Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao: what’s the difference?

If my last post (From Sir Winston to Washington Post) seemed to suggest that I had joined the Churchill fan brigade – known more for its unseemly concern with the Great Man’s dentures than with his Imperial and imperious criminality – as a fresh and overenthusiastic recruit, let me clear the air. What I ought to have said in that post was that his Indophobic outburst in the June 1947 debate on the India Independence Bill in the British Parliament sounds prophetic in the prevailing Indian political context. I stand corrected and abashed for my haste. To save face, my only lame-duck – if that! – excuse could be that, in any case, a visionary – even an accidental one – is sighted and anointed only after the event. If Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, Stalin for the Holodomor (“killing by hunger” in Russian) or the Great Famine of Ukraine (1932-33) and Mao for the mammoth number of starvation deaths in the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), Churchill needs must shoulder the responsibility for the 2000 a month death toll in the 1942-43 Bengal Famine. In his own words, Indians were “a beastly people with a beastly religion” who “bred like rabbits”. http://ind.pn/UofYOK Ergo, they probably were beyond redemption and not worth saving. What the King Emperor’s First Minister did to worsen the situation in the Bengal Famine was to deny food shipments to India and insist on rice exports from India to shore up the war effort. Churchill’s collaborators in his war crime were: the Japanese occupation of Burma that choked off rice imports to India; an untimely cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that wiped out the winter crop; and a panicky government that confiscated in a knee-jerk reaction all vehicles that used to ferry rice from Burma in order to keep them out of reach of the invaders. The government also started buying food grains on the open market to feed the troops and the war workers, thereby nudging the traders into hoarding the scarce stuff and spawning what came to be known as “the black market”. (I vaguely remember hearing the phrase repeatedly at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for the first time a bit after the Quit India call by Gandhi on 8 August 1942.) In a sense, Churchill was the blackguard who brought the black market to India. 

Leave her to heaven.

The world is never weary of Marilyn Monroe. The first time I saw her was in Niagara, the 1953 noir flick. She was the faithless wife planning to murder her husband, the hapless Joseph Cotton. Jean Peters, the better half of a fellow honeymooning couple unwittingly stumbled on her secret lover and got caught in the web. Marilyn was rivetting. Andy Warhol used the publicity shot from the same film as the basis for his famous Marilyn Diptych, Acrylic and silk screen ink on canvas,1962. The Tate Gallery caption to it reads inter alia: “Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.” http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=15976. Very prophetic, what? (A diptych , by the way, is a painting in two panels. http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=88.) There’s another possibility as well. Maybe, Warhol’s multiple-image, multiple-colour-combo metaphor is a pointer that, even in adulation, Marilyn is no more a person but merely a mass-consumption commodity. I wonder what Warhol, as “an expert in subverting notions of celebrity” (as the Publisher’s Weekly once famously tagged him) had he access to it, would have made of the telltale still from the verboten 16 mm Marilyn Monroe film shot in the 1950s and now consigned forever to a vault by a reverent MM devotee. Would he had blown it up and once again worked his assembly line, multiple exposure magic on it? Interestingly enough, Warhol shot in his Factory with a second-hand 16 mm Bolex camera films such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job that have since become underground classics. http://www.warholprints.com/Bio.Andy.Warhol.html. "They're experimental films; I call them that because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm interested in audience reaction to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions," is how Warhol described his work in 'Nothing to Lose', his interview by G Berg in the May1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinema in English. Sam Ishii-Gonzalès, a teacher of aesthetics and film history at New York University and the Film/Media Studies Program at Hunter College, puts a different interpretation on the most famous Warholism: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/14/blow_job.html. “…for Warhol, this "everyone" are the refuse of American society, and this refuse includes himself,” he argues. So, it is not just “a prophetic statement about the media celebrity accorded to serial killers, Monika Lewinsky, Amy Fisher, etc.” Did Warhol’s "everyone" include his already dead Marilyn(s), his close-to-dying Liz, his Brigitte Bardot (“BB” to her French fans) wrapped in the French tricolour and his Mao (“the ultimate star”) based on the portrait photograph in the Little Red Book?