Issue 256 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published October 2001 Copyright © Socialist Review
Tim Evans (Letters, September SR) was correct in his analysis of media hysteria which resulted in a female paediatrician being attacked because people thought paediatrician meant the same as paedophile. Another example of media-induced hysteria is the asylum seeker issue and, as with the paedophile issue, I am frightened as to how easy it is to whip up hysteria.
I have seen streams of letters from people ranting about how asylum seekers are all bogus and how they live in luxury because of the lies they are fed in the newspapers. Once hysteria has been generated, a floodgate has been opened which cannot be closed.
People are convinced that asylum seekers live in luxury regardless of the treatment they actually receive. I am sure tabloid hysteria was responsible for attacks on asylum seekers.
This is not the first time that the tabloids have tried to create the myth that there is a privileged group in society who receive generous benefits, have huge sums of money spent on them and are automatically given housing.
The tabloids did the same thing with single mothers a few years ago. I would very much like to see a Brass Eye programme sending up the media hysteria on asylum seekers, and I would be very interested to see how the tabloids would react to such a programme.
Ian Morris
Bangor
I write with reference to Pat Stack's column about the Brass Eye programme which focused on the issue of paedophilia (September SR).
Along with 3,000 other people I made a formal complaint against Channel 4. Although I understand Pat's point of view, I write from the viewpoint of having first hand experience of what many of your readers could not even imagine.
I found this whole programme an abuse in itself rather than an indictment of media coverage--both in the direct and indirect sense. What understanding did the young boy facing the pilloried pervert in the studio have of what was going on? He may, for all anyone knows, be suffering abuse and telling no one. He was abused by being placed in that situation.
For many of us watching there was the abuse of digging up painful memories that can take a lifetime to bury. Not for us the offer of counselling by telephone at the end of the programme--that is for 'serious' television, of course. I had a week of sleepless nights to cope with--for others there will have been much sterner tests.
I appeal to fellow members of the Socialist Alliance not to applaud the intent of the media creators without thinking about those who have suffered personally. For me this was a cheap, nasty, abusive presentation which should have never been allowed airtime.
Pat Stack says he, along with his siblings, came out of childhood pretty well--there are a whole ageless legion of others who did not, and they should have input to that column.
We all know that Alf Garnett did Till Death Us Do Part as a satire on the racial situation in Britain. I knew people of colour who suffered abuse by the morons who thought it real. This is the same mistake again.
Eric Smalley
East Lancs
I must take issue with the point made in Mike Gonzalez's column that Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony (the 'Leningrad') 'was central to the mythology of a heroic Soviet Union holding off the Nazi armies' and so written with a degree of political correctness (September SR).
No matter how much Stalin wanted to portray the Russian army as a resolute, courageous force, endowed with the mystical certainty of winning, I think it is wrong to think that the Seventh was a conscious embodiment of the dictator's ideal.
Shostakovich's work is the culmination of artistic integrity and should not be considered as a mitigation of previous criticism of the composer's work by the Soviet establishment. His driving force was hunger, cold, disease, bombs and carnage from one of the most terrible episodes in human history.
The symphony, with its martial tone, was an expression of anger and agony by the artist, who had witnessed and suffered, along with his fellow citizens, the horrors of the siege of Leningrad. It was an honest assertion of courage by the Soviet people under the torture of war--a blend of reality and art.
Under these circumstances Shostakovich wrote in accordance with fact. Fact contradicts a myth.
Edward Davies
Stourbridge
While I welcome and share Mike Gonzalez's appreciation of the Fifteenth String Quartet of Shostakovich, 'Older and Wiser?' (September SR), I think he makes a series of mistakes and odd judgements that mar his review.
It is common to many composers that some of their most personal expression is revealed in small-scale chamber music rather than orchestral music--Beethoven and Janącek are two examples that come to my mind.
However, it grates for Mike to say the Fifth Symphony is a 'confident epic', and for him to go on to accuse the composer of 'moral cowardice'. It seems to me that Mike fails to spot the degree of irony and ambivalence so central to Shostakovich's orchestral works--the pain revealed in the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony that he dismisses so glibly is one example.
The truth is that Prokofiev was never Shostakovich's teacher--he left Russia in 1918 when the latter was 12. The Seventh Symphony was premiered in Kuybishev (once again called Samara now) in March 1942. And it is not mere 'repute' but fact that the remnants of the Leningrad radio orchestra performed it on 13 August 1942 in Leningrad itself. Mike would do well to listen to the Tenth Symphony and notice the shift in mood, given that it was written within months of Stalin's death in 1953. A great deal of anguish, bitter irony and introspection is revealed in it.
Shostakovich was no mere puppet of a regime--the fact that he chose to use frowned-upon or banned authors and themes--the words of Yevtushenko, the Babi Yar massacre, Jewish poetry--attest to this.
Prokofiev returned to settle in the Soviet Union in 1936 and was proud of his stance as a jobbing composer. He wrote an 'Ode to Stalin'--something Shostakovich never did.
I feel Mike has hardly scratched the surface of the issue of this composer's importance for the last century and I would like to see more in Socialist Review at some point.
Simon Sanders
London
The impression that Keith Flett gives in his book review of the Left Book Club ('Done by the Book', September SR) is that it was by and large a worthwhile venture, but that 'there were problems' with its Stalinist orientation.
The fact is that the LBC was the biggest conduit for the transmission of Stalinist poison into the working class in Britain. As part of my research for a doctoral thesis, I was obliged to read cover to cover many of the wretched tomes issued by the LBC.
Books like Pat Sloan's Soviet Democracy (sic)--which bluntly insisted that it is a democratic act to silence and, in times of impending or actual war, kill people promoting minority opinions (that is, people like us)--and Johnny Campbell's Soviet Policy and Its Critics, which was an enthusiastic celebration of the Moscow trials, were no aberration but were central to the LBC project.
The reason why you can find so many LBC publications in second hand bookshops is because so many of them were rotten to the core.
The LBC promoted the idea that socialism is, at best, something that is organised for the working class through the state by a bureaucratic elite, or, at worst, a frightful tyranny replete with show trials, state terror and labour camps.
The fight to promote the idea of socialism as the genuinely human society was made more difficult by the likes of the LBC, and we are still fighting against its baleful legacy today.
Paul Flewers
London
House prices in Cambridge and London are now out of reach of most working people. Hence the buying up of property in Fenland by people who work in Cambridge and London.
Over the last few years the stock market boom has resulted in more than 1,000 people who work in the City of London receiving bonuses of £1 million each. The result of this has been to push up house prices in East Anglia.
At the same time some mortgage brokers are selling 100 percent mortgages, based on four or five times and in some cases up to nine times male annual income. This access to 'easy' credit has helped push up house prices even further.
Since 1979 house prices in Britain have experienced boom and bust. The recession of the early 1990s led to a fall in house prices and 1 million people suffered from 'negative equity'. In 2001 manufacturing is already in recession. What will happen to house prices when the service sector enters recession is quite clear.
The boom in house prices in Fenland reminds me of what happened in Florida in the 1920s. Outsiders were attracted to Florida's undeveloped paradise. The dollars poured in, the state prospered and the real estate business boomed. Miami City records show that one plot of land sold for $1,500 in 1914 but changed hands in 1926 for $1.5 million.
But the fact is that it was not to last. In the autumn of 1926 property prices in Florida suddenly fell. However, it took until the 1960s for Florida real estate to regain its 1926 price level.
John Smithee
Cambridge