Mafia-ism and Communism (New Yorker p.36, 5 Feb 96)

[John Gelles <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

	Because I received a request for more of the
	New Yorker article on Cinema Dispute, accent ague,
	from worthy PKTrs far from a N'Yrkr carrying News
	Stand, and because one of my most beloved offerings
	on this forum covered the same subject, I am quoting
	a small passage from the article I mentioned
	yesterday on liberal thoughts in general:

	Adam Gopnik quotes Andre Glucksmann:

	"Kusturica's film  [ "Underground" ]  is not really about
	Yugoslavia, which was not entirely a totalitarian country.
	His Yugoslavia is more like Poland, more like Russia, where
	life was really frozen in a kitsch myth of revolution.

	"Do you know Shalamov's essay on the criminal world?
	Shalamov was a gulag survivor who argued that there is a
	permanent criminal class, a kind of gangster class in the
	world, an underworld with its own culture and its own
	rules, and that the marriage of this class to the perverted
	Enlightenment vision of Marxism was the essence of modern
	totalitarianism.

	"You see the same thing with Mao-gangster manners and
	utopian visions.  No one has made this idea live as art
	the way Kusturica has -- the relation between Mafia-ism and
	Leninism.  In Russia people say that the Mafia has come to
	fill the vacuum left behind by Communism.  No!  It's all
	that's left of it."


		In my own essay on this theme I allowed
		that Mafias in the liberal democratic
		world were equal in their gangsterism
		and even in their sometime exercise of
		political muscle to those in communist
		economies, but that capitalism coopted
		matured Mafias, and tamed them, before
		they reached the pinnacle of power.

		Noam Chomsky and Oliver Stone might not
		agree.  Paris is not alone in this
		review.

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        John Gelles              voice: (805) 642-6675
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