The Secret Speech
Episode #1 of The Socialist Book of the Dead.
This is an incident said to have taken place in the wee hours of February 25, 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” thereafter known popularly as the Secret Speech. It marked the beginning of Soviet de-Stalinization and the start of the Khrushchev Thaw, in which thousands of Russians imprisoned for political reasons were freed. But Khrushchev’s complicity in Stalin’s repressions was suspect, and the Soviet Union remained a miserable and repressive place.
I begin here because it illustrates how socialism requires a forfeiture of conscience in the name of ideals. It typically doesn’t begin with violence, but lofty claims of world betterment. Enemies are routed, then destroyed, on the premise that they’re against the betterment of the world. Finally an autocracy is installed on cynical premises, which then must be dislodged at enormous human cost.
This will be the format for all forthcoming episodes of The Socialist Book of the Dead: twelve panels (intended for two printed pages), with art in black, white, and Communist Crimson. They are destined for an anthology. Your paid subscription helps make the series possible, but it will remain free to read. Buckle up—this ride through the history of socialism will be bumpy.
Wishing you a socialism-free May Day.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.
Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control." Theodore Dalrymple
So well done. Keep them coming.
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