George Orwell said, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - forever."Hey, nice shoes...
It is an indubitable law of the universe, it seems, that the bad guys have the best shit. Just compare the Nuremberg rally to the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Or the May Day military parade in Soviet Moscow's Red Square to the comparable modesty of a US military procession. Totalitarianism is better than democracy, if only in terms of iconography. Natty facial hair optional, natch (aside from Mussolini, of course, but he's very much second division totalitarianism).
No lunchtime sociologist is required for the formulation of this premise. Anyone who has some snifter of a trend in popular culture snag on their synapses can agree with this. The amount of documentaries on channel 4 (or channel fuhrer) on the Nazis is roughly equatable with those on subjects based on unfortunate medical aliments. Prince Harry once famously wore a Swastika armband to one of those hideous little fancy dress parties where the rich and the dumb come one.
And where the whiplash insignia of the Nazis was favoured among rock groups from Motorhead, the early Siouxsie and the Banshees, to Joy Division, and lately forming a string to the soiled Stradivarius of Marilyn Manson, the hammer b'twixt sickle is now a t-shirt cliche.
Last time I saw X Factor (the big 'X' being the swastika of lite entertainment) Cheryl Cole wore a Soviet Army Cap. Professional bohemian Pete Doherty also seems to wear one whenever his trilby has to go to cleaners for its monthly scrape.
And Che Guevara, alive in image (even if the ideas have not proved quite so febrile), is now not a fashion icon based on the encapsulation of a worthy political idea, but an abstract motif, a heady bush of facial hair with not even the wisp of an ideological taint to mar its hirsutal halo.
But there is a disparity of response: the use of communist iconography does not attract the controversy that the use of fascist imagery would court. This being despite the fact that communism lasted far longer, and to far more recently in history, than the full malevolent blossoming of fascism was ever fact. I am not intending to get on the moral treadmill of ranking communism and fascism in terms of evil; I am not A J P Taylor, nor was meant to be. But Soviet kitsch took a place of comfort in popular culture in less than ten years after the wall's fall, while fascist kitsch would still be too awkward a subject for the sunday supplements - maybe because of all the jews in the media - (JOKE). Kitsch, if I could venture my defintion, is characterised by the presenting of something which is obviously trying to be beautiful, or powerful, and the obviousness of the approach, and the ultimate failure in its execution, renders it somewhat laughable. This mocking reaction is what we now call 'kitsch'. In political terms, using the iconography of an ideology that is no longer a threat, for artistic purposes, would be kitsch. Communism, no longer a threat, is now ripe for the plundering by politically non-committal aesthetic types.
But soviet kitsch seems to be rather more acceptable than any nazi equivalent. Why? My theory is that there lies a natural human sympathy for the ideas of communism. The USSR failed, and acted out an uncolletable score of human atrocity, but not because of the ideology itself. It set out to create a utopia, and ended up with a stodigly bureaucratic hell. The Nazis started off with, "Let's kill the jews." And they did. Their ideology come to near fruition. Communism never came to fruition in the soviet bloc. In addition, communism decayed. Nazism exploded. Communism became almost normal, and seemed to be drained of much of its former zealotry under the sclerotic, rather bumblingly semi-evil tenure of Leonid Brezhnev. Communism does not carry the same visceral association with genocide, torture and murder as 'Nazism' does, despite the Math of the body count.
Despite this drain of ideological zeal, the Soviets never lost their 'feel' (if that is not too subjectively bourgeois word- forgive me, comrade) for the well-drilled presentation, the tautly organised spectacle? Who needs pop music when you have nuclear missiles passing through the square?
Maybe its nostalagia, also. Not a wish to return to the old days, but to a time when politics was less complicated; a straight forward dialectic of communism/capitalism, left/right. Now, for the majority of people, its so hard to tell where one stands, that one does not know which way is up, which way is down, or where the bathroom is. This translates into the aesthetic; how come was it that extremists of both left and right were able to conjure such simple, yet mnemoic ideas with just swathes of red, and tangles of lines? All they had to go on was an idea and a stencil, and all the focus groups in all the world could not come up with the design genius of the swastika or the hammer and sickle.
One gets the impression they were drawn up on a beermat at a secret meeting in a room above a scurrilous little bar, not chintzly added to and evolved by tradition, and asphyxiated continuity, like monarchical parades.
Totalitarianism strives for uniformity in society, in the way that minimalists do for art. Uniformity is a form of minimalism. And totalitarianism is an attempt to impose this minimalism on society in toto. In totalitarism, all art is political. And as society is to be simple, demarcated and uniform then so too must art. This is not to suggest that minimalism is in some way fascistic. Deciding how to present your product, your album cover or fashion show or whatever, is an individual thing, and not a manifesto. But no band or designer would ever court the iconography of democracy and epitomise cool. Having a picture of Nelson Mandela on your album cover would not exactly appear edgy, would it? Instead, people would just think, 'oh its another fucking U2 album.' Even if one was politically inclined to consider the White House to be the citadel of global oppression, it doesn't carry the same aesthetic kick of communist or nazi symbology. If, as George Orwell said, a totalitarian future would be a boot stomping on a human face - forever,. However, at least with the Nazis, they'd be wearing cool shoes all the while.
