Zayn: Say something rebellious.

Louis: Uhh okay, I think the working class should uprise against the rich people.

Zayn: I said rebellious, not revolutionary.

.

"Doubts If Nation Needs Prodding Of Communists," Winnipeg Tribune. October 15, 1942. Page 3. ---- [By The Canadian Press] TORONTO, Oct. 15 - Drummond Wren, chairman of a public meeting here Tuesday, which approved lifting of the legal ban on the Communist Party of Canada, today made public a letter he had received from Justice Minister Louis St. Laurent in reply to a telegram from Wren asking that the ban be lifted. In the reply, Mr. St. Laurent. quoted from another letter he had written, he said, in answer to a similar request: "I am sorry if large numbers in Ontario are feeling indignant because the recommendations of the parliamentary committee considering the Defense of Canada Regulations have not been implemented. "Personally I have not favored their implementation, and the information I have received was to the effect that a majority of the people, even in Ontario, still felt that there would be danger in giving any encouragement to the Communist Party. "We are very much impressed by the magnificent resistance of the Russian people, but I for one am inclined to attribute that to their vigorous Russian nationalism rather than to any virtue of international Communism. I am not at all convinced that we require the prodding of Communism. in our constitutional setup."

i actually think Louis could lean more left than Harry. I don’t know why I think that, maybe that he agreed the other day about strikes/unions? maybe because louis’ public image comes across to me as more intentionally grounded than Harry’s? (I think they’re both pretty grounded for multi millionaire musicians but just that Louis’ image comes across more so that way). i can see Louis advocating for liberal causes for the U.S. or U.K. And I can’t see Harry doing that as much except for gay rights stuff or vague stuff about abortion bc of the way he has been marketed and how aloof and vague his public image is. but it’s interesting because Louis has never been vocal about lgbt rights (we know why obviously) or abortion to my knowledge but I still think he leans more left than Harry. maybe it’s his more working class image, which is funny to me considering how rich he is

Yeah, I think about this a lot and I think you could be right.

What i've been learning thru my research is that Lawn Culture and laws against "weeds" in America are deeply connected to anxieties about "undesirable" people.

I read this essay called "Controlling the Weed Nuisance in Turn-of-the-century American Cities" by Zachary J. S. Falck and it discusses how the late 1800's and early 1900's created ideal habitats for weeds with urban expansion, railroads, the colonization of more territory, and the like.

Around this time, laws requiring the destruction of "weeds" were passed in many American cities. These weedy plants were viewed as "filth" and literally disease-causing—in the 1880's in St. Louis, a newspaper reported that weeds infected school children with typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.

Weeds were also seen as "conducive to immorality" by promoting the presence of "tramps and idlers." People thought wild growing plants would "shelter" threatening criminals. Weeds were heavily associated with poverty and immortality. Panic about them spiked strongly after malaria and typhoid outbreaks.

To make things even wilder, one of the main weeds the legal turmoil and public anxiety centered upon was actually the sunflower. Milkweed was also a major "undesirable" weed and a major target of laws mandating the destruction of weeds.

The major explosion in weed-control law being put forth and enforced happened around 1905-1910. And I formed a hypothesis—I had this abrupt remembrance of something I studied in a history class in college. I thought to myself, I bet this coincides with a major wave of immigration to the USA.

Bingo. 1907 was the peak of European immigration. We must keep in mind that these people were not "white" in the exact way that is recognized today. From what I remember from my history classes, Eastern European people were very much feared as criminals and potential communists. Wikipedia elaborates that the Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to restrict Jewish, Slavic, and Italian people from entering the country, and that the major wave of immigration among them began in the 1890s. Almost perfectly coinciding with the "weed nuisance" panic. (The Immigration Act of 1917 also banned intellectually disabled people, gay people, anarchists, and people from Asia, except for Chinese people...who were only excluded because they were already banned since 1880.)

From this evidence, I would guess that our aesthetics and views about "weeds" emerged from the convergence of two things:

First, we were obliterating native ecosystems by colonizing them and violently displacing their caretakers, then running roughshod over them with poorly informed agricultural and horticultural techniques, as well as constructing lots of cities and railroads, creating the ideal circumstances for weeds.

Second, lots of immigrants were entering the country, and xenophobia and racism lent itself to fears of "criminals" "tramps" and other "undesirable" people, leading to a desire to forcefully impose order and push out the "Other." I am not inventing a connection—undesirable people and undesirable weeds were frequently compared in these times.

