November 1999

Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. If we are to learn from the past, we must understand the real causes of events and the true nature of what we seek to understand. Let's look at the great revolutionary figures of history.

Literally, let's look at them. When their faces are arranged side by side, one obvious and, seemingly, crucial fact is immediately apparent; lordy, what a lot of face fuzz. The beard is clearly the great revolutionary tool of modern times.

Karl Marx was the pioneer, with a full face of fur that took years to develop. In the Russian Revolution, Lenin didn't only espouse Marx's communist philosophy; his chin also paid tribute with a modest yet convincing beard.

Later, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba as soon as he started to grow a beard of his own, which over the forty years of Cuban communism has become a veritable nipple-tickler. Even Che Guevara, a man of clearly girly hormones, did his best and grew one of those pritt-stick-yer-chin-and-roll-around-the-bathroom-floor efforts.

Into the revolutionary future, we see revered Green Anarchist editor Paul Rogers already prepared with a frankly uncatchupable hairy swarm of stunning proportions.

But there are other kinds of drastic social change, and these call for other kinds of facial hair. When we look at the real bloodthirsty brutes of history, vicious warlords like Hitler, Stalin, Kenny Ball, Saddam Hussein; again the similarity is startling:- 'tachy bastards to a man.

When they wanted to coerce ordinary British men to go and be slaughtered on the battlefields of the First World War, they used the famous 'Your Country Needs YOU!' poster, with the accompanying pictorial threat coming from the outrageously abundant lipslug of Lord Kitchener. Indeed, the butchering First World War generals on all sides - Haig, Foch, Hindenburg - were all in unashamed possession of the most outlandish whiskers.

Although Stalin was a tache man, he never forgot that he had come to power from Lenin's pro-beard stance. This perhaps explains the disproportionately large beard on the bust of Marx that Stalin commissioned for Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery, North London.

And when we move on to look at the terrifying bastards who smile as they kill, the slimy wormlike minds of the killers with masks of kindness, they're all clean-shaven; Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, Thatcher. Coincidence? Come off it. An absolutist rejection of facial fuzzery is an attack on common humanity.

What is it that places the beard so deep in our psyche as a tool of change? Certainly it predates even Marx; all the common pictures of Evolution theorist Charles Darwin are of an old man who'd spent years on his extensive facial grooming. Yet he put his theory together on a voyage around the world some forty years earlier, when he was a clean shaven man in his mid-twenties. Did his fear of being seen as unbearded make him question his own credibility until he'd got enough revolutionary beard-power to brave the massive onslaught of reactionary response to his ideas?

These archetypes remain with us today. David Bowie's superb late 1980s album Tin Machine - which, with Pixies and Dinosaur Jr, paved the way for the grunge revolution - features him on the cover returned from a clean-shaven decade of pap with, yep, a beard.

The current US advertising campaign for milk runs under the slogan 'Where's Your Mustache?' On the surface it's a reference to the residue often left on the top lip after drinking a glass of milk, but it also subconsciously appeals to the power-crazed moustachioed Stalin in our collective psyche who revels in cruelty; in this case the enormous suffering inflicted on cattle by the dairy industry.

However, the image of beardy benevolence goes back through all history. All the pictures of Jesus, even in their most ludicrously Aryan blond-and-blue version, invariably show him with a convincing chin rug. And even further back than that, from a child's crude crayon drawing to the Sistine Chapel, we always see a monstrous fuckoff woofly beard on the face of the man responsible for the earliest and greatest revolution of all; creation itself. Deep within us all is the knowledge that beardiness is next to godliness.