Cecil Stagg

CECIL STAGG SOCIETY 2021-22: LOWER SIXTH RESEARCH PROJECTS

Each year, students in the Lower Sixth Form have the opportunity to produce a Cecil Stagg independent research project, exploring a topic of personal interest with support and guidance from the relevant academic departments. We are printing here extracts from two particularly good examples from this year’s Lower Sixth: Torin M’s ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of uses of literature as a weapon of ideological war and Callum B’s forensic analysis of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

LITERATURE AS A WEAPON OF IDEOLOGICAL WAR

By the 1950s, a new body appeared, the more widelyknown House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). This new body, headed by the infamous Joseph McCarthy, began what later would be nicknamed the ‘Red Hunt’. McCarthy immediately produced a list of many artists, writers and directors, whom he deemed, without proof, to be members of the Communist Party. Playwrights such as Arthur Miller found themselves blacklisted and forced out of work. In a 1996 interview between Miller and The New Yorker magazine, he stated that the “Death of a Salesman company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death”. Critics interpreted the play as an attempt to bring the capitalist structure into disrepute, personified through the character Willy Loman, whose futile beliefs in the ‘American dream’ left him a failure. The novelist Howard Fast, another victim of the HUAC, who spent three months in prison for refusing to co-operate, found that his novel Spartacus was rejected by over seven publishers for its detailing of an inspiring rebellion that could have parallels drawn with the Russian Revolution. The effects of the ‘Red Hunt’ were sorely felt by the world of the Arts. Outrage was raised over the CCF and HUAC’s fairness. Why was there the liberty to discuss questions around sex frankly in print but political liberty was not to be mentioned? Why was the press given freedom but not literature?

However, the departments were not all for the suppression of leftist literature and, in many cases, the respective bodies endorsed pro-capitalist and anticommunist authors and playwrights, most notably the world-renowned George Orwell. Orwell faced very different treatment to Miller when it came to publication. Whilst Miller struggled to find a director and publisher for The Crucible, the CCF secretly funded a cartoon animation of Animal Farm, whilst the US Air Force dropped copies in the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. The US government had identified literature not only as a dangerous weapon able to spread communist ideology, but also to discredit and embarrass it.

Over in the USSR, the story was a similar one. They employed a policy of rigid censorship and only allowed the publication or performance of pre-selected artists. The musician Shostakovich had his works endorsed by Stalin himself, who believed that his symphonies glorified him (unaware of the fact that they were simply satirical). Playwrights and novelists like Maxim Gorky were also backed by Stalin, who praised him for his sympathetic stories about tramps and social outcasts. On the other hand, writers who did not conform to Stalin’s strict censorship found themselves the target of the Soviet Secret Police and the prisons of the gulag. Events like the ‘Night of the Murdered Poets’, when thirteen Jewish poets were brutally murdered in Lubyanka Prison on 12 August 1952, terrified writers across the country. However, this did not stop the resistance. Similar to Miller’s critique of the ‘Red Hunt’ in his play The Crucible, poets such as Anna Akhmatova were inspired to write secret literary critique of the Stalin regime. Her poem Requiem was orally taught to her trusted friends and became a symbol of resistance to the horrors of Soviet censorship. Stalin recognised literature’s power as a weapon that could potentially depose him: he knew that if popular fiction was in any way anti-communist, the people might begin to see his totalitarian rule as egregious. His policy of raising certain writers and spreading their (supposed) pro-communist message, whilst attempting to silence any form of literature that critiqued it, allowed him to keep relatively stable control of the USSR.

ASSESSING CHINA’S BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

Almost all of the loan contracts which have been agreed since the establishment of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 have involved terms which allow China to scrap the loan at any time and also to call the repayment early. Moreover, the interest rates are often high on the loans, leaving a huge pressure on the borrowing country to succeed with the loan, and finally, every contract since 2014 has incorporated a confidentiality clause – in effect, the borrowing country is obliged to keep certain terms of the contract secret. The desire to hide terms of every contract, potentially from the Western critics who disagree with China’s policies on almost everything, is certainly suspicious. On the other hand, one might argue that China’s foreign policy is no different, in most respects, to that of other countries. A clear resemblance in strategy is apparent in China’s partner, Djibouti. China’s actions in Djibouti after default are eye-catching but it is very important to note that China is not the only country with a military base overseas. In fact, it is not even the only country with a military installation in Djibouti, which is home to bases of the USA, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Spain. The first country on that list, the USA, even has multiple overseas military bases. Additionally, with regard to the USA, it is noticeable that almost all criticisms of the BRI and Xi Jinping’s trade projects have originated from America, whether it be American written articles in American published newspapers or even the IMF, which has itself been criticised for America’s domination of it.

On top of this, not all countries have been impacted badly by the BRI, and perhaps China does not want anyone to be badly affected at all. Kenya is a good example of a case where both countries have mutually benefited from a loan deal with China. With Chinese help and money, a $3.2 billion railway has been constructed connecting the port city of Mombasa to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The new railway takes one third of the time it used to, to travel between these two economically significant cities on the old railway system – one, which furthermore, was more crowded, of far worse quality and, in turn, safety. Kenya has not struggled as yet to pay off the loans, testament to the success of the Chinese-assisted construction of infrastructure in Kenya. Kenya is not the only country to benefit from the BRI to date, and definitely will not be the last. There is a lot to unpack with regard to the analysis of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and all things considered, it is probably easiest to claim with the most validity, that sitting somewhere on the ‘fence’ between the two sides of the debate is the rational viewpoint.

Callum B, Lower Sixth Form

III Form Art