Posted on 07/04/2004 5:53:15 PM PDT by aculeus
It would be simply impossible to gather from all the gushing press coverage last week about Corin Redgrave's Lear at Stratford what a truly terrifying influence he had in British theatrical circles for 20 years or more.
As the most powerful member of the Trotskyite Workers Revolutionary Party within the actors union, Equity, he helped create political cells throughout the acting profession. Central to this was the nature of the WRP: it was less a conventional political movement than a fully-fledged cult, which monopolised the time, energy and financial resources of its members.
At one level, the WRP was plain loopy, barking. But it none the less had all the perverted, personality-destroying characteristics of any seriously demented religious group, and at its heart, it revered one of the most revolting and evil men of Russian history - Lev Davidovich Bronstein: Trotsky. To turn this mass-murderer into an ideological inspiration requires a historical perspective bereft of any morality - which indeed was a key ingredient to the unrelentingly harsh pidgin Marxism that the WRP preached.
Of course, a true follower of the WRP line has to believe all sorts of pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo. Redgrave himself just about admits as much with his recent assertion that "the most important principles of dialectical materialism have been turned upside-down by discoveries in quantum physics". That he ever believed that the behaviour of neutrinos and quarks could have any possible bearing on the relationships between peoples, classes and countries simply proves that he is several planks short of a stage.
Nonetheless he still belonged to a dangerous political organisation that had great potential for evil. Any dangerous human movement requires serious intellectual derangement to fulfil its capacity to do harm, as all totalitarian creeds - from Leninism to Nazism to Maoism - have shown. Moreover, the Leninist-Trotskyite sub-strain of Marxism represented by the WRP was not some benign version of communism, but a brutal and intellectually coercive creed that not only justified Trotsky's numerous atrocities during the catastrophic civil wars from 1919 to 1922.
His slaughter of the naval garrison at Kronstadt in 1921 in particular stands as a towering landmark in 20th-century evil: 20,000 sailors who had gone on strike, demanding democratic government, were butchered by Red Army soldiers, whose families had been taken hostage by Red Guards to ensure compliance with Trotsky's orders.
So the WRP's criticism of Trotsky's great enemy, Stalin, was not based on any humanitarian ism - an emotion which it thoroughly despised as "bourgeois sentimentality" - but because he was neither extreme nor revolutionary enough. It thus speaks volumes for the theatrical world, and for the lame, uncritical standards of those who write about it, that Redgrave today is being endlessly and fawningly interviewed as a theatrical hero for his playing of King Lear at Stratford.
Yet any actor who had embraced a cause as vile and evil on the Right as the WRP was on the Left, would hardly ever be allowed to work again, never mind be the subject of such hagiographical guff as Redgrave currently is. Thus his long career in the WRP is being presented as an eccentric and mildly regrettable interlude which - alas! - distracted him from his real day-job.
This is the reverse of the truth. For some 20 years, Redgrave's real day-job was as loyal, undeviating servant of a political movement that, had it been successful, would have turned Britain into a Marxist tyranny and an open-air lunatic asylum. Moreover, his powerful personality and his mastery of Trotskyite doggerel enabled him to become the ideological hatchet man within Equity for the party leader, the despicable and loathsome predator Gerry Healy.
So in the extensive catalogue of WRP odiousness, the party's unconditional support for - and financial backing from - Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi are mere cherries on what could have been, in different historical circumstances, a very dangerous cake indeed. To be sure, it was a fruit-cake as well - hence the party's solemn purchase of Trotsky's death-mask - but to comparable categories of demented confectionary belonged Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler. Only a relatively benign history prevented the cry of Heil Healy being heard down the Mall, with Commissar Redgrave perhaps assuming office as People's Commissioner for Artistic Conformity to Marxist Principles.
Now to be fair to Corin Redgrave, it couldn't have helped that his older sister has been either baying at the full moon or scampering onto every passing modish bandwagon for the past half century. Nor could it have helped that his father was an almost compulsive shirtlifter. Over time, these things can affect a fellow.
Nonetheless, Corin Redgrave should count his lucky stars that he spent two decades ranting Trotskyite class-hatred, plotting the overthrow of bourgeois democracy and its replacement by some insane proletarian dictatorship. Had he put his name down with the British National Party for a single day, he would have been on Blackfriars Bridge with a penny whistle ever since.
A worthy euphemism that we ought to import.
Who'da thunk that Lynn would be the sane one of the family?
To paraphrase Dennis Miller, how crazy do you have to be to be considered the "Crazy Redgrave"?!
All of the Redgraves are fruit loops.
You ain't kiddin'. Musicians and artists are their similarly imbalanced kin. They tend to believe in utopia because they study fiction and live fantasy.
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