(i) "'...Communism was popular among sailors in the twenties, when young Arne Torvald first shipped out.'" (p. 103)
(ii) "'...he was here in the Depression, when San Francisco was another fertile ground for the left wing.'" (ibid.)
(iii) Question: Did his wife's death push him into the Party?
Answer from Lauring: Yes, she was malnourished when pregnant and had pneumonia when giving birth.
An aside: Arne swore that the conditions causing his wife's death "'...would have been impossible in Russia.'" (ibid.) Yamamura replies by referring to the Ukrainian famine, Stalin's labor camps and the massacre in Budapest. My opinion: Arne is right that the conditions that killed his wife can be prevented and Yamamura is right that such conditions were not prevented in Stalin's Russia.
(iv) Torvald is an environmentalist in a particular sense of that word.
(v) His half empty bookshelves suggest that he hides Communist books when Stateside.
Lauring's defense of Torvald:
the crew know but do not care because he is a good officer and they do not want him debarred from US ports;
very few West European Communists are dangerous;
Arne is a Norwegian patriot who thinks, wrongly, that his country should be allied with the Soviet Union.
Yamamura recognizes the type of leftist that Lauring claims Arne is.
I dislike Yamamura's account of the McCarthy era. He grudgingly acknowledges that some people did get hurt and that overzealous bureaucrats "'...could make things a bit unpleasant...'" (p. 104) but at the same time, of course, he denigrates "'...a lot of intellectuals screaming from the housetops...'" (ibid.)
If people were being hurt and if bureaucrats were making things (just a little bit?) unpleasant, then there was indeed something to "scream" about.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Until at least the death of Brezhnev (after which the USSR started disintegrating), it would have been FOLLY for any country to voluntarily ally with the Soviet Union. Soviet "friendship" meant domination by Moscow and tyrannical rule by its puppets.
And there were famines in the newly founded USSR under Lenin as well, not just Stalin's Terror Famine of Ukraine, which he used to break Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule. Like it or not, Stalin was the faithful disciple of Lenin, extending and completing policies Lenin had started.
As for what Yamamura said about Joseph McCarthy, I agree more with him than with you. Massively researched books I have read, such as William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell's MCCARTHY AND HIS ENEMIES, amply bears out what Yamamura said about hysterical liberals "...screaming from the housetops." There were no Soviet style mass arrests, imprisonments, executions, gulags, etc., in the US. And there WERE traitors like Alger Hiss who spied for the USSR. However crudely and unnuancedly McCarthy may have made his accusations, he was right about that much. The problem was that many liberals were unwilling to admit that they had been deceived by people they liked or wanted to like.
Sean
Sean,
I can believe that Stalin used famine as a policy. If it could be shown that Lenin did that also, then that would change my view of Lenin. I think that Lenin wanted to bring about workers' control and also wanted self-determination for nations previously controlled by Russia, not continued control. Stalin reversed earlier policies.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm sorry, but I still disagree. If Lenin had actually been willing to let various parts of the Tsarist Empire break away, why didn't he? No, he did the exact opposite, yielding as little as he could (mainly Finland, the Baltic states, and the parts of Poland granted to Russia by the Congress of Vienna) and grabbing back, for example, Ukraine, Armenia, the rest of the Caucasus, Russian Central Asia, and even Mongolia (which had never been under Russian rule).
And Lenin never cared beans about "workers' control," what he desired was a dictatorship by the Communist Party. And he said so, many times, in his own writings. I also recalled Stirling's comments about how Lenin SEETHED with hatred for all who dared to oppose him. Borne out by Solzhenitsyn's extensive quotes from Lenin's works in the first volume of THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. Solzhenitsyn was discussing how "Ilyich's" shaped Soviet "law" quite deliberately as an instrument of tyranny. And the first gulags were authorized by "Ilyich."
Sean
Sean,
I recommend Lenin's STATE AND REVOLUTION, very brief, long unavailable in Russia probably because it completely contradicts what Stalin was doing. It explains workers' control and different meanings of "state."
I do not defend every territorial annexation especially if made under pressure during civil war and against military interventions but Lenin did clearly state the principle of national self-determination.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But, I don't care what Lenin SAID, only in what he DID, and said in his more candid, confidential private comments and letters. Which directly contradicted the propaganda in STATE AND REVOLUTION. And that "...principle of national self-determination" was never MEANT by Lenin, it was only spin and propaganda, a means for grasping after supreme power.
Sean
Kaor, Sean and Paul!
It may depend on just what you mean by using famine as a policy. The nascent Soviet Union under Lenin did create famine by confiscating whatever grain the peasants had, particularly in Ukraine, and torturing people to make them reveal where they had food hidden. This was done to obtain food for the Red Army and the cities, etc. under Bolshevik control. I haven’t studied the period enough to say whether Lenin went on record saying, “We will starve the peasants into submission”; he may have deliberately intended that, or may have regarded famine as a regrettable side effect of grabbing the food to feed the troops and win the Civil War. In the latter case, he may have been a shade less evil than Stalin, although I still would not admire him.
As to Joseph McCarthy, he was not, thank Heaven, in a position to order mass arrests and executions, and of course, there were actual Communists and Soviet spies to be concerned about. However, he was not merely crude and unnuanced; he slandered critics, and journalists who reported on him accurately, as Communists. People did lose their jobs, for example, because of false rumors started by McCarthy or by various smaller-scale imitators of his.
This was not only wrong in itself, but tended to discredit opposition to actual Communists and Communism.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
I too recalled how the tyrant Lenin confiscated grain from Russian peasants. I THINK it was both to feed the Red Army and to keep the cities quiet during the Civil War. AND to break resistance to Soviet rule at least in parts of the USSR. Stalin merely brought such a policy to its ruthlessly logical conclusion in crushing Ukraine. Which included the use of slander and false accusations. But I can't take a few people losing their jobs very seriously, not if when compared to the terror famines, mass arrests, imprisonments, and executions of the USSR under both Lenin and Stalin.
Ad astra and regard! Sean
But that is what I meant by Joseph McCarthy being crude and unnuanced in his accusations of there being Soviet agents in the US gov't.
Dang! I garbled my previous comment. The sentence below my farewell to Nicholas should have been placed before "But I can't...."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But I don't agree with comparing injustices which are both unjust!
Paul.
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