And this was at the very beginnings of the eugenics movement, wherein supposedly "inferior" and poor or racialized people were described in a manner much the same as "weeds," particularly supposedly "breeding" much faster than other people.

There is another connection that the essay doesn't bring up, but that is very clear to me. Weeds are in fact plants of the poor and of immigrants, because they are often medicinal and food plants for people on the margins, hanging out around human habitation like semi-domesticated cats around granaries in the ancient Near East.

My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant's young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as "poke salad." Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.

In some parts of the world, it is grown as an ornamental plant for its huge, tropical-looking leaves and magenta stems. But my mom hates the stuff. "Cut that down," she says, "it makes us look like rednecks."

The Uses of History, 8 – From France, 1812 to Russia, 1917, 5 - 1848

The Uses of History, 8 – From France, 1812 to Russia, 1917, 5 – 1848

Man is born free but is everywhere in chains. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 1754. An epic heroism has shone forth in the personal struggles of Socrates, of Paul and Augustine, of Luther and Galileo, and in that larger cultural struggle, borne by these and by many less visible protagonists, which has moved the West on its extraordinary course. There is high…

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Liam: And have you learnt anything this Christmas, Tommo?

Louis: …Not really.

Liam: Nothing?

Louis: Tell you one thing I have learnt—Christmas; ultimately, commercial holiday. Who's the real winner at Christmas? Amazon. They have drones now! Tiny little dystopian slaves delivering iPads and headphones. I ordered a toaster; it was on the doorstep five hours later! Do we need that? It was 4.99! For a toaster! I mean, someone's being exploited there.

White Man

Sure, I know you! You’re a White Man. I’m a Negro. You take all the best jobs And leave us the garbage cans to empty and The halls to clean. You have a good time in a big house at Palm Beach And rent us the back alleys And the dirty slums. You enjoy Rome— And take Ethiopia. White Man! White Man! Let Louis Armstrong play it— And you copyright it And make the money. You're the smart guy, White Man! You got everything! But now, I hear your name ain't really White Man. I hear it’s something Marx wrote down — Fifty years ago— That rich people don’t like to read. Is that true, White Man? Is your name in a book Called The Communist Manifesto? Is your name spelled C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T? Are you always a White Man? Huh?

— Langston Hughes, New Masses, 15 Dec 1936

Good starting points for socialist reading? Detailed medium form summaries? Skeptic debate between various forms, and between other theoretical systems? Please do recommend

For introductory texts, start with the basics. That means starting with the foundation laid out by Marx and Engels themselves, not some abridged text or modern compilation that seeks to re-explain scientific socialism out of a lack of agency for the modern reader (though some of these type are good, but I digress.)

For this i’d recommend:

- Marx, Engels. The Communist Manifesto (obviously)

- Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

- Marx, Engels. Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price, and Profit

The above three are very short, succinct, and informative. The latter two are woefully unrecognized as ideal texts for introductory socialism, and they were written for that explicit purpose.

After that, move on to more wholistic works that flesh out and elaborate upon the historical, material, circumstances that gave rise to the capitalist epoch and how and why they furnish the future conditions for a socialist system.

- Engels. Origin of the Family, State, and Private Property (Whatever copy you’ll procure will probably include his complimentary essay, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, which isn’t hugely beneficial for most discursive purposes but interesting, nonetheless.)

- Lenin. The State and Revolution

- Bukharin. Historical Materialism - A System of Sociology

All of Engels’ work, from his introductions to Marx’s texts, his input on the former, and his original treatises, are a wealth of information.

After the structure of dialectical materialism and the capitalist system are understood, I’d recommend works on how the former can/should be implemented and the latter’s historical reign of misery, as well as works addressing the pressing contradiction of imperialism and core-periphery subjugation. (You won’t find vocabulary like core/periphery/semi periphery in texts like this though, that wouldn’t come about until Immanuel Wallerstein outlined the World Systems Theory in his eponymous book. It’s not strictly a historical materialist work, and made by a bourgeois academic (who was the sociology professor of my sociology professor, which is fun I suppose) but is formative for much of contemporary sociological discourse).

- Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

- Lenin. What is to Be Done?

- Galeano. Open Viens of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

- Said. Orientalism

Along the way, I strongly suggest you actually read Marx’s Capital in full, at least the first volume. It’s not as monolithic and inaccessible as some would lead you to believe, quite the opposite, and cannot be understated in its utility and insight.

