First, I did enjoy the movie! And I think that 'Hearts with hate other than love' is a great message. But we see Jimmy defending Stalin at some point. Is the audience supposed to agree with that or was that just a way to represent the fact that their thoughts weren't allowed to be in public regardless if right or wrong?
shareWell Ken Loach is fairly well-known as a socialist. I wouldn't necessarily say this film is pro-communist but your sympathies are obviously supposed to be with the communist-aligned characters rather than the Church.
shareI wouldn't necessarily say this film is pro-communist but your sympathies are obviously supposed to be with the communist-aligned characters rather than the Church.
The only way to understand Communist (and communist) sympathies during the Great Depression is to study how life, especially working life, was for most people during that time. And to keep in mind the relative lack of information outlets - few people outside of the Soviet Union really knew what horrors Stalin was up to for a long time. It was not the capitalist leaders of the free world who were trying to abolish child labor, lack of overtime, lack of pensions, lack of workman's comp, etc. Those were reforms communists, Communists, and the people who partly or mostly agreed with them supported.
History is complicated and often not well taught, but always worth studying.
I agree that this might be how people were thinking during that time but why does the movie focus on that and not on the fact that they weren't allowed to study and dance? Why make their pro-Stalin ideas look good?
shareDid Jimmy defend Stalin? The priest attacked Stalin, but Jimmy basically said that was an argument for another time.
A lot of people in the 30s and even into the 40s and 50s did admire and trust Stalin, despite reports of repression and disastrous policies in Russia. Even then, he might have been excused as sincerely trying to build a communist state. But I got the sense that the film did not want to show Jimmy as someone who was idealistic about Russia (that would really require a complicated exposition), so they gave him that scene in which he has a chance to defend Stalin and does not.
Communism is baad.. mkay??
Dear americans, the whole world laughts at your naiveté. Really.
Communism is bad. The "whole world" knows it now. The discussion is about the degree of knowledge the people in the movie would have had at the time.
whole world = USA
period.
Stalin wasn't even Communist. He had all the Communists either exiled or murdered, as a potential threat to his dictatorship.
The "party" was a mere cowed, fearful rubber stamp to his own personal hegemony. Think North Korea for a contemporary example. Sort of a rule by cult of personality (read threat, fear & terror).
Communism, in its Marxist-Leninist sense, is more about rule by the industrial proletariat, redistribution of wealth and commonly held property. Stalin was more about mass murder, slave labour, starvation, expropriation and collectivisation by force and industrialisation at any cost and consequence rather than any purported socialist dialectic.
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