal memoir by the novelist Howard Fast that details his time in the Party, why he joined, and why he believed in it up till the Secret Speech. "If I had a Hammer" by Maurice Isserman details the aftermath of the fallout from the secret speech in that Isserman traces what all the people who left the party did after the left the party. It turns out that they got involved in organizing in the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements, as well as in other things that prefigured the New Left. Isserman's book is really valuable also because it doesn't just focus on ex-Party members but looks at all the different currents of left thought that were present during and after McCarthyism, such as the anti-nuclear movement, the Young People's Socialist League, and very topically the formation of SDS from an affiliate of the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, an outgrowth of the Socialist Party, to the SDS of the sixties that we know today. Gives actually very, very, detailed accounts of how SDS first formed, what controversies there were between the Socialist Party people who formally had control over it and what the people who were members themselves wanted to do, leading to the cutting of ties between SDS and the Socialist Party, as well as the attempt to co-opt SDS at its start by the Young People's Socialist League, which wasn't successful and which would have basically killed SDS if it had been carried out.
So what was the Popular Front? Literally, it referred to a new policy within the international Communist movement put in place after the fall of Germany to the Nazis that emphasized cooperation between Communist parties, Socialist parties, and Liberal parties in order to combat the threat of fascism. In reality, although this strategy was effective in France in electing Leon Blum as prime minister on a popular front ticket, the big advantage of the popular front was that it opened up local parties to be much more independant from Moscow and encouraged innovation in organizing techniques and goals. This was especially true in America, where during this period, under the Communist party leadership of Earl Browder, the size and influence of the Communist party grew to the point where hopeful observers thought it might become a mass party and a permanent fixture in American political life.
The Communist Party at this time was heavily involved with the organization of the CIO, or the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which based itself on the concept of industrial unionism, something that the IWW had pioneered, where industrial unionism meant organizing skilled and unskilled workers in an entire industry, from people working the assembly line to janitors.
The CIO, according to James Ryan's excellant book, used the organizational skills of the Communist Party to help mount campaigns for unionization.
The Communist Party at this time also pioneered civil rights work down in the South, one of the only organizations in the '30s and '40s that was doing this sort of work.
They helped out with Rosevelt's Works Progress Administration on art and theater projects, yes, raised money for the Spanish Civil War, organized support for China--at that time occupied by the Japanese and in any case still in Civil War. Maoism as such had not coalesced yet. Organized Unemployed Councils during the depression, helped elect progressive congressmen like Vito Marcantonio in New York City, who represented a district in Spanish Harlem. In other words they were involved in quite a lot of stuff that would normally be taken as being good.
One of the ways they did this was through fronts. Fronts in this period weren't generally deceptive but were independent organizations that the Communist Party created that were avenues for people to be involved with without actually joining the Party. Additionally, Party members were obligated not only to do Party work but to participate in Front organizations as individuals.
Ideologically, the flexability of the period lead to slogans like "Communism is 21st century Americanism", which was based on a reevaluation of the writings of classical American political authors like Jefferson and Lincoln, with the purpose of finding precedents in their writings concerning social justice that prefigured socialism. This was done in good faith. It was based on the recognition that Communism and Socialism wouldn't get very far if it was portrayed purely as an ideological import from Europe.
The extreme importance of this period comes out when you consider what came directly before and what came after. Before the popular front the doctrine guiding the parties was "Third Period Communism", which was basically pure Stalinism. Third Period communists didn't cooperate whatsoever with other trends and were very ideologically rigid. No surprise then that, unlike in Germany, the American following in Third Period Communism was very, very small. Germany is another story, one that would take us beyond this topic.
Immediately after the Popular Front period, when Browder was deposed for being not enough of a hardliner, the Party did possibly the worst thing it could have under McCarthyism: tell its members to shut up and take the fifth, not explaining their political beliefs and why they participated in these organizations, testimony that could have changed American political life. The theory behind this was that the U.S. was entering a period of imminent Fascism and it would be best to concentrate on building an underground rather than try to sell Communism to the American people at large. Then, after Khruschev's secret speech was published, declaring that, yes, Stalin had committed egregious crimes, there was a mass exodus from the Party after a short battle for political control between the progressives and the hardliners. After this the hardliners came into control of the Communist Party, where they stayed up until very recently...with the difference now being that it's not purely hardliners anymore. I doubt it's a progressive institution. But in practical terms this meant that in the histories and in the propaganda the Popular Front period was demonized as was Browder. In Czechoslovakia after the war, when the USSR was consolidating power over central and Eastern Europe, during one of the rounds of purging the people who were hanged were accused of, among other things, "Browderism".
