Jonathan Meades :: Joe Building (1/8)

'Joe Building : The Stalin Memorial Lecture' (2006)

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• Jonathan
• Meades

[ninthcouncil]

Great stuff - almost as good as its predecessor on Nazi architecture. Meades is at his best savaging the pretensions of totalitarians. Perhaps the time is ripe for him to take on Maoism...

[MassiveJungle]

Perhaps they're both terrible, have you ever thought of that?

[olivergwilson]

@fdsdh1 No

[fdsdh1]

@Ultrasecond China is often overlooked when it comes to tyrannical totalitarian regimes, I mean does the UK & USA even care about the Tibetans or political dissidents or living conditions in general?

[fdsdh1]

the USSR was more secretive because persecution wasn't taught about in education (like nazi schools) or propagandised (like on the peoples radio under the nazis)

[fdsdh1]

@WizardKing78 stalin used to be uncle joe, hitler was always just an austrian lunatic

the nazi's were also more open about persecution, the USSR was more secretive about persecution

[fdsdh1]

@TheAdmiral the irony

[Stereolabdream]

@altar1968 Meades spent most of his television career prior to this in reminding the people who live in the UK to the social and political injustices, collective amnesias and strangeness of its past and present.

So, why do you mention the Indian Mutiny ?

[altar1968]

And where does the Indian mutiny sit with this very valid attack on Stalin? Not pot kettle black?

[stoazen]

He'd have done better to take the hypocrisy of soviet propaganda as a matter of course. One of the first things they did was end worker management. It was just a brute empire pretending to be a modern country. Just take it for what it was and ditch this holier than thou attitude.

[belisariusorb]

Of course western intellectuals and politicians who defend Stalinism didn't/don't necessarily "covet the licence of free range tyrants". They just were fooling themselves about Stalin, most of them.

[belzondium]

'The Soviet Union was as much founded on the works of the 19th century poetic realists Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson as it was in that of the 19th century prosaic fantastists Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels'

chuckles ;)