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10/01/2020 - The last remaining active director of the Czech New Wave, Karel Vachek, has finished the longest-ever Czech film, which clocks in at six hours

Communism and the Net or the End of Representative Democracy by Karel Vachek

One of the most original Czechs, the last remaining active director of the Czech New Wave and a former head of FAMUs Documentary department, Karel Vachek, has a new oeuvre travelling the festival circuit. Following his previous efforts, Zvi, the Prince of Pornofolk Under the Influence of Griffiths Intolerance and Tatis Mr. Hulots Holidays or the Foundation and Doom of Czechoslovakia (1918-1992) from 2006 (147 minutes long) and Obscurantist and His Lineage or the Pyramids Tearful Valleys (2011, 199 minutes), he has made yet another of his film-novels, Communism and the Net or the End of Representative Democracy, which clocks in at 335 minutes (split into four acts). The cinematic essay explores politics, philosophy, religion and art.

Fifty years since the Prague Spring and 30 years after the Velvet Revolution, the director shows the exposition, collisions, crises and catharsis of post-November society in a documentary fresco of personal memories, staged scenes and archives of collective memory. While assessing social development, the auteur sees the future as lying in the direct democracy enabled by humans interconnected via the internet. The synopsis alludes to some of the motifs in the sprawling work: Democracy can be saved through creative laughter, dissolving the untouchability and hypertrophic egos of the representatives of state institutions. The internet frees society from the representatives of the non-functional connecting link that prevents direct communication between citizens and the institutions of power.

Vachek reveals more in the directors notes: My whole life story will run through the entire movie for a laugh, as the epicentre of the film is the directors office at FAMU, where he discussed various issues with important peers and his students over the course of his 25-year teaching career (in the directors explanation, he notes that almost 100 personalities from Czech and Slovakian theatre and television appear in front of the camera as a sort of collective hero).

Karel Vachek is an auteur whose works constitute an individual category all of its own in Czech cinema. He proves that, through film, you can not only think about the people and events from contemporary history, but also about the causes and general movements that make them work, noted the board of the Czech Film Fund in 2015 when it approved financial support for the project.

The film will screen at the 49th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam, in The Tyger Burns (Perspectives) section, while the IFFRs programmers stated, Communism and the Net or the End of Representative Democracy feels like the sum total of Vachek's cinema: a classification-defying behemoth of a film, discursive like crazy, ironic, ferocious, ballsy the way public intellectuals rarely are these days.

Communism and the Net or the End of Representative Democracy was staged by Mikul Novotn and Radim Prochzka, of Background Films, and was co-produced by Slovakian producer Robert Kirchhoff (atelier.doc), Czech Television and Universal Production Partners (UPP). The Czech Film Fund and the Slovak Audiovisual Fund supported the film. Background Films is handling the world sales.

You can watch the trailer (in Czech) below:

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Communism and the Net or the End of Representative Democracy ready for the festival circuit - Cineuropa

It was indeed cynical and out-of-touch for the EU (Parliament) to suddenly blame, after 80 years, the Soviet Union for triggering WWII. It is unwise (to say least) to resurrect the arguments surrounding the circumstances of the start of World War II. The historians have agreed, the history has been written and well documented, and is in our books already for many decades.

There is no point in contemporary politicians of eastern flank of the EU (with a striking but complicit silence from the central Europe) pushing up the facts regarding who was to blame. There are neither mandated, nor qualified or even expected to do so.

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Mussolini s Italy and its satellites (helped by the ring of Useful Idiots, then called Quislings) were the culprits and that is universally accepted with no exception. It is now all in the past. Let us leave it there and not in the 21st century which has severe multiplying challenges, especially for the EU, that are still waiting to be tackled.

Enveloped in its own myopia of economic egoism and berfremdung phobia, Europeans are in fact digging and perpetuating defensive self-isolation. While falling short to constructively engage its neighborhood (but not conveniently protected by oceans for it like some other emigrant-receiving countries), Europeans constantly attract unskilled migrants from that way destabilized near abroad. The US, GCC, Far East, Australia, Singapore, lately even Brazil, India, or Angola all have enormously profited from the skilled newcomers. Europe is unable to recognize, preserve, protect and promote its skilled migrants.

Simply, European history of tolerance of otherness is far too short for it, while the legacies of residual fears are deep, lasting and wide. Destructive efforts towards neighbors and accelatered hatreds for at home are perpetually reinforcing themselves. That turns Europe into a cluster of sharply polarized and fragmented societies, seemingly over history and identity, but essentially over the generational and technological gap, vision and forward esteem.

One of the latest episodes comes from a recent political, and highly ahistorical, initiative to make an equation of communism with Nazism. Driven by the obsessive Russophobe notion, this myopic short-term calculus may bring disastrous long-term consequences first and most of all for the Slavic Eastern/southeastern Europe, as well as to the absent-minded Scandinavian Europe, or cynically silent Central Europe.