The main contradiction in the popular front period was that between the relative openness of the local Communist parties and the reality of what was going on in Russia at that time. While local parties were embracing flexable strategies and experimenting with varying the ideology Stalinism still reigned surpreme in the Soviet Union. Not only that but as Stalin's dominance wore on the persecutions continued to get progressively worse. Because of this reality the Popular Front communists were accused of having a secret agenda, of not really in the final analysis being progressive, or, if they really were they were hypocritical in the extreme for taking what was being presented as the reality of Russia issued by Moscow at face value and not questioning it. Interestingly enough, when incontravertable evidence in the form of Khruschev's secret speech came out most of the membership of the Communist Party left. I'll leave it to you to judge the significance of this act in relation to charges of hypocrisy and having a secret agenda.
Nevertheless, during the McCarthy witch hunts a book produced by William Z. Foster, an ultra hardliner who would later become the defacto head of the Communist Party after the mass exodus, produced in the Third Period called "Towards Bolshevik America", was bandied about as 'proof' that the Communists post-Third Period were really not genuine about organizing for social change but were instead conning the public, therefore making them really dangerous, now not just as socialist being part of American society but as infiltrators using front organizations to insidiously push their secret plans.
Beyond the issue of hypocrisy regarding Russia there's also the reality that although people from the International Brigades who went to Spain to fight were genuine idealists, with increased Russian support came other aspects of Russian state organization that weren't quite so positive. The NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, followed the supplies given by the Russians to Spain and went about surveilling Spanish Communist Party members who if suspected of disloyalty were apprehended and tortured and sometimes outright killed by the Soviet Secret police. Documentation for this comes from the book "Stasi", which outlines the evolution of the East German secret police, providing evidence that Mielke, the head of the Stasi, performed this function in Spain after fleeing to Russia to avoid a murder charge against two policemen he assassinated.
So, in summary, a really good time in terms of organizing for social change that could be learned from and applied to today's world.
What happened to the Popular Front? Despite being disbanded, Popular Front politics in Europe lead to the ascendency of the Italian Communist Party, which proved to be the most liberal and most independent Communist Party in Western Europe, actually getting many people elected at all levels and exerting influence in Italy. The French Communist Party benefitted from the Popular Front period two, although their post-war history is that of rejection of those policies and the adoption of hardline orthodox pro-Moscow ways of doing things. The most widespread change that the Popular Front produced was the formation of the Communist state of Yugoslavia, which was largely a product of the grass roots movement of partisan warfare and of basing their support on the people and not on Moscow's influence.
Books: The Earl Browder book is the most comprehensive in respect to these matters. "Being Red" is a personal memoir by the novelist Howard Fast that details his time in the Party, why he joined, and why he believed in it up till the Secret Speech. "If I had a Hammer" by Maurice Isserman details the aftermath of the fallout from the secret speech in that Isserman traces what all the people who left the party did after the left the party. It turns out that they got involved in organizing in the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements, as well as in other things that prefigured the New Left. Isserman's book is really valuable also because it doesn't just focus on ex-Party members but looks at all the different currents of left thought that were present during and after McCarthyism, such as the anti-nuclear movement, the Young People's Socialist League, and very topically the formation of SDS from an affiliate of the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, an outgrowth of the Socialist Party, to the SDS of the sixties that we know today. Gives actually very, very, detailed accounts of how SDS first formed, what controversies there were between the Socialist Party people who formally had control over it and what the people who were members themselves wanted to do, leading to the cutting of ties between SDS and the Socialist Party, as well as the attempt to co-opt SDS at its start by the Young People's Socialist League, which wasn't successful and which would have basically killed SDS if it had been carried out.
