Let’s face facts: Compared to conservatives, leftists aren’t very good-looking, at least when you control for socioeconomic status. This is nowhere more obvious than when it comes to two very famous “First Daughters.” The difference between Ivanka Trump—even if she has had some work done—and Chelsea Clinton is striking.
Ivanka, Chelsea
This difference is also obvious if you compare those who attended pro-life and pro-choice rallies after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Exceptions notwithstanding, conservative men and women are better looking. Conservative men are also more muscular and taller.
British evolutionary psychologist and (possibly unwitting) comedian Prof. Edward Dutton spoke about it at length on his YouTube channel, The Jolly Heretic, which promotes itself as an online English “pub.”
Dutton, who has written many times for VDARE.com, began Goblins: Why Are Extreme Leftists Often So Hideously Unattractive? by dressing as a goblin while pretending to be a not-very-easy-on-the-eye) leader of “Hope Not Hate.”
But then we get to the meat of it: Dutton’s video sets out the growing body of academic studies that prove that Rightists are objectively better-looking—in terms of facial symmetry and other traits regarded as attractive—than Leftists. It’s something we kind of all know, but it’s amazing to see it so clearly proved.
A study published in 2017 in Politics and the Life Sciences found that, controlling for socioeconomic status, white people rated as more attractive in an American sample were more likely to be “conservative” and “Republican.” The less attractive were more likely to be “liberal” and “Democrat” [Effects of physical attractiveness on political beliefs, by Rolfe Daus Peterson and Carl L Palmer, Fall].
Another study published the same year looked at Rightist and Leftist politicians in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia and found that “politicians on the right look more beautiful” [The Right Look: Conservative Politicians Look Better and Voters Reward It, by Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl, and Panu Poutvaara, Journal of Public Economics, February, 2017].
And voters, perhaps unconsciously, know this. The authors say they “use beauty as a cue for conservatism in low-information elections.” In other words, they assume that the more attractive candidate is more likely to be conservative.
Even more fascinating, if you regard yourself as better looking, you become more conservative. Stanford University study found that priming people to think that they were more attractive increased their support for inequality, whereas priming people to think that they were physically unattractive increased their support for equality [Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Thinking that one is attractive increases the tendency to support inequality, by Peter Belmi and Margaret Neale, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2014]. So, if you hypnotize a person into believing that she is ugly, then she becomes more liberal, whereas if you hypnotize a person into believing she is good-looking, she becomes conservative.
But conservatives aren’t just better-looking. Another study from 2017, this time in Evolution and Human Behavior, found that conservative men not only have more attractive and manly faces than leftist men, but also more muscular bodies [Is sociopolitical egalitarianism related to bodily and facial formidability in men?, by Michael E. Price, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, James Sidnaius, and Nicholas Pound, September]. Put simply, in the terms of the Chad-Virgin Twitter meme, conservative men are “Chads;” Leftist men are “Virgins.” [The Virgin vs Chad meme, explained, Daily Dot, November 7, 2017]
Unsurprisingly, conservative men are also taller than Leftist men. A study based on a large sample and published in the British Journal of Political Science reported that “taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative Party, support conservative policies and vote Conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6 per cent” [Height, Income and Voting, by Raj Arunachalam and Sara Watson, October 2018].
To understand this relationship, Dutton presents a number of related findings. Conservatives have better mental health than Leftists. But the direction of causation, a study published just last month showed, is the opposite of what we might expect. Becoming a conservative, and doing “conservative” things like going to church or being involved in civic life, does not make people significantly more mentally healthy. Rather, people who already have good mental health are more likely to be conservative—implying that the mechanism is strongly genetic [A Longitudinal Test of the Conservative-Liberal Well-Being Gap, Salvador Vargas Salfate, Sammyh S. Khan, James H. Liu, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, July 7, 2022].
Additionally Dutton presents research, also published in Personality and Social Psychology, implying that we are instinctively conservative; conservatism, in other words, is our evolutionary norm [Low-Effort Thoughts Promote Political Conservatism by Christian S. Crandall, Jeffrey A. Goodman, and John C. Blanchar, March 16, 2012]. We become more conservative when we act impulsively, when we are stressed and when we are drunk, meaning that our inhibitions are down.
Drawing on the Moral Foundations model of Jonathan Haidt, he argues that we have five moral foundations, reflecting the fact that we are pack animals competing for status within the pack’s hierarchy.
The group-binding foundations are Obedience to Authority, In-group Loyalty and Sanctity vs. Disgust, the latter playing a significant part in wanting to repel outsiders. The “Individualizing” foundations are “Equality”—if you bring everyone down to your level then you get proportionately more—and “Harm Avoidance,” which also avoids harm to you.
Liberal Health Dictators Around the World Look Unhealthy, Ugly
Conservatives are about equal on all five moral foundations. Leftists are high on individualizing foundations but low on binding foundations. In other words, Leftists are selfish and virtue-signal about “equality,” tactics in a covert strategy to attain power.
Dutton argues that the evolutionary “norm” is, therefore, conservatism. Until the Industrial Revolution, we were under “harsh Darwinian selection” and the child mortality rate was about 50%. We were also under group selection; the more group-oriented tended to triumph. With the collapse of child mortality to 1 percent, we saw the rise of genetically sick people who would have died as infants under harsher conditions.
In that about 84 percent of genes relate to brain functioning, the brain is a massive target for mutation. So, if you have “mutant genes of the body”—leading to a poor immune system—you will certainly have them in the mind.
Thus, Leftists desire power over everyone else and deeply hate those they see as powerful. Or maybe depression makes Leftists unhappy. They cope with this by telling themselves that they’re morally superior to everyone else, turning them into Narcissistic Woke campaigners.
Either way, this mutant psychology goes together with general “high mutational load.” Using disproportionately more “bioenergetic resources” to fight off disease because of weak immunity, Leftists cannot produce a symmetrical, good-looking face, cannot produce much muscle, and cannot reach phenotypic maximum height. (Dutton, however, concedes that an environmental element might play a role: Short, ugly, weak people are bullied as children, which elevates mental instability).
So, there you have it. Woke people, science shows, are as ugly as we thought they were. And a key reason is that, both mentally and physically, they are mutants who wouldn’t have survived infancy without the scientific breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution.
Ernest Hemingway se rendait dans le sud de la France depuis Paris dans les années 1920 et sa femme voyageait séparément pour le rencontrer. Elle avait une valise pleine d’histoires d’Hemingway. Quelqu’un a volé la valise dans le train ou à la gare en France. Qu’est-ce que le voleur a pensé lorsqu’il est arrivé dans un endroit sûr et a ouvert le butin capturé. Je crois qu’Hemingway a fait ses premiers brouillons sur une machine à écrire, donc ce voler regardait des pages en anglais… quoi ? Peut avoir semblé sans valeur. C’était à l’époque où Hemingway était inconnu et avant son succès “Farewell To Arms”. Qu’est-il arrivé à ces histoires. Hemingway a dit que c’était probablement une bonne chose pour lui en tant qu’écrivain parce que cela l’a fait recommencer avec de nouvelles histoires.
Pour une raison étrange, cette valise pleine d’histoires en France surgit dans mon esprit de temps en temps. J’imagine quelqu’un se présenter avec la découverte de ces histoires inédites d’un écrivain aussi remarquable. Ou, je fantasme sur la création d’histoires de canular Hemingway sur du vieux papier et découvrir à quoi ressemblait cette valise et annoncer la “découverte” des histoires.
J’étais à Paris, en France, en tant qu’étudiant en 1970. À cette époque, les livres en français étaient très chers et un peu difficiles à obtenir aux États-Unis. Donc, quand je partais pour retourner aux États-Unis, j’avais ce que je considérais comme un trésor de livres en français qui remplissait une grande valise. J’ai encore ces livres. À l’autre bout du métro, près de chez moi, se trouve Harvard Square, où je suis allé une fois chercher des livres français chez les libraires de langues étrangères de Schoenhoff. Les livres français y semblaient toujours si chers. J’allais faire du lèche-vitrine et je me rappelais ce que j’aurais pu avoir à la maison il y a quelques décennies. Je me souviens d’avoir feuilleté une impression spéciale du premier Tin Tin qui coûtait 70 $. Ce travail dans une édition plus petite, ou simplement en ligne, coûte maintenant environ 12 $. J’ai une idée à moitié cuite d’acheter une copie pour passer d’une histoire de socialisme anti-soviétique ne peut pas fonctionner à une histoire anti-stalinienne montrant la lutte entre les léninistes/trotskystes et les staliniens en 1928 en Russie.
J’ai tous les livres que j’ai apportés dans une valise de l’autre côté de l’océan depuis la France il y a toutes ces années sur une étagère de mon salon. Pendant les confinements et confinements liés au COVID j’ai lu La Peste d’Albert Camus.
J’ai descendu le livre de l’étagère haute avec les livres de poche français et je l’ai placé sur le rebord de ma fenêtre. J’ai aussi pris La Bas, et Voyage Au But De La Nuit. Les trois livres étaient à la fenêtre et j’ai pris une photo avec mon téléphone puis je l’ai mise en ligne sur Reddit. Je pense que c’était r/France, ou r/French Literature, ou quelque chose en rapport ou quoi que ce soit qui m’ait plu sur le moment. J’ai eu plus de deux mille vues et beaucoup de “j’aime”. Je me sentais un peu moins seul dans cette tempête, et aussi comme si j’étais une infime partie du flux de mots et d’histoires à Paris, en France.
Puis, il y a quelques semaines, j’ai reçu un étrange message direct de quelqu’un en français me demandant où dans le monde j’avais obtenu ces livres ?
Je les ai eu à Paris, France.
Il m’est apparu que j’avais une valise magique de France avec un trésor d’histoires. J’étais un voyageur temporel aussi sûr que n’importe quel personnage d’une aventure de Jules Verne. Ma valise et moi sommes d’étranges visiteurs du passé… exigeant une attention et apparemment des explications sur l’endroit d’où nous venons dans le monde.
Eh bien, c’est ma planète natale, juste dans le passé.
ENGLISH SUBTITLES. SYNOPSIS: Vladimir Bortko has become the first Russian film director to start shooting of renowned Bulgakov’s novel and not to stop half-way. All the others Russian directors once engaged in the production of “Master and Margaret” have actually turned out to be unable to finalize their projects. The rumors say, it is due to some mysticism… The “Master and Margaret” begins with two story lines: the Devil and his retinue show up to make mischief in 1930’s Moscow while Matthew the Evangelist attempts to uncover the truth about Pontius Pilate and the Crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem in A. D. 33. Halfway through the novel, Bulgakov unveils a third story line set in Moscow, in which the love-stricken Margarita bargains with the Devil to be reunited with her lover, the Master, a tormented writer-hero who pines away in an insane asylum. Bulgakov gradually weaves the three scenarios together, all the while exercising devilish lampoonery and wit to satirize Soviet life under Stalin. Because public discussions of religion and critiques of the government had long been punishable by a trip to the gulag, the themes addressed in “Master and Margaret” very rarely surfaced in the Soviet Union: many Soviet citizens read the Gospel story for the first time in Bulgakov’s narrative.
…………………………………..
………………
4 Sept 2022
I have been listening to the audio book in English and French and have the text in French to ‘The Master and Margarita.’ I just finished the English audio book. I looked at the Wikipedia page about the work. I wanted to get my first impressions from the work itself. I knew that the book was written around 1936. Lenin had been dead for a decade and Trotsky and the other Leninists had lost to the bureaucratic ‘practical’ Stalinists and their careerist apparatchiks. So… The Devil had come to town. Moscow does not believe in tears, but many still shed them.
…………………
So… I did look up the Wikipedia to see what was written there after my first complete listen to the work.
I have spent a lot of time over the last five years or so reading and studying books by people who said that Jesus never existed. There is simply no evidence. A few lines inserted out of sync into ancient texts. There were books in the 19th and early 20th century that were asserting the same ideas without threat of being executed by the religious inquisition. The Bolsheviks and the USSR made the works questioning the very historical existence of any ‘Jesus’ who started Christianity widely available, and under Stalinist control became robotically compulsory. So… This book has a counter answer. God may not exist, but it seems that the Devil does. In human form. I would call it Stalinism.
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Мастер и Маргарита) is a novel by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940 during Stalin‘s regime. A censored version was published in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967, after the writer’s death. The manuscript was not published as a book until 1967, in Paris. A samizdat version circulated that included parts cut out by official censors, and these were incorporated in a 1969 version published in Frankfurt. The novel has since been published in several languages and editions.
The story concerns a visit by the devil to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. The Master and Margarita combines supernatural elements with satiricaldark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying categorization within a single genre. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, as well as the foremost of Soviet satires.[1][2]
Mikhail Bulgakov was a playwright and author. He started writing the novel in 1928, but burned the first manuscript in 1930 (just as his character The Master did) as he could not see a future as a writer in the Soviet Union at a time of widespread political repression.[3] He restarted the novel in 1931. In the early 1920s, Bulgakov had visited an editorial meeting of an atheist journal. He is believed to have drawn from this to create the Walpurgis Night ball of the novel.[4] He completed his second draft in 1936, by which point he had devised the major plot lines of the final version. He wrote another four versions. When Bulgakov stopped writing four weeks before his death in 1940, the novel had some unfinished sentences and loose ends.
A censored version, with about 12 percent of the text removed and more changed, was first published in Moskva magazine (no. 11, 1966 and no. 1, 1967).[5] A manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to Paris, where the YMCA Press, celebrated for publishing the banned work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published the first book edition in 1967.[6] The text, as published in the magazine Moskva in 1968, was swiftly translated into Estonian, remaining for decades the only printed edition of the novel in book form in the Soviet Union.[7] The original text of all the omitted and changed parts, with indications of the places of modification, was printed and distributed by hand in the Soviet Union (in the dissident practice known as samizdat). In 1969, the publisher Posev (Frankfurt) printed a version produced with the aid of these inserts.
In the Soviet Union, the novel was first published in book form in Estonian in 1968 with some passages edited out. The first complete version, prepared by Anna Sahakyants, was published in Russian by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973. This was based on Bulgakov’s last 1940 version, as proofread by the publisher. This version remained the canonical edition until 1989. The last version, based on all available manuscripts, was prepared by Lidiya Yanovskaya.
The novel has two settings. The first is Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears at Patriarch’s Ponds as Professor Woland. He is accompanied by Koroviev, a grotesquely dressed valet; Behemoth, a black cat; Azazello, a hitman; and Hella, a female vampire. They target the literary elite and Massolit, their trade union,[note 1] whose headquarters is Griboyedov House. Massolit consists of corrupt social climbers and their women, bureaucrats, profiteers, and cynics. The second setting is the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate: Pilate’s trial of Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth), his recognition of an affinity with (and spiritual need for) Yeshua, and his reluctant acquiescence to Yeshua’s execution.
Part one opens with a confrontation between Berlioz (the head of Massolit) and Woland, who prophesies that Berlioz will die later that evening. Although Berlioz dismisses the prophecy as insane raving, he dies as the professor predicted. His death prophecy is witnessed by Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, a young, enthusiastic, modern poet who uses the pen nameBezdomny (“homeless”). His nom de plume alludes to Maxim Gorky (Maxim the Bitter), Demyan Bedny (Demyan the Poor), and Michail Golodny (Michail the Hungry). His futile attempts to capture the “gang” (Woland and his entourage) and his warnings about their evil nature land Ivan in a lunatic asylum, where he is introduced to the Master, an embittered author. The rejection of his novel about Pontius Pilate and Christ led the Master to burn his manuscript in despair and turn his back on Margarita, his devoted lover.
The novel’s first part includes satirical depictions of Massolit and Griboyedov House; Satan’s magic show at a variety theatre, satirizing the vanity, greed, and gullibility of the new elite; and Woland and his retinue appropriating Berlioz’s apartment after his death. (Apartments – scarce in Moscow – were controlled by the state, and Bulgakov based the novel’s apartment on his own.)
Part two introduces Margarita, the Master’s mistress, who refuses to despair of her lover and his work. Azazello gives her a magical skin ointment and invites her to the Devil’s midnight Good Friday ball, where Woland gives her the chance to become a witch.