Needleless to say, consensus that todays Europe firmly rests upon is built on antifascism. This legacy brought about prosperity and tranquility to Europe unprecedented all throughout its history. Sudden equation of communism with Nazism is the best and fastest way to destroy very fundaments of Europe once for good.

One is certain, the EU-led Europe is in a serious moral and political crisis of rapid de-evolution. Lets have a closer look.

Una hysteria importante

History of Europe is the story of small hysteric/xenophobic nations, traditionally sensitive to the issue of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and behavioristic otherness. If this statement holds the truth, then we refer to events before and after the Thirty Years War in general and to the post-Napoleonic Europe in particular. Political landscape of todays Europe had been actually conceived in the late 14th century, gradually evolving to its present shape.

At first, the unquestioned and unchallenged pre-Westphalian order of Catholicism enabled the consolidation and standardization of the feudal socio-economic and politico-military system all over the Europe. However at its matured stage, such a universalistic world of Holy Roman Empire and Papacy (Caesaropapism) is steadily contested by the explicitly confrontational or implicitly dismissive political entities, be it ideologically (the Thirty Years War culminating with the Peace of Westphalia) or geopolitically (Grand Discoveries and the shift of the gravity center westwards). The early round of colonizers, the two Iberian empires of Spain and Portugal, are the first entities that emerged, followed by France, Holland, England and Denmark. (Belgium too, although it appeared as a buffer zone at first being a strategic depth, a continental prolongation of England for containment of Central Europeans, of Dutch and Scandinavians from the open sea, while later on also becoming a strategic depth of France for balancing Britain and containment of Denmark and Prussia.)

Engulfed with the quest of the brewing French revolution for the creation of a nation state, these colonizers, all of them situated on the Atlantic flank of Europe, have successfully adjusted to the nation-state concept. Importantly, the very process of creation/formation of the nation-state has been conducted primarily on linguistic grounds since religious grounds were historically defeated once and for all by the Westphalia.[1] All peoples talking the Portugophone dialects in one state, all Hispanophone dialects in another state, all Francophone dialects in the third state, etc.[2] This was an easy cut for peripheral Europe, the so-called old colonizers on the Atlantic flank of Europe, notably for Portugal, Spain, France, England, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Although geopolitically defeated at home, in France, and ideologically contained by the Vienna Congress and its instrument the Holy Alliance of Eastern Conservative Courts, the very idea of a nation-state remained appealing. Both of that-time federations of theocracies (the non-territorial principle-based Habsburg and the Ottoman empires) were inevitably corroding by two chemical precursors: secularism (enlightenment) and territoriality. Once the revolutionary 1848 ousted the principal guardian of feudalism and Rimo-Christian orthodoxy in Europe, Metternich, the suppressed concept got further impetus. And, the revolutionary romance went on

Interestingly, the very creation of Central Europes nation-states was actually enhanced by Napoleon III. The unification of Italophones was his, nearly obsessive, intentional deed (as he grew up in Nice with Italian Carbonari revolutionaries who were fighting papal and Habsburgs control over the northern portions of todays Italy). Conversely, the very unification of Germanophones under the Greater Prussia was his non-intentional mis-chief, with the two subsequently emerging by-products; modern Austria (German-speaking core assembled on the ruins of mighty multinational and multi-lingual empire) and modern Turkey (Turkophone core on the ruins of mighty multiracial and multi-linguistic empire).

Despite being geographically in the heart of Europe, Switzerland remained a remarkably stable buffer zone: Highly militarized but defensive and obsessively neutral, economically omnipresent yet financially secretive, it represents one confederated state of two confronting versions of western Christianity, of three ethnicities and of four languages. Absent from most of the modern European politico-military events Switzerland, in short is terra incognita.

Historically speaking, the process of Christianization of Europe that was used as the justification tool to (either intimidate or corrupt, so to say to) pacify the invading tribes, which demolished the Roman Empire and brought to an end the Antique age, was running parallel on two tracks. The Roman Curia/Vatican conducted one of them by its hammer: the Holy Roman Empire. The second was run by the cluster of Rusophone Slavic Kaganates, who receiving (the orthodox or true/authentic, so-called Eastern version of) Christianity from Byzantium, and past its collapse, have taken over a mission of Christianization, while forming its first state of Kiev Russia (and thereafter, its first historic empire). Thus, to the eastern edge of Europe, Russophones have lived in an intact, nearly a hermetic world of universalism for centuries: one empire, one Tsar, one religion and one language.[3]

Everything in between Central Europe and Russia is Eastern Europe, rather a historic novelty on the political map of Europe. Very formation of the Atlantic Europes present shape dates back to 14th15th century, of Central Europe to the mid-late 19th century, while a contemporary Eastern Europe only started emerging between the end of WWI and the collapse of the Soviet Union meaning, less than 100 years at best, slightly over two decades in the most cases. No wonder that the dominant political culture of the Eastern Europeans resonates residual fears and reflects deeply insecure small nations. Captive and restive, they are short in territorial depth, in demographic projection, in natural resources and in a direct access to open (warm) seas. After all, these are short in historio-cultural verticals, and in the bigger picture-driven long-term policies. Eastern Europeans are exercising the nationhood and sovereignty from quite a recently, thus, too often uncertain over the side and page of history. Therefore, they are often dismissive, hectic and suspectful, nearly neuralgic and xenophobic, with frequent overtones.