Ok, so the legal system did find him mentally ill...
and he didn't purchase the guns months ago but weeks ago. The title link goes to the International Herald Tribune's article, which details the case.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
All right: the UN returns to Iraq
This is good because although it's limited right now increased UN involvement raises the chances that there'll be a handover of power from the U.S. to the UN in Iraq in the future.
"Pressure is building within the United Nations for the gradual return of expatriate relief staff to Iraq to organise aid despite the ongoing violence there, officials said Wednesday.
The UN refugee agency is in the course of boosting its permanent presence in Iraq to two people, including one in Baghdad, while the UN's humanitarian coordination office last week gained approval for a strategic plan outlining a return to Iraq, aid chiefs said.
"UNHCR has already decided to upgrade our presence in Iraq. We will have an international presence in Baghdad. And we will increase our operations in the country," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said after a two-day conference on Iraq's displacement crisis.
"We know there are difficulties, there are security concerns, but there are things we can do and it's time to do our best to take profit of all opportunities to help really the people in distress," he told journalists.
John Holmes, the world body's new Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, told the meeting Tuesday: "We cannot afford to look away and duck our responsibilities. I can assure you that the UN system will certainly not do so.""
"Pressure is building within the United Nations for the gradual return of expatriate relief staff to Iraq to organise aid despite the ongoing violence there, officials said Wednesday.
The UN refugee agency is in the course of boosting its permanent presence in Iraq to two people, including one in Baghdad, while the UN's humanitarian coordination office last week gained approval for a strategic plan outlining a return to Iraq, aid chiefs said.
"UNHCR has already decided to upgrade our presence in Iraq. We will have an international presence in Baghdad. And we will increase our operations in the country," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said after a two-day conference on Iraq's displacement crisis.
"We know there are difficulties, there are security concerns, but there are things we can do and it's time to do our best to take profit of all opportunities to help really the people in distress," he told journalists.
John Holmes, the world body's new Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, told the meeting Tuesday: "We cannot afford to look away and duck our responsibilities. I can assure you that the UN system will certainly not do so.""
More on censoring music for offensive content
In this case for misogynistic content and for violent content. Tasteless? Well, lets put it this way: if they search the room of the kid who did the shooting on monday and find something like KMFDM, which they found in the rooms of the Columbine killers, then we'll be treated to an orgy of calls to censor violence in music on top of the calls already that have come since Imus to censor misogyny in rap.
I'd like to put something forward: if you support this sort of censorship you better burn all the music from the early to mid '90s that you own and all of the independent films from that era, because they all had, at leat in the Alternative world, a hefty dose of anti-PC mixed in with them.
Case in point: Pulp Fiction. They shoot lots and lots of people, use foul language, and snort heroin. Do you think that any of that would be permissable in a world where PC rules? Tarantino is anything but a conservative, too. Burn your Nirvana, because they were openly against PC bullshit, something that they made known at their shows. Don't listen to Sonic Youth. "We're going to kill the california girls"? How anti-woman, even though Kim Gordon devotes a hell of a lot of lyrics to attacking discrimination against women.
Jane's addiction....my god, Perry Ferrel is the anti-Christ in this way of thinking, as is Ministry. KMFDM is something better left alone. My life with the thrill kill kult? The name disqualifies them as well as their entire album "Sexplosion!", with songs like "Sex on Wheels" and "Leathersex".
And don't even get me started on 'zines. The real fucking zines out there were the opposite of politically correct in virtually every sense that you could be. Ditto underground comics of this time period.
The Alternative Culture was an Alternative not just to mainstream bullshit but to the twin demons of conservative Christian hypocrisy and PC fascist liberalism.
I'd like to put something forward: if you support this sort of censorship you better burn all the music from the early to mid '90s that you own and all of the independent films from that era, because they all had, at leat in the Alternative world, a hefty dose of anti-PC mixed in with them.
Case in point: Pulp Fiction. They shoot lots and lots of people, use foul language, and snort heroin. Do you think that any of that would be permissable in a world where PC rules? Tarantino is anything but a conservative, too. Burn your Nirvana, because they were openly against PC bullshit, something that they made known at their shows. Don't listen to Sonic Youth. "We're going to kill the california girls"? How anti-woman, even though Kim Gordon devotes a hell of a lot of lyrics to attacking discrimination against women.
