Ales

Free thinkers are often blamed by proponents of theistic systems of being connected to communist totalitarianism. The history of the Free Thought in former Czechoslovakia suggests otherwise. Freethought organizations in Czechoslovakia were completely suppressed three times: In 1914 (WWI), in 1939 (WWII) and in 1952, shortly after the communists ascended to the power. Communists also confiscated all their private property, including freethought publishing companies, and the general notion of the Free Thought was eradicated from textbooks, communists claimed instead, that “the free thinkers had deflected the working people from the class struggle”.

[ March 24, 2002: Message edited by: Ales ]</p>

lpetrich

Interesting, Ales. From what I understand of Communist ideology, Communists believe that they were appointed by dialectic-materialistic historical necessity to lead the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class. Which is a bit like saying that God is on your side

And that to exercise this leadership, they must have command of all of society. Which is a bit like claiming that one has the One True Religion.

Also, if I understand correctly, Communists believe that human society will eventually evolve into the Communist Utopia, where everybody will be unselfishly helpful to everybody else.

And George Orwell's Animal Farm looks like an allegory of early Soviet Communism; I can recognize a fair amount of that history in it.

Corwin

Actually as I understand it Orwell claimed it wasn't any society in particular... but there are DEFINITE paralells to Nazi Germany.... much more so than any communist system. (Snowball being Hess, etc.)

lpetrich

To me, it's obviously Soviet Communism.

Early in the story, an old boar, Old Major, explains that the cause of the animals' misery is their human masters, and that there will someday be a rebellion in which those human masters will be ousted.

This is directly parallel to Marx's belief that the capitalists are a wicked exploiting class, and his belief that they will inevitably be overthrown.

The pigs are, of course, the Communists; Snowball is a cross between Lenin and Trotsky, and Napoleon is Stalin. Snowball is both idealist and elitist, but Napoleon is shamelessly elitist, and has a big personality cult of him.

Yes, one can find the revolts against collectivism, the purges, and the turning of Trotsky into a villain in it, all in allegorical form.

"Four legs good, two legs bad", complete with contorted explanations that chickens' wings count as legs, is directly parallel with the Soviets' contorted decisions as to who was a member of the working class and who was a member of the capitalist class.

And the sudden changes in sides with respect to a dispute between neighboring farmers are just like Stalin's equally sudden changing sides.

Moses the Raven is the Russian Orthodox Church, which had associated itself closely with the Tsars, and which taught that one will get pie in the sky when one dies.

Toward the end of the story, the pigs become human, suggesting that all Communism had done was to produce a new ruling class.


Nazism I find hard to see in it; I think that one ought to look more closely at it rather than use it as an all-purpose villain.

Ales

I am sorry I haven't yet read Orwell's Animal farm, only some excerpts. I see it as a good example of how pernicious are the "absolute truths". The first is the communist's belief about the unquestionable supremacy of the working class, central planning etc. with claimed supreme benefit to the society, a claim which is amenable to scientific inquiry. On the other hand the religious belief like the conviction, that Holly Spirit does not emanate from God unless with an assistance of Jesus Christ is not amenable to scientific inquiry, but is also held as unquestionable. . I also see another parallel: The Soviets considered cybernetics and genetics as a “bourgeoise parascience” (I don’t remember on which doctrinal teaching this opposition was based), similarly Christians prevented some schools from teaching about evolution.

Pantera

Animal Farm is out of copyright and available on the Web - you can find it <a href="http://www.ddc.net/ygg/etext/animal.htm" target="_blank">here</a>.

One of my favourite anedotes concerns the American publisher who rejected it because his company didn't publish children's stories.

lpetrich

As to why the Soviet Government objected to genetics, it's a long and bizarre story. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is an old bit of folklore often associated with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but it is at least as old as the Bible; Genesis 30 describes Jacob practicing Lamarckian genetic engineering on Laban's livestock.

Lamarck himself thought that there was a more important mechanism: some built-in tendency to progress, so "Lamarckism" may be an unfair label. Charles Darwin also believed that a limited amount of Lamarckism happens.

But as biologists became better at doing experiments, they started finding that Lamarckism does not happen; August Weismann chopped off the tails of 22 generations of mice, only to find the mice still growing tails. By the early 20th cy., Lamarckism was thoroughly discredited; the lab of the last big holdout, Paul Kammerer, was discovered to have had some faked specimens.

But in the Soviet Union, a plant breeder named Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin started claiming success with Lamarck-based plant breeding, and his big follower Trofim Denisovich Lysenko popularized and continued Michurin's work. Biologists from abroad who met him found him to be scientifically illiterate; he thought that doing statistics was a waste of time, and he had no idea of what a controlled experiment was.

Lysenko simply denied the existence of genes, believing instead in Darwin's old theory of pangenesis, that all parts of an organism contribute to its heredity.

Lysenko got Stalin's ear, claiming that he could develop good crop plants much faster than mainstream biologists; Stalin agreed with him about Lamarckism. And Lysenko and his friends started finding mainstream biologists guilty of sins like "Menshevik idealism", Mendelism, Weismannism, and Morganism, sending them off to gulags or executing them. In the late 1940's, the surviving mainstream biologists did Galileo-style recantations and accepted the superior wisdom of the Party.

Lysenkoism was a disaster for Soviet biological research; it took decades to recover. There were Lysenko imitators in other fields, though they were successfully fought off -- this allowed Soviet physicists to develop The Bomb.

[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

lpetrich

Cybernetics is "the science of communication and control", according to the eminent Norbert Wiener. From it grew the theory of computer design and programming, and also the theory of control systems (control theory). Soviet ideologists denounced it as a "bourgeois pseudoscience", though I've never been able to find out the nature of their ideological gripe.

But the Soviet Union got into computers after Stalin's death; Soviet computers were often very close imitations of such models as IBM mainframes and DEC VAXes.

[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

Ales

I found this article about the objections the Soviets made to cybernetics.

<a href="http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/disint.htm" target="_blank">http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/disint.htm</a>

It seems to be possible to find more in the homepage of this author. I only glanced at it. From the Czechs who lived in these times I hear that cybernetics aspired to an explanation of functioning of the society, but communists knew all these explanations of course better and long before. Another possibility is that communists disliked the idea of the human beings being machines, the machines that should serve a man. I also hear that when communists were forced to accept cybernetics, they started to claim that only marxism gave it the proper background, that cybernetics describes nearly everything, but it can never be applied to the human brain-it was of course the communism that reigned in the brain.

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: Ales ]</p>

lpetrich

Thanx, Ales; it's nice to get a view from the former Soviet Bloc. I hope that you'll get yourself to read Animal Farm some day.

Here's a <a href="http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/lysenko.htm" target="_blank">nice page on Lysenkoism</a>.

The Mendel in Mendelism was Gregor Mendel, who had done his famous pea-plant-crossing experiments in Brno, then named Bru"nn, and now in the Czech Republic.

His work was was barely noticed; Mendel hoped to get the interest of the eminent biologist Karl Wilhelm von Na"geli, but Na"geli could not understand Mendel's work. But in 1900, Hugo de Vries, Correns, and Tschermak independently rediscovered Mendelian genetics -- and acknowledged Mendel's priority.

The Morgan in Morganism was Thomas Hunt Morgan, a biologist who had taken up cross-breeding Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies in 1908 in order to learn more about heredity; fruit flies were convenient because they are fast-breeding and because they can easily be raised in a lab.