A long essay by Don Surber on the continuing siren call of Stalinism.
3 thoughts on “The Seeds Of Tyranny”
Good points about Seeger, but then he falls totally off the rails when he starts blaming Hugh Hefner and “because…HEDONISM!!!”. BTW, Playboy has pretty much always espoused a strong John Stuart Mill style liberalism (better known now as libertarianism). The late Robert Anton Wilson, one of the most libertarian of SF writers (likely best known as the author of, along with the the also late Robert Shea, the Illuminatus! trilogy, a classic of anarcho-libertarianism), was an editor at Playboy for several years in the ’60s and ’70s, charged with among other duties writing the monthly column that put forth the Playboy political position, which was (according to Wilson in later books) largely congruent with his own.
I guess the Stalinist version of Playboy would feature Russian women who are “strong on plow”?
I think that was called “Soviet Socialist Realism”; actual nude women would be far too bourgeois. There was a communist Chinese version too.
BTW, for a very, very sly sendup of the entire genre, there’s a site called MaoArt (http://www.maopost.com:8000/wcat=mao&wlan=en&wreq=maoartpre); for a couple of hundred dollars (and a photograph), they will have an authentic Chinese artist paint your face into an authentic Mao propaganda poster done in the authentic Chinese Socialist Realism style. I’d love to have one of these at my desk, just to see how long it would take for a visitor to notice…
Good points about Seeger, but then he falls totally off the rails when he starts blaming Hugh Hefner and “because…HEDONISM!!!”. BTW, Playboy has pretty much always espoused a strong John Stuart Mill style liberalism (better known now as libertarianism). The late Robert Anton Wilson, one of the most libertarian of SF writers (likely best known as the author of, along with the the also late Robert Shea, the Illuminatus! trilogy, a classic of anarcho-libertarianism), was an editor at Playboy for several years in the ’60s and ’70s, charged with among other duties writing the monthly column that put forth the Playboy political position, which was (according to Wilson in later books) largely congruent with his own.
I guess the Stalinist version of Playboy would feature Russian women who are “strong on plow”?
I think that was called “Soviet Socialist Realism”; actual nude women would be far too bourgeois. There was a communist Chinese version too.
BTW, for a very, very sly sendup of the entire genre, there’s a site called MaoArt (http://www.maopost.com:8000/wcat=mao&wlan=en&wreq=maoartpre); for a couple of hundred dollars (and a photograph), they will have an authentic Chinese artist paint your face into an authentic Mao propaganda poster done in the authentic Chinese Socialist Realism style. I’d love to have one of these at my desk, just to see how long it would take for a visitor to notice…