Jane's addiction....my god, Perry Ferrel is the anti-Christ in this way of thinking, as is Ministry. KMFDM is something better left alone. My life with the thrill kill kult? The name disqualifies them as well as their entire album "Sexplosion!", with songs like "Sex on Wheels" and "Leathersex".
And don't even get me started on 'zines. The real fucking zines out there were the opposite of politically correct in virtually every sense that you could be. Ditto underground comics of this time period.
The Alternative Culture was an Alternative not just to mainstream bullshit but to the twin demons of conservative Christian hypocrisy and PC fascist liberalism.
Why not open it all up?
Why stop with workers' education at a basic level, why not make available everything, from philosophy to literature to art and beyond? That's what I'm proposing: eliminate the division between specialist knowledge and working people not by eliminating the specialist knowledge but by opening it up so that everyone can get it.
Tropicalia
Now, there are two parts to this.. The first part is redefining high culture in a way that reflects the country itself, i.e. repurposing high culture. The second part is ignoring the official national culture and producing things that reflect the reality of the regional cultures of the country. What happens when you connect the two? Well, then things really get interesting. There are many organizations that do work based on the concept of giving people video cameras and producing equipment and letting them tell their own stories and create their own media, and what I'm talking about is sort of an extension of that, but a really radical one.
What happens if you disconnect people the official intellectual culture and instead have them create their own culture, not just media, but culture in all senses of the word. I'll give you an example: what if you got working class people to read and apply Plato to their own lives and own situation? Not have it given to them as some sort of person with a long tradition but given as a text to freely interpret in whatever way they want. What if you did the same thing with American history? Or politics? Basically taking a popular education approach but extending it to areas of culture that it traditionally wasn't associated with...like the "Socrates Cafe" model. It would be possible to develop class, region, and ethnicity based philosophy in this sense. An example of this in action is the "Zulu Nation" started by Africa Bambaataa, which tells members to read up and decide what's history and what's not, how the world works and how it doesn't, for themselves without any reference to official culture. Zulu Nation puts especial emphasis on religious belief.
Combined these two forces are very powerful. What about a working class art? A working class system of philosophical beliefs?
It's a culture that's autonomous from the official culture and true to the culture on the ground.
What happens if you disconnect people the official intellectual culture and instead have them create their own culture, not just media, but culture in all senses of the word. I'll give you an example: what if you got working class people to read and apply Plato to their own lives and own situation? Not have it given to them as some sort of person with a long tradition but given as a text to freely interpret in whatever way they want. What if you did the same thing with American history? Or politics? Basically taking a popular education approach but extending it to areas of culture that it traditionally wasn't associated with...like the "Socrates Cafe" model. It would be possible to develop class, region, and ethnicity based philosophy in this sense. An example of this in action is the "Zulu Nation" started by Africa Bambaataa, which tells members to read up and decide what's history and what's not, how the world works and how it doesn't, for themselves without any reference to official culture. Zulu Nation puts especial emphasis on religious belief.
Combined these two forces are very powerful. What about a working class art? A working class system of philosophical beliefs?
It's a culture that's autonomous from the official culture and true to the culture on the ground.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Tropical Truth
Tropical Truth, written by Caetano Veloso. Very good, about the political and philosophical basis for what outwardly appeared to be a musical movement, Tropicalia, but which in reality was a combination of avant-garde artistic movement and a movement aiming at redefining the way Brazillians related to each other and to their culture. It could easily be argued that Brazil, which even today features huge slums and vast areas where people have a standard of living not even close to that of the U.S., and Brazillian thought cannot be applied to the U.S. Well, that's true, but after considering it for a long time---I started writing about a proposed American Tropicalia as an applied Romanticism in 2003---I've come to the conclusion that Tropicalia, despite its intentions, remained a bourgeois movement. If it really wanted to get with the people it would have resembled the PT, or Workers' Party, that Lula heads. Some of the Tropicalistas later joined it but that's sort of beside the point... Tropicalia was the product of an educated elite---although not an elite of predominately European or non-mixed race descent--and tried to balance a wish to produce a Brazillian take on avant-garde art, philosophy, literature, social though, and film, with a desire to root their project not in the Brazil as reflected in official culture but in the Brazil as it really was. This same project can be applied to the United States, especially against the corporate monoculture. However, the basis for all of this is social justice, not just taking on a media image, and a social justice that comes out of being for the particular and the regional rather than for the universal and the national.
