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Article: Memory hole: why the left wants to forget Uncle Joe.(Martin Amis on Joseph Stalin)(Interview)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- December 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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JOSEPH STALIN MADE Martin Amis-laugh four times.
Amis reports that he read "yards" of books about Stalin to write Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Miramax), a meditation on the monstrousness of Stalin and the consequent historical vulnerability of a left that has never fully dealt with its past complicity in mass murder. Indeed, much of the left is still able to laugh nostalgically about the Soviet Union despite its unspeakably horrific past, and that, thinks Amis, makes it morally guilty.
"Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh," writes Amis. Rather, it's the things Stalin was capable of saying, "as if he were a comic creation going through ...