Fall of the Berlin Wall

Today's news has been dominated by the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago.

Of course, there is something repulsive about political leaders from around the world triumphally marking the occasion as though it proves the superiority of their blessed capitalist system. Superior perhaps in terms of longevity, but there is little to celebrate about capitalist poverty, inequality, exploitation and war.

But socialists should celebrate the fall of the Wall - albeit in our own celebrations, not alongside Angela Merkel et al. Those, such as Gorgeous George Galloway, who consider it some terrible tragedy, do socialism a great disservice by continuing to wrongly associate socialism with dictatorship and state repression.

Galloway et al might like to explain why the vast majority of people who tried to cross the Wall - a thousand of whom died in the process - were going from East to West.

Anyways, when I heard the news, I was DJing at Salford Tech (as was) Students' Union, and played this record, which deserves another airing now:

Russian CP Wants Indy Banned

Something about this tickles me. It seems that the Russian Communist Party has taken great exception to the new Indiana Jones film on the grounds that it is not an accurate portrayal of history.

My my, anyone who pursues self-education in history by going to see Indiana Jones films is, erm, probably going to the wrong place. Try your local college.

If the Russian CP has been learning history from Indiana's previous outings, I am going to have to gently break it to them that there is not actually a 700-year-old knight guarding the Holy Grail, and neither does the Ark of the Covenant contain magic dust with the power to shoot out beams of fire and slay Nazis.

It's a fictional movie! A story! And I rather enjoyed it. It's exactly the same as its predecessors, though thankfully of the standard of Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Last Crusade rather than the weak and sexist Temple Of Doom. It has the same delectable contrast between polite university corridors and wild truck chases, the same silly but fun action sequences in which every enemy bullet mysteriously misses its target, the same storyline in which the baddies make Indy find the desired relic for them only to fall for its destructive powers because their motives are less academic than his, the same just-about-plausible first two hours culminating in the fantastical climax.

Actually, at the start I had a tweak of worry that it was a mite cold-war red-bashing. But it goes on to knock the FBI's anti-communist witch-hunting as much as it mocks the Soviets.

But the most amusing thing about this news story is, I think, the Russian CP getting all upset about inaccurate portrayals of history. You'd never catch them doing that kind of thing now, would you?