In his book Moments Politiques, Jacques Ranciére recalls a scene from Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), where Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays an actor named Guillaume, recounts an incident in Red Square, late January of 1967, among Chinese students, Soviet citizens, and a couple of guards working at Lenin’s mausoleum.
The sixty-nine Chinese students had gone to lay wreaths at the tombs of both Lenin and Stalin. There they sang The Internationale and chanted quotations from Mao Zedong and slogans in support of the Cultural Revolution, which had begun a few months before, led by Mao and the Red Guards. There were long lines of some 700-800 people waiting to enter Lenin’s tomb, and the students were lengthening the wait considerably in the bitter Moscow winter. Tempers flared and apparently one of the students hit a Russian woman. A brawl ensued, ending with the people in the queue linking arms and driving the students back to their buses.
The Chinese response was swift and bitter: they called the attack against the students a “fascist atrocity”, and compared “the Soviet revisionist ruling clique” to “German, Italian, and Japanese Fascists, Chiang Kai-Shek, Tsar Nicholas II, paper tigers” and also to “a few flies freezing to death in the swirling snow”. The statement further mentioned that the Soviet people would “rise in rebellion against the revisionist rulers, dismiss them from office, seize power from them, and smash revisionist rule to smithereens.” As political invective, these comments still retain a remarkable virulence, even after almost fifty years.
Three days later, the Chinese students called a press conference at the Chinese embassy to further denounce the conduct of the Soviets. Neither Soviet nor US journalists were allowed to be present. As they spoke about the grave bodily injury occurred during the incident, a Chinese student stepped forward with gauze all over his face, implying that he had been brutally beaten, calling Brezhnev and Kosygin “fascist ordures”. As he grew more impassioned, he unraveled the gauze mask, revealing an unharmed face. The scene with the gauze mask is the one Léaud-Guillaume recreates on camera in La Chinoise. Ranciere analyzes it in terms of the eternal lie of propaganda (“The worse it is the more people believe it”) and then concludes: “By exposing the false truth of a beaten body Godard’s staging reminds us that that there is no such thing as naked truth or suffering that speaks for itself. There is no truth in suffering except that which emerges through a dramatization that gives it speech, an argument, or as we might say in Aristotelian terms, a fable.”
The Cuban cinematic equivalent would have to be that incredible moment in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s “The Last Supper, during the banquet scene where twelve slaves eat with their master. The film is set in the 1790s and takes place during Holy Week. Sebastián, one of the slaves, tells a Yoruba story about Olofi, who made the world, including the Truth and the Lie. “The Truth was beautiful and strong, the Lie ugly and skinny. To compensate Olofi gave the Lie a machete to defend itself. One day the Truth and the Lie met and fought, since they were enemies; when the Truth lets his guard drop the Lie cuts off his head. Not being able to see, the Truth searches for its head and blunders, grabbing instead the head of the Lie and places it where his own had been”. At this point Sebastian takes the head of a pig from the banquet table, places before his own like a mask (a man with a pig’s head) and says: “And from then on he goes about the world, deceiving all the people, the body of the Truth, with the head of the Lie.”
Ranciere is simplifying things in equating propaganda with lies. For sure, some propaganda is mendacious, but propaganda can combine truth, semi-truths and lies all in one package. As an example of propaganda that tells the truth think of the 1987 British poster that states “AIDS, Don’t Die of Ignorance”. More importantly, as Jacques Ellul reminds us, is that beyond persuasion propaganda is designed to make us act. The Chinese student with the bandaged face did precisely that, a perfection union of propaganda of the word with propaganda of the deed. Perhaps the student felt so humiliated internally by what happened in Red Square that bandaging his head was the best way to manifest that wound, which was physical, too, but not visible. It is within the realm of action that the Chinese student’s performance of suffering makes sense. As Ellul states: “The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.”
