On November 23, 2021, your newspaper published an article
entitled “Radiohead’s interactive ‘exhibition’ pushes music and games into new
territory” by Tom Faber[1]
Faber’s article carried a quote from the rock band Radiohead
lead singer Thom Yorke. Yorke said “ “When we first started thinking about it,
we intended to build a physical exhibition in a central London location, on a
Play Station blog. It was going to be a huge red construction made by welding
shipping containers together, constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist
spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture of the Victoria
& Albert Museum in Kensington. This astounding steel carapace would be
inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky. Jutting
up into the grey English sky. And then – being constructed from shipping
containers – we could ship it around the world… New York, Tokyo, Paris.
Yorke’s flippant and ignorant comment regarding the assassination
of the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky is bad enough, but as Faber did not
comment or condemn it, I can assume that he and the Financial Times celebrate
the Stalinist murder of Leon Trotsky.
The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of
savage repression between 1936 and 1940 that targeted the socialist working
class and intelligentsia. Within the Soviet Union, Stalin’s decision to
eradicate socialist opposition to his regime resulted in approximately one
million executions. The victims included the Trotskyist opposition and all
those who had played a significant role in the October Revolution and the early
years of the Soviet Republic. The Stalinist terror claimed the lives of major
Soviet writers, scientists, and artists.
I demand you retract the article and issue an apology. I
will, however, not hold my breath. Nor will I wait for you to publish this
letter in your newspaper. This letter will be published on my
website-atrumpetofsedition.org.