- Marx. Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy, Volume I

Other recommendations:

- Marx. Critique of the Gotha Programme

- Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

- Bevins. The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

- Bevins. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

- Lenin. Critical Remarks on the National Question (1913) (Also, can be found in the recent compilation of Lenin’s work on the subject called Imperialism and the National Question)

- Debord. The Society if the Spectacle

- Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

- Mishra. From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

Truth be told, I’m a grievously under-read marxist, and there are others on this site who could provide a more comprehensive syllabus. To half-assedly make up for it, here are some books i’ve been meaning to read/finish but haven’t gotten to it yet:

- Adorno, Horkheimer. Dialect of Enlightenment

- Marx. Capital, Volumes 2 and 3

- Strong. The Soviets Expected It

- Adorno, Bernstein. The Culture Industry

- Adorno. Minima Moralia

- Mao. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

- Mao. On Protracted War

All of the aforementioned reading can be found online, for free and readily accessible, on places like Marxists.org, or as downloads from places like Libgen. If you want to read on your phone, download the file as an epub and use your device’s proprietary Books app or similar. If you want to read on a PC, I’d recommend a PDF for easiest navigation. If you want to pursue the latter but can only procure the former, you can use a epub reading program like SumatraPDF. If you’re a person who values a physical copy highly enough to warrant a purchase, I’d recommend ThriftBooks, though do be attentive to buying the most suitable copy of whatever material. Also, I’d be happy to send my copies to you or anyone else, via a google drive or telegram, if you feel like coming off anon.

As for “skeptic debate between various forms, and between various systems,” I can’t think of a standalone work with the principle task of dissecting and contrasting various stripes of marxism, but you’ll find as such permeating throughout almost all of these texts. The thing is, the fundamental material conditions haven’t shifted substantially since these were written, wether it be in Marx’s 19th century, Lenin’s 20th, or Bevins’ 21st. The old enemies remain enemies, the old arguments remain true. Dialectical materialism, scientific socialism, is a malleable system. It is a scientific method by which one can analyze the world, understand it with rational clarity, and come to conclusions on how to react to it and make predictions as to how things may unfold. This is the task assigned to any student of marxism. It is not dogma or a ecclesiastical canon, it is a tool.

After you’ve garnered your bachelor’s degree in scientific socialism you can move on to the postgraduate courses, such as chainsmoking cigarettes, caffeine and amphetamine addiction, alcoholism, and playing Disco Elysium.

The source for this figure of 100 million people killed under communist regimes is Le Livre noir du communisme (1997), published in English as The Black Book of Communism (1999). In the introduction, the editor, Stéphane Courtois, used a ‘rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates’ to come up with a figure that approached 100 million, a number far greater than the 25 million victims he attributes to Nazism (which does not, conveniently, include those killed as a result of the Second World War). Courtois equated communism with Nazism, and argued that the ‘single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide’ had impeded the accounting of communist crimes.

The Black Book stoked controversy from its first publication in France. As soon as it hit the shelves, two of the prominent historians contributing to the volume, Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth, attacked Courtois in the pages of Le Monde. Margolin and Werth distanced themselves from the volume, believing that Courtois’s obsession with reaching the number of 100 million led to careless scholarship.

Kristen R Ghodsee and Scott Sehon, The merits of taking an anti-anti-communism stance

On this day, 2 February 1932, it was reported that a mob of 1,000 residents in the Bronx, New York City fought police and bailiffs who were trying to evict three families during the great depression. The New York Times reported that violence broke out when police attempted the evictions "in the Communist neighborhood of the Bronx, where many of the residents [were] striking for a 15% reduction in their rents". The paper also reported that "women scream[ed] defiance" as mounted police, officers on foot, and 50 detectives supported city marshals in evicting families from their homes. Then: "While the furniture was being carried to the sidewalk the women in the windows urged the movers, 'as fellow workers'to quit their jobs, and implored the crowds to fight." The tenants being evicted were the families of Louis Perlstein, Goldie Calmus, and Jenny Newmark. Their landlord claimed the tenants "were agitators, he did not want in his building under any conditions". Over the course of the battle, police arrested nine people, including five women, eight of whom were later jailed for periods of around two days. While it seems in this case the landlord was successful in evicting the families, elsewhere in the city physical resistance to evictions are estimated to have restored around 77,000 evicted families to their homes in that time. Sources, map and more info on our web app: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9179/bronx-residents-fight-evictions https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2200835346768270/?type=3

I found it interesting that Morgan's two guesses about Louis' past are a military defector or a communist sympathiser. I'm no expert, but from what I understand, it makes sense for him to make those specific assumptions based on the historical context. The story Louis gives is flimsy and he wouldn't assume a black man was a waylaid journalist like himself, so of course he looks for an alternative explanation.

