THUNDER ON THE RIGHT By Paul Jackson paulconradjackson@gmail.com
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ne of the building blocks of my political philosophy occurred when I was just 16 and saw Stanley’s Kubrick’s magnificent movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas as the hero who led the fabled Roman slave revolt in 71 BC. The thrust behind Howard Fast’s 1951 novel on which the 1960 movie was based was oppression and slavery strip away the dignity of an individual’s life and do so to such an extent the victim finally has nothing to lose by revolting against the oppressor in a valiant attempt to recapture dignity and freedom. Long before I saw the movie, inspired by my own hero, Sir Winston Churchill, I was already devouring works on Soviet Communism and its equally loathsome radical socialist cousin, Nazism, but Spartacus personified what I believed in politically. When other teenagers were warbling rock ‘n roll tunes I was into deep political philosophy. OK, a wry smile that someone destined to become a Conservative newspaper columnist was partly prodded by an author who was a dedicated member of the Communist Party (CPUSA), worked for The Daily Worker, was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize, and jailed for three months for contempt of Congress in the Joseph McCarthy era. Well, there are many ironies in this saga. As Fast was penning his momentous novel, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European slave states, writers, actors, and other artists were being brutally slammed in the gulags by Josef Stalin for seeking the very freedoms Fast advocated. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, later to gain world fame for his trilogy The Gulag Archipelgo,
Paul Jackson
was one of those. Such persecutions didn’t end with Stalin - under Nikita Kruschev and his heirs, the likes of Boris Pasternak, author of Dr Zhivago, were also persecuted. Dr Zhivago was never published in the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Another irony, Fast was Jewish, and aside from the persecution of fellow writers and artists in the Soviet Union, right up to the time Gorbachev came to power, Jews were persecuted by Moscow’s henchmen. Recall the term ‘Refuseniks.’ This said, Fast, who died just a handful of years ago at the ripe old age of 88, later saw the true nature of Communism and the Totalitarian Left and made his break with it. Why do I bring up Fast and Spartacus at this time? Because now showing on television around the world is a series entitled Spartacus: Blood and Sand that is a mockery of all Fast, Kubrick and Douglas intended. Promoted as having more gore and explicit sex than ever seen on television, the series has no philosophical bent, and is a slur on the real Spartacus and his doomed followers. Fast’s novel carried a message about hope and decency - the TV series is about depravity. The values extolled by Fast and others who have written about Spartacus are tossed aside. A final irony: It is well-known the CIA, through front organizations, secretly promoted both Fast’s novel and the movie within the Soviet Union and its Eastern European slave states to demonstrate it was possible to try to overthrow evil regimes. The CIA did the same with Pasternak’s banned novel and the David Lean movie version. Did Czechoslovakia’s Alexender Dubcek and Vaclev Havel, Poland’s Lech Walesa and their likes ever read the smuggled novels or see the smuggled movies? If so, Fast, the once American Communist and Soviet admirer must have chuckled at the thought that he helped change history by destroying what he once thought was Holy. Anyway, please join me in deploring this travesty of a TV series, and instead read the Fast novel and see the Kubrick movie.
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El Ojo del Lago March 2010