COMMUNISTS: A Matter of Discipline

Little Salvador Dali courts the limelight with fur-lined bathtubs and pianos-in-the-snow. Gigantic Diego Rivera makes headlines with keenly timed, violent, possibly sincere political outbursts. Recently he asked to be reinstated in the Communist Party, from which he had been expelled in 1929 for a breach of discipline; last week, his application still pending, Rivera blew his black-thatched top.

In his modernistic, pink-&-white San Angel studio outside Mexico City, the famed painter announced that in event of a war between Mexico and the Soviet Union he and his “fellow Communists” would fight against their own country. They would not be traitors, he said. The Mexican Government would be a traitor to the nation “because the Soviet Union represents the interests of all the workers of the world and my country is composed mostly of workers.”

Rivera added that if “Anglo-Saxon imperialism” should attempt to array the Americas against Russia, “all conscientious workers . . . from Canada to Patagonia would . . . oppose their local governments [as a] patriotic duty. [They] would sabotage hemisphere communications and eventually destroy supplies of raw materials destined for the Anglo-Saxon war effort.” There was a silver lining: “The imperialistic Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie can live many years in peace and prosperity if it keeps quiet.”

Because there was little chance that Diego Rivera would ever learn to keep quiet, odds were big against the Communist Party’s readmitting him.