The idea that he might be an American soldier is self-explanatory: there were roughly 120,000 Black American soldiers serving overseas during WW2 and plenty of reasons to go AWOL. As an aside, the story Louis gives about looking for his fictional wife isn't totally implausible. A small number of African American women (less than 1000 I think?) served in the American Nurse Corps after they were allowed to enlist in 1941. Whether any went missing in Romania is a different matter.

As for being "a red", over the course of the previous decade a number of African Americans immigrated to or visited the Soviet Union, drawn by the opportunity to escape racial segregation or find work. Among them were well known figures like Langston Hughes (visited in 1932) and Paul Robeson (visited in 1934), people who Morgan would likely be aware of. Whilst there were also white American immigrants to the USSR and communist sympathies were by no means limited to Black Americans, I do think race plays a role in leading him to that conclusion.

This is a bit of a reach, but I see some broader significance in the two scenarios he lays out. His advice to Louis is to go back to the army if he went AWOL and to avail himself of any illusions he has about the Soviet Union. Essentially, he should admit to his betrayal and give up on the dream of a better life elsewhere. Both reinforce the sentiment expressed by Daciana and Louis himself i.e give up and go home, there's nothing out here worth searching for.

The comment Morgane makes about returning being "a paradise compared to Uncle Joseph's utopia" feels especially relevant given Louis' characterisation of Claudia's quest as a search for God. This author notes that African American writers arriving in the Soviet Union often framed it as a quasi religious experience.

Louis is turned in a marriage ceremony that's also part baptism, which promises an escape from the rigid racial hierarchies of his homeland. After decades of disillusionment, Morgan's advice nicely reflects his state of mind. There is no paradise left to strive for so why bother looking?

source of the extract: African Diaspora 1 (2008) 53-85, Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society by Maxim Matusevich

Okay I Could do work but instead I'm going to write about the time shostakovich had the worst time in america

(So, despite the clickbaity title, this will be more of a serious post. I wrote about the topic a few years ago on Reddit , and I'll be citing a lot of the same sources as I cited there, because there are some good ones, along with some new information I've gathered over the years. This was going to be a video essay on my youtube channel, but I sort of kept putting it off.)

The Scientific and Cultural Congress for World Peace, held in New York in 1949, is a particularly fascinating event to study when it comes to researching Shostakovich because of just how divisive it was. True, the event itself, which only lasted a few days, doesn’t get as much spotlight as the Lady Macbeth scandal or the posthumous “Shostakovich Wars,” but you’ll find that when reading about the Peace Conference, as I’ll be referring to it here for the sake of brevity, many of the primary accounts of it never quite tell the full story. The Peace Conference was held during a volatile time, both in Soviet and American politics, as Cold War tensions were on the rise and an ideological debate between capitalism and communism gradually extended to become the focus of seemingly every factor of life- not just politics and economics, but also the sciences, culture, and the arts.

While artists on both sides were frequently cast in different roles in order to create or destroy the image of Soviet or American cultural and ideological superiority, the image either government sought to cast was sometimes contradictory with the sentiments of the artists themselves. For instance, while the CIA-founded Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF) sent African American jazz musician Louis Armstrong on various tours around the world to promote jazz as American culture and dispel perceptions of racism in America, Armstrong canceled a trip to the Soviet Union in order to protest the use of armed guards against the integration of Black students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Meanwhile, the Soviet government’s use of international diplomatic missions by artists as cultural warfare also reflected a desire to portray themselves as the dominant culture, despite the tensions and complications that existed for artists at home. When the Soviet Union sent Dmitri Shostakovich to New York in March 1949 for the Peace Conference, such cultural contradictions are why the conference occurred the way it did, and why Shostakovich’s image has received so much controversy, both in Russia and in the west.

