I saw Gorbachev tell this joke on UK TV when he was still Soviet leader. I can’t remember the show - it may have been Wogan. I think it was in 1989 or 1990. Can’t find it on YouTube.
He spoke in Russian, of course, and a translator was used so us Brits could understand him. I remember laughing and thinking it was a good joke, especially from someone who was leader of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn’t seem to be a bundle of laughs to us.
Very thought-provoking article, Ed, especially when we think about these ideas in relation to recent woke-minded comedy (if it can be dignified with the word ‘comedy’). The sheer unfunniness of woke comedians is, at times, nothing short of toe-curling.
Perhaps that’s the point of it. Imagine you were forced to watch Kate Smurthwaite and Nish Kumar on repeat. You might eventually start to wish for the quiet eradication of all that is anti-woke, in the expectation that the output of woke comedy, now devoid of a ‘butt’ for its ‘jokes’, would cease.
Great article...BTW, P. J. O'Rourke once said that there were three types of humor: parody, in which we make fun of people who are smarter than we are; satire, in which we make fun of people who are richer than we are; and burlesque, in which we make fun of people by taking our clothes off.
Richard Hannia argues that the crystallisation of “the ideology” in the West could not have happened without the civil rights legislation from the 1960’s forward. There seems to be something to this. Civil rights law is obviously a system of differential rights, whereby the State seeks to level the playing field by limiting the rights of the majority (e.g. to free associate), whilst conferring on the individuals within any chosen minority greater rights than those enjoyed by individuals within the majority. This is regarded as adjacent to Marxism because it is. It seeks to equalise not wealth but social status, and it does so without democratic consent. For example, race relations legislation in the UK was introduced from the 1960s when the vast majority of the British (upwards of 80%) were hugely nativistic in outlook. Of course, this experiment in equalisation happens largely at the level of the pleb, and when it goes badly wrong the elites can always pretend the thing didn’t happen at all e.g. the Pakistani “grooming” gangs. And in recent years, the legal system has further embedded the ideology in crossing the critical line between civil law and criminal. Formerly you might find yourself in an employment tribunal, but more recently you can be jailed for thought and expression “crimes” against an identity group. This is an astonishing development, which means we can read about the police investigating a Conservative politician for seeking to raise, in the most innocuous way imaginable (not that this should matter), the issue of gypsy/traveller sites within a Welsh constituency. But rest easy Comrades, the police are to take no further action in this instance.
"The Nazis coldly and precisely murdered their enemies but otherwise left obedient citizens alone; communism consumed its most sycophantic supporters in an absurd manner. Nazism was inherently evil in its intentions, while communism created evil out of human naivety; that made it both less morally repugnant, but also funnier."
I'd agree that Soviet Communism wasn't as good at identifying and killing its foes as Nazism, but suspect that it wasn't less evil, simply less efficient - and even today, one only has to compare the Germans with the Russians to see why.
Bolshevism was certainly more chaotic, and attracted a certain type of chaotic people - reading House of Government it's remarkable how they are quite similar to the modern neurotic social justice activist. But one can compare Nazi Germany with the DDR, and had Germany fallen to communism in the post-WW1 period I don't think it would have been anything like as bad as Hitler's regime, even if some sort of Robespierre or Stalin emerged. I also think that, if you look at the Russian or Spanish civil wars, the extreme Right is just far more brutal.
It's true that, on the whole, the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War executed far more people than the republican side.
Although it is true that, within the dysfuncional alliance that was the republican side, the communists did use excessive brutality(such as in the massacres in Madrid), the killings and massacres enacted by republicans against the putative representatives of the nationalist cause tended to be the result of mob actions by the populace.
The killings perpetrated by the nationalists, however, were the result of official directives from the leaders to their forces on the ground. The ways that the two sides differed in their committing of atrocity might well bear out the idea of the extreme Left being more prone to chaos than the extreme Right. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia certainly bears this out in his description of the interactions between the different factions of the republican side. It was, but for the associated atrociousness of the context, almost comical.
Then again, much has been written recently about the level of sheer hare-brained chaos that was endemic in high places within the pre-war national socialist party in Germany. But the differences between the different totalitarian regimes is an interesting topic for sure.
