So let's see if I have this right. There once was a time, long long ago, when the Czech writer Milan Kundera, for over 30 years now one of the imperialist bloc's most beloved and highly promoted anti-communist artists, may have taken action in defense of his country against the CIA's relentless, dirty postwar campaign to undermine and destroy the Czech and all the Eastern European workers' states. According to the report that just surfaced, Kundera turned in a traitor who was working as an informant for the United States. Kundera of course denies it. What's interesting about the story, however, isn't what he did or didn't do. It's how the telling of it so well illuminates the utter stranglehold of bourgeois ideology in news and arts coverage in this country. The "accusation" is that Kundera acted in defense of his country to expose acts of treason at a time when his country, still in the throes of the suffering and poverty brought on by World War II, was struggling to feed, house, employ, educate, and provide health care equally for everyone. This is depicted as a shocking act of villainy. Natch. Here in the homeland of exploitation, racism and oppression, anything on the side of the socialist alternative is always evil and anything on the side of capitalist inequity -- er, I mean democracy -- is good and pure. Yecch.
I know I keep writing about what I claim to plan to start writing about, but ... I do want to explore the whole issue of which writers from other countries get translated into English and published in this country, and which don't. It's complicated, I think. Ultimately, I think, it has a lot to do with what serves the bourgeois class (by which I don't only mean the profits of the publishers), but it's not cut and dried. Except when it is, as in Kundera's case.