The creation of a nation-state (on linguistic grounds) in the peripheral, Atlantic and Scandinavian, as well as Central Europe was relatively a success-story. However, in Eastern Europe it repeatedly suffered setbacks, culminating in the Balkans, Caucasus and the Middle East. The same calamity also remained in the central or Baltic part of Eastern Europe.[4]

Keeping the center soft

Ever since Westphalia, Europe maintained the inner balance of powers by keeping its core section soft. Peripheral powers like England, France, Denmark, (early Sweden and Poland to be later replaced by) Prussia and Habsburgs, and finally the Ottomans and Russia have pressed on and preserved the center of continental Europe as their own playground. At the same time, they kept extending their possessions overseas or, like Russia and the Ottomans, over the land corridors deeper into Asian and MENA proper. Once Royal Italy and Imperial Germany had appeared, the geographic core hardened and for the first time started to politico-militarily press onto peripheries. This new geopolitical reality caused a big security dilemma. That dilemma lasted from the 1814 Vienna congress up to Potsdam conference of 1945, being re-actualized again with the Berlin Wall destruction: How many Germanies and Italies should Europe have to preserve its inner balance and peace?[5] As the latecomers, the Central Europeans have faced the overseas world out of their reach, as clearly divided into spheres of influence solely among the Atlantic Europeans (and Russians).

In rather simplified terms, one can say that from the perspective of European belligerent parties, both world wars were fought between the forces of status quo and the challengers to this status quo. The final epilogue in both wars was that Atlantic Europe has managed to divert the attention of Central Europeans from itself and its vast overseas possessions onto Eastern Europe, and finally towards Russia.[6]

Just to give the most illustrative of many examples; the Imperial post-Bismarck Germany has carefully planned and ambitiously grouped its troops on the border with France. After the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo (28 June 1914), Europe was technically having a casus belli - as the subsequent mutually declared war between all parties quickly followed this assassination episode and the immediate Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. However, the first armed engagement was not taking place on the southeastern front, as expected between the Eastern belligerent parties such as Austria, Serbia, Russia, the Ottomans, Greece, Bulgaria, etc. The first military operations of WWI were actually taking place in the opposite, northwest corner of Europe something that came only two months past the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. It was German penetration of Belgian Ardennes.

Still, the very epilogue of la Grande Guerra was such that a single significant territorial gain of Germany was achieved only in Eastern Europe. Despite a colossal 4-years long military effort, the German western border remained nearly unchanged.

The end of WWI did not bring much of a difference. The accords de paix Versailles treaty was an Anglo-French triumph. These principal Treaty powers, meaning: Atlantic Europe, invited Germany to finally join the League of Nations in 1926, based on the 1925 Treaty of Locarno. By the letter of this treaty, Germany obliged itself to fully respect its frontiers with Belgium and France (plus demilitarized zone along Rhine) with the unspecified promise to arbitrate before pursuing any change of its borders with Czechoslovakia and Poland. The same modus operandi applied to the Austrian borders with Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Locarno accord actually instrumentalized two sorts of boundaries around Central Europe (GermanyAustria): strict, inviolable ones towards Atlantic Europe; but semipermeable and soft towards Eastern Europe.[7]

That is how the predominant player from Central Europe, Germany, was accepted to the League, a collective system which the Soviet Russia (meaning: Rusophone Europe) was admitted to only a decade later (1934).

Soon after, this double standard sealed-off a faith of many in Europe and beyond.

(End of the 1st Part)

Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevi

Author is professor in international law and global political studies, based in Vienna, Austria. His 7th book From WWI to www. 1918-2018 is published by the New Yorks Addleton Academic Publishers last winter.

Vienna, 04 JAN 2020

[emailprotected]

[1] To be more accurate: Westphalia went beyond pure truce, peace and reconciliation. It re-confirmed existence of western Christianitys Ummah. Simply, it only outlawed meddling into the intra-western religious affairs by restricting that-time absolute Papal (interpretative) powers. From that point of view, Westphalia was not the first international instrument on religious freedoms, but a triumph of western evangelic unity. This very unity later led to the strengthening of western Christianity and its supremacy intercontinentally.