See "The Nine Nations of North America" by Joel Garreau. This too praises the regional, in this case proposing that there are nine distinct geographical/cultural areas in North America that have more in common with themselves than with the rest of the country. The book implies that it would be better for them to have self governance than to be squashed under a federal system. Therefore it comes out for regionalism. I think the nine are "Ecotpia", I like the name, which is the west coast, Quebec, the South, South Florida, New England including Nova Scotia, what's termed the rust belt, the breadbasket, and the "Empty Quarter", which would encompass Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, etc..
But what I like about it is that in emphasizing regionalism it opens the door to a sort of regional conception of social justice. A social justice rooted in traditions in the South would be different from a social justice in New York state would be different from a social justice in Michigan would be different from a social justice in California or the Northwest. This is a highly attractive proposition.
I need to restore the link to the post proposing a confederation based on regional governments encompassing several states as a replacement to the current federal constitutional order.
See "The Nine Nations of North America" by Joel Garreau. This too praises the regional, in this case proposing that there are nine distinct geographical/cultural areas in North America that have more in common with themselves than with the rest of the country. The book implies that it would be better for them to have self governance than to be squashed under a federal system. Therefore it comes out for regionalism. I think the nine are "Ecotpia", I like the name, which is the west coast, Quebec, the South, South Florida, New England including Nova Scotia, what's termed the rust belt, the breadbasket, and the "Empty Quarter", which would encompass Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, etc..
But what I like about it is that in emphasizing regionalism it opens the door to a sort of regional conception of social justice. A social justice rooted in traditions in the South would be different from a social justice in New York state would be different from a social justice in Michigan would be different from a social justice in California or the Northwest. This is a highly attractive proposition.
I need to restore the link to the post proposing a confederation based on regional governments encompassing several states as a replacement to the current federal constitutional order.
The apotheosis of self directed ironic advertizing
I received a postcard handbill, or whatever the fuck you call those things, for a local pizza chain that shall remain nameless that said "The Scam, Go ahead....we dare you " on one side and then "The Scam. Here's your ticket to SCAM ***** Pizza! Go ahead....we dare you!". Yeah. I'm sure that an officially offered deal by this company is a scam. But it appeals to people's cool factor, right? They're saying that they're 'edgy', that they can laugh at themselves and that they're sarcastic, so you should buy their pizza. This is the Northwest, home of irony, especially Olympia, right? It should work. Dude, it feels so, like 1998 around here, you know?
Anyways, people who fall for this will be walking examples of irony themselves, but the coupon itself is just pathetic.
Anyways, people who fall for this will be walking examples of irony themselves, but the coupon itself is just pathetic.
Guns and Virginia Tech
"I always enjoy listening to British people try to wrap their heads around this topic, and today was no exception. They really don’t understand why an event like this wouldn’t lead to a Virginia-wide or nationwide call for tightened restrictions - or outright ban - on firearms."---Auguste on Pandagon
Well the banning fairy has visited us again, first in relation to rap, now in relation to handguns. How easy it is for liberals to just say "Ban it" when a problem comes their way, not even bothering to look at the underlying causes that lead to the incident. In this case, barring the outrageous idea of an outright ban on firearms, I'd really like to know what people actually think could have been done in terms of tighter restrictions to stop this from happening. It's all right to sit on your throne and declare that restrictions should be tightened but what would that mean in the real world? Look at it this way: the kid had no criminal record, he was over 21, and he bought the guns months before the shooting. The seven day waiting period in this case wouldn't have stopped him. What piece of information should the gun seller have had access to in order to determine that this wasn't a person he should sell a gun to? Counselling records from Virginia Tech? Should he have asked "Are you a college student?" and when he answered "yes", say "I need the approval of your school before you can buy a gun" and then asked for psychiatric records from his school? Should someone have seen his creative writing project and notified the authorities that, in their opinion, as people with no legal training, he should not be able to buy a gun? Do you see the problems in this?
