Mixed. He was pretty good at pointing out the problems but the various attempts to implement his solutions haven't really out for the best. Unfortunately none of the human rights-abiding Socialist Internationale members, the syndicalist-influenced movements (1938 worst year of my life), nor a granola-minded grassroots activist who simply believes workers deserve fair conditions/wages for the value of their labor come to my mind when someone identifies as a Marxist.
After all, the Free Speech Movement, a group I often look to as one of my primary ideological influences, coined the slogan "Never trust anybody over 30" to rebuff communist infiltration. They ain't care what Marx said, they were doing their own phucking sh**t.
Rather, I think of the Leninists and their numerous tankie-inclined offspring which for the most part perverted Marx's incomplete vision. They dismantled only hierarchical power structures which threatened their rule, if not subsumed those which worked to their benefits. In this regard I defer to those who suffered under Marxism-Leninism's words, such as my late papou recounting the childhood turmoil he endured during the Greek Civil War and others who codified how
my terrorists can be other's freedom fighters because they weren't afraid to sock an abuser in the mouth:Jagr's grandmother Jarmila told the boy about the first Jaromir Jagr, his grandfather and her husband. He was a farmer. When the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, the grandmother said, they appropriated all the privately owned farms. They collectivized his grandfather's fields and three quarters of his livestock. They left him with the house, barn and yard that the family still lives in today—Jagr, his grandmother, his parents and his uncle. (Jagr's sister, Jitka, is now married and lives 10 minutes away.) Then the authorities told Jagr's grandfather that he had to labor in the cooperative farm for free. His grandfather refused to work for those people who had stolen his farm. So he was thrown into jail, and he remained there for more than two years.
Jaromir Jagr, the hockey player, never knew Jaromir Jagr, the farmer. The grandson was born in 1972. The grandfather died in 1968, by coincidence during the glorious days of the Czechoslovakian freedom movement known as the Prague Spring. "He never knew that the Russians came back," Jagr says. But, of course, they did come back, and Jagr's grandmother made sure that he knew how, on Aug. 20-21, 1968, the troops rolled through Czechoslovakia to squash that fledgling movement in less than 48 hours.
"In school we were always taught the Soviet doctrine," Jagr says. "The U.S.A. was bad and wanted war. Russia was our friend and was preventing the United States from bombing us. Even my father didn't tell me the truth, because he was afraid I'd say something in school that would get us into trouble. But my grandmother, she told me the truth."
One day, sure enough, the teacher picked up Jagr's grade book to write down the score he had made on a test and found the photograph. Are you crazy, Jaromir? Take it out, she told him. So he did. But as soon as class was over, Jagr put the photograph of Ronald Reagan, president of the United States, back into his grade book. Jagr admired Reagan because he was somebody who stood up to the Communists, who had identified the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" that Jagr's family knew it to be. Month after month the teacher continued to find that photo of Reagan in Jagr's grade book, continued to admonish him, but she never confiscated it. And every time, when class was over, Jagr would slip it back into its place.
Jagr never forgot. That is why he admired Reagan. Why he has an American flag in his bedroom and two decals of Old Glory on the windshield of his car in Kladno. And why the young Penguin star, the flamboyant and seemingly carefree spirit, handsome, athletic and rich, wears number 68, after the Prague Spring of 1968, the spring that his grandfather died.
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