Margarita enters the realm of night and learns to fly and control her unleashed passions. Natasha, her maid, accompanies her as they fly over the Soviet Union‘s deep forests and rivers. Margarita bathes and returns to Moscow with Azazello as the hostess of Satan’s spring ball. At Koroviev’s side, she welcomes dark historical figures as they arrive from Hell.
Margarita survives the ordeal, and Satan offers to grant her deepest wish and she asks for another person, she asks to free a woman she met at the ball from eternal punishment. The woman, who had been raped, murdered the child; her punishment was to wake each morning next to the handkerchief she used to smother it. Satan tells Margarita that she liberated the woman, and still has a wish to claim from him. She asks for the Master to be delivered to her and he appears, dazed and thinking he is still in the lunatic asylum. They are returned to the basement apartment which had been their love nest.
Matthew Levi delivers the verdict to Woland: the reunited couple will be sent to the afterlife. Azazello brings them a gift from Woland: a bottle of Pontius Pilate’s (poisoned) wine. The Master and Margarita die; Azazello brings their souls to Satan and his retinue (awaiting them on horseback on a Moscow rooftop), and they fly away into the unknown, as cupolas and windows burn in the setting sun, leaving Earth behind and traveling into dark cosmic space. The Master and Margarita will spend eternity together in a shady, pleasant region resembling Dante Alighieri‘s Limbo, in a house under flowering cherry trees.
Woland and his retinue, including the Master and Margarita, become pure spirits. Moscow’s authorities attribute its strange events to hysteria and mass hypnosis. In the final chapter, Woland tells the Master to finish his novel about Pontius Pilate – condemned by cowardice to limbo for eternity. The Master shouts “You are free! He is waiting for you!”; Pontius Pilate is freed, walking and talking with the Yeshua whose spirit and philosophy he had secretly admired. Moscow is now peaceful, although some experience great disquiet every May full moon. Ivan Ponyrev becomes a professor of philosophy, but he does not write poetry anymore.
Some critics suggest that Bulgakov was responding to poets and writers who he believed were spreading atheist propaganda in the Soviet Union, and denying Jesus Christ as a historical person. He particularly objected to the anti-religious poems of Demyan Bedny. The novel can be seen as a rebuke to the aggressively “godless people.” There is justification in both the Moscow and Judaea sections of the novel for the entire image of the devil. Bulgakov uses characters from Jewish demonology as a retort to the denial of God in the USSR.[citation needed]
Literary critic and assistant professor at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Nadezhda Dozhdikova notes that the image of Jesus as a harmless madman presented in ″Master and Margarita″ has its source in the literature of the USSR of the 1920s, which, following the tradition of the demythologization of Jesus in the works of Strauss, Renan, Nietzsche and Binet-Sanglé, put forward two main themes – mental illness and deception. The mythological option, namely the denial of the existence of Jesus, only prevailed in the Soviet propaganda at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.[8]
Occlusive interpretation
Bulgakov portrays evil as being as inseparable from our world as light is from darkness. Both Satan and Jesus Christ dwell mostly inside people. Jesus was unable to see Judas’ treachery, despite Pilate’s hints, because he saw only good in people. He couldn’t protect himself, because he didn’t know how, nor from whom. This interpretation presumes that Bulgakov had his own vision of Tolstoy‘s idea of resistance to evil through non-violence, by creating this image of Yeshua.[citation needed]
On 24 April 1935, Bulgakov was among the invited guests who attended the Spring Festival at Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, hosted by Ambassador William Bullitt. Critics believe Bulgakov drew from this extravagant event for his novel. In the middle of the Great Depression and Stalinist repression, Bullitt had instructed his staff to create an event that would surpass every other Embassy party in Moscow’s history. The decorations included a forest of ten young birch trees in the chandelier room; a dining room table covered with Finnish tulips; a lawn made of chicory grown on wet felt; a fishnet aviary filled with pheasants, parakeets, and one hundred zebra finches, on loan from the Moscow Zoo; and a menagerie including several mountain goats, a dozen white roosters, and a baby bear.[9]
The festival lasted until the early hours of the morning. The bear became drunk on champagne given to him by Karl Radek. In the early morning hours, the zebra finches escaped from the aviary and perched below the ceilings around the house.
In his novel, Bulgakov featured the Spring Ball of the Full Moon, considered to be one of the most memorable episodes.[10] On 29 October 2010, seventy-five years after the original ball, John Beyrle, U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, hosted an Enchanted Ball at Spaso House, recreating the spirit of the original ball as a tribute to Ambassador Bullitt and Bulgakov.[11]
The MasterAn author who wrote a novel about the meeting of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth), which was rejected by the Soviet literary bureaucracy, ruining his career. He is “detained for questioning” for three months by the secret police because of a false report by an unscrupulous neighbor. Later, he is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where Bezdomny meets him. Little else is given about this character’s past other than his belief that his life began to have meaning when he met Margarita.MargaritaThe Master’s lover. Trapped in a passionless marriage, she devoted herself to the Master, whom she believes to be dead. She appears briefly in the first half of the novel, but is not referred to by name until the second half, when she serves as the hostess of Satan’s Grand Ball on Walpurgis Night. Her character is believed to have been inspired by Bulgakov’s last wife, whom he called “my Margarita”.[citation needed] He may also have been influenced by Faust‘s Gretchen, whose full name is Margarita, as well as by Queen Marguerite de Valois. The latter is featured as the main character of the opera Les Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer, which Bulgakov particularly enjoyed, and Alexandre Dumas‘ novel, La Reine Margot. In these accounts, the queen is portrayed as daring and passionate.Mikhail Alexandrovich BerliozHead of the literary bureaucracy MASSOLIT. He bears the last name (Берлиоз) of French composer Hector Berlioz, who wrote the opera The Damnation of Faust. Berlioz insists that the Gospel Jesus was a mythical figure with no historical basis. Woland predicts that he will be decapitated by a young Soviet woman, which comes to pass as he gets run over by a tram.Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov (Bezdomny)A young, aspiring poet. His pen name, Bezdomny (Иван Бездомный), means “homeless”. Initially a willing tool of the MASSOLIT apparatus, he is transformed by the events of the novel. He witnesses Berlioz’s death and nearly goes mad, but later meets The Master in an asylum where he decides to stop writing poetry.Stephan Bogdanovich LikhodeyevDirector of the Variety Theatre and Berlioz’s roommate, often called by the diminutive name Styopa (Stepa). His surname is derived from the Russian word for “malfeasant”. For his wicked deeds (he denounced at least five innocent people as spies so that he and Berlioz could grab their multi-bedroom apartment), he is magically teleported to Yalta, thereby freeing up the stolen apartment for Woland and his retinue.Grigory Danilovich RimskyTreasurer of the Variety Theatre. On the night of Woland’s performance, Rimsky is ambushed by Varenukha (who has been turned into a vampire by Woland’s gang) and Hella. He barely escapes the encounter and flees to the train station to get out of the city.Ivan Savelyevich VarenukhaHouse-manager of the Variety Theatre, whose surname refers to a traditional alcoholic fruit-punch resembling mulled wine. He is turned into a creature of darkness but is forgiven by the end of Walpurgis Night, restoring his humanity.Natasha (Natalia Prokofyevna)Margarita’s young maid, later turned into a witch.Nikanor Ivanovich BosoyChairman of the House Committee at 302A Sadovaya Street (the former residence of Berlioz). For his greed and trickery, he is deceived by Korovyev and later arrested.
WolandWoland (Воланд, also spelled as Voland) is Satan in the disguise of a “foreign professor” who is “in Moscow to present a performance of ‘black magic’ and then expose its machinations”. Woland instead exposes the greed and bourgeois behaviour of the spectators themselves. Woland is also mentioned in Faust when Mephistopheles announces to the witches to beware because ‘Squire Voland is here’.BehemothAn enormous demonic black cat (said to be as big as a hog) who speaks, walks on two legs, and can transform into human shape for brief periods of time. He has a penchant for chess, vodka, pistols, and obnoxious sarcasm. He is evidently the least-respected member of Woland’s team – Margarita boldly takes to slapping Behemoth on the head after one of his many ill-timed jokes, without fear of reaction. In the last chapters, it appears that Behemoth is a demon pageboy, the best clown in the world. His name (Бегемот) refers to both the Biblical monster and the Russian word for hippopotamus.KorovyevAlso known as Fagotto (Фагот, meaning “bassoon” in Russian and other languages), he’s described as an “ex-choirmaster”, perhaps implying that he was once a member of an angelic choir. He is Woland’s assistant and translator, and is capable of creating any illusion. Unlike Behemoth and Azazello, he doesn’t use violence at any point. Like Behemoth, his true form is revealed at the end: a never-smiling dark knight. In penance for a poorly made joke he was forced to assume the role of a jester; he paid off his debt by serving Satan on his Moscow journey.AzazelloAzazello (Азазелло) is a menacing, fanged, and wall-eyed member of Woland’s retinue who acts as a messenger and assassin. His name may be a reference to Azazel, the fallen angel who taught people to make weapons and jewelry, and taught women the “sinful art” of painting their faces (mentioned in the pseudepigraphalBook of Enoch 8:1–3). He gives a magical cream to Margarita. He transforms into his real shape in the end: a pale-faced demon with black empty eyes.HellaHella (Гелла) is a beautiful, redheaded succubus. She serves as maid to Woland and his retinue. She is described as being “perfect, were it not for a purple scar on her neck”, suggesting that she is also a vampire.
Pontius PilateThe Roman Procurator of Judaea (a governor of a small province). The historical Pontius Pilate was the Prefect of Judaea, not the procurator. This fact was not widely known until after Bulgakov’s death. He suffers terribly from migraines and loves only his dog.Yeshua Ha-NotsriJesus the Nazarene (Иешуа га-Ноцри), a wanderer or “mad philosopher”, as Pilate calls him. His name in Hebrew is said to mean either “Jesus who belongs to the Nazarene sect” or “Jesus who is from a place called Nazareth”, though some commentators dispute the latter interpretation.[12] In the Master’s version, Yeshua describes himself as an orphan (he says “some say that my father was a Syrian“), calls everybody (even a torturer) “kind man”, denies doing miracles, and has one full-time “Apostle”, not twelve, among other departures from the Gospels and mainstream Christian tradition. In the Master’s novel there is not a hint of the cleansing of the Temple or cursing the fig tree. The atheist regime of the novel still considers this Jesus to be offensive.Aphranius(or Afranius). Head of the Roman Secret Service in Judaea. That character was later an inspiration for the 1995 novel The Gospel of Afranius by Kirill Eskov.NizaAphranius’s henchwoman, who entices Judas to his death.Levi MatveiLevite, former tax collector, follower of Yeshua. Levi is introduced as a semi-fictionalized character in the Master’s novel, but toward the end of The Master and Margarita, the “historical” Matthew of the Gospel appears in Moscow to deliver a message from Yeshua to Woland.CaiaphasPolitically savvy High Priest of Judaea. Caiaphas supports the execution of Yeshua in order to “protect” the status quo ante religion, and his own status as the Chief of the Sanhedrin, from the influence of Yeshua’s preachings and followers. He is considerably more aggressive towards Pilate than most accounts, and seems unconcerned by the other man’s senior status.Judas IscariotA spy/informant hired by Caiaphas to assist the authorities in finding and arresting Yeshua. In contrast to the Gospels’ version, in which Judas is a long-time member of Jesus’s “inner circle” of Apostles, Bulgakov’s Judas (of Karioth) meets Yeshua for the first time less than 48 hours before betraying him. He is paid off by Caiaphas, but is later assassinated on Pilate’s orders for his role in Yeshua’s death.
The novel deals with the interplay of good and evil, innocence and guilt, courage and cowardice, exploring such issues as the responsibility towards truth when authority would deny it, and freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. Love and sensuality are also dominant themes in the novel.[13]
Margarita’s devotional love for the Master leads her to leave her husband, but she emerges victorious. Her spiritual union with the Master is also a sexual one. The novel is a riot of sensual impressions, but the emptiness of sensual gratification without love is emphasized in the satirical passages. Rejecting sensuality for the sake of empty respectability is pilloried in the figure of Nikolai Ivanovich, who becomes Natasha’s hog-broomstick.
The interplay of fire, water, destruction, and other natural forces provides a constant accompaniment to the events of the novel, as do light and darkness, noise and silence, sun and moon, storms and tranquility, and other powerful polarities. There is a complex relationship between Jerusalem and Moscow throughout the novel, sometimes polyphony, sometimes counterpoint.
The novel is deeply influenced by Goethe‘s Faust,[14] and its themes of cowardice, trust, intellectual curiosity, and redemption are prominent. It can be read on many different levels, as hilarious slapstick, deep philosophical allegory, and biting socio-political satire critical of not just the Soviet system but also the superficiality and vanity of modern life in general.[15]Jazz is presented with an ambivalent fascination and revulsion. But the novel is full of modern elements, such as the model asylum, radio, street and shopping lights, cars, lorries, trams, and air travel. There is little evident nostalgia for any “good old days” – the only figure who mentions Tsarist Russia is Satan. It also has strong elements of what in the later 20th century was called magic realism.
The novel is influenced by the Faust legend, particularly the first part of the Goetheinterpretation, The Devil’s Pact, which goes back to the 4th century; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (where in the last act the hero cannot burn his manuscript or receive forgiveness from a loving God); and the libretto of the opera whose music was composed by Charles Gounod. Also of influence is Louis Hector Berlioz who wrote the opera La damnation de Faust. In this opera there are four characters: Faust (tenor), the devil Méphistophélès (baritone), Marguerite (mezzo-soprano) and Brander (bass). And also the Symphonie Fantastique where the hero dreams of his own decapitation and attending a witches’ sabbath.
Satirical poetics of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are seen as an influence, as is the case in other Bulgakov novels. Bulgakov perceived and embodied the principles of Gogol’s and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s world perception through the comic mixing of absurd, ghostly and real. Technical progress and the rapid development of mechanized production in the 20th century, combined with the satirical motive of primitivism, characteristic of Russian literature, left an imprint on the nature of Bulgakov’s grotesque.[16]
John Dougherty’s 2017 version for Russian Tumble [24]
Sergei Khramtsov-Templar’s 2000 version (non-published, catalogued with the Library of Congress)
The early translation by Glenny runs more smoothly than that of the modern translations; some Russian-speaking readers consider it to be the only one creating the desired effect, though it may take liberties with the text.[citation needed] The modern translators pay for their attempted closeness by losing idiomatic flow.[citation needed] Literary writer Kevin Moss considers the early translations by Ginsburg and Glenny to be hurried, and lacking much critical depth.[25] As an example, he claims that the more idiomatic translations miss Bulgakov’s “crucial” reference to the devil in Berlioz’s thoughts (original: “Пожалуй, пора бросить все к черту и в Кисловодск…”[26]):
“I ought to drop everything and run down to Kislovodsk.” (Ginsburg)
“I think it’s time to chuck everything up and go and take the waters at Kislovodsk.” (Glenny)
“It’s time to throw everything to the devil and go off to Kislovodsk.” (Burgin and Tiernan O’Connor)
“It’s time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk.” (Pevear and Volokhonsky)
“To hell with everything, it’s time to take that Kislovodsk vacation.” (Karpelson)
“It’s time to let everything go to the devil and be off to Kislovodsk.” (Aplin)
“It’s time to throw it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk.” (John Dougherty)
Several literary critics hailed the Burgin/Tiernan O’Connor translation as the most accurate and complete English translation, particularly when read in tandem with the matching annotations by Bulgakov’s biographer, Ellendea Proffer.[27] However, these judgements predate translations by Pevear & Volokhonsky, Karpelson, Aplin, and Dougherty. The Karpelson translation, even when republished in the UK by Wordsworth, has not been Anglicised, and retains North American spellings and idioms.