If you’re familiar with Soviet history, you may be familiar with the term Zhdanovshchina, which refers to a period of time between 1946 and 1948 in which Andrei Zhdanov, the Central Committee Secretary of the Soviet Union, headed a number of denunciations against prominent figures in the arts and sciences. Among musicians, Shostakovich was one of the most heavily attacked, likely due to his cultural standing, with many of his pieces censored and referred to as “formalist,” along with his expulsion from his teaching positions at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. During this time, Shostakovich often resorted to writing film and ideological music in order to make an income.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as fears of nuclear war began accumulating, peace movements between the two superpowers were regarded more and more as pro-Communist, an opinion backed by the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC). The Waldorf-Astoria Peace Conference, to be held from March 25-27th 1949, was organized by the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions, a progressive American organization, and was to feature speeches held by representatives of both American and Soviet science and culture. Harlow Shapely, one of the conference’s organizers, stated that he intended for the conference to be “non-partisan” and focused on American and Soviet cooperation.

On the 16th of February, 1949, Shostakovich was chosen to be one of the six Soviet delegates to speak at the conference. This was largely due to his fame in the west, where both his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies met a mostly positive reception. Shostakovich initially did not want to go to the conference, stating in a letter to the Agitprop leader Leonid Ilichev that he was suffering from poor health at the time and wasn’t feeling up to international travel and performances. He also said that if he were to go, he wanted his wife Nina to be able to accompany him, but he ended up being sent to New York without any members of his family- perhaps to quell concerns of defection (recall the amount of artists who defected around the time of the 1917 revolution, including notable names such as Rachmaninov and Heifetz).

Stalin famously called Shostakovich on the phone that same day to address the conference, and again, Shostakovich told him he couldn’t go, as he was feeling unwell. Sofia Khentova’s biography even states that Shostakovich actually did undergo medical examinations and was found to be sick at the time, but Stalin's personal secretary refused to relay this information. Shostakovich's close friend Yuri Levitin recalls that when Stalin called Shostakovich on the phone to ask him to go to the conference (despite the fact he had been chosen to go in advance), Shostakovich offered two reasons as to why he couldn't go- in addition to his health, Levitin claims that Shostakovich also cited the fact that his works were currently banned in the Soviet Union due to the Zhdanov decree, and that he could not represent the USSR to the west if his works were banned. While accounts of the phone call vary, the ban on Shostakovich's works was indeed lifted by the time he went to New York for the conference.

When Shostakovich arrived in New York, general anti-Communist sentiment from both Americans and Soviet expatriates, as well as media excitement, resulted in a series of protests in front of the Waldorf Astoria hotel where the conference was to be held, with some of the protesters directly referencing Shostakovich himself, as he was the most well-known Soviet delegate on the trip. In 1942, Shostakovich's 7th ("Leningrad") Symphony was performed in the United States under Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra to high acclaim, helping to promote the idea of allyship with the Soviet Union in the US during the war, and Americans were aware of the Zhdanov denunciations in 1948, as well as the previous denunciations that Shostakovich had suffered in 1936 as a result of the scandal surrounding his opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District." So by 1949, many people in American artistic circles had a sympathetic, if not completely understanding, view of Shostakovich during the birth of the Cold War. They viewed him as a victim of Communism and the Soviet state, who was forced to appease it in order to stay in favor, and as a result, could potentially voice his dissent with the system once in the west. Pickets visible in footage from the protests outside the Waldorf Astoria carried slogans such as "Shostakovich, jump thru [sic] the window," a likely reference to Oksana Kosyankina, a Soviet schoolteacher who had reportedly jumped out of a window in protest (although the details of this story would be found to be highly dubious). Meanwhile, another sign read "Shostakovich, we understand!," a statement that would prove to be deeply ironic. At the conference itself, Shostakovich did not jump through the window, nor did he attempt any form of dissent. Instead, an interpreter read through a prepared speech as he sat on stage in front of a crowd of about 800. The speech praised Soviet music, denounced American "warmongering," and claimed that Shostakovich had accepted the criticism of 1948, saying it "brought his music forward." Many in the audience could see that Shostakovich was visibly nervous- he was "painfully ill at ease," and Nicholas Nabokov (brother of the writer Vladimir Nabokov) remarked that he looked like a "trapped man." Arthur Miller recalled he appeared "so scared." As they noticed how nervous he looked, some of those in attendance sought to make a demonstration of him in order to illustrate Soviet oppression in contrast to the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by American artists, asking him intentionally provocative questions that they knew he would not be able to answer truthfully. From Nicholas Nabokov:

After his speech I felt I had to ask him publicly a few questions. I had to do it, not in order to embarrass a wretched human being who had just given me the most flagrant example of what it is to be a composer in the Soviet Union, but because of the several thousand people that sat in the hall, because of those that perhaps still could not or did not wish to understand the sinister game that was being played before their eyes. I asked him simple factual questions concerning modern music, questions that should be of interest to all musicians. I asked him whether he, personally, the composer Shostakovich, not the delegate of Stalin’s Government, subscribed to the wholesale condemnation of Western music as it had been expounded daily by the Soviet Press and as it appeared in the official pronouncements of the Soviet Government. I asked him whether he, personally, agreed with the condemnation of the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith. To these questions he acquiesced: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I completely subscribe to the views as expressed by … etc….’ When he finished answering my questions the dupes in the audience gave him a new and prolonged ovation.