[2] All modern European languages that are taught in schools today, were once upon a time, actually a political and geographic compromise of the leading linguists, who through adopted conventions created a standard language by compiling different dialects, spoken on the territory of particular emerging nation-state.

[3] Early Russian state has ever since expanded north/northeast and eastward, reaching the physical limits of its outreach by crossing the Bering straits (and the sale of Russian Alaska to the USA in 1867). By the late 17th and early 18th century, Russia had begun to draw systematically into European politico-military theatre. () In the meantime, Europes universalistic empire dissolved. It was contested by the challengers (like the Richelieus France and othersgeopolitical, or the Lutheran/Protestant ideological challengers), and fragmented into the cluster of confronted monarchies, desperately trying to achieve an equilibrium through dynamic balancing. Similar political process will affect Russian universal empire only by late 20th century, following the Soviet dissolution. () Not fully accepted into the European collective system before the Metternichs Holy Alliance, even had its access into the post-Versailles system denied, Russia was still not ignored like other peripheral European power. The Ottomans, conversely, were negated from all of the security systems until the very creation of the NATO (Republic of Turkey). Through the pre-emptive partition of Poland in the eve of WWII, and successful campaigns elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Bolshevik Russia expanded both its territory and its influence westwards. () An early Soviet period of Russia was characterized by isolated bilateral security arrangements, e.g. with Germans, Fins, Japanese, etc. The post WWII days have brought the regional collective system of Warsaw Pact into existence, as to maintain the communist gains in Europe and to effectively oppose geopolitically and ideologically the similar, earlier formed, US-led block. Besides Nixons rapprochement towards China, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the final stage in the progressive fragmentation of the vast Sino-Soviet Communist block (that dominated the Eurasian land mass with its massive size and centrality), letting Russia emerge as the successor. The sudden ideological and territorial Soviet break-up, however, was followed by the cultural shock and civil disorder, painful economic and demographic crisis and rapidly widening disparities. All this coupled with the humiliating wars in Caucasus and elsewhere, since the centripetal and centrifugal forces of integration or fragmentations came into the oscillatory play. Between 1989 and 1991, communist rule ended in country after country and the Warsaw Pact officially dissolved. Subsequently, the Gorbachev-Jeltsin Russia experienced the greatest geopolitical contraction of any major power in the modern era and one of the fastest ever in history. Still, Gorbachev-Jeltsin tandem managed to (re-)brand themselves domestically and internationally each got its own label of vodka.

[4] Many would say that, past the peak Ottoman times, the aggressive intrusion of Atlantic Europe with its nation-state concept, coupled with Central Europes obsessive control and lebensraum quest, has turned lands of a mild and tolerant people, these pivotal intellectual exchange-corridors of southeastern Europe and the Near East into a modern day Balkan powder keg. Miroslav Krleza famously remarked: It was us humans who transformed our good swine to a filthy pig.

[5] At the time of Vienna Congress, there were nearly a dozen of Italophone states and over three dozens of Germanophone entities 34 western German states + 4 free cities (Kleinstaaterei), Austria and Prussia. Potsdam conference concludes with only three Germanophone (+ Lichtenstein + Switzerland) and two Italophone states (+ Vatican).

[6] Why did the US join up Atlantic Europe against Central Europe in both WWs? Simply, siding up with Central Europe would have meant politico-military elimination of Atlantic Europe once and for all. In such an event, the US would have faced a single European, confrontation-potent, block of a formidable strategic-depth to engage with sooner or later. Eventually, Americans would have lost an interfering possibility of remaining the perfect balancer. The very same balancer role, the US inherited from the declining Britain.

[7] Farce or not, history of 1914 nearly repeated itself to its last detail in early 1990s. And, it was not for the first time. 25 and again 75 years after 1914 meaning that 1939. was nearly copied by the events of 9/11 in 1989. Hence, November 1989 was the third time that the western frontiers of Central Europe remained intact, while the dramatic change took place to its East. Besides Anschluss of Eastern Germany by the Western one, borders there in 1990s nominally remained the same, but many former neighbors to Central Europe have one by one disappeared for good from the political map of Eastern Europe.

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De-evolution of Europe The equation of Communism with Nazism (First Part) - Modern Ghana

The New York Times provided another unasked for encomium to Communism, this time by China correspondent Javier Hernandez, in Raising Fists and Hearts to Communism" on Thursday. He reported from Nanhu Lake, a sacred site for true believers, following a student and communist's "spiritual retreat:"

He was anxious about Chinas trade war with the United States. He was worried about the rise of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. So Liu Yuanrong, a lifelong member of the Chinese Communist Party, followed the advice of a friend: Go to the lake.

That would be Nanhu Lake, a cradle of Chinese communism in eastern China that in recent years has become a spiritual retreat for the partys more than 90 million members.