The book was listed in Le Monde‘s 100 Books of the Century. Also, when asked by Tyler Cowen, “What’s your favorite novel?” the technologist Peter Thiel answered, “If you want something a little more intellectual, it’s probably the Bulgakov novel The Master and Margarita where the devil shows up in Stalinist Russia, and succeeds, and gives everybody what they want, and everything goes haywire. It’s hard, because no one believes he’s real.”[28]
A memorable and much-quoted line in The Master and Margarita is: “manuscripts don’t burn” (рукописи не горят). The Master is a writer who is plagued both by his own mental problems and the harsh political criticism faced by most Soviet writers in 1930s Moscow in the Stalinist Soviet Union[citation needed] He burns his treasured manuscript in an effort to cleanse his mind from the troubles the work has brought him. When they finally meet, Woland asks to see the Master’s novel; the Master apologizes for not being able to do so, as he had burnt it. Woland to him saying, “You can’t have done. Manuscripts don’t burn.” There is a deeply autobiographical element reflected in this passage. Bulgakov burned an early copy of The Master and Margarita for much the same reasons as he expresses in the novel. Also this may refer to Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus where the hero, deviating from previous tales of ‘The Devil’s Pact’, is unable to burn his books or repent to a merciful God.
In Moscow, two museums honor the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov and The Master and Margarita. Both are located in Bulgakov’s former apartment building on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, No. 10. Since the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union, the building has become a gathering spot for Bulgakov fans, as well as Moscow-based Satanist groups. Over the years they have filled the walls with graffiti. The best drawings were usually kept as the walls were repainted, so that several layers of different colored paints could be seen around them. In 2003, all of the numerous paintings, quips, and drawings were completely whitewashed.[29]
The two museums are rivals: the official Museum M.A. Bulgakov, although established second, identifies as “the first and only Memorial Museum of Mikhail Bulgakov in Moscow”.[30]
The Bulgakov House (Музей – театр “Булгаковский Дом”) is situated on the ground floor of the building. This museum was established as a private initiative on 15 May 2004. It contains personal belongings, photos, and several exhibitions related to Bulgakov’s life and his different works. Various poetic and literary events are often held. The museum organises tours of Bulgakov’s Moscow, some of which have re-enactors playing characters of The Master and Margarita. The Bulgakov House also operates the Theatre M.A. Bulgakov and the Café 302-bis.
In apartment number 50 on the fourth floor is the Museum M.A. Bulgakov (Музей М А. Булгаков). This facility is a government initiative, founded on 26 March 2007. It contains personal belongings, photos, and several exhibitions related to Bulgakov’s life and his different works. Various poetic and literary events are often held here.
Russian writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were heavily influenced by this novel when writing several of their books. Аmong them are such works as Snail on the Slope, Limping Fate, Overburdened with Evil and others.[38]
1970: The Finnish director Seppo Wallin made the movie Pilatus for the series Teatterituokio (Theatre Sessions) from the Finnish public broadcasting company, based on the biblical part of the book.[39]
1989: Director Roman Polanski was approached by Warner Bros. to adapt and direct Bulgakov’s novel. The project was subsequently dropped by Warner Bros. due to budgetary concerns and the studio’s belief that the subject matter was no longer relevant due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Polanski has described his script as the best he has ever adapted.[44]
1994: A Russian movie adaptation of the novel was made by Yuri Kara. Although the cast included big names and talented actors (Anastasiya Vertinskaya as Margarita, Mikhail Ulyanov as Pilate, Nikolai Burlyayev as Yeshua, Valentin Gaft as Woland, Aleksandr Filippenko as Korovyev-Fagotto) and its score was by the noted Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, the movie was not released on any media. The grandson of Bulgakov’s third wife Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya claimed, as a self-assigned heir, the rights on Bulgakov’s literary inheritance and refused the release. Since 2006, copies of the movie have existed on DVD. Some excerpts can be viewed on the Master and Margarita website.[47] The movie was finally released in cinemas in 2011.[48]Main article: The Master and Margarita (1994 film)
1996: The Russian director Sergey Desnitsky and his wife, the actress Vera Desnitskaya, made the film Master i Margarita. Disappointed by the responses of the Russian media, they decided not to release the film for distribution.[49]
2003: The Iranian director, Kamal Tabrizi, made the movie Sometimes Look at the Sky loosely based on The Master and Margarita.[50]
2005: The Hungarian director Ibolya Fekete made a short film of 26 minutes, entitled A Mester és Margarita. This film, with such noted Russian and Hungarian actors as Sergey Grekov, Grigory Lifanov, and Regina Myannik, was broadcast by MTV Premier on 5 October 2005.[51][52]
2008: The Italian director Giovanni Brancale made the film Il Maestro e Margherita, set in contemporary Florence.[53]
2013: The American producer Scott Steindorff had bought the rights to make the film The Master and Margarita. Many names of possible directors and actors were rumored. Caroline Thompson (The Addams Family, Edward Scissorhands, Black Beauty) was hired to write the script. In 2017, Steindorff announced that he had stopped the project. A little later, the Russian press agency TASS announced that the screen adaptation rights for The Master and Margarita had been granted to Svetlana Migunova-Dali, co-owner of the Moscow-based production house Logos Film, and Grace Loh, who is the head of the production company New Crime Productions in Hollywood.[54]
2017: The French director Charlotte Waligòra made the film Le maître et Marguerite in which she played the role of Margarita herself. The other characters are interpreted by Michel Baibabaeff (Woland), Vadim Essaïan (Behemoth), Hatem Taïeb (Jesus) and Giovanni Marino Luna (The Master).[55]
2018: The Russian director Nikolai Lebedev started preparing the film Master i Margarita: he wrote the script himself and was to start shooting the film with a budget of 800 million roubles (10.5 million euro) in April 2019.[56] The director was later changed to Mikhail Lockshin, and the title to «Woland». Filming began in July 2021 and concluded in November 2021. The film is set to be released in the end of 2022.[57]
2019: In December 2019, Deadline reported that Baz Luhrmann had acquired the rights to the book, with himself producing the film as well as directing. The release date is currently unknown.[58]
2002: the French animators Clément Charmet and Elisabeth Klimoff made an animation of the first and third chapter of The Master and Margarita based on Jean-François Desserre’s graphic novel.[60]
2010: Israeli director Terentij Oslyabya made an animation filmThe Master and Margarita, Chapter 1. His movie literally illustrates the novel.[61][62]
2012: The Russian animation filmmaker Rinat Timerkaev started working on a full-length animated film Master i Margarita. On his blog, Timerkaev informed followers in 2015 that he would not continue working on it due to expenses.[63] He had already released a trailer, which can be seen on YouTube.[64][65]
2015: The Finnish animation filmmakerKatariina Lillqvist started working on a full-length animated puppet film Mistr a Markétka, a Finnish-Czech coproduction. A 5-minute trailer was shown on 2 June 2015 at the Zlín Film Festival in the Czech Republic.[66]
2017: The Russian animation filmmaker Alexander Golberg Jero started working on a full-length animated film Master i Margarita. Media entrepreneur and co-producer Matthew Helderman, CEO of BondIt Media Capital, is responsible for collecting the necessary funds.[67]
Many students of art schools found inspiration in The Master and Margarita to make short animated movies. A full list is available on the Master & Margarita website.[68]
1989: the Russian theatre director Aleksandr Dzekun adapted his theatre play Master i Margarita for television. As suggested by the subtitle, “Chapters from the novel”: the film covers part of the novel; 21 chapters were adapted in a miniseries.[71]
2008: London-based comic strip authors Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal.[77]
2013: The Austrian/French comic strip author Bettina Egger created a graphic novel adaptation entitled Moscou endiablé, sur les traces de Maître et Marguerite. It interweaves the story of ‘The Master and Margarita’ with elements of Bulgakov’s life, and her own exploration of the sources of the novel in Moscow.[78]
Poster for a stage adaptation of The Master and Margarita in Perm, Russia
The Master and Margarita has been adapted on stage by more than 500 theatre companies all over the world. A full list of all versions and languages is published on the Master & Margarita website.[79]
1971: from 1971 to 1977, all theatre adaptations of The Master and Margarita were Polish. They were prohibited from using the title The Master and Margarita. Titles included Black Magic and Its Exposure (Kraków, 1971), Black Magic (Katowice, 1973), Have You Seen Pontius Pilate? (Wrocław, 1974), and Patients (Wroclaw, 1976).[80]
1978: a stage adaptation was directed by Romanian-born American director Andrei Șerban at the New York Public Theater, starring John Shea. This seems to be the version revived in 1993 (see below).[citation needed]
1980: stage production (Maestrul și Margareta) directed by Romanian stage director Cătălina Buzoianu at The Little Theatre (“Teatrul mic”)[82] in Bucharest, Romania.[83] Cast: Ștefan Iordache[84] as “Master”/”Yeshua Ha-Notsri”; Valeria Seciu[85] as “Margareta”; Dan Condurache[86] as “Woland”; Mitică Popescu[87] as “Koroviev”; Gheorghe Visu[88] as “Ivan Bezdomny”/”Matthew Levi”; Sorin Medeleni[89] as “Behemoth”.
1983: stage production Saatana saapuu Moskovaan directed by Laura Jäntti for KOM-teatteri in Helsinki, Finland.
1991: UK premiere of an adaptation at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. 3rd year professional diploma course. Director Helena Kaut-Howson. Cast includes: Katherine Kellgren, James Harper, Paul Cameron, Zen Gesner, Kirsten Clark, Polly Hayes, Abigail Hercules, Clive Darby, and Daniel Philpot.
1992: adaptation at the Lyric Hammersmith in June by the Four Corners theatre company. It was based on a translation by Michael Denny, adapted and directed for the stage by David Graham-Young (of Contemporary Stage). The production transferred to the Almeida Theatre in July 1992.[91]
1993: the Theatre for the New City produced a revival stage adaptation in New York City, as originally commissioned by Joseph Papp and the Public Theater. The adaptation was by Jean-Claude van Itallie. It was directed by David Willinger and featured a cast of 13, including Jonathan Teague Cook as “Woland”, Eric Rasmussen as “Matthew Levi”, Cesar Rodriguez as “Yeshua Ha Nozri”, Eran Bohem as “The Master” and Lisa Moore as “Margarita”. This version was published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. A French version, using part of van Itallie’s text, was performed at the Théâtre de Mercure, Paris, directed by Andrei Serban.[citation needed]
2000: the Israeli theater company Gesher[92] premiered haSatan baMoskva, a musical based on the 1999 Hebrew translation of the novel. The production included song lyrics by Ehud Manor and a 23-musician orchestra. It was directed by Yevgeny Arye and starred Haim Topol, Evgeny Gamburg and Israel “Sasha” Demidov (as noted in the company history).[93]
A German-language stage adaptation of the novel, Der Meister und Margarita, directed by Frank Castorf, premiered at the 2002 Vienna Festival, Austria.[94]
2004: an adaptation of the novel by Edward Kemp and directed by Steven Pimlott was staged in July 2004 at the Chichester Festival Theatre, UK. The cast included Samuel West as “The Master” and Michael Feast as “Woland”. The production included incidental music by Jason Carr.[95]
2004: the National Youth Theatre produced a new stage adaptation by David Rudkin at the Lyric Hammersmith London, directed by John Hoggarth. It featured a cast of 35 and ran from 23 August to 11 September.[96] In 2005, Rudkin’s adaptation received a production with a cast of 13 from Aberystwyth University’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the Theatr y Castell, directed by David Ian Rabey.
In 2006, an almost 5-hour long adaptation was staged by Georgian director Avtandil Varsimashvili.[citation needed]
In 2007, Helsinki, Finland, the group theatre Ryhmäteatteri staged a production named Saatana saapuu Moskovaan (Satan comes to Moscow), directed by Finnish director Esa Leskinen. Eleven actors played 26 separate roles in a three-hour production during the season 25 September 2007 – 1 March 2008.[citation needed]
In 2007, Alim Kouliev in Hollywood with The Master Project production started rehearsals on stage with his own adaptation of Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita.[97] The premier was scheduled for 14 October 2007, but was postponed. Some excerpts and information can be viewed on the Master and Margarita website.[98]
In 2008, a Swedish stage production of Mästaren och Margarita directed by Leif Stinnerbom was performed at Stockholms stadsteater, starring Philip Zandén (The Master), Frida Westerdahl (Margarita), Jakob Eklund (Woland) and Ingvar Hirdwall (Pilate).[99]
In 2011, Complicite premiered its new adaptation, directed by Simon McBurney at Theatre Royal Plymouth. It toured to Luxembourg, London, Madrid, Vienna, Recklinghausen, Amsterdam. In July 2012 it toured to the Festival d’Avignon and the Grec Festival in Barcelona.
In October 2013, Lodestar Theatre premiered a new adaptation by Max Rubin at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool.
December 2015, Macedonian National Theater (Skopje, North Macedonia). Director: Ivan Popovski.
In 2018, Ljubljana Puppet Theatre premiered a special production, composed of two distinct parts (also directed by two separate artists): an interactive theatrical journey through the theatre building including visual art, entitled The Devil’s Triptych, and a separate “theatrical gospel” named Margareta (Margarita), both taking place simultaneously inside and in front of the theatre building (thus theatregoers are required to visit on multiple occasions should they wish to experience the totality of the production). This adaptation premiered in June 2018 to favourable reviews.[102][103]
In 2003, the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, Russia, presented Master i Margarita, a new full-length ballet set to music by Gustav Mahler, Dmitri Shostakovich, Hector Berlioz, Astor Piazzolla and other composers. Choreography and staging by David Avdysh, set design by Simon Pastukh (USA) and costume design by Galina Solovyova (USA).
2010: Synetic Theater of Arlington, VA, presented a dance/performance adaptation of The Master and Margarita directed by Paata Tsikurishvili and choreographed by Irina Tsikurishvili. The show featured a cast of 16, including Paata Tsikurishvili as Master and Irina Tsikurishvili as Margarita. It ran for one month at the Lansburgh Theatre.
In 2015, Estonian theatre Vanemuine premiered a dance adaptation “Meister ja Margarita”, directed by Janek Savolainen.
Hundreds of composers, bands, singers and songwriters were inspired by The Master and Margarita in their work. Some 250 songs or musical pieces have been counted about it.[106]
Many Russian bards, including Alexander Rosenbaum, have been inspired by the novel to write songs about it. They have based more than 200 songs on themes and characters from The Master and Margarita.[109]
A dozen classical composers, including Dmitri Smirnov and Andrey Petrov, have been inspired by the novel to write symphonies and musical phantasies about it.[110]
2011: Australian composer and domra (Russian mandolin) player Stephen Lalor presented his “Master & Margarita Suite” of instrumental pieces in concert at the Bulgakov Museum Moscow in July 2011, performed on the Russian instruments domra, cimbalom, bass balalaika, and bayan.[111]
1972: 3-act chamber opera The Master and Margarita by Russian composer Sergei Slonimsky was completed, but not allowed to be performed or published. It premiered in concert in Moscow on 20 May 1989, and the score was released in 1991. An abridged Western premiere of this work was produced in Hanover, Germany in June 2000.[113]
1977: A musical adaptation (under the title “Satan’s Ball”) written by Richard Crane and directed by his wife Faynia Williams was presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by the University of Bradford Drama Group at Bedlam Theatre.[114] It won a Fringe First award, and garnered excellent reviews.[115]
On 25 August 2006, Andrew Lloyd Webber announced intentions to adapt the novel as a stage musical or opera.[117] In 2007, it was reported by Stage that he had abandoned that work.
In late 2009, a Russian singer and composer Alexander Gradsky released a 4-CD opera adaptation of the novel. It stars Gradsky as the Master, Woland, Yeshua and Behemoth; Nikolai Fomenko as Koroviev, Mikhail Seryshev (formerly of Master) as Ivan; Elena Minina as Margarita; and many renowned Russian singers and actors in episodic roles, including (but not limited to) Iosif Kobzon, Lyubov Kazarnovskaya, Andrei Makarevich, Alexander Rosenbaum, Arkady Arkanov, Gennady Khazanov and the late Georgi Millyar (voice footage from one of his movies was used).[118]
Five alternative composers and performers, including Simon Nabatov, have been inspired by the novel to present various adaptations.
In 2009, Portuguesenew media artists Video Jack premiered an audiovisual art performance inspired by the novel at Kiasma, Helsinki, as part of the PixelAche Festival. Since then, it has been shown in festivals in different countries, having won an honorable mention award at Future Places Festival, Porto. The project was released as a net art version later that year.[120]
^ MASSOLIT may be a Soviet-style abbreviation for “Moscow Association of Writers” (Московская ассоциация литераторов), or “Literature for the Masses”. According to one translation, it may be a play on words in Russian, translatable into English as “Lotsalit”).