During the discussion panel on March 26th, music critic Olin Downes delivered yet another provocative statement towards Shostakovich:

I found both of your works [the 7th and 8th Symphonies] too long, and I strongly suspected in them the presence of a subversive influence—that of the music of Gustav Mahler.

For Shostakovich, and anyone knowledgeable of Soviet politics and music at the time, it's not hard to see why Downes had explicitly mentioned Mahler. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was a highly influential composer when it came to 20th century western music, particularly with regards to the avant-garde movement pioneered by the Second Viennese School- Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. Shostakovich was also heavily influenced by Mahler, but such influences were frowned upon in the mid-30s to 50s Soviet Union. Mahler's style was decidedly more "western," and it's potentially for this reason that Shostakovich's 4th Symphony- perhaps his most "Mahlerian," was withdrawn from performance before its premiere in 1936, having followed the "Lady Macbeth" denunciations. To tie Shostakovich to Mahler would be to point out his direct western influences, while he was being made to issue statements that rejected them. During his speech, Shostakovich made statements criticizing Stravinsky and Prokofiev- two composers who had emigrated and adopted western-inspired neoclassical styles (although Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936). Stravinsky had taken insult to Shostakovich's comments against him, and carried an animosity towards Shostakovich that appeared once again in their meeting in 1962, according to the composer Karen Khachaturian.

On the last day of the conference, March 27th, Shostakovich performed the second movement of his Fifth Symphony on piano at Madison Square Garden to an audience of about 18,000, and had received a massive ovation, as well as a declaration of friendship signed by American composers such as Bernstein, Copland, Koussevitzky, and Ormandy. He returned to the Soviet Union on April 3.

In addition to the 1948 denunciations, in which Shostakovich was pressured to make public statements against his own works, the likely humiliation he endured at the 1949 conference played a role in cementing his dual "public" and "private" personas. For the rest of his life, Shostakovich displayed mannerisms and characteristics at official events that were reportedly much different from those he displayed among friends and family. For the public, and for researchers after his death, it became difficult to determine which statements from him reflected his genuine sentiments, and which ones were made to appease a wider political or social system.

Both the Soviet Union and the west had treated Shostakovich as a means of legitimizing their respective ideologies against one another, a trend that continued long after his death in 1975 and the fall of the USSR in 1991. The publication of his purported memoirs, "Testimony," allegedly transcribed by Solomon Volkov, fueled this debate among academics and artists, becoming known as the "Shostakovich wars." The feud over the legitimacy of "Testimony," however, stood for something much larger than the credibility of an alleged historical document- as historians and musicologists debated whether or not it was comprised of Shostakovich's own words and sentiments towards the Soviet Union, its political systems, and its artistic spheres, they were largely seeking to prove the credibility of their stances for or against Soviet or western superiority. "Testimony" helped evolve the popular western view of Shostakovich as well, from a talented but helpless puppet at the hands of the regime, to a secret dissident bravely rebelling against the system from inside.

Modern Shostakovich scholars, however, will argue that neither of these views are quite true- as more correspondence and documents come to light, and more research is conducted, a more complete view of Shostakovich has been coming into focus over the past decade or so. Today, many academics tend to view Shostakovich and the debate over his ideology with far more nuance- not as a cowardly government mouthpiece or as an embittered undercover rebel, but as a multifaceted person who made difficult decisions, shaped by the varying time periods he lived in, whose actions were often determined by the shifting cultural atmospheres of those time periods, along with his own relationships with others and the evolution of his art. We can be certain Shostakovich did not approve of Stalin's restrictions on the arts- his posthumous work "Antiformalist Rayok," among other pieces of evidence from people he knew, makes that very clear- but many nuances of his beliefs are still very much debated. There has also been a shift away from judging Shostakovich's music based on its merit as evidence in the ideological dispute, and rather for its quality as artwork (something I'm sure he would appreciate!). As expansive as Shostakovich research has become, one thing has become abundantly clear- none of us can hope to truthfully make the statement, "Shostakovich, we understand."

