Reds

 

Red is somehow unique.  It is the only colour with a very strong ideological identity.

White is neutral by definition; blue and yellow have never represented anything meaningful.

Green is a very recent entry and anyhow green movements have never really achieved much in terms of numbers or goals.  Also, green represents nature, which is not an ideology.

Black has represented many but not all fascist movements and has almost always been blended with other colours, so that only a rugby team can really claim to be all black.

But red is different.  Communists, socialists and the likes were and are called reds.  Fascists were never called blacks (unfortunately, otherwise they would have been crushed down instantly by American cops patrolling streets).

This is why a magazine making red its theme cannot escape an ideological pistolotto reminiscent of the soviet era.

And the big question is: if we all agree that community life, sharing, loving each other, etc is better than everybody by itself counting the doubloons in their coffers, then why reds, who base their ideology on those values, are not dominating the world?

The typical answer to this question would be that reds have demonstrated almost everywhere at any time to be capable of acting as the most horrible fascist, with no benefits at all for the people and actually often harsh punishment.  This is damning evidence and I cannot do else than curse the various Stalin, Mengistu, Pol Pot, etc.

But one fact is always neglected in painting the history of reds.  Everywhere a hope was born, and was starting to spark a bonfire of brilliant red (like in Chile with Salvador Allende, in Panama with Torrijos, in Iran with Mosaddegh), suddenly there appeared a colour blind American cop patrolling the country.

Ironically, the same happened also on the other side of the iron curtain.  As soon as the spark hit two Russian controlled countries (Hungary with Nagy and Czechoslovakia with Dubček), the communists again behaved like fascists.

So we will never really know what “socialism with a human face” could look like.

And the future doesn’t certainly look much brighter after Brexit and Trump and the fact that the largest and most esteemed businesses in the world (Google, Apple, etc.) dodge gazillions of taxes every year, more than could feed the world’s poor for centuries to go.

But then, we always need to hope.  And my hope is based on one simple concept that reds have never adopted: small is beautiful.  Which means that big is ugly, which sounds like a blasphemy for conventional wisdom.

Multiple studies show that the ability to collaborate effectively among human beings reaches a peak at around 200/250 individuals.  Above that number, complexity increases, systems are needed to manage complexity, layers are created to manage the systems, and hierarchy and bureaucracy infect the human community like cancer to a human body.

Maybe there is a magic number that could make the world turn better.

Maybe we don’t need a magic number but just a bit of passion for what we do and respect for each other.

Starting from you, youngsters, target readers of this magazine which I plan to use as a pulpit to spread my pearls of wisdom.

Peace and love

Mr Belduquè

P.S. CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

The October Revolution happened in November

The revolution started on the night of 24 October 1917 of the Giulian Calendar which was used in Zarist Russia at the time.  Russia then switched to the commonly used Gregorian Calendar in 1918, which resulted in a change of the date of to 6 November 1917.