He's on an anti-depressant....so he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. That means that there's a hell of a lot of people who aren't psychotic who'll be prevented from owning guns. He wrote violent plays...so he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. What about freedom of speech? Should there be a test of an author's writings to see whether or not he or she is fit to own a gun? He was a loner.....so he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. This has so many problems I don't even know where to start. Because someone isn't a rah rah team player they should be looked at as a potential threat and prevented from buying guns.
So again: what regulations could have been implemented to prevent this guy from buying a gun that don't grossly infringe on the rights of innocent and normal people to buy a gun if they want?
Plus, he bought the gun from a legitimate dealer, not from an unregulated gun show. He hadn't been declared by the courts to be mentally unstable.
Personally I don't buy the NRA's arguments about guns being necessary to protect all of these other rights. I think that's bullshit, as is the notion that if everyone was armed than this thing wouldn't have happened. However, I think that in as much as the gun lobbies direct attention to other things that could have been done to stop this guy that they serve a useful purpose.
The guy had been stalking women. He had set a fire to a dorm room. Reports say that he was increasingly going down hill (he already had owned the gun for months, btw). Then after the first shooting the campus wasn't put on lock down, no announcements were made.
Maybe attention should have been paid to him when he started to seem like he'd be a threat to others and to himself, maybe that's what needs to happen, and not the wholesale banning of firearms.
Well the banning fairy has visited us again, first in relation to rap, now in relation to handguns. How easy it is for liberals to just say "Ban it" when a problem comes their way, not even bothering to look at the underlying causes that lead to the incident. In this case, barring the outrageous idea of an outright ban on firearms, I'd really like to know what people actually think could have been done in terms of tighter restrictions to stop this from happening. It's all right to sit on your throne and declare that restrictions should be tightened but what would that mean in the real world? Look at it this way: the kid had no criminal record, he was over 21, and he bought the guns months before the shooting. The seven day waiting period in this case wouldn't have stopped him. What piece of information should the gun seller have had access to in order to determine that this wasn't a person he should sell a gun to? Counselling records from Virginia Tech? Should he have asked "Are you a college student?" and when he answered "yes", say "I need the approval of your school before you can buy a gun" and then asked for psychiatric records from his school? Should someone have seen his creative writing project and notified the authorities that, in their opinion, as people with no legal training, he should not be able to buy a gun? Do you see the problems in this?
He's on an anti-depressant....so he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. That means that there's a hell of a lot of people who aren't psychotic who'll be prevented from owning guns. He wrote violent plays...so he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. What about freedom of speech? Should there be a test of an author's writings to see whether or not he or she is fit to own a gun? He was a loner.....so he shouldn't be able to buy a gun. This has so many problems I don't even know where to start. Because someone isn't a rah rah team player they should be looked at as a potential threat and prevented from buying guns.
So again: what regulations could have been implemented to prevent this guy from buying a gun that don't grossly infringe on the rights of innocent and normal people to buy a gun if they want?
Plus, he bought the gun from a legitimate dealer, not from an unregulated gun show. He hadn't been declared by the courts to be mentally unstable.
Personally I don't buy the NRA's arguments about guns being necessary to protect all of these other rights. I think that's bullshit, as is the notion that if everyone was armed than this thing wouldn't have happened. However, I think that in as much as the gun lobbies direct attention to other things that could have been done to stop this guy that they serve a useful purpose.
The guy had been stalking women. He had set a fire to a dorm room. Reports say that he was increasingly going down hill (he already had owned the gun for months, btw). Then after the first shooting the campus wasn't put on lock down, no announcements were made.
Maybe attention should have been paid to him when he started to seem like he'd be a threat to others and to himself, maybe that's what needs to happen, and not the wholesale banning of firearms.
Aftermath, Inside the League, the Beast Reawakens, and Dreamer of the Day
Which are the books added in the anti-fascist section. They're all good and are all non-bullshit books. All of them are based on extensive research and reporting. The way I've arranged it goes in chronological order: Aftermath deals with Nazi survivals in South America starting from the end of the second world war, Inside the League deals with the World Anti-Communist League, which somewhat took up the slack from the Nazi survival organizations, Beast Reawakens, which is the most comprehensive book, traces the evolution of neo-fascism from the end of the second world war to the late '90s, while Dreamer of the Day focuses specifically on predecessors of the New Right and the Third Positionists through looking at the person of Francis Parker Yockey, tracing that particular current, which declares itself "Beyond left and right", from the post war years to about the present day.