^ Sollars, Michael (2008). The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present. New York: Infobase Publishing. p. 508. ISBN978-0-81606-233-1.
^ Melville-Logan, Peter, ed. (2014). Encyclopedia of the Novel. New Jersey, United States: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. p. 822. ISBN978-1-11872-389-0.
^ Bulgakov, Mikhail (1967). The Master & Margarita. Ginsburg, Mirra transl. New York: Grove.
^ ——— (1992) [1967, Harper & Row and Harvill]. The Master & Margarita. Glenny, Michael transl; Franklin, Simon intr. New York; London: Knopf; Everyman’s Library.
^ ——— (1996) [1993, 1995, Ardis]. The Master & Margarita. Burgin, Diana & O’Connor, Katherine Tiernan transl; Proffer, Ellendea & Arbor, Ann, annotations and afterword. New York: Vintage.
^ Vakhromeyev, Sergey. “Съемки фильма “Воланд” завершились в Петербурге” [Filming of the film “Woland” has concluded in St Petersburg]. St. Petersburg Dnevnik (in Russian). Retrieved 29 November 2021.
Hedges, Chris (10 March 2014). “Welcome to Satan’s Ball”. Truthdig. A comparison of the Soviet society described in Master and Margarita and modern society in the United States and Russia.
О чем шумите вы, народные витии[3]? Зачем анафемой грозите вы России? Что возмутило вас? волнения Литвы? Оставьте: это спор славян между собою[4], Домашний, старый спор, уж взвешенный судьбою, Вопрос, которого не разрешите вы.
Уже давно между собою Враждуют эти племена; Не раз клонилась под грозою То их, то наша сторона. Кто устоит в неравном споре: Кичливый лях, иль верный росс[5]? Славянские ль ручьи сольются в русском море? Оно ль иссякнет? вот вопрос.
Оставьте нас: вы не читали Сии кровавые скрижали[6]; Вам непонятна, вам чужда Сия семейная вражда; Для вас безмолвны Кремль и Прага[7]; Бессмысленно прельщает вас Борьбы отчаянной отвага — И ненавидите вы нас…
За что ж? ответствуйте: за то ли, Что на развалинах пылающей Москвы Мы не признали наглой воли Того, под кем дрожали вы[8]? За то ль, что в бездну повалили Мы тяготеющий над царствами кумир И нашей кровью искупили Европы вольность, честь и мир?..
Вы грозны на словах — попробуйте на деле! Иль старый богатырь, покойный на постеле, Не в силах завинтить свой измаильский штык[9]? Иль русского царя уже бессильно слово? Иль нам с Европой спорить ново? Иль русский от побед отвык? Иль мало нас? Или от Перми до Тавриды, От финских хладных скал до пламенной Колхиды, От потрясенного Кремля До стен недвижного Китая, Стальной щетиною сверкая, Не встанет русская земля?.. Так высылайте ж к нам, витии, Своих озлобленных сынов: Есть место им в полях России, Среди нечуждых им гробов.
1831
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Ivan Aivazovsky and Ilya Repin – Pushkin’s Farewell to the Sea (1877)
Why rave ye, babblers, so — ye lords of popular wonder? Why such anathemas ‘gainst Russia do you thunder? What moves your idle rage? Is’t Poland’s fallen pride? ‘T is but Slavonic kin among themselves contending, An ancient household strife, oft judged but still unending, A question which, be sure, you never can decide. For ages past still have contended, These races, though so near allied: And oft ‘neath Victory’s storm has bended Now their, and now our side. Which shall stand fast in such commotion The haughty Liakh, or faithful Russ? And shall Slavonic streams meet in a Russian ocean? – Or il’t dry up? This is point for us.
………………
Leave us!: Your eyes are all unable To read our history’s bloody table; Strange in your sight and dark must be Our springs of household enmity! To you the Kreml and Prága’s tower Are voiceless all, you mark the fate And daring of the battle-hour And understand us not, but hate.
What stirs ye? Is it that this nation, On Moscow’s flaming walls, blood-slaked and ruin-quench’d, Spurn’d back the insolent dictation Of Him before whose nod ye blenched? Is it that into dust we shatter’d, The Dagon that weigh’d down all earth so wearily, And our best blood so freely scatter’d, To buy for Europe peace and liberty?
Ye’re bold of tongue — but hark, would ye in deed but try it Or is the hero, now reclined in laurelled quiet, Too weak to fix once more, Izmail’s red bayonet? Or hath the Russian Tsar ever, in vain commanded? Or must we meet all Europe banded? Have we forgot to conquer yet?
Or rather, shall they not, from Perm to Tauris’ fountains,’ From the hot Colchian steppes, to Finland’s icy mountains, From the grey, half-shatter’d wall, To fair Kathay, in dotage buried A steely rampart, close and serried, Rise, Russia’s warriors, one and all?
Then send your numbers without number, Your madden’d sons, your goaded slaves, In Russia’s plains there’s room to slumber, And well they’ll know their brethren’s graves!
The poem was written during the 1830–1831 Polish uprising. The immediate reason for writing it was that some members of the French parliament had called for French armed intervention on the side of Polish insurgents against the Russian army.[10][11][12] In the poem, Pushkin explains that from the Russian point of view the uprising is just a part of the ages old quarrel between relatives (Slavs).[12][13] He tells the French to leave Slavs alone because the eventual outcome of all quarrels between Slavs must be decided between Slavs themselves. He says that the French parliamentarians don’t understand Slavs or Slavic languages, they seek a fight simply because they hate Russia for defeating Napoleon. He dares them to attack Russia in reality, not just in words, saying that in case of a military attack the whole Russian country will rise against the invaders.
The poem had mixed reception in Russian society: it was lauded by government and nationalists, but criticized by liberal intelligentsia.
Adam Mickiewicz published the reply poem Do przyjaciół Moskali (“To Friends Muscovites”, included into the cycle Dziady[14]), where he accused Pushkin of betrayal of their formerly common ideals of freedom, as expressed by the Decembrists. Pushkin started writing a reply, He Lived Among Us, published only posthumously.[15]
From ‘Batgirl’ to ‘Star Wars Detours’ to ‘Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay,’ here are infamous films and series that made headlines for being canceled — and are not available anywhere.
‘The Day the Clown Cried,’ ‘Batgirl’ and ‘Tremors’ PHOTOFEST ; LESLIE GRACE/INSTAGRAM/ WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT /DC ENTERTAINMENT ; UNIVERSAL/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
When Warner Bros. Discovery canceled the release of Batgirl, it was a shocking move to many. But there are other movies and TV shows that have likewise gained infamy due to never seeing the light of day.
The vast majority of axed Hollywood projects are run-of-the-mill concepts that simply didn’t work out or eventually find their way online. That’s not the case with these titles. The below roundup of films and TV series features projects you cannot see anywhere that have achieved a level of notoriety — either due to their scandalous content or because fans desperately want to see them (or both).
In an era where so many mediocre projects are put onto streaming services with a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” mentality, the decision to write-down a fully shot $90 million live–action Batman-verse movie instead of releasing it on HBO Max was hugely surprising — especially given the optics of ditching a DC superhero project that starred Dominican actress Leslie Grace. “It’s an incredibly bad look to cancel the Latina Batgirl movie,” noted comic book kingpin Kevin Smith. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav defended the decision, suggesting that the film, from directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, would harm DC’s brand: “We’re not going to launch a movie until it’s ready. We’re not going to launch a movie to make a quarter, and we’re not going to put a movie out unless we believe in it. … We’re going to focus on quality.”
2. Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide
This 2021 NBC reality show wanted to be like Wipe Out and instead turned into Squid Game. Adult contestants competed on giant versions of kids’ backyard games like Human Pong, Body Bowling, Cornhole and Slip ‘N Slide — whose manufacturer, Wham-O, was a sponsor. But contestants found themselves slippin’ and slidin’ face-first into giardia parasites due to a reported outbreak of “explosive diarrhea” on the watery set. The show was planned for a choice slot following the Summer Olympics closing ceremony, but the snickering viral news reports were a PR nightmare for the network and for Wham-O. Ultimately, NBC crapped out on releasing it.
3. Tremors (2018 TV Pilot)
The 1990 cult hit horror film Tremors has spawned six sequels, and original star Kevin Bacon didn’t return for any of them. Yet Bacon did return to that sandworm-infested small town for a 2018 Syfy TV pilot that was scrapped and never released. “We made an excellent pilot outside of Albuquerque, recreated the town, had a really great cast, director, and writer and to this day I still don’t understand why they didn’t want to move forward with it,” a bewildered Bacon told Dread Central in 2020. “It’s a real head-scratcher for me. If I honestly thought the pilot was shit then I’d say ‘we just didn’t crack it.’” (Instead, Syfy picked up to series a rival pilot, Deadly Class, which only lasted one season). As one Tremors fan ranted on Reddit, “How are there 19 shitty Tremors movie sequels, but this doesn’t get picked up by at least a streaming service?”
4. Star Wars: Detours
Star Wars Detours COURTESY OF LUCASFILM/DISNEY
Most projects listed here are single episodes or a feature film. What’s notable about Star Wars: Detours is that there were 39 shortform episodes completed (and 62 additional scripts written), and yet the series has still never been released (aside from one episode that leaked online). The show is an animated effort from Robot Chicken creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich that was officially announced at Star Wars Celebration in 2012. But Detours hit a detour of its own when Disney shelved the project after the company acquired Lucasfilm a few months later.
“The most recent conversations I’ve had with anybody who would be in a position to say so say that it’s not soon,” Green told EW in 2021. “The way it’s been explained to me is that there hasn’t been enough interest high enough up to go through what it would take to put it out, and that there isn’t an interest in releasing this content on Disney+ from Lucasfilm.”
There’s been no reason given for the project’s scuttling, but one assumes the fact that Detours was a parody of the Star Wars franchise might have something to do with it. “I don’t really have an emotional position [to the series being scrapped] because I got to spend four straight years making something with George Lucas,” Green added. “I got a priceless experience with one of my truest heroes, and got to see him laugh and enjoy all of the things that he had created, in a time before he agreed to sell them to somebody else.”
5. Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay
Seriously, Fox made this: A 2004 reality show where two straight men compete to see who can pass themselves off more convincingly as gay for a $50,000 reward. Each was paired with a trio of coaches and their competitions included swimsuit modeling, making a “gay face” and convincing a date to spank them. The show’s press release had this super-cringe concept description: “A heterosexual male’s worst nightmare: turning gay overnight.” One of the show’s creative consultants defended the special, telling The Advocate, “Our primary purpose was to be funny, but if people actually got to see the show, they would probably be more tolerant of gay people in the future.” But after considerable pushback from GLAAD and many, many others, Fox apologized and yanked the project from its schedule less than two weeks before it was set to air, citing “creative reasons.”
6. My Best Friend’s Birthday
Did you know that Quentin Tarantino’s first film — which he wrote, directed and acted in — wasn’t Reservoir Dogs and was never released? My Best Friend’s Birthday was a low-budget 1987 comedy shot in black and white that the director made while he was still working at the Video Archives movie rental store in Manhattan Beach. The film was reportedly 70 minutes long and it’s not very good, but it’s full of the director’s characteristic pop culture references. “I was totally embarrassed,” Tarantino told Variety. “So I was like, OK, I don’t have a movie here, this is not She’s Gotta Have It, but I learned a lot doing this. This was my film school.” For years, the story was that half the footage was destroyed in a lab fire. But the book My Best Friend’s Birthday: The Making of a Quentin Tarantino Film claims there wasn’t a fire, but that half the film was lost by accident and Tarantino let the lab fire tale spread because it sounded more interesting (a rep for Tarantino had no comment). The surviving footage is online, but Tarantino’s first film will never be seen in its entirety.
7. 100 Years
This is a short film, not a feature, but also rather fascinating: Robert Rodriguez directed a sci-fi piece starring John Malkovich as “the protagonist,” Shuya Chang as “the female protagonist” and Marko Zaror as “the antagonist.” Nobody knows what the film is about. It will be released Nov. 18, 2115 — not a typo. So it’s very likely that nobody reading this story will be alive to see the film, which is reportedly kept in a high-tech safe behind bulletproof glass that will open automatically in 93 years. This would all be incredibly cool if not for the fact 100 Years was shot as part of an ad campaign for Remy Martin’s Louis XIII Cognac to promote the idea that it takes 100 years to make a bottle of their liquor. That takes a lot of the artistic intrigue out of the idea and certainly risks disappointing a crowd gathered around the safe in 2115 who discover it only contains a glorified cognac ad and extremely dated CGI. “What John and I wanted it to be was a work of timeless art that can be enjoyed in 100 years,” Rodriguez told IndieWire. “I’m very proud of it even if only my great grandkids and hopefully my clone will be around to watch.” There are also teaser trailers for the project because, one assumes, Remy Martin didn’t want to wait a whole century to get some footage out of this deal.
8. Uncle Tom’s Fairytales
This unseen 1968 film from legendary comedian Richard Pryor has been the subject of all sorts of reported rumors over the years — including allegations of theft and a pending lawsuit (both untrue). When contacted for fact-checking, the film’s producer and editor, Penelope Spheeris, and Pryor’s widow and estate manager, Jennifer Lee Pryor, wanted to set the record straight on some of the details of its history.
Richard Pryor wrote, directed and starred in Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales and then shredded its work print (not its negative) after an argument with his wife. The 40-minute film revolves around a group of Black activists who kidnap a wealthy white man and then put him on trial for racial crimes in American history. Some footage still exists — scenes from the film were shown at a Directors Guild of America event honoring the comedian in 2005 — but a full print has never been publicly screened.
Jennifer Pryor recently found some additional footage from the film and, along with Spheeris, began hunting for the original negative, which they suspect is still hidden away in a lab somewhere. “After doing research for five years, the negative exists somewhere,” Spheeris says. “We just don’t know where.”
TV pilots get dumped all the time; it’s more rule than exception. So there’s nothing, in itself, unusual about what happened to Bloodmoon. In this case, the notoriety comes from the fact that Bloodmoon was HBO’s successor project to what was arguably the biggest show of the 21st century, Game of Thrones, and cost more than $30 million — yet, even Thrones author George R.R. Martin has never been allowed to see it. (By the by, the only way a studio can successfully write a project off as a tax break is if it’s never released — and therefore monetized — in any way).
Fans have jumped on every detail about the project, which starred Naomi Watts and was set thousands of years before Thrones. The story has been described as “adult, sophisticated and intelligent” and with “a thematic conversation at the center of it about disenfranchisement in the face of colonialism and religious extremism.” Sources point to a few problems, from casting issues to struggling to create an almost entirely different world than the original show. “Bloodmoon was a very difficult assignment,” Martin told THR. “We’re dealing with a much more primitive people. There were no dragons yet. A lot of the pilot revolved around a wedding of a Southern house to a Northern house, and it got into the whole history of the White Walkers.” Added Robert Greenblatt, who was chairman of HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia: “It wasn’t unwatchable or horrible or anything. It was very well-produced and looked extraordinary. But it didn’t take me to the same place as the original series. It didn’t have that depth and richness that the original series’ pilot did.”
10. The Original Game of Thrones Pilot
Speaking of which, clearly Thrones pilots are not easy. HBO’s first attempt at Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga ended up being almost entirely reshot. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have been rather blunt in their assessment of their debut effort. “You listen to how sharply the pitch of somebody’s voice turns up when they tell you it’s good — ‘It’s good!’” recalls Weiss in the book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon. “How much higher than their average register is the word ‘good.’ That’s a gauge of how fucked you are. Our ‘good’ was in dog-whistle territory.” Producers made some casting changes (most notably swapping Tamzin Merchant for Emilia Clarke in the key role of Daenerys), reworked their script and changed directors (from Thomas McCarthy to The Sopranos veteran Tim Van Patten). A friend of the showrunners, producer Craig Mazin, saw both versions and was stunned by the turnaround. “This is the biggest rescue in Hollywood history,” he said he told Benioff. “You saved a complete piece of shit and turned it into something brilliant. That never happens.” Despite intense fan curiosity, the original pilot has never been released in any form.
