Under the Frog: Why Tibor Fischer s 1992 Booker-Nominated Novel May Have Found its Moment – Quillette

RA: 1992, the year of its publication, was a time when it seemed Soviet Communism had been lastingly defeated. Is it a book whose message we need more or less now?

TF: By 1992 it was all over for the Soviet Empire. I wasn t trying to load a message into the book, I was hoping to chronicle a period and a place people in the Anglo-Saxon world knew little about. Most people on the Left (apart from Arthur Scargill) had realized that the countries of the Warsaw Pact weren t workers paradises by the 1970s, but there was a curious reluctance to fully face up to the truth. I worked on a documentary series about Eastern Europe for Channel 4 that was broadcast in 1988. We were attacked by the Independent for being too harsh on Ceau escu. A year later his own compatriots put him up against a wall and shot him.

I spent half my life having to explain that Communist Hungary wasn t some noble experiment. One of my teachers, who, of course, like most staff room sages, knew fuck-all, argued that at least they don t have the rat race, unaware that if there s less cheese, the rats have to race even harder. And it seems I ll have to spend the second half of my life constantly denying that Hungary is some fascist backwater. János Kádár, a dictator who was installed by Soviet tanks and whose regime executed hundreds of Hungarians got a better press in the West than the current, democratically elected prime minister, Viktor Orbán. You can t make it up.

The Far-Left have largely given up on the Five-Year Plans and Central Control of the economy, but they have retreated into the universities and schools where you will still find boastful Marxists. It s what Gramsci called the war of position. You mislead the youth. There is, in fact despite the prattle about diversity, very little diversity in British universities, intellectually. }i~ek, an avowed Communist has a position at Birkbeck University. Why not? But I d love to see Birkbeck offer a position to someone who advocates a challenging form of neo-fascism.

I suppose every generation has the sensation of living in strange times. The sifting process in job applications and university applications in the UK, with the emphasis on ethnicity and social background is an intriguing mixture of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. There is an alarming polarization of politics almost everywhere.

via quillette.com

I’ve got to get this book.