Archive for the ‘History’ Category
The Capital
Via AEIOU a terrific gallery of Soviet buildings that were never built.
Leap backward two decades, and to England: "The changing is translated into something fixed and necessary. This leads to rigid lines and dead crystalline forms, for pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things." (T.E. Hulme, "Modern Art and its Philosophy" as cited in Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, 3).
One more for good measure
One more clip from this weeks LRB for good measure. How about this gem from Bernard Porter’s review of two new books on the Kenya Emergency and the end of the British Empire…
[A]fter the scandalous British beatings of detainees at Hola camp in
1959, which left 11 dead and 60 seriously wounded… Alan Lennox-Boyd, colonial secretary for much of this
period, and one of the villains of both these books… [at first] denied abuses, then when that was no longer
possible he dismissed them as exceptional (‘bad apples’), and appealed
to his critics to remember what they were up against in Kenya: not an
ordinary policing problem, but an outbreak of atavistic ‘evil’ – a
useful word when you are confronting something you don’t understand.
Familiar ring to it, no?
Godless Communism: The Comic
From the Authentic History Center, via boingboing:
Terrific anti-communist comic series from the early 1960s that you can flip through… The best stuff is from the first issue, where the comic takes up that age old American propaganda tactic – one family’s story, their life in the U.S.S.A. (Highlights: the parish priest is sent to a reeducation labor camp, mom has to go to work, and dad has to cut down trees at gunpoint in northern wisconsin). After this, the issues head into the history of Communism from Marx on – great scene with old Karl arguing with his drunken college chums about the merits of Dr. Hegel’s lectures. La plus ca change…
Oh yeah, check out the letter from J.Edgar Hoover that kicks off the festivities. 
Also, don’t miss the hot Commie teacher who takes over at Soviet School 32 (formerly, St. Joseph’s)… (All right, she’s not so hot in frame 3… I think they’ve deliberately uglied her up there… But in the first two frames! I’m gonna start working the red armband, that’s for sure…) 