11. Our Little Genius
Fox reality strikes again! This time, it was not the premise that was the problem, exactly. In 2010’s Our Little Genius, naturally gifted child prodigies competed on a quiz show against highly educated adults. A week before it was set to air, however, creator Mark Burnett raised red flags about his own show, suggesting members of the production team had coached the kids on questions beforehand. While quietly scripting reality TV is routine, interfering with any project that’s classified as a game show is a serious criminal no-no. So Fox put Genius on a pile next to Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay. All that remains is this trailer, and “Oh, come on” indeed.
12. The Day the Clown Cried
Jerry Lewis on the set of The Day the Clown Cried (1972). PHOTOFEST
Slapstick comedian Jerry Lewis’ unfinished and unreleased 1972 film has the entertainer playing a circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. So the “what went wrong” on this project is already pretty apparent. According to reports, the character performs for Jewish children in the camp, gets beaten and eventually ends up leading children to their deaths in the gas chamber, trying to keep them distracted in their final moments.
Lewis realized he had a potential disaster on his hands and halted the film from being released, telling EW in 2013, “You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.”
The Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer has seen a cut and told Spy magazine in 1992: “Seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. ‘Oh, My God!’— that’s all you can say.” Yet a French film critic who also saw a copy, Jean-Michel Frodon, had an entirely different take, telling Vanity Fair in 2017: “I’m convinced it is a very good job. It’s a very interesting and important film, very daring about both the issue, which of course is the Holocaust, but even beyond that as a story of a man who has dedicated his life to making people laugh and is questioning what it is to make people laugh. I think it is a very bitter film, and a disturbing film, and this is why it was so brutally dismissed by those people who saw it.”
In 2015, a couple years before he died, Lewis donated a copy of the film to the Library of Congress, but on the condition that it won’t be screened until 2024.
Why do I love China and the Communist Party of China (CPC)?
It was not always the case.
In fact, for the majority of my life, some 48 years, I hated China and I hated the CPC!
Why This Article
I want to tell my odyssey, my journey to the West, that has taken me far far away from my Motherland.
I hope to connect with a few overseas Chinese who feel similar yearnings that I feel now towards China. I would like to connect with those who feel helplessly sinking in the sea of Western “narratives” or LIES about China promulgated in the mass media, the mainstream and so-called “alternative” media in the West, especially in the USA and Canada.
I am also hoping to connect with a few mainland Chinese who might be able to help me return back to China.
Who knows maybe I will get lucky and President Xi Jinping will hear about my odyssey and be moved to grant me my Chinese citizenship again!
The Arc of My 50 Year Odyssey
It all began one night in Shanghai in early 1972. I don’t remember the exact date as I was only 6 and 1/2 years old when this traumatic event happened and it affected the course of my entire life.
But before I get to that seminal story of how my hatred of China and the CPC began, here is a speech that I gave in early December 2001 (or 2002 I forgot) in the Financial District in San Francisco, California with a bullhorn in hand!
The title on my rambling speech that I literally shouted at the lunchtime passerby’s was “A Warning Of Today’s Holocaust”:
Communists in China have killed over 60 million Chinese people since they have taken over China. Freedom and justice do not exist in Communist China today. Many “Made in China” goods found at Kmart, Wal-Mart, and elsewhere are produced by the slave labor of Chinese people suffering in Laogai concentration camps.
Chinese Communists have killed over 1 million Tibetans. They are currently waging a cultural genocide to wipe out all Tibetan culture through massive population transfer.
Chinese Communists are readying to take Taiwan by force that could lead to the killing of thousands and maybe millions of Taiwan’s people.
Chinese Communists are threatening the people of the United States with nuclear ICBM’s.
Western governments, liberal and conservative, including the United States are beholden to multinational corporations. These companies are interested in two things: (1) captive markets to sell their goods (i.e., totalitarian countries like China), and (2) cheap labor to lower their costs of production (i.e., slave labor found in countries like China).
Western governments and the multinational corporations reason that greater trade with Communist China will somehow cause the Communist dictators to allow freedom and democracy to flourish. The fallacy of this argument was clearly demonstrated by the Tiananmen Square massacre and by the current persecution of the Falun Gong and Zhong Gong spiritual groups.
The motto of the Communists is “Retain power at all costs.” Sacrificing the few or the many to control the rest is their means. The massacre at the Tiananmen Square and its aftermath serve as a stark warning to the Chinese people and to the world.
The truth of China and Tibet today is not really known by the ordinary people of the West. If they realized what is happening, they would equate this to what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1940’s — but worse, a lot worse.
Would Westerners buy Nazi goods produced from concentration camps? Would they help the Nazis build their war machine if they knew the truth?
History has a tendency to repeat itself for those who never learn from it. If the IOC gives the 2008 Olympics to Communist China, it’s Nazi 1936 all over again. Except this time the enemy has the means to destroy millions of people in a matter of minutes.
“Never again….” Repeated again. Today. . . .
Everything in my speech is a LIE! Except for this statement: “The truth of China and Tibet today is not really known by the ordinary people of the West.” But not in the way that I meant it in 2001!
Everything.
This event of my San Francisco speech was the nadir of my odyssey to the West.
In 2003, I began to suspect that some of the “facts” listed in my speech were not truthful. However, it wasn’t until early 2020 and the onset of Covid-19 that I finally realized that everything I thought I knew about China and the CPC were LIES. Finally, the insidious and toxic veil was completely lifted from my mind and my heart about the truth and reality of China and the CPC.
I was finally liberated! Free at last! Free at last! Free at last!
But my odyssey was long and arduous and painful. And it is not over yet.
I will return back to my Motherland to contribute what I will towards China’s National Rejuvenation.
One Night In Shanghai
I was born in Shanghai in July 1965. My parents are both medical doctors. When I was around 5 years old, my parents left me in Shanghai with my uncle Jack, my father’s younger brother. With my little sister, they went to Kunming for work purposes. They believed that the quality of life in Shanghai would be better for me, being their first child and only son and all. So I lived with Jack on the small piece of land that my paternal grandfather had bought before the Communists liberated China.
On this land, which exists today as a public park, there were 3 very small houses. I slept in the middle one, a single bedroom house.
One night in late January or early February 1972, eight plain-clothed local policemen came into my room, just as Jack was tucking me into bed. Of course, in those days, nobody locked their doors or gates. God forbid! Only criminals and counter-revolutionaries would do such a horrible thing!
My bedroom is square in shape, with the entrance door in the middle of one wall and my bed leaning against the opposite wall. Looking towards the door from my bed, to my left is an old jukebox radio, one that had large push buttons for selecting various radio stations.
Six of these policemen took Jack to my right and they were engaged in some discussion that I couldn’t hear. The two other policemen went to the jukebox radio to my left.
I had a bird’s eye view of everything.
Looking at the two policemen, I noticed that one of them was pushing various buttons on the jukebox radio. Then the other one shouted out to Jack across the room asking or rather demanding, “Did you do this?”
In China at that time, it was illegal to listen to radio stations from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Parenthetically, I hear that it’s “illegal” in Taiwan to listen/watch certain mainland Chinese media in 2022! The duo policemen were accusing my uncle of listening to an illegal radio station with evidence that they manufactured right in front of my eyes!
Of course, Jack protested that he wasn’t listening to any illegal radio station. But his protests were in vain and they took him away right there and then.
Just as they were all leaving my bedroom, I stood up on my bed and pointed to one of the two policemen with my right hand and shouted as loud as I could, “He did it! He did it!”
But the lonely voice of a little child was not enough that night.
My uncle Jack ended up in some reform jail for 30 days.
I was left alone with our nanny and cook for what seemed like years to a six year old.
Years later, we were able to piece together what really happened and why Jack was take away to reform jail.
But the scar from that night left an indelible mark on my soul and damaged my views and opinions about China for the next 48 years!
From that night onward, I feared and hated China and the CPC!
Nixon in China
From February 21 through 28, 1972, US President Nixon visited China. It was a historical event. From the American objective, the intended purpose of this visit was to draw China into America’s orbit, to counter the Soviet Union. From the Chinese objective, it was the baby steps towards opening China to the West once again.
Incidentally, the geopolitical tango among Russia, China, and the United States has always been the key to the stability or instability on this planet. This is even more true today in 2022 with the events unfolding in Ukraine and Taiwan.
If people remember anything about that historical visit, they remember Nixon meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing. What they forget is that Nixon also stopped in Shanghai before flying to Beijing.
This is where the trouble began for my uncle. Apparently, Nixon landed at Shanghai’s Hung Chiao Airport which is located very close to our land. Don’t ask me how close (maybe 5 km), but close enough that our local police decided weeks before the important visit to round up all the potential “rabble rousers” and “trouble makers”.
Being a somewhat free thinker with no job and in his 20s, Jack was lumped into the “trouble maker” category. So, he was rounded up with the rest of undesirables a few weeks before Nixon graced our neighbourhood.
During his initial stopover before flying to Beijing, Nixon was only in Shanghai for one hour, but the pre-fallout of his visit lasted a lifetime for me.
Leaving China for Canada/USA
My family left China in October 1973 (my mother joined us later) for Hong Kong. Don’t ask me how that was accomplished, as it was very rare for Chinese citizens to leave China legally in the early 1970s. That story could be another future article!
In October 1974, we left for Vancouver, Canada. I grew up in Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia. I got my Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineer from the University of British Columbia in 1989.
After my graduation, I left for the United States where I spent approximately the next 20 years working as a mechanical engineer, project engineer and project manager. I was a professionally licensed mechanical engineer in the state of California.
For the first 4 years, I joined what turned out to be a spiritual cult in Montana! Of course, you find out about these sticky and uncomfortable truths after the fact!
American Cult
It was during my sojourn in the USA that my opinions about China hardened to such a degree that my resultant false beliefs led me to give that public speech in San Francisco.
The cult that I had join, like a lot of cults, is extremely pro-USA and anti-China. Incidentally, the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies or the Unification Church, a Korean cult with considerable influence in South Korea, Japan and the USA, is extremely pro-USA and anti-China. The Epoch Times, an “alternative” news rag owned by the Falun Gong cult, is over-the-top pro-USA and anti-China. Their “news” about China are re-posted by an influential alternative news blog called zerohedge.com which is quite popular with libertarians and the “free market” believers.
Permit me to say the following about cults in general:
If I can summarize the defining characteristic ormodus operandior spiritual DNA of all cults, the words of George W. Bush encapsulates it best:“You are either with us or you are against us!”
As long as you is going along with the cult’s teachings and philosophy and actions, everything is hunky dory and you are treated as a “member of the family”. But once you cross that line against their teachings or their philosophy or their actions, then you instantaneously become apersona non grataand their mortal enemy.
The United States of America, at the level of its governing elites which alternates between the left and the right every so often, is basically a cult, a very dangerous and vindictive cult. Many Americans who believe religiously in the American MYTH are members of the American cult.
It was also in the USA that the LIES about China and the MYTHS about the USA began to unravel for me.
I want to address four of them now (before continuing to tell my odyssey), and expose them for the LIES and MYTHS that they are, as they have affected me and many others very deeply. Sadly, they continue to do so for millions of people around the world.
1. Tibet Genocide LIE
One of the LIES that I learned while I was with the cult in Montana, called the Summit Lighthouse (TSL) and the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT), is the genocide of 1.2 million Tibetans and the destruction of over 5,000 Tibetan monasteries. This was and still is one of their fundamental political “teachings”.
Along with Hollywood movies about Tibet that feature A-list movie stars like Brad Pitt, it was all too easy to swallow this particularly insidious LIE hook, line and sinker.
Michael Parenti, one of the few progressives in America who talks about the ugly and genocidal reality of the American Empire, wrote an article called “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth”. I encourage everyone who wants to know the truth about Tibet and China’s liberation of Tibet to read his article which can be found at:
Basically, before Tibet was liberated by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1951, Tibet was a medieval kingdom of land-owning lamas, secular leaders, serfs, and slaves. Many more serfs and slaves (95%) than important lamas and secular leaders (5%). The important land-owning lamas, whose progeny is now paraded in the West as “holy men” with their “ancient wisdom” dressed in saffron robes, were in fact slave owners. They maintained a brutal system of serfdom and slavery for centuries for their exclusive benefit and pleasure.
Up until 1959.
Quoting from Parenti’s article:
[The] Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” In fact, it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
The Dalai Lama, before his much acclaimed “escape” to India, lived in luxury in his Potala Palace in Lhasa. His worldly possessions included “8,000 kg of gold [worth about $500 million US dollars in today’s terms], 5 million kg of silver [worth about $4.4 billion US dollars in today’s terms], 20,000 pieces of jewelry, and more than 10,000 items of expensive silk and fur clothing.” His family “owned 27 manors, 30 areas of pasture, and 6,000 serfs”.
Not exactly the Hollywood image of piety and non-attachment that he magically acquired later on in the West.
As to the 1.2 million Tibetans killed by the PLA, Parenti wrote the following rebuttal:
Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.” The official 1953 census–six years before the Chinese crackdown–recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000. Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves–of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.
This particular insidious LIE has a “ring of truth” much like the Kuwaiti incubator babies story that was created out of whole cloth by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA. Her tearful and pivotal testimony before the US Congress and televised nationally and worldwide was what precipitated the first American Gulf War against Iraq in 1991.
The Americans love putting out the facade of a good excuse to wage their genocidal wars. Most of them, if not all, are fake.
However, the truth cannot be hidden for those who seek it. Here is a YouTube documentary series on what Tibet was like before and after her peaceful liberation from serfdom and slavery, as told by former Tibetan serfs and slaves who lived during those times.
(Part 1)
(Part 2)
2. Tiananmen Square Massacre LIE
Most of us remember the iconic photo of the Chinese man standing in front of and stopping a column of PLA tanks near Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Most Westerners believe that thousands of protesting Chinese students were crushed and killed by PLA tanks inside Tiananmen Square. How could this not be true? After all, the BBC and the New York Times both reported this and continue to tell this Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.
I saw it live on TV! Or so I thought.
Although that iconic photo is real, however, no one died inside Tiananmen Square. About 300 people were killed during the June 4th incident outside of Tiananmen Square, most were PLA soldiers and the rest were mainly workers, not students. The students had left Tiananmen Square peacefully early on June 4th.
Those key student leaders who were trained and goaded on by the American CIA (the National Endowment for Democracy or NED) were whisked away secretively via Hong Kong to the United States where they were then offered lucrative scholarships to attend prestigious universities.
Student leaders who benefited from American generosity or quid pro quo after Tiananmen Square include Chai Ling (Princeton University), Wu’er Kaixi (Harvard University), Wang Dan (Harvard University), Liu Gang (Columbia University), Feng Congde (Boston University), and Li Lu (Columbia University).
Here is the story of a cool-aid drinker and bonafide journalist who attended candle light vigils on almost every June 4th demonstration at Victoria Park in Hong Kong for 30 years. His recent awakening to the reality and truth of the so-called “Tiananmen Square Massacre” is quite refreshing and enlightening to read:
In perfect hindsight, the student protestors in Tiananmen Square were 100% wrong, demonstrating for Western style “democracy”. In actuality, they were instigating a “color revolution” to overthrow the CPC, before this phrase came into vogue much later.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping was 100% correct.
The proofs are in the results.
China today is the second largest economy in the world. Some say she is the largest economy in the world using the Purchasing Power Parity method of calculating GDP. At the end of 2020, China lifted all of her citizens from extreme poverty! The total number of Chinese lifted out of extreme poverty totals over 700 million people! This is historical and unprecedented in human history! More about this later below.
When Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, China was basically starting from nothing, after many decades of devastation and destruction from the civil war and the war against the Japanese invasion. When Deng Xiaoping began to steer China’s course towards reforms and opening up in 1978, millions of Chinese people were still riding bicycles!
Today, only 44 years later, millions of Chinese people ride super trains that are the envy of the world. China is the largest automobile market in the world. The Chinese middle class is more than the entire population of the USA. The Chinese space program rivals both the American’s and the Russian’s in terms of technological advancement and achievements. China built her space program all by herself, literally from scratch.
I’d say China has attained phenomenal and historical successes since June 4, 1989 . . . under the leadership and vision of the CPC!
3. Xinjiang Genocide LIE
I am getting a little ahead of myself in telling my odyssey, but here is the latest LIE about China. It’s basically the same Tibetan LIE retold once again.
Today, we are told there is another CPC genocide. This time it’s in the Chinese province of Xinjiang where the ethnic minority, the Uygurs (or Uyghurs, as it is spelled in the West), live.
