Sweet Thunder by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

What Is To Be Done? Come Clean, That’s What.

Yesterday, the copper mouthpiece known as the Daily Post sounded a note of shrill hysteria, inciting mob action against, of all innocent targets, newsboys. Those bonfires of Thunder bundles are only the flicker of the conflagration the Post and its Anaconda masters hope to set off, however. The corporate potentates and their journalistic janissaries are resorting to one of the oldest and ugliest tactics, guilt by association. Let’s examine again the inflammatory charges made against this newspaper and its purportedly notorious editorial, What Is To Be Done?

“Which was, let’s don’t mince words,” the Post blustered, “the exact question of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, with which he titled his published blueprint for undermining the existing order in Russia and seizing power for his ruthless socialistic coterie. It is all there, the plan for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it surfaces now on American soil with the coaxing of a supposedly legitimate newspaper. The telltale phrase is a code for Bolshevism, nothing less and nothing more.”

Oh, really?

The Post accuser-in-charge must not be much of a reader. One only has to delve into that acknowledged masterpiece of Russian and world literature, Anna Karenina, written long before Bolsheviks ever existed to serve as bogeymen, to come across this supposedly sinister catchphrase uttered time and again by the cast of characters as a cry of the Russian soul to the heavens: Oblonsky in despair over his debauched life, Levin—Tolstoy’s country squire alter ego—in guilt over the political paralysis of his privileged class, and most tellingly, Anna Karenina herself in torment over a marriage that is coming apart. If the Robespierre of the Russian revolution, V. I. Lenin, plucked a similar plaint out of the air three decades later, it only shows how common the expression is, down to the current day. To charge that anyone uttering it in print—Tolstoy, we are humbly in your company—is espousing Bolshevism is like saying the dictionary is full of words radicals use.

At that point of the piece, having fought off the worst Cutlass could throw, it was time to fight back, and I did so with vehemence.

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