PREACHING A LICENSE TO KILL

[By Yuri Zhukov, from the Russian newspaper Pravda, September 30, 1965]

James Bond lives in a nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun, where coercion and rape is considered valour and murder is a funny trick. All this is designed to teach people to accept the antics of American marines somewhere in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam or Her Majesty's Intelligence agents in Hong Kong and Aden. Bond's job is to guard the interests of the property class, and he is no better than the youths Hitler boasted he would bring up like wild beasts to be able to kill without thinking.

His creator is Ian Fleming, who posed as The Times correspondent in Russia in 1939 but was in truth a spy for the capitalist nations. Although he is now dead, James Bond cannot be allowed to die because he teaches those sent to kill in Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic and many other places.

It is no accident that sham agents of Soviet counter-intelligence, represented in caricature form, invariably figure in the role of Bond's opponents, because Bond kills right and left the men Fleming wanted to kill -- Russians, Reds and Yellows. Bond is portrayed as a sort of white archangel, destroying the impure races.

The Bond cult started in 1963 when the American leader, President Kennedy, unsuspecting that some American hero with the right to kill would shoot him, too, declared that Fleming's books were his bedside reading.

As if by a magic wand, everything changed. The mighty forces of reaction immediately gave the green light to Fleming. And in James Bond he has created a symbol of the civilization which has used bombs to drown the voice of conscience.

The men and women who allow their talents to be used in the making of films about the exploits of this man are also guilty of furthering the shameful aims of the Western Capitalists.

(Note: In 1974, The Man With The Golden Gun became the first Bond film to be shown in Russia. How's that for revenge?)


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