Xinjiang province, also known as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, is located in the western region of China. It is the home to over 25 million Chinese citizens, comprising of all the 56 Chinese ethnic groups. The Uygurs are a Turkic ethnic group native to Xinjiang. There are about 8 million Uygurs in 2000 and about 12 million in Xinjiang in 2020. Most Uygurs in Xinjiang are Muslims.
The Western narrative on Xinjiang, mainly driven by the United States, is that there are the following: (1) a genocide is waged against the Uygurs by the CPC, (2) Uygur forced labor is used in cotton production and other industries, (3) concentration camps where 1 million or 2 million Uygurs (depending on who is regurgitating this narrative) are imprisoned, (4) thousands of Muslim mosques are destroyed (where have we heard this before?), etc., etc., etc..
I am not going to waste your time or mine to go into this “Tibet Genocide 2.0” LIE retold for Xinjiang. But I will describe the three key sources of these Xinjiang LIES.
One is Adrian Zenz who is a German “anthropologist” known for his very distorted views and published reports on the Xinjiang “concentration camps” and “Uygur genocide”. He is a senior fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank in Washington, DC. Mr. Zenz is a fanatical right-wing, religious zealot whose mission in life seems to be to take down the CPC! Of course, US government money has nothing to do with his “mission”.
The second source of these Xinjiang LIES is an Australian think tank called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute or ASPI which is partially funded by the Australian government. The other sources of ASPI’s funding include such US/UK military industrial corporations as Lockheed Martin (known for producing the F-16, F-22 and F-35 jet fighters), BAE Systems (Eurofighter Typhoon jet fighters, Trident nuclear missile subs), Northrop Grumman (missiles), Thales Group (rocket and mortar systems), and Raytheon Technology (Javelin and Stinger missiles).
The third source is the so-called “World Uyghur Congress” that is funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy or NED which is publicly outed as a CIA front organization, and it is headquartered in Munich, Germany.
What I do want is to leave my readers with three videos on the reality and truth of Xinjiang and the Uygurs today:
4. American MYTH
Americans love to preach to the rest of the world about how fortunate they are living in the land of milk and honey: Freedom and Democracy!
But as one British expat living in China, Jason Lightfoot, remarked about the USA in one of his YouTube videos titled “5 Reasons Why I LOVE Living in China!”:
“They may call themselves ‘the land of the free’, but how free are you if you can’t walk down the streets at night and feel safe? You need to keep a gun under your pillow to feel safe. You can’t walk down certain streets at night time or in the day time. You can’t afford your rent because cost of living is sky high. You drive down a road that’s crumbling, covered in potholes. It damages your car but you can’t afford to fix it because you’ve just been laid off. How free can you be in a society like this?”
To Jason’s astute observations, I would add this rhetorical question, “How free are you and how democratic is it to be forced to work 3 minimum wage jobs every day, seven days a week, just to pay the monthly rent and to provide food on the table for one’s family?”
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book called, “Nickel and Dimed,” describing this particular American plight. Her book came out in 2001 and things have gotten a lot worse since then.
As to the self-proclaimed notion that America is the world’s “greatest democracy”, Chinese venture capitalist and political scientist, Eric X. Li, said it best: “In America, you can change political parties, but you can’t change the policies. In China, you cannot change the party, but you can change policies.”
What is more important, democracy as in voting for political leaders or policy as in having infrastructure (here I include social infrastructure as well)?
Actually both.
In America, the common people neither have the political leaders that represent their needs and interests nor do they have adequate infrastructure necessary to carry on their daily lives. Most of their bridges, highways, dams, and other public works were constructed during the Great Depression and in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Today, America’s infrastructure is literally crumbling before their very eyes. Their once proud social infrastructure, health care and social safety nets have been dismantled and/or privatized. Their dismal and horrific Covid-19 results, with over one million deaths and counting, are a sad and eye-opening testimony to this stark reality.
The MYTH of America versus the reality of America is the difference between how America is portrayed in its Hollywood comic book movies and the harsh reality on Main Street, USA.
Cognitive dissonance!
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort or anguish that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes simultaneously. Cognitive dissonance is a fundamental psychological problem suffered by all cult members. Including cult nations!
The late and great comedian George Carlin summed up the American Myth aka the American Dream ever so eloquently:
“They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep [or dead] to believe it.”
Enlightenment in Argentina
When I had enough of the cognitive dissonance living in the USA, I decided to leave. The hypocrisy and hubris of the Americans were just too much for me. As the Americans love to say, “Love America or leave!” I chose to leave. But where would I go? China was out of the question, because at that time I still feared China and the CPC. So, I looked for a country furthest from the USA that is not so pro-USA.
That country turned out to be Argentina.
Except for a brief period, I have been living in Patagonia, Argentina since August, 2008. In September 2010, I visited Shanghai with my parents. My fear of China and the CPC, though greatly diminished since my San Francisco speech, was still present.
In mid 2020, the Covid-19 epidemic, which started in Wuhan, China, paralyzed the entire world with lockdowns. In Argentina it was the same. With too much time on my hands and nothing to do, I began to study and research China and the CPC.
Under the direct leadership of President Xi Jinping and the CPC, the incredible response of China to contain and then defeat Covid-19 in Wuhan really impressed me. In just 76 days, this new and previously unknown epidemic was brought under complete control in Wuhan, thanks to the heroic and selfless efforts of tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, construction workers, delivery persons, grocery workers, local volunteers, truck drivers, and military personnel. Many volunteered from almost all regions of China to go to Wuhan to fight!
One of the best documentaries on Wuhan’s fight against Covid-19 is produced by Reporterfy Media and it’s called “Blaming Wuhan The Documentary”:
Incidentally, a few Chinese, including two that I know personally, have turned against President Xi Jinping, or it reconfirms their previous judgment of Xi as this evil dictator, because of the supposed fiascos that resulted from his in/actions in the recent Shanghai lockdown. One of the social media stories is about pets accidentally or intentional killed by public personnels disinfecting unattended apartments in Shanghai. And other such Internet stories like that.
Even if these stories are true, what these Chinese critics lack is a discerning perspective. Comparing China’s with the American response and its aftermath, with over one million Covid-19 deaths and counting, these Chinese critics are nitpicking gnats from shit!
Finally, two things completely destroyed the last dregs of my fear and hatred of China and the CPC: (1) China’s Poverty Alleviation program which has successfully lifted over 700 million Chinese out of extreme poverty, and (2) the incredible journey of Xi Jinping, from the humble beginnings of a young farm worker to the all powerful leadership position as China’s President and Leader.
China’s Poverty Alleviation
I had a very old English book about China written at the turn of the last century. I have lost that book and I don’t remember its title. But what I do remember from that book is the figure of 700 million poor Chinese peasants and how the author salivated at the prospect of selling shoes to a few of those 700 million potential customers!
Chairman Mao, the CPC and the PLA liberated China from a century of imperialism and the disease of parasitic colonialism. They laid the solid foundation for a New China by quarantining and disinfecting China from foreign colonists and foreign invaders, and by building up the Chinese military and nuclear weapons. Mao and the CPC had the foresight to defeat the Americans attempting to enclose China via Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan, chiefly in the early 1950s during the so-called Korea War.
One of the key missions of the CPC is to liberate the Chinese people from centuries and even millenniums of poverty. This dream of Chairman Mao and the early pioneers of the CPC was but a dream when the People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1, 1949. There were over 700 million Chinese living in extreme poverty then, including 100 million impoverished rural residents.
China was still a very poor country in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping started his reform and opening up. However, under the collective CPC leadership and vision of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, Poverty Alleviation has accelerated from a rallying cry and a sacred mission to practical actions and state programs in the fulfilment of a 5,000 year old Chinese dream.
Incidentally, US President Lyndon B. Johnson launched America’s “War on Poverty” during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. What are the results of America’s poverty alleviation since 1964? Where is the beef as the Americans would say?!?
What has taken place in China since 1978 is nothing short of the miraculous. However, there were no miracles or magic involved. China’s Poverty Alleviation involved the dedicated hard work of millions of CPC Party members and cadres.
Poverty Alleviation in China involved the hard work and ingenuity of over 3 million grassroots CPC officials stationed in some 128,000 poverty-stricken villages throughout all regions of China.
China’s Poverty Alleviation utilized the “five-batch” principles: (1) Local Industrial Development, (2) Relocation, (3) Eco-Compensation, (4) Children’s Education, and (5) Social Security.
Depending on the specific local conditions, problems and needs, a targeted poverty alleviation approach was employed using the “five-batch” principles.
Local Industrial Development involve nurturing existing or developing new local industries. As it says in the Bible, “If you give man a fish, you have fed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you have fed him for a lifetime.” Well, that’s exactly what China has done throughout her 832 counties. But there is a more practical Chinese saying, “If you want to get rich, build a road first.” Therefore, many local projects involve building much needed paved roads, bridges, highways, railways, 4G/5G Internet, and other infrastructure to connect isolated regions to the rest of China. Other projects involve building solar power stations and wind turbines for the generation of electricity. Then there is the growing of local agricultural products that are sold via the blooming e-commerce trade in China.
In really isolated and hard to access villages, the only practical solution to lift the impoverished locals out of decades and centuries of poverty is to relocate them to more suitable, accessible and fertile areas. Therefore for these poor villagers, Relocation is the key solution. However, these poor villagers were NOT forced to relocate. In many cases, it takes a lot of persistent effort on the part of the local first Party secretary to convince them to relocate to new and better communities where new housing has been constructed, typically free of charge (free housing), and, in many cases, completely furnished with the latest appliances and furnitures! Between 2016 and 2020, some 9.6 million Chinese have been relocated to 35,000 newly built residential communities with 2.66 million new houses and apartments newly built.
Eco-Compensation entails transforming polluting local industries, such as coal mining, to more eco-friendly and sustainable businesses, such local eco-tourism. The guiding philosophy behind this principle is President Xi Jinping’s “Lucid waters and lush mountain are invaluable assets” concept which he first introduced in Yucan Village, Anji county of Huzhou city on August 15, 2005. China’s forestry services has hired 1.1 million poverty-stricken people as forest rangers, to protect the local environment and native wildlife and animals. Some of these newly trained forest rangers were previously employed in non-sustainable industries.
Children’s Education is the key to China’s bright future and to ensure that the cycle of poverty is broken forever. Between 2016 and 2020, “China ensured free compulsory education for 200,000 students from registered poor households, and free vocational education training for more than 8 million junior or high school dropouts.” This means free tuition for school children and tuition allowances for poverty stricken households. Along with relocation, this also means the relocated school children live near their schools, where previously they had to walk for hours to get to school. Some students even had to slide on steel cables across dangerous rivers to get to their schools prior to the building of bridges!
Last by not least is Social Security for the most needed and impoverished families. They may talk about “no child left behind” in the United States, but in China “no one left behind” is not only state policy but it is a reality. Since 2016, China has provided subsistence allowance or poverty support allowance to more than 19.36 million registered poor people. Social Security also includes free health care and health insurance for the most needy and impoverished people.
In November 2020, China succeeded in eliminating absolute or extreme poverty!
The arc of journey of Xi Jinping is one of the most incredible stories in recent history and it will be studied by millions of people everywhere around the world.
Although President Xi Jinping came from a family well connected in the CPC, Xi himself had to literally start at the bottom. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a Long March hero who later became the Secretary-General of the China State Council and a Deputy Prime Minister of China.
In 1969, at the age of 15, Xi Jinping was sent to the countryside along with tens of millions of Chinese youth. He worked as a manual farm laborer for 7 years in a small poor village called Liangjiahe in Yan’an, Shaanxi Province in northwest China. At night, Xi slept on a heated brick and clay bed in a room carved into a mountainside.
Nighttime was also when he could read his many books stored in a large brown box that he had lugged all the way from Beijing to Liangjiahe. His thirst for knowledge spanned literature, history, politics, and philosophy. After a hard day’s of manual labor, Xi would read his books well into the wee hours of the night and early morning with a kerosine lamp as his only source of light. Xi loved reading books like Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and MacBeth, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and of course Mao’s Little Red Book.
Since his father was a high CPC official, some people might wrongly assume that Xi would automatically become a CPC member. No, that was not the case! It took him 10 attempts to apply for CPC membership before he was finally accepted. Later Xi was elected as the village Party secretary or chief of Liangjiahe. For his exemplary work, he was awarded a motorcycle. Instead of keeping it for himself, Xi traded it for “a tractor, a flour-milling machine and a grain thrower”. These machines were much needed and they were extremely helpful to the local villagers.
In Liangjiahe, Xi Jinping found his mission in life: to serve the people! And it was here that the seeds of his ideas and concepts of “poverty alleviation” germinated.
The rest, as they say, is history!
One of the best documentaries on this incredible arc of journey is called “The Making of Xi Jinping” and I highly recommend everyone to watch this short series:
In conclusion, I want like to end my article with two phenomenal videos. The last video shows the incredible gratitude that the Chinese people have towards their doctors and nurses in the fight against Covid-19 and you will never see this kind of emotional outpouring and national pride in the West. The first one is a seminal talk given by Eric X. Li, who like myself is a Shanghai native son, on WHY China’s system of government works which is the reason WHY the Communist Party of China or the CPC is LOVED by hundreds of millions of Chinese . . . including ME!
Ernest Hemingway was going to the south of France from Paris in the 1920’s and his wife was traveling separately to meet him. She had a suitcase full of Hemingway’s stories. Someone stole the suitcase on the train or at the train station in France. What did the thief think when they got to a safe place and open the captured loot. I believe Hemingway did his first drafts on a typewriter, so this voler was looking at pages of English language… what? May have looked worthless. This was when Hemingway was unknown and before his ‘Farewell To Arms’ success. What happened to those stories. Hemingway said it was probably a good thing for him as a writer because it made him start all over again with new stories.
For some strange reason that suitcase full of stories in France pops up in my mind every now and then. I picture someone coming forward with the discovery of these unpublished stories from such a notable writer. Or, I fantasize about creating hoax Hemingway stories on old paper and finding out what that suitcase looked like and announcing the ‘discovery’ of the stories.
I was in Paris, France, as a college student in 1970. At that time French language books were very expensive and a little hard to get in the United States. So, when I was leaving to return to the US I had what I considered to be a treasure trove of French language books that filled a large suitcase. I have these books still. At the other end of the subway train near my house is Harvard Square where I once went to get French books at Schoenhoff’s Foreign Language booksellers. French books always seemed so expensive there. I would go to window shop and remind myself of what I might have at home a couple of decades ago. I remember flipping through a special printing of the first Tin Tin that cost $70. That work in a smaller edition, or simply online, is now about $12. I have a half baked idea of buying a copy to change from an Anti-Soviet socialism can’t work story to an Anti-Stalinist story showing the struggle between the Leninist/Trotskyists and the Stalinists in 1928 Russia.
I have all the books I brought in a suitcase across the ocean from France all those years ago on a shelf in my parlor. During the COVID lockdowns and isolations I read La Peste by Albert Camus.
I took the book down from the high shelf with the French paperbacks an placed it on my windowsill. I also took La Bas, and Voyage Au But De La Nuit. The three books were at the window and I took a picture with my phone and then posted it online on Reddit. I think it was r/France, or r/FrenchLiterature, or something related or whatever struck my fancy at the moment. I got over two thousand views and lots of ‘likes.’ I felt a little less alone in that storm, and also like I was a teeny tiny part of the flow of words and stories in Paris, France.
Then, a couple of weeks ago I got a strange direct message from someone in French asking me where in the world I got those books?
I got them in Paris, France.
It dawned on me that I had a magic suitcase from France with a treasure trove of stories. I was a time traveler as sure as any character in a Jules Verne adventure. My suitcase and me are strange visitors from the past… demanding attention and apparently explanation as to where in the world we came from.
Since 1982, I have written three books, hundreds of articles and thousands of posts related to the atomic bombing of Japan. This week my first film as writer and director, Atomic Cover-up, has premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival, and can be viewed by all until the end of the month.
Yet I still get asked regularly, Why does any of that matter today? You can’t change history, reverse decisions or bring back the dead. Part of the answer, of course, is that more than seventy-five years after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb is still very much with us, along with the controversy over the decision to obliterate the two Japanese cities.