....

I vow to devote my life to defending communism, said Mr. Liu, a 57-year-old electronics trader from southern China, reciting a party oath. I vow to sacrifice everything for the party.

Nanhu Lake, which played host to the Chinese Communist Partys first congress nearly a century ago, has long been a staple of communist lore.

No mention of the atrocities and mass killing (in the millions) committed by Chairman Mao, and not a single discouraging word. Hernandez instead,calls the museum at the lake's propaganda, "a selective retelling of party history."

Hernandez himself is also prone to givinga selective retelling of Chinese Communism, saying they were merely "facing a series of challenges." Series of challenges is blandishment extraordinare: Nothing here about the Muslims in concentration camps.

Hernandez spoke with student Liu Yunlai, who probably didnt hurt his reputation with the authoritarian regime: Im attracted by the spirit of the communists, he added. Its like a faith. Others believe in Buddhism or Taoism. We believe in communism.

The Times has made a habit of whitewashing the Communist past as well as the Communist regimes still creaking along. Whitewashing the crimes of International Communism, as in its Red Century series on the Soviet era, is a recurring bad habit.

NewsBusters has noted the lengths the paper will go to minimize the atrocities of Communism. An October 2008 book review carried the astounding title "East Germany Had Its Charms, Crushed by Capitalism." A headline over a 1992 story on the last Soviet political prisoners being released read: "A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, but Also Serenity."

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NY Times' Latest Awful Whitewash: 'Raising Fists and Hearts to Communism' - NewsBusters

By 1968, global Communism was very much a threat to Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, a massive invasion of Warsaw Pact forces saw a revolution crushed under the communist boot. Eurocommunist parties were popping up in Spain, Finland, and Italy. In China, Mao Zedong had rejected reforms enacted by Deng Xiaoping and re-enacted the repressive policies that led to the Cultural Revolution there. Unlike the Americans, who faced the spread of global Communism with force, the Dutch decided to found the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands a group with which China cooperated.

The Chinese didn't know its pro-China party in the Netherlands was a run entirely by Dutch spies who just wanted information on Chinese intentions.

Beijing even paid for the party newspaper, also run by Dutch spies.

A Dutch intelligence agent named Pieter Boev set up the MLPN in 1968, gaining the trust of its Chinese Communist allies through the publication of its newspaper. Its timing was also fortuitous, as China and the Soviet Union had long before began to split in their view of what global Communism should look like. Since the MLPN embraced Maoist China and rejected the Soviet Union, that was even better for the Chairman. Using his MLPN, Boev was able to expand his influence deeper into the party in Beijing.

His supposedly 600-member Communist party in a deeply capitalist society was the toast of the Communist world while Boev ran the MLPN. In truth, there were only 12 members, but no one in the party or in the rest of the world knew that. Boev could go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and China welcomed him with open arms so much, Zhou Enlai even threw a banquet in his honor. More importantly, they would brief him on the inner workings of the Chinese mission at the Hague.

The math teacher who outsmarted global Communism.

After attending a Communist youth seminar in Moscow in 1955, Boev was recruited by the BVD, the Dutch intelligence service, to play up his Communist bona fides. He accepted and soon visited Beijing for a similar congress. The Sino-Soviet Split played right into the BVD's hands, and after he embraced Maoism, his fake party practically built itself. The Dutch were able to know everything about China's secret workings inside their country, and the Chinese paid for it, all of it orchestrated by Boev, who was never paid as a spy. He was a math teacher at an elementary school.

"I was invited to all the big events - Army Days, Anniversaries of the Republic, everything," Boev told the Guardian in 2004. "There were feasts in the Great Hall of the People and long articles in the People's Daily. And they gave us lots of money."

The secret was kept until after 2001, when a former BVD agent wrote a book about the agency's secret operations. Boev and his fake party were outed.

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How Dutch intelligence agents fooled Communists for almost 40 years - We Are The Mighty

Illustration by Matt Vee. (Courtesy of Penguin Random House)

Business so far this year has astonished even the most perennial optimists, wrote finance reporters E.K. Burger and A.M. Leinbach in June 1929. It wasnt true. That March had seen days of unsettling free-fall in the stock exchange: Burger and Leinbach were writing fiction in the pages of The Magazine of Wall Street, serving a narrative that refused to anticipate the nasty shocks that came four months later, when the stock market collapsed under its own lies and the Great Depression officially began.Ad Policy BOOKS IN REVIEW

Radical artists and writers, many of whom had been roused to politics by the Russian Revolution a decade prior, spent the years after the crash trying to create models of art that could reflect the economic circumstances of people around them. The plight of the suffering became a reliable theme in mainstream art and literature. Three and a half years into the Depression, the critic and fiction writer Michael Gold reviewed Union Square, a novel by the then-popular author Albert Halper. They say it is a proletarian novel, or better the proletarian novel, Gold wrote, but ladies and gentlemen, too bad. Union Square, which follows destitute itinerants living in and around the eponymous square, was just the stale Bohemianism already picked over by liberal novelists of the past. Gold saw the book as lacking social passion, merely synthetic, like a Hollywood movie. He understood that the novel was propped up by a system of inequality and exploitation. Gold excoriated those who claimed belief in freedom and fairness but shied away from saying as much in their books.

