In The Difference Engine, W^m Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s steampunk adventure, the Communards attempt a coup in pseudo-Victorian London.

In Repo Man, a sort of punk-era Cool Hand Luke, a televangelist enjoins us to fight Communism abroad, and liberal humanism at home!

I’ve been reading The God That Failed, a book of essays by prominent ex-Communists. It was published in 1950, and smells of cheap paper and Joe McCarthy, but the writers are excellent. Now I want to go read all Arthur Koester and Richard Wright. Stephen Spender says:

It is obvious that there were elements of mysticism in this faith. Indeed, I think that this is an attraction of Communism to the intellectual. To believe in political action and economic forces which will release the new energies in the world is a release of energy in oneself. One ceases to be inhibited by pity for the victims of revolution. Indeed one can regard pity as a projection of one’s own revolutionary wish to evade the issue of revolution. One can retain one’s faith in the ultimate goals of humanity and at the same time ignore the people in prison camps, the tens of thousands of slave workers. Do these exist? Whether or not they do, it is bourgeois propaganda to maintain so.

Ta-da, the first broad and honest account I’ve had of the issue. People like to say looks good on paper, fails in practice, et cetera, but Spender actually explained how reasonable people could suck up to Lenin and Stalin. I gather from this, and from Louis Fisher’s account here, that Communism was attractive partly for its contradictions, for the one-time alertness it took as a central denial.

Like certain of the elder religions, Communism establishes itself as the outermost frame of reference. Everything in it must be either revolutionary or bourgeois, so there are no neutral judgments – and so everything’s exciting and full of potential. You have only to accept the idea of point sources of good and evil. I think it’s cool just because it starts so abstracted and clean and ends up justifying anything you can call revolutionary. Ah—ah—hatchoonationalsecurity! Oh my! Excuse me!

Most of the essays in the book are not particularly anti-Communist, but anti-totalitarian and anti-delusion, and they’re framed in this wonderful experienced idealism. I respect the mass of mid-century intellectuals, who absorbed terrible things and just got more lucid. My grandmother points out that one of the reasons Communism survived was that it either killed or bought its artists and scientists; it didn’t let them be seen angry. Hitler may have understood some propaganda, but he didn’t seem to notice that he’d first abused and then exiled the people who could complain most loudly and credibly. The Reich didn’t realize that there were international mass media (novelists, even), but the young USSR played them like mad.

I guess I’ve just seen so much of other people’s angst left over from the Cold War that an account from the inside, and of its relatively twee beginnings, is surprising. Never having seen them, I’m sick of hearing about the bitterly noble cold warriors staving off Communism-or-Imperialism. But if these decent-seeming fellas were in the thick of it, writin’ poems ’n’ fightin’ Nazis, I’ll read about it.