For what it's worth, my wife's grandmother lived through the occupation of her Romanian city by both sides in WWII, and she remembers the German soldiers as being more courteous and respectful than the Soviet ones.
‘Among my Desert Island picks was a version of “Lili Marlene” sung by a Wehrmacht choir that I first heard as a 4-year-old child in an Athens street while watching a marching group of German soldiers. I was with my adored Prussian nanny and looked in awe and admiration as they marched in impeccable step past us, singing the haunting song about a girl left behind. They were fair and tall in their great uniforms and helmets, and exuded martial discipline and strength.’
NS Lyons has a very good piece today (link below) arguing that the final destination for the West is China : a system of endless, bureaucratic control by its elites in the name of the greater good and fostered by the endless opportunities provided by technology to coral and survey - or just de-bank and kill.
As a window into humor in the DDR, I highly recommend the German TV series Deutchsland '83 (and its sequels '86 and '89). Very clever, often funny, and pretty unsparing about the failings of the DDR. It has a good shredder scene too in the '89 series. Also quite eye opening about how people in the East saw the West (and the near world war caused by Operation Able Archer!)
I'd disagree about the extreme Right being more brutal than the (extreme) Left, even if one agrees that all political movements can be classified that easily, and I'm not sure that they can. In the end, brutality tends to be proportional to the conviction with which the ideology is held.
I like to think that, as well as humour, their faith helped the Russian people to survive communism. President Putin, addressing the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church:
‘The Church has always been with the people at every time, sharing with them all joys and sorrows…We shouldn’t forget the lessons to be learned from the dramatic events of the early twentieth century. It was in large part the erosion of our spiritual and national foundations that set our country on a course of destruction and precipitated it into revolution, upheaval, fratricidal conflict and war.’
A beautiful video (6¾m) of the first Divine Liturgy to be celebrated in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace since 1917:
Insightful piece. However, I need to be that guy who points out there was no humour in the Gulag. As Varlam Shalamov, Gulag survivor and author of the horrific Kolyma Tales summarised the lessons of his experience:
"A human turns into a beast in three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beating.... I've learned that friendship, solidarity never arise in difficult, I mean really hard conditions — when life is at stake.... spite is the last human emotion to survive. Only spite lets the starving man's flesh hold out — and he is indifferent to the rest. "
And:
"Seen what a forcible argument a simple slap could be for an intellectual..... Beating is almost irresistible as an argument."
However, just as officially approved comedy is narrowing and stagnating, I see more and more underground comedy that does poke fun at the regime. Like in the USSR, these are the jokes told among the working class. The word "Nazi" and "racist" are now effectively jokes as is "something-ist" (as in, "you can't say you don't like rats, that's rodent-ist"). The trans lunacy has spawned many as well. Among the working classes, the 2000's revolution has clearly jumped the shark.
What I'm not seeing is jokes that repudiate the '68 revolution. Jokes against no-fault-divorce or "if it feels good, do it". There's lots of potential humor there, but so far, I haven't heard it. Which implies those are still sacred cows even among the working classes.
BTW: I do not think "racist" being a joke is a good thing, but it is expected. A logical consequence of the overuse of "racist" as an insult is an inability to talk about real racism. Because if everything's racist, nothing is.
Hitler wrote about his intentions/hopes in his correspondence with Lord Rothermere in 1935:
‘An Anglo-German entente would form in Europe and thus in the world a force for peace and reason of 120 million of the most superior people. Britain’s sea power and unique colonial talent would be united with one of the world’s first soldier-races. Were this entente extended to embrace the American nation, then it would, indeed, be hard to see who in the world could disturb the peace without wilfully and consciously neglecting the interests of the White race.’—David Irving, ‘Churchill’s War’, 50
In today’s world, Hitler’s concern for the future of whites is proof indeed that he was evil.
In 2001, David Irving (whom you cite above) sued author Deborah Lipstadt for libel because she described him as a 'Holocaust denier and falsifier'. He sued in an English court because here the burden of proof is on the defence (i.e. Lipstadt and the publisher, Penguin). The judge's conclusion was that:
"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism... therefore the defence of justification succeeds...It follows that there must be judgment for the Defendants." Irving v Lipstadt (13.167-8, 14.1) cited via wiki article
It’s thanks to the Lipstadt case that we know the accuracy of Mr Irving’s work. Miss Lipstadt’s lawyers trawled through Mr Irving’s entire output, including letters to his children, and found only ‘a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation’.
