Posted by Duncan on April 22, 2003 at 09:59:16 from 152.163.188.167 user Duncan.
In Reply to: Re: Ransome on TV and Radio posted by John Nichols on April 21, 2003 at 13:55:54:
I'm afraid I don't dare get back on the politics thing again - I got such a ticking off last time!!!
I understand that there are people on the board that don't want to discuss politics (although I do think they could just ignore it - after all, I have to confess that I tend to skim-read some of the more specific speculations about the layout of Beckfoot, or the measurements of Swallow but may search them out in more detail if ever I'm building a replica...)
Suffice to say that I seem to be somewhat lonely in my assessment of AR's politics. The only person who appears to come close to my view is Paul Foot (and I think his slight tendency towards Trotskyite sectarianism skews even his depiction of Ransome's politics).
I think, essentially, AR's politics were those of any young man who read plenty of Ruskin and Morris (and a little bit of Blatchford) and then found himself encountering the spirit of revolution in a real life situation.
I do not believe that he was fooled or hoodwinked, I think he was a socialist. And in the William Morris tradition (which by the 1920s could be characterised as communist romanticism) there is no extraordinary contradiction in also considering him conservative (with a small 'c' in so far as an imagined golden age shaped the imagined utopian future). However, AR was quite a pragmatic communist romantic, and not as 'conservative' as some.
Clearly both AR and Evgenia were anti-Stalinists in later life (although AR maintained an almost knee-jerk anti-imperialism which is evidenced in all manner of written and anecdotal evidence) and so that might account for why he played down his politics in later life.
Oh well, I've gone and done what I swore I wouldn't...
Duncan