Barrel Strength

In her recent interview, Lessing admits that Communism, to which she was once attracted, is rubbish.

“Communists, she now believes, are ‘murderers with a clear conscience’. But it took her a long time to get there. ‘Yes I called Marxism “the sweetest dream” in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.”

They were wrong about everything, and the mystery is how they simultaneously knew it and pretended to be the vanguard of the omniscient.

Lessing wrote some interesting science fiction, a field not often taken up by lefties, possibly because its premises usually suppose technological progress, t which they seem opposed in fact if not always in principle.

The story takes place on the planet Shikasta (Earth) tens of thousands of years in the past. The all-wise Canopians have the humans in their tutelage, living is stone igloos in ordered ranks under the indirect rule of the UN-type Canopian colonial bureaucrats. The story is written from the point of view of a would-be colonial bureaucrat from the Sirian system, who envies the Canopians their superior moral and social development. Then disaster strikes. The Puttiorian Empire, under the direction of the Criminal Planet Shammat, disrupts the massive phase array (the Lock) that keeps the minds of the humans in thrall. Liberated from the all-wise mental domination of the Canopians, the humans fall into history: they achieve freedom.

It is not pictured that way by Lessing of course. The terrible Puttiorians and the ambassadors from the Criminal Planet Shammat leer at girls’ breasts, wear leather shoes, and smirk knowingly. The more I contemplated the eternal smug dullness of the Canopian rule, the more I thought it resembled a benign North Korea, and the more evident it was that the Criminal Planet Shammat was governed by me, George Jonas and Mark Steyn. Ridding Shikasta of Canopian-Sirian Con-Dominium was the obligation of every free thinking moral person. Come to think of it, it still is.

“With her latest book she has come full circle to the Rhodesia of her childhood. There is a moving chapter in which she describes returning as an elderly woman to the country she had once loved, only to find it devastated by years of Mugabe’s tyrannous rule. She encounters a drunk and obnoxious black man who won’t let her see her father’s old farm. She had been a great champion of black rule.”

Ah! To live long enough to see all the errors of our ways. You can take girl out of the Party, and eventually you can take the Party out of the girl.