"If I say a word out of line, the thought police will be round in a jiffy."
I revise my original reply as follows: I trust you will forgive my temerity in observing that your claim is at variance with the facts.
(a) David Irving's works, including the one you cite, are available both on Amazon and Abebooks, so you cannot reasonably claim, or imply, that the views he represents are subject to official censorship (in this neck of the woods, at least). I accept that the private variety is a different matter.
(b) As to the delightful Ms Chabloz, I confess I am in two minds. On the one hand, Holocaust denial of itself does not warrant gaol time; on the other other, it is very clear that she is determined to be a martyr for the great cause of anti-Semitic abuse. A number of her remarks could, I think, constitute harassment, an offence in its own right, but one which requires a fine judgment by their lordships.
I speak, of course, as an old-school liberal of the bleeding-heart variety; though listing somewhat to starboard in my dotage. I am fully aware that were the more ardent aficionados of the persons you cite to acquire political power, they would be unlikely to grant me and my ilk the same toleration that we afford them.
Great article, but the parallels with today are chilling.
thank you
An acquaintance of mine who used to work with Gorbachev told me that he liked telling people this joke about himself:
A worker standing in a liquor line says: “I have had enough, save my place, I am going to shoot Gorbachev.”
Two hours later he returns to claim his place in line.
His friends ask, “Did you get him?”
“No, the line there was even longer than the line here.”
I saw Gorbachev tell this joke on UK TV when he was still Soviet leader. I can’t remember the show - it may have been Wogan. I think it was in 1989 or 1990. Can’t find it on YouTube.
Well, he did like it a lot for some reason. As well as the one about economic advisers.
I’m sure the translator would have said ‘queue’ by the way, not ‘line’!
He spoke in Russian, of course, and a translator was used so us Brits could understand him. I remember laughing and thinking it was a good joke, especially from someone who was leader of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn’t seem to be a bundle of laughs to us.
Very thought-provoking article, Ed, especially when we think about these ideas in relation to recent woke-minded comedy (if it can be dignified with the word ‘comedy’). The sheer unfunniness of woke comedians is, at times, nothing short of toe-curling.
it's really something. almost a form of torture.
Perhaps that’s the point of it. Imagine you were forced to watch Kate Smurthwaite and Nish Kumar on repeat. You might eventually start to wish for the quiet eradication of all that is anti-woke, in the expectation that the output of woke comedy, now devoid of a ‘butt’ for its ‘jokes’, would cease.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine being forced to grin approvingly at painfully unfunny comedy - forever.
It is funny how the world gets divided over and over again between people who can laugh and people who can’t.
Great article...BTW, P. J. O'Rourke once said that there were three types of humor: parody, in which we make fun of people who are smarter than we are; satire, in which we make fun of people who are richer than we are; and burlesque, in which we make fun of people by taking our clothes off.
Richard Hannia argues that the crystallisation of “the ideology” in the West could not have happened without the civil rights legislation from the 1960’s forward. There seems to be something to this. Civil rights law is obviously a system of differential rights, whereby the State seeks to level the playing field by limiting the rights of the majority (e.g. to free associate), whilst conferring on the individuals within any chosen minority greater rights than those enjoyed by individuals within the majority. This is regarded as adjacent to Marxism because it is. It seeks to equalise not wealth but social status, and it does so without democratic consent. For example, race relations legislation in the UK was introduced from the 1960s when the vast majority of the British (upwards of 80%) were hugely nativistic in outlook. Of course, this experiment in equalisation happens largely at the level of the pleb, and when it goes badly wrong the elites can always pretend the thing didn’t happen at all e.g. the Pakistani “grooming” gangs. And in recent years, the legal system has further embedded the ideology in crossing the critical line between civil law and criminal. Formerly you might find yourself in an employment tribunal, but more recently you can be jailed for thought and expression “crimes” against an identity group. This is an astonishing development, which means we can read about the police investigating a Conservative politician for seeking to raise, in the most innocuous way imaginable (not that this should matter), the issue of gypsy/traveller sites within a Welsh constituency. But rest easy Comrades, the police are to take no further action in this instance.
