Asymmetrical Information

Jane, you're not that much older than I am, but I must regretfully informe you that during my formative years at another Northeastern educational institution, I never heard "L'Internationale." Everyone was too lazy to activitize much past Che t-shirts and occasional banners. I fear the fist-clenching, sonorous Reds of yore are gone from the Ivy League forever. May they live on at Berkeley and NYU.

Yeesh. I'm not even out of college and I got that reference. Mind you I tend to have more interest in communist history than the modal individual my age...

Even twenty years ago I never heard it at Pomona College. If anyone had played it, I'm pretty sure they would have meant it ironically. Or is Che now an ironic reference, too?

At the age of 47, I'm willing to announce that I have almost never heard it, although I have always known what it is. But the one source I have for it is pretty potent: it's the pre-intermission sequence in Reds.

And Les Mis' Do You Hear The People Sing? is a pastiche of same, isn't it?

As a graduate of the Ron Dellums Memorial Re-Education CampUniversity of California at Berkeley, I can say that I'd never actually heard the Internationale until after I graduated (in 1991). There were enough Communists to create multiple factions - we had Maoists, Trotskyites, and the CPUSA, plus all the usual popular front groups, protesting each fall whatever the issue du jour was on Radio Moscow over the summer.

But at least I got the reference.

As a German, I am all to familiar with the "Internationale", but also I can't belief that I have been so fascinated by Marxism during my high school years. I also sought to combine it with something that I think it lacked those times (competition with fair payment, something like a negative tax).

But I never went so far as to be an activist, because I always thought them to be a bit too fanatic ;) There was also the little problem that the DDR was a "social-democracy"-slash-communist country. Ultimately a visit to the DDR healed all my sympathies for Marx's idealistic society..

I seem to remember that the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square sang the Internationale during their protests.

Let it be forgotten.

Let it's words go unsung, it's semtiments go the way of all ridiculous prattle.

Let a generation finally grow up without this idiocy paraded before them as a viable course for humanity.

Let me add my non-memories of the Internationale from growing up in Berkeley in the '60s and '70s.

A Euro thing, methinks -- with the probable exception of hard core Marxists and Leninists of the sort regarded as extreme by even the most liberal of mainstream Berkeleyites.

I am with jack. "let its name be blotted out."

Don't think I've ever heard the Internationale actually sung.

On the other hand, I know the significance of the slogan "U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA".

I had a class in college where the professor devoted an entire period to The Internationale. I suspect I could have gotten some money from David Horowitz if I had raised a stink about it, although it was actually quite apropos of the class's subject matter.

Instead, I'll just come stir up the hornet's nest here. BTW: The prof gave us more and better lyrics than you did!

Oh right.. the class was in 2003.

Forgot to mention: Ayn Rand's viewpoint character in We the Living called the song "the only beautiful thing to come out of the Revolution", or something like that.

Well, I went to college in the early '80s, and I've never heard of it, and only heard of it long after I graduated. Then again, I went to a state engineering college where we were too busy trying to make grades or get drunk. No time for any activism.

Anyhoo, I did run into (on the Net) an Australian who had formed her (negative) views of the US from the fact that the Internationale was illegal here. She knew it was true because her music teacher told her.

I went to Purdue. You can be sure it was never sung there. I went in the 80s, the joke was "skinny ties never went out of style at purdue"

My favorite line from Doctor Zhivago: "Perhaps they'll sing in tune *after* the revolution."

I assume that the workers he referred to were singing the Internationale, but since I've never actually heard it, I don't know for sure.

I'm with Anthony and David - never heard it once as a grad student in the People's Republic of Berkeley during the 70s, not even in front of The Kremlin ...er...Sproul Hall.

I owe Berkeley a lot. Showed up as a fashionably lefty student, had the scales yanked forcibly from my eyes with a month, have broken out in hives on hearing anything remotely leftist ever since. Kinda like getting a rabies shot.

I've heard it sung in Chinese many times, beginning in college. It is definitely not just a "Euro thing." The tune, sans lyrics, is quite beautiful and stirring, I must say. Otherwise, I would be quite happy for it to disappear as I'm not particularly fond of songs glorifying regimes that murdered tens of millions of innocents.

Miles Dunnington, who years ago wrote for the Chicago Tribune, told me he drove our ambassador to Thailand in a Volkswagen, with a hammer and cycle attached as a diplomatic flag, to a Thai government building during the VN war and in the process of entering raised his fist in the manner described at which point nearby Thais joined in the Communist Internationale. This to demonstrate to the ambassador the depth of Thai feeling for us. It was kind of an official greeting I take it like in the Odyssey.

My parents had drifted away from the CPUSA by the time I became aware of politics but were still pretty far left. I was in college in 1968 and attended my share of demonstrations. I don't think I ever heard The Internationale sung.

Perhaps a globalisation anthem should replace it. Sung with a finger up.

No student activist in the US knew those lyrics by heart. The original is in French. It was composed in 1870 and set to music in 1888. It was sung, not only by communists, but by socialists and social democrats. The Chinese student protesters sang it in Tienanmin Square in 1989, before their nominally communist overlords murdered them. I'm not aware that anarchists ever sang it.

The version sung in the US - which I still know by heart - goes like this:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation:
A better world in birth!
No more tradition's chains shall bind us,
Arise you slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations:
We have been nought, we shall be all!
'Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place.
The international proletariat
Shall be the human race
'Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place.
The international proletariat
Shall be the human race.

Some people sing "internationale" (6 syllables) instead of "international proletariat." Wikipedia says "international soviet" - I never heard that, but I suppose they didn't make it up.

Thanks to you, Jane, it is not lodged firmly in my head. If I join the CPUSA, it's all your fault.

... told me he drove our ambassador to Thailand in a Volkswagen, ...

That's one tough bug. No wonder it was called "the people's car."

Having graduated from Berkeley in 1975, I had never heard this until today. However, Berkeley did have the famous "Red Star" tours when I was there.

I think the Lefties are going to have to get a much more peppy, much less ponderous tune if they're going to have any sucess in singing songs to move the masses. Or perhaps they just need a less ponderous philosophy?

let's hear it for engineering schools!

no whiny activists, prof.'s ideology has no importance and it almost never comes up, most profs and students are very conservative, and the only reason you won't be able to meet the recruiters from GE/M$/Lockheed/Exxon... is because there are too bloody many people ahead of you inline.

Nothing like seeing your student union reps run for parliament as hardcore conservatives while they were still part of the student union. Conservative slate usually won and the communist slate always lost by a landslide. Conservative slate = advocating for the abolition of government funding for university, income contingent college loans, flat tax...

JR - "international proletariat"? Is that where Tom Lehrer got his line about "It don't even matter if you put a couple of extra syllables into a line"?

If I were in a more creative mood right now, I could change that one line to make it a lovely right-wing song.

Anthony: I hope you get in a creative mood soon, I'd love to see the right-wing version of the song.

One of the longstanding peculiarities of American politics is that, nutcases aside, liberals and conservatives have usually wanted pretty much the same things. Usually it's just the details (how and how much) that they argue over. (IMO, at present the Democratic party has been taken over by America-hating nutcases - but that's a temporary condition that can only last as long as they get credibility from nutcases in the mainstream media, who are presently fast losing all their own credibility.)

Beyond that, what Communists say they want isn't much different, either. The problems arise with their methods, which are so obviously bound to produce the opposite results that it's hard to ascribe their failures to stupidity rather than malice. So I'm not surprised that 3/4 of the Internationale could be a right wing song. You don't expect them to put Gulags and standing in line for toilet paper into their propaganda, do you?

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