I recently saw characters in some English mystery movie playing chess, and it made me think of how it’s understandable that they’d like to play chess in England, since they have a tradition of monarchy rule there, and they still have a king and queen, etc., (well, not a king right now, and their monarchy is just for show these days, but you know what I mean…) but that for people in the United States, and for other republican and democratic systems, as well as for communists, chess might not be so much in line with their world view. But Americans play chess a lot, and for many years, Soviets held the world championship in chess.
This seems very out of character to me, that fact that Soviet communists would be so good at, and would even be willing to play, the game of chess. I thought that especially communists would loathe the very idea of the world of the chess game, where expendable common soldiers had to die protecting the spoiled wastrels in the monarchy and ruling class. Isn’t this exactly what Marxism was all about trying to eradicate? Or perhaps they liked to think of the back line of the chess board pieces as being communist party chairmen, their assistants, etc., and that the pawns were the Bolshevik foot-soldiers dying for the cause of international communism, and not for royalist scum who had bled the masses white for generations.
But wouldn’t interest in chess make you suspect in a system like communism? I mean, the whole point of the game is to protect the king (or Czar/Tsar, in Russia), right? And wouldn’t that make one seem like someone practicing for the restoration of the monarchy? And isn’t chess a game for bourgeois intellectual types? They’re always plotting to overthrow governments! I’d view them with suspicion if I were a Bolshevik, that’s all I’m saying.
And come to think of it, wouldn’t it have made players suspect during the English Civil War? I mean, trying to protect the king and stuff would make one look like a royalist and thus cannon fodder for the Roundheads, right? I would think that during the reign of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell, playing chess would have been considered treason. Or perhaps they had a special set made up, with one side being King Charles and the Royalists, and the other side being Cromwell and the Roundheads; but it would have only been legal at the time for Cromwell’s side to win, otherwise: the death penalty!
But feminists must have enjoyed certain elements of chess, right? I mean, sure, it’s still a patriarchal system in the game; but the king, while the highest and most important character, is completely impotent and unable to protect himself in any way, while his wife, the queen, is possessed of super ninja powers and could do whatever she wished and destroy whomever she wished whenever she wished (so long as it was her turn, that is). In fact, she was more powerful and had more abilities than anyone else in the whole cast of characters, and all of them were men: all completely at her mercy! Who knows: maybe chess was invented by a woman; perhaps a queen who wished to use it was a way to make fun of her husband the king, and all of his advisers and soldiers. And when it became popular, it rubbed in the insult every time it was played anywhere. So that’s why the king used his only power greater than his wife’s, that of propaganda (in a traditionally patriarchal establishment), to change the history of the creation of the game of chess so nobody would know who did it, or who it was intended to ridicule. Anyway, for all we really know, it could have happened that way! There is no official origin for the game of chess, and I think we all know why, don’t we?