"The Nazis coldly and precisely murdered their enemies but otherwise left obedient citizens alone; communism consumed its most sycophantic supporters in an absurd manner. Nazism was inherently evil in its intentions, while communism created evil out of human naivety; that made it both less morally repugnant, but also funnier."
I'd agree that Soviet Communism wasn't as good at identifying and killing its foes as Nazism, but suspect that it wasn't less evil, simply less efficient - and even today, one only has to compare the Germans with the Russians to see why.
Bolshevism was certainly more chaotic, and attracted a certain type of chaotic people - reading House of Government it's remarkable how they are quite similar to the modern neurotic social justice activist. But one can compare Nazi Germany with the DDR, and had Germany fallen to communism in the post-WW1 period I don't think it would have been anything like as bad as Hitler's regime, even if some sort of Robespierre or Stalin emerged. I also think that, if you look at the Russian or Spanish civil wars, the extreme Right is just far more brutal.
It's true that, on the whole, the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War executed far more people than the republican side.
Although it is true that, within the dysfuncional alliance that was the republican side, the communists did use excessive brutality(such as in the massacres in Madrid), the killings and massacres enacted by republicans against the putative representatives of the nationalist cause tended to be the result of mob actions by the populace.
The killings perpetrated by the nationalists, however, were the result of official directives from the leaders to their forces on the ground. The ways that the two sides differed in their committing of atrocity might well bear out the idea of the extreme Left being more prone to chaos than the extreme Right. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia certainly bears this out in his description of the interactions between the different factions of the republican side. It was, but for the associated atrociousness of the context, almost comical.
Then again, much has been written recently about the level of sheer hare-brained chaos that was endemic in high places within the pre-war national socialist party in Germany. But the differences between the different totalitarian regimes is an interesting topic for sure.
For what it's worth, my wife's grandmother lived through the occupation of her Romanian city by both sides in WWII, and she remembers the German soldiers as being more courteous and respectful than the Soviet ones.
Taki writes:
‘Among my Desert Island picks was a version of “Lili Marlene” sung by a Wehrmacht choir that I first heard as a 4-year-old child in an Athens street while watching a marching group of German soldiers. I was with my adored Prussian nanny and looked in awe and admiration as they marched in impeccable step past us, singing the haunting song about a girl left behind. They were fair and tall in their great uniforms and helmets, and exuded martial discipline and strength.’
https://www.takimag.com/article/corona-bologna/
NS Lyons has a very good piece today (link below) arguing that the final destination for the West is China : a system of endless, bureaucratic control by its elites in the name of the greater good and fostered by the endless opportunities provided by technology to coral and survey - or just de-bank and kill.
https://unherd.com/2023/08/the-west-and-china-share-the-same-fate/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3
As a window into humor in the DDR, I highly recommend the German TV series Deutchsland '83 (and its sequels '86 and '89). Very clever, often funny, and pretty unsparing about the failings of the DDR. It has a good shredder scene too in the '89 series. Also quite eye opening about how people in the East saw the West (and the near world war caused by Operation Able Archer!)
I'd disagree about the extreme Right being more brutal than the (extreme) Left, even if one agrees that all political movements can be classified that easily, and I'm not sure that they can. In the end, brutality tends to be proportional to the conviction with which the ideology is held.
OT, but I will be in Poland late September so if any subscribers want to meet for a coffee, let me know!
I like to think that, as well as humour, their faith helped the Russian people to survive communism. President Putin, addressing the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church:
‘The Church has always been with the people at every time, sharing with them all joys and sorrows…We shouldn’t forget the lessons to be learned from the dramatic events of the early twentieth century. It was in large part the erosion of our spiritual and national foundations that set our country on a course of destruction and precipitated it into revolution, upheaval, fratricidal conflict and war.’
A beautiful video (6¾m) of the first Divine Liturgy to be celebrated in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace since 1917:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2cRXymXEMY
The triumph of Good over Evil, of Christ over Antichrist. So heartening, and I’m not even a believer any more.