The mythical belief in this instance is Communism à la Mao (hence the accusation of revisionism towards the Soviets). He is committed not only to the belief but to the perceived insult and suffering, which is why Ellul also says that “action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible”. There is no turning back, since it has become his justification for action. In Francisco Morán’s new book on Martí he tells of a similar incident involving “El Apóstol”. While in jail Martí wore a metal ring around his waist, with a chain that went down to his foot; it appears in an iconic photo and many drawings or representations of his incarceration. Mañach recounts a moment in Spain when Manuel Fraga meets Martí, and Martí opens his shirt to show him his prison scars, as if they were wounds from battle. Morán reminds us that in Martí’s autopsy there are no indications or scars on his torso. In Martí’s mythical belief in his own martyrdom, we see the propaganda of deed and word blending, externalizing his inner pain.
While I agree with Ranciere’s incisive remarks, we need to explore some of the elements of the “fable”. Both the incident and Godard’s film occur deep into the Sino-Soviet split, a process that began with Khrushchev’s Speech on Stalinist crimes and cult of personality in 1956, and later blossomed into hostility revolving around issues of economic policy, support for revolutionary movements, the nature of bureaucracy, and foreign policy (particularly with regards to the U.S.). By the time of the Cultural Revolution and the incident in Red Square relations between the two Communist giants were already strained.
Old ghosts seem to reappear in evoking not only the film, but also the actual incident in Red Square, especially the use (abuse?) of the word revisionism. The term goes back to Bernstein and polemics within Social Democracy in the 1890s, to some of Luxemburg’s writings on Bernstein, and later of the Soviet’s condemnation of Titoism in the 1940s, the mutual abuse of the term during the Sino-Soviet dispute from the 50s and 60s, and in the critique of the Eurocommunists in the 1970s. But as David Coates reminds us, each major Marxist is “a revisionist by default”. Lenin revised Marx. So did Luxemburg, Korsch, Gramsci, Mariátegui, Trotsky, Mao, not to mention all the Frankfurt School and what is called Western Marxism (Sartre, Goldmann, Althusser, Lefebvre and more), as well as Fanon, Mandel, Amin, Cabral, and Arrighi. Not to be a “revisionist” would be to embrace Marxism as a “set of timeless axioms”, which makes subsequent thinkers mere reciters of quotes or compilers of footnotes to the Grand Text. Cuba was revisionist by default and from the start since the Revolution was not led by the Communist Party and Che’s ideas on guerrilla warfare, especially his foquismo, revised Mao’s.
The question is, were the Chinese really serious about these comments, which in effect was calling for the overthrow of a fellow communist country, the cradle and beacon of world socialism? Yes, if you follow the rhetoric closely. Today, it may strike us as bordering on the ridiculous, but its logic is ironclad, albeit in a florid, if not paranoid way. According to Mao and his associates, the USSR, through its condemnation of Stalin (in 1956), its policy of peaceful coexistence with the U.S., its emphasis on market incentives in the economy which included trying to “compete with the capitalist countries”, and its lack of support for Third World revolutionary movements, had turned the country away from the revolutionary path, sending the Soviets down the capitalist road. This restoration of capitalism was one of the cardinal sins of revisionism and the Chinese spared no insult in denouncing this sin, along with liberalism, individualism, petty-bourgeois aesthetics (which included everything from Beethoven to Adorno to Mickey Mouse), Confucian thought, bourgeois decadence, sexual debauchery, and other right-wing infantile disorders. Later events in Chinese history, especially under (and post) Deng Xiaoping make these criticisms seem suspect, if not comical, at best.
Were the Chinese at the 1967 press conference aware of the fact —as Ranciére suggests— that there is no such thing as the “naked truth” and brazenly stating as such, in effect saying don’t believe your eyes, believe the propaganda? Did the “left-eous path” they were taking during the Cultural Revolution make concerns about veracity seem trivial, and that their belief in the performativity of “politics in command” was more important than “revisionist notions of the truth”? Was the visage of that Chinese student after the gauze was removed the face of a lie? Or was it that of Kierkegaard’s apostle, described by Zizek as “one who has dedicated his life to bearing witness to an impersonal Truth that transcends him.”? Is this what Cubans mean when they say “Esta revolución es más grande que nosotros” (this Revolution is bigger than all of us)? Is it the truth of knowing you are the solution to the riddle of history? This curious incident and Godard’s re-creation of it raises more questions than it can answer. The fable seems to wear the body of truth and the head of a lie. If truth is meant to survive it cannot be built on certainty and coercion, but on doubt and compassion.
Image: Still from Godard’s La Chinoise (1967).