Beyond that, however, the atomic attack over Japan remains a vital lesson for us all, not only for the first use of a nuclear weapon in war, but because of the official “first-use” nuclear policy the U.S. maintains today. Even the fact that the US still has a first-strike policy (meaning we will use nuclear weapons first in a crisis if need be) will surprise many, especially with the end of the Cold War now a distant memory for some.
It’s a subject rarely explored in the media – even during the marking of the 75th anniversary last summer – or in American policy circles. Resisting a no-first-use pledge, in fact, has been a cornerstone of US nuclear policy for decades. Following a few positive signs from Obama, moving very far in the direction of no-first-use seemed a long way off in Trump’s America and its fate under Biden remains hazy.
Perhaps the strongest reason is this: most Americans, our media and our leaders (including every president), have endorsed our “first-use” of the bomb against Japan. This remains true today, despite new evidence and analysis that has emerged for many years. We saw it again last summer, when Chris Wallace’s Fox special, and then his bestselling book defending the bombings, drew more attention than anything. My Atomic Cover-up film, in fact, shows how the truths of Hiroshima were largely kept out of the media as the US suppressed the most shocking and important footage of the aftermath of the bombings for decades.
There has also been little change abroad – where the use of the bomb in 1945 has been roundly condemned from the beginning. Indeed, US support, even pride, in our use of the weapon has given us little moral standing in arguing that other countries should not develop nuclear weapons and consider using them, possibly as a first, not a last, resort (that’s our policy, remember).
So it all goes back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While I respect the views of a range of historians on this matter, and the opinions of the men who fought in the Pacific, I happen to believe the bombs should not have been used against Japan – directly over the center of massive cities. The war would likely have ended very shortly without it (the bloody American invasion was not set until months later), largely because of the Soviets finally declaring war on Japan – an event long-dreaded by Japanese leaders.
But the key point for today is this: how the “Hiroshima narrative” has been handed down to generations of Americans – and overwhelmingly endorsed by officials and the media, even if many historians disagree – matters greatly.
Over and over, top policymakers and commentators say, “We must never use nuclear weapons,” yet they endorse the two times the weapons have been used against cities in a first strike. To make any exceptions, even in the means exceptions can be made in the future. Indeed, we have already made two exceptions, with more than 200,000 civilians killed. The line against using nuclear weapons has been drawn… in shifting sand.
Polls show that huge numbers of Americans have taken their cues from officials and the media. As I note in my film, recent ones show disturbing levels of support for pre-emptively using the bomb against North Korea and Iran cities under if the US feels threatened by them.
And, as I’ve noted, the fact that the United States first developed, and then used – twice – the WMD to end all WMDs has severely compromised our arguments against others building the weapon ever since. Hiroshima was our original sin, and we are still paying for it, even if most Americans do not recognize this.
That is why I always urge everyone to study the history surrounding the decision to use the bomb and how the full story was covered up for decades. And now, of course, I urged them to watch my film. There is certainly, in the minds of the media and the American public, no taboo on using nuclear weapons, and it all started, but did not end, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is what nuclear abolitionists – or even those who simply want the end of our first-use policy – are up against.
2. The U.S. Government and its ‘news’-media lied — didn’t merely “err” — to deceive the U.S. public to believe the “Saddam’s WMD” falsehoods that were used to ‘justify’ criminally invading Iraq on 20 March 2003.
5. The claim that Taiwan isn’t and hasn’t even been a part of China is a blatant lie about history, to deceive U.S.-and-allied publics and aiming to enable the U.S. regime to grab China too.
6. U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media lie constantly so as to deceive their publics to support their criminal invasions, coups, and sanctions, against countries that the U.S. regime is aiming ultimately to conquer, even countries (such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine) that never threatened, nor posed any threat to, U.S. national security.
8. The termination of American democracy, and the decision by the U.S. Government to ultimately conquer the entire world, occurred on 25 July 1945, and the Cold War excuse — that it was about communism, instead of about ultimate global conquest by the U.S. — was, and remains, a lie.
NOTE: A reader of this article commented on it by saying: “Actually US democracy did not end in 1945, as it never existed in the first place. The authors of the Constitution deliberately made it a republic, not a democracy.” To this, I replied:
A “republic” IS a “democracy”: they are synonyms for a nation in which the government REPRESENTS the public, instead of being some dictator or (more commonly) dictatorial class of people who DON’T represent the public.
You got balled-up in words instead of thinking about WHAT THE WORDS REPRESENT. “Democracy” and “republic” represent the SAME THING.
(There supposedly are also nations that are ‘direct democracies’ in which the government is ‘direct’ from the voters instead of entailing any voting for representatives; but none such actually exists today, because a direct democracy is possible only for tiny nations, “city-states,” and even most of those do and have had representatives. In the real world, “democracy” and “republic” are the same thing.)
It is because of such confusions by, and gullibility OF, the public, that politicians such as Pelosi, Biden, and Obama, and such as Trump, Bush, and Reagan, can so easily fool the public to accept them as BEING representatives of the public, INSTEAD OF as being representatives of the billionaires who funded their political careers — which they actually are and have been.
A long-lost painting by the British graffiti artist Banksy has resurfaced in a swank art gallery in downtown Tel Aviv, an hour’s drive and a world away from the concrete wall in the occupied West Bank where it was initially sprayed — a move Palestinians have branded as theft.
The relocation of the painting — which depicts a slingshot-toting rat and was likely intended to protest the Israel occupation — raises ethical questions about the removal of artwork from occupied territory and the display of such politically-charged pieces in radically different settings from where they were created.
The painting initially appeared near Israel’s separation barrier in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem and was one of several works created in secret around 2007. They employed Banksy’s trademark absurdist and dystopian imagery to protest Israel’s decades-long occupation of the occupied West Bank.
Now it resides at the Urban Gallery in the heart of Tel Aviv’s financial district, surrounded by glass and steel skyscrapers.
“This is theft of the property of the Palestinian people,” said Jeries Qumsieh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Tourism Ministry. “These were paintings by an international artist for Bethlehem, for Palestine, and for visitors to Bethlehem and Palestine. So transferring them, manipulating them and stealing them is definitely an illegal act.”
“This is the story of David and Goliath,” said Koby Abergel, an Israeli art dealer who purchased the painting, without elaborating on the analogy. He said the gallery was simply displaying the work, leaving its interpretation to others.
The 70-kilometer (43-mile) journey it made from the occupied West Bank to Tel Aviv is shrouded in secrecy. The 900-pound concrete slab would have had to pass through Israel’s serpentine barrier and at least one military checkpoint — daily features of Palestinian life and targets of Banksy’s biting satire.
The graffiti artwork was spray-painted on a concrete block that was part of an abandoned Israeli army position in Bethlehem, next to a soaring concrete section of the separation barrier.
It was not possible to independently confirm his account of its journey.
The piece now stands on an ornately patterned tile floor, surrounded by other contemporary art. Baruch Kashkash, the gallery’s owner, said the roughly 2-square-meter (-yard) block was so heavy it had to be brought inside by a crane, and could barely be moved from the doorway.
Israel’s illegal occupation means it controls all access to the occupied West Bank, and Palestinians require Israeli permits to travel in or out and to import and export goods.
Abergel claimed the artwork’s move was not coordinated with the Israeli military, and that his Palestinian associates, whom he declined to name, were responsible for moving it into Israel and crossing through military checkpoints. He said he has no plans to sell the piece.
According to the international treaty governing cultural property to which Israel is a signatory, occupying powers must prevent the removal of cultural property from occupied territories. It remains unclear exactly how the 1954 Hague Convention would apply in this instance.
Most of us claim we want to be happy—to have meaningful lives, enjoy ourselves, experience fulfillment, and share love and friendship with other people and maybe other species, like dogs, cats, birds, and whatnot. Strangely enough, however, some people act as if they just want to be miserable, and they succeed remarkably at inviting misery into their lives, even though they get little apparent benefit from it, since being miserable doesn’t help them find lovers and friends, get better jobs, make more money, or go on more interesting vacations.
Why do they do this? After perusing the output of some of the finest brains in the therapy profession, I’ve come to the conclusion that misery is an art form, and the satisfaction people seem to find in it reflects the creative effort required to cultivate it. In other words, when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity. It can even give life a distinctive meaning.
So if you aspire to make yourself miserable, what are the best, most proven techniques for doing it? Let’s exclude some obvious ways, like doing drugs, committing crimes, gambling, and beating up your spouse or neighbor. Subtler strategies, ones that won’t lead anyone to suspect that you’re acting deliberately, can be highly effective. But you need to pretend that you want to be happy, like everybody else, or people won’t take your misery seriously. The real art is to behave in ways that’ll bring on misery while allowing you to claim that you’re an innocent victim, ideally of the very people from whom you’re forcibly extracting compassion and pity.
Here, I cover most areas of life, such as family, work, friends, and romantic partners. These areas will overlap nicely, since you can’t ruin your life without ruining your marriage and maybe your relationships with your children and friends. It’s inevitable that as you make yourself miserable, you’ll be making those around you miserable also, at least until they leave you—which will give you another reason to feel miserable. So it’s important to keep in mind the benefits you’re accruing in your misery.
• When you’re miserable, people feel sorry for you. Not only that, they often feel obscurely guilty, as if your misery might somehow be their fault. This is good! There’s power in making other people feel guilty. The people who love you and those who depend on you will walk on eggshells to make sure that they don’t say or do anything that will increase your misery.
• When you’re miserable, since you have no hopes and expect nothing good to happen, you can’t be disappointed or disillusioned.
• Being miserable can give the impression that you’re a wise and worldly person, especially if you’re miserable not just about your life, but about society in general. You can project an aura of someone burdened by a form of profound, tragic, existential knowledge that happy, shallow people can’t possibly appreciate.
Honing Your Misery Skills
Let’s get right to it and take a look at some effective strategies to become miserable. This list is by no means exhaustive, but engaging in four or five of these practices will help refine your talent.
1. Be afraid, be very afraid, of economic loss. In hard economic times, many people are afraid of losing their jobs or savings. The art of messing up your life consists of indulging these fears, even when there’s little risk that you’ll actually suffer such losses. Concentrate on this fear, make it a priority in your life, moan continuously that you could go broke any day now, and complain about how much everything costs, particularly if someone else is buying. Try to initiate quarrels about other people’s feckless, spendthrift ways, and suggest that the recession has resulted from irresponsible fiscal behavior like theirs.
Fearing economic loss has several advantages. First, it’ll keep you working forever at a job you hate. Second, it balances nicely with greed, an obsession with money, and a selfishness that even Ebenezer Scrooge would envy. Third, not only will you alienate your friends and family, but you’ll likely become even more anxious, depressed, and possibly even ill from your money worries. Good job!
Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter.
2. Practice sustained boredom. Cultivate the feeling that everything is predictable, that life holds no excitement, no possibility for adventure, that an inherently fascinating person like yourself has been deposited into a completely tedious and pointless life through no fault of your own. Complain a lot about how bored you are. Make it the main subject of conversation with everyone you know so they’ll get the distinct feeling that you think they’re boring. Consider provoking a crisis to relieve your boredom. Have an affair (this works best if you’re already married and even better if you have an affair with someone else who’s married); go on repeated shopping sprees for clothes, cars, fancy appliances, sporting equipment (take several credit cards, in case one maxes out); start pointless fights with your spouse, boss, children, friends, neighbors; have another child; quit your job, clean out your savings account, and move to a state you know nothing about.
A side benefit of being bored is that you inevitably become boring. Friends and relatives will avoid you. You won’t be invited anywhere; nobody will want to call you, much less actually see you. As this happens, you’ll feel lonely and even more bored and miserable.
Exercise: Force yourself to watch hours of mindless reality TV programs every day, and read only nonstimulating tabloids that leave you feeling soulless. Avoid literature, art, and keeping up with current affairs.
3. Give yourself a negative identity. Allow a perceived emotional problem to absorb all other aspects of your self-identification. If you feel depressed, become a Depressed Person; if you suffer from social anxiety or a phobia, assume the identity of a Phobic Person or a Person with Anxiety Disorder. Make your condition the focus of your life. Talk about it to everybody, and make sure to read up on the symptoms so you can speak about them knowledgeably and endlessly. Practice the behaviors most associated with that condition, particularly when it’ll interfere with regular activities and relationships. Focus on how depressed you are and become weepy, if that’s your identity of choice. Refuse to go places or try new things because they make you too anxious. Work yourself into panic attacks in places it’ll cause the most commotion. It’s important to show that you don’t enjoy these states or behaviors, but that there’s nothing you can do to prevent them.
Practice putting yourself in the physiological state that represents your negative identity. For example, if your negative identity is Depressed Person, hunch your shoulders, look at the floor, breathe shallowly. It’s important to condition your body to help you reach your negative peak as quickly as possible.
Exercise: Write down 10 situations that make you anxious, depressed, or distracted. Once a week, pick a single anxiety-provoking situation, and use it to work yourself into a panic for at least 15 minutes.
4. Pick fights. This is an excellent way of ruining a relationship with a romantic partner. Once in a while, unpredictably, pick a fight or have a crying spell over something trivial and make unwarranted accusations. The interaction should last for at least 15 minutes and ideally occur in public. During the tantrum, expect your partner to be kind and sympathetic, but should he or she mention it later, insist that you never did such a thing and that he or she must have misunderstood what you were trying to say. Act injured and hurt that your partner somehow implied you weren’t behaving well.
Another way of doing this is to say unexpectedly, “We need to talk,” and then to barrage your partner with statements about how disappointed you are with the relationship. Make sure to begin this barrage just as your partner is about to leave for some engagement or activity, and refuse to end it for at least an hour. Another variation is to text or phone your partner at work to express your issues and disappointments. Do the same if your partner is out with friends.
Exercise: Write down 20 annoying text messages you could send to a romantic partner. Keep a grudge list going, and add to it daily.
5. Attribute bad intentions. Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.
Exercise: List the names of five relatives or friends. For each, write down something they did or said in the recent past that proves they’re as invested in adding to your misery as you are.
6. Whatever you do, do it only for personal gain. Sometimes you’ll be tempted to help someone, contribute to a charity, or participate in a community activity. Don’t do it, unless there’s something in it for you, like the opportunity to seem like a good person or to get to know somebody you can borrow money from some day. Never fall into the trap of doing something purely because you want to help people. Remember that your primary goal is to take care of Numero Uno, even though you hate yourself.
Exercise: Think of all the things you’ve done for others in the past that haven’t been reciprocated. Think about how everyone around you is trying to take from you. Now list three things you could do that would make you appear altruistic while bringing you personal, social, or professional gain.
7. Avoid gratitude. Research shows that people who express gratitude are happier than those who don’t, so never express gratitude. Counting your blessings is for idiots. What blessings? Life is suffering, and then you die. What’s there to be thankful for?
Well-meaning friends and relatives will try to sabotage your efforts to be thankless. For example, while you’re in the middle of complaining about the project you procrastinated on at work to your spouse during an unhealthy dinner, he or she might try to remind you of how grateful you should be to have a job or food at all. Such attempts to encourage gratitude and cheerfulness are common and easily deflected. Simply point out that the things you should be grateful for aren’t perfect—which frees you to find as much fault with them as you like.
Exercise: Make a list of all the things you could be grateful for. Next to each item, write down why you aren’t. Imagine the worst. When you think of the future, imagine the worst possible scenario. It’s important to be prepared for and preemptively miserable about any possible disaster or tragedy. Think of the possibilities: terrorist attacks, natural disasters, fatal disease, horrible accidents, massive crop failures, your child not getting picked for the varsity softball team.
8. Always be alert and in a state of anxiety. Optimism about the future leads only to disappointment. Therefore, you have to do your best to believe that your marriage will flounder, your children won’t love you, your business will fail, and nothing good will ever work out for you.
Exercise: Do some research on what natural or manmade disasters could occur in your area, such as earthquakes, floods, nuclear plant leaks, rabies outbreaks. Focus on these things for at least an hour a day.
9. Blame your parents. Blaming your parents for your defects, shortcomings, and failures is among the most important steps you can take. After all, your parents made you who you are today; you had nothing to do with it. If you happen to have any good qualities or successes, don’t give your parents credit. Those are flukes.