Two years after that novel was published, another book began to appear in the cheap cafeterias around 14th Street. As scholar Floyd Cheung notes, H.T. Tsiangs 1935 novel The Hanging on Union Square bore striking similarities to Halpers. (Each protagonist wanders around the same few blocks of Manhattan, encountering similar character archetypes along the way.) But Tsiang, unlike Halper, didnt shy from the label of proletarian literature. Tsiang pursued it past subtlety, literary realism, and marketability. No ones a hero, I think, one of his characters says. Were just workers! Gold sneered at the lack of politics in Halpers book, writing, Not a worker in the novel. Not a person who suffers as the masses suffer today. Not one bitter cry of rage against capitalism! Tsiang was ready to answer his challenge.

The Hanging on Union Square follows Mr. Nut, an aspiring businessman with just a nickel and a 10-cent check in his pocket. He spends his days ambling around Union Square, getting lightly swindled by his friend Mr. Wiseguy and pestered by communists pushing various party publications, like The Daily Worker. (Another pesterer is selling copies of his novel China Reda book Tsiang wrote and sold in the same cafs.) Though desperate for food and shelter, Mr. Nut furiously distances himself from the activists who offer him help and fraternity, insisting that he is a Capitalist, until he finds himself mixed up with the police. A black communist rushes to his defense, and the cops beat them both. The blood of the colored race and the blood of the white race that fell on the cement pavement were of one color, Tsiang writes. Bloodied and chastened, Nut realized also that Communists were not necessarily bad people. In effect, Hanging is a Knstlerroman for communism.

Tsiangs book is as densely populated as the neighborhood where it takes place, but characters with real names are few and far between, and the handful of names were given are more like labels: Miss Stubborn, an organizer for the Communist Party; Mr. System, her predatory former boss; Miss Digger, who likes getting men to spend their money; Mr. Wiseguy and Mr. Ratsky, two more bad guys. Mr. Nut, the wacky naf, is caught between all these figures as the conflict between workers and bosses escalates. Though his natural instinct is to hedge, hes forced to make decisions and take sides as the stakes of his choices become increasingly clear. Tsiang isnt shy about articulating these consequences, with scenes of elite debauchery (financial, sexual, moral) set in sharp contrast to the miseries of Depression-era New York, in an order that makes it obvious that one follows from the other.

Hanging takes place over a few days. Most of it follows Nut dipping in and out of cafs and potential places to spend a night. Tsiang keeps us updated on his location at all times, and Mr. Nut never strays far from the square where he begins and ends his adventure. We see New Yorks speakeasies, its movie theaters, its private clubs where the entertainment supposedly rivals that of Paris. Nut spends time in the apartments of a lonely poet, a sex-crazed book critic, a desperate mother, and a sadistic magnate. He joins political marches to the square and stumbles past assemblies to aid the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers in Alabama falsely accused of raping two white women. We see the frustrations of Communist Party bureaucracy, staffed by college-graduate sympathizers, the millionaires son[s] and well-known writers who see in their party membership an opportunity for publicity. Hanging offers a portrait of a New York City for the rich and the poor, the immigrant and the native-born, the newly homeless and the seasoned itinerant.

Tsiangs oddball style and plainspoken politics make his purpose clear: to live up to the calling of revolutionary literature and strip away the artifice of the bourgeois novel, which naturalizes the unnatural human relations and inhuman conditions of life under the free market. In a few decades, the CIA and instiutions like the Rockefeller Foundation would invest heavily in artists, magazines, and MFA programs to steer American art away from politics, social issues, and Soviet realism. But before American schoolchildren learned to show, not tell, Tsiang, Gold, and their cohort of proletarian writersincluding Langston Hughes, Agnes Smedley, and Richard Wrighttried to tell America what it really looked like.Related Article

Born in 1899 in China, Tsiang grew up in an era of revolution. In 1911, Sun Yat-Sen helped topple the 300-year-old Qing dynasty. As a young man, Tsiang joined Suns party, the Kuomintang, which soon split into conservative and communist-leaning factions. A member of the partys left wing, he hurried into exile after Chiang Kai-Shek took power, ducking into the United States through a loophole for students in the Chinese Exclusion Act. Tsiang attended Stanford, Columbia, and the New School without ever completing a degree. Instead, he spent his time agitating, editing a Chinese newspaper in the Bay Area and following the political struggles of workers in New Yorks Chinatown. Eventually, the combination of his political activity and disregard for the terms of his visa caught the attention of immigration authorities, and he was interned on Ellis Island for several months. He was spared from deportation after a letter-writing campaign by his friends and spent the rest of his life in America, under FBI surveillance. Until a few years ago, his most faithful readers were the federal agents on his case.