Sources for further reading:

Articles:

Shostakovich and the Peace Conference (umich.edu)

Louis Armstrong Plays Historic Cold War Concerts in East Berlin & Budapest (1965) | Open Culture

Biographical and Primary Sources:

Laurel Fay, "Shostakovich, a Life"

Pauline Fairclough, "Critical Lives: Dmitry Shostakovich"

Elizabeth Wilson, "Shostakovich, a Life Remembered"

Mikhail Ardov, "Memories of Shostakovich"

HUAC Report on Peace Conference

Video Sources and Historic Footage:

Arthur Miller on the Conference

"New York Greets Mr. Bevin and Peace Conference Delegates"

"Shostakovich at the Waldorf"

"1949 Anti Communism Protest"

"Battle of the Pickets"

Arranged marriage for the meme!

Yay! I don't have a vivid imagination for this trope, so more than half are cases where the arranged marriage is totally canon.

Thorn/Ophélie (La passe-miroir/The Mirror Visitor)

It's very classic arranged marriage (for supernatural reasons) turns into resentment that stops them from realizing the good things about the other turns into alliance turns into unspoken love (painful for the reader) and maybe more? It fully worked on me. I especially loved how the description of Thorn (the book is Ophélie PoV) turn from uncharitable descriptions of an average looking man to very horny descriptions of an average looking man.

If you don't know the series, I can advertise it more. It's good French fantasy.

2. Louis/Caesar (Kimi o Shinasenai tame no Monogatari)

Yeah I have at least one m/m canon arranged marriage, is a dystopian future where romantic partners and reproduction partners are totally disconnected. It's a painful case of arranged marriage with love only on one side, it's a mess and they don't make it work. I enjoyed it though. ^^

3. Xavin/Karolina (Runaways)

In the category: arranged marriage to end a war. This one starts with love only one one side (it helps that one of them was raised to see this marriage as a positive thing and the other never heard about it), but they make it work. For a while. Because they're separated because you can't get peace that easily. Not the main romance for Karolina, but my fave.

4. David/Josiane (L'homme qui rit)

This one has a creepy age difference, but the relationship is fun despite it. They're capricious nobility of the kind "we could have loved each other so much, but the fact that our parents decided this for us is totally ruining the concept". I have hope for them in the future.

5. MIlly/Lloyd (Code Geass)

They are a case who absolutely don't fall in love with each other and break the engagement. I think their personalities go well together, though, and that they could have been good friends if not for the "ugh" reaction of being arranged engaged.

6. Khonnen/Leah (The Dybbuk)

Tragic version! Their parents engaged them to each other before they were born, and because of this they feel drawn to each other (it's a world with magic) and fall in love. Leah's uncle has forgotten about the promise and wants his niece to marry a rich man. The boy dabbles in dark magic to get her anyway and dies, but his ghost is possessing her. It's absolutely not healthy. Still shipping it.

7. Philip/Elizabeth (The Americans)

Communist spies in the eighties who are technically work colleagues but have a marriage licence and actual children. It's a slow burn romance and I love it.

8. Eponine/Marius (Les Misérables)

This one is absolutely not canon! I don't know why, I came across the idea of Marius thinking he has to marry Eponine out of gratefulness for Thénardier saving his father, either because he's naive, or because Thénardier is manipulating him, and I thought it had potential for being absolutely awful (complimentary)!

9. Ciel/Elizabeth (Black Butler)

You know, they're cute (they're cousins but I don't care). As of recently in the manga it's more complicated than this, but if anything it made me ship it even more.

10. Twilight/Yor (Spy x Family)

Both got married to have a cover for their (opposite sides) spy activities. Neither knows about it. It's written as cute anyway, on the arranged marriage that becomes real side, with their common affection for their (arranged) daughter a big part of the feelings. It works for me.

On April 10th 1936 Activists including the 'Red Duchess of Athol' formed a committee to send an ambulance to Spain in memory of three Dundonians killed while fighting for the Spanish Republican government.

A remarkable Scottish woman of principles.....

I’m using this wee bit of history to actually tell you about one of the woman in particular here, I will touch on the Ambulance story during the post, but in the main it’s about one remarkable lady

The Red Duchess, or Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, as she was formally known, was Scotland’s first female MP, The Red Duchess tag is a bit of a misnomer, as Kitty was a Tory politician, but beffore you judge her on this, please don’t hold that against her though, read the post and then judge her.