Extend the blame to other people from your past: the second-grade teacher who yelled at you in the cafeteria, the boy who bullied you when you were 9, the college professor who gave you a D on your paper, your first boyfriend, even the hick town you grew up in—the possibilities are limitless. Blame is essential in the art of being miserable.
Exercise: Call one of your parents and tell her or him that you just remembered something horrible they did when you were a child, and make sure he or she understands how terrible it made you feel and that you’re still suffering from it.
10. Don’t enjoy life’s pleasures. Taking pleasure in things like food, wine, music, and beauty is for flighty, shallow people. Tell yourself that. If you inadvertently find yourself enjoying some flavor, song, or work of art, remind yourself immediately that these are transitory pleasures, which can’t compensate for the miserable state of the world. The same applies to nature. If you accidentally find yourself enjoying a beautiful view, a walk on the beach, or a stroll through a forest, stop! Remind yourself that the world is full of poverty, illness, and devastation. The beauty of nature is a deception.
Exercise: Once a week, engage in an activity that’s supposed to be enjoyable, but do so while thinking about how pointless it is. In other words, concentrate on removing all sense of pleasure from the pleasurable activity.
11. Ruminate. Spend a great deal of time focused on yourself. Worry constantly about the causes of your behavior, analyze your defects, and chew on your problems. This will help you foster a pessimistic view of your life. Don’t allow yourself to become distracted by any positive experience or influence. The point is to ensure that even minor upsets and difficulties appear huge and portentous.
You can ruminate on the problems of others or the world, but make them about you. Your child is sick? Ruminate on what a burden it is for you to take time off from work to care for her. Your spouse is hurt by your behavior? Focus on how terrible it makes you feel when he points out how you make him feel. By ruminating not only on your own problems but also those of others, you’ll come across as a deep, sensitive thinker who holds the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair and seek out negative feelings, like anger, depression, anxiety, boredom, whatever. Concentrate on these feelings for 15 minutes. During the rest of the day, keep them in the back of your mind, no matter what you’re doing.
12. Glorify or vilify the past. Glorifying the past is telling yourself how good, happy, fortunate, and worthwhile life was when you were a child, a young person, or a newly married person—and regretting how it’s all been downhill ever since. When you were young, for example, you were glamorous and danced the samba with handsome men on the beach at twilight; and now you’re in a so-so marriage to an insurance adjuster in Topeka. You should’ve married tall, dark Antonio. You should’ve invested in Microsoft when you had the chance. In short, focus on what you could’ve and should’ve done, instead of what you did. This will surely make you miserable.
Vilifying the past is easy, too. You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, you never got what you needed, you felt you were discriminated against, you never got to go to summer camp. How can you possibly be happy when you had such a lousy background? It’s important to think that bad memories, serious mistakes, and traumatic events were much more influential in forming you and your future than good memories, successes, and happy events. Focus on bad times. Obsess about them. Treasure them. This will ensure that, no matter what’s happening in the present, you won’t be happy.
Exercise: Make a list of your most important bad memories and keep it where you can review it frequently. Once a week, tell someone about your horrible childhood or how much better your life was 20 years ago.
13. Find a romantic partner to reform. Make sure that you fall in love with someone with a major defect (cat hoarder, gambler, alcoholic, womanizer, sociopath), and set out to reform him or her, regardless of whether he or she wants to be reformed. Believe firmly that you can reform this person, and ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Exercise: Go to online dating sites and see how many bad choices you can find in one afternoon. Make efforts to meet these people. It’s good if the dating site charges a lot of money, since this means you’ll be emotionally starved and poor.
14. Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything.
It helps if the things you criticize are well liked by most people so that your dislike of them sets you apart. Disliking traffic and mosquitos isn’t creative enough: everyone knows what it’s like to find these things annoying, and they won’t pay much attention if you find them annoying, too. But disliking the new movie that all your friends are praising? You’ll find plenty of opportunities to counter your friends’ glowing reviews with your contrarian opinion.
Exercise: Make a list of 20 things you dislike and see how many times you can insert them into a conversation over the course of the day. For best results, dislike things you’ve never given yourself a chance to like.
\—–
I’ve just listed 14 ways to make yourself miserable. You don’t have to nail every one of them, but even if you succeed with just four or five, make sure to berate yourself regularly for not enacting the entire list. If you find yourself in a therapist’s office—because someone who’s still clinging to their love for you has tricked you into going—make sure your misery seems organic. If the therapist enlightens you in any way or teaches you mind-body techniques to quiet your anxious mind, make sure to co-opt the conversation and talk about your misery-filled dreams from the night before. If the therapist is skilled in dream analysis, quickly start complaining about the cost of therapy itself. If the therapist uses your complaints as a launching pad to discuss transference issues, accuse him or her of having countertransference issues. Ultimately, the therapist is your enemy when trying to cultivate misery in your life. So get out as soon as possible. And if you happen upon a therapist who’ll sit quietly while you bring all 14 items on this list to life each week, call me. I’ll want to make an appointment, too.
Directed by Xavier Giannoli; written by Giannoli and Jacques Fieschi, based on the novel by Honoré de Balzac
Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues), directed by Xavier Giannoli, is a film adaptation of the novel with the same title by French author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). The book, written between 1837 and 1843, appeared in three parts. The film concentrates almost exclusively on the second (and strongest) portion, A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris (1839).
The semi-ironic title refers to Lucien Chardon, a young man from a provincial city in the southwest of France, who comes to Paris in 1821 to pursue a career as a poet. He has artistic aspirations, influenced by Romanticism, of the most elevated sort. Novel and film both recount the painful process of his systematic disillusionment and corruption. Balzac places the vileness of the press and the willingness of journalists to be hired by the highest bidder at the center of things. Beyond and behind that, the writer lays bare the transformation of art itself under capitalism into a commodity.
Lost Illusions is a monumental novel, a turning point in modern literature, and Giannoli and Jacques Fieschi, his co-screenwriter, have done a remarkable job of interpreting and dramatizing it.
When the film opens, Lucien (Benjamin Voisin) still lives in the provinces. He has developed a relationship with the intellectual-aristocratic leading light of his town, Louise de Bargeton (Cécile de France). He dedicates florid verses to the elegant woman, who has an older blockhead of a husband. Lucien’s more serious rival is the Baron du Châtelet (André Marcon), an indefatigable intriguer. Indeed, when Mme. de Bargeton breaks with her husband and moves to Paris, with Lucien in tow, Châtelet quickly convinces her to drop the youth.
Vincent Lacoste and Benjamin Voisin in Lost Illusions (2021)
Subsequently, at a point when Lucien is almost penniless in the unforgiving French capital, he encounters Etienne Lousteau (Vincent Lacoste), who writes for various “insolent” publications, with generally Liberal leanings, as opposed to the competing Royalist periodicals. The Bourbon Restoration, bringing Louis XVIII (brother of the executed Louis XVI) to the French throne, took place after the fall of Napoleon in 1814-15, following a quarter-century of revolution, war and upheaval.
During their first encounter, Lousteau asks Lucien, “What do you think I do?” The other tentatively suggests something about enlightening the public about art, the world… No, Lousteau responds, “My job is to make the shareholders rich, and along the way, rake it in.”
Through Lousteau, who once had artistic ambitions himself, Lucien makes contact with other journalists, editors, publishers and theater managers. One of Lucien’s first new acquaintances is the publisher/book dealer Dauriat (Gérard Depardieu). The latter contemptuously rejects the notion of publishing Lucien’s volume of sensitive verses. There’s no profit in it. Later, Lucien will be able to blackmail the publisher into putting out his poetry by savaging a new work by the well-known writer Nathan (the Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan in a very affecting performance), one of Dauriat’s leading authors. Lucien soon after pens a heartfelt, laudatory comment about Nathan’s volume.
Much of the journalists’ feverish activity centers around the Paris stage, and the ferocious competition between theaters and between performers. Everything is for sale. Streetwalkers circulate by the thousands, but prostitution is rife in every sphere. Theater owners, playwrights, actresses bribe Lousteau and his associates for favorable notices. The master-cynic Singali (Jean-François Stévenin) makes a career out of being paid to direct his sizable claque to jeer at or applaud a given piece or performer.
Money is the new royalty, someone explains, and no one wants to chop its head off. Despite trepidations and inner conflicts, Lucien makes headway in this new realm. He authors scintillating, but shallow reviews that attract attention. He takes up with Coralie (Salomé Dewaels), a young actress with ambitions, including artistic ones. She already has a protector and lover, the wealthy Camusot (Jean-Marie Frin), but the young people easily find their way around that.
Lucien continues to rise in prominence. But his head has now been fatally turned. All that is weakest, most unresolved, most fame- and wealth-seeking in his nature comes to the fore. He takes the line of least resistance at each decisive juncture. (In the novel, Balzac writes that the course of sacrificing oneself for art is “beset with hidden dangers,” it is “a perilous path,” whereas “Lucien’s character” impelled him to proceed along “the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at the quickest and promptest means.”)
Lucien, now feted everywhere, in one scene—drunk on champagne—puts on a fake crown: “To Paris! To our loves!” He’s on top of the world, literary royalty. Lucien is even able to exact a degree of revenge against Châtelet and other enemies with his cruel wit. His attachment to principles, to poetry slowly dissolves. In any case, as Lousteau tells him, “What we write is forgotten.” Or, as a character from the same journalistic milieu casually observes in the Balzac novel that follows the further misadventures of Lucien (The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, 1838-1847), “Are there such things as opinions nowadays? There are only interests.”
However, Lucien remains dominated by one obsession that will help bring about his downfall: changing his surname legally to “de Rubempré,” his mother’s maiden name, thus enabling him to enter the ranks of the nobility. For that, he needs assistance at the highest level of the French state, from the king himself or his entourage. When Lucien once again meets the well-connected Louise de Bargeton, she promises to aid him. As part of the effort to ingratiate himself with the powers that be, Lucien abandons his old Liberal friends (and convictions) and begins writing for a Royalist publication. His former colleagues thereupon plot to destroy him, in part through the public humiliation of Coralie, booed off the stage and “torn to shreds” by the reviewers. In addition, Lucien’s name, through a trick, appears on anti-Royalist articles, finishing him off in that quarter too. The would-be poet is reduced to writing advertisements while Coralie lies terribly ill. “A new world was dawning,” the narrator explains …
Benjamin Voisin in Lost Illusions (2021)
Giannoli and Fieschi have accomplished something intriguing, and demanding. They have attempted to absorb Balzac’s novel as a whole, retain its essential structure and gist, while rewriting the actual dialogue, reworking individual situations and changing certain characterizations. The thrust of Balzac’s story is here, although not so many of his lines. Giannoli speaks about the desire not to “plagiarize” the novel. He comments, “Art feeds on what it burns. Cinema is by nature the transfiguration of a reality or a book. Otherwise, what good is it?”
To a considerable extent, the filmmakers have succeeded. They have “softened” the novel’s attitude toward certain figures—Madame de Bargeton, for example. They have also added a more hopeful conclusion. The director explains that he found some of Balzac’s writing “harsh and punitive.” It’s possible that something has been gained in the process, and perhaps something has been lost. Balzac’s relentless, ferocious assault on this environment and its denizens can at times be wearing, but, fortunately, this version of Lost Illusions has not shied away from the novelist’s deep aversion to the falsity, hypocrisy, venality and all-embracing corruption he saw around him.
Giannoli made some other interesting observations to an interviewer:
“This theme of lost innocence, of ‘self-waste,’ of what was beautiful and precious in oneself, particularly touches me. This insidious way that an era or an environment has to lead you to deny your ideals, your most beautiful ‘values.’
“During the period when Balzac wrote Illusions, Marx was in the streets of Paris and [British author William Makepeace] Thackeray was preparing [The Luck of] Barry Lyndon, which would be serialized a little later. We could find dozens of other examples of authors who understood that the world had entered, to use a formula dear to Marxists, ‘the icy waters of selfish calculation.’ The critic Georg Lukacs has written magnificent pages on this great novel of the ‘capitalisation of minds’ and the ‘commodification of the world.’
“Balzac sees this moment when being degenerates into having, and having degenerates into appearing, because he also tells the story of France’s conversion to capitalism… The human, political, spiritual and artistic damage caused by this earthquake.
“What still has meaning in a world where everything is assessed at a market value?… Does art still have a place in such a world?”
The acting is excellent in Lost Illusions. The younger actors throw themselves into their parts, and the more veteran performers—Marcon, Depardieu, Stévenin, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as Finot, Jeanne Balibar as Madame d’Espard)—add extraordinary texture and coloring. Great care has been taken with every aspect of the production. The filmmakers clearly want their audience to be gripped and engaged. This is important to them and thus it becomes important to us.
The intense and increasingly intolerable pressures and contradictions building up in French and global society must play a role in this. Artists turn to past works and past eras because of something pressing in the present. Giannoli and Fieschi are not simply amusing themselves here. This is a serious effort reflecting serious conditions. The revulsion for the upper echelons and their literary-media apologists resonates strongly today. By making the film, its creators, whether they fully mean to or not, set themselves in opposition to the widespread and often well-paid acquiescence of the current “intelligentsia” in the face of the pandemic, unending war, the resurgence of fascism.
Balzac was writing under the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830-1848), that early stage of French capitalist development during which, according to Marx, it was not the entire bourgeoisie that ruled, “but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them—the so-called financial aristocracy.” Marx famously added that during these years, “an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.”
A thoughtful artist today would understandably associate features of that epoch with features of our own, during the terminal decline of bourgeois rule.
Balzac, a Royalist himself, opposed the rise of the bourgeoisie from the point of view of defending the old, “model” aristocratic society then going out of existence. As a great realist, however, he went “against his own class sympathies and political prejudices,” in Frederick Engels’ phrase. In his vast Human Comedy (dozens of interconnected novels and stories), the novelist chronicled “the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles” and around this central picture grouped “a complete history of French Society from which,” wrote Engels in a letter, “I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.”
Balzac did this as an artist, not a sociologist. Underpinned as they are by a definite and urgent conception of the epoch, his stories develop spontaneously, with a vivid, complex life of their own. His characters are individualized and their actions socially and psychologically convincing. The protagonists are not the mere “fleshing out” of social groupings or tendencies, but actual human beings, battling out the central moral and social issues confronting them. In Balzac’s work, as Georg Lukacs commented in his essay on the novel, the sum total of socially determining factors is expressed in “poetic form,” in “an uneven, intricate, confused and contradictory pattern, in a labyrinth of personal passions and chance happenings.”
Lukacs makes a number of other points. He argues that Lost Illusions portrays the deterioration of literature “in great detail. From the writer’s ideas, emotions and convictions to the paper on which he writes them down, everything is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold.” Moreover, Lukacs points out that Balzac was writing at a time when the capitalist corruption of ethics was still a work in progress, so to speak, in the stage of “its primitive accumulation in all the sombre splendour of its atrocity.” The fact that “the spirit” has become a marketable item “is not yet accepted as a matter of course.” Balzac still exhibits outrage, not acceptance or resignation.
Salomé Dewaels in Lost Illusions (2021)
This anger and disgust at the sad fate and degeneration of the post-Restoration youth in France finds expression in many, many passages in Lost Illusions. For example: “‘It is difficult to keep illusions on any subject in Paris,’ answered Lucien as they turned in at his door. ‘There is a tax upon everything—everything has its price, and anything can be made to order—even success.’”
And: “For the past two hours the word money had been sounding in Lucien’s ears as the solution of every difficulty. In the theatre as in the publishing trade, and in the publishing trade as in the newspaper-office—it was everywhere the same; there was not a word of art or of glory. The steady beat of the great pendulum, Money, seemed to fall like hammer-strokes on his heart and brain.”
Lucien is advised, “Swim with the stream; it will take you somewhere—A clever man with a footing in society can make a fortune whenever he pleases.” Another admonishes him, “I credited you with the omnipotence of the great mind—the power of seeing both sides of everything. In literature, my boy, every idea is reversible, and no man can take upon himself to decide which is the right or wrong side.”
Lucien eventually concludes from his experiences, “Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot.” These conceptions are not scattered throughout—or tacked on to—Lost Illusions, they form its connective tissue. And they have the greatest immediacy in our time.
For its honest approach and artistry, Giannoli’s film is highly recommended.
xenagoguevicene 