I'll blog on what the books under the "Popular Front" section are about later in the day.
I'll blog on what the books under the "Popular Front" section are about later in the day.
The anti-fascist links.
I'm going to keep this brief because I've got to get going but the anti-fascist links and the similar books were, and will be, dedicated to combatting a new current of ultra-right thought in the U.S. connected to the "New Right" in Europe and typified by the "Third Position" and "National Anarchist" currents. The reason why these things are so dangerous is that they aren't like traditional neo-nazi groups. They state that they're somewhat socialist and the thought that they put up on their websites isn't blatantly racist. They often do have articles about idiosyncratic socialist figures, but they combine it with admiration for fascist intellectuals in Italy, Nazis like Gregor Strasser, who they characterize as the more socialist leader of the National Socialists, Julius Evola, who was a favorite of the SS, confidant of Mussolini, and later one of the main advocates of a renewed neo-fascism in postwar Europe. They will respond to charges that they're racist or, in the case of the "National Anarchists", that they're fascist, by using the fact that they're literature isn't blatantly like that for plausable deniability. I think that the danger in the U.S. is that, unlike regular neo-Nazis, these people have the potential to actually attract a mass following. That's not to say that the pseudo-fascist currents in the Bush supporters camp have anything to do with Third Positionists but these guys are a parallel threat.
Samir Amin's "Eurocentrism"
Added it to the "Good Books" section. What Amin tries to do in it is give an analysis of the rise of capitalism and development of the west from a non-western perspective by looking at the west as an extension of the ancient and mediterranian worlds. Argues that what happened in the west wasn't in any way something due to an indefinable unique quality that the west possesses and the rest of the world doesn't, but that being on the fringe of the civilized world, i.e. the Muslim world and the world of Asia, allowed the west to be more flexable. This re-envisioning is also important because it corrects a major weakness in many sectors of leftist theory, which is this: people can somewhat explain how capitalism developed out of feudalism and out of the classical past and point to how socialism could be a necessary corrective to capitalism, and people can explain how the development of capitalism depended also on the plunder of non-European societies, but they have a really hard time explaining from this sort of analysis what non-European societies are about. Why they evolved like they did. Marx, and all of this is Marxist mostly, invented the clunky and somewhat racist notion of the "Asiatic mode of production" or Asian despotism, arguing that non-European states were so dictatorially run that social change and development was simply not possible. "Eurocentrism" is a corrective to this notion.
By the way, I'm trying to limit the amount of books I put up on the right. If I put up every interesting book that I've come across that has something to do with the left, globalization, economics, counterculture, in the last seven years it would be completely unwieldly. Will maybe put up anti-fascist books and links again.
By the way, I'm trying to limit the amount of books I put up on the right. If I put up every interesting book that I've come across that has something to do with the left, globalization, economics, counterculture, in the last seven years it would be completely unwieldly. Will maybe put up anti-fascist books and links again.
Probably the best article about what happened at Virginia Tech
From the AP via Yahoo. Title link leads to it.
Turns out that "Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said.", so he wasn't a recent immigrant, although he wasn't a citizen.
And "News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic,", "Citing unidentified sources, the Tribune said he had recently shown troubling signs, including setting a fire in a dorm room and stalking some women."
So this wasn't the case of a recent immigrant snapping out of the blue and methodically killing people.
Turns out that "Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said.", so he wasn't a recent immigrant, although he wasn't a citizen.
And "News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic,", "Citing unidentified sources, the Tribune said he had recently shown troubling signs, including setting a fire in a dorm room and stalking some women."
So this wasn't the case of a recent immigrant snapping out of the blue and methodically killing people.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Ah, the other side of Olympia, re:Grindhouse
So I get there at 9:30. Movie starts, some guy starts yelling. I figure, you know, that since it's 9:30 on a Sunday night the place is packed with film enthusiasts, it's a cult film, and so audience participation is something that kind of fits, or at least something that is understandable. Movie goes on, the first part ends, then there's the fake trailers in between. One of them is for something like "Nazi Werewolf women of the SS", complete with lots of swastikas and armbands. The guy who's so far just been annoying now starts shouting "Yeah! Yeah! That's what I'm talking about! Yeah!", in a way that indicated he wasn't being ironic.