Kitty shook up parliament with her high principles and disregard for old school tribal politics, she joined the House of Commons in 1923 after winning the seat of Kinross and West Perthshire for the Conservatives. She also realised the threat Hitler posed and defied her party whips – reading Mein Kampf in the original German and giving translations to Chamberlain and Churchill to try to convince them of the imminent danger.

She was a woman full of contraries, before women had received the vote in 1918 she had outspokenly opposed giving them the vote, arguing that they were not yet sufficiently educated!

In the late 1920s her attention shifted to international issues. She supported a campaign to prevent female genital mutilation in the British colonies in East Africa and she became concerned over developments in the USSR: her book The Conscription of A People exposed and denounced Soviet forced-labour practices.

Her understanding of the dangers the Nazi’s posed influenced her support for the Spanish Republic after the failure of the attempted military coup in July 1936.

The U.S. journalist Louis Fischer gave this assessment of her;

“In her old-fashioned black silk dress that fell to her shoe tops she would sit on the platform, at Spain meetings, with Communists, left-wing socialists, working men and disabled International Brigaders and appeal for help for the Republicans. She would interrogate everybody who had been to Spain and hang on their words and note many of them in a book filled with her illegible scrawl.”

It was the ease with which she aligned to the communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, that the Red Duchess name came about. It was much more than politics with Kitty though, she organised the evacuation of nearly 4,000 children from Bilbao and accommodated them in Britain.

It was Katherine Murray and another Scottish woman Fernanda Jacobsen who helped with humanitarian efforts during the war in Spain, Jacobsen became commandant of the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) which provided humanitarian assistance in three convoys.. Jacobsen led the first unit of six ambulances and a lorry, with a crew of 19, which set out from Glasgow on 17 September 1936. Over the course of the war there were three such convoys, all led by Jacobsen.

The Red Duchess toured Scotland to raise support, stirring audiences into action with her spellbinding oratory, and visited Spain with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. The fruit of her journey was the enormously affecting book 'Searchlight on Spain', which sold 300,000 copies in Britain. The aristocrat's work demonstrated the social breadth of the Aid for Spain campaign in Scotland, and inspired women from all backgrounds.

While casting aside the politics of left and right, Atholl believed in the right for the Republicans to legitimately govern and defend themselves. The Duchess, who was also an accomplished pianist and composer, proved to be a heavy weight and fearless operator - but her name today remains relatively obscure.

It wasn’t all about Spain though, The Duchess, even before she had taken her seat in Westminster, had already reported on the dire state of health provision in the Highlands and Islands as part of the influential Dewar Committee, whose findings became the blueprint for the NHS in Scotland.

As I said earlier this was a woman of contraries and her opposeition of women’s suffrage at 21,led to Lady Astor, the first English female MP to take their seat in Westminster, derided her as “Canute trying to keep the waves back.”

Later, her position changed and the Duchess would befriend Sylvia Pankhurst who was to publicly endorse her as an independent candidate in the 1938 by-election which she triggered after losing the support of her local party over her views on Nazi Germany. At the time there was a widespread feeling of appeasement towards Hitler and his policies, Kitty Murray was a lost voice in her opposition to them. Such was her belief that she resigned her seat and stood as an independent, fighting almost entirely on this single issue.

A telegram from Stalin supporting the Duchess' campaign inflicted further damage to a campaign that was set against the vast resources of the Conservative Party. She lost the election by just 1,305 votes.

Her friend and campaign organiser Frieda Stewart said: “The challenge was one of principle against a whole party-political machine; and the Tories were determined that they were not going to be put in their place by one dissident individual, whatever her title.”

Murray, who authored several books, largely stepped away from the fray of public and political life following her defeat.

Following the death of her husband in 1942, she became Honorary Colonel of the Scottish Horse Regiment and also served as President of the Perthshire Branch of the Red Cross Society. Kitty Murray, the Duchess of Atholl spent spent a lot of her private income on assisting refugees. With the support of the Foreign Office she broadcast a message of support in the autumn of 1944 to the Poles resisting the Germans in Warsaw. She was also very concerned for those suffering at the hands of the Soviets. Just before the war ended, the Duchess of Atholl, chaired the British League for European Freedom, a post which she held up to her death in 1960.

Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl died in Edinburgh in 1960, aged 85, after falling from a wall.

Read more about this all but forgotten woman here https://www.basquechildren.org/-/docs/articles/atholl2019