Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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Название: Time Bites: Views and Reviews
Автор: Doris Lessing
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Критика
isbn: 9780007290093
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The most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world is Political Correctness, which is both immediately evident, and to be seen everywhere, and as invisible as a kind of poison gas, for its influences are often far from the source, manifesting as a general intolerance. The history books will say something like this: ‘When the certitudes of communism began to dissolve then collapsed with them – but slowly in some countries – the dogmas of Socialist Realism; but at once stepped into the vacuum Political Correctness. This began as a sensitive, honest and laudable attempt to remove the racial and sexual biases encoded in language, but it was at once taken over by the political hysterics, who made of it another dogma. In no time, from one end of the world to the other, everyone was saying, “It is Politically Correct”, “I am afraid it isn’t Politically Correct”, as if ordered to do so. There could hardly be a conversation without it, and PC was used often as the Victorians used “It isn’t done”, meaning socially improper, or to bolster the orthodoxies of “received opinion”, or even to criticise the eccentric. The new tyranny soon took over whole universities, particularly in the United States, departments of universities, colleges, schools, dictating habits of criticism, suffocating thought in some areas of scientific research, dimming the natural ferments of intellectual life. The submission to the new creed could not have happened so fast and so thoroughly if communist rigidities had not permeated the educated classes everywhere, for it was not necessary to have been a communist to absorb an imperative to control and limit: minds had already been thoroughly subdued to the idea that free enquiry and the creative arts must be subject to the higher authority of politics.’
Truly, we cannot stand being free. Mankind – humankind – loves its chains, and hastens to forge new ones if the old ones fall away.
The trouble is that people who need the rigidities, dogmas, ideologies, are always the most stupid, so Political Correctness is a self-perpetuating machine for driving out the intelligent and the creative. It is forming a class of people – researchers, journalists, particularly educators – who are exiles in their own culture, sometimes kept in inferior work, or even unemployed, and yet they are often the best, the most innovative, the most flexible.
In a certain prestigious university in the United States two male faculty members told me they hated PC but did not dare say so, if they wanted to keep their jobs. They took me into the park to say it, where we could not be overheard, as used to happen in the communist countries. Militant feminists were in charge.
In a good school in California I was taken to task by pupils for Political Incorrectness, in The Good Terrorist, which they were being ‘taught’ in class. Being ‘taught’ meant going through it to find incorrect thinking. Again, a young teacher took me aside to say she hated what was going on, and she was leaving teaching altogether, because this was what teaching had become.
In Wales I heard of a teacher, much loved by the pupils, who taught literature as it should be, out of her own love and enthusiasm, but she had been eased out of the department. Her ideas were considered old-fashioned. She was the kind of teacher of whom you hear people say: I was so lucky, I had this teacher who taught me to love books.
The sad question has to be, with this pattern so firmly established in our minds, when we do succeed in driving out the nasty new tyranny – if we do – what will replace it? The intolerances of religion were succeeded by communism, their mirror image, which set the stage for Political Correctness. What next? What should we be looking out for, what should we be guarding against?
The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer
This book was put into my hands by a veteran of the campaign in Burma, a particularly nasty theatre of the Second World War. ‘You’ll never read a better book about being an ordinary soldier. Pity they were Nazis.’ I read it with awe at what human beings can stand, and rereadings have not dulled my reactions. Many books are written about war, few by the men who do the bloody work. We are far here from the balanced reports of war correspondents, from the plans of generals, let alone the demented schemes for world conquest of Stalin and Hitler.
Guy Sajer, not yet seventeen, with a French father and a German mother – a First World War alliance – fell in love with military excellence, as he puts it, and joined Hitler’s armies. He then had to become all German, and fought with the German armies into and across Russia, retreated, pursued by the Russians and, starving, the only one left alive of his comrades, was advised by a kindly French officer that since his mother was German, not his father – which would have meant him becoming a prisoner – he could join the French administration supervising the collapse of Germany. The German boy, twenty years old, had to reverse his efforts to suppress his French self, was fed and clothed and rehabilitated – his body, not his mind – but not surprisingly became very ill. Which reminds me of a friend who, having survived four years of horror in a Japanese prison camp, people dying all around him of starvation and disease, arrived skeletal but healthy in England, but nearly died of a mild flu.
Could there be an apter symbol of Europe, of Europe’s mingled and mangled fates, than this young man? Or a more painfully racked person than Guy Sajer at the Victory Celebrations in Paris, which celebrated the defeat of his Germany, reciting under his breath the names of his dead comrades whose heroism was certainly not being applauded that day, and who were soon to be deliberately forgotten by the new Germany who had to find them an embarrassment?
Years ago I was told that this Guy Saje. r was living in Paris, solitary, and bitter that the men, or rather, boys – we have to remind ourselves that we are reading about 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds – had never been credited for their bravery. He has consecrated his life to bearing witness, says that as far as any personal life is concerned, he was burned out. This book could have been called ‘A Dead Man Bears Witness’. I think he would have approved. A person may flare like a match and be left a blackened twisted wraith of himself.
They started off, as young men do, high on adventure and patriotism. Sieg Heils and Heil Hitlers are recorded but not made much of. The cloudy patriotic idealism of Nazism does emerge in the speeches of officers trying to justify the war, and Sajer records that he rebuked comrades for lapses in patriotism. What immediately emerges as a major theme is that soldier’s preoccupation, food. These youths, at an age when no amount of food can ever be enough, were on rations, and it all gets worse as the war goes on and Germany frays apart: ersatz food, ersatz clothes, and the supply convoys uncertain, or not coming at all. These always hungry young men were fighting like wolves, on air, sometimes for days, then weeks at a time.
The author says that we, sitting comfortably and reading his words in safety, can never understand what he is describing. That is true. ‘I cannot find words to describe what I saw. Words and syllables were perfected to describe unimportant things.’ This plea to our imaginations repeats throughout his pages.
A comparison presents itself: Solzhenitsyn’s 1914, that account of the confusions of war, masses of men being moved about, chaos everywhere, no one knowing what is going on. These soldiers, making impossible sacrifices, urged on by officers to find in themselves yet another ounce of effort, thought they were supplying the soldiers fighting at Stalingrad, but that front had collapsed. They were being killed in their thousands to support men already dead or taken prisoner. And the tale is told again, again; when the German front was collapsing СКАЧАТЬ