One of the many fascinating features of this interview with András Forgách is that he reacted to the crushing of the Prague Spring by renouncing his Hungarian parents' Stalinism and becoming a Maoist instead. That was not unusual. I hate to admit it, but, written and presented by David Aaronovitch though it is, this is well worth a listen.
Most people know that Trotskyism was a fashionable way of being very left-wing but anti-Soviet in Britain, but they do not know about the admittedly much smaller Maoist subculture. Many people know that Maoism fulfilled that function on the campuses of West Germany, but not that it had an underground appeal to youth in East Germany, too. If there was one thing of which East Germany, like the Soviet Union, could never have been accused, then it was a Cultural Revolution. There were no Swinging Sixties there. There was Bach, not the Beatles.
And I expect that very few people in Britain, and relatively few in America, will know what an inspiration Maoism was to the most radical black activists in the United States. They saw a revolution in the most populous country on earth, non-white, and setting off anti-colonial struggles all over the world.
Nothing ever came of any of this in the West in the end, of course. It is a fascinating historical curiosity, but it is nothing more than that. Unlike Aaronovitch's Eurocommunism. How about a programme on that? Or how about a programme on the Loony Right? Recent tragic events have seen that emerge from the shadows, essentially unchanged. Yet it is at the very centre of power in this country, just as it was in the 1980s.
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