Insightful piece. However, I need to be that guy who points out there was no humour in the Gulag. As Varlam Shalamov, Gulag survivor and author of the horrific Kolyma Tales summarised the lessons of his experience:
"A human turns into a beast in three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beating.... I've learned that friendship, solidarity never arise in difficult, I mean really hard conditions — when life is at stake.... spite is the last human emotion to survive. Only spite lets the starving man's flesh hold out — and he is indifferent to the rest. "
And:
"Seen what a forcible argument a simple slap could be for an intellectual..... Beating is almost irresistible as an argument."
See: https://web.archive.org/web/20100418200011/http://shalamov.ru/en/library/34/1.html
However, just as officially approved comedy is narrowing and stagnating, I see more and more underground comedy that does poke fun at the regime. Like in the USSR, these are the jokes told among the working class. The word "Nazi" and "racist" are now effectively jokes as is "something-ist" (as in, "you can't say you don't like rats, that's rodent-ist"). The trans lunacy has spawned many as well. Among the working classes, the 2000's revolution has clearly jumped the shark.
What I'm not seeing is jokes that repudiate the '68 revolution. Jokes against no-fault-divorce or "if it feels good, do it". There's lots of potential humor there, but so far, I haven't heard it. Which implies those are still sacred cows even among the working classes.
BTW: I do not think "racist" being a joke is a good thing, but it is expected. A logical consequence of the overuse of "racist" as an insult is an inability to talk about real racism. Because if everything's racist, nothing is.
The Jewish joke is the funniest.
*Nazism was inherently evil in its intentions*
Hitler wrote about his intentions/hopes in his correspondence with Lord Rothermere in 1935:
‘An Anglo-German entente would form in Europe and thus in the world a force for peace and reason of 120 million of the most superior people. Britain’s sea power and unique colonial talent would be united with one of the world’s first soldier-races. Were this entente extended to embrace the American nation, then it would, indeed, be hard to see who in the world could disturb the peace without wilfully and consciously neglecting the interests of the White race.’—David Irving, ‘Churchill’s War’, 50
In today’s world, Hitler’s concern for the future of whites is proof indeed that he was evil.
I think the fact that he murdered millions of innocent people is the main proof.
Ah, the Holocaust. You’ve got me there. If I say a word out of line, the thought police will be round in a jiffy.
Thought police my a*se.
In 2001, David Irving (whom you cite above) sued author Deborah Lipstadt for libel because she described him as a 'Holocaust denier and falsifier'. He sued in an English court because here the burden of proof is on the defence (i.e. Lipstadt and the publisher, Penguin). The judge's conclusion was that:
"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism... therefore the defence of justification succeeds...It follows that there must be judgment for the Defendants." Irving v Lipstadt (13.167-8, 14.1) cited via wiki article
Good morning.
*Thought police my a*se*
See, for example, Alison Chabloz: ‘This post could be the last one for a while, as I expect to be sent back behind bars for three weeks.’
https://alisonchabloz.com/2020/01/08/a-pound-of-flesh-just-in-time-for-shabbat/
*David Irving*
It’s thanks to the Lipstadt case that we know the accuracy of Mr Irving’s work. Miss Lipstadt’s lawyers trawled through Mr Irving’s entire output, including letters to his children, and found only ‘a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation’.
https://www.unz.com/announcement/the-remarkable-historiography-of-david-irving/#p_1_8
'Good morning', you say. So be it.
"If I say a word out of line, the thought police will be round in a jiffy."
I revise my original reply as follows: I trust you will forgive my temerity in observing that your claim is at variance with the facts.
(a) David Irving's works, including the one you cite, are available both on Amazon and Abebooks, so you cannot reasonably claim, or imply, that the views he represents are subject to official censorship (in this neck of the woods, at least). I accept that the private variety is a different matter.
(b) As to the delightful Ms Chabloz, I confess I am in two minds. On the one hand, Holocaust denial of itself does not warrant gaol time; on the other other, it is very clear that she is determined to be a martyr for the great cause of anti-Semitic abuse. A number of her remarks could, I think, constitute harassment, an offence in its own right, but one which requires a fine judgment by their lordships.
I speak, of course, as an old-school liberal of the bleeding-heart variety; though listing somewhat to starboard in my dotage. I am fully aware that were the more ardent aficionados of the persons you cite to acquire political power, they would be unlikely to grant me and my ilk the same toleration that we afford them.
The plumber joke made me laugh out loud