Rose Over Chaos

scientists on this post: yuuuup 👍

During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

"In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people there are various fronts, among which there are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts. To defeat the enemy we must rely primarily on the army with guns. But this army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy."

Mao was, of course, correct to say this, because he won the war, so clearly the overall strategy worked. But we are not in 1942 and we (proletarians) do not have An Army nor do we even have A Party (which is the first step). In the western world in 2025 we are much closer to the situation described by Vonnegut. Artists are operating either as individuals or as employees of media companies. Unorganized individuals can make political statements via art but without mass coordination of the message there will be limited impact. And of course artists who are operating as employees can hardly be said to have any ability to make political statements outside of an extremely narrow range. But the point is that even if you get every artist in the western world to coordinate on the message, if they have no party and no army, then they will ultimately not be able to liberate themselves.