The Human Front Read Online Free PDF Page A

a left-winger. Anyway, Matheson, what did you think about what Dr. Lynch had tae say?”
    I told him.
    “Well, fine,” he said. “The question is, d’ye want tae dae something about it?”
    “I’ve already put my name down to raise money for Medical Aid.”
    “That’s good,” he said. “But it’s no enough.”
    We negotiated an awkward corner of the path, leaping a crumbled culvert. Orr ended up ahead of me.
    “Dr. Lynch,” he said over his shoulder, “had some other things tae say, about what people can do. And we’re discussing them tonight.” He named a cafe. “Back room, eight sharp. Drop by if ye like. Up tae you.”
    He ran on, leaving me to think.

    Heaven knows what Orr was thinking of, inviting me to that meeting. The only hypothesis which makes sense is that he had shrewdly observed me over the years of our acquaintance, and knew me to be reliable. I need not describe the discussion here. Suffice it to say that it was in response to a document written by Lin Piao which Dr. Lynch had clandestinely distributed during his tour, and which was later published in full as an appendix to various trial records. I was not aware of that at the time, and the actual matters discussed were of a quite elementary, and almost entirely legal, character, quite in keeping with the broad nature of the Front. It was only later thatI was introduced to the harsher regimens in Dr. Lynch’s prescription.
    We started small. Over the next few weeks, what time I could spare from studying for my Highers, in evenings, early mornings, and weekends, was taken up with covering the town’s East End and most of Port Glasgow with the slogans and symbols of the Front, as well as some creative interpretations of our own.
    F REE DUBCEK, we wrote on the walls of the Port Glasgow Municipal Cleansing works, in solidarity with a then-famous Czechoslovak guerrilla leader being held incommunicado by NATO. To the best of my knowledge it is still there, though time has worn the “B” to a “P.”
    And, our greatest coup, on the enormous wall of the Thompson yard, in blazing white letters and tenacious paint that no amount of scrubbing could entirely erase:
    F ORGET KING BILLY AND THE POPE
    U NCLE JOE’S OUR ONLY HOPE
    The Saturday after the last of my Higher exams, I happened to be in the car with my father, returning from a predictably disastrous Morton match at Cappielow, when we passed that slogan. He laughed.
    “I must say I agree with the first line,” he said. “The second line, well, it takes me back. Good old Uncle Joe, eh? I must admit I left ‘Joe for King’ on a few shit-house walls myself. Amazing that people still have faith in the old butcher.”
    “But is it really?” I said. I told him of my long-ago (it seemed—seven years, my god!) playground scrap over the memory of Stalin.
    “It’s fair enough that he killed Germans,” Malcolm said. “Or even that he killed Americans. The problemsome people, you know, have with Stalin is that he killed
Russians,
in large numbers.”
    “It was a necessary measure to prevent a counterrevolution,” I said stiffly.
    Malcolm guffawed. “Is that what they’re teaching you these days? Well, well. What would have happened in the SU in the ‘30s if there had been a counterrevolution?”
    “It would have been an absolute bloody massacre,” I said hotly. “Especially of the Communists, and let’s face it, they were the most energetic and educated people at the time. They’d have been slaughtered.”
    “Damn right,” said Malcolm. “So we’d expect—oh, let me see, most of the Red Army’s generals shot? Entire cohorts of the Central Committee and the Politburo wiped out? Countless thousands of Communists killed, hundreds of thousands sent to concentration camps, along with millions of ordinary citizens? Honest and competent socialist managers and engineers and planners driven from their posts? The economy thrown into chaos by the turncoats and time-servers who replaced