Coloring
July 3, 1943
Ideas are colored by what they are dipped in. There was a young Chinaman the other day, nearly accusin’ me of havin’ invented Confucius. He had been UNeducated by contact with half-baked occidental ideas. Lost his own cultural heritage, didn’t think Confucius was so modern, that was because he hadn’t read him, of course. Mencius was also accused of having brightened up Confucius, but he knew better. He knew he hadn’t.
Formerly, when Kung died, the disciples after staying together three years, packed their baggage and returned to their homes, but Tzu Kung went back and built a house on the altar ground, and lived there alone for three years. And the disciples thought Yew Jo might serve as teacher, but Tzu said:
Washed in the waters of Kiang and Han, bleached in the autumn sun.
After that, no. There is nothing to add. Nothing to add to that whiteness.
Mebbe the difference between the Greek flash in the pan, and the Chinese persistence is due to Kung’s having got the answer. Mencius following and enforcing it. Whereas in Greece, Socrates gunned ’round. As Aristotle says: “Socrates was the first to see that thought hinges on definitions.” But Aristotle had to put the guesses in order. He didn’t take Socrates or any of the other Greek philosophers as a solid basis. And spent a lot of time talking about abstractions. Tho’ he did say that the general statement must be based on a lot of concrete data. And he did study the different constitutions of states, i.e., different political systems, and regulations. All that of course OUGHT to be the basis of senatorial training, of congressional training. And it drags me a bit away from the simple text I meant to enforce, or suggest. When I said ideas are tinged by what they are dipped in, I was thinkin’ of widdy Trotsky. Down there in Mexico, speakin’ evil of Stalin, in fact blamin’ Joe for the war, and saying she was to fix it all up, and conduct the world revolution. Now we all like revolution, except when we are settin’ too easy. And a considerable revolution has occurred during most of our lifetimes. Though Senator Vandenberg mayn’t have heard of it YET.
Mr. Marx, Charlie, went to England, went there at a time when England had a sort of a lead over less favored nations. And he heard about Hobhouse. And I reckon about Mr. Owen, Robert Owen. And he wanted to start something in Germany, but the ideas got switched off onto Russia, a less favored country. A backward country, full of Tartars and Muscovites, and Cossaks and Nomads. And the result has been in many ways UNsatisfactory. In fact Owen’s ideas about factory reform, etc. have gone a lot further in Germany, under the Führer, whose writing you probably haven’t read. In fact you and Vandenburg and these sachems probably haven’t read EITHER Stalin, OR Hitler, or Mussolini. So you decide to take over an old shirt of Lenin’s, at least that passage about training a staff of administrators, and you send a lot of unbreached kids down to the University of Virginia to learn how to administer. Which is looney. I mean if you think a kindergarten can administer its parents, or infants officiate over adults.
The idea takes color from what it is dipped in. The idea of treating work men like human beings, favored by Robert Owen, etc. has progressed in Germany. I reckon for model factory conditions, etc. you would have to go to Germany NOW, thought the Burgomaister of Worgl, [who] had Henry Ford’s life or ghosted autobiography on his bookshelf. But for the Senator’s information, before he gives way to nostalgia for a lost era, and consents to puttin’ up a stooge, or pseudo General Grant, to initiate a new era of pillage and public scandal. I mean by having a man, or wanting a president who knows NOTHING about public administration, but covers the graft by a military aureole, more or less.
Let the Senator READ a little Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Of course you can GET Stalin for 10 cents in America, and you probably can NOT get the works of the Axis leaders. Or if so, I suspect they would not be in authoritative translations.
Well now, what in Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism? And where was the error, if error? Was it in program or was it something that happened later, in petrification of program? Or in Russian inability to act on exotic ideas; and the general drop or droop or subsidence of the exotic ideas into the mire of Slavic chaos (with condiments: oh yes, with condiments, according to some unkindly critics)?
But supposin’ the widdy Trotsky DOES drag the program OUT of the Slavic ambiance, out of Russia, into the American hemisphere? Already AT it in fact, get a humanitarian coloring. Not having been able to shoot Mr. Stalin, Mrs. Trotsky now decides war is wicked, or at least an error. The kindly U.S.A., Y.M.C.A. circumjacence coloring Mrs. Trotsky’s susceptible mind. What would American communism finally come to? Where would it land? Or for the matter of that, where would the British episcopal Lambeth Palace, curates and mitre brand of communism finally end? What effect would the British dislike of the nosey parker have on Weishaupt’s latch for universal and close range espionage, every brother spyin’ and telling on everyone else?
Is Mrs. Trotsky ready to color, or to paint up to the point of seeing the homestead as something more germane to the American temperament than the kolckhoz or factory farm? That would be something to ask her. Since you are head in’ for communism, lickety split, hell for leather, or mebbe hell with a shortage of leather, certainly with a shortage of pigskin and Japanese cherry trees.
And in conclusion where does she stand or SET on the matter of economic aggression? On the matter of dumping? On the matter of those seven league strides toward a higher cultural level than Lenin wanted to shove onto the Muscovites?
And the desired self-criticism inside the party? Has the American Communist Party yet opened up to the self-critics from the inside? Probably Will, or rather Kumrad William Williams was a bit pessimistic on that subject, when I was last admitted to his acquaintance. Certainly Messrs. Churchill and Roosevelt do seem to represent pretty much all that is worst in the plutocracy. So widdy Trotsky may git a run for her money.