*****
In reference to the first film it would surprise me if less ink is given to the racial dynamics of it than the second film. Both films were good on that score, but since the first one appeared as more of a straightforward slasher film there's the potential that this part of it may be overlooked. All of the heroes and most of the major characters are Latino/a and the main good guy who isn't is Arabic. In the second one, which deals with two groups of four women as the main characters, two of each of the four are women of color. And not portrayed as tokens either but as independent and integral characters.
*****
In reference to the first film it would surprise me if less ink is given to the racial dynamics of it than the second film. Both films were good on that score, but since the first one appeared as more of a straightforward slasher film there's the potential that this part of it may be overlooked. All of the heroes and most of the major characters are Latino/a and the main good guy who isn't is Arabic. In the second one, which deals with two groups of four women as the main characters, two of each of the four are women of color. And not portrayed as tokens either but as independent and integral characters.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Olympia
Olympia is a great town. I live on the edge of things, pretty much in the country. It reminds me of home, at least the area I lived in growing up: lots of trees, peace and quiet, and drug dealers. How our memories come back to us. I grew up in a place in Michigan at the edge of the Detroit area in some proximity to "The camp", which was a campground run by my grandparents. The name of it I'm not going to release to Google to enable people who were associated with it to find this site, but it no longer exists. The camp, as we referred to it and as I'll call it, wasn't a KOA or anything like that but a place in the woods where people could basically come up and party on weekends, do drugs, and no one would care. A place where people on the run from the law frequently hid out with friends who basically lived there. Yes, indeed. The person who was my father at the time worked for my grandparents at the camp, who of course lived there, and so we were doubly connected to it. Had for friends bikers who helped out in various capacities around the camp and other sort of unsavory folk. Big connection to the little world of the seamy side of the little town we lived by. The camp was always unpopular and the police were always wanting it to get shut down. I wrote in a biographical essay for a class a long time ago that it was a place where the seventies continued on to the eighties without that much of a change. It even featured for a time a fundamentalist religious cult of sorts where the members lived at the camp in lieu of a commune.
People grew marijuana there occasionally....at the end of its run the camp had also become a favorite place for gang-bangers from the rougher parts of the Detroit area to come and party on the weekends. People came through on some sort of circuit, connected to shady things going on in other parts of the country, and it became a sort of place for the criminally inclined to meet, greet, trade stories, and network.
Yes, Olympia, not quite the same as the camp but on the edges recognizable enough to bring back nostalgia for me.
People grew marijuana there occasionally....at the end of its run the camp had also become a favorite place for gang-bangers from the rougher parts of the Detroit area to come and party on the weekends. People came through on some sort of circuit, connected to shady things going on in other parts of the country, and it became a sort of place for the criminally inclined to meet, greet, trade stories, and network.
Yes, Olympia, not quite the same as the camp but on the edges recognizable enough to bring back nostalgia for me.
Easy to go overboard but there's PC and then there's PC...
There's PC as a strawman for sexism, racism, homophobia, which is how the right today uses it, and then there's PC as a real way that some liberals used to argue their beliefs, one that seems to have faded significantly as time has gone by. The result is that conservative people are now talking about something that really doesn't have that much of an influence on American society and are saying that virtually everything liberals do is motivated by it. This doesn't let the real, historical, PC off the hook though. Like I said, the real thing is a formalistic pseudo-radicalism that has little to do with the reality of the problems it's confronting. Let's not use the Imus incident to start, through the guise not of Imus' obscene comments but through attacking rap music, another round of superficial PCism that again will not address the root causes of what it claims to be dealing with.
Kathy Sierra
I've been trying to get to some of the essence of the story, which involves a computer programmer with a website getting death threats and having pictures of her altered to be sexually explicit in a violent way. Aside from the obvious, that this never should have happened, we now know that nerd culture really doesn't have any limits, that death threats and rape threats can just as easily come from this sector of society as it can from others.
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