Serfs You Will Remain

After their biggest blood letting, the very quarrelsome human species set out in 1945 to make a safer world.

Stalin was an unequivocal criminal. Historical records indicate he had been a Czarist police informer. They are the lowest of all criminals, as they lack even honour among thieves. There seems little question he was plotting to seize as much of the world as he could get his murderous fingers on.

The other world leaders were therefore behoved to marshall their populations against him. At the same time they had to convince their peoples the cost of the last war was a holy crusade against total evil. But after this successful holy crusade, serfs they would remain. Psychological traps had to be set to revolt their populations against weighing any alternative post-world orders. With Stalin that was easy. Russia remained a miserable place. It had always been so, but a whole-hearted support of Soviet communism was no longer possible. Much more difficult was convincing the common man and woman that they must accept a return to the glaring economic and social inequities of the pre-war past. For them to accept the actually unacceptable, it had to be made inevitable.

Therefore the modern King Richards preached, "Serfs you will remain but you will be free serfs." If that sounds Orwellian, that explains perfectly why it was never so baldly propagated. But after all, this was the Orwellian age.

When young impressionable British and American men were exposed to elementary Communism propaganda in the Korean war, many quickly embraced it. A new clinical term was promptly released into the lexicon – brain-washing. These healthy young men could never have sanely worked out for themselves a Communist philosophy. In the controlled West, all the sensible intelligent people assumed that.

Out of such cultural ballast, there grew up in the Western world a new and unique class of subverters. As they were too young for the war, they lacked its iron disciplines. But they knew somewhere that something important in their environment was horribly wrong. They believed without question the propaganda of the war but their society was making its ideals nonsense.

The new cultural heroes in modern books, movies, and music lashed back. But at what? Maybe the right to shout your mouth off? Or for a radical sartorial look? But the system was indulgent about that and actually absorbed and exploited it into its capitalism.

Fifty years ago, a decade after the war, another term entered into the lexicon – "angry young men".
It was coined directly after the first performances of John Osborne's English play, Look Back In Anger ►

The protagonist Jimmy Porter is mid-twenties. He has lived through the Depression and the war years. He has listened to all the promises. After all that, what has been left to him? He occupies a one-room flat and owns a sweet stall. He had attended University and had left after a year because nothing had actually happened. All really that is left for him is to rant against his bleak and meaningless world in the English Midlands in the middle of the century.

Despite its revealed power, all the Auckland Public Libraries held only one copy of the play. So now its strangled message is less than a public curio, more an antique junk.

Jimmy Porter is eponymous for carrying the burden, if not of the world, certainly the second-hand luggage of the "posh". He thunders against them but would emulate them if he could.

The play is essentially a comedy. No stage characer dies, nothing much happens. If C.S. Lewis knew about it, he might have called it a classical comedy. Jimmy indeed snarls cleverly that he is Sextus, and his vacuous wife is Lady Pusillamimous, on their way to the Games.

In a wider sense it is classical that Jimmy's wife and later his girl-friend are serf's serfs. They do nothing but slave in the flat for Jimmy. He is incessantly irascible to them while they appear to have lost even their most intimate autonomy. There seem to be no "angry young women" then – just sex kittens and drudges.

As a young man wrote the play, the only young woman to resist Jimmy is broken by his animal passion. His wife returns, his girl-friend leaves and everything reverts to the play's beginning. That means a half-filthy flat with two men reading the Sunday papers and a woman drudging. Jimmy rails and she thumps the iron.

Ten years later in 1966 the drudge might throw it at him.