To the extent that Tsiang is remembered, its as a Chinese writer, not a proletarian one. As The New Yorkers Hua Hsu writes in his biography of Tsiang, A Floating Chinaman, Tsiangs career-long struggle was to get Americans to take the complexities of Chinese society seriously, in contrast to the sympathetic but sentimental depictions from Western writers like Pearl Buck. Hsu says Buck and her work haunted Tsiang throughout his life in America, especially her best-selling novel The Good Earth, which won her a Pulitzer and the Nobel. The veneer of naive good intentions that covered the books lazy stereotyping and colonial airs infuriated Tsiang, compounded by its rabid reception in America. Her novels immensely popular, flattened vision of China inspired many of his books most vicious passages. (In one particularly odd moment in Hanging, Miss Digger declares her intention to go to the Orient and conduct research, improving upon the work of an unnamed journalistclearly Buck.) Hanging was reissued this year as part of Penguins Asian Pacific American Heritage Month series, though apart from Miss Diggers speech theres very little mention of China or even Chinese Americans in it. Mr. Nut describes himself, defensively, as very Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic and Yankee. Hanging holds race, like everything else, at enough of a distance to make it unfamiliar. Though racism in the book is as real as capitalism, racial identity seems flexible with the right mind-set. (Mr. Wiseguy does facial exercises to make himself look more Aryan.)

Tsiangs relentless criticism often turned inward. Anonymous versions of the author make frequent appearances in his work as single-minded madmen hovering around societys margins. In a later novel, And China Has Hands, Tsiangs stand-ina fervent, irritating poetis tossed out of a public debating hall, where the topic of the night is What Is Proletarian Literature and Who Pays the Printing Bills? The poet is lonely, furious, and always marginal, vaguely aware that onlookers think hes embarrassing his Chinese peers. Its unmistakably Tsiang. Over the course of his life, he floated in and out of school, employment, social circles, political commitments, and his own novels. Both a desperate hanger-on and a bitter drifter, Tsiang had too much personality.

His books are filled with broad archetypes: Tsiangs characters are single-minded, personifying cardinal virtues and sins. They are greedy or slothful or brave or righteous. One may be a stand-in for the fight against racism, another for feminist struggle, a third for Chinese American labor rights. This substitution of type for character was in keeping with much leftist art in the first half of the century. Proletarian literature was stripped of the bourgeois ideologies scaffolding most cultural products, ideologies that only aestheticized unjust relations within the art and legitimized an unequal society in real life. This honesty took different forms, depending on the artists and their mediums. For novelists, it often meant sacrificing many of the qualities that defined the novel itself. As Raymond Williams argued, the concept of the proletarian novel took a while to find footing, as the central tensions of novels had been inheritance and propertied marriage. Working-class writers, even into the 20th century, were more likely to write memoirs or popular poetry, according to Williams.

And although its written as a novel, The Hanging on Union Square hews more closely to the conventions of drama. (In fact, Tsiang found more success when he staged it several years later.) It moves from spectacle to spectacle without dwelling too much on the interior. Poetic interludes conclude its first three acts, and each act has a refrain, repeated at the beginning of each scene. The poems are repetitive ditties; they seem meant to be put to music or read in a call-and-response with the reader. The climax of the novel is a literal dramathe titular hanging in Union Squarestaged by Mr. Wiseguy and Mr. System to solve the three problems they see facing Depression-era America: unemployment, sky-high suicide rates, and the escalating mania of the rich for entertainment.

The same problems preoccupied Tsiangs social-realist contemporariesthe Steinbecks and the dos Passosesbut unlike them, Tsiang had little interest in steely, self-serious misery. In the book, as in his life, he is constantly cheeky and self-deprecating. Not only did Tsiang refer to himself as an annoying peddler of his own books, but the original cover of Hanging resembled a madmans conversation with himself, Hsu writes. Its all text, no images: three words (YES, NO, and SO) printed large across the cover, with smaller italics legible on closer inspection, so that the cover reads YES the cover of a book is more of a book than the book is a book, I sayNO, and SO with no title or author name. The books first pages are full of tepid, bemused half-praise and rejection notices from publishers. Tsiang had trouble publishing his works and resorted, for the most part, to publishing them himself.

