And then there's Simon Leys.......

The publications of Simon Leys' books, The Emperor's New Clothes and Chinese Shadows have done much to demolish the pro-Chinese ideology in the West. Without the French ex-situationist Rene Vienet's encouragement it is doubtful if the shy and retiring Leys would have picked up his pen. However the fact Leys is a Catholic humanist believing deeply in culture means that his critique falls short of the necessary demolition thrown up by genuine social revolutions. Chinese Totalitarianism as the envoy of our collective future also has the vice of salvaging liberalism. Thus Simon Leys can get away with extolling the virtues of a classic humanist education, continuing to believe, pace Orwell, that the 'creative' profession of a writer is subversive –

"literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death - the writer is merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus - from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer's world", (Orwell's, Inside the Whale)

and carry on to say that Solsyhenitsyn is an "upright and free man" (Chinese Shadows) and that Soviet Sinologists are "specialized brutes" having "no humanist education at all." It is not so much the specialized brute one takes objection to as the underlying belief that a "humanist education" would make all the difference. Elsewhere too, the equation between a 'humanist' and 'a free man' is too easily made.

The same goes for Ley's shock / horror reaction to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the vandalizing of the priceless remains of China's past. Because of the use to which this desecration of the past was put Leys can write....

"In every major city of China where foreign visitors came regularly, one or two monuments have been admirably restored, and a permanent exhibit has been organized to show archaeological objects found during the Cultural Revolution – this is to give the impression that the Cultural Revolution far from destroying the Chinese cultural heritage, has enriched it!"

And let us not forget that many of these monuments – especially temples and monasteries - are only open to foreigners and overseas visitors and forbidden to the common people.

Within totalitarian regimes to be reminded of the past can have following Leys arguments a liberating function because it takes one back to a time when two and two could not be made to make five. (Remember the toast in Orwell's 1984... "To the past"). However this variety of deliverance through yesterday, this springtime archeology really in the West belongs to the Museums and Recreation Dept and is open to Everyman / woman / child. To argue for it as a subversive cause (and Leys can't help but do this is only to reinvigorate movements originating in the 19th century which called for the throwing open of the museum and the private collections of the aristocracy) to the scrutiny of the 'common people'. Seen as a victory against laissez faire capitalism the museums for all movements were also closely related to the first effects in the direction of education for the working class. The attitude of passive looking that it encouraged within the field of culture was also meant to inculcate the habit of quiet inactivity in the midst of a social order that escaped all control. And it was in the confines of the museum, within the still centre of culture that the utopia of lawless capitalism was first put to the test. (Gladstone in a pamphlet circa 1839.... The State in its Relations with the Church remarked "the higher instruments of human cultivation are also ultimate guarantees of public order" and in a contribution to the Art Union Journal of 2nd June 1840 wrote, "If the example of the government were followed by other proprietors people would look at public statues without desiring to throw stones at them.")

By 1845 the lawless utopia of property for the few, propertyless for the many - excepting the sale of their labour power / property - had failed. A museum bill for the "Protection of Property contained in Public Museums, Galleries, Cabinets, Libraries and other Public Depositories from Malicious Injuries" was introduced in response to the smashing to pieces of the Portland Vase in the British Museum on 7th February 1845. There are two points to be stressed given Ley's obvious horror at vandalism. The first that it completely overlooks the class strategy behind the 19th and 20th century concern for the cultural improvement of the masses and the second that a vandal's spree has often inaugurated or typified the early stages of bourgeois rule (e.g. the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the pillaging of churches and castles by Cromwell, the sale of the art treasures of the aristocracy by Napoleon, the sacking of the homes of the English Aristocracy during the early years of the Irish Republic in the 1920s.) Leys reaction is that of a mature bourgeoisie too advanced in years to remember the scissions in the history of the Nation State where contact with and access to the past is the stuff of a synoptic humanism. Leys humanism stretches back to antiquity. It is the gaze of a man not threatened by the past unlike the early bird revolutionary bourgeoisie fearful of Thermidor and restoration. But his very catholicity also aims to weaken the proletariat when at its most innovatory. In a note on the Papoashan cemetery he says, "Many steles are pushed over and broke some painted red or smeared with tar, and pieces of stone are lying about on the ground. This vandalism seems to have expressed blind rage against the ruling class as a whole, all of whose representatives were attacked indiscriminately." (Chinese Shadows) Why "blind rage" and what does a "discriminate" attack on the ruling class amount too?

Maoism - suicide and madness

Leys mentioning the numbers of "writers, artists, and intellectuals" who committed suicide in protest against the Cultural Revolution has a footnote explaining that suicide in China has always been essentially a political act – "and is now more than ever the highest form of protest against arbitrary power." When in the West Maoists and ex-Maoists committed or attempted suicide their reasons for doing so were never so high-minded - they literally felt themselves driven beyond the extremes of endurance. They did not commit suicide or try to do so as a gesture of proud defiance but because they were more than desperate; the pain inside was simply just too great to endure. In that at least there was something social. However their reasons for doing so were not like those of terminally ill patients who merely want release from further pointless suffering. Never having understood reality when they were 'sane' they understood it even less when they cracked up. So their outlook was never one of fatalistic acceptance, which at least has the merit of not underestimating what's out there even as it overestimates its permanence but marked by the same extreme voluntarisms, which had been a hallmark of their 'sanity'. They never quietly gave up the ghost. Rushing around everywhere they swung from one bizarre extreme to another, impervious to moods or guilt feelings and taking upon themselves the fashionable cross of the moment. Recklessly lashing out right and left of the political spectacle in their refusal to accept any personal responsibility for themselves they practically transgressed good and evil if in their ideology they schizophrenically clung to moralist dualisms.