Editors, publishers, and even sympathetic friends were bewildered by Tsiangs eccentricities, his brashness in demanding recognition, his internationalist politics, and his relentless drive to joke, even at his own expense. Mr. System, Hangings central villain, bemoans how nowadays a poet writes as if he were doing bookkeeping. This, in fact, is exactly how Tsiang writes. His sentences account for their subject and verb without ambiguity, and he repeats himself when he wants to be clear. At one false plot peak, Mr. Nut ended the story literarily, non-propagandizingly and publishablybut of course, the book goes on, and the publishability of the book is lost.

Tsiangs politics suggest that the books focal points would be plot and characteryet, despite himself, Tsiangs manic spirit animates his voice. A potential romance between Mr. Nut and Miss Stubborn is perhaps the books most naturalistic plot point, sending Mr. Nut into a state of love-addled confusion. Untying tied the tie tighter, he muses. But like everything else, it ends with politics, reflected in Miss Stubborn. As a revolutionist, and as a communist, Stubborn was of the opinion that there was love for the biological reason, for the artistic reason, and for the political (revolutionary) reason. She has little interest in bourgeois gender conventions, which reduce women to objects. As an It, a girl had to be passive. As a revolutionist and as a communist, Stubborn felt she must overthrow this tradition and stand up and become She.

The idea is one to chew on, but its almost outcharmed by its deliverylove for the artistic reason! The parenthetical (revolutionary)! Stubborns determined description of herself as a revolutionist and as a Communist! Every aspect of the book, from the structure of its sentences to its narrative arc, is in service to its politicswhich are really in service to Tsiangs personality.

The assertiveness of the book cows its readers into believing that it doesnt vacillate wildly between poles. But the narrative coheres around its internal tensions, as when Tsiangs apparent allergy to sentiment runs up against his desire to depict the dire straits of poor families or when his mechanically plotted sentences and distaste for poetizing give way to startling lyric detaila stockingless girl, an undercover cop given away by his policemans neck, a husky cafeteria patron who sat at a corner table, enthroned.

After his radicalization at the hands of the police, Nut is more attentive to the suffering of the poor. Whereas he once preferred to think of himself as an out-of-work businessman who scorned those who, like him, could not make ends meet, he becomes a witness to inequality, a flneur of the proletariat who watches as people fail to connect with one another and families starve through a bitter winter.

Ordinary people have written, almost with religious awe, of the wondrous despair through which they lived in the 1930s, Vivian Gornick writes in The Romance of American Communism. Other, not so ordinary people have written of the equally wondrous spiritual exhilaration they experienced during the Thirties. In Hanging, Tsiang manages to convey the sense, echoed by party members at the time, that communism was a system that could orient its believers like none other. Tsiang scrupulously tracks Mr. Nuts location for us, but Nut knows where he is (and where hes going) because of the constant flow of peopleworkers, radicals, and the police chasing themto Union Square. The reader understands that this is what Tsiang believes communism can do for people: help locate themselves in society and imagine and act upon a path to a freer world.

Though the books formal aspects range from jarring to quaint to delightful, they all reflect the infectious freedom with which Tsiang wrote. His flinging disregard for the fashionable and the novelistic are thrilling, but so are the serious, deep convictions underlying them. For anyone with revolutionary sympathies, its an emotionally stirring book, proving that representation and interiority arent all that moves us; so can the eviction of a family named Stubborn, or an unnamed poet pleading for intimacy. Thats what Tsiang wanted, after all.

But theres also a despair in reading the book that Tsiang didnt anticipate: the feeling of a lost New York, a Union Square where thousands regularly gathered, lined with union buildings, the offices of The Daily Worker, and the dingy cafeterias where the Nuts and Stubborns of the world gathered. After the rallies and riots of the 1860s, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects of many of New Yorks great public spaces, redesigned the square to meet the public requirement of mass-meetings. Though they really intended it for military assemblies, New Yorkers took them at their word. Ten thousand workers gathered in the square to celebrate the first Labor Day in 1882.

Halper, the Union Square novelist whom Gold excoriated, remembered that in the early 1930s (when Tsiang was writing) there were weekly leftwing parades which frequently ended with clubbings by the police. On Saturday mornings I could see the mounted cops in the side streets, bunched together, resting, healthy-faced, chatting cheerfully before the afternoons action. The Daily Worker building was at that time covered in signs calling for class struggle and for people to Fight Police Terror, Unemployment, and War Preparations, and for the Defense of the Soviet Union. When you gathered for a demonstration at one end of the park, you could see those signs from any angle, along with the heads of the thousands of people alongside you.

Now, as Whole Foods and Barnes & Noble face off across the park, its impossible for protesters, when they gather, to see from one end of the plaza to the other. A thicket of cars surrounds the square. At the entrances to its interior stand barricades erected by the business-improvement district. Theyre covered in blue cloth, printed, like a bitter punchline in Hanging, with the words Welcome to Union Square. Tsiang would know better than to believe that fiction.

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H.T. Tsiang, the Flneur of Socialist Fiction - The Nation